The volume represents the seventh in the series on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. It comprises a collection of essays on the significance and working of memory in ancient texts and visual documentation, from contexts both oral (or oral-derived) and literate. The authors discuss a variety of interpretations of ‘memory’ in Homeric epic, lyric poetry, tragedy, historical inscriptions, oratory, and philosophy, as well as in the replication of ancient artworks, and in Greek vase inscriptions. They present therefore a wide-ranging analysis of memory as a fundamental faculty underlying the production and reception of texts and material documentation in a society that gradually moved from an essentially oral to an essentially literate culture.

A comprehensive account of the language of Ancient Greek civilization in a single volume, with contributions from leading international scholars covering the historical, geographical, sociolinguistic, and literary perspectives of the language. A collection of 36 original essays by a team of international scholars Treats the survival and transmission of Ancient Greek Includes discussions on phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics

This is the first part of a new narratological history of Greek literature, which deals with the definition and boundaries of narrative and the role of narrators and narratees.

Surveying the variety of ways in which written texts and oral discourse were involved in ancient religions, the contributions to this volume show that oral and written forms were intricately connected in both Greek and Roman state and private religions.

Providing a comprehensive study of "oral tradition" in Israel, this volume unpacks the nature of oral tradition, the form it would have taken in ancient Israel, and the remains of it in the narrative books of the Hebrew Bible. The author presents cases of oral/written interaction that provide the best ethnographic analogies for ancient Israel and insights from these suggest a model of transmission in oral-written societies valid for ancient Israel. Miller reconstructs what ancient Israelite oral literature would have been and considers criteria for identifying orally derived material in the narrative books of the Old Testament, marking several passages as highly probable oral derivations. Using ethnographic data and ancient Near Eastern examples, he proposes performance settings for this material. The epilogue treats the contentious topic of historicity and shows that orally derived texts are not more historically reliable than other texts in the Bible.

This volume unites scholars of classical epigraphy, papyrology, and literature to analyze the documentary habit in the Roman Empire. Texts like inscriptions and letters have gained importance in classical scholarship, but there has been limited analysis of the imaginative and sociological dimensions of the ancient document. Individual chapters investigate the definition of the document in ancient thought, and how modern understandings of documentation may (mis)shape scholarly approaches to documentary sources in antiquity. Contributors reexamine familiar categories of ancient documents through the lenses of perception and function, and reveal where the modern understanding of the document departs from ancient conceptions of documentation. The boundary between literary genres and documentary genres of writing appears more fluid than prior scholarship had allowed. Compared to modern audiences, inhabitants of the Roman Empire used a more diverse range of both non-textual and textual forms of documentation, and they did so with a more active, questioning attitude. The interdisciplinary approach to the "mentality" of documentation in this volume advances beyond standard discussions of form, genre, and style to revisit the document through the eyes of Greco-Roman readers and viewers.

It is generally assumed that whatever else has changed about the human condition since the dawn of civilization, basic human emotions - love, fear, anger, envy, shame - have remained constant. David Konstan, however, argues that the emotions of the ancient Greeks were in some significant respects different from our own, and that recognizing these differences is important to understanding ancient Greek literature and culture. With The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, Konstan reexamines the traditional assumption that the Greek terms designating the emotions correspond more or less to those of today. Beneath the similarities, there are striking discrepancies. References to Greek 'anger' or 'love' or 'envy,' for example, commonly neglect the fact that the Greeks themselves did not use these terms, but rather words in their own language, such as orgê and philia and phthonos, which do not translate neatly into our modern emotional vocabulary. Konstan argues that classical representations and analyses of the emotions correspond to a world of intense competition for status, and focused on the attitudes, motives, and actions of others rather than on chance or natural events as the elicitors of emotion. Konstan makes use of Greek emotional concepts to interpret various works of classical literature, including epic, drama, history, and oratory. Moreover, he illustrates how the Greeks' conception of emotions has something to tell us about our own views, whether about the nature of particular emotions or of the category of emotion itself.

This volume deals with aspects of orality and oral traditions in ancient Greece, and is a selection of refereed papers from the fourth biennial Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece conference, held at the University of Missouri Columbia in 2000. The book is divided into three parts: literature, rhetoric and society, and philosophy. The papers focus on genres such as epic poetry, drama, poetry and art, public oratory, legislative procedure, and Simplicius’ philosophy. All papers present new approaches to their topics or ask new and provocative questions.

Greek ethnography is commonly believed to have developed in conjunction with the wider sense of Greek identity that emerged during the Greeks' "encounter with the barbarian"--Achaemenid Persia--during the late sixth to early fifth centuries BC. The dramatic nature of this meeting, it was thought, caused previous imaginings to crystallise into the diametric opposition between "Hellene" and "barbarian" that would ultimately give rise to ethnographic prose. The Invention of Greek Ethnography challenges the legitimacy of this conventional narrative. Drawing on recent advances in ethnographic and cultural studies and in the material culture-based analyses of the Ancient Mediterranean, Joseph Skinner argues that ethnographic discourse was already ubiquitous throughout the archaic Greek world, not only in the form of texts but also in a wide range of iconographic and archaeological materials. As such, it can be differentiated both on the margins of the Greek world, like in Olbia and Calabria and in its imagined centers, such as Delphi and Olympia. The reconstruction of this "ethnography before ethnography" demonstrates that discourses of identity and difference played a vital role in defining what it meant to be Greek in the first place long before the fifth century BC. The development of ethnographic writing and historiography are shown to be rooted in this wider process of "positioning" that was continually unfurling across time, as groups and individuals scattered the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world sought to locate themselves in relation to the narratives of the past. This shift in perspective provided by The Invention of Greek Ethnography has significant implications for current understanding of the means by which a sense of Greek identity came into being, the manner in which early discourses of identity and difference should be conceptualized, and the way in which so-called "Great Historiography," or narrative history, should ultimately be interpreted.

"Lawmaking and Adjudication in Archaic Greece" re-evaluates central aspects of the genesis and application of laws in the communities of archaic Greece, including the structure and function of legislative bodies, the composition of the courts, the administration of justice and the use and abuse of legal norms and procedures by litigants in the courts and everyday settings. Combining a detailed analysis of epigraphical and literary evidence and the application of a model of interpretation borrowed from cultural analyses of law, this book argues that far from being monolithic creations of archaic polities that unilaterally informed social life, archaic legal systems can be more appropriately viewed as ideologically polyvalent and socially complex.It includes legal norms and the administration of justice articulated associations with divine and secular authority but also incorporated, mainly in their reception and application by average citizens, discourses of utility and resistance that actively contributed in the composition of social relations.