The end of dialogue in antiquity / edited by Simon Goldhill.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Goldhill, Simon.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dialectic.

Dialogue.

Philosophy, Ancient.

Church history.

Dialogue--Religious aspects.

Physical Description:

viii, 266 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Summary:

’Dialogue’ was invented as a written form in democratic Athens and made a celebrated and popular literary and philosophical style by Plato. Yet it almost completely disappeared in the Christian empire of late antiquity: This book, the first general and systematic study of the genre in antiquity, asks: who wrote dialogues and why? Why did dialogue no longer attract writers in the later period in the same way? Investigating dialogue goes to the heart of the central issues of power, authority, openness and playfulness in changing cultural contexts. This book analyses the relationship between literary form and cultural authority in a new and exciting way, and encourages closer reflection about the purpose of dialogue in its wider social, cultural and religious contexts in today’s world.

Contents:

Introduction : why don't Christians do dialogue? / Simon Goldhill

Fictions of dialogue in Thucydides / Emily Greenwood

The beginnings of dialogue : Socratic discourses and fourth-century prose / Andrew Ford

Plato's dialogues and a common rationale for dialogue form / Alex Long

Ciceronian dialogue / Malcolm Schofield

Sympotic dialogue in the first to fifth centuries CE / Jason König

Can we talk? : Augustine and the possibility of dialogue / Gillian Clark

'Let's (not) talk about it' : Augustine and the control of epistolary dialogue / Richard Miles

Christians, dialogue and patterns of sociability in late antiquity / Richard Lim

Boethius, Gregory the Great and the Christian 'afterlife' of classical dialogue / Kate Cooper and Matthew Dal Santo

No dialogue at the symposium? : conviviality in Ben Sira and the Palestinian Talmud / Seth Schwartz

Dialectic and divination in the Talmud / Daniel Boyarin.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 242-262) and index.

ISBN:

9780521887748

0521887747

OCLC:

258083198

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description