The Five Ancient Criteria of Democracy: The Apotheosis of Equality

Democracy in ancient Athens was different from what is implemented today even in the most advanced democracies. To evaluate this difference, this paper presents five criteria of democracy and then applies them to ancient Athens and modern advanced democracies. In comparison and according to five criteria, modern democracies are inferior to what the eligible citizens of Ancient Athens enjoyed. The ancient Greek literature on the subject has identified five criteria of democracy which neither today nor in ancient times were fully satisfied. The democracy today satisfies some but not all five criteria. This was also true for the ancient (Athenian) democracy. They differ in which criteria they satisfied. Of course, each criterion is fulfilled to a certain extent and this may differentiate modern from ancient democracy. These issues are discussed in this paper.

Greek Migrant Literature in the Early Roman Empire

This article argues that the concept of migrant literature, developed in postcolonial studies, is a useful tool for analysing Greek literature of the Early Roman Empire (27 BC-AD 68). The city of Rome attracted huge numbers of migrants from across the Mediterranean. Among them were many writers from Hellenized provinces like Egypt, Syria and Asia, who wrote in Greek. Leaving their native regions and travelling to Rome, they moved between cultures, responding in Greek to the new world order. Early imperial Greek writers include Strabo of Amasia, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Nicolaus of Damascus, Timagenes of Alexandria, Crinagoras of Mytilene, Philo of Alexandria and Paul of Tarsus. What connects these authors of very different origins, styles, beliefs, and literary genres is migrancy. They are migrant writers whose works are characterized by in-betweenness, ambivalence and polyphony.

Ogni epoca ha la sua guerra di Troia Poesie neogreche, per Ettore

Reception of Homer in Modern Greek literature. Translation. Modern Greek poetry. Digenis. Loukanis. Solomòs. Palamàs. Kavafis. Seferis. Elytis. Patrikios. Dimitriadis.

Motifs of homosexuality in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

To avoid the stigma of societal dissaproval, love for somebody of the same sex has often been hidden from the declinatory views of the public; however, it has also been secretively transcribed into a broad spectrum of art. Virginia Woolf embroidered her homosexuality into the grotesque lines of Orlando. At the time, Woolf was engaged in an intense lesbian relationship with author Vita Sackville-West, who served as a model for the work’s main character. Woolf proclaimed her masterpiece “A Biography”, mirroring the duality of her own and Vita’s character, the perpetual beauty of the book’s hero, enduring for centuries, and his subtle gender transition. In the paper, we discuss some of the homosexual motifs in Orlando, which were formed by different influences, including the queer movement, ancient Greek literature and feminism.

Essays on Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

In this book one of the world's leading Hellenists brings together his many contributions over four decades to our understanding of early Greek literature, above all of elegiac poetry and its relation to fifth-century prose historiography, but also of early Greek epic, iambic, melic and epigrammatic poetry. Many chapters have become seminal, e.g. that which first proposed the importance of now-lost long narrative elegies, and others exploring their performance contexts when papyri published in 1992 and 2005 yielded fragments of such long poems by Simonides and Archilochus. Another chapter argues against the widespread view that Sappho composed and performed chiefly for audiences of young girls, suggesting instead that she was a virtuoso singer and lyre-player, entertaining men in the elite symposia whose verbal and musical components are explored in several other chapters of the book. Two more volumes of collected papers will follow devoted to later Greek literature and culture.

Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach’’: A Depiction of Victorian Doubt and Faith

Dissatisfied with his age Arnold turned towards Greek Culture and literature. Victorian age was an age of doubt and faith. Religious faith were in melting pot. Darwin’s ‘Origin Of Species’ (1859) shook the Victorian faith. Darwin questioned the very basic statement of ‘The Holy Bible’. Arnold considered literature as a weapon to established the broken faith of Victorians. He took Greek literature as reference to write literature. Arnold keenly observed Greek art and culture and find solace in it. He used Greek Art and Culture as the tool of morality and it has the healing power to wounded Victorian faith. Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach is a poetry of vanished past and vanished faith. Keywords: Reflective elegy, Vanished Faith, Victorian Doubt and Faith, Sea of faith.

Celsus in his World

Celsus penned the earliest known detailed attack upon Christianity. While his identity is disputed and his anti-Christian treatise, entitled the True Word, has been exclusively transmitted through the hands of the great Christian scholar Origen, he remains an intriguing figure. In this interdisciplinary volume, which brings together ancient philosophers, specialists in Greek literature, and historians of early Christianity and of ancient Judaism, Celsus is situated within the cultural, philosophical, religious and political world from which he emerged. While his work is ostensibly an attack upon Christianity, it is also the defence of a world in which Celsus passionately believed. It is the unique contribution of this volume to give voice to the many dimensions of that world in a way that will engage a variety of scholars interested in late antiquity and the histories of Christianity, Judaism and Greek thought.