Aspects Of Orality And Greek Literature In The Roman Empire

Orality was the backbone of ancient Greek culture throughout its different periods. This volume will serve to deepen the reader’s knowledge of how Greek texts circulated during the Roman Empire. The studies included here approach the subject from both a literary and a sociocultural point of view, illuminating the interconnections between literary and social practices. Topics considered include epigraphy, the rhetoric of transmitting the texts, language and speech, performance, theatre, narrative representation, material culture, and the interaction of different cultures. Since orality is a widespread phenomenon in the Greek-speaking world of the Roman Empire, this book draws the reader’s attention to under-researched texts and inscriptions.

Voice and Voices in Antiquity draws together 18 studies of the changing concept of voice and voices in the oral traditions and subsequent literate genres of the ancient world. Ranging from the poet's voice to those of characters as well as historically embodied communities, and from the interface between the Greek and Near Eastern worlds to the western reaches of the Roman Empire, the scholars assembled here offer a methodologically rich and diverse series of approaches to locating the power of voice as both poetic construct and communal memory. The results not only enrich our understanding of the strategies of epic, lyric, and dramatic voices but also illuminate the rhetorical claims given voice by historians, orators, philosophers, and novelists in the ancient world.

The volume represents the seventh in the series on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. It comprises a collection of essays on the significance and working of memory in ancient texts and visual documentation, from contexts both oral (or oral-derived) and literate. The authors discuss a variety of interpretations of ‘memory’ in Homeric epic, lyric poetry, tragedy, historical inscriptions, oratory, and philosophy, as well as in the replication of ancient artworks, and in Greek vase inscriptions. They present therefore a wide-ranging analysis of memory as a fundamental faculty underlying the production and reception of texts and material documentation in a society that gradually moved from an essentially oral to an essentially literate culture.

Explores the role of written and oral communication in Greece.

This text uses up-to-date literary and cultural theory to explore the phenomenal rise of interest in literary writing in Greece under the Roman Empire.

In this book Jason Konig offers for the first time an accessible yet comprehensive account of the multi-faceted Greek literature of the Roman Empire, focusing especially on the first three centuries AD. He covers in turn the Greek novels of this period, the satirical writing of Lucian, rhetoric, philosophy, scientific and miscellanistic writing, geography and history, biography and poetry, providing a vivid introduction to key texts, with extensive quotation in translation. The challenges and pleasures these texts offer to their readers have come to be newly appreciated in the classical scholarship of the last two or three decades. In addition there has been renewed interest in the role played by novelistic and rhetorical writing in the Greek culture of the Roman Empire more broadly, and in the many different ways in which these texts respond to the world around them. This volume offers a broad introduction to those exciting developments.

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.

The focus of this book--its new perspective--is on the 'receivers' of literature: readers, spectators, and audiences. Twelve contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, explore the various and changing interactions between the makers of literature and their audiences or readers from the earliest Greek poetry to the end of the Roman empires in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. From the heights of Athens to the hellenistic Greek diaspora, from the great Augustans to the irresistible tide of Christianity, the contributors deploy fresh insights to map out lively and provocative, yet accessible, surveys. They cover the kinds of literature which have shaped western culture--epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, rhetoric, epigram, elegy, pastoral, satire, biography, epistle, declamation, and panegyric. Who were the audiences, and why did they regard their literature as so important? --jacket.

The Greek and Roman novels can be seen as an important transitional moment in the trajectory from performance to reading, from oralism to textuality, that has underpinned the history of discourse in European consciousness since the 5th century BC. In different and intriguing ways, they explore the contrast, tension, conflict, competition or dialogue between modes of discourse, which frame the novel's concern with identity and self-fashioning, as well as advertising innovation more generally.This volume brings together an international group of scholars interested in ancient and modern constructions of orality and writing and how they are reflected and manipulated in the ancient novel. The essays deal not only with questions of genre, oral poetics and traditions, but also with how various ways of pitting or collapsing modes of representation can become loaded articulations of wider world-views, of cultural, literary, epistemological anxieties and aspirations. The contributors focus in particular on issues surrounding theatricality, gender identity, rhetorical performance, epistolarity, monumentality and power in the ancient novel.

This volume deals with aspects of orality and oral traditions in ancient Greece, and is a selection of refereed papers from the fourth biennial Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece conference, held at the University of Missouri Columbia in 2000. The book is divided into three parts: literature, rhetoric and society, and philosophy. The papers focus on genres such as epic poetry, drama, poetry and art, public oratory, legislative procedure, and Simplicius’ philosophy. All papers present new approaches to their topics or ask new and provocative questions.