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The subject of the posthuman, of what it means to be or to cease to be human, is emerging as a shared point of debate at large in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This volume asks what classical learning can bring to the table of posthuman studies, assembling chapters that explore how exactly the human self of Greek and Latin literature understands its own relation to animals, monsters, objects, cyborgs and robotic devices. With its widely diverse habitat of heterogeneous bodies, minds, and selves, classical literature again and again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human; not to equate and confound the human with its other, but playfully to highlight difference and hybridity, as an invitation to appraise the animal, monstrous or mechanical/machinic parts lodged within humans. This comprehensive collection unites contributors from across the globe, each delving into a different classical text or narrative and its configuration of human subjectivity-how human selves relate to other entities around them. For students and scholars of classical literature and the posthuman, this book is a first point of reference Theoretical introduction:The subject of the human /Giulia Maria Chesi and Francesca Spiegel --Introductions to post/human theories.The question of the animal and the Aristotelian human horse /Oxana Timofeeva --Foucault, the monstrous and monstrosity /Luciano Nuzzo --How to become a cyborg /Kirstin Mertlitsch --Anders, Simondon and the becoming of the posthuman /Yuk Hui --De/humanization.Odysseus, the boar and the anthropogenic machine /Marianne Hopman --What is it like to be a donkey (with a human mind)? Pseudo-Lucian's Onos /Tua Korhonen --Quam soli vidistis equi : focalization and animal subjectivity in Valerius Flaccus /Anne Tuttle Mackay --Animality, illness and dehumanisation: the phenomenology of illness in Sophocles' Philoctetes /Chiara Thumiger --The imperial animal : Virgil's Georgics and the anthropo-/theriomorphic enterprise /Tom Geue --Animals, governance and warfare in the Iliad and Aeschylus' Persians /Manuela Giordano --The sovereign and the beast : images of ancient tyranny /Roland Baumgarten --The monstrous.Typhoeus or cosmic regression (Theogony 821-880) /Jenny Strauss Clay --Demonic disease in tragedy : illness, animality, and dehumanisation /Giovanni Ceschi --The Sphinx and another thinking of life /Kathrine Fleming --When Rome's elephants weep : humane monsters from Pompey's theater to Virgil's Trojan horse /Aaron Kachuck --The monstrosity of Cato in Lucan's Civil war /James McNamara --Why can't I have wings? Aristophanes' birds /Maria Gerolemou --Bodies and entanglements.The seer's two bodies : some early Greek histories of technology /Martin Devecka --Fluid cypress and hybrid bodies as a cognitively disturbing metaphor in Euripides' Cretans /Johan Tralau --Body politics in the Antiquitates romanae of Dionysius of Halicarnassus /Yuddi Gershon --The myth of Io, and female cyborgic identity /Antonietta Provenza --Cosmic, animal and human becomings : a case study in ancient philosophy /Laura Rosella Schluderer --Post-humanism in Seneca's happy life : "animalism", personification, and private property in Roman Stoicism (Epistulae morales 113 and De vita beata 5-8) /Alex Dressler --Hagiography without humans : Simeon the Stylite /Virginia Burrus --Objects, machines and robotic devices.Assemblages and objects in Greek tragedy /Nancy Worman --Hybris and hybridity in Aeschylus' Persians: a post-humanist perspective on Xerxes' expedition /Anne-Sophie Noel --Malfunctions of embodiment : man/weapon agency and the Greek ideology of masculinity /Francesca Spiegel --Aeneid 12 : a cyborg border war /Elena Giusti --The presence of presents: speaking objects in Martial's Xenia and Apophoreta /Katherine Wasdin --Automatopoetae machinae : laws of nature and human invention (Vitruvius ix. 8.4-7) /Mireille Courrent --Pandora and robotic technology today /Giulia Maria Chesi & Giacomo Sclavi --Art, life and the creation of automata : on Pindar, Olympian 7.50-53 /Agis Marinis --Staying alive : Plato, Horace and the written text /Alexander Kirichenko --Beyond the beautiful evil? the ancient/future history of sex robots /Genevieve Liveley --Conclusions /Simon Goldhill.
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