In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C.-A.D. 400Terry L. PapillonStanley E. Porter, ed. Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C.-A.D. 400. Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1997. xvi 1 901 pp. Cloth, Gld. 430, US $253.This massive collection of essays by various authorities will serve as a good basic introduction to the nature and history (...) of classical rhetoric, even for those working outside the Hellenistic period.Its intentions are several: to provide (1) “a comprehensive and wide-ranging introduction to classical rhetoric as it was practiced in the Hellenistic period,” (2) “a thorough introduction to the standard categories of thought, terminology, and theoretical writing on the subject, along with its history and development,” (3) “an assessment of the use of classical rhetorical categories in a representative selection of literary genres and a number of specific writers of the Hellenistic period,” (4) “relevant examples of each term defined and analyzed,” and (5) “areas warranting further research” (xiii–xiv). It has four intended audiences: scholars working with the New Testament, and with Hellenistic classical, and patristic authors. It succeeds in attaining the five stated goals, and will be useful for the four stated audiences. This is especially true for the first audience, New Testament scholars. It will serve a fifth audience well too: it would be a useful book for graduate students, both in classical and in New Testament studies, since it offers clear presentations of issues and future work, points well to other bibliography, and is so broad in scope as to be a concise literary history of classical and biblical literatures.The book is broken into three larger parts. Part I, “Rhetoric Defined,” includes six chapters of introduction to and overview of the five parts of rhetoric. Kennedy’s two chapters (“Historical Survey of Rhetoric” and “The Genres of Rhetoric”) display his typically clear, magisterial, and thorough presentation of the background material. The next four chapters, on the five parts of rhetoric, serve as preparation for the rest of the book. They are of mixed quality. Wuellner’s chapter on arrangement (3), placed before the chapter on invention, is overly difficult, idiosyncratic, and less helpful than it could be, especially when it follows on Kennedy’s clear and controlled prose. Heath’s chapter on invention (4) is a stimulating change of pace. Rather than offering just a straight discussion of the history of invention (though the discussion of its history is thorough), he works through all aspects of the topic with an actual case before him, the response of Antenor during the Trojan War to the Greek request for the return of Helen. He discusses almost every aspect of invention, with thorough reference to the ancient theorists, as he grapples with the actual situation. This provides a good sense of what an orator would actually go through in the composition process. Rowe’s chapter on style (5) follows the four virtues with an emphasis on examples of ornamentation. He begins with the assertion that “at least three reasons account for its [the four virtues’] influence” (121): it provides a “rich nomenclature,” it offers precepts that “apply to any verbal expression,” [End Page 308] not only that used to persuade, and it provides “criteria for judging style that are sufficiently flexible to allow for changing tastes and requirements.”Part II, “Rhetoric in Practice,” treats various genres in ten chapters: the epistle (J. T. Reed), philosophical prose (D. M. Schenkeveld), historical prose (S. Rebenich), poetry and rhetoric (R. Webb), biography (R. A. Burridge), oratory and declamation (D. H. Berry and M. Heath), homily and panegyrical sermon (F. Siegert), the rhetoric of romance (R. F. Hock), apocalyptic and prophetic literature (J. M. Knight), and drama and rhetoric (R. Scodel). These serve as a useful, if uninspiring, survey of several genres in the Hellenistic period, with appropriate reference to important classical antecedents and post-Hellenistic developments. These essays are, in essence, a brief survey of classical and biblical literature. They are thorough and give the appropriate background information with abundant bibliography for further study.Their most useful function is to provide a backdrop for... (shrink)

Cet article est la première édition d’une épigramme votive gravée sur l’une des pièces majeures du Musée diachronique de Larissa, une stèle à relief remployée pour servir de chapiteau à l’époque byzantine où l’on voit neuf Muses faire cortège autour d’une divinité placée dans une grotte qui pourrait être identifiée avec Apollon. L’inscription et le relief sont incomplets et posent quelques difficultés d’interprétation. Nous avançons des hypothèses de reconstitution du texte, complétées par un premier commentaire iconographique, et essayons de replacer (...) cet objet dans son ancien contexte monumental, archéologique, culturel et religieux : une dédicace du peuple aux Piérides semble être liée à la fondation d’un culte des Muses à Larissa par un citoyen riche qui, en échange de sa générosité, espère pouvoir obtenir une prêtrise. (shrink)

"General Survey. The succession of thinkers and schools. The history of ancient philosophy covers about eleven centuries, from Thales who lived during the sixth century B.C. to Boethius and Simplicius who flourished at the beginning of the sixth A.D. From the point of view of the history of formal logic this long epoch may be divided into three periods. (1) The pre-Aristotelian period, from the beginnings to the time at which Aristotle..

Au viie s., l’extension des territoires d’Argos et de Sparte dans le Péloponnèse était telle que le mont Parnon est devenu la zone de contact entre les deux cités : après l’annexion de la Thyréatide par Sparte, au vie s., l’époque classique continue à être ponctuée de conflits entre les deux cités, Argos cherchant à en reprendre le contrôle. Les auteurs anciens sont de peu de secours pour démêler l’écheveau de l’histoire politique de cette région, sise aux confins des territoires (...) argien, arcadien et spartiate, aux ve et ive s. : ils la mentionnent rarement, celle‑ci étant demeurée hors des grands conflits. Aussi, les sources archéologiques prennent‑elles toute leur importance. Cette contribution s’efforce de prolonger les enquêtes topographiques conduites par nos aînés en recourant à l’étude des fortifications, source de choix pour appréhender l’histoire régionale. Ainsi, l’étude des ouvrages fortifiés de Thyréatide (enceintes urbaines, tours isolées) permet d’éclairer l’histoire de cette région si convoitée ainsi que certains points de l’histoire du Péloponnèse à l’époque classique. De la période archaïque à l’époque hellénistique, la Thyréatide a été à la fois un ensemble cohérent et une partie des confins (eschatiai) d’un ensemble politique plus vaste, une région frontalière, aux marges du territoire lacédémonien ou argien, qui a conduit à l’implantation d’un réseau de villes fortifiés et de tours de guet. Après avoir fait l’inventaire de ces fortifications, leur analyse architecturale comme celle de leur implantation topographique nous ont souvent permis, d’abord d’y distinguer plusieurs phases de construction, ensuite de replacer ces ouvrages dans le réseau fortifié auquel ils appartiennent. Enfin, on a pu proposer parfois qui, de Sparte ou d’Argos, était le commanditaire de ces ouvrages fortifiés et vers quels ennemis ceux‑ci étaient tournés. Nous avons ainsi pu montrer que plusieurs de ceux qui étaient attribués à Sparte sont en fait à considérer plutôt comme argiens. (shrink)

In the Hellenistic world, both in Greece and in Egypt, friendship was a current and popular topic. This no doubt has influenced Ben Sira, a Jewish author from the second century bce, who in his book of wisdom has included no less than seven passages on different aspects of friendship. As a keen observer he lays stress on the sociological, or rather the socio-ethical foundations and implications of being one's friend. Over and above this, it always is fear of (...) God which directs one's friendship aright. (shrink)

Ancient philosophers had always been fascinated by religion. From the first century BC onwards the traditionally hostile attitude of Greek and Roman philosophy was abandoned in favour of the view that religion was a source of philosophical knowledge. This book studies that change, not from the usual perspective of the history of religion, but as part of the wider tendency of Post-Hellenistic philosophy to open up to external, non-philosophical sources of knowledge and authority. It situates two key themes, ancient (...) wisdom and cosmic hierarchy, in the context of Post-Hellenistic philosophy and traces their reconfigurations in contemporary literature and in the polemic between Jews, Christians and pagans. Overall, Post-Hellenistic philosophy displayed a relatively high degree of unity in its ideas on religion, which should not be reduced to a preparation for Neoplatonism. (shrink)

This series provides individual textbooks on early Greek poetry, on Greek drama, on philosophy, history and oratory, and on the literature of the Hellenistic period and of the Empire. Each part has its own appendix of authors and works, a list of works cited, and an index. This volume studies the revolutionary movement represented by the more creative of the Hellenistic poets and finally the very rich range of authors surviving from the imperial period, with rhetoric (...) and the novel contributing a distinctive flavour to the culture of the time. Appropriately enough, the volume closes with a survey of books and readers in the ancient world, which draws attention to the bookish nature of Greek literature from the Hellenistic period onwards and points forward to its survival into the Middle Ages. (shrink)

This collection of fourteen essays explores the pervasive influence and dynamic character of oratory during the Hellenistic period and survey its different manifestations in diverse literary genres and socio-political contexts, especially the dialogue between the Greek oratorical tradition and the developing oratorical practices at Rome.

This chapter pursues an understanding of what Cicero thought 'Italic' philosophy to be, and proceeds to develop a broader account of how Cicero's version compares with the surviving textual evidence and testimonia from the Hellenistic period of the philosophy of the 'Italic' philosophers, including the Lucanians 'Ocellus', 'Eccelus', and 'Aresas/Aesara', and the Rudian Ennius. Special focus is placed on their theories of cosmology, psychology, and law. Collocation of 'Italic' with 'Pythagorean' philosophy of this era aids in building a (...) more comprehensive view of what Hellenistic Pythagoreanism may have looked like. Uploaded here is the pre-publication version; please email me for the printed version. (shrink)

From the Hellenistic period we have two extensive texts of great interest which draw on Aristotle’s ethical works. One is Antiochus’ system of ethics in Cicero’s De Finibus V; the other is the long account of “the ethics of Aristotle and the other Peripatetics” in Stobaeus’ Eclogae II, 116-152, plausibly ascribed to Arius Didymus. Antiochus’ ethics is consciously “eclectic” in the sense that he is using a variety of ethical material and approaches, Aristotelian and other, to create something (...) of his own. Arius, however, professes to be telling us what Aristotelian ethics is, and scholars have been disconcerted to find something so different from any idea we have of Aristotelian ethics. We find a text in which material clearly taken from the ethical works and the Politics has been not just summarized but recast in terms that are clearly Stoic. Most strikingly, before we get to what we recognize as Aristotelian material we find a long section developing in an Aristotelian context what seems clearly to be the Stoic notion of oikeiōsis. Either Arius, or more likely the Peripatetic source he is following, has presented Aristotle’s ethics in a very changed form. Since we have no hope of pinpointing a particular Peripatetic source for the passage, I shall for convenience refer to “Arius” or “the Arius passage,” but the person or people with whom we are concerned are more likely to be, in fact, Arius’ source or sources. (shrink)

Charles E. Snyder considers the New Academy's attacks on Stoic epistemology through a critical re-assessment of the 3rd century philosopher, Arcesilaus of Pitane. Arguing that the standard epistemological framework used to study the ancient Academy ignores the metaphysical dimensions at stake in Arcesilaus's critique, Snyder explores new territory for the historiography of Stoic-Academic debates in the early Hellenistic period. Focusing on the dispute between the Old and New Academy, reveals the metaphysical dimensions of Arcesilaus' arguments as essential to (...) grasping what is innovative about the so-called New Academy. Resisting the partiality for epistemology in the historical reconstructions of ancient philosophy, this book defends a new philosophical framework that re-positions Arcesilaus' attack on the early Stoa as key to his deviation from the metaphysical foundations of both Stoic and Academic virtue ethics. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship on Hellenistic philosophy in French, Italian, and German, Beyond Hellenistic Epistemology builds bridges between analytical and continental approaches to the historiography of ancient philosophy, and makes an important and disruptive contribution to the literature. (shrink)

The doctrines of the Hellenistic Schools - Epicureans, Stoics, and Sceptics - are known to have had a formative influence on later thought, but because the primary sources are lost, they have to be reconstructed from later reports. This important collection of essays by one of the foremost interpreters of Hellenistic philosophy focuses on key questions in epistemology and ethics debated by Greek and Roman philosophers of the Hellenistic period. There is currently a new awareness of (...) the great interest and influence of Hellenistic philosophy. In bringing together a major collection of scholarly and interpretative studies by a leading figure in the field, this volume is a boon to philosophers and classicists who work on the Hellenistic period, but also to students keen to enrich their understanding of the history of epistemology and ethics. (shrink)

John Sellars presents a broad and lively introduction to Hellenistic philosophy. This was a rich period for philosophy, with the birth of Epicureanism and Stoicism, alongside the activities of Platonists, Aristotelians, and Cynics. Sellars offers accessible coverage of all areas from epistemology to ethics and politics.

This collection makes available in English twelve papers by the distinguished French scholar Professor Jacques Brunschwig. The essays deal with problems arising in the texts and doctrines of the three major philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period - Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism. The author's strategy is to focus on some specific problem and then to enlarge the conclusion of his discussion so as to reformulate or reassess some more important issue. The main subjects tackled are: problems in Epicurean (...) cosmology and linguistic theory; aspects of Stoic logic, ontology and theology; the history of Scepticism; and analysis of some of the conceptual tools used by the Sceptics in their anti-dogmatic arguments. (shrink)

Changes in the nature and conception of philosophy reflect changes in the modes in which philosophy was pursued during the first thousand years of the formation and influence of Aristotle’s philosophy. In the Hellenic period, philosophy consisted of inquiry and discussion, oral or written, in expositions or dialogues. Recording other positions, past or present, that is, history, was part of both modes of philosophizing. In the Hellenistic period, philosophy moved into schools and libraries and became scholastic and (...) scholarly. The schools interpreted doctrines and methods, and the libraries edited books and classified the branches of knowledge and letters. The history of philosophy became records of the opinions of philosophers and the successions of schools, or histories of sciences and arts. Aristotelianism was formed among the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, and members of the Peripatetic school wrote the first histories of science. Aristotle’s works were not needed in either enterprise. His books were preserved, lost, forgotten, and emended, and editors determined their authenticity, contents, structure, and order. In the period of the Roman Empire, philosophy was rejoined to rhetoric, dialectic, and sophistic. It was the period of the Second Sophistic, during which political and forensic rhetoric declined, the Platonic dialectic of dialogues and Ideas was transformed into the Neoplatonic dialectic of hierarchies and the One, and Sophistic assumed therapeutic functions in conjunction with medicine, and theatrical and mass-educational functions as epideictic rhetoric. The works of Aristotle were epitomized and interpreted, and Aristotelian words and ideas entered into the formation of a new organization of the liberal arts, a new transcendental theology, and new forms of literature and literary criticism. (shrink)

This paper introduces scholars of Greek political thought to the continued existence of the phenomenon of demagoguery, or ‘leadership of the people’, in the Hellenistic period. After summarizing Classical elite discourse about demagoguery, I explore three areas in which political leaders continued to run afoul of elite norms in Hellenistic democratic poleis: 1) political persecution of the wealthier members of a political community; 2) ‘pandering to’ the people in a way considered infra dignitatem; and 3) stoking bellicosity (...) among the common people. I show that considerable continuities link the Classical and Hellenistic periods and that demagoguery should be approached as a potential window onto ‘popular culture’ in Greek antiquity. (shrink)

Fourteen essays consider the interaction between Greek philosophy and Jewish religious thought during the Hellenistic period. Attention is paid to the work of Ben Sira, Solomon, and Philo of Alexandria, especially concerning issues like stoicism, freedom and determinism, creation, mysticism, and sex. Attempts to find a synthesis of Jewish and Greek thought are emphasized. Author and title index only. c. Book News Inc.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in ContextPeter E. KnoxKathryn J. Gutzwiller. Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. 358 pp.Cloth, $45.The publication of Alan Camerons The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes in 1993 set a coronis upon one stage in the efforts of modern scholars to sort out the untidy garden that we know as ancient Greek epigram. (...) We now know as much about the history of this corpus as we are likely to discover without the introduction of new evidence, and scholarly attention might logically be expected to return to the interpretation and criticism of these poems. Transmitted for the most part in the socalled Palatine Anthology and filtered through the agency of anthologists ancient and medieval, the epigrams of the ancient practitioners of this minor genre have tended to be studied individually, [End Page 628] like gemstones dislodged from their original settings. The luster of each piece may be easily admired, but what has been lost is the color and clarity that is imparted by the contrast with its neighbors. The ambitious task that Kathryn Gutzwiller has set herself in this closely argued and learned book is no less than to recover from the collecta membra of the Palatine Anthology the contours of the epigram books of nine poets from the early Hellenistic period to Meleager in the first century B.C.E.The opening chapter provides an introduction, which, taken together with the following chapter ("Hellenistic Epigram Books"), lays the foundation for the remainder of the work and establishes its basic premise, that all the Hellenistic epigrammatists composed their work for "publication" in carefully constructed books, arranged on principles which Gutzwiller can recover. This is the basis for what she terms "a new interpretative strategy" in the criticism of Hellenistic epigrams, "to read them as if"—her emphasis—"we knew their place in historical collections" (7). The remainder of the book is occupied by her reconstructions of the epigram books of Anyte, Nossis, Leonidas of Tarentum, Asclepiades, Posidippus, Hedylus, Callimachus, Antipater of Sidon, and Meleager. Readers who are convinced by her arguments in these opening chapters will be swept along by her hypothetical arrangements, which she supports with close readings of individual poems set in their new contexts. Others, myself included, will remain suspicious of the solidity of the foundations of this edifice, while still finding much to admire in her sophisticated interpretations of individual poems.Much of Gutzwiller's theoretical underpinning depends upon rather strict adherence to the orthodox view of what she characterizes as the "Callimachean aesthetic preference for the miniature, the intricate, and the fragmented" (4). The Hellenistic epigram books that she posits correspond neatly with Callimachean aesthetics so described. She rejects out of hand Cameron's arguments for the social role of epigram in a sympotic setting, in favor of the bookish background described by (e.g.) Peter Bing. The hypothesis of a neat and well– ordered world of Hellenistic poetry books, as outlined by some modern scholars, is not undisputed, but readers will not hear much about that here. Gutzwiller sweeps aside skeptical challenges to this picture, and the possibility, for example, that Callimachus produced a collected edition of his poetry, advanced only as a hypothesis by Rudolf Pfeiffer, is here (19) represented as "the probability... that Callimachus published his complete oeuvre, ordered and divided into books." Her summary of the papyrus evidence paints a far more stable picture of the situation of books in the manuscript culture of the Hellenistic world than the evidence safely allows. For Gutzwiller, any references to the of a poet "indicate an authorially compiled epigram book" (20). This naïve extension of Pfeiffer's theory of the composition of a "Collected Works" of Callimachus, and unswerving allegiance to the communis opinio of Callimachean aesthetics, are recurring themes in Gutzwiller's reconstructions of ancient epigram books. Having settled upon the essential aesthetic that determines the [End Page 629] configuration of the book, it remains only to attach the surviving poems to this framework. Not surprisingly, the reconstructed books then offer further confirmation of the underlying assumptions. On this shaky foundation, for example, Gutzwiller... (shrink)

This is a relatively short but important book. Boys-Stones argues for the following : Both Platonists and Christians from the end of the first century A.D. onwards grounded the authority of a doctrine in its antiquity. Christian writers claimed that Christianity is the expression of an ancient wisdom from which both Judaism and pagan philosophy are deviations. Platonists claimed that Plato gave the fullest expression to an ancient wisdom also preserved, though less perfectly, in the supposed writings of Orpheus and (...) Pythagoras. This approach is itself a development from the attempts of Platonists to resist skeptical arguments from the disagreements between different schools by claiming that the philosophical schools that developed after Plato changed his doctrines for the worse, this explaining their disagreements, combined with the appeal, developed by the Stoics and more widely influential in the early Imperial period, to a supposed wisdom of earlier mankind preserved in imperfect form in mythological doctrines. Boys-Stones draws careful distinctions: while the early Stoics distinguished between the pre-philosophical, natural understanding of the earliest humans, and the subsequent development of a conscious inquiry into nature, Posidonius argued for the presence of philosophers even in the Golden Age, resisting an innate human tendency towards evil. Boys-Stones describes how the first-century A.D. Stoic Cornutus took the further step of arguing that the early philosophers themselves expressed their doctrines in allegorical form, whereas for the early Stoics the contributions of poets had obscured the truth rather than expressing it. A new emphasis on antiquity is also apparent, Boys-Stones argues, in Josephus’s responses to Hellenistic anti-Semitic arguments, and in Philo of Alexandria’s readiness to interpret Greek myths as allegorical expressions of the truth. Thus, for Boys-Stones, and together gave rise to the view that Plato gave the fullest expression to truths which derived their authority from their antiquity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Brief History of Philosophical Schools in Antiquity Life in the Schools Specific Characteristics of Philosophy in the Hellenistic Schools Bibliography.

In Greek inscriptions on cult foundations and regulations from the Hellenistic period onwards it is possible to see the development of an especial religious discourse that includes ancient and new hymnic elements, in addition to new topoi that do not belong to the Hymn tradition. This new religious discourse develops incorporating new features of Greco-Roman religion, strongly influenced by oriental cults, and at the same time well aware of the new philosophical trends that very much pervaded religion at (...) this time. Some sacred inscriptions from the third century BC onwards show precedents of elements well attested in the sacred literary prose of the second century AD. In this paper, the main topoi that constitute this new religious discourse will be analyzed looking specifically at the topoi concerning the founder of the sacred institution or norms, the god or gods worshipped and the worshippers, and also the topoi concerning the content of the foundation norms and the resources used to force the observance of the norms. (shrink)