Spiritus flat ubi vult academicus. It seems evident that the study of antiquity and the study of antiquity’s persistence will continue to be distributed ubique terrarum. This pleasing circumstance was exemplified in January 2014, at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, an institution named after Poland’s influential nineteenth-century epic and lyric poet. As part of an ongoing series of such academic meetings, the university hosted the Seventh International Conference on Fantasy and Wonder. Its topic was Antiquity in Popular Literature and Culture. Several of the papers given in Poznań appear in this volume in revised form. They demonstrate the continuing presence of the past, or, to put it slightly differently, the importance of the past in the present and, by extension, for the future.

This book adopts a new approach to the classical world by focusing on ancient popular culture.

Not all readers in ancient Greece whiled away the hours with Homer, Plato, or Sophocles - at least, not always. Many enjoyed light reading, such as can be found in the pages of this lively anthology. Various types of popular writing - novels, short stories, books of jokes or fables, fortune-telling handbooks - trace their origins to the ancient Mediterranean. In fact, some of this literature was so successful that it remained in circulation for centuries, even into the Middle Ages. Translated into other languages, these works were the best sellers of their time and remain enjoyable reading today. They are also fascinating social documents that reveal much about the daily lives, humor, loves, anxieties, fantasies, values, and beliefs of ordinary men and women.

It is estimated that only a small fraction, less than 1 per cent, of ancient literature has survived to the present day. The role of Christian authorities in the active suppression and destruction of books in Late Antiquity has received surprisingly little sustained consideration by academics. In an approach that presents evidence for the role played by Christian institutions, writers and saints, this book analyses a broad range of literary and legal sources, some of which have hitherto been little studied. Paying special attention to the problem of which genres and book types were likely to be targeted, the author argues that in addition to heretical, magical, astrological and anti-Christian books, other less obviously subversive categories of literature were also vulnerable to destruction, censorship or suppression through prohibition of the copying of manuscripts. These include texts from materialistic philosophical traditions, texts which were to become the basis for modern philosophy and science. This book examines how Christian authorities, theologians and ideologues suppressed ancient texts and associated ideas at a time of fundamental transformation in the late classical world.

In this volume thirty new studies have been specially commissioned from scholars in seven countries to treat key texts and cultural phenomena from the Homeric age to the medieval period. A wide variety of critical approaches are employed to challenge orthodoxies and to present fresh perspectives on the literature, art and history of classical antiquity, late antiquity and the middle ages. Attractive features of the volume include the treatment of newly emerging areas of inquiry in addition to canonical texts and the representation of views of established international scholars at the forefront of the discipline. A recurrent motif of the volume emerges in the interpretive benefits of combining philological acumen with theoretical and intertextual considerations. This accessible and provocative book will be of interest to classicists, historians, art historians, students of comparative literature, and anyone concerned with the immense cultural legacy of classical Mediterranean civilisation. Greek and Latin quotations are accompanied by translations throughout.

This volume takes a fresh look at ekphrasis as a textual practice closely connected to our embodied imagination and its verbal dimension; it offers the first detailed study of a large family of ancient ecphrastic shields, often studied separately, but never as an ensemble with its own development. The main objective consists of establishing a theoretical and historical framework that is applied to a series of famous ecphrastic shields starting with the Homeric shield of Achilles. The latter is reinterpreted as a paradigmatic "thing" whose echoing down the centuries is reinforced by the fundamental connection between ekphrasis and artefacts as its primary objects. The book demonstrates that although the ancient sources do not limit ekphrasis to artificial creations, the latter are most efficient in bringing out the intimate affinity between artefacts and vivid mental images as two kind of entities that lack a natural scale and are rightly understood as ontologically unstable. Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature: The World’s Forge should be read by those interested in ancient culture, art and philosophy, but also by those fascinated by the broader issue of imagination and by the interplay between the natural and the artificial.

In recent decades many valuable studies have been highlighting the cultural changes that deeply affected the Roman world between the fourth and sixth centuries AD. These changes, mostly due to Christianization as well as reactions to it, occurred in literary and cultural fields. In the past they have been explained through a well-defined pattern, namely a twofold process, adapting changing contents to unchanging formal structures. However, this pattern may not be effective today, given the new framework arising from the increasing amount of data and its close examination. The papers herein collected deal with many specific texts or issues, all included in the so-called literary area of 'secularity' (according to the definition by R. A. Markus). The aim of this case-studies gallery, ranging from the fourth to seventh centuries AD, is precisely to offer a multi-layered approach to the complex, unclear-cut interweaving of continuity and discontinuity. Indeed, this is at the heart of the transformation, process of intellectual horizons in Latin Late Antiquity. This volume consists of three sections, devoted to investigating the transformation of cultural heritage in poetry and prose respectively, and the key role of school education in shaping late ancient 'secular' culture. Book jacket.