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This book makes an illuminating contribution to one of Christianity's central problems: the understanding and interpretation of scripture, and more specifically, the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The book analyzes the practice and theory of “figural” reading in the Christian tradition of Biblical interpretation by looking at the writings of Jewish and Christian thinkers, both ancient and modern, who have reflected on that form of traditional Christian Biblical interpretation. It argues that Christian interpretation of Hebrew scripture originally was, and should be, aimed at not reducing the Jewish meaning, or replacing it, but rather at building on it or carrying on from it. The book closely examines the work of three prominent twentieth-century thinkers, who have offered influential variants of figural reading: Biblical scholar Daniel Boyarin, philologist and literary historian Erich Auerbach, and Christian theologian Hans Frei. Contrasting the interpretive programs of these modern thinkers to that of Origen of Alexandria, the text proposes that Origen exemplifies a kind of Christian reading, which can respect Christianity's link to Judaism, while also respecting the independent religious identity of Jews. Through a fresh study of Origen's allegorical interpretation, this book challenges the common charge that Christian non-literal reading of scripture necessarily undermines the literal meaning of the text.

This study sheds new light on one of the most spectacular changes to occur in late antiquity—the rise of pilgrimage all over the Christian world—by setting the phenomenon against the wide background of the political and theological debates of the time. Asking how the emerging notion of a sacred geography challenged the leading intellectuals and ecclesiastical authorities, the book reshapes our understanding of early Christian mentalities by unraveling the process by which a territory of grace became a territory of power. Examining ancient writers' responses to the rising practice of pilgrimage, the book offers a nuanced reading of their thinking on the merits and the demerits of pilgrimage, revealing theological and ecclesiastical motivations that have been overlooked, and questioning the long-held assumption of scholars that pilgrimage was only a popular, not an elite, religious practice. In addition to Greek and Latin sources, the book includes Syriac material, which allows her to build a rich picture of the emerging theology of landscape that took shape over the fourth to sixth centuries.

The two centuries between A.D. 250 and A.D. 450 witnessed the creation of a distinctive Christian Greek culture in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. This book focuses on the transition from ancient to Christian Hellenism as it was expressed in the biographical and panegyric literature of the period. The chapters show how literary genres focusing on individual lives help to reveal this historical process. The contributors are leading scholars who bring several disciplines to bear on these texts: they include historians, theologians, classicists, and historians of religion. This book presents much new research and helps show Late Antiquity not only as an important transitional period but also as an era with an identity of its own. Among the figures the biographical texts bring to life are Antony the Great, the charismatic desert father, and Basil of Caesarea, the influential church politician. Collectively the chapters go beyond discussion of particular texts to consider such general topics as strategies of rhetoric and representation, the place of classical Greek culture in both pagan and Christian education, and what is meant by philosophy as a way of life.

This study investigates the creation of historical fictions in a wide range of Hellenistic Jewish texts. Surveying so-called Jewish novels, including the Letter of Aristeas, Second Maccabees, Esther, Daniel, Judith, Tobit, and Josephus's account of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem and of the Tobiads, Artapanus, and Joseph and Aseneth, the book demonstrates that the use of historical fiction in these texts does not constitute a uniform genre. Instead it cuts across all boundaries of language, provenance, genre, and even purpose. It argues that each author uses historical fiction to construct a particular model of Hellenistic Jewish identity through the reinvention of the past. The models of identity differ, but all seek to explore relations between Jews and the wider non-Jewish world. The book goes on to present a focal in-depth analysis of one text, Third Maccabees. Maintaining that this is a late Hellenistic, not a Roman, work it traces important themes in Third Maccabees within a broader literary context. It evaluates the evidence for the authorship, audience, and purpose of the work and analyzes the historicity of the persecution described in the narrative. Illustrating how the author reinvents history in order to construct his own model for life in the diaspora, this book weighs the attitudes and stances, from defiance to assimilation, of this crucial period.

This work points to a new understanding of the logic of Roman rule during the early Empire. The book shows that Tacitus does not write about the reality of imperial politics and culture but about the imaginary picture that imperial society makes of these concrete conditions of existence—the “making up and believing” that figure in both the subjective shaping of reality and the objective interpretation of it. The book traces Tacitus's development of this fingere/credere dynamic both backward and forward from the crucial year ad 69. Using recent theories of ideology, especially within the Marxist and psychoanalytic traditions, it exposes the psychic logic lurking behind the actions and inaction of the protagonists of the Histories. This work demonstrates how Tacitus offers penetrating insights into the conditions of historical knowledge and into the psychic logic of power and its vicissitudes, from Augustus through the Flavians. By clarifying an explicit acknowledgment of the difficult relationship between res and verba, in the Histories, this book shows how Tacitus calls into question the possibility of objective knowing—how he may in fact be the first to allow readers to separate the objectively knowable from the objectively unknowable. Thus, Tacitus appears here as going further toward identifying the object of historical inquiry—and hence toward an “objective” rendering of history—than most historians before or since.

Demosthenes (384–322 B.C.) was an Athenian statesman and a widely read author whose life, times, and rhetorical abilities captivated the minds of generations. Sifting through the rubble of a mostly lost tradition of ancient scholarship, this book tells the story of how one group of ancient scholars helped their readers understand Demosthenes' writings. This book collects, translates, and offers explanatory notes on all the substantial fragments of ancient philological and historical commentaries on Demosthenes. Using these texts to illuminate an important aspect of Graeco-Roman antiquity that has hitherto been difficult to glimpse, this book gives a detailed portrait of a scholarly industry that touched generations of ancient readers from the first century B.C. to the fifth century and beyond. The book surveys the physical form of the commentaries, traces the history of how they were passed down, and explains their sources, interests, and readership. It also includes a complete collection of Greek texts, English translations, and detailed notes on the commentaries.

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.

This book reinvigorates our understanding of Vergil's Georgics, a vibrant work written by Rome's premier epic poet shortly before he began the Aeneid. Setting the Georgics in the social context of its day, the book connects the poem's idyllic, and idealized, portrait of rustic life and agriculture with changing attitudes toward the countryside in late Republican and early Imperial Rome. It argues that what has been seen as a straightforward poem about agriculture is in fact an enchanting work of fantasy that elevated, and sometimes whitewashed, the realities of country life. Drawing from a wide range of sources, the book shows how Vergil's poem reshaped agrarian ideals in its own time, and how it influenced Roman poets, philosophers, agronomists, and orators. The book brings a fresh perspective to a work that was praised by Dryden as “the best poem by the best poet”.

This cultural and intellectual history focuses on education as practiced by the imperial-age Romans, looking at what they considered the value of education and its effect on children. The author details the processes, exercises, claims, and contexts of liberal education from the late first century Bce to the third century ce—the epoch of rhetorical education. He examines the adaptation of Greek institutions, methods, and texts by the Romans, and traces the Romans' own history of education. The author argues that while Rome's enduring educational legacy includes the seven liberal arts and a canon of school texts, its practice of competitive displays of reading, writing, and reciting were intended to instill in the young social as well as intellectual ideas.

This book shows that religion is shaped not only in the halls of theological disputation and institutions of divine study, but also in ordinary events of everyday life. The book argues that common aspects of human relations offer a major source for the symbols of religious texts and rituals of late antique Judaism as well as its partner in narrative dialogues and early Christianity. Focusing on the “neighborhood” of the Galilee that is the birthplace of many major religious and cultural developments, this book brings to life the riddles, parables, and folktales passed down in Rabbinic stories from the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era.