The Author's Voice in Classical and Late Antiquity

What significance does the voice or projected persona in which a text is written have for our understanding of the meaning of that text? This volume explores the persona of the author in antiquity, from Homer to late antiquity, taking into account both Latin and Greek authors from a range of disciplines. The thirteen chapters are divided into two main sections, the first of which focuses on the diverse forms of writing adopted by various ancient authors, and the different ways these forms were used to present and project an authorial voice. The second part of the volume considers questions regarding authority and ascription in relation to the authorial voice. In particular, it looks at how later readers - and later authors - may understand the authority of a text's author or supposed author. The volume contains chapters on pseudo-epigraphy and fictional letters, as well as the use of texts as authoritative in philosophical schools, and the ancient ascription of authorship to works of art.

1 - The poet in the Iliad
2 - Xenophon's and Caesar's third-person narratives or are theya?
3 - Listening to many voices: Athenian tragedy as popular art
4 - When I read my Cato, it is as if Cato speaks: the birth and evolution of Cicero's dialogic voice
5 - Author and speaker(s) in Horace's Satires 2
6 - I, Polybius : self-conscious didacticism
7 - Drip-feed invective: Pliny, self-fashioning, and the Regulus letters
8 - An I for an I: reading fictional autobiography
9 - Ille ego qui quondam: on authorial (an)onymity
10 - Authorship and authority in Greek fictional letters
11 - Plato's religious voice: Socrates as godsent, in Plato and the Platonists
12 - When the dead speak: the refashioning of Ignatius of Antioch in the long recension of his letters
13 - Ars in their I's: authority and authorship in Graeco-Roman visual culture

Anna Marmodoro is a Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. She has a background in ancient and medieval philosophy, and a strong research interest in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of religion. She has published journal articles in all these areas, and edited two collections of essays: The Metaphysics of Powers (2010) and The Metaphysics of the Incarnation (OUP, 2011). She also directs a large-scale research project based in Oxford, which investigates the nature of the fundamental building blocks of reality in ancient and contemporary thought. Jonathan Hill is Templeton World Charity Foundation Research Officer, based in the Department of Materials, University of Oxford. He was previously Research Assistant in the Philosophy Faculty, working with Anna Marmodoro on a Leverhulme-funded project on the philosophy of religion. He is author of The Lion Handbook: the History of Christianity (2007) and Dictionary of Theologians: to 1308 (2010), and co-edited with Anna Marmodoro The Metaphysics of the Incarnation (OUP, 2011).