Sacred words

The 20 papers in this publication were first presented at the Eighth International Conference on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World, held in 2008 in Soeterbeeck, the Netherlands. The main subjects are Greek literature, Greek law, Greek and Roman religious texts, Roman literature, and early Christian literature. Individual paper topics include divine discourse in Homer's Iliad, past and present in Pindar's religious poetry, writing sacred laws in archaic and classical Crete, embedded speech in the Attic leges sacrae, hexametrical incantations as oral and written phenomena, unknowable names and invocations in late antique theurgic ritual, Plautus the theologian, dilemmas of pietas in Roman declamation, Paul's self-images within an oral milieu, and Augustine's Psalm Against the Donatists.