The end of dialogue in antiquity
By: ed. Simon Goldhill.
Contributors: Goldhill, Simon.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 266
ISBN-13: 9780521887748
Subjects: Dialectic; Dialogue; Philosophy, Ancient; Church history; Dialogue -- Religious aspects
Description: "'Dialogue' was invented as a written form in democratic Athens and made a celebrated and popular literary and philosophical style by Plato. Yet it almost completely disappeared in the Christian empire of late antiquity. This book, the first general and systematic study of the genre in antiquity, asks: who wrote dialogues and why? Why did dialogue no longer attract writers in the later period in the same way? Investigating dialogue goes to the heart of the central issues of power, authority, openness and playfulness in changing cultural contexts. This book analyses the relationship between literary form and cultural authority in a new and exciting way, and encourages closer reflection about the purpose of dialogue in its wider social, cultural and religious contexts in today's world."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Why don't Christians do dialogue? / Simon Goldhill; title: Fictions of dialogue in Thucydides / Emily Greenwood; title: The beginnings of dialogue : Socratic discourses and fourth-century prose / Andrew Ford; title: Plato's dialogues and a common rationale for dialogue form / Alex Long; title: Ciceronian dialogue / Malcolm Schofield; title: Sympotic dialogue in the first to fifth centuries CE / Jason Konig; title: Can we talk? : Augustine and the possibility of dialogue / Gillian Clark; title: Let's (not) talk about it : Augustine and the control of epistolary dialogue / Richard Miles; title: Christians, dialogue and patterns of sociability in late antiquity / Richard Lim; title: Boethius, Gregory the Great and the Christian 'afterlife' of classical dialogue? / Kate Cooper and Matthew Dal Santo; title: No dialogue at the symposium? : conviviality in Ben Sira and the Palestinian Talmud / Seth Schwartz; title: Dialectic and divination in the Talmud / Daniel Boyarin.