Coming Soon Online from the Hellenic Studies Series

We are very pleased to announce the forthcoming online publication of these two books from the Hellenic Studies Series at the CHS website:
Pepper, Timothy, editor, A Californian Hymn to Homer
Much as an ancient hymnist carries a familiar subject into new directions of song, the contributors to A Californian Hymn to Homer draw upon Homeric scholarship as inspiration for pursuing new ways of looking at texts, both within the Homeric tradition and outside it. This set of seven original essays, accompanied by a new translation of the Homeric “Hymn to Apollo,” considers topics that transcend traditional generic distinctions between epic and lyric, choral and individual, performed and literary. Treating subjects ranging from Aeschylus’s reception of Homeric anger to the representation of mantic performance within Early Islamic texts, the collection presents a selection of imaginative critical work done on the West Coast by scholars of antiquity.
Also available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.
 
Lesher, James, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield, editors, Plato’s Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception
In his Symposium, Plato crafted a set of speeches in praise of love that has influenced writers and artists from antiquity to the present. Early Christian writers read the dialogue’s “ascent passage” as a vision of the soul’s journey to heaven. Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium inspired poets and artists throughout Renaissance Europe and introduced “a Platonic love” into common speech. Themes or images from the dialogue have appeared in paintings or sketches by Rubens, David, Feuerbach, and La Farge, as well as in musical compositions by Satie and Bernstein.
The dialogue’s view of love as “desire for eternal possession of the good” is still of enormous philosophical interest in its own right. Nevertheless, questions remain concerning the meaning of specific features, the significance of the dialogue as a whole, and the character of its influence. This volume brings together an international team of scholars to address such questions.
Also available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.

---