Böcker i Bloomsbury Studies in Classica-serien

Hailed by Tom Holland as a 'fascinating and compendious survey of ancient attitudes to Xerxes' and now available in paperback, Imagining Xerxes is a transhistorical analysis that explores the richness and variety of Xerxes' afterlives within the ancient literary tradition and the reinvention of his image in a remarkable array of cultural and historical contexts.This Persian king, who invaded Greece in 480 BC, quickly earned a notoriety that endured throughout antiquity and beyond. The Greeks' historical encounter with Xerxes - which resulted, against overwhelming odds, in the defeat of the Persian army - has inspired a series of literary responses to the king in which he is variously portrayed as the archetypal destructive and enslaving aggressor, as the epitome of arrogance and impiety, or as a figure synonymous with the exoticism and luxury of the Persian court. Emma Bridges examines the earliest representations of the king, in Aeschylus' tragic play Persians and Herodotus' historiographical account of the Persian Wars, before tracing the ways in which the image of Xerxes was revisited and adapted in later Greek and Latin texts. The author also looks beyond the Hellenocentric viewpoint to consider the construction of Xerxes' image in the Persian epigraphic record and the alternative perspectives on the king found in the Jewish written tradition.

This volume examines the long and complex history of the Greco-Roman tradition in South America, arguing that the Classics have played a crucial, though often overlooked, role in the self-definition in the New World. Chronicling and theorizing this history through a detailed analysis of five key moments, chosen from the early and late colonial period, the emancipatory era, and the 20th and 21st centuries, it also examines an eclectic selection of both literary and cinematographic works and artefacts such as maps, letters, scientific treatises, songs, monuments, political speeches, and even the drafts of proposals for curricular changes across Latin America. The heterogeneous cases analysed in this book reveal cultural anxieties that recur through different periods, fundamentally related to the 'newness' of the continent and the formation of identities imagined as both Western and non-Western - a genealogy of apprehensions that South American intellectuals and political figures have typically experienced when thinking of their own role in world history. In tracing this genealogy, The Classics in South America innovatively reformulates our understanding of well-known episodes in the cultural history of the region, while providing a theoretical and historical resource for further studies of the importance of the Classical tradition across Latin America.

Focusing on the works of Camillo Sbarbaro and Giovanna Bemporad, this book examines the tragic Greek paradigm influenced by these two poets and offers the first in-depth analysis of poetic translations of Greek tragedy in 20th-century Italian poetry.The linguistic and ideological diversity, embedded in their respective work, is chartered and examined so that the reader learns how narratives of Greek tragedy shaped their poetic universe. Caterina Paoli provides a fresh perspective on the pedagogical commitment of the Italian poets and their roles as translators of classical studies. She also investigates the Italian poetic community's response to the process of cultural appropriation and re-shaping of national identity based on the classical studies that was supported by the Fascist regime from 1922-43. As well as offering a discussion of larger cultural patterns, the reader is also presented with textual analysis of the translations. Poetically, politically and philosophically, Paoli fills a large gap in current scholarship on the translation of ancient literature in the Italian poetic community. This ground-breaking book will spark debates and inspire further studies of classical reception.

This open-access book fills a huge gap in the study of classical reception in Irish literature by making accessible in translation selections from a wide variety of 10th-15th century texts. These texts are important because they demonstrate Ireland's indigenous and pre-colonial expertise in classical learning. Ireland thus emerges as a unique case in postcolonial terms where classical education is normally assumed to derive from a British imperial model. The collection situates the antiquity sagas into a broader framework of Irish, Scandinavian, and international medieval literatures. The first section of the book correlates historical Irish and world chronologies with those of ancient Greece and Rome (including texts such as the first fragment of the Annals of Tigernach). The second and third sections focus on the reception of Homer and Latin epics (including such texts as Togail Troí, Imtheachta Aeniasa and In Cath Catharda). The fourth section looks at pseudo-histories with texts such as Merugud Uilix and Scéla Alaxandair. Finally the sixth section explores histories and books of scholarly knowledge (including texts such as Dindshenchas and Auraicept na nÉces). Together these extracts posit thematic analogies between Irish and Graeco-Roman traditions across genre, historiography, linguistics and mythography, showcasing the marked influence of classical concepts and tropes.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.