Literary Studies: Classical, Early & Medieval

The era of Old Comedy (c. 485 c. 380 BCE), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristopha...

The era of Old Comedy (c. 485 c. 380 BCE), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristopha...

Funny happenings.The rollicking comedies of Plautus, who brilliantly adapted Greek plays for Roman audiences ca. 205184 BC, are the earliest Latin ...

Hellenistic history.The historian Polybius (ca. 200118 BC) was born into a leading family of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea) and served th...

The era of Old Comedy (c. 485 c. 380 BCE), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristopha...

Hellenistic history.The historian Polybius (ca. 200118 BC) was born into a leading family of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea) and served th...

Scholars at dinner.In The Learned Banqueters, Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek lit...

An antiquarians festival.The Saturnalia, Macrobius encyclopedic celebration of Roman culture written in the early fifth century AD, has been prized...

Inscribed some time after 264 BCE, the Parian Marble offers a chronological list of events with an exceptional emphasis on literary matters. Litera...

Since Friedrich Schleiermachers work in the 1800s, scholars interested in the literary dimension of Platos writings have sought to reconcile the di...

This book plumbs the virtues of the Homeric poems as scripts for solo performance. Despite academic focus on orality and on composition in performa...

As prose dramatic texts Plato's dialogues would have been read by their original audience as an alternative type of theatrical composition. The 'pa...

Guillaume de Machaut, a pioneer of a new school of lyric compositions, is the most important poet and composer of late medieval France. This long o...

Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich...

The symposion is arguably the most significant and well-documented context for the performance, transmission, and criticism of archaic and classica...

Antiquitys most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.Galen of Pergamum (129?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor M...

Rome, from the beginning.Livy (Titus Livius), the great Roman historian, was born at Patavium (Padua) in 64 or 59 BC, where after years in Rome h...

Antiquitys most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.Galen of Pergamum (129?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Mar...

Though Achilles the character is bound by fate and by narrative tradition, Achilless poem, the Iliad, was never fixed and monolithic in antiquityit...

Christians talked, debated, and wrote dialogues in late antiquity and on throughout Byzantium. Some were philosophical, others more literary, theol...