Tim Whitmarsh
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1153573 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Tim Whitmarsh |
| PRENOMES | Tim |
| SOBRENOME | Whitmarsh |
| ASSINATURA | WHITMARSH T |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Cambridge |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 71 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 52 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 64 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 7 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2001 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Seriously pederastic
The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race
Race as a concept has had a fraught role in the history of Classics, woven into its formation as an academic discipline. While the texts and artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean world provide complex understandings of what race might mean and how it might operate, they have also provided fodder for modern racial ideologies. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and groundbreaking overview of 'race' and 'racism' in ancient Mediterranean cultures …
Coming Up for Air
In an article first published in this journal, Jonas Grethlein responds to the present author’s discussion of the fact that ancients did not—unlike modern narratologists—differentiate between (extratextual) author and (intratextual) narrator. Grethlein attempts to qualify Whitmarsh’s position in two respects: (i) he believes that the ancient author was conflated not just with literary narrators but also with characters; (ii) he believes that the …
Justin, Tatian and the Forging of a Christian Voice
This article considers the construction of the speaking subject in Justin’s First Apology and Tatian’s To the Greeks , two interlocking texts (often associated with the problematic genre of Christian apologetics). Bracketing questions of biographical reality, it explores the fictionalising techniques Justin and Tatian adopt to magnify their own authority, co-opt well-known narrative models (including martyrologies and imitatio Christi ) in the se…
The Mustering of the Delphians (4.19–21)
At the end of Book 4 the Delphians, encouraged by the tricky priest Calasiris to arrange an expedition in pursuit of Charicleia and her alleged abductor Theagenes, muster for war—an episode that turns out to be inconsequential. This chapter reads the phase as one of a series of Heliodorean experiments with ‘false beginnings’, in the context of a narrative that is itself fundamentally about the question of origins (i.e. the mystery of Charicleia’s…
Sphragis 1
This chapter represents the first of this volume’s two attempts at breaking open Heliodorus’ brief, allegedly autobiographical ‘seal’ at the end of the text. Beginning from the ambiguous position of this paratext (is it within or without the text?), it turns to focus on Heliodorus’ relationship with his predecessors in the romance genre. It then considers the author’s self-identification as a ‘Phoenician man’ in the context of similar phrasing in…
Reading Heliodorus' Aethiopica
Emotions and Narrativity in the Greek Romance
When Oracles Don’t Come True
Reception in the Greco-Roman World
The embrace of reception theory has been one of the hallmarks of classical studies over the last 30 years. This volume builds on the critical insights thereby gained to consider reception within Greek antiquity itself. Reception, like 'intertextuality', places the emphasis on the creative agency of the later 'receiver' rather than the unilateral influence of the 'transmitter'. It additionally shines the spotlight on transitions into new cultural …
Altered States
Why speak of ‘reception’ in classical antiquity, rather than ‘allusion’ or ‘intertextuality’? This chapter begins by assessing the reasons for the emergence of the term reception in the scholarship of the last thirty years, identifying (a) a shift away from unilateral models of ‘influence’; (b) a postmodern promotion of the status of the ‘copy’; (c) a pedagogical need for multiplication of access points into the ancient world. But the idea of ‘re…
Less Care, More Stress
This article considers a short text that was widely circulated in the mid- Roman Empire, in both a four-line and a six-line version, usually on gemstones. The text is a poem of sorts, but of a quite distinctive type. Part of it can be scanned according to the rules of classical (quantitative) metre, but more striking is the consistent rhythmic (stressed) pattern. Stressed poetry is not otherwise attested so early; this text may point to a substra…
Greeks on Greekness
(Not) talkin’ ‘bout a revolution
Quickening the Classics. The Politics of Prose in Roman Greece
The Cretan Lyre Paradox. Mesomedes, Hadrian, and the Poetics of Patronage
Greek Poets and Roman Patrons in the Late Republic and Early Empire
Dirty Love
Where does the Greek novel come from? This book argues that whereas much of Greek literature was committed to a form of cultural purism, presenting itself as part of a continuous tradition reaching back to definitively Greek founding fathers, the novel revelled in cultural hybridity. The earliest Greek novelistic literature combined Greek and non-Greek traditions (or at least affected to combine them: it is often hard to tell how ‘authentic’ the …
Dirty Love in Late Antiquity
This chapter discusses Musaeus’s Hero and Leander , a classic (and highly influential) tale of out-of-place desire composed in the fifth century CE. It is an extraordinary witness, in an era of Christian moralism, to the persistence of the novelistic tendency to see illicit, ‘dirty’ love in a positive light.
Whose Paradigm?
Alexander the Great was a symbol of Hellenism; but he was also, quite independently, a symbol of imperial autocracy across cultures. This chapter explores the ways in which figures of absolute power like Alexander, and his precedent Cyrus, operate both within and beyond specific cultural traditions.
Who Was Ctesias?
Ctesias, the author of the Zarinaea and Stryangaeus story, was an extraordinary figure, a Greek who spent time in the Persian court and claimed to have access to Persian sources. He was influential stylistically on the novelistic tradition; and he also may have been highly self-conscious about the fictive nature of his writing (although it is impossible to tell without his own words).
Sourcing Callirhoe
Chariton’s Callirhoe is the earliest extant example of the Greek novel. What preceding texts are there that resemble it? Martin Braun demonstrated in the 1930s that many of the motifs that we think of as characteristically novelistic are found in Josephus’s retelling of the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. Does that tell us that Josephus was influenced by now-lost novels? Or that Jewish storytelling influenced the course of the novel? Or that…
How to Write Anti-Roman History
In this chapter, Tim Whitmarsh reconstructs an example of a type of history writing—accounts with a pronounced anti-Roman bias—that has left only exiguous traces in the extant collection of ancient textual sources. Whitmarsh traces this oppositional history by scrutinizing the several categories of professed opponents whom Dionysius of Halicarnassus ventriloquizes. Whitmarsh tentatively identifies Metrodorus of Scepsis as a likely target of Diony…
Alexander in Kohl
This chapter provides an extended analysis of the theme of hybridity and intermarriage in the Alexander Romance , where Alexander turns out to be the son of the Thracian Olympias and the last Egyptian pharaoh, Nectanebo.
‘The Long Hellenistic’
Egypt is a culture that had novelistic literature earlier than others, and which was open to multiple different cultural influences over a long period. This chapter introduces the Alexander Romance , a text that embodies generic and cultural fluidity, surviving as it does in multiple different forms demonstrating multiple different linguistic and cultural registers. The Alexander Romance was antiquity’s most widely disseminated text after the Bib…
Greek Literature and the Roman Empire
Greek Literature and the Roman Empire uses up-to-date literary and cultural theory to make a major and original contribution to the appreciation of Greek literature written under the Roman Empire during the second century CE (the so-called 'Second Sophistic'). This literature should not be dismissed as unoriginal and mediocre. Rather, its central preoccupations, especially mimesis and paideia, provide significant insights into the definition of G…
Written on the Body
Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their ph…
The Greek Novel
Were the Greek novels titled according to a consistent convention? This article confronts the view that the original titles were always historiographical in form (Assyriaka, Lesbiaka, Aithiopika, etc.) and that readers were thus steered to expect, in the first instance, realistic narrative. Examining the evidence in detail, it argues that the formula the novels were likeliest to have shared was ta kata + girl's name (or girl's + boy's names). On …
Atheistic Aesthetics
The famous Sisyphus fragment of a tragedy or satyr play is one of the best known documents of ancient atheism, proposing as it does a social-constructionist theory of the emergence of religion as a form of social control. This article argues that the fragment should be seen not just as a philosophical contribution to Presocratic and sophistic thought on the gods, but also as a work of theatrical poetics: it alludes to Hesiod's foundational role i…
Alexander’s Hellenism and Plutarch’s textualism
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Theomachy and Theology in Early Greek Myth
Cet article se penche sur la représentation de la famille des Éolides dans le Catalogue des femmes du pseudo-Hésiode. Les Éolides, qui apparaissent très tôt dans le cycle mythique (et de façon particulièrement proche de la phase originelle de la vie humaine dans laquelle dieux et mortels ont été convives), présentent un cas remarquable de jalousie du divin. Ils cherchent en particulier à rivaliser avec la divinité en faisant usage d'artefacts hum…
Being Greek under Rome
These especially commissioned essays open up a fascinating perspective on a crucial era of western culture. In the second century CE the Roman empire dominated the Mediterranean, but Greek culture maintained its huge prestige. At the same time, Christianity and Judaism were vying for followers against the lures of such an elite cultural life. This book looks at how writers in Greek from all areas of Empire society respond to their political posit…
The performative context of Dio’s Kingship orations
Subject Ancient Roman History Textual Criticism Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Conclusion
Cultural identity is not innate, but constructed and vied for in social space. In Stuart Hall’s terms, it is ‘not an essence but a positioning’} Assumptions that Greek identity in any period stemmed organically from a single, integral radical risk complicity with nineteenth-century racial theory: the explicitly biological metaphors (‘blood’, ‘vitality’, ‘reinvigoration’) may have gone, but the familiar talk of a renaissance or ‘flourishing’2 of H…
Rome Uncivilized
The first part of this book focused primarily upon literary culture (paideia) as a means of creating Greek identity by exploring the relationship between past and present. The composition and dissemination of texts, and also the construction of the identity of the pepaideumenos (‘educated man’) were not self-evident activities; rather, they provided a matrix wherein identities could be inflected in different ways at different times. The ‘secondar…
Translation of Favorinus, On Exile (P.Vat. 11)
Subject Ancient Roman History Textual Criticism Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Civilizing Rome
The previous chapter considered the representation of intercultural stand-off, a scenario in which the emperor is negatively assessed on the grounds of his rejection of pedagogical advice, while the philosopher is positively appraised for his manly, serene triumph over adversity. This chapter considers the more constructive counterpart of the exilic paradigm, namely the harmonious coexistence of philosophy and the principate.
Education
The previous chapter discussed the multiple ways in which mimetic literature can be used to construct or challenge cultural links with the past. In this chapter, I wish to broaden the focus, so as to encompass the litterateur him- or her- (but as a rule him-) self. That is to say, I wish to consider the question of what sort of individual identity accrues to the pepaideumenos, the ‘educated’ man (or woman). Several fine studies already exist deal…
Dedication
Repetition
In 1964 Bernard van Groningen responded to an invitation to speak on the subject of ‘General literary tendencies of the second century AD’ at the fourth International Congress of Classical Studies in Philadelphia. His oration, subsequently published, is one of the most hostile of the many attacks upon Greek literary culture under Roman rule, a blunt, historically insensitive, and occasionally incoherent diatribe against what he sees as ‘an essent…
Abbreviation
Title Pages
Satirizing Rome
In the last two chapters we have seen how the polarization of ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’ — as though the two entities were discrete — is fraught with an ironic awareness of the mutual implication of the two. The texts on exile articulate an alienated distancing from Rome into the canonical past of free-speaking Greek autonomy, but in a self-conscious manner that knowingly bespeaks the Romanness of their authors. The tradition of imperial pedagogy is sim…
Alexander’s Hellenism and Plutarch’s textualism
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Written on the Body
Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their ph…
Greek Literature and the Roman Empire
Greek Literature and the Roman Empire uses up-to-date literary and cultural theory to make a major and original contribution to the appreciation of Greek literature written under the Roman Empire during the second century CE (the so-called 'Second Sophistic'). This literature should not be dismissed as unoriginal and mediocre. Rather, its central preoccupations, especially mimesis and paideia, provide significant insights into the definition of G…
Reading for Pleasure
Aelius Aristides
The Cretan lyre paradox
Being Greek under Rome
The Greek Novel
Were the Greek novels titled according to a consistent convention? This article confronts the view that the original titles were always historiographical in form (Assyriaka, Lesbiaka, Aithiopika, etc.) and that readers were thus steered to expect, in the first instance, realistic narrative. Examining the evidence in detail, it argues that the formula the novels were likeliest to have shared was ta kata + girl's name (or girl's + boy's names). On …
Chapter 10. Quickening the Classics
Chapter Twenty-Six. Philostratus
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…
Narrative
Narrative is now a permanent fixture in modern criticism on the Greek novel. Under the pervasive influence of narratology, popularised particularly by Gérard Genette and Mieke Bal, concepts such as 'embedded narrative', 'narratees' and 'focalisation' (these terms will be glossed in the course of my discussion) have become a familiar part of the armoury of literary theory. This chapter has no pretensions towards recapitulation of the standard form…
Class
Where do we pitch the novels, in terms of social class? This is a more difficult question than is often admitted. The authors, to begin with them, can rarely be pinpointed demographically. The Latin novelists were no doubt high-powered individuals: Petronius was probably Nero's courtier, and Apuleius' father - a duumvir or chief magistrate in his city of Madaurus - was rich enough to leave his sons the hefty sum of 2 million sesterces (Apology 23…
Classical Antiquity Studies (59 obras) · Art (50 obras) · History (45 obras) · Literature (42 obras) · Philosophy (36 obras) · Classics (24 obras) · Aesthetics (19 obras) · Byzantine Studies and History (19 obras) · Ancient history (17 obras) · Law (17 obras)