Ancient epistolary fiction is a still largely under-explored field of research, at the intersection of studies on epistolography and on pseudepigraphy.
One of the best written and most amusing treatises of antiquity is Lucian's True History, forming a rather long narrative in two books, which suggested Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Rabelais's Voyage of Pantagruel and Cyrano de Bergerac's Journey to the Moon.
The Anabasis is his story of the march to Persia to aid Cyrus, who enlisted Greek help to try and take the throne from Artaxerxes, and the ensuing return of the Greeks, in which Xenophon played a leading role.
The fluidity of myth and history in antiquity and the ensuing rapidity with which these notions infiltrated and cross-fertilized one another has repeatedly attracted the scholarly interest.
Volume I of Franco Montanari's "e;Kleine Schriften"e; comprises some 66 papers on ancient scholarship, a topic which he decisively helped establishing as an extremely important field of study; they include general surveys of Alexandrian and Pergamene philology, major contributions to ancient Homeric scholarship (with a particular emphasis on Aristarchus), ancient scholarship on Hesiod and Aeschylus, as well as an important number of editions and notes on papyrological scholarly texts.
This book investigates the complex reception of Terence in Ovid and a number of allusions to the Terentian comedies in the love elegies and the exilic elegiac epistle Tristia 2.
It is now considered one of Aristophanes' most brilliant parodies of Athenian society, with a particular focus on the subversive role of women in a male-dominated society, the vanity of contemporary poets, such as the tragic playwrights Euripides and Agathon, and the shameless, enterprising vulgarity of an ordinary Athenian, as represented in this play by the protagonist, Mnesilochus.
