Late Hellenistic Greek Literature in Dialogue

Description

Late Hellenistic Greek literature, both prose and poetry, stands out for its richness and diversity. Recent work has tended to take an author-by-author approach that underestimates the interconnectedness of the literary culture of the period. The chapters assembled here set out to change that by offering new readings of a wide range of late Hellenistic texts and genres, including historiography, geography, rhetoric and philosophy, together with many verse texts and inscriptions. In the process, they offer new insights into the various ways in which late Hellenistic literature engaged with its social, cultural and political contexts, while interrogating and revising some of the standard narratives of the relationship between late Hellenistic and imperial Greek literary culture, which are too often studied in isolation from each other. As a whole the book prompts us to rethink the place of late Hellenistic literature within the wider landscape of Greek and Roman literary history.

Jason Koenig is a Professor of Classics at the University of St. Andrews. He has published widely on the Greek literature and culture of the Roman Empire. His books include Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2005) and Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture (Cambridge, 2012). Nicolas Wiater is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Classics at the University of St. Andrews. He specialises in late Hellenistic and early imperial Greek literature. His publications include The Ideology of Classicism: Language, History, and Identity in Dionysius of Halicarnassus (2011) and, with T. A. Schmitz, The Struggle for Identity. Greeks and their Past in the First Century BCE (2011).