The rhetorical question, often assumed to have been favoured by the sophist Gorgias, became a fundamental feature of ancient rhetoric in both Greek and Latin. By the time of Senecan tragedy, an ...accumulation of as many as seventeen serial rhetorical questions can be found expressing extremes of emotion, especially indignation or despair. Rhetorical questions in some archaic and classical Greek authors have received limited attention, for example, in the
those delivered by Thersites in exciting indignation (2.225–233) and by the authorial voice to create pathos in asking Patroclus about the Trojans he has killed (16.692–693); the string of questions Aphrodite humorously asks in Sappho 1; the ritual queries in the Derveni Papyrus; the series of two to three questions found (often near the beginning of speeches) in the
of some tragedies. But the increasing variety and sophistication of the deployment of the rhetorical question in the Greek orators has been surprisingly neglected. This article analyses some of the different uses to which Lysias puts rhetorical questions especially in relation to characterisation in his orations and argues that they represent a considerable advance on the practice of any predecessor in any genre.
The 'Advocating Classics Education' (ACE) project is an initiative led by Professor Edith Hall and Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson, based at King's College London. The project seeks to extend the ...availability of Classical Civilisation and Ancient History (CC/AH) qualifications to learners in non-fee-paying schools across the United Kingdom. To do so, Professor Hall has been awarded a Leadership Fellowship of £250,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project's full title is 'Studying Classical Civilisation in Britain: recording the past and fostering the future' and it runs from 1st May 2017 to 31st August 2018.
Abstract
The voices of pottery workers across the British Isles during the heyday of the taste for classically themed ceramics are almost silent to us, since so few left memoirs or diaries. But other ...sources cumulatively build up a picture of skilled male, female, and child workers familiar with multifarious ancient artefacts and books visually reproducing them. At Etruria and Herculaneum, workers were encouraged to see themselves as participants in the rebirth of the ancient ceramic arts; they were trained in painstaking reproduction of details not only from ancient vases but from ancient gems, intaglios, ivories, coins, bas-reliefs, frescoes, friezes, statues, and sarcophagi. They were familiar with the stories of a substantial number of ancient mythical and historical figures, and the different aesthetic conventions of classical Athenian, Hellenistic, and Roman art. Some were even able to study antiquity at institutions of adult education, and had access to well-stocked workers’ libraries.
This exciting collection constitutes the first analysis of the modern performance of ancient Greek drama from a theoretical perspective. The last three decades have seen a remarkable revival of the ...performance of ancient Greek drama; some ancient plays - "Sophocles", "Oedipus", "Euripides", and "Medea" - have established a distinguished place in the international performance repertoire, and attracted eminent directors including Peter Stein, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Sellars, and Katie Mitchell. Staging texts first written two and a half thousand years ago, for all-male, ritualised, outdoor performance in masks in front of a pagan audience, raises quite different intellectual questions from staging any other canonical drama, including Shakespeare. But the discussion of this development in modern performance has until now received scant theoretical analysis. This book provides the solution in the form of a lively interdisciplinary dialogue, inspired by a conference held at the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama (APGRD) in Oxford, between sixteen experts in Classics, Drama, Music, Cultural History and the world of professional theatre.The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Classics and Drama alike.
From Greek and Roman times to the digital era, the library has remained central to knowledge, scholarship, and the imagination.The Meaning of the Libraryis a generously illustrated examination of ...this key institution of Western culture. Tracing what the library has meant since its beginning, examining how its significance has shifted, and pondering its importance in the twenty-first century, notable contributors-including the Librarian of Congress and the former executive director of the HathiTrust-present a cultural history of the library. In an informative introduction, Alice Crawford sets out the book's purpose and scope, and an international array of scholars, librarians, writers, and critics offer vivid perspectives about the library through their chosen fields.The Meaning of the Librarywill appeal to all who are interested in this vital institution's heritage and ongoing legacy.
A recurring element of the landscape of Tony Harrison's poetry is the sculpted image, especially the classical artistic figure, which still haunts the modern world's visual field - the realistic ...human form metamorphosed into metal, stone or timber. This essay identifies some of the aesthetic and political functions which they fulfil in a selection of his works, starting from his documented fascination with Nietzsche's statement that tragic poetry, like the tragic mask, or Perseus' mirror, allows humans to look at intolerable suffering entailed by the human predicament without being turned into stone. The last part of the essay stresses Harrison's portrayal of the processes of flux, change and metamorphosis of matter, processes which produce or are symbolised by anthropomorphic artefacts (above all the moment when the miners are melted down in the furnace to produce the statue of Prometheus) and argues that these crucial moments in his works are an expression both of his fascination with the visual as well as the literary forms inherited from classical antiquity, and of his fundamentally materialist philosophical outlook.
Greek tragedy is currently being performed more frequently than at any time since classical antiquity. This book is the first to address the fundamental question, why has there been so much Greek ...tragedy in the theatres, opera houses and cinemas of the last three decades? A detailed chronological appendix of production information and lavish illustrations supplement the fourteen essays by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the worlds of classics, theatre studies, and the professional theatre. They relate the recent appeal of Greek tragedy to social trends, political developments, aesthetic and performative developments, and the intellectual currents of the last three decades, especially multiculturalism, post-colonialism, feminism, post-structuralism, revisions of psychoanalytical models, and secularization.
This article argues that Hephaestus, the only physically disabled Olympian deity, occupies an important position in the history of comedy and the Greek tradition of laughter. From the Homeric epics ...to fourth-century comedy and vase-painting, Hephaestus is consistently to be found in cultural contexts which explore the instrumentality of laughter in domestic and social relationships, rituals and entertainments. The article proposes that the structure of the mythical narrative of the Return of Hephaestus, with its estrangement of the protagonist from his community, riotous reconciliation, and komastic procession, underlies several Old Comedies. It also suggests that his banausic profession and deformity helped to make him particularly popular in cultural artifacts—vases and dramas—produced in Athens in the democratic period because neither his trade nor his appearance would have disqualified him from wielding sovereign power, κράτος, as a citizen there.
For Vossius, the chain represented the inter-relationship of all the arts and sciences; the chain which connects the knowledge of particulars in the separate fields is the chain of philosophy.2Here, ...I want to bind together all the arts and sciences as represented by the multidisciplinary fellowship of the European Academy. Since I can't do it myself with Zeus' cosmic chain, nor indeed one bestowed upon me by Alexander the Great, then at least I can try to do it with a twenty-first-century celebration of Aristotle's towering achievements and with thoughts about how we can benefit from one of most ground-breaking ideas - potentiality. 2017 is the 2400th anniversary of Aristotle's birth in 384 BCE in Stagira, the eastern prong of the triple Chalkidiki peninsula in the northern Aegean Sea. According to Plato's idealist model of the universe, what we apprehend by the senses in the physical world is itself but a pale and inferior imitation of the real world, which consists of eternal, unchangeable, immaterial ideas or forms. Humans as a species share certain kinds of potential, but Aristotle saw different categories of human as possessing different kinds and levels. ...children (by which he means boys) are not yet capable of rational deliberation, but are fully endowed with the potential for it. Since the end of the city-state as a whole is to ensure that its citizens live the good life, it is manifest that education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private - not as at present, when everyone looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all.
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