This first in-depth study of Valerius Flaccus’ animals reveals their role in his poetic programme and the manifold ways in which he establishes their subjectivity. In one encounter, a trapped bird becomes a tragic victim, while the trapper is dehumanized. Elsewhere there are touching portrayals of animal/human camaraderie and friendship. Furthermore, Valerius’ provocative consideration of the ‘monstrous’ challenges simplistic definitions of any being’s nature, or the nature of relationships across species. His challenge entails profound ethical implications for his Roman readership, which resonate with us as we assess our own relationship to animals and the natural world today.

Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica is one of the most significant surviving works of Flavian epic, which has recently become much more popular as a field of study and teaching in Latin literature. This is the first commentary in English directly tailored to the needs of graduate and advanced undergraduate students. It provides an introduction to the major themes of the poem and the structure and content of Book III in particular which can function as an overview of the key features of Flavian epic. The detailed commentary on Book III discusses linguistic issues, intertextual and mythical allusions and thematic strands. The book consists of two major episodes in the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts which can be read together or independently of each other.

Valerius Flaccus' unfinished and unjustly neglected epic recounting the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece and the early stages of the doomed love affair of Jason and Medea has been relegated to the outer fringes of classical scholarship for many years. A full-length study devoted to the Argonautica has not been published in English for over 100 years. This book seeks to address this balance. Dr. Hershkowitz aims to provide readers who have not yet encountered Valerius Flaccus' work with a general introduction to this multi-faceted epic poem. At the same time the author offers those already familiar with the Argonautica an in-depth re-evaluation of the work, contextualizing it within both an historical and literary framework, focusing in particular on its intertextual relationship with Apollonius' Argonautica and Vergil's Aeneid.

It discusses, inter alia, the limited evidence for Valerius' life; the main features of his often difficult poetic language; the handling of the Argonautic myth in literature prior to Valerius; his innovative treatment of the inherited material; and his self-positioning within the broader literary tradition, particularly his sophisticated adaptation of formal and thematic elements from his two principal poetic models, Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica and Virgil's Aeneid. While the commentary is written for readers with some competence in Latin, the introduction, and the facing English translation, are thoroughly accessible to non-Latinate readers with an interest in Roman literature and in the ancient epic tradition."--BOOK JACKET.

A text (with apparatus criticus), translation, and commentary, with introduction, of the first book of Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica, an unfinished Roman epic extending to eight books and several thousand lines, written in the Flavian period (69-96 CE). The commentary addresses both textual and semantic matters and broader questions of stylistics, poetics, thematics, and cultural context. Particularly close attention is paid to Valerius' choice of diction, his sophisticated use of figures and tropes, his often sly erudition, the recurring and strategic resort to subtle intertextual gestures, and, where appropriate, the reception of his work in later authors. The substantial introduction provides an overview of the poet and his poem.

The subject of the posthuman, of what it means to be or to cease to be human, is emerging as a shared point of debate at large in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This volume asks what classical learning can bring to the table of posthuman studies, assembling chapters that explore how exactly the human self of Greek and Latin literature understands its own relation to animals, monsters, objects, cyborgs and robotic devices. With its widely diverse habitat of heterogeneous bodies, minds, and selves, classical literature again and again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human; not to equate and confound the human with its other, but playfully to highlight difference and hybridity, as an invitation to appraise the animal, monstrous or mechanical/machinic parts lodged within humans. This comprehensive collection unites contributors from across the globe, each delving into a different classical text or narrative and its configuration of human subjectivity-how human selves relate to other entities around them. For students and scholars of classical literature and the posthuman, this book is a first point of reference.

This volume offers a new translation of Plutarch’s three treatises on animals—On the Cleverness of Animals, Whether Beasts Are Rational, and On Eating Meat—accompanied by introductions and explanatory commentaries. The accompanying commentaries are designed not only to elucidate the meaning of the Greek text, but to call attention to Plutarch’s striking anticipations of arguments central to current philosophical and ethological discourse in defense of the position that non-human animals have intellectual and emotional dimensions that make them worthy of inclusion in the moral universe of human beings. Plutarch’s Three Treatises on Animals will be of interest to students of ancient philosophy and natural science, and to all readers who wish to explore the history of thought on human–non-human animal relations, in which the animal treatises of Plutarch hold a pivotal position.