Voice and Voices in Antiquity

Voice and Voices in Antiquity draws together 18 studies of the changing concept of voice and voices in the oral traditions and subsequent literate genres of the ancient world. Ranging from the poet's voice to those of characters as well as historically embodied communities, and from the interface between the Greek and Near Eastern worlds to the western reaches of the Roman Empire, the scholars assembled here offer a methodologically rich and diverse series of approaches to locating the power of voice as both poetic construct and communal memory. The results not only enrich our understanding of the strategies of epic, lyric, and dramatic voices but also illuminate the rhetorical claims given voice by historians, orators, philosophers, and novelists in the ancient world.

Niall W. Slater, Ph.D. (1981), Princeton, is Dobbs Professor of Latin & Greek at Emory University. Previous books include Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes (2002), Reading Petronius (1990), and Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (1985; 2000 (2nd, rev. ed)).

Contributors are: Geoffrey Bakewell, Deborah Beck, Anton Bierl, Aubrey Buster, Ombretta Cesca, John "Jay" Fisher, Margaret Foster, Jasper Gaunt, Naomi Kaloudis, Joanna Kenty, Athena Kirk, Amy Koenig, Claas Lattmann, Elizabeth Minchin, Raymond F. Person, Jr., Ruth Scodel, Tazuko van Berkel, and Andreas Willi.

"Niall Slater’s edited volume Voice and Voices in Antiquity considers the simultaneously present and absent sonority of the voices of antiquity, and it probes the relationship between orality, vocality, and text. The book emerges during a vibrant moment for voice studies in Classics, and functions as the eleventh installment in the thriving biennial conference series “Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World,” whose first volume/conference tackled the theme “Voice into Text.” Each of the chapters in this volume contains nuanced and sophisticated readings in a wide range of genres, periods, and cultural traditions.(...) Slater’s overview of the individual essays reveals a deep consideration of the multifaceted ways in which this theme can be explored, and his introduction reveals how the individual papers speak to one another across languages, genres, eras, and methodologies." Hannah Silverblank, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2017.07.30.

"The theme of this volume, 'voice and voices', offers a particularly fruitful opportunity to explore the significance of 'voice' as it crosses the boundaries between oral and literate cultures. (...) Overall, this is an excellent volume that makes several important contributions to our understanding of voice in Greek literature. There is much here to explore, and it is well worth the exploring." Juliette Harrisson in Pacific Coast Philology 53.1, 2018