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What happened to Greek literature after the classical period—when Sophocles, Plato, and Demosthenes were just a memory? Postclassical Greek culture has usually been thought of as dominated by aristocratic elites obsessed with preserving links to the past. This book proposes a very different model. Covering popular fiction, poetry, and Greco-Jewish material, it argues for a rich, dynamic, and diverse culture that cannot be reduced to a simple model of continuity. Shining new light on a series of playful, imaginative texts that are left out of the traditional accounts of Greek literature—texts such as Euhemerus’s Sacred Inscription, Lucian’s paratragedy Gout, and Theodotus’s biblically themed epic—it models a more adventurous, exploratory approach to later Greek culture. Beyond the Second Sophistic offers not just a new way of looking at Greek literature from 300 BCE onward but also a challenge to the Eurocentric, aristocratic constructions that have traditionally been placed on the Greek heritage. The book consists of five new and ten revised essays. Accessible and lively, it will appeal to students and scholars of Greek literature and culture, Hellenistic Judaism, world literature, and cultural theory. All foreign languages are translated.

In the ancient Greece of Pericles and Plato, the polis, or city-state, reigned supreme, but by the time of Alexander, nearly half of the poleis of the mainland Greek world had surrendered part of their autonomy to become members of larger political entities called koina. In the first book in fifty years to tackle the rise of these so-called Greek federal states, Emily Mackil draws a complex, fascinating map of how shared religious practices and long-standing economic interactions facilitated political cooperation and the emergence of a new kind of state that structured much of Greek history. Creating a Common Polity seeks both to understand and to explain the formation of states in ancient Greece that incorporated multiple poleis and divided authority among them in ways that are loosely analogous to modern federal states. With a focus on the three best attested examples from mainland Greece—Boiotia, Achaia, and Aitolia—this study considers the development of the formal political institutions of the koinon as a product of repeated interactions between individuals and communities and as a response to a deeply contingent set of pressures and opportunities. Religious interactions created a context of belonging within which multiple poleis could recognize common interests and forge institutions for cooperation, which were, in turn, protected and maintained in part by ritual means. The creation of a common polity significantly increased economic mobility and integration, and koina emerged as effective mechanisms for the management of risk and catastrophe. Despite a few notorious episodes, coercion played very little role in the formation of koina, which are characterized by coordination and careful protection of the terms of the federal bargain. The analysis is contextualized by a detailed historical narrative and supported by a dossier of inscriptions, with Greek text and English translation.

The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Drawing on the ancient conception of mousikē, in which words, song, dance, and instrumental accompaniment were closely linked, Naomi Weiss emphasizes the interplay of performance and imagination—the connection between the chorus’s own live singing and dancing in the theater and the images of music-making that frequently appear in their songs. Through detailed readings of four plays, she argues that the mousikē referred to and imagined in these plays is central to the progression of the dramatic action and to ancient audiences’ experiences of tragedy itself. She situates Euripides’s experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousikē within a broader cultural context, and in doing so, she shows how he both continues the practices of his tragic predecessors and also departs from them, reinventing traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage.

Starting with Augustus and extending through early Byzantium, a discourse of imperial founding helped articulate and legitimate imperial authority. Artwork, literature, imperial honors, and the built environment comprised the statements in this multiauthored, empire-wide discourse. These statements were bound by the idea that imperial men and women were sacred founders of the land, mirror images of the empire’s divine founders. By establishing a new capital for the Roman Empire, Constantine and his formidable mother, Helena, initiated a Christian transformation of the discourse of imperial founding. Over time, this transformation empowered imperial women, impacted the cult and images of the Virgin Mary, fueled contests between church and state, and provoked an arresting synthesis of imperial and Christian art.

Seers featured prominently in ancient Greek culture, but they rarely appear in colonial discourse from the archaic and classical periods. Margaret Foster exposes the ideological motivations behind this discrepancy and reveals how colonial discourse’s privileging of the colonial city’s founder and his dependence on Delphi, the colonial oracle par excellence, entails a corresponding suppression of the seer. Foster explains why the seer’s authority conflicts with that of the founder and investigates a sequence of literary works from a range of genres that showcase this dynamic. The first study to analyze the seer and the Delphi-sanctioned founder relationally, this volume illuminates the contests between religious and political powers in archaic and classical Greece.