A Man of Many Interests: Plutarch on Religion, Myth, and Magic PDF Download

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004404473
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
This volume approaches Plutarch’s intellectual and professional activity, and the the way he managed to cover such an impressive range of areas and interests, which make of his work an inexhaustible source of information on the ancient world.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004687300
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
The volume puts into the spotlight overlaps and points of intersection between Plutarch and other writers of the imperial period. It contains twenty-eight contributions which adopt a comparative approach and put into sharper relief ongoing debates and shared concerns, revealing a complex topography of rearrangements and transfigurations of inherited topics, motifs, and ideas. Reading Plutarch alongside his contemporaries brings out distinctive features of his thought and uncovers peculiarities in his use of literary and rhetorical strategies, imagery, and philosophical concepts, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the empire’s culture in general, and Plutarch in particular.

Author: Paola Volpe Cacciatore
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004448462
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Philology, philosophy, commentary and reception in Plutarch's work are only some of the main topics discussed within a large academic output devoted to the writer of Chaeronea by Professor Paola Volpe Cacciatore. The volume is divided into four sections: Plutarchean Fragments, Quaestiones convivales, Religion & Philosophy, and Plutarch's Reception from Humanism to Modern Times. The eighteen studies collected in this volume, originally published in Italian and here translated into English, concern the Corpus Plutarcheum, including Table-Talks, De Iside et Osiride, the treatises against the Stoics, De genio Socratis, De liberis educandis, De musica, and some Plutarchean fragments. The volume is a tribute to celebrate the lifelong study of Plutarch's work by Professor Paola Volpe Cacciatore, one of the most remarkable Plutarchean scholars of the last decades.

Author: Bram Demulder
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462703299
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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A groundbreaking and wide-ranging presentation of Plutarch’s ethics based on the cosmological foundation of his ethical thought Plutarch of Chaeronea (c. 45-120 CE) is the most prolific and influential moral philosopher in the Platonic tradition. This book is a fundamental reappraisal of Plutarch’s ethical thought. It shows how Plutarch based his ethics on his particular interpretation of Plato’s cosmology: our quest for the good life should start by considering the good cosmos in which we live. The practical consequences of this cosmological foundation permeate various domains of Greco-Roman life: the musician, the organiser of a drinking party, and the politician should all be guided by cosmology. After exploring these domains, this book offers in-depth interpretations of two works which can only be fully understood by paying attention to cosmological aspects: Dialogue on Love and On Tranquillity of Mind.

Author: Frederick E. Brenk
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004532471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The present book includes sixteen studies by Professor Frederick E. Brenk on Plutarch on Literature, Graeco-Roman Religion, Jews and Christians. Of them, thirteen were published earlier in different venues and three appear here for the first time. Written between 2009 and 2022, these studies not only provide an excellent example of Professor Brenk’s incisiveness and deep knowledge of Plutarch; they also provide an excellent overview of Plutarchan studies of the last years on a variety of themes. Indeed, one of the most salient characteristics of Brenk’s scholarship is his constant interaction and conversation with the most recent scholarly literature.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004443541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
The polygraph from Chaeronea includes in Moralia and Lives a wide range of interesting views on religious and philosophical matters: philosophical theology, cult, ethics, politics, natural sciences, hermeneutics, atheism, and the afterlife. The essays included in Plutarch’s Religious Landscapes offer a glance into these views.

Author: Gareth Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350149446
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
This volume offers the first annotated English translation of the first two books of On Celibacy (1473) by the eminent Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro (1454-93); Books 3 and 4 of On Celibacy are presented, along with Barbaro's On the Duty of the Ambassador, in the companion piece to this first volume. Setting out the historical context that crucially conditions Barbaro's advocacy of the celibate life in Books 1 and 2, the introduction examines how On Celibacy seeks to justify a contemplative existence that rejects the career path expected of a figure of Barbaro's standing within the Venetian patrician class. Beyond setting out the essential facts of Ermolao Barbaro's life-story, Gareth Williams discusses how On Celibacy is set in counterpoise to the treatise On Marriage (1415) that was composed by Ermolao's eminent grandfather, Francesco Barbaro. If the latter's treatise was vitally concerned with the institution of marriage as a key factor in the safeguarding of family succession and the stability of patriciate participation in government at Venice, On Celibacy presents an alternative ideal whereby the celibate can proudly renounce civic life in the name of self-discovery and the pursuit of wisdom, his abilities simply unsuited to the rigors of civic life. On Celibacy is thus implicated in a much wider 15th-century debate about the claims of the contemplative as opposed to the active life – a debate that extends all the way back to Graeco-Roman antiquity.

Author: Panagiota Sarischouli
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311143513X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
The earliest written references to the Osirian myth-complex appeared already in the Pyramid Text spells (c. 2400–2300 BCE). The most complete exposition of this ancient Egyptian myth is, however, found in the Greek treatise On Isis and Osiris, in which the 2nd-century CE Platonist Plutarch utilises Egyptian mythology to advocate his philosophical ideas concerning the divine and the nature of the cosmos. This book aims at “decoding” Plutarch’s narrative of the Osirian myth, linking his claims to the existing Egyptian and Greek parallels. It thus analyses a multitude of mythic and religious traditions from a transcultural perspective, exploring the relation of the Pharaonic features of the Osirian divinities to the features they had acquired in Ptolemaic and Roman times, interpreting the Egyptian myth within the overall framework of parallel mythologies from other cultures, and examining whether the brief mythic stories (historiolae) recited in Late Egyptian ritual texts can be deployed to enrich the context of certain obscure episodes in Plutarch’s account of the myth. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars and students of Plutarch and later Middle Platonism, but also to Egyptologists. Due to its thematic variety and scope, this publication will also appeal to a wider array of readers (specialists and non-specialists alike) interested in religious syncretism, interreligious connections, and the challenge of multiculturalism from Hellenistic times until Late Antiquity.

Author: Raphaëla Dubreuil
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004681744
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
An orator turns to an actor for advice, citizens expect assemblies to unfold like dramas, and a theater-goer cries at a play thinking of his fallen enemy: no Life escapes the mention of theatrical imagery in Plutarch’s paralleled biographies. And yet this is the first book not only to examine Plutarch’s consistent and coherent use of this imagery but also to argue that it is systematically employed to describe, explore, and evaluate politics in action. The theater becomes Plutarch’s invitation for us to question and uncover key moments of Athenian, Spartan, and Roman history as it unfolds.

Author: Lucia Athanassaki
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192676172
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Plutarch's Cities is the first comprehensive attempt to assess the significance of the polis in Plutarch's works from several perspectives, namely the polis as a physical entity, a lived experience, and a source of inspiration, the polis as a historical and sociopolitical unit, the polis as a theoretical construct and paradigm to think with. The book's multifocal and multi-perspectival examination of Plutarch's cities - past and present, real and ideal-yields some remarkable corrections of his conventional image. Plutarch was neither an antiquarian nor a philosopher of the desk. He was not oblivious to his surroundings but had a keen interest in painting, sculpture, monuments, and inscriptions, about which he acquired impressive knowledge in order to help him understand and reconstruct the past. Cult and ritual proved equally fertile for Plutarch's visual imagination. Whereas historiography was the backbone of his reconstruction of the past and evaluation of the present, material culture, cult, and ritual were also sources of inspiration to enliven past and present alike. Plato's descriptions of Athenian houses and the Attic landscape were also a source of inspiration, but Plutarch clearly did his own research, based on autopsy and on oral and written sources. Plutarch, Plato's disciple and Apollo's priest, was on balance a pragmatist. He did not resist the temptation to contemplate the ideal city, but he wrote much more about real cities, as he experienced or imagined them.