Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective

Front Cover
Oliver Taplin
Oxford University Press, 2000 - Literary Criticism - 596 pages
The focus of this book--its new perspective--is on the 'receivers' of literature: readers, spectators, and audiences. Twelve contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, explore the various and changing interactions between the makers of literature and their audiences or readers from the earliest Greek poetry to the end of the Roman empires in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. From the heights of Athens to the hellenistic Greek diaspora, from the great Augustans to the irresistible tide of Christianity, the contributors deploy fresh insights to map out lively and provocative, yet accessible, surveys. They cover the kinds of literature which have shaped western culture--epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, rhetoric, epigram, elegy, pastoral, satire, biography, epistle, declamation, and panegyric. Who were the audiences, and why did they regard their literature as so important? --jacket.
 

Contents

GREEK LITERATURE
5
The great age of drama
88
Herodotos and Thoukydides
133
Greek wisdom literature
156
The Athenian orators
192
Greek literature after the classical period
217
Later Greek literature
257
Prose literature down to the time
311
Poetry of the later Augustan
403
Prose literature from
438
Epic of the imperial period
468
The literature of leisure
492
Latin literature from the second century to the end
519
Further Reading
547
Chronology
563
Acknowledgements
573

Poetry of the late Republic
336
Poetry between the death of Caesar and
359

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About the author (2000)

Oliver Taplin is Professor of Classical Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College.

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