In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry by Thomas J. NelsonJason S. NethercutMarkers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry. By Thomas J. Nelson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. xvi + 441. ISBN: 9781009086882The thesis of this book is big and important. Nelson shows conclusively that metaliterary citation of engagement with other texts is not, as conventional wisdom maintains, the creation of (...) bookish poets in Alexandria and their Roman counterparts. In fact, every single category of what Nelson calls “indexicality” is fully on display in Archaic Greek poetry, often already in the Iliad and the Odyssey; such indexicality is regularly shown to be deployed via the exact same mechanisms and for the exact same poetic ends as what we witness five centuries later. Well produced, meticulously researched, and generally free of infelicities and errors, Nelson’s book is mandatory reading for Hellenists and Latinists alike and undoubtedly will remain a fixture in bibliographies for many years to come.Nelson breaks his argument into five chapters, beginning in Chapter 1 with methodological considerations regarding terminology, theory, audience, and, especially, the frameworks available for the phenomenon of allusion in Archaic Greek poetry, much of which we must situate in oral traditions. The footnotes to this chapter are especially comprehensive with respect to earlier scholarship on allusive indexing in Greco-Roman poetry; accordingly, this overview now represents the standard that will need to be consulted by anyone currently working on allusion and intertextuality. Chapters 2 to 4 each take up in turn a major category of indexicality, including footnoting (2), appeals to memory (3), and temporal appeals to generalized “earlier” authorities and “future” readers (4). The procedure is always to argue by demonstration; it is here that Nelson shines especially brightly, as he is an excellent close reader, and his examples are usually perfectly chosen to illustrate his point. Nelson opts sensibly to interpret the panoply of allusions he adduces in his book primarily as allusions to mythological fabulae, rather than to texts, although he does make space for allusion to earlier texts in this material, especially when there is no other reasonable explanation for the evidence he brings forward. Generally, this is all well done in a manner duly sensitive to the evidentiary uncertainties involved. While some readers might quibble with any given reading advanced by Nelson, the cumulative effect puts any case one could bring against his basic thesis out of court.Certain individual examples have the potential drastically to reorient our understanding of the relationship between our earliest Greek epics. To choose only one, but perhaps the most consequential: as part of his demonstration in Chapter 2 that the so-called “Alexandrian Footnote” must be reconceived as an [End Page 461] inherent component of Greek poetry from its inception, Nelson demonstrates that Homer’s generalized appeal to the tradition of Zeus’ battle with Typhoeus at the culmination of the catalogue of Greeks (φασί, Il. 2.783) actually invites comparison specifically with Hesiod’s inset narrative of this battle in the Theogony (esp. 843–7 and 857–9). Nelson adduces widespread similarities of language in the two descriptions (e.g., ἱμάσσῃ, Il. 2.782 ~ ἱμάσσας, Theog. 857; γαῖα δ’ ὑπεστενάχιζε, Il. 2.781, στεναχίζετο γαῖα, Il. 2.784 ~ Typhoeus: στενάχιζε δὲ γαῖα, Theog. 858; Zeus: ἐπεστενάχιζε δὲ γαῖα, Theog. 843; πυρὶ χθὼν πᾶσα νέμοιτο, Il. 2.780 ~ καῦμα... πυρός, Theog. 844–5, χθὼν πᾶσα, Theog. 847; and χθὼν | σμερδαλέον κονάβιζε, Il. 2.465–6 ~ σμερδαλέον κονάβησε, Theog. 840). More importantly, Nelson shows that the precise detail that Homer footnotes, namely that Typhoeus’ resting place (εὐνάς) is located among the Arimnoi (Il. 2.783), refutes Hesiod’s claim that the defeated Typhoeus is dispatched to Tartarus (Theog. 868) by cross-referencing Hesiod’s own singular footnote (φασί, Theog. 306) for the story that Typhoeus shared a “bed” with Echidna who resides, precisely, among the Arimnoi (Theog. 304–8). As Nelson puts it (81), “Homer’s φασί appears to index tradition precisely at the point where it is most contestable,” and he continues (83), “[i]f Homer and Hesiod were contemporaneous Hellenistic poets, scholars might argue that this pair of indices marks a reciprocal relationship between these two passages—a self-reflexive cycle of cross referencing, in which each author knowingly nods to the ‘talk’ of their poetic peer. In the context of archaic epic, however, it is likely... (shrink)

Did archaic Greek poets think that speech should be factually informative? Studies in the "history of thought" suggest that archaic culture offered no developed alternative to the opposition of truth to falsehood judged in relationship to fact. But the mythic poems display more interest in person-to-person agreement than eye-to-object fidelity. This is seen in the numerous stories where partnerships are negotiated and symbolized through tokens whose impersonal value is flagrantly disregarded. In the Hymn to Hermes, facetious non-truths (...) establish intimacy and cooperation among those who understand them. (shrink)

In the proem of the “Theogony” Hesiod describes the conception and birth of the Muses. At ll. 58-60 he specifies that Mnemosyne’s pregnancy lasted one entire year, ένιαντός. This unusual one-year pregnancy puzzles Hesiod’s commentators; West, for example, translates ένιαντός as ‘due time’ rather than ‘year’. The purpose of this article is to argue that Hesiod intended ένιαντός to mean ‘year’.

This chapter discusses metaphors for elpis in early Greek poetry. Metaphor can be a crucial element in the formation and extension of emotion concepts and gives an unsurpassed sense of a culture’s phenomenology of emotion; the chapter aims to establish how far elpis metaphors resemble those of other, more prototypical emotion concepts. A brief discussion of the semantics of elpis in Homer and other early Greek poetic sources is followed by a review of the main categories of (...) metaphors for elpis. It is clear that elpis can, but need not, mean “hope”; and it is equally clear that elpis need not be thought of in metaphorical terms. Elpis metaphors, however, cluster very strongly around those applications that can be interpreted in terms of English “hope.” They characterize elpis as an emotion; but they rarely make it as violent, disruptive, or irruptive an experience as many other emotions are. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of ExhortationGregory HaysElizabeth Irwin. Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of Exhortation. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv + 350 pp. Cloth, $90.Thirty years ago we understood archaic Greek elegy pretty well—or so we imagined. The elegists sang of the new developments of the archaic period, above all the rise (...) of the polis. They wrote first-person poetry celebrating their own individuality; most modern anthologies open emblematically with Archilochus's... They invoked the phraseology of epic only to reject its values: Homer's aristocratic warriors retreated in disarray before the bandy-legged general of the mercenary Archilochus. The arrival of the citizen soldier was reflected in Tyrtaeus and Callinus, whose exhortations hoplites chanted as they marched into battle. Solon was a little harder to accommodate in this picture: an odd hybrid of Jeremiah and Polonius, rising to occasional grandeur, but weak on logic and organization. Still, his praise of Eunomia helped bridge the gap between Homeric naiveté and the abstract thinking of the fifth century. And of course there was that law code...This explanatory model reflects the Geistesgeschichte approach of Bruno Snell, Hermann Fränkel, and Werner Jaeger, and it has been notably tenacious. But as a tool for explaining elegy (and lyric generally) it has come to seem pretty dated. Archilochus's "I" was problematized as early as 1964 in K. J. Dover's contribution to the Fondation Hardt Archiloque volume. But it was in the 1980s that the ice really started to break up. In an influential article (JHS 106 [1986] 13-35), [End Page 427] Ewen Bowie stressed the symposium's centrality as the performative context for elegy, thus making conservative aristocrats the genre's primary consumers (so much for the citizen soldier and the rising middle class!). The rise of "cultural poetics" left archaic society—and its poets—looking much less familiar. Finally, the conventional relationship between elegy and epic was being reexamined. Many supposed Homeric allusions melted away under closer examination (notably in Robert Fowler's The Nature of Early Greek Lyric [Toronto, 1987]). Recent scholarship has proposed dramatically later dates for the stabilization of the Homeric poems, calling into question their priority to lyric even in a chronological sense. The old picture of elegy as an archaic response to a monolithic "epic" has given way to theories of an ongoing and dynamic dialogue between (and within) both genres.These trends are reflected in Elizabeth Irwin's study of Solon, a revised version of her 1999 Cambridge dissertation. It also reflects renewed interest in the poet, appearing soon after commentaries by Maria Noussia (2001) and Christoph Mülke (2002) and almost simultaneously with a collective volume edited by Josine Blok and André Lardinois (Solon of Athens: New Historical and Philological Approaches [Leiden, 2006]), to which Irwin has contributed. Along with Solon, Irwin focuses on Callinus and Tyrtaeus, and one of her stated goals is "to help us unlearn what we think we know about this poetry and its historical significance" (18).The book is divided into three parts. In part 1 ("The Politics of Exhortation") Irwin examines the tradition of martial exhortation represented by Tyrtaeus and Callinus. The conventional view had these poets discarding Homer's individualistic front-fighters in favor of the new citizen-armies of the polis— is now a civic virtue. But as Irwin observes, "fighting for one's fatherland" is not alien to Iliadic values. For her, the similarities between martial elegy and epic outweigh any differences. As she notes, the evocation of future warfare in sympotic elegy mirrors a corresponding appeal to past feasting in the exhortations of the Iliad. Martial elegy provides (or sees itself as providing) an off-duty complement to Homeric warriors' battlefield vaunts—the sort of thing Sarpedon might have directed to Glaucus back in Lycia while the slave-boys were refilling the goblets. Such Iliadic self-fashioning constructs its sympotic audience not simply as heroic, but specifically as a heroic elite. While martial elegy may pay lip service to the polis, its center of gravity is elsewhere. Thus Tyrtaeus fragment 11W can conclude with patronizing advice to the... (shrink)

This paper explores the complex meanings of paizein and its compound sumpaizein used in connection with young girls and/or Eros in archaic Greek poetry. My basic question is whether the verb necessarily implies a knowing eroticism on the part of the character whom it describes, or whether it is the poet's way of inviting the audience to share his knowledge at the expense of the character, a kind of "wink" of complicity. I argue that there are fundamental (...) ambiguities in this particular use of paizein and that the instability of its semantic field is linked to the liminality of the stage of life to which it commonly refers. When Eros "plays," we know we should be on guard, but a young girl's "play" is somewhat more difficult to interpret. In this context, I suggest that Greek poetry can represent the liminality of a girl's sexual status through the physical setting in which the action takes place: the "players" are placed in a natural environment that reflects their stage in life, namely, the moments just before the loss of innocence, and that locus itself is open to divergent interpretations dependent on the sexual "knowledge" of the viewer. The notion "girls at play" thus resists any single interpretation, as the girls' sexual status always contains within it the potential for rapid and drastic change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek PoetryFrederick T. GriffithsRichard Hunter. Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xii 1 207 pp. Cloth, $54.95.To locate Theocritus on the evolving map of third-century culture, Richard Hunter forgoes mapmaking itself in favor of the scattered “sites” found in seven nonbucolic mimes, hymns, and erotic poems. He introduces these lively and learned essays with (...) the observation that “too often ‘Hellenistic poetry’ is treated as an entity in which the whole is easier to grasp, and in some ways more interesting, than the parts” (x). Theocritus’ Nachleben deepens the distortion: “Concentration on Theocritus’ ‘bucolic poems’ has tended to obscure the fact that the range and variety of his poems are very characteristic of the poetic milieu of the period” (20). Successive chapters find Theocritus crossing paths with Apollonius Rhodius, Aratus, Herodas, and Callimachus. As ever, all roads lead back to Homer, but Hunter pointedly directs our view elsewhere. Different as they are, Helen (Idyll 18), Hiero II (16), the Alexandrian housewives (15), the Dioscuri (22), and three languishing paederasts (12, 29, 30) commonly witness to the third century’s interest in the “song culture” of the archaic age, an age with many centers and patrons, a “rich tapestry of poetic forms” (p. 2), and a performance culture not overshadowed by the dramatic festivals of Athens.Philology’s erstwhile handmaiden, archaeology, presides as a tenth Muse both over Theocritus’ learned “recuperation” of archaic song and, at another level, over Hunter’s revival of these underappreciated Idylls. Even “the poems themselves dig deeply into a (real or constructed) archaic world for much of their matter and their form” (196). The figure of science gestures to his seamless [End Page 468] integration of papyrology, dialectology, and metrics and inevitably digs up artifacts with more cultural residue than some “intellectual exercise divorced from any meaningful social or ideological context” (11). Hunter undermines the “ivory tower” currently under siege by Alan Cameron and others. The book’s signal contribution comes, however, from questions of “performative context” (4) that may betray the trope. “Musical archaeology” (101) creaks in describing Theocritus’ “rescue” of archaic musical forms. “Locating the Site” (chapter 1) in fact excavates performance and dialect more than anything else. What Hunter’s gritty “archaeology” importantly is not is the stale, library-bound trope of “aetiology.” His introduction proceeds (“Toward Theocritus,” 1–13) via the Fragmentum Grenfellianum and Heracles’ nursery (24.1–9) rather than from Callimachus’ Aetia, which as a project does not figure in these six essays. It is Philitas and, less conventionally, Erinna and Asclepiades who pave the way for Theocritus (“The Poetic Context,” 14–28). Chapter 1 ends with an important survey of “the languages of Theocritus” (28–45), which can be recommended to students and general readers as an introduction to literary dialects in Theocritus, here presented with rare sensitivity to their literary use.Were Hunter starting from “life and times” rather than “site,” familiar topics would at once impose themselves: patronage, religion, the pandectic hexameter, and the elite appropriation of “subliterary” forms. These obligations are agreeably distributed over the five chapters of readings, or perhaps one might better say, “five performances.” For Hunter never marches through an Idyll from end to end but instead selects, restages, and defamiliarizes key passages against the backdrop of, inter alia, recently recovered papyri, hieroglyphic decrees, Old and New Comedy, instrumental performance, meditations on mimesis and mummification, and snatches of Alcman or Theognis not already fossilized in commentary. Of what should be a conventional ag ¬ n between thumos and reason in Idyll 12 he observes: “The irony of the poem lies in the fact that it is the speech of the thumos which is then characterized by an appeal to reason, whereas the lover hectors his thumos like a comic father lecturing his wayward son” (182). We were not expecting Terence: “Cf. perhaps Ter. Ad. 685–95.” With his sharp ear, timing, and fluency in all ages of Greek and Roman verse, Hunter has more than enough fresh insights to hold the attention of both generalists and Theocriteans.“‘All the Twos’: Idyll 22” (chapter 2) works from astute... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 127.1 (2006) 137-140 [Access article in PDF] Derek Collins. Master of the Game: Competition and Performance in Greek Poetry. Hellenic Studies 7. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2004. Distributed by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. xx + 267 pp. Paper, $19.95. Collins states the purpose of his book clearly in the opening paragraph of his introduction (ix): "to offer a detailed examination (...) of the competitive performance of Greek poetry from the late archaic to the classical period. Its central argument is that the basic response pattern called "capping" is a pervasive competitive performance technique common to tragic and comic stichomythia, dramatic representations of lament, forms of Platonic dialectic and dialogue, the sympotic performance of elegy, skolia and related verse games, as well as the rhapsodic performance of epic." In order to fulfill this ambitious purpose, Collins divides his book into three parts: drama, symposia, and epic. An introduction, two appendices (one on ritual aischrologia and the other a brief survey of comparative typologies), bibliography, and indices complete the volume.Collins focuses on specific elements within these genres: stichomythia in Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides' Cyclops, and Plato's Euthydemus occupy part 1. Part 2 is based on skolia, Aristophanes, and a selection of poets—Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Solon, and Anacreon—who offer a sympotic perspective on rhapsodes and competition. In part 3, Collins' evidence for the competitive and creative nature of rhapsodic performance ranges from scholiasts through Homer, the Certamen, Polybius, and inscriptions. Collins has brought together a very wide range of material, complete with translations, which he discusses in a way that I often found convincing and, even when I did not, found stimulating to consider.Collins bases much of his discussion on capping, enjambement, and word play, specifically riddles and puns. He offers a brief definition of capping, the fundamental concept of his work (ix): when two (or more) speakers or singers perform, "one participant sets a topic or theme in speech or verse to which another responds by varying, punning, riddling, or cleverly modifying that topic or theme." Without giving a detailed definition of enjambement, Collins shows its importance for the speaker who must respond to a line already sung by the first performer and argues that enjambement should be seen as a mark of a singer's creativity, his ability to adapt the material given him by the first singer. Collins applies the terms "pun" and "riddling" somewhat too loosely, I think, to many of the passages from tragedy that he discusses. If we understand a pun to be word play based on a word with more than one meaning or based on two different words that are similar in sound, then I am not certain why the image [End Page 137] of famine as an ally of the Greeks, in the words of Darius (Aeschylus, Persians 490–91) should be considered one (9). And what is riddling about the exchange between Talthybius and the elder coryphaeus (Agamemnon 538–50; pp. 15–16)? These passages seem to me simply to be ambiguous. Collins' discussion of puns and riddles in symposia is more convincing (124–29).Collins' reading of the exchange between Euripides and Aeschylus in Aristophanes' Frogs (1198–1248), in which Aeschylus caps Euripides' prologues with the tag ("he lost his little bottle of oil"), is particularly valuable, because he does not limit himself to one approach or perspective. He shows the many grammatical and metrical subtleties of the exchange, its links to other genres, and the possibly sexual jokes (33–43). We can imagine everyone in the audience finding something to laugh at in this scene.Collins conceives of symposia as occasions for amusement, intellectual discussion, and even for violence, if drinking or teasing get out of hand. He suggests that symposiasts and rhapsodes have more in common than we might imagine if we look only at what the symposiasts say about themselves or at the metrical and philosophical differences between the two kinds of performances (85, 135–46). Whether the antagonism toward rhapsodes expressed by oligarchs at symposia has any... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Age of Grace: “Charis” in Early Greek PoetryDana R. SmithThe Age of Grace: “Charis” in Early Greek Poetry, by Bonnie MacLachlan; xxi & 192 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, $29.95.Bonnie MacLachlan has two concerns in this book. First, she sees early charis, conventionally and inadequately translated as “grace,” as the result of feeling, concrete action, and sometimes concrete objects, fused in such a (...) way that early Greeks did not clearly distinguish these as separate aspects. Second, she focuses on the experience of beauty or pleasure as a crucial part of reciprocity in charis, and argues that many of the now-fashionable models from the social sciences, such as those dealing with reciprocal exchange of goods and favors, are insufficient to account for this particular dynamic of allurement. What later ages sensed, and what we sense, as two or more different kinds of charis “may not have been sensed as such by the archaic Greek mind.” Rather, the early Greeks possessed an integrated sense of these fragments as part of a single experience. “A charis-event, provoked by moral or aesthetic beauty, was disarming; it broke down the barriers of the self, and it demanded that the beneficiary reach out to another.” This study combines extremely able discussions of different sides of this crucial concept with a large vision of their integration into a coherent whole: “[Charis] was the moral glue of their society, linking such other central moral ideas as timê [“honor,” “prerogative,” “price”], dikê [“due portion,” “justice”], themis [“unwritten law”], xenia [“requital of gifts and hospitality”], and aidôs [“reverence,” “awe”].”How well does MacLachlan demonstrate this twofold idea? She deserves high praise for setting forth the essential passages of her authors clearly and succinctly, for giving numerous insights into them, for adducing much pertinent scholarship, and certainly for furthering the development of her important thesis. Her discussion of the earliest conception of charis (chap. 2, “The Charis of Achilles”), focused mainly on Homer, with material from the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod, gives a sensitive and persuasive account of relations among charis, timê, and dikê. She makes excellent points about specific perceptions of beauty, especially visual, although one comes away a bit uncertain as to how these aspects all cohere, and also as to whether there are differences in charis between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Her discussion of the cult dimensions of charis (chap. 3, “The Charites”), while fascinating in itself, contains little direction for using this information so as to understand the thesis. She gives careful readings of her examples of erotic and social charis (chaps. 4 and 5, “Erotic Charis” and “Social Charis”), clearly identifying types that contrast with the earlier prototypical experience, although sometimes her criticism of these is more implicit than stated. A more forceful definition of the “problem” of erotic charis, for example, would have helped unify this discussion with that of erotic charis in Aeschylus. Her discussion of Pindar and Bacchylides (6, “Epinician Charis”), perhaps the high point of the book, shows the richest ties to the multi-dimensional Homeric charis; here we return clearly to the topic of [End Page 172] beauty, see the pertinence of some of the cult information, and sense the transformational dynamics of charis as profoundly important for this genre of poems. She leaves somewhat open, however, the question of whether charis is a single thing in Pindar. The chapter on Aeschylus (7, “Charis in the Oresteia”) presents a powerful reading of different kinds of charis in conflict, private versus public, resulting in a unified view of the trilogy as a whole. Once more we note different senses of charis, but in a way that highlights their collision: the duality of charis is further brought into relation with other dualities, such as that of dikê. This chapter connects well with other parts of the book; erotic and false charis become important issues.If there is a criticism to make of this book, it is that MacLachlan does not do quite enough to work out the relations between her provocative thesis and her discussions of particular poems. Some sections are too dissertation-like in presenting evidence, and more thought about the... (shrink)

The period from the eighth to the fifth centuries B.C. was one of extraordinary creativity in the Greek-speaking world. Poetry was a public and popular medium, and its production was closely related to developments in contemporary society. At the time when the city states were acquiring their distinctive institutions epic found the greatest of all its exponents in Homer, and lyric poetry for both solo and choral performance became a genre which attracted poets of the first rank, (...) writers of the quality of Sappho, Alcaeus and Pindar, whose influence on later literature was to be profound. This volume covers the epic tradition, the didactic poems of Hesiod and his imitators, and the wide-ranging work of the iambic, elegiac and lyric poets of what is loosely called the archaic age. The contributors make use of recent papyrus finds to fill out the picture of a cosmopolitan and highly sophisticated literary culture which had not yet found its intellectual centre in Athens. (shrink)

Philosophical reflection on the conditions of knowledge did not begin in a cultural vacuum. Several centuries before the Ionian thinkers began their investigations, the Homeric bards had identified various factors that militate against a secure grasp of the truth. In the words of the ‘second invocation of the Muses’ in Iliad II: “you, goddesses, are present and know all things, whereas we mortals hear only a rumor and know nothing.” Similarly Archilochus: “Of such a sort, Glaucus, son of Leptines, is (...) the mind of mortal man, whatever Zeus may bring him for the day, for he thinks such things as he meets with.” When one adds the truism that the scope of human experience pales in comparison with the synoptic view of events enjoyed by the gods, it follows that for most matters it is for the gods to know and mortals merely to conjecture. Traces of the older ‘poetic pessimism’ can be seen in the teachings of many of the first philosophers. Alcmaeon reaffirms that “while the gods enjoy clear and certain knowledge of all things, mortals must conjecture from signs” (B 1). Although Xenophanes encourages inquiry into a wide range of phenomena, he concludes that “No man has known nor will there be anyone who knows the clear and sure truth concerning the gods and what I say about all things” (B 34). And when philosophers begin to affirm a more optimistic view they often do so in terms that invite comparison with the older outlook. The chief truth Heraclitus claims to have discovered is the logos or ‘basic formula’ which holds everywhere and forever (B 1, 30, 80, and 90). Parmenides provides reason to think that human beings can discover the truth even about things located “far off” (B 4). And both Empedocles and Democritus contrast the inferior awareness of those “who think in terms of what they have met with” with the wisdom available to those who have heard and ponder their teachings (B 131). For these thinkers, separation in space and time—the old ‘locality problem’—no longer posed an impediment to knowledge. -/- . (shrink)

Studies of early mythography have stressed the dependent relationship between the so-called logographers and epic archaic poetry. Better knowledge of archaic and classical mythography in recent years has provided more accurate details of the context of the production and purposes of the fragmentary works by Hecataeus, Acusilaus, Pherecydes and Hellanicus. Each of them has his own agenda and programme, which have to be explained within their context and not, from a purely historic-literary perspective, as an appendix, a (...) continuation or an exegesis of the epic tradition. This article argues that conditions of preservation, and means of transmission, of fragmentary mythographers have shaped the way we approach them. In other words, the process of reception of epic poetry through the exegetic and grammarian tradition distorts our view and leads the modern reader to see mythography as being dependent on Homer or Hesiod. (shrink)

Les origines de la réflexion sur la musique dans la Grèce ancienne sont à chercher non dans la philosophie, mais dans la tradition poétique. Partant de la reconstruction des fonctions fondamentales de la musique et des différentes valeurs esthétiques assignées au chant dans les poèmes homériques, cet article reconstruit le développement des idées, thèmes et concepts esthétiques dans la réflexion des poètes sur leur propre art, leur méthode et leur style de composition, au fil d’un itinéraire philosophique qui va d’Hésiode (...) à Lasos d’Hermione et à Pratinas. La réflexion ultérieure des philosophes sur la musique ne naît pas de nulle part, mais, comme le montrent plusieurs exemples spécifiques, présuppose ces étapes complexes, riches et pour ainsi dire préliminaires. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the methodological issues posed by the reception of archaic and classical poetry in imperial rhetorical texts. It argues that references to ancient poems and poets in the works of imperial sophists are always already the product of appropriation and rewriting, and that the study of sophists’ engagement with poetry should go beyondQuellenforschungto explore how and why poetic models were transformed in light of their new rhetorical and imperial contexts. To illustrate this approach and its (...) contribution to our understanding of both ancient-reception phenomena and imperial rhetorical culture, the article focusses on Himerius of Athens, a fourth-centuryc.e.sophist and teacher of rhetoric whose fondness for lyric poetry has caused hisOrationsto be used as a quarry for lyric fragments and testimonia. Himerius’ treatment of carefully chosen lyric models is here discussed with attention to his self-presentation and rhetorical agenda to show how the sophist appropriated the voices of diverse lyric icons to promote his school and negotiate his position in relation to the imperial administration. This analysis restores Himerius’ intellectual significance within late imperial culture and society, but it also demonstrates how a more in-depth study of the reception of ancient poetry in imperial sophistic literature has the potential to illuminate the strategies of cultural politics used by imperial authors to (re)construct Greek tradition. (shrink)

Images permeate and propel archaic thinking in diverse ways. How do philosophic texts from the Greek archaic period (ca. eighth through early-fifth centu­ries BCE) conceive of images and what do images accomplish in archaic philosophies? In what ways can attention to images in philosophic texts open perspectives onto the relations of myth, poetry, and philosophy in the archaic Greek period? With these questions guiding the inquiry, this paper explores texts from various traditions jointly (...) related within the archaic Aegean cultural matrix. Texts from what might be termed philosophy’s prehistory, such as the ancient Egyptian Leiden Hymns and Odysseia, pro­vide important context for understanding the continuity and development of images. (shrink)

Although the Greek language of the archaic period lacked nominative expressions equivalent to the English “knowledge”, Greek speakers and writers employed a number of verbs in speaking of those who fail or succeed in knowing some fact, truth, state of affairs, or area of expertise—most commonly eidenai, gignôskein, epistamai, sunienai, and noein (in its aorist forms). In the Homeric poems, knowledge can be attained either through direct observation, through a revelatory trial or testing procedure, or from the (...) reliable testimony of others (each of these approaches figures in the discovery of Odysseus’ identity). Three broad ‘epistemic sentiments’ pervade early Greek poetry: the inability of mortals to grasp the nature of things lying beyond their immediate experience; the inability of mortals to grasp the larger course of events or ‘conceiving of what lies ahead and behind’ (prossô kai opissô); and the ability of ‘gifted’ poets and seers to overcome these limitations by drawing upon divine sources of truth and wisdom. (shrink)

Philologus, founded in 1846, is one of the oldest and most respected periodicals in the field of Classics. It publishes articles on Greek and Latin literature, historiography, philosophy, history of religion, linguistics, reception, and the history of scholarship. The journal aims to contribute to our understanding of Greco-Roman culture and its lasting influence on European civilization. The journal Philologus, conceived as a forum for discussion among different methodological approaches to the study of ancient texts and their reception, publishes original (...) scholarly contributions with a strong international focus. Publications languages are: German, English, Italian, French. As of 2014 the publication of supplementary volumes will be resumed. The series Philologus. Supplemente / Philologus. Supplementary Volumes will publish monographs and edited volumes pertaining to all aspects of the study of ancient literature and its reception, with a special focus on topics concerning literary theory, philosophy and the history of scholarship from an interdisciplinary perspective. (shrink)

The seventeen contributions constituting this edited volume focus on archaic Greek thought — Presocratics broadly understood, including Sophists, Archaic poets, or Tragedians — and its multiform reception, use or appropriation through times and lands. -/- The first chapters deal with the direct reconstruction and understanding of early Greek thought, from the very first philosophical writings to the last Presocratic philosopher. By alternating discussions of editorial and translation issues, stylistic analysis, geographical study and history of science, these (...) contributions question the value of the testimonies or fragments attributed to those early thinkers and challenge our understanding of the texts at the origin of western philosophy. -/- The volume subsequently focuses on the echoes of those Archaic voices, over a long period of time from Aristotle to the 20th century. From their early reception in Greek and Roman time to their adaptation in contemporary poetry, by way of their appropriation and use in Islamic philosophy or in Latin-America colonization, the contributions gathered in this second part illustrate the large scope of influence of ancient philosophers and of their ideas in various times and places. (shrink)

Open any history or hand-book of Greek literature in general, or Greek lyric in particular, and you will very soon come across several references to monody and choral lyric as important divisions within the broader field of melic poetry. And the terms loom larger than the mere question of handy labels: they permeate and pervade the whole approach to archaic Greek poetry. Chapters or sub-headings in literary histories bear titles like ‘Archaic choral lyric’ (...) or ‘Monody’. Indeed it is possible to write a whole book and call it Early Greek Monody. Diehl's Anthologia Lyrica Graeca was structured around this distinction, which it adopted in preference to the chronological arrangement that is the obvious alternative. Indeed, it went so far as ‘to invent Greek titles “μονωιδίαι” and “χορωιδίαι” ’. Most scholars would now agree that this is to go too far. But most would also continue to accept the validity and importance of the division, which a scholar has recently termed ‘the most fundamental generic distinction within ancient lyric poetry’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 125.1 (2004) 135-140 [Access article in PDF] Barry B. Powell. Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvi + 210 pp. 57 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $55. Harvey Yunis, ed. Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. x + 262 pp. Cloth, $55. These two works, published within a year of (...) each other, exist in an uneasy but complementary relationship. Each illustrates the merits and drawbacks of the other's approach, and neither enters into dialogue with the central premises of its opposite number. But, together, they do illustrate the point (or impasse) at which a central question in classical scholarship now stands. Almost a half decade since the ground-breaking studies by Goody and Watt, Havelock, and others, scholars still puzzle over the precise impact that the spread of the alphabet had on Greek society and mentality, and they document Greece's gradual transformation from an oral or song culture to a text-based one. While Barry Powell focuses on the early history of this transformation, and the essays in Harvey Yunis' study cast a broader temporal and thematic net, many of the same preoccupations mark both inquiries. What are the chief areas of difference between oral and literate modes of reception and transmission? How and why do texts come into being? How are they deployed?Powell's work is very much a continuation and refinement of his controversial publication of the early 1990s, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet(Cambridge, 1991). There, he argued that the Greek alphabet, unique for its capacity to record the sounds of speech, was invented by a single individual, at a single time and place, and for the express purpose of preserving the Iliadand Odyssey. There, too, he emphasized that writing, whatever the notational form it assumed, imperfectly mirrors speech and that the two systems of communication are fundamentally different. His position remains largely unchanged, although now the focus shifts. In this new work, he sets theories concerning the origins of the Homeric songs within the context of the particular nature of alphabetic writing, mounting a critique against those who neglect the "special role that alphabetic writing... played in the preservation, creation, and dissemination of archaic and classical Greek poetry" (188). It is an enterprise that takes him on a circuitous path. In a seemingly rather random concatenation of chapters ("Text," "Orality and Genre," "Myth," to name a few) Powell spends a substantial portion of the work showing how the existing terms used to debate the Homeric question [End Page 135] are riddled with vagaries and contradictions. But while he excellently illustrates how loose is the deployment of these expressions and concepts in existing scholarship, he fails to supply new and more exact terms. The reader is left with a rather dispirited sense that we cannot even talk about such things as "Tradition" or "Literacy" (persuasively shown to be no monolithic concept) without falling into a morass of confusion. A similar spirit of destruction, rather than reconstruction, marks his treatment of M. L. West's The East Face of Helicon(Oxford, 1997). If, for all the evidence that West (and Powell himself) amasses for the deep penetration of Eastern myth and literary forms on the Greek tradition, West's study neglects the special nature of alphabetic writing, then how exactly did the novel system change the material borrowed by the Greeks?More satisfying are later chapters where Powell grounds some of the observations made in these early, often brief and schematic discussions, in actual case studies, demonstrating his admirable knowledge of, and facility in, the decipherment of the writing systems of the Near and Far East. Particularly rich is the contrast that emerges between the multilingual Near East, with the possibility of cultural transmission through texts that multilingualism allows, and the monolingual culture of Greece. Fascinating, too, are the close readings of Egyptian and Chinese texts as part of an illustration of the... (shrink)

Over a hundred instances of the word ὕμνος from extant archaic poetry demonstrate that the Greek hymn was understood broadly as a song of praise. The majority of these instances comes from Pindar, who regularly uses the term to describe his poems celebrating athletic victors. Indeed, Pindar and his contemporaries saw the ὕμνος as a powerful vehicle for praising gods, heroes, men and their achievements—often in service of an ideological agenda. Writing a century later Plato used the (...) term frequently and with much the same range. A survey of his usage reveals instances of ὕμνοι for gods,daimones, heroes, ancestors, leading citizens, noble deeds, sites and landscapes. Despite abundant evidence of Plato's own practice, studies of the Greek hymn posit an extreme narrowing of the genre in the classical period and cite the philosopher as the sole witness to, if not the originator of, this development. Two passages in particular, one from theRepublicand one from theLaws, are seen to support the claim that by the fourth centuryb.c.e.the term ὕμνος refers exclusively to songs for gods. InRepublicBook 10, we find the memorable edict on poetic censorship: ‘But we must know that of poetry only ὕμνοι for the gods and ἐγκώμια for the good must be admitted into our city.’LawsBook 3 offers what appears to be an even more straightforward pronouncement: ‘Back then our music was divided according to its various types and arrangements; and a certain type of song was prayers to the gods, and these were called by the name ὕμνοι.’ From these two statements has arisen the consensus that Plato saw a divine recipient as the defining feature of the ὕμνος and, moreover, that this position reflects thecommunis opiniofrom at least the fourth centuryb.c.e.onward. (shrink)

Of the Presocratic thinkers traditionally credited with the foundation of Greek philosophy, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles are exceptional for writing in verse. This is the first book-length, literary-critical study of their work. It locates the surviving fragments in their performative and wider cultural contexts, applying intertextual and intratextual analyses in order to reconstruct the significance and impact they conveyed for ancient audiences and readers. Building on insights from literary theory and the philosophy of literature, the book sheds new light (...) on these authors' philosophical projects and enriches our appreciation of their works as literary artefacts. It also expands our knowledge of the genres in which they wrote, of the literary culture of the Western Greek world, and of the development of Greek poetics from the Archaic to the Classical periods, exposing the influence of these thinkers on more famous Sophistic and Platonic ideas about literature. (shrink)

The emotions have long been an interest for those studying ancient Greece and Rome. But while the last few decades have produced excellent studies of individual emotions and the different approaches to them by the major philosophical schools, the focus has been almost entirely on negative emotions. This might give the impression that the Greeks and Romans had little to say about positive emotion, something that would be misguided. As the chapters in this collection indicate, there are representations of positive (...) emotions extending from archaic Greek poetry to Augustine, and in both philosophical works and literary genres as wide-ranging as lyric poetry, forensic oratory, comedy, didactic poetry, and the novel. Nor is the evidence uniform: while many of the literary representations give expression to positive emotion but also describe its loss, the philosophers offer a more optimistic assessment of the possibilities of attaining joy or contentment in this life.The positive emotions show some of the same features that all emotions do. But unlike the negative emotions, which we are able to describe and analyze in great detail because of our preoccupation with them, positive emotions tend to be harder to articulate. Hence the interest of the present study, which considers how positive emotions are described, their relationship to other emotions, the ways in which they are provoked or upset by circumstances, how they complicate and enrich our relationships with other people, and which kinds of positive emotion we should seek to integrate. The ancient works have a great deal to say about all of these topics, and for that reason deserve more study, both for our understanding of antiquity and for our understanding of the positive emotions in general. (shrink)

A ‘pious pessimism’ pervaded much of archaic Greek poetry: ‘It is for the gods to know and men merely to opine’ was the prevailing sentiment. However, in the late 6th century a set of independent-minded individuals began to move away from the older pessimism to embrace a more optimistic and secular outlook. In various ways they maintained that mere mortals could, if they were prepared to undertake the appropriate inquiries, achieve a clear and sure understanding of the (...) entire cosmos. Heraclitus and Parmenides offered the most detailed lines of investigation, but both Pythagoras and Empedocles presented themselves as savants able and willing to impart their wisdom to all those prepared to listen to and embrace their teachings. Among the most important elements in this transition were the concepts of phusis or the essential nature of a th’ing, and the logos or rational account in which that nature could be formulated. -/- . (shrink)

This book offers a resolution of the paradox posed by the pleasure of tragedy by returning to its earliest articulations in archaic Greek poetry and its subsequent emergence as a philosophical problem in Plato's Republic. Socrates' claim that tragic poetry satisfies our 'hunger for tears' hearkens back to archaic conceptions of both poetry and mourning that suggest a common source of pleasure in the human appetite for heightened forms of emotional distress. By unearthing a (...) psychosomatic model of aesthetic engagement implicit in archaic poetry and philosophically elaborated by Plato, this volume not only sheds new light on the Republic's notorious indictment of poetry, but also identifies rationally and ethically disinterested sources of value in our pursuit of aesthetic states. In doing so the book resolves an intractable paradox in aesthetic theory and human psychology: the appeal of painful emotions. (shrink)

Discussion of the closing lines of Pindar¿s seventh Nemean has concentrated almost exclusively on the lines¿ relevance to the larger question that hangs over the poem: does the ode serve as an apologia for the poet¿s uncomplimentary treatment of Neoptolemus in an earlier Paean, and is Pindar here most plainly gainsaying the vilification in which he supposedly previously engaged. The reading that I offer suggests that a very different concern frames the conclusion to the work. Rather than seeking to exculpate (...) himself, the poet announces instead that in the song that the audience has just heard, the composer has adhered to two prime virtues that the encomiastic genre should embrace: variatio and an ability to counter the language of blame. By reorienting the debate in this way, I aim to elucidate the striking metaphors and other rhetorical devices that fill the final lines, and most particularly to make sense of the canine imagery that seems so recurrent a motif. As my reading seeks to show, the dog is chosen as master trope both for his relation to the practice of invective and for his relevance to that stale act of repetition that the poet here rejects. By giving his audience a sample of the mode of speech that the calumnist practises, and that the praise poet may appropriate when combating the opposite genre, Pindar makes the merits of his own poetry shine the brighter, and invites the cognoscenti to appreciate his sophia. More broadly, the encomiastic singer¿s brief deployment of the weapons of the abuse poet allows us to understand something of the overlapping and symbiotic relations between the different genres in archaic Greek poetry. (shrink)

This article argues that the literary contexts of Horace's Odes 3.13, especially archaic Greek poetry, have been relatively neglected by scholars, who have focussed on identifying the location of the fons Bandusiae and on understanding the significance of the sustained description of the kid sacrifice. This study presents a more holistic interpretation of the ode by exploring Horace's interactions with previously unnoticed (Alcaeus, frr. 45 and 347) and underappreciated (Hes. Op. 582–96) archaic Greek poetic intertexts, (...) which also offer a fresh perspective on earlier debates. Horace's use of Alcaeus’ fr. 45, a key intertext, firmly places the fons Bandusiae within the literary landscape of Horace's Sabine estate, and offers a structural and argumentative model for Odes 3.13; further, Alcaean and Hesiodic allusions also suggest that the kid is sacrificed as a surrogate for Horace for keeping him safe. These conclusions are used to offer a new interpretation of the ode on metapoetic, political and philosophical levels, and to explore how these different aspects of the ode interact with Horace's other odes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wandering in Ancient Greek CultureVanda ZajkoSilvia Montiglio. Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xii + 290 pp. Cloth, $50.Beginning at the beginning with Odysseus's poignant statement to Eumaeus at Odyssey 15.343 that "for mortals, nothing is worse than wandering," Silvia Montiglio seeks to present an overview of the conception of wandering from the archaic to the early Roman age. The (...) introduction states clearly that its approach is both synchronic and diachronic, and the way the chapters are organized reinforces this approach, as they focus on particular themes ("Wandering, Lying and Poetry," "The Meaning of 'Home' in One's Journey: From Apollonius' Argonautica to the Novel") while simultaneously pursuing an historical trajectory. The epilogue, entitled "What Greek Wanderers Did Not Do," expands the time fame and provides insights into the differences between pagan and Christian ideas about wandering, contrasting Neoplatonist and Cynic ascetics who describe wandering primarily as a figurative manifestation of the human condition with the peregrinatio of those Christian sages for whom "to wander means to renounce this world and one's earthly self in the expectation of the Kingdom of God" (264).Throughout, there is a preoccupation both with the semantic fields of the words used for wandering, such as, for example, in the second chapter, where the middle-passive voice of the words used for wandering are adduced to emphasize the fundamental passivity of the wanderer within Greek thought, and with the wider symbolic significance of wandering within mythological, geographical, and political landscapes as it is manifested in a variety of genres and historical periods. [End Page 129] This extensive concentration means that the potential readership of the book is a diverse one and includes both those with and without Greek and those interested in particular texts as well as in the ancient world as it is most broadly conceived. There are some places in the discussion where the material is openly and heavily dependent on other works, such as the discussion of liminality that occupies pages 16–23, which to a large extent reviews the insights of Ken Dowden, Death and the Maiden: Girls' Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology (1989), and 37–41, which revisit some of the points made by Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy (1995); but in a work of such scope and eclecticism, this avowed indebtedness testifies to the thoroughness of the scholarship rather than the unoriginality of the thought involved in its production.One of the great strengths of the book is the forging of connections among different kinds of texts. In the chapter entitled "Wandering in Space and Time," Plato's theory of the wandering cause in the Timaeus is read alongside other narratives of beginnings so that the progress of the cosmos from wandering to stability is associated with that of the individual body: Herodotus contrasts the "much-wandering" of the ancestors of the Dorians with the autochthony of the Athenians who are by far the most developed of the Greeks; his successor Thucydides argues that migrations characterized the patterns of habitation of the earliest times; Democritus describes the mother's navel as an anchor that restrains the wandering womb, and he also considers the earth to have wandered before it thickened and became fixed in one position; pursued by Hera, the pregnant Leto searches far and wide for a place to deliver Apollo until she finds refuge on Delos, the island that, according to Callimachus (Hymn to Delos 191–92), also wandered until the birth of the god enabled it to put down roots. Montiglio describes the thematic and conceptual links among these different discourses in a typically fertile passage:Associating wandering within the amorphous beginnings of the cosmos is not idiosyncratic to the philosopher who disparagingly relegates wandering to the world of matter. The materialistic Democritus shares a similar notion, and so do myth and historiography. Wandering, the liminal condition, is systematically removed by growth and progress. Whether it be in biology, history, or geology, progress equals sedentariness, agglomeration, and fixity; whereas wandering defines the physical or social organism when still in the making and/or disjointed. Wandering marks cultural, biological, and geological protohistory.(12)The book... (shrink)

Tracing the interrelationship among play, poetic imitation, and power to the Hellenic world, Mihai I. Spariosu provides a revisionist model of cultural change in Greek antiquity. Challenging the traditional and static distinction made between archaic and later Greek culture, Spariosu's perspective is grounded in a dialectical understanding of values whose dominance depends on cultural emphasis and which shifts through time. Building upon the scholarship of an earlier volume, Dionysus Reborn, Spariosu her continues to draw on Dionysus--the "God (...) of many names," of both poetic play and sacred power--as a mythical embodiment of the two sides of the classical Greek mentality. Combining philosophical reflection with close textual analysis, the author examines the divided nature of the Hellenic mentality in such primary canonic texts as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, Works and Days, the most well-known of the Presocratic fragments, Euripides' Bacchae, Aristophanes' The Frogs, Plato's Republic and Laws, and Aristotle's Poetics and Politics. Spariosu's model illuminates the many of the most enduring questions in contemporary humanistic study and addresses modern questions about the nature of the interrelation of poetry, ethics, and politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Death in the Greek World: From Homer to the Classical Age by Maria Serena MirtoJoseph W. DayMaria Serena Mirto. Death in the Greek World: From Homer to the Classical Age. Trans. by A. M. Osborne. Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture 44 Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. x + 197 pp. 10 black-and-white figs. Paper, $19.95.Mirto (with Osborne) has given us a readable book on a (...) topic of perennial interest, full of learning but unencumbered by the development of a comprehensive argument with full scholarly apparatus (there are no footnotes or endnotes). I devoured it on a couple of airplane rides, during which its intelligent presentation thoroughly distracted me from my physical discomfort. The book provided a clear and concise review of important topics which I have not studied intensely for years, and it initiated me into recent trends and made me thirsty to approach its suggestions for further reading—while avoiding the spring by the white cypress, of course.The volume is an expansion and updating, as well as a translation, of the Italian original, La morte nel mondo greco (Rome 2007). Much scholarship from 2007 and later is cited, especially in discussions of Dionysian and “Orphic” material (chap. 2). Important additions are a useful section on the confusing (to the uninitiated) topic of hero cults and “an appendix outlining fundamental developments in modern studies of death in the Greek world” (x). The latter traces an interesting journey through the history of mentalities from R. Hertz (Durkheim’s student), through E. de Martino and P. Ariès, on to C. Sourvinou-Inwood’s disagreement with I. Morris about change and stability in early Greek attitudes toward death.Mirto articulates her goal in the preface as “a general synthesis of people’s relationships with death in the Greek world... [a] survey of the ways in which archaic and classical Greek culture dealt with the trauma of death” (ix). One does not judge such a book on its original interpretations and scholarly arguments; other criteria apply. For example, how comprehensive (or representative) is the selection of topics, approaches, and examples? How useful (or user-friendly) is the selection, especially for the audience to which it is addressed?At the level of overall structure, Mirto scores high for comprehensiveness. Any treatment of Greek death must devote major attention to the three topics she announces : (1) “beliefs about the afterlife, on the boundary between literary imagination and religious faith”; (2) “funerary rituals and material evidence of the cult of the dead”; (3) “ideologies... that construct an ideal model of death, making it an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, event” (ix). Chapter 1 on traditional views, mostly derived from Homer (also treated in chap. 5.1), commences Mirto’s discussion of the first topic, which is continued in chapter 2 on more [End Page 337] optimistic eschatologies, especially those associated with Dionysus and Orpheus. The second topic is treated in chapters 3 (on death, mourning, and last rites) and 4 (on markers, epitaphs, and tomb and hero cult). Chapter 5 is devoted to the third topic, with particular attention to the development of the polis and Athens’ patrios nomos and funerary legislation. R. Garland’s widely used survey (The Greek Way of Death [Ithaca 1985], 2d ed. 2001) covers much the same ground, though that book’s feel is quite different. Garland provides a richness of source and scholarly citations that Mirto eschews; for example, Garland devotes twenty-three pages (chap. 7 and its dense endnotes) to visits to the grave, while Mirto barely touches on the matter.At the level of specifics, Mirto’s comprehensiveness is uneven. Reflecting her expertise in archaic and classical poetry, as well as her engagement with the history of mentalities, discussions of literature and some sub-literary textual material are excellent, while she is less full but still useful on iconography (especially that of white-ground lekythoi and sculpture) and polis regulations. Perceptions of comprehensiveness, of course, will vary among readers. Because of gaps in my knowledge, I learned most from Mirto’s presentation of Dionysian and “Orphic” material: the gold lamellae, the Olbia bones, the Derveni papyrus (chap. 2, with the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient SatireCedric LittlewoodRalph M. Rosen. Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire. Classical Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiii + 294 pp. 4 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $55.This book ranges from pre-literary myths and rituals of abuse to the verse satire of Juvenal in pursuit of a poetics of mockery largely abstracted from the historical contexts of its production. We set (...) the various poetic modes of Greco-Roman mockery more successfully in their historical contexts, Rosen argues, with a synchronic appreciation of the literary phenomenon we recognize broadly as satire. The Roman practitioners of this famously home-grown genre themselves demand that we broaden our horizons: Persius, for example, prefaces his satires with fourteen lines of choliambics, while Horace (mis)represents his satiric predecessor Lucilius as deriving entirely from Old Comedy (Satires 1.4.1–7). Rosen’s study is bounded by the limits of poetry: Lucian’s comic sketches have no place in this book because they lack the “otherness” of poetic speech to demarcate them from the rhetoric of the everyday. This is a distinction with which I think one may valuably take issue—the prose of Petronius’ Satyricon hardly lacks markers of its own fictionality—but it is an important one for Rosen (see below on Callimachus, Iambus 1). Drama provides the fundamental model for the satiric posture: the poet, whether or not he plays a role himself in his comedy, stages a performance of mockery for an audience. Poetic mockery is a ritual act, and the chorus of Aristophanes’ Frogs (368–76) could draw an analogy between the abuse performed in one Dionysiac ceremony (the initiates’ procession to Eleusis) and in another (comic drama). How exactly comic mockery may have evolved from religious ritual is neither Aristophanes’ nor Rosen’s concern: their aim is to invoke the ritual of religious practice as a model for the conventions of art.Comic mockery is an ugly and potentially dangerous art. For his first case study, Rosen discusses the myth of Iambe, etymological kin to the iambus of poetic invective. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Iambe interrupts the grief of her mistress with jests ( 1, 202). Demeter laughs and ends her grieving fast. Rosen argues that Iambe’s comic interlude was abuse directed against the goddess who, with her laughing response, recognized the performance of mockery as something different from an act of hostility. Whether Demeter was the target of abuse or simply the audience of a breach of decorum is hard to determine from the text, but N. J. Richardson (The Homeric Hymn to Demeter [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974], 215) usefully records the parallel Alexandrian myth of Ascalabus, whom Demeter turned into a gecko because he laughed at her in the same circumstances. The fate of the obscenely joking Cercopes who are released [End Page 433] by a laughing Hercules rather than killed in anger provides another model not just for the restorative power of laughter but for the appropriate reaction to comic mockery. What, then, are we to make of Homer’s Thersites? Gregory Nagy argued (The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], 260–62) that the base and ugly Thersites personifies the poetry of blame. His depiction and his fate show this genre’s inferiority to the epic poetry of praise. For Rosen, although many poetic characters engage in the practice of blame, “there can only be one playing the role of blame poet... and the criterion for identifying him as such is the level of “righteousness” he can persuade an audience he has on his side” (76). This, in my view, is a very difficult argument to sustain. Rosen acknowledges that an inscribed audience (here the Achaeans) does not offer a secure guide to the righteousness of the speaker, that the high moral stance of a poetic mocker is typically compromised by irony and by comedy, and that the terminology of mocker and mocked is “labile and unstable” (116). Nevertheless, a satirist whose righteousness is only intermittently convincing (as is often the case) is to be seen... (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to increase our understanding of what archaic verse epitaphs meant to contemporary readers. Section I suggests their fundamental message was praise of the deceased, expressed in forms characteristic of poetic encomium in its broad, rhetorical sense, i.e., praise poetry. In section II, the conventions of encomium in the epitaphs are compared to the iconographic conventions of funerary art. I conclude that verse inscriptions and grave markers, not only communicate the same message of (...) praise, but do so in a formally parallel manner. Section III, drawing on Pindar as a preserver of archaic thinking, attributes the parallelism between verse epitaph and grave marker to their common debt to funerary ritual. The epigrams will be seen to share with their monuments the goal of memorializing this ritual. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece: Nondramatic Poetry in Its SettingAndré LardinoisEva Stehle. Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece: Nondramatic Poetry in Its Setting. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. xi 1 367 pp. Cloth, $39.50.Both gender and performance have been the focus of much research in Greek literature since the mid-1970s, although they usually have been studied by different sets of scholars. A quick gender (...) analysis shows that gender studies, so far, have attracted mainly female scholars (with the prominent exception of Jack Winkler), while the study of the performance contexts of early Greek literature has been dominated by men: Claude Calame, Bruno Gentili, and Wolfgang Rösler, to name but a few. Eva Stehle, for the first time, combines both approaches to present a new reading of various passages in archaic and classical Greek literature.The book consists of six chapters with an introduction and a brief conclusion. The introduction opens with six ancient reports about performances, some of which touch upon the staging or self-presentation of the performers. This self-presentation can encompass many characteristics, including the performers’ physical fitness, social status, wealth, or gender. Stehle argues that the latter was considered particularly important in antiquity and is nowadays most easily detectable, because it is reflected in the language of the texts. This gendered self-presentation of the performers in turn has to be situated within the specific context of the performance. Stehle recognizes three types of performances in early Greece to which she relates the three major genres of poetry: (1) community performances (chapters 1–3), reflected mostly in choral poetry, (2) performances by bards of hexameter poetry (chapter 4), and (3) symposia (chapter 5), where most monodic lyric together with elegy and iambos was performed. Chapter 6 is devoted to Sappho, whose love poetry, Stehle argues, “was designed to escape the tyranny of the performance culture” (323).Another important concept discussed in the introduction is that of “psychological efficacy” (19–21). This relates to the effect a performance is supposed to have on the audience, besides entertainment. In chapter 1, Stehle discusses the psychological efficacy of community poetry, which, she argues, is to renew the community and provide a unifying discourse. Community poetry is mostly, but not exclusively, choral. A chorus can function as both reflection and model of the community, which means that it can speak for or to the audience. Among the fragments Stehle treats in this chapter are Alkman fr. 1, the Swallow Song (PMG 848), the Athenian praise song for Demetrios Poliorketes, Pindar’s Paian 9, Tyrtaios’ Eunomia, Solon’s Salamis elegy, and Archilochos frr. 98–99. [End Page 633]Chapter 2 (“Women in Performance in the Community”) continues the analysis of Alkman fr. 1 and further discusses Alkman fr. 3, Pindar’s Daphnephoria (fr. 94b), Korinna fr. 655, other evidence for songs sung by parthenoi, evidence for performances by adult women (chapter 2.2), and finally a number of inscriptions with women as subjects (chapter 2.3). (Inscriptions are also discussed at the end of chapter 6.) There is, according to Stehle, something of a paradox in the representation of the community by women, who otherwise lack a public voice. This paradox is resolved in Alkman’s partheneia fragments by having the young women downplay the efficacy of their voice. The same holds true for the young women in Pindar’s Daphnephoria fragment. In Korinna fr. 655 the poem “does not limit or depreciate women’s ability to speak effectively” (103), but it is unclear if this is a choral song. Adult women staged themselves as producers of warriors and proper wives. In other words, “women performing communal poetry combined the function of providing reflection and model with a staging of their own subordinate status in the community” (113). Stehle finds in the inscriptions a more positive expression of women’s identities, which she attributes to the “self-sufficient authority” of writing (115).The male body was associated with martial strength and aggressiveness, qualities which could be displayed in armed dances like the pyrrhiche but in other contexts were problematic for addressing the community. Therefore several strategies were developed to mitigate the aggressive... (shrink)

Interpreters of archaic Greek epic poetry have long labored to explain the meaning of the semantically ambiguous phrase involving “tree (δρῦς) and/or rock (πέτρη).” The idiom appears three times in archaic epic: in the proem of Hesiod’s Theogony, during Hector’s deliberation about negotiating a truce in Iliad 22, and in Penelope’s speech to a disguised Odysseus in Odyssey 19. A tantalizingly similar, and equally unsolved idiom, rgm ‘ṣ w lḫšt ’abn, appears in the thirteenth-century Ugaritic Ba’al (...) Cycle found at Ras Shamra. Current scholarship agrees that this phrase connotes ideas of prophecy. This article argues that the phrase’s history can be traced further back to a metaphor describing the audio-visual phenomenon of lightning and thunder as the storm-god’s oracular speech. Crucial evidence for this account is found in Bronze Age material culture. (shrink)

In Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason Barry Sandywell outlined and defended a central place for reflexivity in the human sciences. In this second equally outstanding and challenging volume of Logological Investigations, he reconstructs the origins of "European" reflection. The author's central claim is that the world does not exist independently of us, but that it is constituted through the terms of our discursive categories. Rather than research being a triumphant exploration, it is more fully understood as agonized self-reflection (...) on the grounds of knowledge production. Sandywell argues that this approach has been inherent throughout Western philosophy and in so doing, he shows that the reflexive character of human experience in Western Culture can be traced through the desire for intelligibility that animated Greek drama, poetry, philosophy and science as explorations of the cosmos, body-politics and the soul. (shrink)

A history of the origins of the classical ideal of beauty in archaic Greece. 'To look like a Greek god' is proverbial for beauty today just as it was for Homer nearly three thousand years ago. In this book, Hugo Shakeshaft tells the untold story of beauty's inextricable link with the divine in this formative era of ancient Greek history (c.750-480 BCE). Through in-depth analysis of a wide array of ancient sources, the book offers a panoramic view (...) of the Archaic Greek world in arguing that ideas of beauty were fundamental to how Greeks thought about and worshipped their gods. Surveying everything from Homeric epic, lyric poetry, and votive inscriptions to vase-paintings, sculpture, and the architecture of Greek temples, Shakeshaft reveals how ideas and experiences of beauty structured human relations with the divine in Archaic Greece. Comparisons are made throughout the book with the literature, art, and architecture of the diverse cultures of the ancient Near East to clarify its insights into Archaic Greece. These comparisons highlight that the association of beauty and the divine has been at the heart of many societies throughout human history, despite its oversight in the lively debate about beauty in academia and the art world in the twenty-first century. With a novel contribution to this debate and the history of aesthetics, the book uncovers an aspect of ancient Greek history with an enduring legacy, showing how we still live with the cultural dialogue which originated in this period. (shrink)

Este artículo se dedica al estudio de Afrodita en los poemas del poeta mélico tardo-arcaico Baquílides, específicamente en el Fr.20 B, el Ditirambo 17 y en el Epinicio 5. Se toma como base la representación de la diosa en la mélica griega arcaica, con excepción de Píndaro, a fin de observar semejanzas y diferencias en su diseño en el poeta de Ceos y en el modo en que el erotismo figura en el pequeño corpus considerado, principalmente en el tercer texto (...) indicado. This article turns to the study of Aphrodite in the three melic poems of the late archaic Greek poet Bacchylides, where she is found: Fr. 20B, 17 th Dythiramb and 5 th Epinician ode. The background for the commentary will be the representation of the goddess especially in archaic Greek melic poetry, except for Pindar, and a comparative perspective will be sustained throughout, so that similarities as well as differences may be observed in the Cean poet's drawing of the goddess and in the way eroticism is present in the corpus defined for this paper - mainly in its third song. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the OdysseyErwin F. CookLillian Doherty. Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. viii 1 220 pp. Cloth, $37.50.Siren Songs makes a significant contribution to feminist literature on Homer. Most importantly, Doherty is able to show in detail how the very sensibilities that make Homer appealing to the modern reader can seduce the (...) unwary into accepting the poem’s androcentric frame of reference. If her book’s ideological model based on gender and class hierarchy leads to repeated imprecisions and reductionism, this affects its argument in detail, but not in outline.Doherty’s methodology is objectivist, assumes an essentialist definition of the female, and consciously avoids positioning the Odyssey in the context of archaic Greek gender constructions. One place where she at least acknowledges that the Odyssey originated in a specific culture exposes a problem some will have with this book: “It may be objected that my conclusions are hardly surprising given the aristocratic focus of early Greek epic and the patriarchal norms of archaic Greek society. In this context, it may be urged, the surprise is to see lower-class and female characters even this fully represented” (170). She responds that her conclusions refute arguments by Farron and Rose that in giving prominence to female and lower-class characters Homer makes an antiaristocratic statement. This tactic runs the risk of reducing her own efforts to a book-length refutation of a pair of articles.Many Homerists will also be surprised to read that “the production and reception of a narrative text is never a direct act of communication between the author and the external audience but a ‘bracketed’ or mediated communication” (87). Thus, the poem’s external audience is not “composed of living human beings, who have read and judged the epic since its creation, but... a hypothetical audience posited by the epic narrator” (19). Further, no true repetition exists in literature (182–83). These assertions derive from critical approaches to the modern novel, and although true to a certain extent of all literature they are arguably least true of poetry composed in performance using metrical formulae.Chapter 1 surveys scholarship on whether Penelope recognizes Odysseus before the mnesterophonia. Doherty argues that Penelope’s motivation remains obscure because of an accumulation of narrative indeterminacies created by multiple focalization (45–46; though cf. her apparent assumptions on 143). She lauds Felson-Rubin and Winkler for their insistence on regarding Penelope as an agent capable of acting in her own self-interest, and equal to her husband in metis. Yet they ultimately fail to stand outside the poem’s androcentric frame of [End Page 461] reference and to see that Penelope’s excellence is based on traits she shares with males. It thus becomes necessary to establish narrative openings that expose “instabilities within ideology” (52) or permit the reader “to project active and even subversive female subject positions” (63). Narrative redundancies serving to reinforce the androcentric frame must also be acknowledged, however, for opening the text may inadvertently render its androcentric frame more palatable.Chapters 2 and 3 reconstruct the poem’s internal and external audiences. Doherty argues that these audiences included women. Although Eumaeus’ ability to evaluate the beggar’s storytelling ability proves he is no stranger to epic performance, he “must be considered an ‘overhearer’ rather than a member of the regular audience” (72–73). Eumaeus can, however, support a very different view of class relationships in Homer: when Telemachus appears unexpectedly, Eumaeus kisses his eyes and greets him as a father greets a long-absent son, and Telemachus addresses him as atta; Eumaeus is able to buy a slave on his own; and he may have an advisory role at court since he says he used to question people claiming to have seen his master.The Nekuia is central to Doherty’s project in these chapters. Odysseus’ decision to pause after his catalogue of women divides the Nekuia “roughly along gender lines, and draws attention to the fact that the internal audience of Phaeacians is also marked for gender” (67). In her approval of Odysseus’ tale, Arete... (shrink)

Xenophanes of Colophon (fl. 530 BC) is widely regarded as the first skeptic in the history of Western philosophy, but the character of his skepticism as expressed in his fragment B 34 has long been a matter of debate. After reviewing the interpretations of B 34 defended by Hermann Fränkel, Bruno Snell, and Sir Karl Popper, I argue that B 34 is best understood in connection with a traditional view of the sources and limits of human understanding. If we hold (...) that mortal beings can achieve certain knowledge only with the assistance of divine powers, while rejecting any possibility of bridging the divine-human gap, a broad skepticism concerning the prospects for human knowledge becomes inevitable. It is therefore of some relevance that Xenophanes repudiated the practice of divination through signs (mantikê) and offered entirely naturalistic explanations of phenomena popularly regarded as indications of the divine will (thunder, lightning, eclipses, rainbows, etc.). (shrink)