The elegists, ancient Rome's most introspective poets, filled their works with vivid, first-person accounts of dreams. Emma Scioli examines these varied and visually striking textual dreamscapes, arguing that the poets exploited dynamics of visual representation to share with readers the intensely personal experience of dreaming.

"This work establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. As such, it challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks are not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. The argument mobilizes the Greek novels-a literary form that flourished under the Roman empire, offering narratives of love, separation, and eventual reunion in and around the Mediterranean basin-as a series of case studies. Three of these novels in particular-Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius' Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus' Daphnis and Chloe-are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After an Introduction that establishes the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry: Chariton and Latin love elegy (Chapter 1); Chariton and Ovidian epistles and exilic poetry (Chapter 2); Chariton and Vergil's Aeneid (Chapter 3); Achilles Tatius and Latin love elegy (Chapter 4); Achilles Tatius and Vergil's Aeneid (Chapter 5); Achilles Tatius and the theme of bodily destruction in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lucan's Bellum Civile, and Seneca's Phaedra (Chapter 6); Longus and Vergil's Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (Chapter 7). The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire, and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period"--

Analyses of Rancière's philosophy and its potential for understanding the conversation between contemporary politics and art cinema.

This book analyzes the relationship between wedding poetry and love poetry in the classical world. By treating both Greek and Latin texts, it offers an innovative and wide-ranging discussion of the poetic representation of social occasions. The discourses associated with weddings and love affairs both foreground ideas of persuasion and praise even though they differ dramatically in their participants and their outcomes. Furthermore, these texts make it clear that the brief, idealized, and eroticized moment of the wedding stands in contrast to the long-lasting and harmonious agreement of the marriage. At times, these genres share traditional forms of erotic persuasion, but at other points, one genre purposefully alludes to the other to make a bride seem like a paramour or a paramour like a bride. Explicit divergences remind the audience of the different trajectories of the wedding, which will hopefully transition into a stable marriage, and the love affair, which is unlikely to endure with mutual affection. Important themes include the threshold; the evening star; plant and animal metaphors; heroic comparisons; reciprocity and the blessings of the gods; and sexual violence and persuasion. The consistency and durability of this intergeneric relationship demonstrates deep-seated conceptions of legitimate and illegitimate sexual relationships. By examining these two types of poetry in tandem, Eros at Dusk adds fresh insight into the social concerns and generic composition of these occasional poems.

Ovid's remarkable and endlessly fascinating Metamorphoses is one of the best-known and most popular works of classical literature, exerting a pervasive influence on later European literature and culture. A vast repository of mythic material as well as a sophisticated manipulation of story-telling, the poem can be appreciated on many different levels and by audiences of very different backgrounds and educational experiences. As the poem's focus on transformation and transgression connects in many ways with contemporary culture and society, modern research perspectives have developed correspondingly. Metamorphic Readings presents the state of the art in research on this canonical Roman epic. Written in an accessible style, the essays included represent a variety of approaches, exploring the effects of transformation and the transgression of borders. The contributors investigate three main themes: transformations into the Metamorphoses (how the mythic narratives evolved), transformations in the Metamorphoses (what new understandings of the dynamics of metamorphosis might be achieved), and transformations of the Metamorphoses (how the Metamorphoses were later understood and came to acquire new meanings). The many forms of transformation exhibited by Ovid's masterpiece are explored--including the transformation of the genre of mythic narrative itself.

A lucrative trade in Athenian pottery flourished from the early sixth until the late fifth century B.C.E., finding an eager market in Etruria. Most studies of these painted vases focus on the artistry and worldview of the Greeks who made them, but Sheramy D. Bundrick shifts attention to their Etruscan customers, ancient trade networks, and archaeological contexts. Thousands of Greek painted vases have emerged from excavations of tombs, sanctuaries, and settlements throughout Etruria, from southern coastal centers to northern communities in the Po Valley. Using documented archaeological assemblages, especially from tombs in southern Etruria, Bundrick challenges the widely held assumption that Etruscans were hellenized through Greek imports. She marshals evidence to show that Etruscan consumers purposefully selected figured pottery that harmonized with their own local needs and customs, so much so that the vases are better described as etruscanized. Athenian ceramic workers, she contends, learned from traders which shapes and imagery sold best to the Etruscans and employed a variety of strategies to maximize artistry, output, and profit.

About the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, and about the role of gender in the influence of this on later dramatists

In the Flesh deeply engages postmodern and new materialist feminist thought in close readings of three significant poets—Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid—writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class. Erika Zimmermann Damer underscores the fluid, dynamic, and contingent nature of identities in Roman elegy, in response to a period of rapid legal, political, and social change. Recognizing this power of material flesh to shape elegiac poetry, she asserts, grants figures at the margins of this poetic discourse—mistresses, rivals, enslaved characters, overlooked members of households—their own identities, even when they do not speak. She demonstrates how the three poets create a prominent aesthetic of corporeal abjection and imperfection, associating the body as much with blood, wounds, and corporeal disintegration as with elegance, refinement, and sensuality.

The famous polymath Plutarch often discussed the relationship between spouses in his works, including Marriage Advice, Dialogue on Love, and many of the Parallel Lives. In this collection, leading scholars explore the marital views expressed in Plutarch's works and the art, philosophy, and literature produced by his contemporaries and predecessors. Through aesthetically informed and sensitive modes of analysis, these contributors examine a wealth of representations—including violence in weddings and spousal devotion after death. The Discourse of Marriage in the Greco-Roman World demonstrates the varying conceptions of an institution that was central to ancient social and political life—and remains prominent in the modern world. This volume will contribute to scholars' understanding of the era and fascinate anyone interested in historic depictions of marriage and the role and status of women in the late Hellenistic and early Imperial periods.

In "Neither Letters nor Swimming": The Rebirth of Swimming and Free-diving, John McManamon documents the revival of interest in swimming during the European Renaissance and its conceptualization as an art. Renaissance scholars realized that the ancients considered one truly ignorant who knew “neither letters nor swimming.”