Lecture as an adventure

Abstract

Philologist Olga Alieva studied the formation and development of the protreptic and parenese genres in ancient Greek and early Christian literature within her PhD thesis. Later, she taught ancient languages at the Yuriy Shichalin's Museum Graeco-Latinum Classical School, and since 2013 she has been working at the HSE School of Philosophy. The book under the headline “Philosophical text in antiquity” is a continuation of the research that took place from 2014 to 2017, revised for publication in this form in 2022. The book is composed of seven lectures covering the form and content of the ancient philosophical text, the dichotomy of written and oral word in ancient Greek culture, the relationship between ancient science and philosophy, poetry and prose, myth and logos, the features of the rhetorical situation and the object of the text, its purpose, the status of the author and the publisher. Of course, a much longer list of problems is addressed, but let's not forget that the main content of the work, without the preface, the appendix, which is also very interesting in itself, a nominal index and list of references, occupies only one hundred and thirty-three pages. And here the question arises: how suitable is the lecture genre for disclosing such extensive material in a very limited framework? The solution is the lecture genre itself, which always assumes that what the author is going to tell will be too voluminous and one will have to deal with the management of available facts, evidence and data. This review shows that Olga Aliyeva's style of data composition is a worthy example of such work, which turns a lecture into an adventure.