For many in the late nineteenth-century Pater was a by-word for sensual pleasure and sexual licence, and it is this Pater that dominates Decadent Studies today. But many Victorians read Pater as recommending austere discipline and sensuous continence. Restraint can be read as central to Pater’s attempt to base a practical ethic on sceptical, aesthetic principles. Sense experience was crucially important to this ethic. But Pater repeatedly distinguishes between healthy, productive sensuousness, and a harmful sensuality that he associates with an excess of transience, disease, and death. He represents continence as evidence of the personal discipline that allows the aesthete to effectively filter the good from the bad, the healthy from the unhealthy, in objects or periods or people; as he put it, to make ‘use of the flower, when the fruit perhaps was useless or poisonous’. And although Pater always leaves interpretative space for continent eroticism, especially homoeroticism, in his texts, attending to restraint is crucial for understanding his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reception.

The origins of modern georgic writing lie in the ancient Mediterranean, in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. On the Greek side the genre begins with the poetry of Hesiod, embraces dozens of treatise in poetry and prose written during the Hellenistic era, and comes to an end in Byzantine times with the massive compilation of farming lore known as the Geoponica. Latin georgic starts with Cato’s essay on agriculture, culminates in Vergil’s Georgics – the poem that defined the genre for later European authors – and persists in the Latin prose of Columella, Pliny, and Palladius. The diversity of the genre evades definition. Its popularity is unsurprising in the context of a world where wealth meant ownership of land and most people tilled the soil.

The introduction provides an overview of certain recurring subjects of the study, including music’s role in fostering the “good cheer” of the banquet, the power of metasympotic representations, the use of music for communication and display, the social and political aspects of self- and class-display through social music, ways in which elite music-making at archaic and classical symposia influenced customs of later periods and their interpretation, and the interconnections between dining and the festival/theater in all periods.

An intense debate has arisen among scholars concerning the financial sustainability of the grain funds that Greek and Roman cities used to cope with the instabilities of the grain market. In this paper, we apply a Monte Carlo simulation to model their financial dynamics. Due to the uncertainties pertaining to the scope of such funds (targeting urban dwellers only or including rural residents), our model takes into account two scenarios: ‘optimistic’ (urban only) and ‘pessimistic’ (both urban and rural). The analysis reaches several important findings: (1) For both scenarios, we witness a considerable rate of funds collapsing in their first 10 years of operation. After 10 years, however, the probability of failure displays very little change, as if there was a threshold over which the funds had accumulated enough capital to withstand shortages. (2) As expected, the survival rates are significantly higher for the optimistic scenario. (3) The withdrawals seem to have the most dramatic impact on the dynamic of the fund. Overall, while the grain funds do not appear to be sustainable in the urban-rural scenario, they show clear signs of sustainability in the urban-only scenario. The results invite reconsideration of the widespread view that grain funds were an inefficient and precarious response to food crisis.

This chapter deals with the development of early hymnography (c. 400–600 CE), including the Syriac and Georgian texts that influenced, or witnessed to, the Greek tradition. After an introductory section that deals with the second-century Odes of Solomon and fourth-century hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, the chapter moves on to fifth- and sixth-century Syriac poetry and dialogues, followed by important Greek hymns such as the Akathistos. The chapter concludes with sections on the Akathistos Hymn and on the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist, who was responsible for creating a more human, as opposed to symbolic, literary image of the Virgin. Romanos remained influential for both hymnography and homiletics in subsequent centuries, as liturgical writers elaborated the image of the Virgin Mary as human mother and intercessor for their audiences.

Language contact studies and historical linguistics, i.e. the study of language change, are subfields of linguistics that have long been recognized as being mutually relevant. This chapter explores this relationship along two dimensions: first, with regard to the fields of study themselves, and second, and perhaps more importantly, with regard to those aspects of language contact and of influence external to a given linguistic system that are particularly relevant to understanding the basic subject matter of historical linguistics, i.e. what happens to languages as they pass through time. In terms of the fields of study, an overview of the historiography of the distinction between internally motivated and externally motivated change is offered. This survey is followed by a discussion of several case studies, in which language contact serves as an actuator of change as well as some in which it is an inhibitor of change. Finally, the interaction of language contact with another key issue in historical linguistics, namely language genealogy, is discussed, along with a consideration of the naturalness and pervasiveness of language contact.

The Balkans were the first sprachbund (linguistic league, area, etc.) identified as a locus of contact-induced change owing to multi-lateral, multi-directional, mutual multilingualism to be identified as such. In this model, multilingualism is shared by speakers of the various languages, it is stable across generations, and it involves varied social groups. While no linguistic situation is unchanging, the combination of the factors mentioned here differentiates the sprachbund from other contact situations such as a diaspora, a colony, or that of endangered indigenous languages. Owing to the complexity of a sprachbund, the directionality of contact-induced change is not always discernible, nor is such directionality necessarily relevant, the point being the fact of convergence itself. This chapter defines the basic linguistic features relevant to the study of the Balkans as a linguistic area and also gives an overview of the linguistic study of the region. An important conclusion is the fact that the Balkan sprachbund continues to be a relevant lens through which language contact – both historical and ongoing – can be viewed.

This chapter explores the question, using primarily epigraphic evidence, whether individual, localized Jewish communities, without any obvious connection to each other across the ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse Roman Empire, can be said to have had, or displayed, a “micro-identity” in addition to their non-local ethnic one, or whether this feature, if not entirely absent in some cases, was indeed overshadowed by their shared history and ethnic origins. The answer offered: in some cases, maybe.

Chapter 24 provides a history of thought on poetry translation ranging from the Roman poets translating Greek, to the experiments of Louis and Celia Zukovsky. They explore how poetic forms, for example the haiku and the sonnet, have been introduced to literary systems beyond their origins through translation, and how the poetry of the classical world has been reanimated through modernism’s shifts in practices and views of translation. They discuss the ‘translation’ of texts in a literary context by poets and versioners who may or may not read the source languages concerned. Throughout, the emphasis is on exemplification and on the connection between theoretical perspectives and paratextual reflection.

This chapter deals with the development of early hymnography (c. 400–600 CE), including the Syriac and Georgian texts that influenced, or witnessed to, the Greek tradition. After an introductory section that deals with the second-century Odes of Solomon and fourth-century hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, the chapter moves on to fifth- and sixth-century Syriac poetry and dialogues, followed by important Greek hymns such as the Akathistos. The chapter concludes with sections on the Akathistos Hymn and on the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist, who was responsible for creating a more human, as opposed to symbolic, literary image of the Virgin. Romanos remained influential for both hymnography and homiletics in subsequent centuries, as liturgical writers elaborated the image of the Virgin Mary as human mother and intercessor for their audiences.

This chapter explores the question, using primarily epigraphic evidence, whether individual, localized Jewish communities, without any obvious connection to each other across the ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse Roman Empire, can be said to have had, or displayed, a “micro-identity” in addition to their non-local ethnic one, or whether this feature, if not entirely absent in some cases, was indeed overshadowed by their shared history and ethnic origins. The answer offered: in some cases, maybe.

In this chapter, the reception of Greek tragedy in Hellenistic poetry is studied in connection with intertextuality, which is here considered a specific form of reception by which later authors recognize the importance and relevance of earlier texts by alluding to them. There is a particular focus on the fragmentary plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. It shows that Callimachus, Apollonius and Theocritus used many Greek plays that are now lost. They referred to the plays’ plots or subjects, with an apparent preference for plays with Trojan, Argonautic and Argive myths, but also alluded to striking tragic imagery. Issues to which the allusions draw attention include literary criticism, generic matters, aspects of the mythological tradition and Ptolemaic ideology. All this suggests that the Alexandrian poets were familiar with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, particularly, but not exclusively those which were of thematic interest for their own poetry. Clearly the plays which were not included in the later canon of tragedies were still an object of active reception and consulted with eagerness in the Hellenistic period.