Overview

The 'classical tradition' is no invention of modernity. Already in ancient Greece and Rome, the privileging of the ancient played a role in social and cultural discourses of every period. A collaboration between scholars in diverse areas of classical studies, this volume addresses literary and material evidence for ancient notions of valuing (or disvaluing) the deep past from approximately the fifth century BCE until the second century CE. It examines how specific communities used notions of antiquity to define themselves or others, which models from the past proved most desirable, what literary or exegetic modes they employed, and how temporal systems for ascribing value intersected with the organization of space, the production of narrative, or the application of aesthetic criteria.

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'Valuing the Past in the Greco-Roman World asks how the past was defined, accessed, and valued in that period of time so often considered our antiquity (18) and provides an array of fascinating examples that work together to undercut notions of the value of the past in the past as in any way uniform or monolithic. This range of historical perspectives calls for further reflection on the ethics and politics underlying our own individual and institutional practices of valuing the past in the present and contributes much to our understanding of the range of values ascribed to the past in the past.' Kelsi Morrison-Atkins in Ancient Jew Review 2017

Author Information

James Ker, Ph.D. (2002, University of California, Berkeley) is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the Unversity of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Deaths of Seneca (Oxford, 2009) and also works on ancient Roman concepts of time. Christoph Pieper, Ph.D. (2008, Bonn University) is Assistant Professor of Latin at Leiden University. He has published Elegos redolere Vergiliosque sapere. Cristoforo Landinos Xandra zwischen Liebe und Gesellschaft (Hildesheim etc., 2008) and is interested in Roman eloquence and memory studies. Contributors are: Karen Bassi, Lisa Cordes, Joseph Farrell, Caitlin C. Gillespie, Jonas Grethlein, Joseph A. Howley, Casper C. de Jonge, James Ker, Lawrence Kim, Christina S. Kraus, Eleanor Winsor Leach, Maaike Leemreize, Jeremy McInerney, Margaret M. Miles, Sheila Murnaghan, Jason S. Nethercut, Christoph Pieper, Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, Amanda S. Reiterman, and Mieke de Vos.

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