Simonides is tantalising and enigmatic, known both from fragments and from an extensive tradition of anecdotes. This monograph, the first in English for a generation, employs a two-part diachronic approach: Richard Rawles first reads Simonidean fragments with attention to their intertextual relationship with earlier works and traditions, and then explores Simonides through his ancient reception. In the first part, interactions between Simonides' own poems and earlier traditions, both epic and lyric, are studied in his melic fragments and then in his elegies. The second part focuses on an important strand in Simonides' ancient reception, concerning his supposed meanness and interest in remuneration. This is examined in Pindar's Isthmian 2, and then in Simonides' reception up to the Hellenistic period. The book concludes with a full re-interpretation of Theocritus 16, a poem which engages both with Simonides' poems and with traditions about his life.
Plato hailed her as "the Tenth Muse," and 2,500 years later her voice remains dazzling as well as direct and honest. Sappho, a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos, wrote verse that sings to bot
In The Newest Sappho Anton Bierl and Andre Lardinois have edited 21 papers of world-renowned Sappho scholars dealing with the new papyrus fragments of poems by Sappho that were published in 2014.
The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual addresses the varied modes of interaction between ancient Greek lyric poetry and the visual arts as well as more general notions of visuality.
This book is a study of Theocritus’ narrating techniques, intertextual practices, and the relationship between them. By a close, careful description and analysis of these features as particularly depl
Pindar and the Emergence of Literature places Pindar in the context of the evolution of Archaic Greek poetics. While presenting an in-depth introduction to diverse aspects of Pindar's art (authorial metapoetics, imagery, genre hybridization, religion, social context, and dialect), it seeks to establish a middle ground between cultural contextualism and literary history, paying attention both to poetry's historical milieu and its uncanny capacity to endure in time. With that methodological objective, the book marshals a new version of historical poetics, drawing both on theorists usually associated with this approach, such as Alexander Veselovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg, and on T. S. Eliot, Hans Blumenberg, Fredric Jameson, and Stephen Greenblatt. The ultimate literary-historical problem posed by Pindar's poetics, which this book sets out to solve, is the transformation of pre-literary structures rooted in folk communal art into elements that still inform our notion of li
This groundbreaking book attempts a fully contextualized reading of the poetry written by Pindar for Hieron of Syracuse in the 470s BC. It argues that the victory odes and other occasional songs compo
This is the first monograph entirely devoted to the corpus of late classical Greek lyric poetry. Not only have the dithyrambs and kitharodic nomes of the New Musicians Timotheus and Philoxenus, the hymns of Aristotle and Ariphron, and the epigraphic paeans of Philodamus of Scarpheia and Isyllus of Epidaurus never been studied together, they have also remained hidden behind a series of critical prejudices – political, literary and aesthetic. Professor LeVen's book provides readings of these little-known poems and combines engagement with the style, narrative technique, poetics and reception of the texts with attention to the socio-cultural forces that shaped them. In examining the protean notions of tradition and innovation, the book contributes to the current re-evaluation of the landscape of Greek poetry and performance in the late classical period and bridges a gap in our understanding of Greek literary history between the early classical and the Hellenistic periods.
Ibycus is a crucial figure in the world of archaic poetry, whose work has not received the attention it deserves. This commentary brings together his most important fragments, together with some less
All but one of the 17 papers are from an international conference at Rethymnon, Crete, in May 2007, and that one from the inaugural meeting of the Network for the Study of the Archaic and Classical Gr
Though often assumed by scholars to be a product of traditional, and perhaps oral, compositional practices comparable to those found in early Greek epic, archaic elegy has not until this point been an
The second edition of this translation of The Life of Luxury by ancient Greek poet and cookbook writer Archestratus is revised and updated to account for major advances in translation and analysis of
You've just won the gold medal, what are you going to do? In Ancient Greece, your patron could throw a feast in your honor and have a poet write a hymn of praise to you. The great poet Pindar compose
You've just won the gold medal, what are you going to do? In Ancient Greece, your patron could throw a feast in your honor and have a poet write a hymn of praise to you. The great poet Pindar composed
Newly available in English, the latest volume from accomplished literary critic Franco Ferrari offers extraordinary new insight into the life and works of Sappho, one of the most individualistic and e
In 2005 the discovery of an unknown poem by classical Greek poet Sappho was announced, and scholars have swarmed the rare find since. A panel session was devoted to the poem at the January 2007 annual
Greek lyric poetry encompassed a wide range of types of poem, from elegy to iambos and dithyramb to epinician. It particularly flourished in the Archaic and Classical periods, and some of its practitioners, such as Sappho and Pindar, had significant cultural influence in subsequent centuries down to the present day. This Companion provides an accessible introduction to this fascinating and diverse body of poetry and its later reception. It takes account of the exciting new papyrus finds and new critical approaches which have greatly advanced our understanding of both the corpus itself and of the sociocultural contexts in which lyric pieces were produced, performed and transmitted. Each chapter is provided with a guide to further reading, and the volume includes a chronology, glossary and guide to editions and translations.
