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A Commentary on Aristophanes’ Knights presents a fresh look at the play that cemented Aristophanes’ reputation as a rising star in comic theater. Knights offers an examination of social and political life in ancient Athens during the empire-destroying Peloponnesian War, as well as giving us Aristophanes’ comic send-up of the dangerous populist demagogue Cleon. This is a thoroughly modern commentary on a key play in the theatrical genre of Old Comedy, which satirized virtually every aspect of Athenian life in a period when Athens was at the height of its power and international prestige.

In addition to the complete Greek text and commentary, this volume includes a substantial introduction to the playwright’s career and to the historical and political background of the play. It includes advice for students on grammar and syntax, meter, festivals and staging, as well as topical and literary references and allusions that will help guide students to a mature appreciation of the comedy’s humor, seriousness, and artistic quality. Priced and sized for classroom use, this is the first full commentary on Knights since 1901 and will be widely welcomed.

A Commentary on Cicero, De Divinatione I, is the first English-language commentary on the Latin text of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s dialogue in almost one hundred years. The defense of divination (the science of predicting the future) offered in Book 1 is illustrated with many entertaining anecdotes that make the argument more accessible to a wider range of readers than many of Cicero’s other philosophical works. De Divinatione also preserves many fragments of otherwise lost masterpieces of Roman Republican literature. It is a text important for the study of Roman religion, as well as Roman political and intellectual history.

Andrew R. Dyck ranks among the top Latinists in Ciceronian studies. In this new volume, he offers the first commentary on Cicero’s De Divinatione II in nearly a century. This commentary aims to equip students and scholars of Latin with the kinds of historical and philosophical background and linguistic and stylistic information needed to understand and appreciate Cicero’s text on Roman religion and divination. Dyck situates Cicero’s text in the context of Roman religion in antiquity, and he traces the subsequent reception of the text. The introduction reviews recent interpretations of De Divinatione. Dyck rejects the view that has recently been widespread in Anglophone studies that De Divinatione stages a debate between roughly equal opponents and without the emergence of a clear authorial point of view. Instead he argues that a careful reading shows that Cicero as author is invested in the argument, with the particular aim of countering superstition.

Celia Schultz’s earlier volume in this series presented the text and commentary for De Divinatione I. With Andrew Dyck’s companion volume on the second book of De Divinatione, students and teachers are well served with crucial texts from one of Rome’s most famous philosophers, as he considers important Roman practices and beliefs.

Distinguished Latinist Andrew R. Dyck presents the first English commentary on Cicero’s De Natura Deorum II in over fifty years. This text is the only connected exposition of Stoic theology to survive from the ancient world. It includes an argument for the existence of the gods from the construction of the cosmos taken up by later thinkers, as well as an exposition of the world-order and divine providence according to Stoic doctrine. After a period in which Cicero’s philosophical works were treated mainly as sources for reconstructing the thought of earlier philosophers, they are now coming to be appreciated as intelligent and skillful works in their own right. This book will assist students and others studying Cicero’s De Natura Deorum II by providing its historical context, improved Latin text, and a detailed commentary with references to the latest literature on the subject.

Lively and critically aware, T. H. M. Gellar-Goad’s A Commentary on Plautus’ Curculio is the new reference text on the play. Curculio follows the efforts of the title character to trick a sex-trafficker into handing over an enslaved woman to the young man infatuated with her instead of to the soldier who’s paid for her—and will turn out to be her long-lost brother. As Plautus’ shortest comedy, Curculio has proven to be a desirable text for university performances. The play exemplifies Plautus’ style, with a blend of erotic, deception, and recognition plotlines, plus a wide range of archetypal characters. Gellar-Goad’s commentary is the complete package, with introductions to themes, content, humor, meter, and syntax; notes on matters of performance, interpretation, and social history; and a text with aids to scansion and clarifying stage directions.

This up-to-date, authoritative commentary on the play will prove useful to directors and actors and will readily introduce students to the joys of Roman comedy.
 

Leading Harvard philosophy professor William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966), author of 17 books and in his day second only to John Dewey in the breadth of his thinking, is now largely forgotten, and his once-influential writings are out of print. This volume, which combines a rich selection of Hocking's work with incisive essays by distinguished scholars, seeks to recover Hocking's valuable contributions to philosophical thought.

The interpretation of Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion has a long and rich tradition. However, its study is often narrowly focused on its so-called “ontological argument.” As a result, engagement with the text of this work tends to be lopsided, and the prayerful purpose that undergirds the whole book is often completely ignored. Even the most rigorous engagements with the Proslogion often have little to say, for instance, about how the prayers of Proslogion 1, 14, and 18 contribute materially to Anselm’s argument, or how his doctrine of God develops organically from the divine formula in the early chapters to the doctrines of eternity, simplicity, and Trinity in later chapters. There are very few works that offer a sustained analysis to Anselm’s flow of thought throughout the entire Proslogion, and no one has explored how Anselm’s doctrine of creaturely joy in heaven in Proslogion 24-26 is a fitting climax and resolution to the book. Anselm’s Pursuit of Joy attempts a sustained, chapter-by-chapter textual analysis of the Proslogion, and offers the first effort to situate Anselm’s doctrine of heaven in Proslogion 24-26 as the climax of the earlier themes of Anselm’s work. Gavin Ortlund suggests that the basic purpose of Anselm’s argument in the Proslogion is to seek the visio Dei that he articulates as his soul’s deepest desire (Proslogion 1). While Anselm’s argument for God’s existence (Proslogion 2-4) is an important piece of this effort, it is only one step of a larger trajectory of thought that leads Anselm to meditate further on God’s nature as the highest good of the human soul (Proslogion 5-23), and then to anticipate the joy of possessing God in heaven (Proslogion 24-26). In other words, the establishment of God’s existence is only the penultimate consequence of Anselm’s famous formula “that than which nothing greater can be thought”—his ultimate concern is with the infinite creaturely joy that is entailed by his existence. The Proslogion is, far more than an argument for God’s existence, a meditation on God as the chief happiness of the human soul.