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The Classics collection is located on the 1st floor of the UCL Main Library and is arranged by subject in accordance with Garside, UCL's own classification scheme. Each book has a shelfmark on the spine which consists of the name of the collection, followed by a letter and number indicating the subject, and the first three letters of the author's surname.
The sequence starts with books on classical studies generally (CLASSICS A) and classical literature generally (CLASSICS C), subdivided by topic. These sections are followed by books on Greek language and literature (CLASSICS G) and books on Latin language and literature (CLASSICS L).
Comprehensive series of Greek and Latin texts, such as the Loeb Classical Library and Oxford Classical Texts are shelved together and are followed by an A-Z of ancient authors. Each author has their own shelfmark, or series of shelfmarks, for example: Homer (CLASSICS GN 1-13), Virgil (CLASSICS LV 12-35).
The Papyrology collection is located in the corridor outside the Classics reading rooms. Editions of papyrological texts (PAPYROLOGY PA) are arranged alphabetically in accordance with the symbol for the papyrological text e.g. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (PAPYROLOGY PA 340 OXY).
The 24 essays collected in this book address the complex interactions between concepts of time, grammatical tense, and type of genre of prose or poetry in ancient Greek literature. The chronological scope stretches across nearly a millennium from archaic epic to the Second Sophistic, from the emotional intensity of Homer to Plutarch and the playfulness of Lucian, tracing patterns, developments, contrasts, and intertextual allusiveness across diverse texts and authors. These include dramatists (Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes), philosophers (Plato), lyricists (Alcman and Sappho), ancient literary critics (Dionysius of Halicarnassus), orators (whose lawcourt speeches were delivered literally 'against the clock' in the form of the clepsydra), Hellenistic poets (Apollonius and Lycophron), historiographers (Herodotus) and the fabulist Aesop. The structure is informed by Greek philosophical categories, exploring discrete metaphysical, psychological, aetiological, and ethical ideas about temporality; the collective project of the volume is to investigate how authors manipulated not only tenses but imagery, moods, and metres, as well as generic conventions, in shaping and articulating notions about orality, literariness, subjectivity, immediacy, presence, futurity, causation, gender, sexuality, ethnography, cosmology, and remotest prehistory. The result is a pioneering, unique, and multifaceted volume that throws light not only on the rich linguistic resources of the ancient Greek language in evoking time, but on surprising interconnections between genres often studied in isolation.
Roman Comedy against the Subject provides an expansive interpretation of four Roman comedies named after objects--Plautus's Cistellaria, Aulularia, and Rudens, and Terence's Eunuchus. In this book, the titular object provides an opportunity not to reconceive the relational politics of Roman comedy, but to conceive a different politics of familial and social relations with Roman comedy. Employing object-oriented ontology, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and Black critical theory, the book radically recasts perennial problems of Roman comedy and literature in general: the author, in relation to "mothering" (alternative maternities); character, in relation to neurodiversity; genre, in relation to sibling-like parentality; and the title itself, in relation to gendering and ungendering. Roman Comedy against the Subject explores the aesthetic and political possibilities of becoming object, of embracing "itness." Rather than assimilating objects to subjects or vital agents, the book finds emancipatory potential in renouncing the normative and intrinsically exclusionary subjecthood of "he," "she," and "they," markers of privilege that are burdened by the violence of humanization and often dehumanizing of others. The introduction features nine brief but acute readings of object-oriented modern dramas: Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie, Yukio Mishima's The Damask Drum, Eugène Ionesco's Les Chaises, and Alice Childress's String, among others.
The Travels of Odysseus employs the theme of travel to explore the Odyssey and its contexts. The book provides an analysis of travel by Odysseus, notably his narration to the Phaeacians of his adventurous and supernatural return from the Trojan War and his false travel tales told upon his return to Ithaca. The so-called “wanderings” or Apologos of Odysseus (Books 9–12 of the Odyssey) will be compared and contrasted to the “lying tales,” which themselves are of great interest as realistic travel stories. These travel tales by Odysseus will be contextualized by Epic Cycle poems about travel to and from the Trojan War, other travel tales told within the Odyssey, and a variety of stories about Odysseus leaving Ithaca again after his return (including Teiresias’ prediction of an “inland journey” and the Telegony of the Epic Cycle).
Festivals feature prominently in Latin literature, even in works that are not explicitly dedicated to festive days like Ovid’s Fasti. This book explores the role of festivals in elegiac, lyric, and epic poetry, as well as historiography. In all of these, festivals play a more pervasive role than has so far been realized. Tibullus’ elegiac oeuvre rests on an interplay between amatory and festive poetics, and Propertius uses festivals in his fourth book of elegies to question, from an amatory perspective, the memory associated with Roman festivals. In the poetry of Sulpicia and Ovid’s Tristia, festivals allow voices that are otherwise marginalized to shape their own commemoration. Horace’s Odes and the Carmen saeculare rest on an intriguing interplay of festivity in the private sphere, which forms but a fleeting moment, and the monumentality of public festivals. Post-Vergilian Latin epicists use festivals to explore the fragility of human identity in a world dominated by the gods, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and to question the commemoration connected with festive days, undermining the foundational importance of festivals in the Aeneid. In Livy’s ab urbe condita and Tacitus’ Histories, festivals both provide structure and capture long-term developments in Roman history, while situating both works in broader historiographical and intertextual dialogues. The book sheds new light on these works, uncovering their unique ‘festive poetics’. It demonstrates that Latin literature adds important new aspects to our understanding of festivals, which offer even richer avenues of creating meaning and shaping or questioning commemoration than is often assumed.
This book contributes to the Multimedia Yasna (MUYA) Project, led by Prof. Almut Hintze of SOAS, by presenting an edition of the first eight chapters of the Sanskrit Yasna. This new edition is accompanied by an English translation and two glossaries. This study aims to provide a framework for Parsi literary production in the Indian context and, at the same time, to relate the Sanskrit text to its Avestan and Pahlavi versions. The special feature of this unique text is that it belongs to the Indian cultural environment while remaining part of the Zoroastrian tradition.
The Body and the Senses in Greek Tragedy is the first book to approach the corporeality of Greek drama in terms of its capacity to involve audiences in the construction of meaning, not only on an affective but also on an intellectual level. Afroditi Angelopoulou argues that the inner workings of theatre, and the reasons behind its effectiveness, can be located in the lived, sentient body as the root of human thought, experience, and awareness. Drawing on theories of embodiment, theatre, and performance studies, this study shows that investigating the playwrights' sustained and varied use of elements of corporeality is essential for uncovering the meaning of tragic narratives, whether experienced in live performance or as a text. Through close readings of select plays, Angelopoulou explores the intricate connections between sensory experience, language, physical movement, and affect, focusing on the way inter-corporeal processes unfold on the stage and within the theatre space. She demonstrates how thinking with and through the body can ultimately encourage the spectator, as well as the reader, to participate in the act of sense-making. Each chapter traces distinct somatic themes, indicating how these contribute to a play's aesthetics, ethics, and narrative arc. By employing the human sensorium as a hermeneutic device, The Body and the Senses in Greek Tragedy offers a compelling methodology for studying language, subjective experience, and performance reception in Greek drama.
From Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles (2011) to Pat Barker's The Voyage Home (2024), there has been a huge rise in women's rewritings of ancient myths and texts in recent years. Women writers are looking back to the classical past more than ever before, and there is serious public interest in women's reworkings of the ancient world. But at the same time, this is nothing new: women have been responding to the worlds of Greece and Rome for hundreds of years, across many different time periods, and multiple cultures and languages. This first volume in a two-volume set explores the different ways that women have retold and responded to Classics across the ages, as well as how these responses might resist or unpack the tensions inherent in notions of gender, race, canonicity, class and cultural heritage-in a context in which classical education and scholarship have been confined to the ivory tower, studied by men in pursuit of an understanding of the 'great men' of history. Looking at extraordinary women writers across thousands of years, from Sappho, Marguerite de Navarre, Lucrezia Marinella and Renée Vivien to Tayari Jones, Roz Kaveney, Zadie Smith and Anne Carson, from ancient Greece to the Venezuelan diaspora, this volume demonstrates the urgency and the centrality of women's creations in the world of Classics.
In the last few years, there has been a major and unmissable surge in women's retellings and re-creations of ancient myths and texts that has put women's re-creations of Classics centre-stage. Drawing together an interdisciplinary range of creative and scholarly voices, this volume asks why classical creative retellings by women are so popular now-and considers what creativity can do to foster new ways of thinking and writing about Classics, thus blurring the boundary between the creative and the critical. Contributors engage with debates on how to make Classics more accessible through the medium of creative works, so that it is not just a discipline for the select few. This second volume in a two-volume set brings together original creative work by some of the many women writers who are pushing forward changes in the landscape of re-creating Classics, from Madeline Miller to Jennifer Saint, Emily Hauser, Caroline Lawrence, Roz Kaveney, Nikita Gill, Fiona Benson, Anne Carson and many more. These are set alongside discussions and interviews between writers and academics, roundtable conversations among poets and critics, and reflections on creative and inclusive pedagogy-thus offering a cutting-edge collaboration between practitioners and researchers, and underlining the centrality of women's re-creations of Classics to the contemporary shaping of the field.
Epic poetry, notably the Iliad and the Odyssey, stands as one of the most enduring legacies of ancient Greece. Although the impact of these epics on Western civilization is widely recognized, their origins remain the subject of heated debate. Were they composed in a single era or over the course of centuries? Were they crafted by one or by many poets? Do they reflect historical reality? These and other important questions are answered in this book. Using a fresh, dynamic approach, Michael Cosmopoulos reconstructs the world of the Homeric poems and explores the interplay between poetry, social memory, and material culture. By integrating key insights from archaeology, philology, anthropology, and oral tradition, he offers a nuanced perspective of the emergence and early development of Greek epic. His wide-canvas approach enables readers to appreciate the complexity of the Homeric world and gain a deeper understanding of the intricate factors that shaped these magnificent poems.
Support-verb constructions, like 'to make a suggestion' or 'to take heart', are verbal multi-word expressions. They are lexically, morphosyntactically, semantically, and pragmatically versatile and thus form an integral, enriching, and natural part of the classical Greek lexicon grammar. Taking heart does not involve barbarism and taking a picture does not involve theft, yet how does one know that for a corpus language like classical literary Attic Greek? This book embraces the diversity of this internally heterogenous group of constructions which sit at three interfaces.
During the 1st millennium BCE, Pre-Classical Anatolia acted as a melting pot and crossroads of languages, cultures and peoples. The political map of the world changed after the collapse of the Bronze Age, the horizon of sea routes was expanded to new interregional networks, new writing systems emerged including the alphabets. The Mediterranean world changed dramatically, and Indo-European languages - Luwic, Lydian, but also Phrygian and Greek - interacted with increasing intensity with each other and with the neighbouring idioms and cultures of the Syro-Mesopotamian, Iranian and Aegean worlds. With an innovative combination of linguistic, historical and philological work, this book will provide a state-of-the-art description of the contacts at the linguistic and cultural boundary between the East and the West.
The Augustan poet Ovid exerted significant influence over the Middle Ages, and his exile captured the later medieval imagination. Medieval Responses to Ovid's Exile examines a variety of creative scholastic and literary responses to Ovid's exile across medieval culture. It ranges across the medieval schoolroom, where new forms shape Ovidian exile anew, literary pilgrimages, medieval fantasies of dismemberment and visits to Ovid's tomb. These responses capture Ovid's metamorphosis into a poet for the Christian age, while elsewhere medieval poets such as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer demonstrate how to inhabit an Ovidian exilic voice. Medieval audiences fundamentally understood the foundations laid by the exilic Ovid, and so from antiquity and from exile Ovid shaped his own reception. The extent, enthusiasm and engagement of medieval responses to Ovid's exile are to such a degree that they must be considered when we read Ovid's exilic works, or indeed any of his poetry.
Virgil remains one of the most important poets in the history of literature. This emerges in the rich translation history of his poems. Hardly a European language exists into which at least one of his poems has not been translated, from Basque to Ukrainian and Dutch to Turkish. Susanna Braund's book is the first synthesis and analysis of this history. It asks when, where, why, by whom, for whom and how Virgil's poems were translated into a range of languages. Chronologically it spans the eleventh- and twelfth-century adaptations of the Aeneid down to present-day translation activity, in which women are better represented than in earlier eras. The book makes a major contribution to western intellectual history. It challenges classicists and other literary scholars to reassess the features of Virgil's poems to which the translators respond and offers a treasure-trove of insights to translation theorists and classicists alike.
Cicero is one of the most important historical figures of classical antiquity. He rose from a provincial family to become consul at Rome in 63 BC and continued to play an active role in politics before his murder under the triumvirs Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus. He also engaged in Roman intellectual culture, writing key works on both rhetoric and philosophy. We have a very large body of written evidence by and about him - far more than for any other figure of the Roman Republic - including private correspondence not intended for publication. However, previous biographers - in mapping his political career - have mostly overlooked his other activities. Taking a broader perspective enables a much fuller and richer profile of him to emerge. This epochal new portrait of Rome's great orator offers a more complete picture of the man, his personality, and his works in the overall context of his remarkable life.
Despite its small size, epigram attracted some of the best poetic talents of antiquity, exerting a strong influence on Latin literature and continuing to inspire poetic creativity till our days. During the last decades research on epigram flourished to an unprecedented degree. This book draws on and engages with this renewed scholarly interest in the briefest of the ancient Greek genres. By shifting focus away from a particular poet, collection, and the epigrammatic production of a specific historical period, it explores diachronically erotic epigram from various interpretative angles, treating the surviving material as an organic whole. Four motifs drive diachronic research encompassing a wide chronological span from the Hellenistic up until the early Byzantine era: the lamp, sea and nautical imagery, the beloved’s comparison to Aphrodite, and Eros and the Erotes. By analysing how these motifs were shaped and adapted over the centuries, the book illustrates the epigrammatists’ changing attitudes towards the material inherited from earlier poetic tradition, and leads to a deeper appreciation of the narrative techniques adopted by them as well as of the inner dynamics of poetic imitation and competition. Moreover, the scrutiny of the motifs within wider literary and historical backgrounds reveals the influence exerted by different cultural and sociopolitical environments on the epigrammatists’ work over the course of centuries. The book offers a model for the type of diachronic research that can be applied to other epigrammatic subgenres and other motifs, and to Latin epigram.
From Renaissance humanism to the transatlantic slave trade, this collection portrays how classical texts have been entangled with the politics of race, shaping exclusion and resistance. Spanning centuries and continents, Classics and Race follows the entangled histories of classical studies and racial thought to show how ancient texts have been used to shape and justify ideas about race. This essential collection presents historical primary sources from the late medieval period to the mid-twentieth century, each paired with insightful essays by leading scholars who unpack their significance in shaping both racist and anti-racist ideologies. Moving chronologically, the volume explores classical humanism in the Renaissance, the discipline's ties to the transatlantic slave trade, and the global intersections of race and antiquity across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. Rather than treating Classics as a neutral intellectual pursuit, this work demonstrates how the field has long been entangled in broader struggles over identity and power. More relevant than ever, Classics and Race offers a vital historical foundation for ongoing debates about the role of antiquity in shaping modern racial discourse.
The first volume of its kind to integrate trends in Translation Studies with Classical Reception Studies A Companion to the Translation of Classical Epic provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging account of key debates and case studies centered the translation of Greek and Latin epics. Rather than situating translation studies as a complementary field or an aspect of classical reception, the Companion offers a systematic framework for adapting and incorporating translation studies fully into classical studies. Its many chapters elaborate how translation is a central element in the epic's reception trajectories across the globe and addresses theoretical and methodological concerns arising from this conjunction. The Companion does not just provide a comprehensive overview of the translation theories it covers, but also offers fresh insights into theoretical and methodological issues currently at the top of the interdisciplinary agenda of scholars studying the global routes of ancient epic. In its sections, leading classicists, translation theorists, classical reception scholars, and cultural historians from Europe and North and South America reconfigure questions this research faces today, highlighting methods for an integrated approach. It explores how this integrated perspective responds to key challenges in the study of the epic's reception, emphasizing topics of temporality, gender, agency, community, target-language politics, and material production. A special section also features detailed dialogues with active translators such as Emily Wilson, Stanley Lombardo, and Susanna Braund, who speak extensively and frankly about their work.
Identities in Antiquity is a multi-disciplinary platform for the synthetic study of ancient identities, set in a more rounded and inclusive notion of antiquity. The volume showcases methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of ancient identities by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and career stages. In doing so, it promotes a more holistic approach to the study of ancient identities, facilitating comparisons between different periods and disciplines and generating new knowledge in the process. Chapters illustrating the intersecting, multifaceted, and mutable (or else highly immutable) nature of ancient identities address themes such as ethnicity, race, gender, mobility, religion, and elite and sub-elite identities - most notably that of the enslaved - in case studies spanning the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond, from the third millennium BCE until the early Middle Ages. The volume is suitable for students and scholars working on the Ancient Near East, the Graeco-Roman Worlds, Late Antiquity, and Byzantium, offering a valuable contribution to the study of past identities and the internal workings of ancient societies.
Rooted in a range of approaches to the reception of classical drama, the chapters in this book reflect, in one way or another, that Greek and Roman drama in performance is an ongoing dialogue between the culture(s) of the original and the target culture of its translation/adaptation/performance. The individual case studies highlight the various ways in which the tradition of Greek and Roman plays in performance has been extremely productive, but also the ways in which it has engaged, at times dangerously, in political and social discourse.
Materials relevant to the study of Classics can also be found in the following Library collections:
The Institute of Archaeology Library houses collections relating to the following subject areas:
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