This volume brings together 29 junior and senior scholars to discuss aspects of Hesiod's poetry and its milieu and to explore questions of reception over two and half millennia from shortly after the poems' conception to Twitter hashtags. Rather than an exhaustive study of Hesiodic themes, the Handbook is conceived as a guide through terrain, some familiar, other less charted, examining both Hesiodic craft and later engagements with Hesiod's stories of the gods and moralizing proscriptions of just human behavior. The volume opens with the "Hesiodic Question," to address questions of authorship, historicity, and the nature of composition of Hesiod's two major poems, the Theogony and Works and Days. Subsequent chapters on the archaeology and economic history of archaic Boiotia, Indo-European poetics, and Hesiodic style offer a critical picture of the sorts of questions that have been asked rather than an attempt to resolve debate. Other chapters discuss Hesiod's particular rendering of the supernatural and the performative nature of the Works and Days, as well as competing diachronic and synchronic temporalities and varying portrayals of female in the two poems. The rich story of reception ranges from Solon to comic books. These chapters continue to explore the nature of Hesiod's poetics, as different writers through time single out new aspects of his art less evident to earlier readers. Long before the advent of Christianity, classical writers leveled their criticism at Hesiod's version of polytheism. The relative importance of Hesiod's two major poems across time also tells us a tale of the age receiving the poems. In the past two centuries, artists and writers have come to embrace the Hesiodic stories for themselves for the insight they offer of the human condition but even as old allegory looks quaint to modern eyes new forms of allegory take form.

The Metamorphoses, written by the Roman poet Ovid, has fascinated readers ever since it was written in the first century CE, and here Celia M. Campbell offers a bold new interpretive approach. Reasserting the significance of the ancient hymnic tradition, she argues that the first pentad of Ovid's Metamorphoses draws a programmatic strain of influence from hymns to the gods, in particular conversation--and competition--with the work of the Alexandrian poet Callimachus, a favored source of inspiration to Augustan writers. She suggests that Ovid read Callimachus' six hymns as a self-conscious set--and reading the first five books of the Metamorphoses through Callimachus' hymnic collection allows us to pierce the occasionally opaque and seemingly idiosyncratic mythology Ovid constructs. Through careful, innovative close readings, Campbell illustrates that Callimachus and the hymnic tradition provide a kind of interpretative key to unlocking the dynamic landscape of divine power in Ovid's poetic cosmos.

Introducing a largely neglected area of existing interactions between Greco-Roman antiquity and media theory, this volume addresses the question of why interactions in this area matter and how they might be developed further. It aims not only to promote awareness of the presence of the classics in media theory but also to encourage more media attentiveness among scholars of Greece and Rome. By bringing together an international team of scholars with interdisciplinary expertise in areas ranging from classical literature and classical reception studies to art history, media theory and media history, film studies, philosophy, and cultural studies, the volume as a whole engages with numerous aspects of 'classical' Greece and Rome revolving around issues of philosophy, cultural history, literature, aesthetics, and epistemology. Each chapter provides its own definition of what constitutes mediality and how it operates, constructs different genealogies of the concept of the medium, and engages with emergent fields within media studies that range from cultural techniques to media archaeology, diagrammatology, and intermediality. By seeking to foreground the persistency of Greco-Roman paradigms across the different strands of media theory the volume persuasively calls for a closer consideration of the conceptual underpinnings of the cultural practices around the transformation of ancient Greece and Rome into 'classics.'

This volume is an edition of the poetical and grammatical fragments of Philitas of Cos, the early-Hellenistic scholar and poet who served as an exemplary model for the great Alexandrian poets. His output includes frivolous Hermes and Demeter which both had fundamental impact on later metapoetic imagery, and the Ataktoi Glossai, a glossary interpreting mainly Homeric idiom in pre-Aristarchean fashion. The body of the book consists of an Introduction discussing life, literary affiliations and metre; an edition of testimonies and fragments along with a commentary elucidating matters of language and influence on the scholar-poets, Propertius and Longus. The study of Philitas is brought up to date with new testimonies and new neglected sources for the fragments. Recent papyrological findings, verse inscriptions, lexicographic sources and inscriptions from Cos are taken into consideration. Passages dubiously ascribed to Philitas are discussed. The book closes with three Appendices and comprehensive Indexes.

Fame and glory, rumour and reputation have fascinated through the ages. The way in which they are communicated and spread is a topic which impacts our lives on a daily basis and is an important theme in current literature. The ancient world is an ideal arena for the exploration of these issues, being a ‘closed’ period of human history that offers a secure resource for exploring the phenomenon. Philip Hardie’s Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is an authoritative work on this subject, and the stimulus for this volume. Continuing the on-going discussion, each one of the contributors examines further aspects of the issue in the work of Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Manilius, Juvenal and the Christian poet, Prudentius. The volume offers insights into the poets’ personal quest for acclaim and – more importantly – their awareness of the qualities of the phenomenon, an awareness which, on occasion, led them to personify fame and glory. Virgil’s personification of Fama in Aeneid 4 was fame’s most important personification, influencing artists for centuries to come, and it is this subject with which the volume concludes.