This volume deals with aspects of orality and oral traditions in ancient Greece, and is a selection of refereed papers from the fourth biennial Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece conference, held at the University of Missouri Columbia in 2000.
The book is divided into three parts: literature, rhetoric and society, and philosophy. The papers focus on genres such as epic poetry, drama, poetry and art, public oratory, legislative procedure, and Simpliciusâ philosophy. All papers present new approaches to their topics or ask new and provocative questions.
Ian Worthington is Professor of Greek History at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has published extensively on Greek history, oratory, and epigraphy, including A Historical Commentary on Dinarchus (University of Michigan Press, 1992), Greek Orators II (Aris & Phillips, 1999), and his edited books include Persuasion, Greek Rhetoric in Action (Routledge, 1994), Voice Into Text: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece (Brill, 1996) and Demosthenes, Statesman and Orator (2000).
John Miles Foley, Byler Chair in the Humanities and Curators' Professor of Classical Studies and English at the University of Missouri, specializes in ancient Greek, medieval English, and South Slavic verbal art. His most recent books are Homer's Traditional Art (Penn State, 1999) and How to Read an Oral Poem (Illinois, 2001).
All those interested in classics, ancient history, oral traditions, comparative literature, anthropology.