This book explains the importance of food to ancient Greek comedy: it was a medium through which comedy could represent the material, social, agricultural, political and religious worlds to the Greek city-state. The text also contains translations of hundreds of comic fragments; and it reassesses the division of comedy into Sicilian and Attic Old, Middle, and New.

This special issue of the American Journal of Philology illuminates the nature and function of food and dining in the Roman world, offering historical, sociological, literary, cultural, and material perspectives. The articles collected here explore topics from diverse fields to analyze Roman culture and material practice, including the dietary practices and nutritional concerns of the Romans, dining and its links to ideology during the early imperial period, public banqueting and its social function in Roman society, and the emphasis placed on the waiting servant in both domestic and funerary settings. The American Journal of Philology is renowned for its role in helping to shape American classical scholarship. Today the Journal has achieved worldwide recognition as a forum for international exchange among classicists by publishing original research in Greco-Roman literature, and culture.

In the early modern period, deceit and fraud were common issues. Acutely aware of the ubiquity and multiplicity of simulation and dissimulation, people from this period made serious efforts to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon, trying to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable, pleasant and unpleasant, wicked and virtuous forms of deceit, and seeking to unravel its principles, strategies, and functions. The twelve case-studies in this volume focus on the use of deceit by several groups of people in different spheres of life, as well as on its representation in literary and artistic genres, and its conceptualization in philosophical and rhetorical discourses. The studies testify to the rich variety of deceitful strategies applied by people from the early modern period, as well as to the subtlety and diversity of the conceptual frameworks they construed in order to grasp the many aspects of the elusive yet all-pervasive phenomenon of deceit. Contributors include: Daniel Acke, Jacques Bos, Wiep van Bunge, Evelien Chayes, Paul J.C.M. Franssen, Paul van Heck, Toon van Houdt, Alfons K.L. Thijs, Bert Timmermans, Johannes Trapman, Mark van Vaeck, Natascha Veldhorst, and Johan Verberckmoes.

A Companion to Food in the Ancient World presents acomprehensive overview of the cultural aspects relating to theproduction, preparation, and consumption of food and drink inantiquity. • Provides an up-to-date overview of the study of food inthe ancient world • Addresses all aspects of food production, distribution,preparation, and consumption during antiquity • Features original scholarship from some of the mostinfluential North American and European specialists in Classicalhistory, ancient history, and archaeology • Covers a wide geographical range from Britain to ancientAsia, including Egypt and Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, regionssurrounding the Black Sea, and China • Considers the relationships of food in relation toancient diet, nutrition, philosophy, gender, class, religion, andmore

In ancient Greek comedy, nothing is ever 'just a joke'. This book treats jokes with the seriousness they deserve, and shows that far from being mere surface-level phenomena, jokes in Greek comedy are in fact a site of poetic experimentation whose creative force expressly rivals that of serious literature. Focusing on the fragments of authors including Cratinus, Pherecrates, and Archippus alongside the extant plays of Aristophanes, Naomi Scott argues that jokes are critical to comedy's engagement with the language and convention of poetic representation. More than this, she suggests that jokes and poetry share a kind of kinship as two modes of utterance which specifically set out to flout the rules of ordinary speech. Starting with bad puns, and taking in crude slapstick, vulgar innuendo and frivolous absurdism, Jokes in Greek Comedy demonstrates that the apparently inconsequential jokes which pepper the surface of Greek comedy in fact amplify the impossible and defamiliarizing qualities of standard poetic practice, and reveal the fundamental ridiculousness of treating make-believe as a serious endeavour. In this way, jokes form a central part of Greek comedy's contestation of the role of language, and particularly poetic language, in the truthful representation of reality.

The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction to and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From its birth in Greece to its end in Rome, from its Hellenistic to its Imperial receptions, no topic is neglected. The 41 essays offer cutting-edge guides through comedy's immense terrain.