Introduction

This book explores artistic and intellectual expression as the selfrepresentation of man. Like its companion volume, When Men were Men: Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiquity (Foxhall and Salmon 1998), it starts from the premise that the history of classical antiquity as the ancients tell it to us is a history of men. However, the focus here is specifically on the creation, re-creation and iteration of that male self as presented in language, poetry, drama, philosophical and ‘scientific’ thought and art: man constructing himself as subject in classical antiquity and beyond, in more recent appropriations of that tradition.