Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses

Shane Butler is Nancy H. and Robert E. Hall Professor in the Humanities and Professor and Chair of Classics at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author, most recently, of The Ancient Phonograph (2015), and editor of Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (2016). He is also co-editor, with Mark Bradley, of this series, as well as being co-editor, with Alex Purves, of its first volume, Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses (2013).Alex Purves is Professor of Classics at the University of California Los Angeles, USA. She is the author of Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative (2010) and co-editor, with Shane Butler, of Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses (2013), published in this "Senses in Antiquity" series. Her most recent book, Homer and the Poetics of Gesture, is forthcoming.

• Introduction, Shane Butler and Alex Purves; 1. Why Are There Nine Muses?, James I. Porter; 2. Haptic Herodotus, Alex Purves; 3. The Understanding Ear: Synaesthesia, Paraesthesia, and Talking Animals, Mark Payne; 4. Aristophanes, Cratinus and the Smell of Comedy, Mario Telo; 5. "Looking Mustard": Greek Popular Epistemology and the Meaning of aneiyo, Ashley Clements; 6. Plato, Beauty and "Philosophical Synaesthesia", Ralph M. Rosen; 7. Manilius' Cosmos of the Senses, Katharina Volk; 8. Reading Death and the Senses in Lucan and Lucretius, Brian Walters; 9. Colour as Synaesthetic Experience in Antiquity, Mark Bradley; 10. Blinded by the Light: Oratorical Clarity and Poetic Obscurity in Quintilian, Curtis Dozier; 11. The Sense of a Poem: Ovids Banquet of Sence (1595), Sean Keilen; 12. Saussure's Anaphonie: Sounds Asunder, Joshua Katz; 13. Beyond Narcissus, Shane Butler; Bibliography

"This agenda-setting collection challenges us to look beyond the 'visual/textual' paradigm and gives us a taste of the fascinating sensual and aesthetic possibilities afforded by the other senses, individually and in concert." - Victoria Wohl - University of Toronto "Previous forays into a sensory approach to the Classical world have been somewhat disparate, and an entire volume on the topic is to be welcomed - The thirteen chapters in this volume range widely from Homer to Quintilian, and flirt with all of the five senses as recognised in a modern western sensorium (vision, hearing, touch, taste and olfaction), individually and in a more multisensory manner." - Digressus: The Internet Journal for the Classical World