Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity
Exploring the intersection of Christianity and the concept of time, Simon Goldhill reveals how religious beliefs reshaped humanity's perception and experience of temporal existence. His engaging analysis highlights the lasting impact of these transformations on contemporary society, emphasizing the relevance of historical changes in our understanding of time.
Explores how literary form changes when Christianity and rabbinic Judaism take shape. By reading little-known but hugely influential texts, this book opens a new and exciting vision of how the literature of the first millennium shaped culture.
Revised edition of the pioneering Reading Greek Tragedy, which serves as an advanced, critical introduction for non-specialist readers who want to appreciate the plays in all their complexity. Includes a substantial new Introduction which engages with critical and scholarly developments in Greek tragedy since the original publication.
In recent years, the personal politics of academic institutions have sparked intense debate regarding access to education and the influence of identity on scholarship. This collection of essays from a prominent scholar of ancient Greece offers a thought-provoking exploration of these issues. It examines the role of personal voice in scholarship, the interplay of religion and cultural identity within academia, and the transformative nature of translation in engaging with ancient literature. The first essay addresses how scholars can discuss their positionality and its impact on their work, questioning whether anyone can narrate their own story with sufficient self-awareness and sophistication. The titular second essay adopts a socio-anthropological lens, investigating patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the classics discipline, particularly the historical marginalization of Jews and their gradual assimilation post-World War II. This discussion prompts critical reflections on contemporary issues of race and identity in academia and their broader societal implications. The third essay shifts focus to the technological aspects of the discipline, emphasizing translation as a crucial, transformative practice rather than a mere technique. It argues that each generation requires its own translations to redefine its relationship with antiquity, underscoring the evolving nature of scholarship in response to changing cultural conte
Jerusalem is the site of some of the most famous religious monuments in the world, from the Dome of the Rock to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Western Wall of the Temple. Since the nineteenth century, the city has been a premier tourist destination, not least because of the countless religious pilgrims from the three Abrahamic faiths.But Jerusalem is more than a tourist site--it is a city where every square mile is layered with historical significance, religious intensity, and extraordinary stories. It is a city rebuilt by each ruling Empire in its own way: the Jews, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims, and for the past sixty years, the modern Israelis. What makes Jerusalem so unique is the heady mix, in one place, of centuries of passion and scandal, kingdom-threatening wars and petty squabbles, architectural magnificence and bizarre relics, spiritual longing and political cruelty. It is a history marked by three great forces: religion, war, and monumentality.In this book, Simon Goldhill takes on this peculiar archaeology of human imagination, hope, and disaster to provide a tour through the history of this most image-filled and ideology-laden city--from the bedrock of the Old City to the towering roofs of the Holy Sepulchre. Along the way, we discover through layers of buried and exposed memories--the long history, the forgotten stories, and the lesser-known aspects of contemporary politics that continue to make Jerusalem one of the most embattled cities in the world.