Simon Goldhill offers a fresh and exciting perspective on how the Victorians used material culture to express their sense of the past in an age of progress, especially the biblical past and the past of classical antiquity. From Pompeian skulls on a writer's desk, to religious paraphernalia in churches, new photographic images of the Holy Land and the remaking of the cityscape of Jerusalem and Britain, Goldhill explores the remarkable way in which the nineteenth century's sense of history w...

Jerusalem is the site of some of the most famous religious monuments in the world, from the Dome of the Rock to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Western Wall of the Temple. Since the nineteenth century, the city has been a premier tourist destination, not least because of the countless religious pilgrims from the three Abrahamic faiths.But Jerusalem is more than a tourist site—it is a city where every square mile is layered with historical significance, religious intensity, ...

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the ord...

"We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual kind."So begins A Very Queer Family Indeed, which introduces us to the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Benson became Archbishop of Canterbury at the height of Queen Victoria's reign, while his wife, Mary, was renowned for her wit and charm—the prime minister once wondered whether she was "the cleverest woman in England or in Europe." Th...

How does literary form change as Christianity and rabbinic Judaism take shape? What is the impact of literary tradition and the new pressures of religious thinking? Tracing a journey over the first millennium that includes works in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, this book changes our understanding of late antiquity and how its literary productions make a significant contribution to the cultural changes that have shaped western Europe.

Queer Cambridge recounts the untold story of a gay community living, for many decades, at the very heart of the British Establishment. Making effective use of chiefly forgotten archival sources – including personal diaries and letters – the author reveals a network that was in equal parts tolerant and acerbic, and within which the queer Fellows of Cambridge University explored bold new forms of camaraderie and relationship. Goldhill examines too the huge influence that these individuals ha...

This book is an advanced critical introduction to Greek tragedy. It is written specifically for the reader who does not know Greek and who may be unfamiliar with the context of the Athenian drama festival but who nevertheless wants to appreciate the plays in all their complexity. Simon Goldhill aims to combine the best contemporary scholarly criticism in classics with a wide knowledge of modern literary studies in other fields. He discusses the masterpieces of Athenian drama in the light o...

Written by one of the best-known interpreters of classical literature today, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy presents a revolutionary take on the work of this great classical playwright and on how our understanding of tragedy has been shaped by our literary past. Simon Goldhill sheds new light on Sophocles' distinctive brilliance as a dramatist, illuminating such aspects of his work as his manipulation of irony, his construction of dialogue, and his deployment of the actors ...

Lucian is one of the most prolific and wide-ranging writers from antiquity and one of the most influential and controversial. His work is deeply embedded in the cultural and religious politics of the Greek world in the Roman Empire, but also played an important role in later periods, particularly during the Renaissance, and was considered a crucial example of the inherited wisdom of classical antiquity. Lucian's prose is limpid and elegant as well as sharply funny and full of great stories...

'Dialogue' was invented as a written form in democratic Athens and made a celebrated and popular literary and philosophical style by Plato. Yet it almost completely disappeared in the Christian empire of late antiquity. This book, a general and systematic study of the genre in antiquity, asks: who wrote dialogues and why? Why did dialogue no longer attract writers in the later period in the same way? Investigating dialogue goes to the heart of the central issues of power, authority, openne...

In Being Urban, Simon Goldhill and his team of outstanding urbanists explore the meaning of the urban condition, with particular reference to the Middle East. As Goldhill explains in his introduction, ‘What is a good city?’, five questions motivate the book:How can a city be systematically planned and yet maintain a possibility of flexibility, change, and the wellbeing of citizens?How does the city represent itself to itself, and image its past, its present and its...

Modern disciplinary silos tend to separate the fields of classical philology and theology. This collection of essays, however, explores for the first time the deep and significant interactions between them. It demonstrates how from antiquity to the present they have marched hand in hand, informing each other with method, views of the past and structures of argument. The volume rewrites the history of discipline formation, and reveals how close the seminar is to the seminary.