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Hailed by Tom Holland as a 'fascinating and compendious survey of ancient attitudes to Xerxes' and now available in paperback, Imagining Xerxes is a transhistorical analysis that explores the richness and variety of Xerxes' afterlives within the ancient literary tradition and the reinvention of his image in a remarkable array of cultural and historical contexts.This Persian king, who invaded Greece in 480 BC, quickly earned a notoriety that endured throughout antiquity and beyond. The Greeks' historical encounter with Xerxes - which resulted, against overwhelming odds, in the defeat of the Persian army - has inspired a series of literary responses to the king in which he is variously portrayed as the archetypal destructive and enslaving aggressor, as the epitome of arrogance and impiety, or as a figure synonymous with the exoticism and luxury of the Persian court. Emma Bridges examines the earliest representations of the king, in Aeschylus' tragic play Persians and Herodotus' historiographical account of the Persian Wars, before tracing the ways in which the image of Xerxes was revisited and adapted in later Greek and Latin texts. The author also looks beyond the Hellenocentric viewpoint to consider the construction of Xerxes' image in the Persian epigraphic record and the alternative perspectives on the king found in the Jewish written tradition.

This volume examines the long and complex history of the Greco-Roman tradition in South America, arguing that the Classics have played a crucial, though often overlooked, role in the self-definition in the New World. Chronicling and theorizing this history through a detailed analysis of five key moments, chosen from the early and late colonial period, the emancipatory era, and the 20th and 21st centuries, it also examines an eclectic selection of both literary and cinematographic works and artefacts such as maps, letters, scientific treatises, songs, monuments, political speeches, and even the drafts of proposals for curricular changes across Latin America. The heterogeneous cases analysed in this book reveal cultural anxieties that recur through different periods, fundamentally related to the 'newness' of the continent and the formation of identities imagined as both Western and non-Western - a genealogy of apprehensions that South American intellectuals and political figures have typically experienced when thinking of their own role in world history. In tracing this genealogy, The Classics in South America innovatively reformulates our understanding of well-known episodes in the cultural history of the region, while providing a theoretical and historical resource for further studies of the importance of the Classical tradition across Latin America.

Focusing on the works of Camillo Sbarbaro and Giovanna Bemporad, this book examines the tragic Greek paradigm influenced by these two poets and offers the first in-depth analysis of poetic translations of Greek tragedy in 20th-century Italian poetry.The linguistic and ideological diversity, embedded in their respective work, is chartered and examined so that the reader learns how narratives of Greek tragedy shaped their poetic universe. Caterina Paoli provides a fresh perspective on the pedagogical commitment of the Italian poets and their roles as translators of classical studies. She also investigates the Italian poetic community's response to the process of cultural appropriation and re-shaping of national identity based on the classical studies that was supported by the Fascist regime from 1922-43. As well as offering a discussion of larger cultural patterns, the reader is also presented with textual analysis of the translations. Poetically, politically and philosophically, Paoli fills a large gap in current scholarship on the translation of ancient literature in the Italian poetic community. This ground-breaking book will spark debates and inspire further studies of classical reception.