This book collects new work on Latin didactic poetry and prose in the late Republic and early Empire, and it evaluates the varied, shifting roles that literature of teaching and learning played during this period. Instruction was of special interest in the culture and literature of the late Roman Republic and the Age of Augustus, as attitudes towards education found complex, fluid, and multivalent expressions. The era saw a didactic boom, a cottage industry whose surviving authors include Vergil, Lucretius, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, Varro, Germanicus, and Grattius, who are all reexamined here. The contributors to this volume bring fresh approaches to the study of educational literature from the end of the Roman Republic and early Empire, and their essays discover unexpected connections between familiar authors. Chapters explore, interrogate, and revise some aspect of our understanding of these generic and modal boundaries, while considering understudied points of contact between art and education, poetry and prose, and literature and philosophy, among others. Altogether, the volume shows how lively, experimental, and intertextual the didactic ethos of this period is, and how deeply it engages with social, political, and philosophical questions that are of critical importance to contemporary Rome and of enduring interest into the modern world. Didactic Literature in the Roman World is of interest to students and scholars of Latin literature, particularly the late Republic and early Empire, and of Classics more broadly. In addition, the volume’s focus on didactic poetry and prose appeals to those working on literature outside of Classics and on intellectual history.

Professor Dihle sees the Greek and Latin literature between the 1st century B.C. and the 6th century A.D. as an organic progression. He builds on Schlegel's observation that art, customs and political life in classical antiquity are inextricably entwined and therefore should not be examined separately. Dihle does not simply consider narrowly defined `literature', but all works of cultural socio-historical significance, including Jewish and Christian literature, philosophy and science. Despite this, major authors like Seneca, Tacitus and Plotinus are considered individually. This work is an authoritative yet personal presentation of seven hundred years of literature.

This volume investigates how versions of Trojan War narratives written in Greek in the first through fifth centuries C.E. created nostalgia for audiences. In ancient education, the Iliad and the Odyssey were used as models through which students learned Greek language and literature. This, combined with the ruling elite’s financial encouragement of re-creations of the Greek past, created a culture of nostalgia. This book explores the different responses to this climate, particularly in the case of the third-century C.E. poet Quintus of Smyrna’s epic Posthomerica. Positioning itself as a sequel to the Iliad and a prequel to the Odyssey, the Posthomerica is unique in its middle-of-the-road response to nostalgia for Homer’s epics. This book contrasts Quintus’ poem with other responses to nostalgia for Homeric narratives in Greek literature of the Roman Empire. Some authors contradict pivotal events of the Iliad and Odyssey, such as the first-century orator Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Speech, which claims that the Trojan hero Hector did not in fact die, contrary to the Iliad’s account. Others re-created Homeric narratives but did not contradict them, improvising some elements and adding others. Quintus strikes a compromise in his epic, re-imagining Homeric narrative by introducing new characters and scenarios, while at the same time retaining the Iliad and Odyssey’s aesthetics. Nostalgias for Homer in Greek Literature of the Roman Empire is of interest to students and scholars working on Homeric reception and the Greek literature of the Roman Empire, as well as those interested in classical literature and reception more broadly.

"In ancient didactic poetry, poets frequently make use of imagery - similes, metaphors, acoustic images, models, exempla, fables, allegory, personifications, and other tropes - as a means to elucidate and convey their didactic message. In this volume, which arose from an international conference held at the University of Heidelberg in 2016, we investigate such phenomena and explore how they make the unseen visible, the unheard audible, and the unknown comprehensible. By exploring didactic poets from Hesiod to pseudo-Oppian and from Vergil and Lucretius to Grattius and Ovid, the authors in this collective volume show how imagery can clarify and illuminate, but also complicate and even undermine or obfuscate the overt didactic message. The presence of a real or implied addressee invites our engagement and ultimately our scrutiny of language and meaning"--

What do the mysterious Roman author Vegetius, the Byzantine emperor Leo VI, and the Chinese general Li Jing all have in common? They are three of the dozens of authors across the medieval Mediterranean world and beyond who wrote works of military literature, sometimes called military handbooks, manuals, or treatises. This book brings together a multidisciplinary international team of scholars who present cutting edge essays on diverse aspects of medieval military literature. While some chapters offer novel approaches to familiar authors like Vegetius, some present research on under-valued topics like Byzantine military illustrations, and others provide holistic studies on subjects like early modern treatises, they all move the discussion of medieval military literature forward. Contributors are Michael B. Charles, Georgios Chatzelis, Pierre Cosme, Maxime Emion, Immacolata Eramo, Michael Fulton, David Graff, John Haldon, Catherine Hof, John Hosler, Savvas Kyriakidis, Łukasz Różycki, Katharina Schoneveld, Georgios Theotokis, Conor Whately, Michael Whitby, and Nadya Williams.

Johannine Writings and Apocalyptic provides a wide-ranging and thorough annotated bibliography for John's Gospel, the Johannine letters, Revelation, and apocalyptic writings pertinent to these books. More inclusive than many other bibliographies, this volume provides reference to over 1300 individual entries, often including references to multiple works with a given description. Annotations are designed to provide guidance to a wide range of readers, from students wishing to gain entry to the subject to graduate students engaging in research to professors needing ready access to useful materials. The volume is topically organized and indexed for easy access.

Ever since Karl Jaspers's "axial age" paradigm, there have been a number of influential studies comparing ancient East Asian and Greco-Roman history and culture. However, to date there has been no comparative study involving multiple literary traditions in these cultural spheres. This book compares the dynamics between the younger literary cultures of Japan and Rome and the literatures of their venerable predecessors, China and Greece. How were writers of the younger cultures of Rome and Japan affected by the presence of an older "reference culture," whose sophistication they admired, even as they anxiously strove to assert their own distinctive identity? How did they tackle the challenge of adopting the reference culture's literary genres, rhetorical refinement, and conceptual vocabulary for writing texts in different languages and within distinct political and cultural contexts? Classical World Literatures captures the striking similarities between the ways early Japanese authors wrote their own literature through and against the literary precedents of China, and the ways Latin writers engaged and contested Greek precedents. But it also brings to light suggestive divergences that are rooted in geopolitical, linguistic, sociohistorical, and aesthetic differences between early Japanese and Roman literary cultures. Proposing a methodology of "deep comparison" for the cross-cultural comparison of premodern literary cultures and calling for an expansion of world literature debates into the ancient and medieval worlds, Classical World Literatures is both a theoretical intervention and an invitation to read and re-read four major literary traditions in an innovative and illuminating light.