Ian Repath

Fritz-Gregor Herrmann

This volume in honour of John Morgan contains seventeen essays by colleagues, research students, and post-doctoral researchers who have worked with and been influenced by him during his 40 years in Swansea, up to and beyond his retirement in 2015. It is designed to reflect the esteem and affection in which the honorand is held, as teacher, supervisor, colleague, and friend. All the contributions reflect John Morgan's interests, with a particular focus on narrative, which has always been at the forefront of his teaching and research: he has elucidated the forms, structures, strategies, and functions of numerous ancient narratives, especially fictional, in a voluminous body of scholarship. The contributors consider a wide range of narratives, extending from those which show the influence of older stories on the beginnings of ancient Greek civilisation, through various narrative genres in different periods of antiquity, and up to later eras when the impact of Greek and Roman learning, stories, and ideas has been felt. The core of this volume contains discussions of narratives from the Roman imperial period, since this is the area to which the majority of John Morgan's work has been devoted and where his research has seen him become a world-leader in the study of the ancient Greek novel. Several of the contributions, at various stages of development, were delivered and discussed at gatherings organised under the aegis of KYKNOS, the Centre for Research on the Narrative Literatures of the Ancient World, which was established at Swansea in 2004 at John Morgan's initiative.

Some Organic Readings in Narrative, Ancient and Modern

Jas Elsner

Antonella Ghersetti

Simon Swain

Robert Hoyland

George Boys-Stones

Polemon of Laodicea (near modern Denizli, south-west Turkey) was a wealthy Greek aristocrat and a key member of the intellectual movement known as the Second Sophistic. Among his works was the Physiognomy, a manual on how to tell character from appearance, thus enabling its readers to choose friends and avoid enemies on sight. Its formula of detailed instruction and personal reminiscence proved so successful that the book was re-edited in the fourth century by Adamantius in Greek, translated and adapted by an unknown Latin author of the same era, and translated in the early Middle Ages into Syriac and Arabic. The surviving versions of Adamantius, Anonymus Latinus, and the Leiden Arabic more than make up for the loss of the original. The present volume is the work of a team of leading Classicists and Arabists. The main surviving versions in Greek and Latin are translated into English for the first time. The Leiden Arabic translation is authoritatively re-edited and translated, as is a sample of the alternative Arabic Polemon. The texts and translations are introduced by a series of masterly studies that tell the story of the origins, function, and legacy of Polemon's work, a legacy especially rich in Islam. The story of the Physiognomy is the story of how one man's obsession with identifying enemies came to be taken up in the fascinating transmission of Greek thought into Arabic.

Polemon's Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam

Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul

Some Organic Readings in Narrative, Ancient and Modern: Gathered and originally presented as a book for John

Ian Repath

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