Plutarch’s Unexpected Silences

Plutarch’s Unexpected Silences
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-06-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004514252

This book examines passages in Plutarch’s works that foil expectations and whose silence invites closer examination. The contributors question omissions of authors, works, people, and places, and they examine Plutarch’s reticence to comment where he usually would.

Generic Enrichment in Plutarch’s Lives

Generic Enrichment in Plutarch’s Lives
Author: Chrysanthos S. Chrysanthou
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2024-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429648839

This volume addresses the important literary phenomenon of ‘generic enrichment’ in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. It examines the ways in which features of other genres are deployed and incorporated in Plutarch’s biographies and the effects of this on the texts themselves and readers’ responses to them. ‘Generic enrichment’, a term coined by Stephen Harrison with reference to Latin poetry, is used here to refer to the different ways in which a text of one genre might incorporate or evoke features of other genres. The fact that particular Plutarchan biographies may contain not only allusions to specific texts from a variety of genres, but also features such as vocabulary, phraseology, and plot-forms which evoke other genres, has been noticed sporadically by scholars. However, this is the first volume to discuss this feature as a distinct phenomenon across the corpus of Parallel Lives and to attempt an assessment of its effect. Chapters cover the interaction of Plutarchan biography with a series of genres, including archaic poetry, comedy, tragedy, historiography, philosophy, geographical and scientific texts, oratory, inscriptions, novelistic writing and periegetical works. Together these studies demonstrate the generic complexity and richness of Plutarch’s Lives, enhance our understanding of ancient biography in general and Plutarchan biography in particular, and explore the range of effects such generic enrichment might have on readers. Generic Enrichment in Plutarch’s Lives is of interest to students and scholars of Plutarch and ancient biography, as well as to those working in other periods and genres of both Latin and Greek literature, and to those beyond the field of Classical Studies who are interested in questions of genre and literary theory.

The Cambridge Companion to Plutarch

The Cambridge Companion to Plutarch
Author: Frances B. Titchener
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1009302116

Plutarch is one of the most prolific and important writers from antiquity. His Parallel Lives continue to be an invaluable historical source, and the numerous essays in his Moralia, covering everything from marriage to the Delphic Oracle, are crucial evidence for ancient philosophy and cultural history. This volume provides an engaging introduction to all aspects of his work, including his method and purpose in writing the Lives, his attitudes toward daily life and intimate relations, his thoughts on citizenship and government, his relationship to Plato and the second Sophistic, and his conception of foreign or 'other'. Attention is also paid to his style and rhetoric. Plutarch's works have also been important in subsequent periods, and an introduction to their reception history in Byzantium, Italy, England, Spain, and France is provided. A distinguished team of contributors together helps the reader begin to navigate this most varied and fascinating of writers.

Plutarch's Prism

Plutarch's Prism
Author: Rebecca Kingston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2022-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009243489

Explores the reception of Plutarch in early modern French and English political thought, with a focus on the theme of public service.

In the Mists of Time: Negotiating the Past in Ancient Literature

In the Mists of Time: Negotiating the Past in Ancient Literature
Author: Franco Montanari
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2024-10-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3111501892

The idea of the past, far from suggesting a nostalgic longing or an antiquarian curiosity for ages and cultures irrevocably lost, is essential to the human perception of the world. The volume at hand, entitled In the Mists of Time: Negotiating the Past in Ancient Literature, explores pastness as expressed through myth and early history and as reflected in sophisticated concepts and epistemological questions in Ancient Greek and Latin literature. The eighteen contributions illustrate how the ancients addressed the past through poetry, history and philosophy and lend insight into the metaliterary, self-reflexive way of dealing with past texts through scholarship.

Localism in Hellenistic Greece

Localism in Hellenistic Greece
Author: Sheila L. Ager
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2023-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487548370

The Hellenistic age witnessed a dynamic increase of cultural fusion and entanglement across the Mediterranean and Eurasian worlds. Amid seismic changes in the world writ large, the regions of central Greece and the Peloponnese have often been considered a cultural space left behind. Localism in Hellenistic Greece explores how various processes impacted the countless small-scale, local communities of the Greek mainland. Drawing on notions of locality, localism, local tradition, and boundedness in place, Sheila L. Ager and Hans Beck delve into some of the main hubs of Hellenistic Greece, from Thessaly to Cape Tainaron. Along with their contributors, they explore how polis and ethnos societies positioned themselves in a swiftly expanding horizon and the meaning-making force of the local. The book reveals how local discourses were energized by local sentiments and, much like an echo chamber, how discourses related back to the community and the place it occupied, prioritizing the local as the critical source of communal orientation. Engaging with debates about cultural connectivity and convergence, Localism in Hellenistic Greece offers new insights into lived experience in ancient Greece.

Historiographical Alexander

Historiographical Alexander
Author: Borja Antela-Bernádez
Publisher: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra / Coimbra University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release:
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9892624629

In a famous statement, Ulrich Wilcken argues that each historian has his own Alexander. A critical examination of the traditions in Historiographic Alexander allows to reconsider both our ideas of alterity and success, and how great can be a human being, or to what extent what was great in the past still has to be accepted as such in our present days. To sum up, to revisit Alexander from the eyes of the historians in the Contemporary Age offers a genuine opportunity to rethink History as such, and to evaluate how can we imagine new ways to explain the past in order to build a rich appreciation of the present in order to imagine brand new futures. The aim of the following pages is to review Alexander’s portraits and concerns in the works and scopes of the more recent historical traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Plutarch on Literature, Graeco-Roman Religion, Jews and Christians

Plutarch on Literature, Graeco-Roman Religion, Jews and Christians
Author: Frederick E. Brenk
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2023-05-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004532471

The present book includes sixteen studies by Professor Frederick E. Brenk on Plutarch on Literature, Graeco-Roman Religion, Jews and Christians. Of them, thirteen were published earlier in different venues and three appear here for the first time. Written between 2009 and 2022, these studies not only provide an excellent example of Professor Brenk’s incisiveness and deep knowledge of Plutarch; they also provide an excellent overview of Plutarchan studies of the last years on a variety of themes. Indeed, one of the most salient characteristics of Brenk’s scholarship is his constant interaction and conversation with the most recent scholarly literature.

Plutarch's Practical Ethics

Plutarch's Practical Ethics
Author: Lieve Van Hoof
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2010-06-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199583269

A study of Plutarch's practical ethics, a group of texts within his Moralia designed to help powerful Greeks and Romans manage their ambitions and society's expectations successfully. Lieve Van Hoof depicts philosophy under the Roman Empire as a kind of symbolic capital engendering power and prestige for author and reader alike.