Sublime Cosmos in Graeco-Roman Literature and Its Reception

Abstract

The essays collected in this volume examine manifestations of our sublime cosmos in ancient literature and its reception. Individual themes include religious mystery; calendrical and cyclical thinking as ordering principles of human experience; divine birth and the manifold nature of divinity (both awesome and terrifying); contemplation of the sky and meteorological (ir)regularity; fears associated with overpowering natural and anthropogenic events; and the aspirations and limitations of human expression. In texts ranging from Homer to Keats, the volume’s chapters apply diverse critical methods and approaches that engage with sublimity in various aesthetic, agential and metaphysical aspects. The ancient texts – epic, dramatic, historiographic and lyric – treated here are rooted in a remote world where, within a framework of (perceived) celestial order, literature, myth and science still communicated profoundly, a tradition that continued in literary receptions of these ancient works. This volume honours the intellectual legacy of Thomas D. Worthen, a scholar whose expertise and insights cut across multiple disciplines, and who influenced and inspired students and colleagues at the University of Arizona, USA, for over three decades. Beyond clarifying temporally and culturally distant contemplations of the human universe, these essays aim to inform the continuing sense of wonder and horror at the sublime heights and depths of our ever-changing cosmos. This volume honours Thomas D. Worthen, late Professor of Classics at the University of Arizona and author of The Myth of Replacement: Stars, Gods, and Order in the Universe. The individual chapters, focused on Greek and Roman literary texts and their post-classical receptions, are united in their engagement with ‘the sublime’, an ancient concept embraced here in its full breadth of aesthetic, agential, and metaphysical meanings. Across literary texts ranging from Homer to Keats, the contributors examine the many relationships of the cosmic and the sublime manifested in such themes as time’s subjectivity; ontological insecurity; divine birth and the nature of divinity; (im)mortality and regenerative rites; the play of reflection and distortion in our perception of the world; metatheatricality and the notion that humans are actors in a cosmic drama; the metaphysics of erōs; our confrontations with astronomical (ir)regularity and (dis)order; human fears of awesome technology; and the disruptive effects of epidemics. The ancient texts discussed in this volume, rooted as they are in a world where literature, myth, science, and metaphysics communicated profoundly, can offer contemporary readers distanced, palliative perspectives on our own technologically and economically knotted, and culturally siloed, moment in history.