Jason König
Biographic Data
| ID | 3979629 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jason König |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jason |
| FAMILY NAME | König |
| SIGNATURE | KÖNIG J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9758-1099 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 31 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden
This book demonstrates how the Romans constructed garden boundaries specifically in order to open up or undermine the division between a number of oppositions, such as inside/outside, sacred/profane, art/nature, and real/imagined. Using case studies from across literature and material and visual culture, Victoria Austen explores the perception of individual garden sites in response to their limits, and showcases how the Romans delighted in playin…
The Folds of Olympus
The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. This book is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those inter…
Folds of Olympus
Summit Altars
This chapter introduces tension that runs right through the long history of representing mountains in ancient Greek and Roman literature. It conveys something of the way in which ancient portrayals of mountains confront with powerful images against which to measure relationships around the world. It also considers the mountains of the Mediterranean as both divine and human places. The chapter provides a wider context of ancient religious practice…
Ecocritical Readings in Late Hellenistic Literature
This chapter draws on approaches from the environmental humanities in exploring the hypothesis that late Hellenistic literature was unusually positive in its representations of landscape alteration. It first sketches out the predominantly negative tradition of representing landscape alteration in ancient literature from Herodotus onwards, before examining the more celebratory versions that we find in Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. At the same time …
Dio Chrysostom and the Mountains of Euboia
This chapter talks about the countryside, which has often been idealised as an unspoiled space set apart from the problems of urban life throughout the Western literary tradition. It cites Raymond Williams's The Country and the City that drew attention to the artificiality of nostalgic images of rural life in English literature from about 1600 onwards. It also considers the idea of pristine nature free from human interference as a fabrication, ev…
Ammianus Marcellinus
This chapter reviews the work of Ammianus Marcellinus, which offers the most sensationalistic of all ancient portrayals of mountain peoples and mountain warfare. Ammianus' Res Gestae covers the period 353 to 378 CE and is based in part on his involvement in fighting against the Persians and of being besieged in the city of Amida. It covers detailed accounts of campaigning in mountainous country and other kinds of difficult terrain both there and …
Mountains and Bodies in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
This chapter reviews Apuleius' Metamorphoses , which is one of the most mountainous texts and the most ‘rocky’ text in the whole of ancient literature. Metamorphoses also includes the most extensive and most bizarre ancient depiction of a stage-set mountain. The chapter discusses two strands of mountain depiction that stand out particularly in Apuleius' account. The first is a series of strikingly rhetorical and in some cases symbolic description…
Mountain Saints in Late Antique Christian Literature
This chapter looks at frequent descriptions of inhabiting mountain territory and in the saints' lives that survive from late antiquity right through the medieval period, many of which have mountain settings. It highlights the flexibility of the Greek term oros , which can refer to mountain peaks where some holy men are said to have occupied sites on or near the summits. Oros also applies to the rocky expanses of wild terrain at lower altitude, es…
Warfare and Knowledge in Mountain Territories
This chapter highlights mountains as places of warfare in the ancient world, noting their great strategic significance in controlling key mountain passes that had military and economic advantages. It talks about the posed distinctive challenges of leadership as mountain battle sites were often unpredictable and hard to conquer and control. It points out how the distinctive topography of particular mountain regions led to a situation where the sam…
The Folds of Olympus
A cultural and literary history of mountains in classical antiquity The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. The Folds of Olympus is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian sa…
Mountain and City
This chapter talks about the Cyclops Polyphemus, which is one of the first mountain people of European literature. In the Odyssey he is a figure far removed from urban civilisation, which anticipates the ethnographic language that if Cyclopes are the first people of the mountains, then Odysseus is ancient literature's first ethnographer. It reviews the association between mountains and uncivilised populations that was very widespread in ancient G…
Mountain Narratives in Greek and Roman Historiography
This chapter discusses three figures that overshadow the view of mountain generalship in ancient historiography: Xerxes, the Persian king; the Macedonian Alexander the Great; and the Carthaginian Hannibal. The campaigns of these three figures were used as images against which other later military campaigns were measured, describing them as powerful exemplars of the rewards and hazards of human dominance over the earth's surface. The chapter highl…
Mountains in Greek and Roman Art
This chapter talks about mountains, which were objects of fascination in Greek and Roman art in ways quite different from modern landscape painting. Mountains in Greek and Roman art were compressed and miniaturised because of the restrictions of the media within which they were depicted, such as on a coin, and it was also a consequence of their symbolic function, which allowed the image to stand as a shorthand for a particular place. The chapter …
Pausanias
The chapter reviews traditions of mountaintop sacrifice that were still flourishing throughout the eastern Mediterranean when the Homeric poems were composed in the eighth century BCE. It talks about other forms of religious expression in mountain landscapes, citing the ash altar on the summit of Mount Lykaion where an athletic festival is often held. It also mentions that the slopes of Mount Helikon gained a new identity as a place of festival a…
Late Hellenistic Greek Literature in Dialogue
Late Hellenistic Greek literature, both prose and poetry, stands out for its richness and diversity. Recent work has tended to take an author-by-author approach that underestimates the interconnectedness of the literary culture of the period. The chapters assembled here set out to change that by offering new readings of a wide range of late Hellenistic texts and genres, including historiography, geography, rhetoric and philosophy, together with m…
Mountain Landmarks in Latin Literature
This chapter describes Mount Soracte, which is one of the most famous mountains in ancient literature but is also one of the most briefly described. Mount Soracte stands about 30 miles north of Rome, standing at 691 metres above sea level and not a long walk from the village of Sant-Oreste on its slopes. The chapter cites the Soracte ode by Horace, which was written in the late first century BCE and has been one of the best known and most loved o…
Epilogue
This chapter reviews the idea of the summit position that has been a very powerful one within modern mountaineering culture. At various times over the last few centuries the idea of conquering mountain summits has been entangled with imperialist ideals. It emphasizes how viewing mountain scenery is linked with ways of envisaging landscape that have an elitist history, where the ability to appreciate and access places of beauty and sublimity has b…
Solitude and Biography in Jerome’s Life of Hilarion
This chapter studies Jerome’s Life of Hilarion . Solitude poses particular problems to the biographer. How can one depict someone else’s solitary experience? The first half of the chapter offers a survey of representations of solitude in ancient biography and autobiography, and examines some of the reasons for their relative scarcity. The second half of the chapter addresses Jerome’s use of those traditions, arguing that the Life of Hilarion draw…
Representations of Intellectual Community in Plutarch, Pliny the Younger and Aulus Gellius
L’UMR 7044 (ARCHIMEDE) regroupe une forte concentration d’archéologues, de philologues et d’historiens des mondes anciens dont la spécialité porte sur l’Europe moyenne et centrale, ainsi que sur la Méditerranée et ses voisins orientaux (Rome, Grèce, Byzance, Anatolie, Mésopotamie, Syro-Palestine, Égypte)
Athletes and Trainers
Athletic activity was a major preoccupation of the Greek elite in the imperial period. This chapter looks at the relationship between athletic and intellectual activity, focusing especially on the way in which athletic skill could in itself be presented as a form of paideia. It looks first at day-to-day training in the gymnasium, focusing particularly on the use of athletics in the education of young men of the Greek elite and on the expertise of…
Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture
Re-Reading Pollux
Ioulios Polydeukes, more commonly known as Pollux, was a Greek sophist and lexicographer active in the closing decades of the second century a.d . His Onomasticon is one of the most important lexicographical texts of the Imperial period. It is essentially a set of word lists dedicated to collecting clusters of related words on topics from a vast range of different areas of intellectual activity and everyday life. The text survives only in epitomi…
Images of Elite Community in Philostratus
This chapter aims to show that the Philostratus presents a spectrum of different models for imagining the constitution of Hellenic elite culture, and for imagining the relationship between elite Greeks and elite Romans. It begins with the work's preface, which emphasizes harmony and community between Philostratus and his addressee, one of the emperors Gordian. The chapter turns to Philostratus' portrayal of interaction between sophists and empero…
Ancient Libraries
Frontinus' Cameo Role in Tacitus' Agricola
Frontinus appears only once in Tacitus' Agricola , at a moment in the text where Tacitus is filling in some background, sketching a rough history of the Roman occupation of Britain up to the time when Agricola took over as governor of the province. His appearance is brief, and the momentum of the whole section makes it tempting to see him as a mere footnote in the tale of Agricola's life and career. I will argue, however, that Frontinus' role in …
Representations of Intellectual Community in Plutarch, Pliny the Younger and Aulus Gellius
L’UMR 7044 (ARCHIMEDE) regroupe une forte concentration d’archéologues, de philologues et d’historiens des mondes anciens dont la spécialité porte sur l’Europe moyenne et centrale, ainsi que sur la Méditerranée et ses voisins orientaux (Rome, Grèce, Byzance, Anatolie, Mésopotamie, Syro-Palestine, Égypte)
Re-Reading Pollux
Ioulios Polydeukes, more commonly known as Pollux, was a Greek sophist and lexicographer active in the closing decades of the second century a.d . His Onomasticon is one of the most important lexicographical texts of the Imperial period. It is essentially a set of word lists dedicated to collecting clusters of related words on topics from a vast range of different areas of intellectual activity and everyday life. The text survives only in epitomi…
Favorinus' Corinthian Oration in its Corinthian context
At some time in the second quarter of the second century AD, the controversial sophist–philosopher Favorinus seems to have delivered a speech in Corinth, complaining about the removal of a statue which had previously been erected there in his honour. In doing so he was addressing the inhabitants of a city which occupied an unusual – in many ways unique – position between Greek and Roman identity: Corinth had been sacked by Roman forces in 146 BC,…
Favorinus' Corinthian Oration in its Corinthian context
At some time in the second quarter of the second century AD, the controversial sophist–philosopher Favorinus seems to have delivered a speech in Corinth, complaining about the removal of a statue which had previously been erected there in his honour. In doing so he was addressing the inhabitants of a city which occupied an unusual – in many ways unique – position between Greek and Roman identity: Corinth had been sacked by Roman forces in 146 BC,…
Alciphron's Epistolarity
This chapter examines Alciphron's Letters, which portray a world of longing and loss, a world of fragile happiness and comic disillusionment. There are four books: Letters from Fishermen, Farmers, Parasites, and Courtesans. Each of those four groups reveals through its letters its own desires and sufferings, its own extravagant dreams and bathetic failures. Two themes (as far as they can be separated) are particularly prominent: precarious or fai…
Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire
The Romans commanded the largest and most complex empire the world had ever seen, or would see until modern times. The challenges, however, were not just political, economic and military: Rome was also the hub of a vast information network, drawing in worldwide expertise and refashioning it for its own purposes. This fascinating collection of essays considers the dialogue between technical literature and imperial society, drawing on, developing a…
Body and text
The bodies of the ancient novels are hard to ignore: beautiful, chaste bodies, god-like bodies, ugly bodies, dead bodies, fragmented bodies, penetrated bodies, animal bodies, bodies that are hard to tell apart from one another. The novels confront us with these forms insistently. Some of them look easy to interpret, as shining examples of chastity and virtue, qualities that manifest themselves inevitably in beauty. But many of them are enigmatic,…
Games and Festivals
The festivals of the Greek world demonstrate the power of Hellenism as a unifying ideal, together with the vitality and variety of local Hellenic practice. There is a vast array of complementary views of Greek festivals, which between them can help people to reconstruct the perspectives of spectator and competitor, citizen and foreign visitor, emperor and benefactor, cultural centres and cultural margins. That highly varied body of material makes…
Greek Literature in the Roman Empire
In this book Jason Konig offers for the first time an accessible yet comprehensive account of the multi-faceted Greek literature of the Roman Empire, focusing especially on the first three centuries AD. He covers in turn the Greek novels of this period, the satirical writing of Lucian, rhetoric, philosophy, scientific and miscellanistic writing, geography and history, biography and poetry, providing a vivid introduction to key texts, with extensi…
Sympotic dialogue in the first to fifth centuries CE
SYMPOTIC QUESTIONS Many of the essays in this volume, the introduction included, interrogate the idea that Christian writers felt uncomfortable with the dialogue form, and so either neglected it completely or else used it very differently from their Greco-Roman or Jewish counterparts. There are reasons for expressing reservations about those formulations. Most strikingly, it is easy enough to amass a long series of counterexamples: many Christian…
Greek Athletics
Athletic training and athletic competition were key features of ancient Greek life for more than 1,000 years, from the foundation of the Olympic festival in the eighth century BC into the Roman period. Recent years have seen an enormous growth in scholarship on the subject, and in undergraduate teaching, but many seminal articles remain inaccessible, especially to English-speaking readers. This volume brings together for the first time a collecti…
Saints and Symposiasts
Greek traditions of writing about food and the symposium had a long and rich afterlife in the first to fifth centuries CE, in both Greco-Roman and early Christian culture. This book provides an account of the history of the table-talk tradition, derived from Plato's Symposium and other classical texts, focusing among other writers on Plutarch, Athenaeus, Methodius and Macrobius. It also deals with the representation of transgressive, degraded, ec…
Ancient Libraries
Alciphron and the Sympotic Letter Tradition
The author's argument in this chapter is that Alciphron's Letters (especially Book 3, his Letters of Parasites ) engages closely with a long-standing tradition of writing in letter form about symposia and dinner parties. One strand in that tradition is the letter of invitation. The other is the retrospective banquet letter, in other words the kind of letter which offers a report of a dinner party for the benefit of someone who was not present. A …
Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance
There is a rich body of encyclopaedic writing which survives from the two millennia before the Enlightenment. This book sheds new light on that material. It traces the development of traditions of knowledge ordering which stretched back to Pliny and Varro and others in the classical world. It works with a broad concept of encyclopaedism, resisting the idea that there was any clear pre-modern genre of the 'encyclopaedia', and showing instead how t…
Frontinus' Cameo Role in Tacitus' Agricola
Frontinus appears only once in Tacitus' Agricola , at a moment in the text where Tacitus is filling in some background, sketching a rough history of the Roman occupation of Britain up to the time when Agricola took over as governor of the province. His appearance is brief, and the momentum of the whole section makes it tempting to see him as a mere footnote in the tale of Agricola's life and career. I will argue, however, that Frontinus' role in …
Images of Elite Community in Philostratus
This chapter aims to show that the Philostratus presents a spectrum of different models for imagining the constitution of Hellenic elite culture, and for imagining the relationship between elite Greeks and elite Romans. It begins with the work's preface, which emphasizes harmony and community between Philostratus and his addressee, one of the emperors Gordian. The chapter turns to Philostratus' portrayal of interaction between sophists and empero…
Re-Reading Pollux
Ioulios Polydeukes, more commonly known as Pollux, was a Greek sophist and lexicographer active in the closing decades of the second century a.d . His Onomasticon is one of the most important lexicographical texts of the Imperial period. It is essentially a set of word lists dedicated to collecting clusters of related words on topics from a vast range of different areas of intellectual activity and everyday life. The text survives only in epitomi…
Athletes and Trainers
Athletic activity was a major preoccupation of the Greek elite in the imperial period. This chapter looks at the relationship between athletic and intellectual activity, focusing especially on the way in which athletic skill could in itself be presented as a form of paideia. It looks first at day-to-day training in the gymnasium, focusing particularly on the use of athletics in the education of young men of the Greek elite and on the expertise of…
Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture
Representations of Intellectual Community in Plutarch, Pliny the Younger and Aulus Gellius
L’UMR 7044 (ARCHIMEDE) regroupe une forte concentration d’archéologues, de philologues et d’historiens des mondes anciens dont la spécialité porte sur l’Europe moyenne et centrale, ainsi que sur la Méditerranée et ses voisins orientaux (Rome, Grèce, Byzance, Anatolie, Mésopotamie, Syro-Palestine, Égypte)
Solitude and Biography in Jerome’s Life of Hilarion
This chapter studies Jerome’s Life of Hilarion . Solitude poses particular problems to the biographer. How can one depict someone else’s solitary experience? The first half of the chapter offers a survey of representations of solitude in ancient biography and autobiography, and examines some of the reasons for their relative scarcity. The second half of the chapter addresses Jerome’s use of those traditions, arguing that the Life of Hilarion draw…
The Folds of Olympus
The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. This book is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those inter…
Folds of Olympus
Summit Altars
This chapter introduces tension that runs right through the long history of representing mountains in ancient Greek and Roman literature. It conveys something of the way in which ancient portrayals of mountains confront with powerful images against which to measure relationships around the world. It also considers the mountains of the Mediterranean as both divine and human places. The chapter provides a wider context of ancient religious practice…
Ecocritical Readings in Late Hellenistic Literature
This chapter draws on approaches from the environmental humanities in exploring the hypothesis that late Hellenistic literature was unusually positive in its representations of landscape alteration. It first sketches out the predominantly negative tradition of representing landscape alteration in ancient literature from Herodotus onwards, before examining the more celebratory versions that we find in Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. At the same time …
Dio Chrysostom and the Mountains of Euboia
This chapter talks about the countryside, which has often been idealised as an unspoiled space set apart from the problems of urban life throughout the Western literary tradition. It cites Raymond Williams's The Country and the City that drew attention to the artificiality of nostalgic images of rural life in English literature from about 1600 onwards. It also considers the idea of pristine nature free from human interference as a fabrication, ev…
Ammianus Marcellinus
This chapter reviews the work of Ammianus Marcellinus, which offers the most sensationalistic of all ancient portrayals of mountain peoples and mountain warfare. Ammianus' Res Gestae covers the period 353 to 378 CE and is based in part on his involvement in fighting against the Persians and of being besieged in the city of Amida. It covers detailed accounts of campaigning in mountainous country and other kinds of difficult terrain both there and …
Art (32 works) · History (32 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (25 works) · Literature (21 works) · Aesthetics (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Archaeology (16 works) · Ancient history (14 works) · Classics (13 works) · Political science (12 works)