The arrival of the Sophists in Athens in the middle of the fifth century B.C. was a major intellectual event, for they brought with them a new method of teaching founded on rhetoric and bold doctrines which broke away from tradition. In this book de Romilly investigates the reasons for the initial success of the Sophists and the reaction against them, in the context of the culture and civilization of classical Athens.

The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens

Literature & Fiction

Romilly, Jacqueline de.

History & Criticism

Clarendon Press

The arrival of the Sophists in Athens in the middle of the fifth century B.C. was a major intellectual event, for they brought with them a new method of teaching founded on rhetoric and bold doctrines which broke away from tradition. In this book de Romilly investigates the reasons for the initial success of the Sophists and the reaction against them, in the context of the culture and civilization of classical Athens.

History

Lloyd, Janet

Ancient Civilizations

Oxford University Press

Poetry has power to excite emotions and to charm. The relation of this spell of words to divine inspiration, witchcraft, and magic is the starting point of jacqueline de romilly・€・s carl newell jackson lectures. She studies the influence of this idea on the origin and development of rhetoric, showing how the sophist gorgias used poetic rhythms and style to lend prose speech the power of poetry to capture and to move an audience, and how he emulated the power of the magicians in casting spells. It was this use of speech to beguile that was the focus of plato・€・s attacks on the sophists and orators. Mme. De romilly examines plato・€・s hostility toward the arts of illusion, and discusses his classification of the arts and the spurious arts, among which he included rhetoric. In challenging plato・€・s views, isocrates and aristotle attempted to isolate non-poetic speech from inspiration and magic, but the result was to turn the art of speech into a science.

Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Carl Newell Jackson Lectures, 10)

Harvard University Press

The publication of Jacqueline de Romilly’s Histoire et raison chez Thucydide in 1956 virtually transformed scholarship on Thucydides. Rather than mining The Peloponnesian War to speculate on its layers of composition or second-guess its accuracy, it treated it as a work of art deserving rhetorical and aesthetic analysis. Ahead of its time in its sophisticated focus upon the verbal texture of narrative, it proved that a literary approach offered the most productive and nuanced way to study Thucydides. Still in print in the original French, the book has influenced numerous Classicists and historians, and is now available in English for the first time in a careful translation by Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings. The Cornell edition includes an introduction by Hunter R. Rawlings III and Jeffrey Rusten tracing the context of this book’s original publication and its continuing influence on the study of Thucydides.Romilly shows that Thucydides constructs his account of the Peloponnesian War as a profoundly intellectual experience for readers who want to discern the patterns underlying historical events. Employing a commanding logic that exercises total control over the data of history, Thucydides uses rigorous principles of selection, suggestive juxtapositions, and artfully opposed speeches to reveal systematic relationships between plans and outcomes, impose meaning on the smallest events, and insist on the constant battle between intellect and chance. Thucydides’ mind found in unity and coherence its ideal of historical truth.

The Mind of Thucydides (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, 62)

Cornell University Press

This biography of Alcibiades, the charismatic Athenian statesman and general (c. 450–404 BC) who achieved both renown and infamy during the Peloponnesian War, is both an extraordinary adventure story and a cautionary tale that reveals the dangers that political opportunism and demagoguery pose to democracy. As Jacqueline de Romilly brilliantly documents, Alcibiades's life is one of wanderings and vicissitudes, promises and disappointments, brilliant successes and ruinous defeats. Born into a wealthy and powerful family in Athens, Alcibiades was a student of Socrates and disciple of Pericles, and he seemed destined to dominate the political life of his city―and his tumultuous age.
Romilly shows, however, that he was too ambitious. Haunted by financial and sexual intrigues and political plots, Alcibiades was exiled from Athens, sentenced to death, recalled to his homeland, only to be exiled again. He defected from Athens to Sparta and from Sparta to Persia and then from Persia back to Athens, buffeted by scandal after scandal, most of them of his own making. A gifted demagogue and, according to his contemporaries, more handsome than the hero Achilles, Alcibiades is also a strikingly modern figure, whose seductive celebrity and dangerous ambition anticipated current crises of leadership.

The Life of Alcibiades: Dangerous Ambition and the Betrayal of Athens (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, 68)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Précis de littérature grecque

Literary

La tragédie grecque

PETITES LECONS SUR LE GREC ANCIEN

Trédé-Boulmer, Monique

Essays & Correspondence

Stock

La lecture de l'oeuvre de Thucydide revele immediatement des particularites de forme assez remarquables. Non seulement les discours, avec leur entrelacs de formules et leur breve densite, mais le recit lui-meme, avec sa fermete depouillee et son eclat de theoreme, suggerent un art exceptionnel. Ce sont ces particularites de forme et cet art que l'on voudrait ici contribuer a mettre en lumiere.

Histoire et raison chez Thucydide (Etudes Anciennes Serie Grecque) (French Edition)

Genre Fiction

Les Belles Lettres

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