A deeply insightful approach to cultivating leaders of character centered on the arts and humanitiesWhat does it mean to lead? Whom do we consider to be leaders? And how might viewing leadership through the many lenses of the humanities expand our understanding of how it is imagined, represented, and enacted?Drawing on insights from eminent scholars in the classics, philosophy, religion, literature, history, art, music, and theater, The Arts of Leading

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring This Very Short Introduction introduces the life, work, and influence of one of the greatest dramatists of all time, Sophocles the Athenian. Placing his plays within their historical context, and explaining the conventions of ancient Greek tragic theatre, Edith Hall spotlights their distinctive features-tight plots, titanic personalities, lucid style, sympathetic women, exquisite poetry, and stagecraft. This analysis i...

The 24 essays collected in this book address the complex interactions between concepts of time, grammatical tense, and type of genre of prose or poetry in ancient Greek literature. The chronological scope stretches across nearly a millennium from archaic epic to the Second Sophistic, from the emotional intensity of Homer to Plutarch and the playfulness of Lucian, tracing patterns, developments, contrasts, and intertextual allusiveness across diverse texts and authors. These include dramati...

This is the first book to explore the history of ancient Greek and Roman influences and reception in England’s North East, topics which have often transcended social boundaries dictated by working identity, class, religion, gender, and ethnicity.Together, the chapters cover a broad range of themes and topics from architecture, theatre, working-class education, poetry, post-war novels and Hadrian's Wall. Each section, taken as a whole, views the specific topic from complementary soc...

‘Wonderful and timely … Hugely recommended’ STEPHEN FRYWhat do you and an ancient philosopher have in common? It turns out much more than you might think…Aristotle was an extraordinary thinker yet he was preoccupied by an ordinary question: how to be happy. In this handbook to his timeless teachings, Professor Edith Hall shows how ancient thinking is precisely what we need today, even if you don’t know your Odyssey from your Il...

An award-winning classicist turns to Greek tragedies for the wisdom to understand the damage caused by suicide and help those who are contemplating suicide themselvesIn Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the Tyrant, a messenger arrives to report that Jocasta, queen of Thebes, has killed herself. To prepare listeners for this terrible news, he announces, “The tragedies that hurt the most are those that sufferers have chosen for themselves.” Edith Hall, whose own li...

Love and loyalty, hatred and revenge, fear, deprivation, and political ambition: these are the motives which thrust the characters portrayed in these three Sophoclean masterpieces on to their collision course with catastrophe. Recognized in his own day as perhaps the greatest of the Greek tragedians, Sophocles's reputation has remained undimmed for two and a half thousand years. His greatest innovation in the tragic medium was his development of a central tragic figure, faced with a test o...

"Wonderful…a thoughtful discussion of what made [the Greeks] so important, in their own time and in ours." —Natalie Haynes, IndependentThe ancient Greeks invented democracy, theater, rational science, and philosophy. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. Yet this accomplished people never formed a single unified social or political identity. In Introducing the Ancient Greeks, acclaimed classics scholar Edith Hall offers a bold sy...

Longlisted for the 2022 Runciman AwardThis is the first book-length study of the classicism of Tony Harrison, one of the most important contemporary poets in England and the world. It argues that his unique and politically radical classicism is inextricable from his core notion that poetry should be a public property in which communal problems are shared and crystallised, and that the poet has a responsibility to speak in a public voice about collective and politic...

Studies of ancient theater have traditionally taken Athens as their creative center. In this book, however, the lens is widened to examine the origins and development of ancient drama, and particularly comedy, within a Sicilian and southern Italian context. Each chapter explores a different category of theatrical evidence, from the literary (fragments of Epicharmus and cult traditions) to the artistic (phylax vases) and the archaeological (theater buildings). Kathryn G. Bosher argues that,...

They gave us democracy, philosophy, poetry, rational science, the joke. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. They wrote the timeless myths of Odysseus and Oedipus, and the histories of Leonidas’s three hundred Spartans and Alexander the Great.But who were the ancient Greeks? And what was it that enabled them to achieve so much?Here, Edith Hall gives us a revelatory way of viewing this geographically scattered people, visiting different communitie...

This volume sets out to discuss a crucial question for ancient comedy – what makes Aristophanes funny? Too often Aristophanes' humour is taken for granted as merely a tool for the delivery of political and social commentary. But Greek Old Comedy was above all else designed to amuse people, to win the dramatic competition by making the audience laugh the hardest. Any discussion of Aristophanes therefore needs to take into account the ways in which his humour actually works.This ques...