‘Madness’ in the Ancient World: Innate or Acquired?
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Book Series
Antiquité et sciences humaines
- Pages: approx. 410 p.
- Size:156 x 234 mm
- Illustrations:2 b/w, 9 col.
- Language(s):English, Greek, Latin
- Publication Year:2025
- € 95,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-59655-6
- Paperback
- Forthcoming (Oct/25)
- € 95,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-59656-3
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- Forthcoming
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This interdisciplinary volume sheds light on the fascination with origins from different perspectives: how is the power of origins employed in historiography, in ancient literature, in religious contexts, in philosophy, or in political debate? The contributions explore, from very different angles, how aetiology works as a creative process that collapses temporal categories (present/past) and forges the past by explaining the present from the past, and how origins function as a versatile legitimizing discourse
Subject(s)
BIO
Athanassios Vergados is Professor of Greek at Newcastle University. His publications include A Commentary on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (2013) and Hesiod’s Verbal Craft: Studies in Hesiod’s Conception of Language and Its Ancient Reception (2020).
Anke Walter is Professor of Classics (Latin Philology) at the University of Zurich. She has published monographs on Storytelling in Flavian Epic (2014), Time in Ancient Stories of Origin (2020), and Festivals in Latin Literature – The Poetics of Celebration (2025).
Summary
This interdisciplinary volume sheds light on the fascination with origins from different perspectives. The international team of contributors investigate how the power of origins is employed in historiography, in ancient literature, in religious contexts, in philosophy, and in political debate. What is it that makes origins such a fascinating form of discourse? The contributions explore, from very different angles, how aetiology works as a creative process that collapses temporal categories (present/past) and forges the past in order to legitimise the present, ultimately establishing cultural identity. Other topics include the interaction of time and space in the discourse of origins and the different ways in which aetia can bolster or undermine political power, of an elite or of the people. Origins, it is shown, are a multi-faceted and fluid form of discourse: inherent in them is the possibility of constantly re-reading and re-shaping the past, and thus they are also a site of competition and correction. Attention is also paid to the functioning of origins in different media, both literary and iconographical. It becomes clear that the appeal to origins is a highly versatile mode of discourse that can express a wide range of meanings.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter I. Introduction
Athanassios Vergados & Anke Walter
Chapter II. Si[gh]ting Origins in Hesiod’s Theogony
Jenny Strauss Clay
Chapter III. Isidore of Seville and the Power of Origo. The Concept at Work
Sergey Vorontsov
Chapter IV. Picturing Dynastic Descent. Relative vs. Absolute Origin in the Genealogical Imagery of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century
Volker Bauer
Chapter V. Ovid and Origins. The Opening Cosmogony in the Metamorphoses
Claudio Barone
Chapter VI. Telling Origins by Challenging Origins – Ovid’s Swan Narratives in the Metamorphoses
Philipp Geitner
Chapter VII. Indispensable Fictions. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Augustan Discourse of Origins
Alexander Kirichenko
Chapter VIII. Comic Cosmogonies. Re-booting the Universe
Niall W. Slater
Chapter IX. Aporia and Medial Beginnings in Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition
Matthew Pincus
Chapter X. A New Beginning. Aristotle and the Birth of Zoology
Claudia Zatta
Chapter XI. Etymology and Aetiology in Hellenistic and Imperial Didactic Poetery
Athanassios Vergados
Chapter XII. In the Beginning. The Competitive Origins of Greek and Jewish Historiography in Josephus’ Against Apion
Sarah Teets
Chapter XIII. Aitia of the Past – Stories of Origin in Silius Italicus’ Punica
Anke Walter
Chapter XIV. Creation and Epic Beginnings. Sibylline Oracles I, 1-64 and I Homeric Centos 1-91
Anna Lefteratou
Chapter XV. An Empire of Origins. Varro, Etymology, and Empire
Jay Fisher
Chapter XVI. Horace and the Beginnings of Rome
Andreas T. Zanker
Chapter XVII. Qui primus Romae... Pliny’s Natural History and the Encyclopedic Mode of Aetiology
Eva Marie Noller
Index locorum
Index rerum
