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Article

books, Greek and Roman  

H. Maehler

Books existed in *Egypt long before they came into use in Greece. Systems of writing had been invented and developed for administrative purposes in both Egypt and *Mesopotamia by c.3000 bce. While the Sumerians (see sumerian) and Babylonians used clay tablets for their *cuneiform scripts, the Egyptians used papyrus. A blank sheet of papyrus was found in the tomb of the vizier Hemaka in Saqqara of c.3000 bce. The oldest surviving inscribed papyrus texts are the temple accounts of Abusir of c.2450 bce. A number of fine statues of seated scribes of the same period suggests that this profession was already well established and that writing had been practised for centuries, long enough for the ‘hieratic’ script to develop through the adaptation of hieroglyphs to the use of reed-brush and papyrus. The hieroglyph for ‘book-roll’ is first attested in the first dynasty (c.

Article

consolation  

J. H. D. Scourfield

The practice of offering words of consolation to those afflicted by grief is reflected in the earliest Greek poetry (e.g. Hom. Il. 24. 507–51). Later, under the twin influences of rhetoric and philosophy, a specialized consolatory literature began to develop, initiating a tradition which persisted through Graeco-Roman antiquity and into the Middle Ages and beyond. In broad terms, this ‘genre’ can be taken to comprise both situation-specific texts, addressed to individuals who have suffered recent bereavement or some other kind of loss-experience, such as exile or illness, and texts of a more abstract or theoretical (‘metaconsolatory’) kind. The first category includes, centrally, prose letters of consolation, which might be brief or extensive, essentially private or possessing an evident public dimension; poems, often hardly distinguishable from epicedia (see epicedion); and funeral speeches, which in late antiquity in particular might contain a substantial consolatory element. Outside the literary tradition narrowly understood also survive personal letters on papyrus and inscribed decrees from Greek cities consoling the relatives of deceased honorands. To the second category belong philosophical treatises and other writings on death and the alleviation of grief; *Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations 1 and 3 is a good example.

Article

emotions  

Douglas Cairns

“Emotion” is a vernacular rather than a scientific concept. The experiences that are called emotions in English are a subset of a wider range of affective experiences. Categories of particular emotions similarly constitute families whose members are by no means homogeneous. As perceptions of the world and of ourselves, emotions are richly permeated by cognition. As syndromes of multiple factors, they have an event-like structure that lends itself to narrative explanation. Historical analysis of emotion(s) thus requires close attention to conceptual history and to contexts, both immediate and cultural/historical. Classicists can explore the historical contingency of “emotion” in Greek and Latin, both in the theories of the major philosophical schools and in a variety of literary texts. But emotion history now uses a much wider range of literary, documentary, visual, and material evidence. Understanding emotion is an essential aspect of many early 21st-century approaches to Classics, especially in ancient history, classical literature and rhetoric, and ancient philosophy, just as the visual and physical remains of the classical world are rich in emotional implications and deeply entwined with the representation, performance, and pragmatics of ancient emotion.

Article

epic  

Philip Hardie

At the summit of the ancient hierarchy of genres, epic narrates in hexameter verse the deeds of gods, heroes, and men The authority of Homer, the name given to the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey, ensures that the forms and conventions of the Homeric poems are determinative for the whole of the Greco-Roman tradition of epic. From an early date, the production and reading of epic poems was accompanied by intensive scholarly and critical activity. Over the centuries, numerous epics were written on both legendary and historical subjects, as the genre responded to changing aesthetic and ideological conditions. In Rome, Virgil’s Aeneid successfully established for itself an authority comparable to that of the Homeric poems, and all later Latin epics place themselves within a Virgilian tradition. Epic in Greek and Latin continues to flourish in late antiquity, when Christian writers appropriate its forms to propagate their own messages and praise their own heroes.

Article

epyllion  

Edward Courtney and Gail Trimble

Epyllion (diminutive of epos), term applied in modern (not ancient) times to some ‘short epics’, hexameter poems of mythological narrative in not more than one book. The texts most frequently called ‘epyllion’ are Hellenistic (especially the Hecale of *Callimachus (3), certain poems of *Theocritus, and Moschus’ Europa) and Roman (the sixty-fourth poem of *Catullus (1), lost works by other *neoterics, and the *Ciris).

Characteristics often considered typical of epyllion include: unfamiliar mythical subject-matter, often erotic; a subjective, emotional style; an uneven narrative scale, with some events elaborated and others quickly passed over; the inclusion of a second theme within the main narrative by means of a speech or *ekphrasis.

However, many of these features are shared with other Hellenistic or neoteric poetry, with earlier poems in the post-Homeric epic tradition, or with shorter poetic narratives in other metres (especially lyric), while some poems usually identified as ‘epyllia’ exhibit only one or two of them. The meaningfulness of the term has therefore been questioned, although its convenience is generally agreed.

Article

explanation, historical  

Christopher Pelling

‘Which of the gods was it that brought the two together in strife?’, asks the Iliad as it launches its narrative (1.8); early in the Odyssey*Zeus complains that mortals blame the gods when they are responsible for their own sufferings (1.32–3). Both poems however swiftly complicate any attempt to limit explanations to either the human or the divine level. Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel, Achilles kills Hector, and Odysseus gets home, largely because they are the people that they are, but gods often intervene too. The Greeks win because they are better fighters; they also win because more gods are on their side. The poems also suggest another form of explanation, not tracing events to their origins but relating them to a familiar pattern of human life. Suffering is the lot of humanity (Il. 24.525–6); outrages like those of the suitors are punished. Life is like that, and one should not be surprised.

Article

fable  

Francisco R. Adrados and Niklas Holzberg

Fable, a short story in the popular tradition of Greece and other ancient cultures. Fables found their way into literature as illustrative examples; later they were compiled into collections.

They usually deal with a conflict in which animals speak and intervene, but the characters may also be plants, sundry objects, men, or gods, Fable normally deals with the triumph of the strong, but also portrays the cunning of the weak and their mockery of, or triumph over, the powerful. Fables also stress the impossibility of changing nature; some give aetiological explanations. Most often there is a comic element; sometimes the ‘situation’ of a protagonist is depicted, from which the audience may draw analogies.

It is therefore impossible to offer a fixed definition. The boundaries of fable intermesh with those of myth, animal proverbs, anecdotes, tales, and *chreiai. Fable is normally fiction, but does at times use anecdotes about real characters. It reflects popular literature and may satirize the values and abuses of the dominant social classes.

Article

feminism and ancient literature  

Helen Morales

Feminism does not refer to one coherent theory, doctrine, or political movement. The range of movements and ideologies that thrive under the term feminism, however, are all committed to political and social change. Feminism recognises that we live in a patriarchal world, that is to say a world in which women are, and have historically been, oppressed by and unequal to men. It opposes this, and strives to change existing power structures so that people of all genders and races have control over their own bodies, have equal opportunities and value, can participate fully in community life, and are allowed to live with dignity and freedom.

What has this to do with ancient literature? There are several significant ways in which feminism and ancient literature interact. Ancient literature, particularly ancient Greek tragedy and myth, has played a formative role in shaping feminist theory. Feminism encourages scholars to uncover and reevaluate a tradition of women’s writing. Feminism has provided the tools for us better to understand how ancient literature functioned to promote, and sometimes to challenge, the misogynist practices of ancient Greek and Roman societies. Scholars have detected feminism, or proto-feminism, in ancient writing. Queer theory and feminism join forces to mine ancient literature for alternatives to hetero, cisgender, and gender binary models of identity. Feminism has changed the field of ancient literary studies by valuing authors and genres that are sensitive to the perspectives of women of all ethnicities and statuses. Finally, ancient literature is used to serve contemporary activism: Greek and Latin texts are used by modern feminist authors who rewrite and creatively adapt ancient literature, and classicists resist the use of ancient literature to promote misogyny and white supremacy.

Article

folktale  

William Hansen

Folktales are traditional fictional stories. Unlike works of original literary fiction, they are normally anonymous narratives that have been transmitted from one teller to another over an uncertain period of time, and have been shaped by multiple narrators into the form and style that are characteristic of oral narratives. The transmission of traditional tales is predominantly oral, but in literate societies such as Greece and Rome, transmission also takes place via written works.

“Folktale” is an umbrella term for a number of subgenres: the wonder tale (commonly known as the fairytale), the religious tale, the novella, the humorous tale (with its subforms the joke and the tall tale), the animal tale, and the fable. Since there was no ancient notion of folktales as such, no compilation of folktales exists from antiquity—only compilations of particular genres of folktales such as the fable and the joke.

Unlike myths and legends, folktales are narrative fictions, make no serious claim to historicity, and are not ordinarily accorded credence. They differ from myths and especially from legends in their handling of the supernatural.

Article

friendship, ritualized  

G. Herman

Friendship, ritualized (or guest-friendship), a bond of trust, imitating kinship and reinforced by rituals, generating affection and obligations between individuals belonging to separate social units. In Greek sources this bond is called xenia, xeiniē, and xeineiē; in Latin, hospitium. The individuals joined by the bond (usually men of approximately equal social status) are said to be each other's xenos or hospes. As the same terms designated guest-host relationships, xenia and hospitium have sometimes been interpreted in modern research as a form of hospitality. Xenia, hospitium, and hospitality do overlap to some extent but the former relationships display a series of additional features which assimilate them into the wider category called in social studies ritualized personal relationships, or pseudo-kinship. The analogy with kinship did not escape the notice of the ancients themselves. According to the *AristotelianMagna Moralia, xenia was the strongest of all the relationships involving affection (philia) (2.

Article

genre  

Gian Biagio Conte and Glenn W. Most

A grouping of texts related within the system of literature by their sharing recognizably functionalized features of form and content. Theory of genre as such is quite lacking in antiquity (its place is taken by theories of *imitatio) and ancient theoretical discussions of specific literary genres are few and for the most part unsatisfactory. They operate according to criteria which are one-sidedly formal (generally metrical), thematic (the characters' moral or social quality, the general subject-matter), or pragmatic (the situation of performance), but scarcely attempt to correlate or justify them; they are more interested in classifying existing works than in understanding the mechanisms of literary production and reception and are directed to the needs of the school and the library, not to the critic's; they bungle some genres (lyric) and ignore others (the novel). Rhetorical handbooks sometimes distinguish among oratorical genres, but the precise relation between their (often pedantic) prescriptions and the literary works remains uncertain.

Article

ghosts  

Esther Eidinow

Identifying a ghost in Greek literature and distinguishing it from what we might call a delusion or a supernatural entity can sometimes pose difficulties: *Homer tends to use the term psyche to describe his spirits, but we also find skia. In later writers, eidolon is used (Hdt. 5.92.η and Pl. Leg. 959b of the corpse), which can also mean a phantom of the mind, or even just a likeness. Later still, *daimōn, alone, or combined with other words to evoke particular forms of demon (see below) appears. Other terms (which will appear throughout the entry) evoked the particular ways in which individuals died and became ghosts. This entry will focus on appearances in the mortal realm of spirits connected to a death, indicating where there are any ambiguities of spectral terminology. As the move from psyche to daimōn might suggest, there seems to be a gradual development in the strength, substance and presence of ghosts in the ancient world; while living mortals seem, in turn, to find increasingly sophisticated ways to manipulate their spectral visitors and their needs for their own ends.

Article

graffiti  

Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons

Graffiti are informal, unofficial writings or drawings on surfaces not first produced for writing purposes, such as walls, pavement stones, rocks, and ceramics. Graffiti elucidate a great deal about life in the ancient world including topics such as social history, literacy, linguistic variation, sexuality, religious practices, and the use of space in ancient cities. These texts were composed in a variety of media: typically, they were scratched into the physical support, but paint, charcoal, and chalk were used as well. Graffiti have been found in many cities of the Greco-Roman world and in a variety of spaces including houses, tombs, religious spaces, and public areas. Since the texts were often inscribed or written on delicate surfaces such as wall plaster, only a small portion of the thousands that were once inscribed survive to the present.Graffiti (singular graffito) are informal, unofficial writings or drawings on surfaces not first produced for writing purposes, such as walls, pavement stones, rocks, and ceramics. A narrow definition of the word from its Italian root meaning “to scratch” only includes texts or drawings scratched into a hard surface such as plaster, stone, or marble. Because informal writings made with materials such as charcoal and chalk served the same purposes and were written in the same locations, and, in some instances, by the same authors as their inscribed counterparts, they are also included in the genre. The term graffiti, now used in English for writing of this sort from any era, was coined by .

Article

Justin  

Alexander Hugh McDonald and Antony Spawforth

Justin (Marcus Iunian(i)us Iustinus), dated to the 2nd, 3rd, or even (Syme) 4th cent. ce, important as the author of a Latin *epitome of the otherwise lost ‘Philippic Histories’ of *Pompeius Trogus, whom he seems to have followed closely, confining his authorial voice to moralizing passages.

Article

libraries  

P. J. Parsons

By the end of the 5th cent. bce, books were in general circulation, even if some regarded them as a fad of intellectuals like *Euripides (Ar. Ran. 943, cf. fr. 506 KA); Athens had booksellers (Eup. fr. 327, Aristomenes (2) fr. 9, KA), and exports reached the Black Sea (Xen. An. 7. 5. 14), see euxine. Individuals collected the best-known poets and philosophers (Xen. Mem. 4. 2. 1); an imagined collection of the later 4th cent. bce includes *Orpheus, *Hesiod, *tragedies, *Choerilus (probably (2)), *Homer, *Epicharmus, and all kinds of prose, including Simus' Cookery (Alexis fr. 140 KA). Of famous collectors (Ath. 1. 3a), *Aristotle took first place (Strabo 13. 1. 54); but his library, like that of the other philosophic schools, remained private property (for its chequered history, see Strabo, ibid.; Plut. Sull. 26. 1–2).Institutional libraries begin with the Hellenistic monarchies; the ‘public’ library of *Pisistratus (Gell.

Article

literacy  

Rosalind Thomas

The number of people who could read and write in the ancient world is hard to determine. Without statistical evidence, we must rely mostly on chance information and inference: for example, the institution of *ostracism implies that most Athenian citizens could be expected to write a name. Our evidence (written) indicates the literate, not the illiterate, and especially the highly educated élite. The ancient habit of reading aloud meant that written texts could often be shared the more easily by others; the presence of inscriptions (see epigraphy, greek) does not itself imply that they were read by everyone, since their symbolic value added another dimension to their written contents. There are also many different levels of literacy, which complicate the picture, from the basic ability to figure out a short message, to functional literacy or ‘craft literacy’, to the skill required for reading a literary papyrus (reading and writing skills may also have been separate). However, certain broad generalizations are possible. The ‘mass literacy’ of modern industrial countries was never achieved in the ancient world (cf. Harris (see bibliog. below), who believes a maximum of 20–30 per cent literacy was achieved, and that in Hellenistic cities). Women, slaves, and the lower social levels would usually be less literate. Archaic Greece and particularly Archaic Rome have left fewer instances of writing (graffiti, inscriptions), implying sparse literacy, and Archaic Greek cities sometimes attempt to ensure an official's power over the written word was not abused. However, there were pockets and periods where a higher rate of basic literacy among the adult citizen-body is probable: for instance, under the Athenian *democracy, when there was a relatively high level of reading-matter and incentives to read (even the sausage seller can read a little, Ar.

Article

literary criticism in antiquity  

Donald Russell

1. The arts of formal speech played a great part in ancient life, so that it was natural that vocabularies and conceptual frameworks should be developed for the purposes of evaluation, speculation about the nature and role of poetry, and practical advice for successful composition, especially in oratory. In the resulting body of doctrine, this last element—which is the contribution of *rhetoric—is dominant, and it is this which seems the most striking difference between Graeco-Roman ‘criticism’ and most modern analogues.2. The first evidences we have of reflection on these subjects are in the early poets. *Homer and *Hesiod speak of their art as a gift of the *Muses, who inspire the poet, know all things, and can tell false tales as well as true (Il. 2. 484–92; Od. 8. 479 ff.; Hes. Theog. 1–104). *Pindar too called himself the ‘prophet’—i.e. ‘spokesman’—of the Muses (fr. 137 Snell–Maehler), and was proud to think of his ‘wisdom’ as the product of natural endowment, not of teachable technique, which was for lesser mortals (Ol.

Article

metaphor and simile  

Michael Silk

Features of literary language that have been extensively discussed by theorists and critics since antiquity. The first purposeful investigations are *Aristotle's (Poet.21–2; Rh. 3. 2. 6–4. 4, 3. 10. 7–11. 15). By the time of *Quintilian (Inst. 8. 5. 35–9. 3. 102) metaphor and simile have a place in an elaborate apparatus of ‘tropes’ (τρόποι, tropi/modi) and ‘figures’ (σχήματα, figurae), with metaphor (μεταφορά, translatio) classed among the tropes, and simile (εἰκών, similitudo) generally associated with the figures (e.g. Cic. De or. 3. 205, cf. Quint. Inst. 9. 2. 1–2). Figures comprise a variety of supposedly special ‘conformations’ (Quint. Inst. 9. 1. 4), from homoeoteleuton to rhetorical question. Tropes comprise all deviations (except for errors) from established word usage, including in particular(a) deviations based on contiguity or association, in modern analysis generally grouped together as ‘metonymy’ (‘arma virumque cano’, ‘arms and the man I sing’, Verg. Aen.

Article

metonymy  

Sebastian Matzner

The term metonymy denotes a literary trope, that is, a specific form of defamiliarized expression, which indirectly refers to what is at issue. Metonymy achieves this by way of exploiting an already existing association between the term (or terms) used metonymically—the metonym—and the term (or terms) implicitly at issue. Metonymy thus differs from metaphor, among other things, in that it does not invoke an underlying analogy or similarity between what is said and what is at issue. In both ancient and modern criticism, metaphor received significantly more attention than metonymy (partly owed to the fact that the poetic effects of metaphor tend to eclipse those of metonymy, partly because of the stronger appeal of the logical dimension at the heart of metaphor). As a result, metonymy—though widely used—is often ill-defined as a critical concept. Today, it features in literary-aesthetic, diachronic-etymological, (post-)structuralist, and cognitive criticism. Ancient literature, both Greek and Latin, is rich in metonymic usages, albeit with varying degrees of poetic intensity; the pattern is one of relatively few intense outcomes, and relatively many less intense ones. Prominent among the general literary-aesthetic effects of metonymy’s semantic shifts are the creation of a poignantly condensed impression of what is at issue; a change in focalization by zooming out onto a higher plane or zooming in on newly foregrounded micro-level aspects; and movement between the concrete-material and the abstract-conceptual dimensions of what is at issue.

Article

narrative, narration  

Massimo Fusillo

In the last 30 years, interest in narrative has developed at an incredible pace. Two branches of this ‘narratology’ may be distinguished. The one is oriented towards the ‘story’ as signified (‘what happened’: cf. especially the work of Greimas and Bremond, looking back to Propp's famous Morphology of the Folktale); the other is oriented rather towards the narrative as signifier (‘the way it is told’: Stanzel, Genette, in the line of the Russian formalists, Henry James, and E. M. Forster). Both approaches have been widely applied in classical studies, but the first has perhaps been more successful in the anthropological study of myth (see mythology), the second in literary studies, in that it focuses on the rhetorical construction of the work rather than its underlying functional structure. The sophisticated armoury of methods that is modern narratology is one of the products of structuralism and semiotics, and like those more general movements it has in recent times been subject to qualifications and criticisms from post-structuralists and from reception theorists and students of literary pragmatics with their greater focus on the audience or readership of a work.