Unceta Gómez Luis, Berger Łukasz (eds.) Politeness in Ancient Greek and Latin

Cambridge University Press, 2022. — 380 p.Politeness serves to manage social relations or is wielded as an instrument of power. Through good manners, people demonstrate their educational background and social rank. This is the first book to bring together the most recent scholarship on politeness and impoliteness in Ancient Greek and Latin, signalling both its universal and its culture-specific traits. Leading scholars analyse texts by canonical classical authors (including Plato, Cicero, Euripides, and Plautus), as well as non-literary sources, to provide glimpses into the courtesy and rudeness of Greek and Latin speakers. A wide range of interdisciplinary approaches is adopted, namely pragmatics, conversation analysis, and computational linguistics. With its extensive introduction, the volume introduces readers to one of the most dynamic fields of Linguistics, while demonstrating that it can serve as an innovative tool in philological readings of classical texts.Luis Unceta Gómez is Senior Lecturer in Latin Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. His research interests focus on Latin semantics and pragmatics, and especially linguistic politeness, topics on which he has published extensively.Łukasz Berger is a lecturer in Classics at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. His research interests are pragmatic aspects of dialogue in Roman comedy.