While nineteenth-century scholars debated whether the fragmentary Satyrica of Petronius should be regarded as a traditional or an original work in ancient literary history, twentieth-century Petronian scholarship tended to take for granted that the author was a unique innovator and his work a synthetic composition with respect to genre. The consequence of this was an excessive emphasis on authorial intention as well as a focus on parts of the text taken out of the larger context, which has increased the already severe state of fragmentation in which today's reader finds the Satyrica. The present study offers a reading of the Satyrica as the mimetic performance of its fictional auctor Encolpius; as an ancient road novel told from memory by a Greek exile who relates how on his travels through Italy he had dealings with people who told stories, gave speeches, recited poetry and made other statements, which he then weaves into his own story and retells through the performance technique of vocal impersonation. The result is a skillfully made narrative fabric, a travelogue carried by a desultory narrative voice that switches identity from time to time to deliver discursively varied and often longish statements in the personae of encountered characters.This study also makes a renewed effort to reconstruct the story told in the Satyrica and to explain how it relates to the identity and origin of its fictional auctor, a poor young scholar who volunteered to act the scapegoat in his Greek home city, Massalia (ancient Marseille), and was driven into exile in a bizarre archaic ritual. Besides relating his erotic suffering on account of his love for the beautiful boy Giton, Encolpius intertwines the various discourses and character statements of his narrative into a subtle brand of satire and social criticism (e.g. a critique of ancient capitalism) in the style of Cynic popular philosophy. Finally, it is argued that Petronius' Satyrica is a Roman remake of a lost Greek text of the same title and belongs - together with Apuleius' Metamorphoses - to the oldest type of Greco-Roman novel, known to antiquity as Milesian fiction. Supplementum 2 in Ancient Narrative

This collection of Daniel Boyarin's previously uncollected essays on the Talmud represents the different methods and lines of inquiry that have animated his work on that text over the last four decades. Ranging and changing from linguistic work to work on sex and gender to the relations between formative Judaism and Christianity to the literary genres of the Talmud in the Hellenistic context, he gives an account of multiple questions and provocations to which that prodigious book gives stimulation, showing how the Talmud can contribute to all of these fields. The book opens up possibilities for study of the Talmud using historical, classical, philological, anthropological, cultural studies, gender, and literary theory and criticism. As a kind of intellectual autobiography, it is a record of the alarums and excursions of a life in the Talmud.

Few surviving works of classical literature have cast the haunting, hilarious, insightful, and eerie spell conjured by the Satyricon of the Neronian courtier and eventual victim Petronius. Fragmentary, opaque, and enigmatic, at times it seems that deception and obfuscation are the favorite tricks of its author. A Reading of Petronius’ Satyricon offers a fresh look at this genre-defying masterpiece, proceeding episode by episode and scene by scene through a vision of the hell that humanity has fashioned for itself. Petronius mercilessly and exactingly appraises Rome’s embrace of the Golden Age dreams of the Augustan principate, judging his fellow citizens and himself by the yardstick of the Neronian reign that broods over them like an avenging specter. Petronius' Satyricon offers medicine for ambulatory corpses, a prescription that consists of notifying the dead of the diagnosis, and of pointing out the inevitable and eminently logical antidote for those consumed by insatiable hunger and unfulfillable longing. Bitterly sardonic and preternaturally serene, Lee Fratantuono’s reading reveals Petronius to be nothing less than the ultimate literary voice of a dying dynasty, a prose and poetic verbal magician of serious intention, a virtuoso in the art of unmasking the ghoulish horror and inconsolable sadness that lurk often just below the surface of the comic.

While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.

Petronius: A Handbook unravels the mysteries of the Satyrica, one of the greatest literary works that antiquity has bequeathed to the modern world. Includes a dozen original essays by a team of leading Petronius and Roman history scholars Features the first multi-dimensional approach to Satyricon studies by exploring the novel's literary structure, social and historic contexts, and modern reception Supplemented by illustrations, plot outline, glossary, map, bibliography, and suggestions for further reading

This volume reveals how Apuleius' Metamorphoses -- the only fully extant Roman novel and a classic of world literature -- works as a piece of literature, exploring its poetics and the way in which questions of production and reception are reflected in its text. Providing a roughly linear reading of key passages, the volume develops an original idea of Apuleius as an ambitious writer led by the literary tradition, rhetoric, and Platonism, and argues that he created what we could call a seriocomic 'philosophical novel' avant la lettre. The author focuses, in particular, on the ways in which Apuleius drew attention to his achievement and introduced the Greek ass story to Roman literature. Thus, the volume also sheds new light on the forms and the literary and intellectual potential of the genre of the ancient novel.

The protagonists of the ancient novels wandered or were carried off to distant lands, from Italy in the west to Persia in the east and Ethiopia in the south; the authors themselves came, or pretended to come, from remote places such as Aphrodisia and Phoenicia; and the novelistic form had antecedents in a host of classical genres. These intersections are explored in this volume. Papers in the first section discuss “mapping the world in the novels.” The second part looks at the dialogical imagination, and the conversation between fiction and history in the novels. Section 3 looks at the way ancient fiction has been transmitted and received. Space, as the locus of cultural interaction and exchange, is the topic of the fourth part. The fifth and final section is devoted to character and emotion, and how these are perceived or constructed in ancient fiction. Overall, a rich picture is offered of the many spatial and cultural dimensions in a variety of ancient fictional genres.