Video games have frequently been associated with newness, the present or even the future. Despite this, they have long had a close and creative relationship with history. While many early games dealt with ahistorical topics such as digital versions of already-extant analogue games (billiards, chess, tennis or ping-pong) or futuristic ideas such as Spacewar (1962), it was not long before games began to deal with history. Hamurabi (1968), for example, was one of the earliest strategy games, in which, through a text-based interface, the player acted as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi (c.1810–c.1750 bc) in the management of their kingdom.

Chapter 1 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho analyses Sappho’s biography, sifting the ancient texts which give us information about Sappho’s life, and considering just how reliable they are as sources for the poet of Lesbos.

Roman literature was by nature intertextual from the beginning, taking on the genres it inherited from the Greeks and adapting them within the constraints and zeities of native Roman prosody, Latin language, and Roman cultural differences. No longer seen under the sign of ‘influence’ or as part of the struggle to look or behave like the father – even when it is a matter of translation – this reality is rather seen as part of the dynamism of a literature that is as contentious, rivalrous and as preoccupied with dominating as the culture and state of which it was a part. Nor is the rivalry simply with the Greeks. Ennius takes an emulative and corrective stance with Naevius, updating his metre and much else. The prologues of Terence show that internal contention is as much a part of the game as any struggle to come to grips with and rearrange the sources in the poets of New Comedy.

Chapter 12 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho discusses Sappho’s poetic persona and its relationship to a putative historical figure; it exploits the material so fruitful in the biographical tradition from another angle, to illuminate the character types and roles constructed within Sappho’s poems and how they help to authorise the poet and engage her audience.

Gender issues are deeply implicated in many, if not all, aspects of Catullus’ poetry: sexual invective, politics, persona theory, the character of Lesbia, poetics and intertextuality, and the representation of social relations. In fact, isolating such concerns and approaches within a chapter is somewhat misleading. One of the central contributions of feminist and gender studies is the insight that Roman discourses about sexual behaviour and gender may be deployed in the ‘pursuit of non-sexual (as well as sexual) ends’ and that it is impossible to separate off discourses about sexuality and gender from other discourses, especially those involving ‘other hierarchical systems of power’. Although Catullus’ sustained engagement with issues involving gender and sexuality has long been recognised, more recent scholarship has illuminated Catullus’ use and exploration of gender positioning and sexual invective to articulate such concerns as masculinity, social and political power and poetics.

Chapter 16 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho investigates how the poetry of Sappho came to the world of the Alexandrian Museum, placing her transmission scholarly schematisation of the Greek literary heritage that took place within that period.

Chapter 30 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in Latin America, examining figures such as José Martí, Julio Herrera y Reissig, Esteban de Luca, Lucas José de Alvarenga, TomÁs Antônio Gonzaga, Carlos Guido y Spano, Álvares de Azevedo, Antônio Frederico de Castro Alves, Mario Faustino, SalomÓn de la Selva, Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Mercedes Matamoros, Juana de Ibarbourou, Alfonsina Storni, Alejandra Pizarnik, Rosario Castellanos, Mercedes CortÁzar, and Ana Cristina César.

And three ‘bips’ disrupted the silence – this is how a written history of game sound might start. These famous ‘bips’ in three different pitches occurred when players hit the white pixel representing the ball with the controllable white bar representing the bat, when the ball bumped from the upper or lower border or when the ball went off screen in the first widely commercially successful arcade game, Pong (1972). These sounds were not produced with a sound chip, but by the voltage peaks of the circuits in the gaming machine: in other words, their origin was analogue. Three years later, the arcade game Gun Fight (in Japan and Europe released under the name Western Gun), created by Tomohiro Nishikado, included a monophonic version of the famous opening bars of Chopin’s funeral march from his Second Piano Sonata, and was the first game to include a melodic line. Again three years later, Taito’s arcade title Space Invaders (1978), also created by Nishikado, used a changing soundtrack for the first time. It drew attention to the possibilities that a dynamic approach towards sound and music provided in terms of enhancing the player’s experience during play. The arcade cabinet produced its sounds using the Texas Instruments SN76477 sound chip that had come to market the same year. Such programmable sound generators (PSGs) were used to produce the sound and music for arcade titles, home consoles and home computers. Some of these chips came to fame, either as they were used widely and in many gaming devices, or because of their distinct sound, or both. Famous examples are General Instrument’s AY-3–8910 (1978), the MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID (Sound Interface Device; 1981) Atari’s POKEY (Pot Keyboard Integrated Circuit, 1982) and the Amiga Paula (1985). While these chips are usually referred to under one name as one item, it is worthwhile noting that many of them were produced in several iterations and versions. Another early approach towards game music beside the use of PSGs was wavetable synthesis, most famously adopted by Namco with their Namco WSG (Waveform Sound Generator) for their 8-bit arcade-game system boards such as the Namco Pac-Man board (1980) or the Namco Galaga board (1981). From the mid-1980s FM synthesis (Frequency Modulation Synthesis) was popular, particularly since the release of Yamaha’s DX7 synthesizer, and became the standard for game sound until the mid-1990s, with Yamaha being one of the main hardware producers. Unlike the PSGs, which used set soundwaves to give particular timbres, FM synthesis allowed waveforms to be blended and altered, giving rise to a far greater variety of timbres.

The collection of poems which the Italian Renaissance handed down to us under the title Catulli Veronensis liber documents an unprecedented revolution in the Latin poetic landscape. Catullus redefined the parameters of acceptable subject matter, ideological stance, and poetic persona; he accomplished that transformation through an exceptional ability to engage with inherited traditions of literary and colloquial language. Catullus was capable of refashioning the terminology of traditional Latin values, and of elevating traits of Latin usage that poets had previously rejected as inappropriate or discarded as outdated. He was the exquisite translator of Sappho and Callimachus, the ingenious recycler of Plautus and Ennius, the skilful epigrammatist capable of juxtaposing Hellenistic innovations, Latin conversational and inscriptional formulae, and his own personal elaboration of the language of the street. In so doing Catullus created a poetic diction that defies generic classifications and projects a distinctly subjective authorial voice.

Chapter 13 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines a wide range of poetic features, such as deixis, intimacy, proximity, repetition, timing, narrative, etc., in relation to lyric (as opposed to epic, for example), broadening the characterisation of Sappho as a lyric poet.

Junko Ozawa was born in 1960 in the Saitama prefecture. After attending the Musashino College of Music as a student in the Musicology Department and graduating with a major in Instrumental Piano, she joined the Namco Corporation in 1983 (now Bandai Namco Entertainment). The first game she worked on was Gaplus (1984, the name was later changed to Galaga 3 in the United States), and following this game, she was in charge of the music for The Tower of Druaga (1984, for which she also wrote the sound driver) and Rolling Thunder (1986), amongst several other games. She was also responsible for porting some of her game music from the Arcade to the Famicom versions (e.g. The Tower of Druaga), and further created the music for games that Namco developed for other companies, including Nintendo’s critically acclaimed rhythm game Donkey Konga (for the Nintendo GameCube, 2003). She is credited alongside Toshio Kai, Nobuyuki Ohnogi, Yuriko Keino and Yuu Miyake for the song ‘Katamari On Namco’ on the Katamari Damacy – Touch My Katamari Original Sound Track 2 soundtrack release of the PlayStation Vita title Touch My Katamari (2011). Since leaving Namco in 2008, she has continued to compose music, alongside giving piano performances and doing a variety of musical activities.

This chapter will concentrate on the English-language literary reception of Catullus since 1750, particularly in poetry; there is stimulating work elsewhere on the reception of Catullus in other European literatures in this period. It will largely focus on Britain, with occasional excursions into other English-speaking environments. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain had seen much interest in translating and adapting Catullus into English, but the Augustan world of Pope and Dryden preferred the more obviously polished Virgil, Horace and Ovid amongst the Latin poets, a taste continued in the age of Dr Johnson (d.1784), and it was in the Romantic period from the later eighteenth century that Catullus began to regain in Britain the literary popularity he had enjoyed in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts.

As a famous representative of the Greek literary heritage, Sappho is both a source of tremendous literary meaning and recreation in the Imperial period, for e.g. Achilles Tatius and Longus, but at the same time an object of censure from Christian moralists, as in Tatian’s Oratio ad Graecos. Chapter 22 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho discusses her transmission and reception as the ancient world began to change into a Christian one.

Chapter 20 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho looks at Sappho’s significance for the rich poetic culture of the Hellenistic world, including Apollonius, Theocritus, and Posidippus, as a parallel development to the scholarly discourse surrounding the editing of her work during this period.

For centuries what remained of Sappho’s poems lay as isolated quotations in the works of other authors who had survived antiquity. Chapter 18 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho tells the story of how these quotations, or fragments, were gathered together from the sixteenth century on – and how the coming of the papyri in the twentieth century had a dramatic impact on editorial practice too.

If Catullus had been born fifty years earlier, in the midst of the Gracchan revolution, or fifty years later, on the eve of the battle of Actium, he would have had a very different life from the one which he did have – and he would have been a very different poet. But this presupposes that we know when Catullus was in fact born; do we? According to St Jerome (Chron. 1930), he was born in Verona in 87 bc (‘Gaius Valerius Catullus scriptor lyricus Veronae nascitur’). The reference to Verona tallies with what can be inferred from the poems. In one poem he begs a fellow poet to visit him in Verona (35.3), in another he appears to write from Verona but explains that his primary residence is in Rome (68a.27–8, 34–5).

Chapter 32 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in India, examining figures such as Sir William Jones, Kamala Das, Adela ‘Violet’Nicolson (Laurence Hope), Lord Alfred Douglas, Somerset Maugham, Mohammad Sana’ullah Dar (Miraji), Abdul Aziz Khalid, Keki N. Daruwalla, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, and Beram Saklatvala (Henry Marsh).