Welcome to the first post for ‘Rethinking Late Hellenistic Literature and the Second Sophistic’.
We put this project together mainly because we want to contribute to broadening current approaches to ‘imperial’ Greek literature and culture. The literature of the Second Sophistic has obviously been a big growth area in recent decades, but the Greek literature of the second and first centuries BCE still lags behind a bit. There has been a move towards more detailed studies of some late Hellenistic authors individually, but there is still a shortage of work which examines the literature of that period as a whole, and its relationship with what follows in the first to third centuries CE. Our expectation is that rethinking those earlier texts in the light of recent work on the ‘Second Sophistic’ (for example on identity, the Greek past, relations between Greek and Roman culture) will help to raise new questions about it. We hope also that a comparative approach which looks at late Hellenistic and Second-Sophistic texts side by side will help to make clear not only what draws them together, but also what makes them distinctive individually.
The ultimate goal of the project is to produce an edited volume on those themes. For now we are concentrating on a series of events designed as an opportunity to try out work in progress. The first is a small planning workshop on Thursday 13 June (all welcome—see events page for details). The first half of that event will be used for discussing the questions laid out above for Greek literature. In the second half we want to think about how can broaden our perspective on the Greek literary/historiographical material which is our main focus by looking at parallel developments in Late Hellenistic Philosophy, Roman History, Latin Literature and Archaeology.
In addition we have a two day conference on 5-6 September 2013, and then another one-day workshop in March 2014.
The monthly posts to this website will be used flexibly for updates on progress with the project, general reflections on possible future directions for imperial Greek literature, and also (especially) for short work-in-progress posts—for example abstracts of conference papers and very early drafts of material for publication. We would very much welcome feedback on any of this material, and on our plans for the project; also enquiries about attending events or contributing to this work-in-progress section (jpk3@st-andrews.ac.uk; nw23@st-andrews.ac.uk).