Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of "great" and "little" traditions spanning centuries. Evidence going back to the fifth century BCE suggests that Aesop participated in the practices of nonphilosophical wisdom (sophia) while challenging it from below, and Kurke traces Aesop's double relation to this wisdom tradition. She also looks at the hidden influence of Aesop in early Greek mimetic or narrative prose writings, focusing particularly on the Socratic dialogues of Plato and the Histories of Herodotus. Challenging conventional accounts of the invention of Greek prose and recognizing the problematic sociopolitics of humble prose fable, Kurke provides a new approach to the beginnings of prose narrative and what would ultimately become the novel. Delving into Aesop, his adventures, and his crafting of fables, Aesopic Conversations shows how this low, noncanonical figure was--unexpectedly--central to the construction of ancient Greek literature. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

A collection of animal fables told by the Greek slave Aesop.

The Synoptic gospels were written by elites educated in Greco-Roman literature, not exclusively by and for early Christian communities.

Olivia Stewart Lester examines true and false prophecy at the intersections of interpretation, gender, and economics in Revelation, Sibylline Oracles 4-5, and contemporary ancient Mediterranean texts. With respect to gender, these texts construct a discourse of divine violence against prophets, in which masculine divine domination of both male and female prophets reinforces the authenticity of the prophetic message. Regarding economics, John and the Jewish sibyllists resist the economic actions of political groups around them, especially Rome, by imagining an alternate universe with a new prophetic economy. In this economy, God requires restitution from human beings, whose evil behavior incurs debt. The ongoing appeal of prophecy as a rhetorical strategy in Revelation and Sibylline Oracles 4-5, and the ongoing rivalries in which these texts engage, argue for prophecy's continuing significance in a larger ancient Mediterranean religious context.

A major critical reassessment of the fable and of the literary representation of the human-animal relationship after Darwin.

Reformer of the church, biblical theologian, and German translator of the Bible Martin Luther had the highest respect for stories attributed to the ancient Greek author Aesop. He assigned them a status second only to the Bible and regarded them as wiser than "the harmful opinions of all the philosophers." Throughout his life, Luther told and retold Aesop’s fables and strongly supported their continued use in Lutheran schools. In this volume, Carl Springer builds on the textual foundation other scholars have laid and provides the first book in English to seriously consider Luther’s fascination with Aesop’s fables. He looks at which fables Luther knew, how he understood and used them, and why he valued them. Springer provides a variety of cultural contexts to help scholars and general readers gain a deeper understanding of Luther’s appreciation of Aesop.

This wide-ranging collection, consisting of 50 essays by leading international scholars in a variety of fields, provides an overview of the reception history of a major literary genre from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present day. Section I considers how the 5th- and 4th-century Athenian comic poets defined themselves and their plays, especially in relation to other major literary forms. It then moves on to the Roman world and to the reception of Greek comedy there in art and literature. Section II deals with the European reception of Greek and Roman comedy in the Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern periods, and with the European stage tradition of comic theater more generally. Section III treats the handling of Greco-Roman comedy in the modern world, with attention not just to literary translations and stage-productions, but to more modern media such as radio and film. The collection will be of interest to students of ancient comedy as well as to all those concerned with how literary and theatrical traditions are passed on from one time and place to another, and adapted to meet local conditions and concerns.