Saturday, October 31, 2026

Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy

Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy
Book cover for Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy  

Vulnerability is not often associated with virtue. Yet to be vulnerable is central to human experience. In this book, McCoy examines ways in which Greek epic, tragedy, and philosophy have important insights to offer about the nature of human vulnerability and how human beings might better come to terms with their own vulnerability. While studies of Greek heroism and virtue often focus on strength of character, prowess in war, or the achievement of honour for oneself or one’s society, McCoy examines another side to Greek thought that extols the recognition and proper acceptance of vulnerability. McCoy begins with the literary works of Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Philoctetes before expanding her analysis to philosophical works. There, she analyzes imagery of wounding in Plato’s Gorgias and Symposium as well as Aristotle’s work on the vulnerability inherent in friendship and an innovative interpretation of tragic catharsis in the Poetics. As much a work of philosophy as of classical textual analysis, McCoy’s work aims at a deeper understanding of the virtues of vulnerability for individuals and societies alike.

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199672783.001.0001
Online ISBN:
9780191757327
Print ISBN:
9780199672783
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

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Festivals in Latin Literature: The Poetics of Celebration

Festivals in Latin Literature: The Poetics of Celebration
Book cover for Festivals in Latin Literature: The Poetics of Celebration 

 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.

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Founding the City: Statecraft and Urbanism in Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia, c. 200–100 BCE

Founding the City: Statecraft and Urbanism in Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia, c. 200–100 BCE
Book cover for Founding the City: Statecraft and Urbanism in Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia, c. 200–100 BCE  

The founding, or re-founding, of cities was a powerful engine of local change in the empire(s) created by Alexander the Great and his Successors. New cities, such as Antioch and Alexandria, epitomized the new world that later came to be defined as “Hellenistic.” In this study, François Gerardin examines the subsequent development of this phenomenon by marshaling the evidence for a “new wave” of city foundation in the second century BCE. Approaching this corpus from the perspective of state formation, rather than cultural hybridization, he points out the resilience, if not the resistance, of Hellenistic monarchies—namely, the Attalids, Ptolemies, and Seleucids—at a time when Rome and Arsacid Parthia were on the rise. More specifically, he identifies a shift in power relations between state and subject, monarch and city, in which local adaptations of the polis—i.e., the self-governing citizen community commonly associated with Greece—played a central part. The same process, he argues, characterized each part of the Hellenistic world in a different way, for reasons ranging from ethnicity and dynastic identity to institutional legacies and geographical constraints. In this reevaluation of the later Hellenistic period as an age of ongoing vitality, the example of Euergetis, a new polis in Egypt, occupies center stage. Documented in a fragmentary archive of ancient papyri, it is examined here for the first time in all its facets.

https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197811313.001.0001
Online ISBN:
9780197811313
Print ISBN:
9780197811283
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Contents

 

 

 

 

 

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The Marriage of Freedom and Justice, 3000-300 BCE: A New History of Ideas

Book cover for The Marriage of Freedom and Justice, 3000-300 BCE: A New History of Ideas  

This book provides a new history of ideas concerning freedom and justice by comparing undervalued sources from ancient Near Eastern cultures with well-known ancient Greek sources, from early civilizations to pre-Hellenistic times. The book has two main theses. First, freedom is a value outside the Western world. Autonomous legal responsibility, self-mastery and free choice, inwardness, and originality are all ideas found before classical antiquity. Furthermore, in some ancient Near Eastern cultures, including ancient Israel, one finds early democratic institutions and democratic rules of procedure, including the law of impartiality. Second, freedom and justice did not come into deep conflict with each other. Instead, they married, from very early on, and their marriage kept developing over time, especially in the form of liberation and equity. Sporadic individual and collective debt releases, the exodus myth, the laws about the regular release of debt slaves, Solon’s reform, and the establishment of the law of impartiality connect the ideas of freedom and justice from early times onwards. Liberation, as an eminent idea in cultural memory, drives equity to unfold as situational justice and subsistence ethics for the needy. In this book, we find the beginning of the idea of prioritarianism that weds freedom with justice and grants priority to the worst off.

https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197922477.001.0001
Online ISBN:
9780197922477
Print ISBN:
9780197922491
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Contents


 

 

 

 

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