Space, Time and Language in Plutarch

✍ Scribed by Aristoula Georgiadou (editor); Katerina Oikonomopoulou (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: German
• Leaves: 396
• Series: Millennium-Studien / Millennium Studies; 67
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

'Space and time' have been key concepts of investigation in the humanities in recent years. In the field of Classics in particular, they have led to the fresh appraisal of genres such as epic, historiography, the novel and biography, by enabling a close focus on how ancient texts invest their representations of space and time with a variety of symbolic and cultural meanings. This collection of essays by a team of international scholars seeks to make a contribution to this rich interdisciplinary field, by exploring how space and time are perceived, linguistically codified and portrayed in the biographical and philosophical work of Plutarch of Chaeronea (1st-2nd centuries CE). The volume’s aim is to show how philological approaches, in conjunction with socio-cultural readings, can shed light on Plutarch’s spatial terminology and clarify his conceptions of time, especially in terms of the ways in which he situates himself in his era’s fascination with the past. The volume’s intended readership includes Classicists, intellectual and cultural historians and scholars whose field of expertise embraces theoretical study of space and time, along with the linguistic strategies used to portray them in literary or historical texts.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
List of contributors
Preface
Introduction: Reading Plutarch through space, time and language
1. Moving through space and time in Plutarch
Space travel and time travel in Plutarch
Time and space in Plutarch’s Lives
2. Time manipulation and narrative signification
Espace mémoriel et paysage monumental
Plutarch and tense: The present and the imperfect
Narrative time and space in Plutarch’s Life of Nicias
3. Religious locales as places of reflection on language, discourse and time
Space, time, and language in On the Oracles of the Pythia: ‘3,000 years of history, never proved wrong’
Poetry, extravagance, and the invention of the ‘archaic’ in Plutarch’s On the Oracles of the Pythia
Delphi, place and time in Plutarch’s Lycurgus and Lysander
Space, Delphi and the construction of the Greek past in Plutarch’s Greek Questions
4. Models of the past I: configurations of memory and history for Plutarch’s imperial readers
Greeks and the Roman past in the Second Sophistic: The case of Plutarch
Plutarch and the advent of Hellenism in Rome
Creating paradigms for the politikoi: Bridging the gap in political space and time with pre-imperial heroes
Greatness measured in time and space: The Agesilaus–Pompey
5. Models of the past II: Plutarch and the classical era
Discussing the past: Moral virtue, truth, and benevolence in Plutarch’s On the Malice of Herodotus
Solon on the road
Modelli del passato in due conferenze di Plutarco: De gloria Atheniensium e De audiendo
Shifting boundaries: Philotimia in democratic Athens and in Plutarch’s Lives
6. Philosophy and religion between past and present
Is dualism a Greek word? Plutarch’s dualism as a cultural and historical phenomenon
Egyptian knowledge at Plutarch’s table: Out of the question?
7. Space, time and notions of community
Divisions in Greek culture: Cultural topoi in Plutarch’s biographical practice
The construction of a cosmopolitan space in Plutarch’s On Exile
Il significato del termine ξένος in Plutarco: lo straniero nella realtà dell’Impero cosmopolita
8. Sympotic spaces: forging links between past and present
Past and present in Plutarch’s Table Talk
Sympotic space, hierarchy and Homeric quotation in Table Talk 1.2
Plutarque et la tradition rhétorique du banquet
Theseis rather than quaestiones convivales
9. Space, place, landscape: symbolic and metaphorical aspects
Individuated gods and sacred space in Plutarch
Espacio monumental y autopsia en las Vidas Paralelas de Plutarco
Military space and paideia in the Lives of Pyrrhus and Marius
Astronomical and political space: The sun’s course and the statesman’s power in Plutarch and Dio
Bibliography
Index of subjects
Index of ancient and modern authors
Index of passages