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  3. Cambridge Classical Studies

A series of monographs on all aspects of classical learning: literature, philosophy, history and archaeology. Most of the books arise from work done at Cambridge University.

  • General Editors: J. P. T. Clackson, University of Cambridge, G. Betegh, University of Cambridge, S. P. Oakley, University of Cambridge, R. G. Osborne, University of Cambridge, M. J. Squire, University of Cambridge, C. Vout, University of Cambridge, T. J. G. Whitmarsh, University of Cambridge

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95 results in Cambridge Classical Studies

Page 1 of 5

Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion
  • Tatiana Bur
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025

Proclus on Aristotle on Plato
  • A Case Study on Motion
  • Rareș Ilie Marinescu
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • This is a study of Proclus' engagement with Aristotle's theory of motion, with a specific focus on Aristotle's criticism of Plato. It refutes the often-held view that Proclus – in line with other Neoplatonists – adheres to the idea of an essential harmony between Plato and Aristotle. Proclus' views on motion, a central concept in his thought, are illuminated by examining his Aristotelian background. The results enhance our view of the reception and authority of Aristotle in late antiquity, a crucial period for the transmission of Aristotelian thought which immensely shaped the later reading of his work. The book also counteracts the commonly held view that late antique philosophers straightforwardly accepted Aristotle as an authority in certain areas such as logic or natural philosophy.

Cretan Hieroglyphic
  • Edited by Matilde Civitillo, Silvia Ferrara, Torsten Meissner
  • Published online:
    17 October 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024
  • Nearly 4000 years ago a hieroglyphic script was used on Crete which predates Linear A and Linear B, indeed any other writing in Europe, but remains undeciphered since its discovery at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the first comprehensive account of this script, which is analysed by the leading experts through an array of lenses, including archaeology, philology, palaeography, cognitive studies and decipherment theory, in order to showcase its importance in the history of writing. The book takes a broad approach to writing, understanding it not solely or even mainly as a visual tool to convey language, but primarily as a social and cultural phenomenon rooted in agency, materiality, and semiotics. The volume will provide an invaluable tool for scholars and will facilitate further research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Orthographic Traditions and the Sub-elite in the Roman Empire
  • Nicholas Zair
  • Published online:
    25 May 2023
    Print publication:
    08 June 2023
  • This book makes use of digital corpora to give in-depth details of the history and development of the spelling of Latin. It focusses on sub-elite texts in the Roman empire, and reveals that sophisticated education in this area was not restricted to those at the top of society. Nicholas Zair studies the history of particular orthographic features and traces their usage in a range of texts which give insight into everyday writers of Latin: including scribes and soldiers at Vindolanda, slaves at Pompeii, members of the Praetorian Guard, and writers of curse tablets. In doing so, he problematises the use of 'old-fashioned' spelling in dating inscriptions, provides important new information on sound-change in Latin, and shows how much can be gained from a detailed sociolinguistic analysis of ancient texts.

Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry
  • Thomas J. Nelson
  • Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023
  • Challenging many established narratives of literary history, this book investigates how the earliest known Greek poets (seventh to fifth centuries BCE) signposted their debts to their predecessors and prior traditions – placing markers in their works for audiences to recognise (much like the 'Easter eggs' of modern cinema). Within antiquity, such signposting has often been considered the preserve of later literary cultures, closely linked with the development of libraries, literacy and writing. In this wide-ranging new study, Thomas Nelson shows that these devices were already deeply ingrained in oral archaic Greek poetry, deconstructing the artificial boundary between a supposedly 'primal' archaic literature and a supposedly 'sophisticated' book culture of Hellenistic Alexandria and Rome. In three interlocking case studies, he highlights how poets from Homer to Pindar employed the language of hearsay, memory and time to index their allusive relationships, as they variously embraced, reworked and challenged their inherited tradition.

Traditional and Cosmic Gods in Later Plato and the Early Academy
  • Vilius Bartninkas
  • Published online:
    06 April 2023
    Print publication:
    13 April 2023
  • This book sheds new light on Plato's cosmology in relation to Greek religion by examining the contested distinction between the traditional and cosmic gods. A close reading of the later dialogues shows that the two families of gods are routinely deployed to organise and structure Plato's accounts of the origins of the universe and of humanity and its social institutions, and to illuminate the moral and political ideals of philosophical utopias. Vilius Bartninkas argues that the presence of the two kinds of gods creates a dynamic, yet productive, tension in Plato's thinking which is unmistakable and which is not resolved until the works of his students. Thus the book closes by exploring how the cosmological and religious ideas of Plato's later dialogues resurfaced in the Early Academy and how the debates initiated there ultimately led to the collapse of this theological distinction.

Carpe Diem
  • The Poetics of Presence in Greek and Latin Literature
  • Robert A. Rohland
  • Published online:
    18 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022
  • Carpe diem – 'eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!' – is a prominent motif throughout ancient literature and beyond. This is the first book-length examination of its significance and demonstrates that close analysis can make a key contribution to a question that is central to literary studies in and beyond Classics: how can poetry give us the almost magical impression that something is happening here and now? In attempting an answer, Robert Rohland gives equal attention to Greek and Latin texts, as he offers new interpretations of well-known poems from Horace and tackles understudied epigrams. Pairing close readings of ancient texts along with interpretations of other forms of cultural production such as gems, cups, calendars, monuments, and Roman wine labels, this interdisciplinary study transforms our understanding of the motif of carpe diem.

Homer, Parmenides, and the Road to Demonstration
  • Benjamin Folit-Weinberg
  • Published online:
    24 June 2022
    Print publication:
    09 June 2022
  • It is widely agreed that Parmenides invented extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration, a transformative event in the history of thought. But how did he manage this seminal accomplishment? In this book, Benjamin Folit-Weinberg finally provides an answer. At the heart of this story is the image of the hodos, the road and the journey. Brilliantly deploying the tools and insights of literary criticism, conceptual history, and archaeology, Folit-Weinberg illuminates how Parmenides adopts and adapts this image from Homer, especially the Odyssey, forging from it his pioneering intellectual approaches. Reinserting Parmenides into the physical world and poetic culture of archaic Greece, Folit-Weinberg reveals both how deeply traditional and how radical was Parmenides' new way of thinking and speaking. By taking this first step toward providing a history of the concept method, this volume uncovers the genealogy of philosophy in poetry and poetic imagery.

Seneca's Characters
  • Fictional Identities and Implied Human Selves
  • Erica M. Bexley
  • Published online:
    23 June 2022
    Print publication:
    07 July 2022
  • Seneca's Characters addresses one of the most enduring and least theorised elements of literature: fictional character and its relationship to actual, human selfhood. Where does the boundary between character and person lie? While the characters we encounter in texts are obviously not 'real' people, they still possess person-like qualities that stimulate our attention and engagement. How is this relationship formulated in contexts of theatrical performance, where characters are set in motion by actual people, actual bodies and voices? This book addresses such questions by focusing on issues of coherence, imitation, appearance and autonomous action. It argues for the plays' sophisticated treatment of character, their acknowledgement of its purely fictional ontology alongside deep – and often dark – appreciation of its quasi-human qualities. Seneca's Characters offers a fresh perspective on the playwright's powerful tragic aesthetics that will stimulate scholars and students alike.

Poetry and Number in Graeco-Roman Antiquity
  • Max Leventhal
  • Published online:
    05 May 2022
    Print publication:
    26 May 2022
  • Poetry and mathematics might seem to be worlds apart. Nevertheless, a number of Greek and Roman poets incorporated counting and calculation within their verses. Setting the work of authors such as Callimachus, Catullus and Archimedes in dialogue with the less well-known isopsephic epigrams of Leonides of Alexandria and the anonymous arithmetical poems preserved in the Palatine Anthology, the book reveals the various roles that number played in ancient poetry. Focussing especially on counting and arithmetic, Max Leventhal demonstrates how the discussion, rejection or enacting of these two operations was bound up with wider conceptions of the nature of poetry. Practices of composing, reading, interpreting and critiquing poetry emerge in these texts as having a numerical component. The result is an illuminating new way of approaching Greek and Latin poetry – and one that reaches across modern disciplinary divisions.

Creating the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition
  • Laura Viidebaum
  • Published online:
    03 November 2021
    Print publication:
    18 November 2021
  • This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and Isocrates. It highlights the parallel development of the rhetorical tradition that became understood, on the one hand, as a domain of style and persuasive speech, associated with the figure of Lysias, and, on the other, as a kind of philosophical enterprise which makes significant demands on moral and political education in antiquity, epitomized in the work of Isocrates. There are two pivotal moments in which the two rhetoricians were pitted against each other as representatives of different modes of cultural discourse: Athens in the fourth century BCE, as memorably portrayed in Plato's Phaedrus, and Rome in the first century BCE when Dionysius of Halicarnassus proposes to create from the united Lysianic and Isocratean rhetoric the foundation for the ancient rhetorical tradition. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World
  • Jessica Lightfoot
  • Published online:
    19 July 2021
    Print publication:
    16 September 2021
  • Wonder and wonders constituted a central theme in ancient Greek culture. In this book, Jessica Lightfoot provides the first full-length examination of its significance from Homer to the Hellenistic period. She demonstrates that wonder was an important term of aesthetic response and occupied a central position in concepts of what philosophy and literature are and do. She also argues that it became a means of expressing the manner in which the realms of the human and the divine interrelate with one another; and that it was central to the articulation of the ways in which the relationships between self and other, near and far, and familiar and unfamiliar were conceived. The book provides a much-needed starting point for re-assessments of the impact of wonder as a literary critical and cultural concept both in antiquity and in later periods. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Reception in the Greco-Roman World
  • Literary Studies in Theory and Practice
  • Edited by Marco Fantuzzi, Helen Morales, Tim Whitmarsh
  • Published online:
    05 June 2021
    Print publication:
    27 May 2021
  • The embrace of reception theory has been one of the hallmarks of classical studies over the last 30 years. This volume builds on the critical insights thereby gained to consider reception within Greek antiquity itself. Reception, like 'intertextuality', places the emphasis on the creative agency of the later 'receiver' rather than the unilateral influence of the 'transmitter'. It additionally shines the spotlight on transitions into new cultural contexts, on materiality, on intermediality and on the body. Essays range chronologically from the archaic to the Byzantine periods and address literature (prose and verse; Greek, Roman and Greco-Jewish), philosophy, papyri, inscriptions and dance. Whereas the conventional image of ancient Greek classicism is one of quiet reverence, this book, by contrast, demonstrates how rumbustious, heterogeneous and combative it could be.

Cosmography and the Idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece
  • A Philology of Worlds
  • Renaud Gagné
  • Published online:
    08 May 2021
    Print publication:
    22 April 2021
  • Cosmography is defined here as the rhetoric of cosmology: the art of composing worlds. The mirage of Hyperborea, which played a substantial role in Greek religion and culture throughout Antiquity, offers a remarkable window into the practice of composing and reading worlds. This book follows Hyperborea across genres and centuries, both as an exploration of the extraordinary record of Greek thought on that further North and as a case study of ancient cosmography and the anthropological philology that tracks ancient cosmography. Trajectories through the many forms of Greek thought on Hyperborea shed light on key aspects of the cosmography of cult and the cosmography of literature. The philology of worlds pursued in this book ranges from Archaic hymns to Hellenistic and Imperial reconfigurations of Hyperborea. A thousand years of cosmography is thus surveyed through the rewritings of one idea. This is a book on the art of reading worlds slowly.

Aegean Linear Script(s)
  • Rethinking the Relationship Between Linear A and Linear B
  • Ester Salgarella
  • Published online:
    10 September 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2020
  • When does a continuum become a divide? This book investigates the genetic relationship between Linear A and Linear B, two Bronze Age scripts attested on Crete and Mainland Greece and understood to have developed one out of the other. By using an interdisciplinary methodology, this research integrates linguistic, epigraphic, palaeographic and archaeological evidence, and places the writing practice in its sociohistorical setting. By challenging traditional views, this work calls into question widespread assumptions and interpretative schemes on the relationship between these two scripts, and opens up new perspectives on the ideology associated with the retention, adaptation and transmission of a script, and how identity was negotiated at a moment of closer societal interaction between Cretans and Greek-speaking Mainlanders in the Late Bronze Age. By delving deeper into the structure and inner workings of these two writing systems, this book will make us rethink the relationship between Linear A and B.

The Undeciphered Signs of Linear B
  • Interpretation and Scribal Practices
  • Anna P. Judson
  • Published online:
    04 September 2020
    Print publication:
    24 September 2020
  • Decades after Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B and showed that its language was Greek, nearly one-sixth of its syllabic signs' sound-values are still unknown. This book offers a new approach to establishing these undeciphered signs' possible values. Analysis of Linear B's structure and usage not only establishes these signs' most likely sound-values – providing the best possible basis for future decipherments – but also sheds light on the writing system as a whole. The undeciphered signs are also used to explore the evidence provided by palaeography for the chronology of the Linear B documents and the activities of the Mycenaean scribes. The conclusions presented in this book therefore deepen our understanding not only of the undeciphered signs but also of the Linear B writing system as a whole, the texts it was used to write, and the insight these documents bring us into the world of the Mycenaean palaces. A colour version of figures 5.1-5.4 of chapter 5 can be found under the 'Resources' tab.

Roman Frugality
  • Modes of Moderation from the Archaic Age to the Early Empire and Beyond
  • Edited by Ingo Gildenhard, Cristiano Viglietti
  • Published online:
    26 June 2020
    Print publication:
    09 July 2020
  • Roman Frugality offers the first-ever systematic analysis of the variants of individual and collective self-restraint that shaped ancient Rome throughout its history and had significant repercussions in post-classical times. In particular, it tries to do the complexity of a phenomenon justice that is situated at the interface of ethics and economics, self and society, the real and the imaginary, and touches upon thrift and sobriety in the material sphere, but also modes of moderation more generally, not least in the spheres of food and drink, sex and power. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawing on ancient history, philology, archaeology and the history of thought, the volume traces the role of frugal thought and practice within the evolving political culture and political economy of ancient Rome from the archaic age to the imperial period and concludes with a chapter that explores the reception of ancient ideas of self-restraint in early modern times.

Migration, Mobility and Language Contact in and around the Ancient Mediterranean
  • Edited by James Clackson, Patrick James, Katherine McDonald, Livia Tagliapietra, Nicholas Zair
  • Published online:
    12 May 2020
    Print publication:
    28 May 2020
  • Migration, Mobility and Language Contact in and around the Ancient Mediterranean is the first volume to show the different ways in which surviving linguistic evidence can be used to track movements of people in the ancient world. Eleven chapters cover a number of case studies, which span the period from the seventh century BC to the fourth century AD, ranging from Spain to Egypt, from Sicily to Pannonia. The book includes detailed study of epigraphic and literary evidence written in Latin and Greek, as well as work on languages which are not so well documented, such as Etruscan and Oscan. There is a subject index and an index of works and inscriptions cited.

The Sanctuary at Bath in the Roman Empire
  • Eleri H. Cousins
  • Published online:
    07 January 2020
    Print publication:
    16 January 2020
  • The Roman sanctuary at Bath has long been used in scholarship as an example par excellence of religious and artistic syncretisms in Roman Britain. With its monumental temple, baths, and hot springs, its status as one of the most significant Roman sites in the province is unquestioned. But our academic narratives about Roman Bath are also rooted in the narratives of our more recent past. This book begins by exploring how Georgian and Victorian antiquaries developed our modern story of a healing sanctuary at Roman Bath. It shows that a curative function for the sanctuary is in fact unsupported by the archaeological evidence. It then retells the story of Roman Bath by focusing on three interlinked aspects: the entanglement of the sanctuary with Roman imperialism, the role of the hot springs in the lives of worshipers, and Bath's place within the wider world of the western Roman Empire.

The Language of Roman Letters
  • Bilingual Epistolography from Cicero to Fronto
  • Olivia Elder, Alex Mullen
  • Published online:
    26 September 2019
    Print publication:
    03 October 2019
  • Roman letters demonstrate that language has imperium: the power to resolve problems, to negotiate relationships and to construct identities. This book combines sociolinguistic and historical approaches to explore how that power is deployed by the bilingual elite of the Roman Republic and Empire, offering the first systematic analysis of Greek code-switches in the letters of Cicero, Pliny, Marcus Aurelius and Fronto and in the Lives of Suetonius. Greek was a subtle tool within Latin epistolary communication, and an analysis of letter writers' bilingual practices reveals their manipulation of language to manage relationships between peers and across hierarchical or political divides, uncovering the workings of politics and society. Comparative analysis of Roman and modern code-switching contributes to the debate on how bilingual strategies in letters evolve and how they relate to oral and literary language. The language of letters illuminates the Roman world and its entanglements with Greek language and culture.

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