Late Hellenistic Greek Literature in Dialogue

Jason König, Nicolas Wiater

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781316516683
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009035637
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Late Hellenistic Greek literature, both prose and poetry, stands out for its richness and diversity. Recent work has tended to take an author-by-author approach that underestimates the interconnectedness of the literary culture of the period. The chapters assembled here set out to change that by offering new readings of a wide range of late Hellenistic texts and genres, including historiography, geography, rhetoric and philosophy, together with many verse texts and inscriptions. In the process, they offer new insights into the various ways in which late Hellenistic literature engaged with its social, cultural and political contexts, while interrogating and revising some of the standard narratives of the relationship between late Hellenistic and imperial Greek literary culture, which are too often studied in isolation from each other. As a whole the book prompts us to rethink the place of late Hellenistic literature within the wider landscape of Greek and Roman literary history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Figure
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Empire Becomes a Body: Power, Space and Movement in Polybius' Histories
• Chapter 2 Pyrenaean Mountains and Deep-Valleyed Alps: Geography and Empire in the Garland of Philip
• Chapter 3 Sailing the Sea, Sailing an Image: Periplus and Mediality in Diodorus' Bibliotheke and Philostratus' Imagines
• Chapter 4 Ecocritical Readings in Late Hellenistic Literature: Landscape Alteration and Hybris in Strabo and Diodorus
• Chapter 5 Civic and Counter-Civic Cosmopolitanism: Diodorus, Strabo and the Later Hellenistic Polis
• Chapter 6 The Wrath of the Sibyl: Homeric Reception and Contested Identities in the Sibylline Oracles 3
• Chapter 7 Imagining Belonging: The Use of Athens in Hellenistic Rome
• Chapter 8 Philosophical Self-Definition in Strabo's Geography
• Chapter 9 Narrating 'the Swarm of Possibilities': Plutarch, Polybius and the Idea of Contingency in History
• Chapter 10 'Asianist' Style in Hellenistic Oratory and Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists
• Chapter 11 Greek Reading Lists from Dionysius to Dio: Rhetorical Imitation in the Augustan Age and the Second Sophistic
• Chapter 12 Envoi: To Live in Hellenistic Times
• References
• Index Locorum
• General Index