The Role of Genre in the Depiction of Leadership in Antiquity
A Leader of Many Genres
The Role of Genre in the Depiction of Leadership in Antiquity
A Leader of Many Genres
Buying pre-order items
Ebooks and Audiobook
You will receive an email with a download link for the ebook or audiobook on the publication date.
Payment
You will not be charged for pre-ordered books until they are available to be shipped. Pre-ordered ebooks will not be charged for until they are available for download.
Amending or cancelling your order
For orders that have not been shipped you can usually make changes to pre-orders up to 72 hours before the publishing date.
Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available
Description
What makes a good leader? Greek and Roman writers asked that question constantly and answered it in strikingly different ways depending on when they were writing and what kind of text they were writing. This volume examines how leadership was imagined across classical literature, from the fifth century BCE to the fourth century CE. Historians, poets and philosophers all drew on one another as they built their portraits of kings, generals and statesmen, borrowing and adapting the models they inherited – and often arguing with them. The historian Polybius pushed back against the fashion for writing history as the story of great men, insisting that leaders be understood inside a wider and far less predictable world. The poet Lucan drew on Lucretius' portrait of the philosopher Epicurus to shape his own disquieting Julius Caesar.
Read together, these texts show that the qualities expected of a leader – mercy, eloquence, memory, self-command – were shaped as much by literary form as by political circumstance. What emerges is not a single idea of leadership but a set of competing and sometimes contradictory ones. Ranging from Athenian tragedy to Augustan poetry, imperial biography and Greek oratory under Rome, the volume sets these ancient arguments alongside modern thinking about what leadership is and how it is learned.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- PDF/UA-2, 1.4
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
Has alternative text descriptions for images
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
Table of Contents
Part 1: Leadership Within and Between Genres
1. Agamemnon and Menelaus as Generals in Sophocles and Euripides: Epic Characters and Contemporary Concerns, Theodore Hill
2. The clementia of Augustus in Horace and Ovid: The role of genre and intertextuality in the representation of a leadership value, Bénédicte Delignon
3. Recontextualizing Leadership: History & Biography in Polybius' Histories, Emma Nicholson
4. Dio of Prusa, Plutarch and the Paradigmatic Value of Epaminondas as a Flexible Model of Leadership, Thierry Openeer
Part 2: Philosophical Models of Leadership
5. Following Diogenes: Cynic Leadership in Plutarch, Inger Kuin
6. Caesar as light-bringer: Exploring Lucan's use of Lucretius' philosophical leader, Liam Preston
7. The Leader as Doctor: Healing the city in Dio's Oration 32, Raphaëla Dubreuil
Part 3: Performing Leadership
8. Superior memory as an attribute of the ideal leader, Joe Grimwade
9. Leadership values and the Studia of the Suetonian Caesars: the princeps bonus dicendi peritus, Jacqueline Klooster
10. The Other Leader: Reading Values of Female Leadership through Monuments in Vergil and Ovid, Anna-Sofia Alitalo
Product details
| Published | 07 Jan 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 232 |
| ISBN | 9781350359529 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Related Titles
