This book contains a selection of pagan Greek poetic texts ranging in date from the first to the sixth century AD. It makes easily accessible for the first time work by poets such as Quintus Smyrnaeus, Nonnus, Musaeus and Babrius hitherto neglected in Classical syllabuses. Genres represented include epic, epyllion, didactic, epigram, lyric and the verse fable. There is a brief general introduction, and in addition each section of detailed commentary is prefaced by a discussion of literary aspects of the poems and of their wider contexts. The book is intended primarily for undergraduate and graduate students of Greek, but will be of interest also to Classical scholars.
This book is an anthology of Greek poetry written during the third to first centuries BC, the Hellenistic period. It is intended to make available to undergraduates and graduate students a selection of texts which are for the most part not easily accessible elsewhere. The volume contains a wide and representative range of poetry including hymns, didactic verse, pastoral poetry, epigrams and epic. An introduction provides cultural and historical background, and a full commentary elucidates problems of language and reference in the texts. In this second edition, many notes have been rewritten and the bibliography has been updated. The selection has also been augmented with three hundred more lines of Greek text (Theocritus poems 5 and 15), and is now more than 2000 lines in length.
This book is an anthology of Greek poetry written during the third to first centuries BC, the Hellenistic period. It is intended to make available to undergraduates and graduate students a selection of texts which are for the most part not easily accessible elsewhere. The volume contains a wide and representative range of poetry including hymns, didactic verse, pastoral poetry, epigrams and epic. An introduction provides cultural and historical background, and a full commentary elucidates problems of language and reference in the texts. In this second edition, many notes have been rewritten and the bibliography has been updated. The selection has also been augmented with three hundred more lines of Greek text (Theocritus poems 5 and 15), and is now more than 2000 lines in length.
This book is an anthropology of Greek poetry written during the third to first centuries B. C. - the so-called Hellenistic period. The volume contains a wide and representative range of poetry includi
Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica, the only long mythological epic to survive in Greek from the period between Apollonius’ Argonautica (3rd century BC) and Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (5th century AD), fills in
Theocritus (early third century BCE), born in Syracuse and also active on Cos and at Alexandria, was the inventor of the bucolic genre. Like his contemporary Callimachus, Theocritus was a learned poet