A History Today Best Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, and other authors of ancient Rome are so firmly established in the Western canon today that the birth of Latin literature seems inevitable. Yet, Denis Feeney boldly argues, the beginnings of Latin literature were anything but inevitable. The cultural flourishing that in time produced the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and other Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history. “Feeney is to be congratulated on his willingness to put Roman literary history in a big comparative context...It is a powerful testimony to the importance of Denis Feeney’s work that the old chestnuts of classical literary history—how the Romans got themselves Hellenized, and whether those jack-booted thugs felt anxiously belated or smugly domineering in their appropriation of Greek culture for their own purposes—feel fresh and urgent again.” —Emily Wilson, Times Literary Supplement “[Feeney’s] bold theme and vigorous writing render Beyond Greek of interest to anyone intrigued by the history and literature of the classical world.” —The Economist

The invention of literature, writes Florence Dupont, is recent, and its classical ancestry is not firm. Rather than representing solely the remains of a network of readers and writers, the odes, epics, tales, and dramas of Greece and Rome had a much more diversified background and purpose. Some works were intended to be read in groups; other works were not meant to be read at all. Resisting the traditional temptation to project current tastes and beliefs backward upon Greece and Rome. The Invention of Literature presents classical writings in all their differences. The labor of understanding a lyric or an epic as it was understood in its time requires a radical reconsideration of what reading is and what it means.

Early Christian writings form a body of literature that has shaped Western culture as a whole, as Enrico Norelli and Claudio Moreschini demonstrate in this comprehensive book. The first six centuries of Christian experience impacted art and developed a philosophy that faced opposition, resolved internal conflicts, transposed itself into medieval civilization, and continues to influence culture today. Available for the first time in English, Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature highlights the special character of the gospel message, the nucleus of every Christian literary form. The earliest Christian works from the first through the fourth centuries are presented along with respected contemporary writings in the first volume. The second volume moves to the Golden Age of Christian literature. The major personalities of the time--Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, all writers of the highest rank--are matched with Greek-speaking authors such as Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and John Chrysostom, thinkers to whom present-day Christians turn once again for spiritual direction. This two-volume edition organizes the material in chronological order. Each segment's detailed discussion concludes with an up-to-date bibliography. It also includes a general bibliography and each volume includes an index of authors and anonymous works. Specialists in classics and medieval studies as well as general theologians, art historians, archaeologists, and other students of culture will find in this work an in-depth survey, quality scholarship, and an original approach.

This volume explores the significance of old age in Greek and Latin poetry and dramatic literature, not just in relation to other textual and historical concerns, but as a cultural and intellectual reality of central importance to understanding the works themselves. The book discusses a wide range of authors, from Homer to Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides; from Horace to Vergil, Ovid, and beyond. Classical scholarship on these texts is enriched by a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from such fields as anthropology, social history, literary theory, psychology, and gerontology. The contributions examine the many and complex representations of old age in classical literature: their relation to the social and psychological realities of old age, their connection with the author’s own place in the human life course, their metaphorical and symbolic capacity as poetic vehicles for social and ethical values.

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 provides a unique overview of the complete histories of Latin and Greek as second languages.

From the archaic period onwards, ancient literary authors working within a range of genres discussed and quoted a variety of inscriptions. This volume offers a wide-ranging set of perspectives on the diversity of epigraphic material present in ancient literary texts, and the variety of responses, both ancient and modern, which they can provoke.