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Over his long and illustrious career as Lecturer, Reader and Professor in Edinburgh University (1961-1976), Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge (1976-2001) and currently Fellow of the McDonald Institute of Archaeology at Cambridge, Anthony Snodgrass has influenced and been associated with a long series of eminent classical archaeologists, historians and linguists .In acknowledgement of his immense academic achievement, this collection of essays by a range of international scholars reflects his wide-ranging research interests: Greek prehistory, the Greek Iron Age and Archaic era, Greek texts and Archaeology, Classical Art History, societies on the fringes of the Greek and Roman world, and Regional Field Survey. Not only do they celebrate his achievements but they also represent new avenues of research which will have a broad appeal.

Narratologies, both ‘classical’ structuralist narratology and the ‘new narratologies’ of the past twenty years, have mostly been built around the novel. At the same time, the history of narrative methods has become a recognized area of scholarly discussion. While this work is not confined to the history of the novel, the novel tends to be most prominent. Meanwhile, structuralist narratology has been adapted and applied to ancient literary texts. These studies tend to go directly from an individual text to universals, showing that a Greek author uses a technique found in modern literatures, or that the author's combination of techniques is unusual. They do not show how the methods of storytelling develop over time from one author or genre to another, or how Greek narrative is like and unlike other narrative traditions. This volume represents the beginnings of such a project. Several papers look particularly at ways in which early Greek narrative, particularly Homer, differs from earlier and contemporary Near Eastern narratives. Another group looks at typical features of Greek narrative (exemplarity, occasion, favoured structures). Another considers particular genres (historiography, lyric, tragedy). Others examine particular narrative devices through time or consider how Latin authors read and adapt Greek narrative. The volume as a whole shows how much remains to be explored once we study narrative historically; how much comparison can enhance our understanding of Greek; and how much the study of Greek narrative can contribute to narratology more broadly.

Manuel II Palaiologos was not only a Byzantine emperor but also a remarkably prolific rhetorician and theologian. His oeuvre included letters, treatises, dialogues, short poems and orations. This book deals with several of his texts shaped by a didactic intention to educate the emperor’s son and successor, John VIII Palaiologos. It is argued that the emperor constructed a rhetorical persona which he used in an attempt to compete with other contemporary power-brokers. While Manuel Palaiologos adhered to many rhetorical conventions of his day, he also reasserted the civic role of rhetoric. With a special focus on the first two decades of Manuel II Palaiologos’ rule, 1391–1417, the volume offers a new understanding of the imperial ethos in Byzantium by combining rhetorical analysis with investigation of social and political phenomena. The volume examines the changes in the Byzantine imperial idea by the end of the fourteenth century with a particular focus on the instrumentalization of the intellectual dimension of the imperial rule. It also seeks to integrate late Byzantine imperial visions into the bigger picture of Byzantine imperial ideology and to introduce analytical concepts from rhetorical, literary, and discursive theories.

This book addresses two historical mysteries. The first is the content and character of the fourth century BCE Greek works on the Persian Achaemenid Empire treatises called the Persica. The second is the method of work of the second century CE biographer Plutarch of Chaeronea (CE 45-120) who used these works to compose his biographies, in particular the Life of the Persian king Artaxerxes. By dealing with both issues simultaneously, Almagor proposes a new way of approaching the two entangled problems, and offers a better understanding of both the portrayal of ancient Persia in the lost Persica works and the manner of their reception and adaptation nearly five hundred years later. Intended for both scholars and students of the Achaemenid Empire and Greek imperial literature, this book bridges the two worlds and two important branches of scholarship. The book builds a picture of the character and structure of the lost Persica works by Ctesias of Cnidus, Deinon of Colophon, Heracleides of Cyme. While focusing on the Artaxerxes (and certain other passages), it shows how Plutarch used the Persica.

Rome Season Two: Trial and Triumph is a collection of seventeen original research essays that responds to the critical and commercial success of the second season of the HBO television series, Rome (2005-07). While Rome gained immediate notoriety for its heady mix of exceptionally high production values with gripping performances and plot lines, the series also offers a new visual, narrative, and thematic aesthetic for the depiction of the tumultuous period after Caesar’s assassination, and in particular, the struggle between Octavian and Antony, the role of Cleopatra, and the story’s many received meanings. The essays in this volume explore the ways in which Rome nods to earlier receptions of ancient Rome as well as to more recent popular onscreen recreations of antiquity, while at the same time the series applies new techniques of interrogation to current social issues and concerns. The contributors to this volume are all authorities in their various sub-fields of ancient history and literature, whose academic work also engages expertly with popular culture and modern media appropriations and adaptations of the ancient world. Individual chapters address questions of politics, war, and history, while examining the representation of gender and sexuality, race and class, spectacle and violence, all in the setting of late Republican Rome. This volume considers the second season of Rome as a provocative contribution to the understanding of how specific threads of classical reception are constantly being reinvented to suit contemporary tastes, aspirations, and anxieties.

This book focuses from various perspectives on the striking similarities (as well as the concomitant differences) between early Greek and early Indian thought. In both cultures there occurred at about the same time the birth of 'philosophy', the idea of the universe as an intelligible order in which personal deity is (at most) marginal and the inner self is at the centre of attention. The similarities include a pentadic structure of narrative and cosmology, a basic conception of cosmic order or harmony, a close relationship between universe and inner self, techniques of soteriological inwardness and self-immortalisation, the selflessness of theory, envisaging the inner self as a chariot, the interiorisation of ritual, and ethicised reincarnation. Explanations for the similarites are a shared Indo-European origin, parallel socio-economic development, and influence in one direction or the other.