Fantasy in Greek and Roman Literature
offers an overview of Greek and Roman excursions into fantasy, including imaginary voyages, dream-worlds, talking animals and similar impossibilities. This is a territory seldom explored and extends to rarely read texts such as the
Aesop Romance
,
The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice
, and
The Pumpkinification of the Emperor Claudius.
Bringing this diverse material together for the first time, Anderson widens readers’ perspectives on the realm of fantasy in ancient literature, including topics such as dialogues with the dead, Utopian communities and fantastic feasts. Going beyond the more familiar world of myth, his examples range from
The Golden Ass
to the Late Antique
Testament of a Pig.
The volume also explores ancient resistance to the world of make-believe.
Fantasy in Greek and Roman Literature is an invaluable resource not only for students of classical and comparative literature, but also for modern writers on fantasy who want to explore the genre’s origins in antiquity, both in the more obvious and in lesser-known texts.