California Classical Studies
California Classical Studies publishes peer-reviewed long-form scholarship with online open access and print-on-demand availability. The primary aim of the series is to disseminate basic research (editing and analysis of primary materials both textual and physical), data-heavy research, and highly specialized research of the kind that is either hard to place with the leading publishers in Classics or extremely expensive for libraries and individuals when produced by a leading academic publisher. In addition to promoting archaeological publications, papyrological and epigraphic studies, technical textual studies, and the like, the series will also produce selected titles of a more general profile.
Submissions (in English) are invited from all, and no affiliation with the University of California is required. For more information, please visit the CCS website at http://calclassicalstudies.org.
Print On Demand copies of CCS books are available at:
http://escholarship-california_classical_studies.lulu.com/spotlight/
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Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translation, Vol. 1(2022)The magical formularies on papyrus are precious witnesses to practices and processes of cultural transmission: i.e. the creation, communication, transformation and preservation of knowledge, both in text and image, across history and between the cultures of Egypt and Greece. More than eighty such handbooks survive, some of them in a fragmentary state. Our book, the work of an international team of papyrologists and historians of magic, replaces Papyri graecae magicae edited by K. Preisendanz, which appeared almost a century ago and has been used as one of the most important sources for the study of Greek magic, augmented in the 1990s by the excellent work of R. Daniel and F. Maltomini, the Supplementum Magicum. Our project has collected all the known magical formularies and fully studied both their materiality and their texts. The facing English translation with...
Edgar J. Goodspeed, America’s First Papyrologist(2021)This is a study whose main sources are archival, principally Edgar J. Goodspeed’s “Student Travel Letters” from 1899–1900. These letters home recount Goodspeed’s daily and sometimes hourly activities during nearly two years abroad, in continental Europe, England, Egypt, and the Holy Land, in pursuit of scholarly seasoning. The book’s focus is on his engagement with the newly emergent field of papyrology—the decipherment and study of the ancient Greek manuscripts then being discovered in Egypt. The letters allow for a tracking of this engagement in far greater depth than that allotted in his 1953 autobiography, As I Remember, or in his 90-page unpublished memoir, “Abroad in the Nineties,” filling in some apparently intentional gaps, casting doubt on some of his later self-assessments but putting much additional substance to the claim that he was indeed “America’s First Papyrologist.” The...
Early Greek Alchemy, Patronage and Innovation in Late Antiquity(2019)Early Greek alchemy, Patronage and Innovation in Late Antiquity provides an example of the innovative power of ancient scholarly patronage by looking at a key moment in the creation of the Greek alchemical tradition.
New evidence on scholarly patronage under the Roman empire can be garnered by analyzing the descriptions of learned magoi in several texts from the second to the fourth century CE. Since a common use of the term magos connoted flatterer-like figures (kolakes), it is likely that the figures of “learned sorcerers” found in texts such as Lucian’s Philopseudes and the apocryphal Acts of Peter captured the notion that some client scholars exerted undue...
Preliminary Studies on the Scholia to Euripides(2017)This work presents five studies that are parerga to the online edition of Euripidean scholia (EuripidesScholia.org), for which the release of a much more complete sample covering Orestes 1–500 is planned for 2018. The first chapter reviews the achievements and shortcomings of previous editions of Euripidean scholia and argues for a more comprehensive treatment of this and similar corpora of scholia and for the importance of glosses. It assesses the few surviving traces in the scholia of views attributed to philologists and commentators working from Hellenistic times to early Byzantium. The second chapter illuminates a genre of annotation termed here “teachers’ scholia,” prominent in many of the younger manuscripts, but also present to a small degree in the oldest witnesses. Evidence for the teaching of Ioannes Tzetzes related to Euripides is gathered more completely than previously, as...
The Archaeology of Roman Surveillance in the Central Alentejo, Portugal(2017)During the first century B.C.E. a complex system of surveillance towers was established during Rome’s colonization of the central Alentejo region of Portugal. These towers provided visual control over the landscape, routes through it, and hidden or isolated places as part of the Roman colonization of the region. As part of an archaeological analysis of the changing landscape of Alentejo, Joey Williams offers here a theory of surveillance in Roman colonial encounters drawn from a catalog of watchtowers in the Alentejo, the artifacts and architecture from the tower known as Caladinho, and the geographic information systems analysis of each tower’s vision. Through the consideration of these and other pieces of evidence, Williams places surveillance at the center of the colonial negotiation over territory, resources, and power in the westernmost province of the Roman Empire...
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Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Text of Aristotle's Metaphysics(2016)Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentary (about AD 200) is the earliest extant commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and it is the most valuable indirect witness to the Metaphysics text and its transmission. Mirjam Kotwick’s study is a systematic investigation into the version of the Metaphysics that Alexander used when writing his commentary, and into the various ways his text, his commentary, and the texts transmitted through our manuscripts relate to one another. Through a careful analysis of lemmata, quotations, and Alexander’s discussion of Aristotle’s argument Kotwick shows how to uncover and partly reconstruct a Metaphysics version from the second century AD. Kotwick then uses this version for improving the text that came down to us by the direct manuscript tradition and for finding solutions to some of the puzzles in this tradition. Through a side-by-side examination of...
Greek Satyr Play: Five Studies(2015)To download this item, select the Supplemental Material tab above.
With a new introduction and some revisions, these essays on Classical Greek satyr plays, originally published in various venues between 2002 and 2010, suggest new critical approaches to this important dramatic genre and identify previously neglected dimensions and dynamics within their original Athenian context. Griffith shows that satyr plays, alongside the ludicrous and irresponsible—but harmless—antics of their chorus, presented their audiences with culturally sophisticated narratives of romance, escapist adventure, and musical-choreographic exuberance, amounting to a “parallel...
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A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal(2013)Edward Courtney's study of the Satires of Juvenal is the only full-scale commentary on the corpus since the nineteenth century and retains its value for students and scholars a generation after its first appearance in 1980. This commentary incorporates the findings of classical study up to that time, including the work of A. E. Housman, new discoveries such as those of papyri, and the expanding horizons of classical research. Courtney elucidates the form of each poem and the progression of thought, and offers many suggestions for the adjustment of traditional punctuation. In addition to basic explanation of the text, the commentary offers a detailed understanding of the literary and historical context, including thorough treatment of social customs, realia, development of the Latin language, and rhetorical features. The Introduction discusses Juvenal's life, his development as a satirist...
The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy(2013)Pindar’s epinikian odes were poems commissioned to celebrate athletic victories in the first half of the fifth century BCE. Drawing on the insights of interpretive anthropology and cultural history, Leslie Kurke investigates how the socially embedded genre of epinikion responded to a period of tremendous social and cultural change. Kurke examines the odes as public performances which enact the reintegration of the athletic victor into his heterogeneous communities. These communities—the victor’s household, his aristocratic class, and his city—represent competing, sometimes conflicting interests, which the epinikian poet must satisfy to accomplish his project of reintegration. Kurke considers in particular the different modes of exchange in which Pindar’s poetry participated: the symbolic economy of the household, gift exchange between aristocratic houses, and the...