Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome

James I. Porter

Princeton University Press, 2006 - Art - 450 pages

The term "classical" is used to describe everything from the poems of Homer to entire periods of Greek and Roman antiquity. But just how did the concept evolve? This collection of essays by leading classics scholars from the United States and Europe challenges the limits of the current understanding of the term. The book seeks not to arrive at a final definition, but rather to provide a cultural history of the concept by exploring how the meanings of "classical" have been created, recreated, and rejected over time. The book asks questions that have been nearly absent from the scholarly literature. Does "classical" refer to a specific period of history or to the artistic products of that time? How has its definition changed? Did those who lived in classical times have some understanding of what the term "classical" has meant? How coherent, consistent, or even justified is the term?


The book's introduction provides a generous theoretical and historical overview. It is followed by eleven chapters in which the contributors argue for the existence not of a single classical past, but of multiple, competing classical pasts. The essays address a broad range of topics--Homer and early Greek poetry and music, Isocrate, Hellenistic and Roman art, Cicero and Greek philosophy, the history of Latin literature, imperial Greek literature, and more. The most up-to-date and challenging treatment of the topic available, this collection will be of lasting interest to students and scholars of ancient and modern literature, art, and cultural history.

Contents

• Chapter 1: 69
• obstacles such a visit presented 13 Cyriac of Ancona: 74
• 100: 77
• Chapter 2: 89
• Chapter 3: 106
• Chapter 4: 127
• But it is important to keep the Hellenistic world and: 136
• But one can go further For the scenes implied: 139
• increasing the satyrs agony may indicate that the Red: 143
• think of the dramatic and portentous story of Troys fall: 148
• comparison along these lines And every Vergilian could understand: 154
• Chapter 5: 173
• The legacy of Plato was the blueprint trivium of physics: 182
• except by reference to the Philosophy which grounds philosophical literacy: 203
• Chapter 6: 204
• Chapter 7: 237
• Chapter 8: 270
• Classicism thus becomes not the affirmation of a particular and: 272
• Chapter 9: 301
• illusion that apparently is still to be: 321
• Chapter 10: 353
• Such narratives however need reconsideration In the: 355
• Lucians status as a: 356
• context where learning is patronized by the colonial masters: 362
• Chapter 11: 377
• BIBLIOGRAPHY: 389
• De Ste Croix GEM 1981 The Class Struggle: 398
• CONTRIBUTORS: 431

Popular passages

Page 47 - We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.

Page 45 - The body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life. What is 'learned by body' is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is.

Page 41 - ... nor beautiful in relation to one thing and ugly in relation to another; nor is it beautiful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in...

About the author

James I. Porter is Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome; Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, James I. Porter
• Editor: James I. Porter
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2006
• ISBN: 0691089426, 9780691089423
• Length: 450 pages
• Subjects: Art / History / Ancient & Classical; History / Ancient / General; History / World; Literary Criticism / Ancient & Classical; Science / Earth Sciences / Geography