Philosophy In Ovid Ovid As Philosopher

"This volume contains sixteen essays on various aspects of Ovid's engagement with philosophical trends and topics. Ovid has long been celebrated for the versatility of his poetic imagination, the diversity of his generic experimentation throughout his long career, and his intimate engagement with the Greco-Roman literary tradition that precedes him; but what of his engagement with the philosophical tradition? Ovid's close familiarity with philosophical ideas and with specific philosophical texts has long been recognized, perhaps most prominently in the Pythagorean, Platonic, Empedoclean, and Lucretian shades that color his Metamorphoses. This philosophical component, however, has often been perceived as a feature subordinate to Ovid's larger literary agenda; and because of the controlling influence conceded to that literary impulse, readings of the philosophical dimension have often focused on the perceived distortion, ironizing, or parodying of philosophical sources and ideas. This book counters this tendency by (i) considering Ovid's seriousness of engagement with, and his possible critique of, the philosophical writings that inform his works; (ii) questioning the feasibility of separating out the categories of the "philosophical" and the "literary" in the first place; (iii) exploring the ways in which Ovid may offer unusual, controversial, or provocative reactions to received philosophical ideas; and (iv) investigating the case to be made for viewing the Ovidian corpus not just as a body of writings that are often philosophically inflected, but also as texts that may themselves be read as philosophically adventurous and experimental"--

Lucretius' didactic masterpiece De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) is one of the most brilliant and powerful poems in the Latin language, a passionate attempt at dispelling humanity's fear of death and its enslavement by false beliefs about the gods, and a detailed exposition of Epicurean atomist physics. For centuries, it has raised the question of whether it is primarily a poem or primarily a philosophical treatise, which also presents scientific doctrine. The current volume seeks to unite the three disciplinary aspects - poetry, philosophy, and science - in order to offer a holistic response to an important monument in cultural history. With ten original essays and an analytical introduction, the volume aims not only to combine different approaches within single covers, but to offer responses to the poem by experts from all three scholarly backgrounds. Philosophers and scholars of ancient science look closely at the artistic placement of individual words, while literary critics explore ethical matters and the contribution of Lucretius' poetry to the argument of the poem. Topics covered include death and grief, evolution and the cosmos, ethics and politics, perception, and epistemology.

The main purpose of this book is to provide an introduction, in the form of a literary study, both to the major aspects of the Metamorphoses and to Ovid's basic aims in the poem. -- Book Jacket.

The first complete commentary in English on Ovid's Metamorphoses, covering textual interpretation, poetics, imagination, and ideology.

Comprising fifteen books and over two hundred and fifty myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the longest extant Latin poems from the ancient world and one of the most influential works in Western culture. It is an epic on desire and transgression that became a gateway to the entire world of pagan mythology and visual imagination. This, the first complete commentary in English, covers all aspects of the text – from textual interpretation to poetics, imagination, and ideology – and will be useful as a teaching aid and an orientation for those who are interested in the text and its reception. Historically, the poem's audience includes readers interested in opera and ballet, psychology and sexuality, myth and painting, feminism and posthumanism, vegetarianism and metempsychosis (to name just a few outside the area of Classical Studies).

A stimulating investigation of some of Ovid's source-material.

The collection of essays in this volume offers fresh insights into varied modalities of reception of Epicurean thought among Roman authors of the late Republican and Imperial eras. Its generic purview encompasses prose as well as poetic texts by both minor and major writers in the Latin literary canon, including the anonymous poems, Ciris and Aetna, and an elegy from the Tibullan corpus by the female poet, Sulpicia. Major figures include the Augustan poets, Vergil and Horace, and the late antique Christian theologian, Augustine. The method of analysis employed in the essays is uniformly interdisciplinary and reveals the depth of the engagement of each ancient author with major preoccupations of Epicurean thought, such as the balanced pursuit of erotic pleasure in the context of human flourishing and the role of the gods in relation to human existence. The ensemble of nuanced interpretations testifies to the immense vitality of the Epicurean philosophical tradition throughout Greco-Roman antiquity and thereby provides a welcome and substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of reception studies.

PIERIDES III, Editors: Myrto Garani and David Konstan Despite the Romans' reputation for being disdainful of abstract speculation, Latin poetry from its very beginning was deeply permeated by Greek philosophy. Philosophical elements and commonplaces have been identified and appreciated in a wide range of writers, but the extent of the Greek philosophical influence, and in particular the impact of Pythagorean, Empedoclean, Epicurean and Stoic doctrines, on Latin verse has never been fully in...