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Lew Wallace's Ben- Hur: A Tale of the Christ was one of the most popular novels ever written, and its portrayal of ancient Rome and Roman institutions (e.g. chariot racing and penal system) influenced millions of people for well more than a century. Yet no one has ever identified Wallace's classical sources or examined his research methodology. After discussing Wallace's lack of formal education, this paper examines his access to and use of primarily Josephus, Plutarch, Homer, and other ancient and secondary sources, especially Gibbon and Pope, several problems (particularly the size of the Antioch Circus and length of the spina), and how subsequent theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the novel assumed, reinterpreted, or ignored the results of Wallace's research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to show that Jerome, in his three biographies of monks ( Lives of Saint Paul, Saint Malchos and Saint Hilarion), written between 376 and 392, 'converts' classical travel narratives to hagiography, borrowing topics from ancient genres such as epos, history, geography or novel. But at the same time the author creates a new literary frame for these christian peregrinationes. Indeed, these short novels offer him the opportunity to think about how difficult it is to understand the eremitic xeniteia. Is it possible to be in touch with a holy man whose holiness comes from the fact that he is always fleeing human society, to get nearer to God? The solution proposed by Jerome belongs to literary art: he paradoxically succeeds in making obvious the holy man's absence, thanks to the rhetorical device of euidentia. The text, which generates mental visions, moves the Christian reader spiritually closer to the holy man, although that figure's holiness depends on a sort of exclusion of every kind of relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that major nineteenth-century British novelists promote the novel as the dominant national literary form, in direct competition with classical forms, such as the epic. Because of this agenda, some novelists castrate, cripple, or dehumanize the figure of the scholar of antiquity, as a way of symbolically rejecting ancient genres. The primary focus is on two novels of faith and doubt by women novelists: George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872-3), and Mary Augusta Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), novels which make great capital out of presenting and taming sickly, deathly, impotent, and sinister classicists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]