The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most exciting and fast-moving areas of ancient-world studies. This new collection of essays, by world-renowned experts (and some new voices) in classical, Jewish, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian literature, focuses specifically on prose fiction, or 'the ancient novel'. Twenty chapters either offer fresh readings - from an intercultural perspective - of familiar texts (such as the biblical Esther and Ecclesiastes, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Story and Dictys of Crete's Journal), or introduce material that may be new to many readers: from demotic Egyptian papyri through old Avestan hymns to a Turkic translation of the Life of Aesop. The volume also considers issues of methodology and the history of scholarship on the topic. A concluding section deals with the question of how narratives, patterns and motifs may have come to be transmitted between cultures.

Twenty essays by renowned scholars explore contact between Greece and the Ancient Near East through the medium of prose fiction.

The Greek romance was for the Roman period what epic was for the Archaic period or drama for the Classical: the central literary vehicle for articulating ideas about the relationship between self and community. This book offers a reading of the romance both as a distinctive narrative form (using a range of narrative theories) and as a paradigmatic expression of identity (social, sexual and cultural). At the same time it emphasises the elasticity of romance narrative and its ability to accommodate both conservative and transformative models of identity. This elasticity manifests itself partly in the variation in practice between different romancers, some of whom are traditionally Hellenocentric while others are more challenging. Ultimately, however, it is argued that it reflects a tension in all romance narrative, which characteristically balances centrifugal against centripetal dynamics. This book will interest classicists, historians of the novel and students of narrative theory.

A modern historian sheds new light on an ancient Greek history of Persia.

Focusing on the period known as the Second Sophistic (an era roughly co-extensive with the second century AD), this Handbook serves the need for a broad and accessible overview. The study of the Second Sophistic is a relative new-comer to the Anglophone field of classics and much of what characterizes it temporally and culturally remains a matter of legitimate contestation. The present handbook offers a diversity of scholarly voices that attempt to define, as much as is possible in a single volume, the state of this rapidly developing field. Included are chapters that offer practical guidance on the wide range of valuable textual materials that survive, many of which are useful or even core to inquiries of particularly current interest (e.g. gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of religion, political theory, history of medicine, cultural linguistics, intersection of the Classical traditions and early Christianity). The Handbook also contains essays devoted to the work of the most significant intellectuals of the period such as Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Apuleius, the novelists, the Philostrati and Aelius Aristides. In addition to content and bibliographical guidance, however, this volume is designed to help to situate the textual remains within the period and its society, to describe and circumscribe not simply the literary matter but the literary culture and societal context. For that reason, the Handbook devotes considerable space at the front to various contextual essays, and throughout tries to keep the contextual demands in mind. In its scope and in its pluralism of voices this Handbook thus represents a new approach to the Second Sophistic, one that attempts to integrate Greek literature of the Roman period into the wider world of early imperial Greek, Latin, Jewish, and Christian cultural production, and one that keeps a sharp focus on situating these texts within their socio-cultural context.

In this richly detailed study, Robert Cioffi explores the signficance of the Nile River Valley as the geographic centre of the ancient Greek novel during the genre's heyday in the Roman empire. He shows how the region is repeatedly portrayed in these fictions as a dual-site of ethnographic representation and of resistance to imperial power.

This volume centres on one of the most important questions in the study of antiquity – the interaction between Greece and the Ancient Near East, from the Mycenaean to the Hellenistic periods. Focusing on the stories that the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean told about the gods and their relationships with humankind, the individual treatments draw together specialists from both fields, creating for the first time a truly interdisciplinary synthesis. Old cases are re-examined, new examples discussed, and the whole range of scholarly opinions, past and present, are analysed, critiqued, and contextualised. While direct textual comparisons still have something to show us, the methodologies advanced here turn their attention to deeper structures and wider dynamics of interaction and influence that respect the cultural autonomy and integrity of all the ancient participants.