Books in the Cambridge Classical Studies series

This is the first comprehensive study of the sublime in Lucan. Drawing upon renewed literary-critical interest in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, Henry Day argues that the category of the sublime offers a means of moving beyond readings of Lucan's Bellum Civile in terms of the poem's political commitment or, alternatively, nihilism. Demonstrating in dialogue with theorists from Burke and Kant to Freud, Lyotard and Ankersmit the continuing vitality of Longinus' foundational treatise On the Sublime, Day charts Lucan's complex and instructive exploration of the relationship between sublimity and ethical discourses of freedom and oppression. Through the Bellum Civile's cataclysmic vision of civil war and metapoetic accounts of its own genesis, through its heated linguistic texture and proclaimed effects upon future readers and, most powerfully of all, through its representation of its twin protagonists Caesar and Pompey, Lucan's great epic emerges as a central text in the history of the sublime.

The first volume to show the different ways in which surviving linguistic evidence can be used to track movements of people in the ancient world. Discusses cases for the period from the seventh century BC to the fourth century AD, ranging from Spain to Egypt, from Sicily to Pannonia.

Leading scholars explore how ancient Greek and Roman philosophy developed over its long history a sense in which philosophers might acknowledge the authority of some other philosopher or group of philosophers, as well as a number of canonical texts whose discussion itself became a mode of philosophical debate.

Argues that Propertius' third book re-invents Latin love-elegy, in competition with Horatian lyric and Virgilian epic, as part of an ambitious claim to Augustan pre-eminence. Uses detailed readings of individual elegies to explore elegy's engagement with emerging Augustan mores.

With his extensive knowledge of the ways in which Plato was read and invoked as an authority in late antiquity Dr Tarrant builds a most impressive reconstruction of Philo of Larissa's brand of Platonism and of its arrival in Middle Platonism, particularly that of Plutarch, long after the Academy's institutional demise.

Our knowledge of Alexander the Great is derived from the widely varying accounts of five authors who wrote three and more centuries after his death. The value of each account can be determined in detail only by discovering the source from which it drew, section by section, whether from a contemporary document, a memoir by a companion of Alexander, a hostile critique or a romanticizing narrative.

Prometheus Bound was accepted without question in antiquity as the work of Aeschylus, and most modern authorities endorse this ascription. But since the nineteenth century several leading scholars have come to doubt Aeschylean authorship. Dr Griffith here provides a thorough and wide-ranging study of this problem.

A critical study of Persius' poetic aims, aversions and techniques, based mainly on an extended analysis of Satires I. John Bramble shows how Persius' discontent with conventional literary language led him to compress the existing satiric idiom and create a powerful individual style. The author situates Persius' work in the tradition of Roman satire, and shows how he takes the concepts and metaphors of literary criticism back to their physical origins, to indict moral and literary decadence through a series of images connected with, for example, gluttony and sexual excess. This is a model study of a classical text, which makes consistent sense of a difficult and subtle manner, and answers questions posed by the potentially constricting nature of Roman poetic form. It also reconstructs the referential framework of ideas and associations upon which a sophisticated writer addressing a discriminating audience could draw.

Professor Shipp's purpose in the first edition of this book (published in 1953) was 'to examine in as much detail as possible the development of the language of the Iliad in some of its typical features, with careful attention to the spoken dialects involved and to the influence of metre'. In the second edition he widens the scope of his work to examine the Odyssey as well as the Iliad, and he extends its detail to include syntax as well as grammatical forms and to cover questions of vocabulary more comprehensively. The author's earlier conclusions are shown to be confirmed, and an important further result for the Odyssey has been to show the typical lateness of the language of moralizing passages.

This book attempts to provide a more positive assessment of Lucretius' aims and methodology by considering the poet's attitude to myth, and the role which it plays in the De Rerum Natura, against the background of earlier and contemporary views.

Apollonius Rhodius' influential epic poem from the Hellenistic period is here examined from a number of perspectives, with the main emphasis on thematic and narrative complexities arising from the poet's use of language. Written in an accessible style, this book breaks new ground in the critical interpretation of the poem.

This 1999 book is a wide-ranging study of the language of Sophocles. From a detailed analysis of sentence-structure it moves on to discuss how language shapes the perception of characters, of myths, of gods and of choruses. All chapters are concerned to investigate how Sophoclean language engages readers and spectators.

The astronomical material in Ovid's Fasti has been overlooked by the current trend of scholarly interest in the poem. It is this material which is the subject of this book. The author does not study Ovid's stars using the techniques of mathematical astronomy. Rather she aims to combine the methodology of recent 'programmatic' or genre-based readings with a broad cultural perspective.

This is a 1999 study of one of the most famous poems of Roman literature. By close reading of selected passages from the Georgics the author seeks to understand the work in terms of the cultural and political upheavals which were afflicting Rome at the time of its composition.

This in-depth and engaging study of Aristotle's theory of the sense-organs shows the extent to which his theory is motivated by his interest in form and function.

How was the poet Homer imagined by ancient Greeks? This book examines stories about this elusive figure that circulated between the sixth and fourth centuries BC, and attempts to explore the ancient reception of the Homeric poems and to look at it in relation to modern conceptions and approaches.

The Chain of Change, first published in 1990, is a philosophical commentary devoted to Aristotle's Physics VII, in which Aristotle argues for the existence of a first, unmoved cosmic mover. This study systematically considers the major issues of the book.

This is an in-depth treatment of Juvenal's third book of Satires, which gives a welcome overview of the development of Juvenal's satiric output.

A feature of Roman rhetorical education under the early empire was the dominance of the declamatio - the declamation on a mythological, historical or quasi-legal theme. The elder Seneca, father of the philosopher and dramatist, compiled an anthology of the often bizarre utterances of the declaimers.

This book is at once an analytical study of one of the most important mathematical texts of antiquity, the Mathematical Collection of the fourth-century AD mathematician Pappus of Alexandria, and also an examination of the work's wider cultural setting.

A study of a small agricultural village in the Fayum as a social and economic unit towards the end of the second century BC, which was a period of civil unrest and economic disruption in Egypt. The book is based on papyrus documents from the archive of the village scribe.

This study examines how one of the most popular and glamorous figures of Greek mythology, and a key character in the Homeric epics, was imagined on the tragic stage of fifth-century Athens. Dr Michelakis argues that dramatists persistently appropriated Achilles to address concerns of their time.

This book is a philosophical analysis of Plato's dialogue, the Statesman. Dr Lane finds that rather than being transitional between the Republic and the Laws, the Statesman deserves a special place of its own - the dialogue emerging as a text which proposes an alternative conception of knowledge, authority, and the relationship between them.

This study examines the literary complexities of the poetry which Ovid wrote in Tomis, his place of exile after his banishiment from Rome. The author contests Ovid's claims of the terminal decline of his art through close analysis of the literary manoeuvres contradicting his prose, counteracting traditional scholarly antipathy to these poems.

By analysing a selection of speeches of the Athenian orator Andokides and the decisions reached by his audience on each occasion, Dr Missiou demonstrates that the orator had divergent perceptions, values and attitudes from those of his audience on a number of issues. By this means she challenges the criticism that the decisions of the Assembly during this period were irresponsible and irrational.

Demos is a study of a classical city-state, providing an integrated account which gives due attention to the countryside as well as urban areas of a polis. Concentrating on classical Athens, it establishes the nature of settlement in the countryside and how it relates to farming, mineral mining and political participation in local and central politics.

An interpretation of Hellenistic and Roman education. Teresa Morgan draws on evidence from all over the classical world, including papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, to re-examine one of the institutions which made that world an entity, and which was one of its most influential legacies to the west.

This interpretation of Plato's dialogue, the Sophist, shows how important the issues concerning the sophist are to the possibility of philosophy. Plato is seen to struggle with difficult philosophical issues in a single line of inquiry and, in defining the sophist, to reveal his conception of the authentic philosopher.

The first comprehensive account of syllabic writing in ancient Cyprus, tackling epigraphic, archaeological and historical problems relating to the island's writing systems in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, and challenging some longstanding or traditional views. Invaluable for scholars studying Cypriot epigraphy or archaeology.

In Aristotle's view, Anaxagoras stood out from the other Presocratics as a sober man among the incoherent. This book explores the fragmentary evidence both for Anaxagoras' concept of mind - to which Aristotle was particularly referring - and for his subtle, complex and elusive theory of matter and change.