Stephen Halliwell
University of St Andrews, Classics, Faculty Member
Modern Greek translation of S. Halliwell, Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (Cambridge, 2008)
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Paperback, in Oxford World's Classics series, of four translations published in hardback (2022) as Aristophanes: Acharnians, Knights, Wasps and Peace.
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Marginal Comment, which attracted keen and widespread interest on its original publication in 1994, is the remarkable memoir of one of the most distinguished classical scholars of the modern era. Its author, Sir Kenneth Dover, whose... more
Marginal Comment, which attracted keen and widespread interest on its original publication in 1994, is the remarkable memoir of one of the most distinguished classical scholars of the modern era. Its author, Sir Kenneth Dover, whose academic publications included the pathbreaking book Greek Homosexuality, conceived of it as an 'experimental' autobiography-unflinching in its attempt to analyse the entanglements between the life of the mind and the life of the body. Dover's distinguished career involved influential writings, prominent positions of leadership, and several high-profile controversies, including the blocking of an honorary degree for Margaret Thatcher from Oxford University, and a bitter debate in the British Academy over the fellowship of Anthony Blunt after his exposure as a former Soviet spy. This edition of Marginal Comment is much more than a reprint: it includes a substantial introduction by Stephen Halliwell which discusses both the book's genesis and its controversial reception, as well as numerous annotations based in part on materials originally excluded by Dover but left in his personal papers at his death. Now newly available, the memoir provides a rich case-study in the intersections between an intellectual life and its social contexts.
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English version of the edition published in Italian, in the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla series, in 2021. This version contains a new English translation of the Greek text and some additions to both the introduction and commentary.
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Dust jacket for the final volume of my 3-volume verse translation of Aristophanes. The hardback was published in February 2022, a paperback in the Oxford World's Classics series can be expected within the next year.... more
Dust jacket for the final volume of my 3-volume verse translation of Aristophanes. The hardback was published in February 2022, a paperback in the Oxford World's Classics series can be expected within the next year.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/aristophanes-acharnians-wasps-knights-peace-9780198149958?q=halliwell%20knights&lang=en&cc=gb
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/aristophanes-acharnians-wasps-knights-peace-9780198149958?q=halliwell%20knights&lang=en&cc=gb
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I cavalli degli dèi balzano in aria d’un colpo quanto lontano abbraccia con gli occhi un uomo che da un’altura scruta il mare colore del vino: Omero, nell’Iliade, misura «il loro slancio su distanze rapportate all’universo intero», e se... more
I cavalli degli dèi balzano in aria d’un colpo quanto lontano abbraccia con gli occhi un uomo che da un’altura scruta il mare colore del vino: Omero, nell’Iliade, misura «il loro slancio su distanze rapportate all’universo intero», e se quei cavalli saltassero due volte non ci sarebbe più spazio al mondo. Nell’Odissea quello stesso Omero, ora vecchio, è come un sole al tramonto, «simile all’Oceano che retrocede in sé stesso e si isola nei propri confini». L’Iliade è capace di rappresentare il divino come grande, immacolato, puro. Allo stesso modo il libro biblico della Genesi, raccontando «Dio disse: sia la luce. E la luce fu», fa mostra della medesima sublime potenza. Chi parla così è l’autore, al quale non riusciamo a dare un nome, del breve trattato Sul sublime, quello che, dopo la Poetica di Aristotele, ha conosciuto maggior fortuna nella cultura occidentale; colui che ha consacrato per sempre la nozione di tutto ciò che è elevato, possente di sentimento, agonistico, vibrante nel cuore stesso degli esseri umani, e nella letteratura: nell’epica, nella tragedia, nella lirica, nell’oratoria – in Omero, Saffo, Sofocle, Platone, Demostene. «Una sorta di apice e perfezione dei discorsi», e «un punto di partenza grazie a cui i massimi poeti e prosatori primeggiarono e abbracciarono l’eternità con la loro fama», ecco cos’è il sublime per questo scrittore: il quale sostiene altresì che sua caratteristica precipua è l’appagare il pubblico «con la sensazione che gli ascoltatori stessi abbiano creato quello che hanno ascoltato», perché il sublime predispone alla grandezza del pensiero e richiede, ma anche restituisce, una «contemplazione reiterata». La Fondazione Valla ha affidato la cura dello scritto Sul sublime al maggiore studioso del campo, Stephen Halliwell, il quale ha composto una introduzione e un commento che faranno scuola. Lo affianca Massimo Fusillo, redigendo un saggio ispirato che racconta, in parole e immagini, l’eredità del sublime attraverso i due millenni successivi: dal Medioevo al Rinascimen to, da Burke a Kant, da Coleridge a Shelley, da Caspar David Friedrich a Turner, sino alle «epifanie moderniste» e alle «contaminazioni postmoderne». Laura Lulli è autrice della nuova, fedele traduzione del trattato.
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A new edition of the treatise On the Sublime, with introduction, Greek text, facing Italian translation (by Laura Lulli), and extensive commentary (translated into Italian by Laura Lulli), together with an essay on the modern reception of... more
A new edition of the treatise On the Sublime, with introduction, Greek text, facing Italian translation (by Laura Lulli), and extensive commentary (translated into Italian by Laura Lulli), together with an essay on the modern reception of ideas of the sublime by Massimo Fusilli. (An English version of the edition will appear with Oxford University Press in spring 2022.)
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A new verse translation with substantial general introduction, introductions to individual plays, and notes. A matching volume to Aristophanes Birds and Other Plays (World's Classics, Oxford UP, 1997). The present volume will be... more
A new verse translation with substantial general introduction, introductions to individual plays, and notes. A matching volume to Aristophanes Birds and Other Plays (World's Classics, Oxford UP, 1997). The present volume will be paperbacked in the World's Classics series in 2016.
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This article reconsiders the remarkable sequence of funeral oration, plague description and Pericles’ final speech at Thucydides 2.34-65 as a test-case of the way in which the historian exposes the profound contingency of history and yet... more
This article reconsiders the remarkable sequence of funeral oration, plague description and Pericles’ final speech at Thucydides 2.34-65 as a test-case of the way in which the historian exposes the profound contingency of history and yet claims to interpret the underlying meanings of historical processes. The argument concentrates on a neglected feature of the passage – four occurrences (twice in Pericles’ mouth, twice in the historian’s narrative) of the term μεταβολή, a “transformation” or radical turn of events, and a word with tragic associations. The repeated appearances of this term are analysed as an index of Thucydides’ dramatisation of the historical dialectic between Periclean ideology (which treats the Athenian polis as a supra-personal entity whose fame will never die) and the uncontrollable forces of war, as symbolised by the radical contingency of the plague. Though acknowledging the risk of material disaster, Pericles’ funeral oration and final speech express an “anti-tragic” conviction that contingency can be transcended by a collective commitment to the beloved city’s perpetual glory. Thucydides’ own perspective, however, while affirming his admiration for Pericles, may itself be tragic in its perception of the disparity between a Periclean vision of Athens and the ultimate damage done to the city’s identity and values by the experience of war.
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A reconsideration of Sir Kenneth Dover's Marginal Comment as an exercise in 'experimental' autobiography, with a detailed account of the book's reception on its first publication in 1994 and some observations on Dover's own discussion of... more
A reconsideration of Sir Kenneth Dover's Marginal Comment as an exercise in 'experimental' autobiography, with a detailed account of the book's reception on its first publication in 1994 and some observations on Dover's own discussion of the book in two published interviews and in some personal correspondence.
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This chapter [from Scholarship and Controversy: Centenary Essays on the Life and Work of Sir Kenneth Dover, eds. S. Halliwell and C. Stray] supplements the book’s treatments of Dover’s substantive scholarship, as well as the... more
This chapter [from Scholarship and Controversy: Centenary Essays on the Life and Work of Sir Kenneth Dover, eds. S. Halliwell and C. Stray] supplements the book’s treatments of Dover’s substantive scholarship, as well as the biographically orientated pieces, by examining how his intellectual values informed his conception of Classics (especially the Greek half of the subject) as a discipline. It offers close readings of four pieces which Dover wrote for, roughly speaking, non-specialist audiences: his 1976 Presidential Address to the Classical Association; a 1979 lecture (published in 1984, and overlapping with material in his book The Greeks) to the 7th congress of FIEC (International Federation of Associations of Classical Studies) in Budapest; a 1985 lecture entitled ‘What are the “Two Cultures”?’; and a short article from 1988 in an Italian magazine, L’humana avventura (this last piece is translated in an appendix to his chapter). Among the strands of thought drawn out from these publications are Dover’s life-long rejection of many standard ‘defences’ and educational-cum-cultural justifications of Classics (especially those which posit the supposed uniqueness of Greco-Roman civilisation, its special status as the ‘origin’ of the modern West, the canonical standing of its literature, and its value as the basis of a normative humanism) and his replacement of these by a conception of ‘history’ which embraces all the main intellectual activities of the humanities. On the basis of this conception of history, which he thought of as anthropologically inflected, Dover maintained that there is ‘smooth continuity’ between past and present, allowing the present to learn from the past even across gulfs of time. The chapter carefully explores the ramifications of these and related convictions of Dover’s.
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The nature and scope of aesthetics have been a subject of debate ever since the eighteenthcentury coinage of the term. Application of aesthetics as a theoretical or experiential category to the study of earlier periods therefore needs to... more
The nature and scope of aesthetics have been a subject of debate ever since the eighteenthcentury coinage of the term. Application of aesthetics as a theoretical or experiential category to the study of earlier periods therefore needs to be dialectical and pluralistic. But the contribution made by Greco-Roman antiquity to the evolution of ideas such as beauty, creative inspiration, and sublimity is indisputable; it reaches back to issues and values already salient in the pre-philosophical culture of archaic Greece, many of them associated with the uniquely Greek symbolism of the Muses. The early Greek association between song, music, and dance was consolidated and expanded, first by intermedial comparisons and subsequently by the concept of mimesis, into a standard grouping of the 'mimetic arts' which bracketed musico-poetic forms together with visual forms of artistic representation and expression. It was this cluster of activities which provided a frame of reference for philosophical theorizing. In Plato, representational and figurative art-forms are seen as carrying great cultural and psychological power, but consequently as in need of educational and political control in an ideal society. Aristotle moves nearer to a recognition of a qualified degree of aesthetic autonomy, while stressing the cognitive and emotional aspects of responses to mimetic art. In Hellenistic philosophy, Stoicism regarded the whole cosmos as imbued with divinely sustained and quasi-moral beauty, while Epicureanism's simplified standards of pleasure narrowed the valuation of mimetic art. [Longinus], On the Sublime is a prime instance of the way that new thinking could emerge from modifications of older ideas; its own model of creativity entails rivalrous emulation between present and past writers. Plotinus's Enneads offers a revaluation of mimetic art through an intellectualized conception of beauty whose influence can be seen at work in Renaissance aesthetics and beyond.
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This paper argues that the semantics of mimesis and related terms in Plato’s dialogues are far less stable than orthodox accounts claim. After some preliminary remarks on the intricate implications of the Republic’s Cave allegory in this... more
This paper argues that the semantics of mimesis and related terms in Plato’s dialogues are far less stable than orthodox accounts claim. After some preliminary remarks on the intricate implications of the Republic’s Cave allegory in this respect, I focus first on difficulties of interpretation raised by mimesis vocabulary in the Sophist, including the much-discussed dichotomy of eikastikê and phantastikê, whose complications make it a provisional and ultimately discarded attempt to distinguish between reliable and unreliable forms of representation. In the Republic, the semantics of mimesis expand and contract according to the needs of different stages of the argument, as well as shifting between negative and positive evaluations. Part of my analysis concerns the Republic’s series of comparisons between philosophers and painters, comparisons which are at odds with Socrates’ reductive treatment of painting in Book 10. The Sophist calls mimesis a ‘multifarious class’ of entities: no single argument in Plato supplies a definitive way of theorising its conceptual ramifications; we should abandon talk of ‘Plato’s doctrine’ of mimesis.
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An attempt to counteract some misunderstandings of Aristotle's attitude to theatrical performance. Includes comparative reference to other theorists, especially Castelvetro and Hegel.
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An overview of the potential elements of a 'philosophy of literature' to be found in various ancient authors and/or schools, with comments on carefully selected passages/issues in Plato, Aristotle, Epicureanism (Philodemus), Stoicism... more
An overview of the potential elements of a 'philosophy of literature' to be found in various ancient authors and/or schools, with comments on carefully selected passages/issues in Plato, Aristotle, Epicureanism (Philodemus), Stoicism (Seneca), and Plutarch.
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This paper approaches the subject of Platonic beginnings and endings primarily from the perspective of the Phaedrus, the only dialogue in which questions of discursive form and unity, including the function of beginnings and endings,... more
This paper approaches the subject of Platonic beginnings and endings primarily from the perspective of the Phaedrus, the only dialogue in which questions of discursive form and unity, including the function of beginnings and endings, provide part of the work’s own theoretical subject-matter. After noting some neglected evidence for ancient sensitivity to the philosophical symbolism of the very first words of the Phaedrus, I offer selective observations on how the beginnings and endings of the dialogues are notable in general for their avoidance of strongly closed form and instead frequently dramatise a kind of tension between the contingency of life and the hoped for determinacy of philosophy. I then examine in detail the way in which the beginnings and endings of the dialogue’s own three set-piece logoi are drawn into a larger discussion of discursive form, including Socrates’ remarks on the desirable ‘organic unity’ of a good logos. But I reject the almost universal assumption that we can extract from the Phaedrus a definitive set of principles of discursive form which can be directly applied to the practices of Plato’s dialogues themselves. Platonic writing manifests a complexity which exceeds Socrates’ theorisation of discursive form in the Phaedrus.
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A close reading of three Aristophanic scenes in which non-elite Athenian citizen characters confront one another in ways which highlight issues relating to the operation of Athenian democratic social values. The analysis teases out an... more
A close reading of three Aristophanic scenes in which non-elite Athenian citizen characters confront one another in ways which highlight issues relating to the operation of Athenian democratic social values. The analysis teases out an intricate comic interplay between foreground absurdism and background realism.
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This article scrutinises one of the most challenging theses of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, that only as an aesthetic phenomenon can existence and the world be (or appear to be) 'justified'. Through a close examination of the work's... more
This article scrutinises one of the most challenging theses of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, that only as an aesthetic phenomenon can existence and the world be (or appear to be) 'justified'. Through a close examination of the work's frequently masked revaluation of a series of Greek sources of thinking, not least its 'inversion' of both the metaphysics and the aesthetics of Plato's Republic, the article shows how the thesis of aesthetic 'justification' is caught up in a tension between Apolline and Dionysian interpretations, the first entailing a quasi-Homeric sense that the Olympians justify human existence by living a transfigured form of it themselves, the second involving a tragic insight into reality as itself the creative work of a 'world-artist', the latter allusively associated by Nietzsche with the philosophy of Heraclitus.
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This paper employs a historicising approach to laughter, of the kind elaborated more fully in my book Greek Laughter: a Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (2008), in order to investigate some important but... more
This paper employs a historicising approach to laughter, of the kind elaborated more fully in my book Greek Laughter: a Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (2008), in order to investigate some important but elusive aspects of the Greek mythico-religious imagination. My central focus is on depictions of divine laughter at opposite ends of the spectrum of ancient Greek culture, in Homeric epic and Lucianic satire. What does it mean to imagine gods who can laugh at and/or with one another, as well as at and/or with humans? Is such laughter a marker of distance between divine and human conditions of existence, or does the idea of laughter serve to limit the gods by subjecting them to inescapably human evaluation? I reject models of explanation (both ancient and modern) which treat the laughter of the Olympians either as a contamination of an originally purer conception of the gods or as consistently expressing a serenely detached state of immortality. I argue, instead, that divine laughter reflects tensions between the literal and the symbolic which are intrinsic to anthropomorphising Greek religious sensibilities, and that far from conveying blissful detachment divine laughter characterises gods who are heavily invested in the conflicts of the human world.
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This article attempts to analyse in detail the problematic relationship between those elements in Aristotle's Poetics which modern scholars typically refer to as a form of 'literary history' and Aristotle's own conception of 'history' as... more
This article attempts to analyse in detail the problematic relationship between those elements in Aristotle's Poetics which modern scholars typically refer to as a form of 'literary history' and Aristotle's own conception of 'history' as evidenced in both the Poetics and elsewhere. Could/did Aristotle himself conceive of something like 'literary history'? If he had, would it have involved modifications to what are widely taken to be his own restrictions on the nature of history as an intellectual practice?
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Addresses the question 'Was there a Greek concept of fiction?' and marshalls relevant evidence from the early archaic to the imperial period.
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This paper reexamines some neglected implications of the famous and highly influential conception of poetic unity set out in Chapters 7-8 of the Poetics. My argument addresses the paradox that while Aristotle describes tragedy in Chapter... more
This paper reexamines some neglected implications of the famous and highly influential conception of poetic unity set out in Chapters 7-8 of the Poetics. My argument addresses the paradox that while Aristotle describes tragedy in Chapter 6 as 'mimesis of life', in Chapter 8 he sharply contrasts the conditions of unity required of a (tragic) plot-structure with the supposedly inescapable disunity of any individual's life. How can tragedy (or any other mimetic art) be a representation of 'life' and yet differ so sharply from life in what I call its 'narrative conditions'? Poetic form, on Aristotle's view, depends on the causal intelligibility of life yet involves a kind of coherence which life itself lacks. I argue that this tension in the Poetics' relationship between 'art' and 'life' cannot be wholly resolved: in an important sense, the meaning of 'life' is changed by its organisation into 'plot'. I also explore the further question of why Aristotle imposes the most stringent demands of poetic unity on a genre which is centrally concerned with the dislocation and destruction of life: I consider whether this is a symptom of Aristotelian resistance to tragic pessimism. Finally, I illustrate the different kinds of criticism to which Aristotle's paradigm of poetic unity has been subjected since the Romantic era, employing some of the views of Milan Kundera to show that this paradigm remains a resilient presence in the dialectic of modern aesthetics.
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Research Interests: Greek Tragedy and Tragedy
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Research Interests: Classics, History of Classical Scholarship, Thucydides, Ancient Greek ethics, Theocritus (Classics), and 7 moreHomosexuality, Ancient Greek Language, Classics: Ancient History and Archaeology, Ancient Greek Literature, Ancient Greek Drama, History of Homosexuality, and History of Classical Philology
Few other semantic fields pervade Plato’s oeuvre, from the earliest to the latest works, in such a definitive and ambivalent way as that of mimesis. From the philosophy of language to aesthetics and moral psychology, from metaphysics to... more
Few other semantic fields pervade Plato’s oeuvre, from the earliest to the latest works, in such a definitive and ambivalent way as that of mimesis. From the philosophy of language to aesthetics and moral psychology, from metaphysics to cosmology and theology: in a strikingly large array of philosophical subject areas, the semantics of mimesis have crucial significance in Plato. The conference volume “Platonic Mimesis Revisited” offers a comprehensive and context-sensitive re-examination of mimesis in all relevant dialogues. Unlike earlier monographic studies, it brings together a considerable variety of scholarly perspectives from Philosophy and Classics, thus providing a broad tableau of modern approaches to the topic.
Reviewed by Lloyd Gerson in BMCR 2022.06.09: "As Pfefferkorn and Spinelli note in their introduction, a central aim of this collection is to broaden the study of imitation in Plato beyond aesthetic questions. Indeed, one way that this book succeeds, in my view, is by showing how even aesthetic questions, including those relating to music, painting, theatre, and dance, for example, cannot be effectively addressed in regard to Plato without reference to the widest possible metaphysical context. [...] All of the essays [...] taken together, bring into focus a concept, that of mimesis, that one might have supposed is not as central as it in fact is in the dialogues."
https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2022/2022.06.09/
Reviewed by Lloyd Gerson in BMCR 2022.06.09: "As Pfefferkorn and Spinelli note in their introduction, a central aim of this collection is to broaden the study of imitation in Plato beyond aesthetic questions. Indeed, one way that this book succeeds, in my view, is by showing how even aesthetic questions, including those relating to music, painting, theatre, and dance, for example, cannot be effectively addressed in regard to Plato without reference to the widest possible metaphysical context. [...] All of the essays [...] taken together, bring into focus a concept, that of mimesis, that one might have supposed is not as central as it in fact is in the dialogues."
https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2022/2022.06.09/
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Bu makale, Stephen Halliwell'in The Living Handbook of Narratology'de yer alan 2014 tarihli "Diegesis-Mimesis" isimli makalesinin Türkçe çevirisidir. Anlatıbilim alanının anlatmak/göstermek (telling/ showing) olarak karşıladığı... more
Bu makale, Stephen Halliwell'in The Living Handbook of Narratology'de yer alan 2014 tarihli "Diegesis-Mimesis" isimli makalesinin Türkçe çevirisidir. Anlatıbilim alanının anlatmak/göstermek (telling/ showing) olarak karşıladığı diegesis/mimesis terimleri ilk kez Platon'un Devlet'indeki bir pasajda bir arada kullanılmıştır. Sonrasında Aristoteles, Poetika adlı eserinde terimleri kendi bağlamınca yeniden kullanır; fakat bu kullanım kimi noktalarda Platoncu izler taşıyor olmakla birlikte, kimi bakımlardan münferit yeni bağlamlarıyla Devlet'deki kullanımdan ayrışır. Günümüzde bu dikotomi, anlatıbilim alanının tayin ettiği dar karşılıklarıyla dolayıma girmiştir. Öte yandan Platon'un Devlet'i referans alındığında Sokrates tarafından çizilen temel ayrımın standart modern kullanımdaki gibi tümüyle "göstermek" ve "anlatmak" arasında olmadığı görülmektedir. Dahası, Antik Çağ'daki bu ilk kullanımlarından itibaren, eleştirel düzlemde kategorik bir çift olarak terimlerin uzun ve kimi zaman ziyadesiyle karmaşık kullanımlarının tarihi, günümüze kadar uzanmaktadır. Bu makalede Stephen Halliwell, söz konusu bu karmaşayı, Sokrates'in görüşlerinin aktarıldığı/yorumlandığı Platon'un Devlet'ine ve Aristoteles'in Poetika'sına odaklanarak ortaya koymakta, terimlerin Orta Çağ ve Rönesans'taki kullanımlarına değinmekte, modern anlatıbiliminin indirgemeci kategorizasyonu kaynaklı açmazlara dikkat çekmekte, ve son olarak, konu üzerine çalışmak isteyen araştırmacılara alanda gördüğü boşlukları işaret etmektedir.