Classical Constructions Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean

Don Fowler was Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford until his early death in 1999. He was an inspiring teacher and colleague, who did fundamental work in establishing a variety of new ways of reading for students of Classical literature, in particular through aspects of narratology, such as focalization and closure. He also contributed to the development of studies of gender, genre, allusion, and ecphrasis, and the use of commentaries and computers in Classics. All of this was underpinned by exemplary scholarship. This memorial volume contains a full list of his publications and a previously unpublished paper, on the image of the Roman uir as inflexible and slow-moving, and the extent to which that was determined by him-or by us. There are also new papers by a group of Don's friends, leading classicists at universities in England, Ireland, Italy, and the USA: Phillip Mitsis, Gordon Campbell, Alessandro Schiesaro, Michele Lowrie, Llewelyn Morgan, Philip Hardie, Joseph Farrell, Stephen Hinds, Ben Tipping, Matthew Leigh, Deborah H. Roberts, Andrew Laird, Stephen Harrison. All are concerned to tell stories about the past from a critically informed position. Three of the papers deal with Lucretius and Epicureanism; others with Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Silius, Lucan, and Petrarch. Reception is a major concern of the authors, both in the modern world and in antiquity; so is rhetoric and the interface between philosophy and literature. Though these are papers of ground-breaking scholarship, the style is deliberately informal, as a memorial of the honorand, and they contain personal reminiscences and reflections on death. Book jacket.

S. J. Harrison is Bowra Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Wadham College, Oxford.