Touch and the Ancient Senses

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: What and Where is Touch? Alex Purves1. Hands Know the Truth: Touch in Euryclea’s Recognition of OdysseusSilvia Montiglio2. Touching, Proximity, and the Aesthetics of Pain in SophoclesNancy Worman3. Aristotle and the Priority of TouchRebecca Steiner Goldner4. The Duality of TouchDavid Sedley5. Getting to Grips with Classical Art: Rethinking the Haptics of Graeco-Roman Visual CultureVerity Platt and Michael Squire6. In the Body of the Beholder: Herder’s Aesthetics and Classical SculptureHelen Slaney7. The Contaminating Touch in the Roman WorldJack Lennon8. The Touch of Poetry in the Carmina PriapeaElizabeth Young9. In Touch, In Love: Apuleius on the Aesthetic Impasse of a Platonic PsycheGiulia Sissa10. Noli me tangere: the Theology of TouchCatherine Conybeare11. Losing Touch: Impaired Sensation in Greek Medical WritingsRebecca Flemming

"Purves' volume provides a powerful corrective to sight as the preeminent sense in Classical scholarship. As each essay demonstrates, touch blurs the boundaries between subjective and objective experience in providing what Purves calls a "feeling for the past." This volume is required reading for scholars interested in the relationship between perception, cognition, and affect in interpreting ancient texts and artifacts." - Karen Bassi, University of California Santa Cruz, USA"Touch and the Ancient Senses provides a useful introduction to this changing area of the field ... this study is often fascinating and it contains many seeds for further discussion ... an elegant overall structure, with Aristotle’s problem as a thread running from the first sentence of Alex Purves’ introduction to the last sentence of the final chapter. This is an appropriate frame for a topic that puzzled philosophers and physicians throughout antiquity."- Kenneth Silverman, University of Florida, USA, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2018