Pater the Classicist is the first book to address in detail Walter Pater's important contribution to the study of classical antiquity. Widely considered our greatest aesthetic critic and now best known as a precursor to modernist writers and post-modernist thinkers of the twentieth century, Pater was also a classicist by profession who taught at the University of Oxford. He wrote extensively about Greek art and philosophy, but also authored an influential historical novel set in ancient Rome, Marius the Epicurean, and a variety of short stories depicting the survival of classical culture in later ages. These superficially diverging interests actually went closely hand-in-hand: it can plausibly be asserted that it is the classical tradition in its broadest sense, including the question of how to understand its workings and temporalities, which forms Pater's principal subject as a writer. Although he initially approached antiquity obliquely, through the Italian Renaissance, for example, or the poetry of William Morris, later in his career he wrote more, and more directly, about the ancient world, and particularly about Greece, his first love. The essays in this collection cover all his major works and reveal a many-sided and inspirational figure, whose achievements helped to reinvigorate the classical studies that were the basis of the English educational system of the nineteenth century, and whose conception of Classics as cross-disciplinary and outward-looking can be a model to scholars and students today. They discuss his classicism generally, his fiction set in classical antiquity, his writings on Greek art and culture, and those on ancient philosophy, and in doing so they also illuminate Pater's position within his Victorian context, among figures such as J. A. Symonds, Henry Nettleship, Vernon Lee, and Jane Harrison, as well as his place in the study and reception of Classics today.

Pater the Classicist is the first book to address in detail Walter Pater's important contribution to the study of classical antiquity. Widely considered our greatest aesthetic critic and now best known as a precursor to modernist writers and post-modernist thinkers of the twentieth century, Pater was also a classicist by profession who taught at the University of Oxford. He wrote extensively about Greek art and philosophy, but also authored an influential historical novel set in ancient Rome, Marius the Epicurean, and a variety of short stories depicting the survival of classical culture in later ages. These superficially diverging interests actually went closely hand-in-hand: it can plausibly be asserted that it is the classical tradition in its broadest sense, including the question of how to understand its workings and temporalities, which forms Pater's principal subject as a writer. Although he initially approached antiquity obliquely, through the Italian Renaissance, for example, or the poetry of William Morris, later in his career he wrote more, and more directly, about the ancient world, and particularly about Greece, his first love. The essays in this collection cover all his major works and reveal a many-sided and inspirational figure, whose achievements helped to reinvigorate the classical studies that were the basis of the English educational system of the nineteenth century, and whose conception of Classics as cross-disciplinary and outward-looking can be a model to scholars and students today. They discuss his classicism generally, his fiction set in classical antiquity, his writings on Greek art and culture, and those on ancient philosophy, and in doing so they also illuminate Pater's position within his Victorian context, among figures such as J. A. Symonds, Henry Nettleship, Vernon Lee, and Jane Harrison, as well as his place in the study and reception of Classics today.

Pater the Classicist is the first book to address in detail Walter Pater's important contribution to the study of classical antiquity. Widely considered our greatest aesthetic critic and now best known as a precursor to modernist writers and post-modernist thinkers of the twentieth century, Pater was also a classicist by profession who taught at the University of Oxford. He wrote extensively about Greek art and philosophy, but also authored an influential historical novel set in ancient Rome, Marius the Epicurean, and a variety of short stories depicting the survival of classical culture in later ages. These superficially diverging interests actually went closely hand-in-hand: it can plausibly be asserted that it is the classical tradition in its broadest sense, including the question of how to understand its workings and temporalities, which forms Pater's principal subject as a writer. Although he initially approached antiquity obliquely, through the Italian Renaissance, for example, or the poetry of William Morris, later in his career he wrote more, and more directly, about the ancient world, and particularly about Greece, his first love. The essays in this collection cover all his major works and reveal a many-sided and inspirational figure, whose achievements helped to reinvigorate the classical studies that were the basis of the English educational system of the nineteenth century, and whose conception of Classics as cross-disciplinary and outward-looking can be a model to scholars and students today. They discuss his classicism generally, his fiction set in classical antiquity, his writings on Greek art and culture, and those on ancient philosophy, and in doing so they also illuminate Pater's position within his Victorian context, among figures such as J. A. Symonds, Henry Nettleship, Vernon Lee, and Jane Harrison, as well as his place in the study and reception of Classics today.

As a teacher of Plato in Oxford's Literae Humaniores, Walter Pater was informed by philosophy from his earliest essays to his last book. The Platonism of Walter Pater examines Pater's deep engagement with Platonism throughout his career. It overturns his reputation as a superficial aesthete known mainly for his 'Conclusion' to The Renaissance to reposition his contribution to literature and the history of ideas. In his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth, Pater was influenced by several of Plato's dialogues. Phaedrus, Symposium, Theaetetus, Cratylus, and The Republic informed his philosophy of beauty, history, myth, knowledge, ethics, language, and style. As a philosopher, critic, and artist, Plato embodied what it meant to be an author to Pater, who imitated his creative practice from vision to expression. For Pater Platonism was also a point of contact with his contemporaries, including Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde, offering a means to take new measure of their literary relationships. Using the interdisciplinary critical tools of Pater's own educational milieu which combined literature, philosophy, and classics, The Platonism of Walter Pater repositions the importance Pater's contribution to literature and the history of ideas.

According to Xenophon, Socrates tried to persuade his associate Aristippus to moderate his excessive indulgence in wine, women, and food, arguing that only hard work can bring happiness. Aristippus wasn't convinced. Instead, he and his followers espoused the most radical form of hedonism in ancient Western philosophy. Before the rise of the better known but comparatively ascetic Epicureans, the Cyrenaics pursued a way of life in which moments of pleasure, particularly bodily pleasure, held the highest value. In The Birth of Hedonism, Kurt Lampe provides the most comprehensive account in any language of Cyrenaic ideas and behavior, revolutionizing the understanding of this neglected but important school of philosophy. The Birth of Hedonism thoroughly and sympathetically reconstructs the doctrines and practices of the Cyrenaics, who were active between the fourth and third centuries BCE. The book examines not only Aristippus and the mainstream Cyrenaics, but also Hegesias, Anniceris, and Theodorus. Contrary to recent scholarship, the book shows that the Cyrenaics, despite giving primary value to discrete pleasurable experiences, accepted the dominant Greek philosophical belief that life-long happiness and the virtues that sustain it are the principal concerns of ethics. The book also offers the first in-depth effort to understand Theodorus's atheism and Hegesias's pessimism, both of which are extremely unusual in ancient Greek philosophy and which raise the interesting question of hedonism's relationship to pessimism and atheism. Finally, the book explores the "new Cyrenaicism" of the nineteenth-century writer and classicist Walter Pater, who drew out the enduring philosophical interest of Cyrenaic hedonism more than any other modern thinker.

An openly lesbian, feminist writer, Vernon Lee—a pseudonym of Violet Paget—is the most important female aesthetician to come out of nineteenth century England. Though she was widely known for her supernatural fictions, Lee hasn’t gained the recognition she so clearly deserves for her contributions in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of empathy, and art criticism. An early follower of Walter Pater, her work is characterized by extreme attention to her own responses to artworks, and a level of psychological sensitivity rarely seen in any aesthetic writing. Today, she is largely overlooked in curriculums, her aesthetic works long out of print. David Zwirner Books is reintroducing Lee’s writing through the first-ever English publication of "Psychology of an Art Writer" (1903) along with selections from her groundbreaking "Gallery Diaries" (1901–1904), breathtaking accounts of Lee’s own experiences with the great paintings and sculptures she traveled to see. Ranging from deeply felt assessments of the way mood affects our ability to appreciate art, to detailed descriptions of some of the most powerful personal experiences with artworks, these writings provide profound insights into the fields of psychology and aesthetics. Her philosophical inquiries in The Psychology of an Art Writer leave no stone unturned, combining fine-grained ekphrases with high fancy and dense abstraction. The diaries, in turn, establish Lee as one of the most sensitive writers about art in any language. With a foreword by Berkeley classicist Dylan Kenny, which guides the reader through these writings and contextualizes these texts within Lee’s other work, this is the quintessential introduction to her astonishing and complex oeuvre.

A lively exploration of the joys of a not-so-dead language From the acclaimed novelist and Oxford professor Nicola Gardini, a personal and passionate look at the Latin language: its history, its authors, its essential role in education, and its enduring impact on modern life—whether we call it “dead” or not. What use is Latin? It’s a question we’re often asked by those who see the language of Cicero as no more than a cumbersome heap of ruins, something to remove from the curriculum. In this sustained meditation, Gardini gives us his sincere and brilliant reply: Latin is, quite simply, the means of expression that made us—and continues to make us—who we are. In Latin, the rigorous and inventive thinker Lucretius examined the nature of our world; the poet Propertius told of love and emotion in a dizzying variety of registers; Caesar affirmed man’s capacity to shape reality through reason; Virgil composed the Aeneid, without which we’d see all of Western history in a different light. In Long Live Latin, Gardini shares his deep love for the language—enriched by his tireless intellectual curiosity—and warmly encourages us to engage with a civilization that has never ceased to exist, because it’s here with us now, whether we know it or not. Thanks to his careful guidance, even without a single lick of Latin grammar readers can discover how this language is still capable of restoring our sense of identity, with a power that only useless things can miraculously express.

A rigorously and imaginatively researched anthology of classical literature, bringing together one hundred stories from the rich diversity of the literary canon of ancient Greece and Rome. Striking a balance between the 'classic classic' (such as Dryden's translation of the Aeneid) and the less familiar or expected, Of Gods and Men ranges from the epic poetry of Homer to the histories of Arrian and Diodorus Siculus and the sprawling Theogony of Hesiod; from the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides to the biographies of Suetonius and Plutarch and the pen portraits of Theophrastus; and from the comedies of Plautus to the fictions of Petronius and Apuleius. Of Gods and Men is embellished by translations from writers as diverse as Queen Elizabeth I (Boethius), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Plato), Walter Pater (Apuleius's Golden Ass), Lawrence of Arabia (Homer's Odyssey), Louis MacNeice (Aeschylus's Agamemnon) and Ted Hughes (Ovid's Pygmalion), as well as a number of accomplished translations by Daisy Dunn herself.

Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone is a landmark study that will move the field of musicology in important new directions. The book presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere of the melodrama Perséphone at the Paris Opera on April 30th, 1934, engaging with the collaborative, transnational nature of the production. Author Tamara Levitz demonstrates how these collaborators-- Igor Stravinsky, André Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Ida Rubinstein, among others-used the myth of Persephone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art. In investigating the aesthetic and political consequences of the artists' diverging perspectives, and the fall-out of their titanic clash on the theater stage, Levitz dismantles myths about neoclassicism as a musical style. The result is a revisionary account of modernism in music in the 1930s. As a result of its focus on the collaborative performance, this book differs from traditional accounts of musical modernism and neoclassicism in several ways. First and foremost, it centers on the performance of modernism, highlighting the theatrical, performative, and sensual. Levitz places Christianity in the center of the discussion, and questions the national distinctions common in modernist research by involving a transnational team of collaborators. She further breaks new ground in shifting the focus from "history" to "memory" by emphasizing the commemorative nature of neoclassic listening rituals over the historicist stylization of its scores, and contends that modernists captured on stage and in philosophical argument their simultaneous need and inability to mourn the past. The book as a whole counters the common criticism that neoclassicism was a "reactionary" musical style by suggesting a more pluralistic, ambivalent, and sometimes even progressive politics, and reconnects musical neoclassicism with a queer classicist tradition extending from Winckelmann through Walter Pater to Gide. Modernist Mysteries concludes that 1930s modernists understood neoclassicism not as formalist compositional approaches but rather as a vitalist art haunted by ghosts of the past and promissory visions of the future.

Hendrik Petrus Berlage, the Dutch architect and architectural philosopher, created a series of buildings and a body of writings from 1886 to 1909 that were among the first efforts to probe the problems and possibilities of modernism. Although his Amsterdam Stock Exchange, with its rational mastery of materials and space, has long been celebrated for its seminal influence on the architecture of the 20th century, Berlage's writings are highlighted here. Bringing together Berlage's most important texts, among them "Thoughts on Style in Architecture", "Architecture's Place in Modern Aesthetics", and "Art and Society", this volume presents a chapter in the history of European modernism. In his introduction, Iain Boyd Whyte demonstrates that the substantial contribution of Berlage's designs to modern architecture cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of the aesthetic principles first laid out in his writings.