Download or read book Reading the Victory Ode written by Peter Agócs and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-09 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of papers by international experts on one of the most paradoxical and influential poetic genres of classical antiquity.
Download or read book Myth Locality and Identity in Pindar s Sicilian Odes written by Virginia M. Lewis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Myth, Locality, and Identity argues that Pindar engages in a striking, innovative style of mythmaking that represents and shapes Sicilian identities in his epinician odes for Sicilian victors in the fifth century BCE. While Sicily has been thought to be lacking in local traditions for Pindar to celebrate, Lewis argues that the Sicilian odes offer examples of the formation of local traditions: the monster Typho whom Zeus defeated to become king of the gods, for example, now lives beneath Mt. Aitna; Persephone receives the island of Sicily as a gift from Zeus; and the Peloponnesian river Alpheos travels to Syracuse in pursuit of the local spring nymph Arethusa. By weaving regional and Panhellenic myth into the local landscape, as the book shows, Pindar infuses physical places with meaning and thereby contextualizes people, cities, and their rulers within a wider Greek framework. During this time period, Greek Sicily experienced a unique set of political circumstances: the inhabitants were continuously being displaced, cities were founded and resettled, and political leaders rose and fell from power in rapid succession. This book offers the first sustained analysis of myth in Pindar's odes for Sicilian victors across the island that accounts for their shared context. The nodes of myth and place that Pindar fuses in this poetry reinforce and develop a sense of place and community for citizens locally; at the same time, they raise the profile of physical sites and the cities attached to them for larger audiences across the Greek world. In addition to providing new readings of Pindaric odes and offering a model for the formation of Sicilian identities in the first half of the fifth century, the book contributes new insights into current debates on the relationship between myth and place in classical literature.
Download or read book Theatrical Reenactment in Pindar and Aeschylus written by Anna Uhlig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the songs of Pindar and Aeschylus share a "theatrical" spirit that illuminates choral performance in Classical Greece.
Download or read book Pindars sechste olympische Siegesode written by Zsolt Adorjani and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pindar’s Sixth Olympian Ode is considered one of the poet’s most brilliant victory odes. This is the first full-scale commentary on it. Adorjáni presents Greek text with critical apparatus, translation and metrical analysis. Three introductory chapters treat matters of history (background, date, performance) and literary criticism. Then follows a verse-by-verse commentary rooted in the tradition of philological exegesis, concentrating on grammatical, stylistic and interpretive features. Until now the Sixth Olympian has been praised chiefly for its magnificent and lucid presentation of the myth of Iamos, a seer of Arcadian origin and ancestor of the prophetic clan of the Iamidae. This commentary illuminates both the overwhelming depth of thought and the cunningly wrought structure of this masterpiece, contributing to a better understanding of Pindar’s verbal artistry. Pindars sechste olympische Ode ist einer der glänzendsten Siegesgesänge des Dichters. Hier wird der erste umfassende philologische Kommentar zum Gedicht vorgelegt. Adorjáni bietet einen griechischen Text mit kritischem Apparat, Übersetzung, metrischer Analyse und drei Einleitungskapiteln, die in die Probleme der Geschichtlichkeit (Hintergrund, Entstehungszeit, Aufführung) und der literarischen Interpretation hineinführen. Auf diesen Teil folgt ein von Vers zu Vers fortschreitender Kommentar, der gemäß den alten Traditionen der Texterklärung auf grammatische, stilistische und interpretatorische Fragen eingeht. Bisher wurde Olympie 6 zumeist als großartige und suggestive Erzählung des Mythos des Sehers Iamos, des Vorfahren der olympischen Iamiden, gewürdigt. Diesem Kommentar ist daran gelegen, die intrikate Gedankentiefe und vollkommenste Formkunst dieses Meisterwerks vor Augen zu führen.
Download or read book Eschatology in Antiquity written by Hilary Marlow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-29 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the rhetoric and practices surrounding views on life after death and the end of the world, including the fate of the individual, apocalyptic speculation and hope for cosmological renewal, in a wide range of societies from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Byzantine era. The 42 essays by leading scholars in each field explore the rich spectrum of ways in which eschatological understanding can be expressed, and for which purposes it can be used. Readers will gain new insight into the historical contexts, details, functions and impact of eschatological ideas and imagery in ancient texts and material culture from the twenty-fifth century BCE to the ninth century CE. Traditionally, the study of “eschatology” (and related concepts) has been pursued mainly by scholars of Jewish and Christian scripture. By broadening the disciplinary scope but remaining within the clearly defined geographical milieu of the Mediterranean, this volume enables its readers to note comparisons and contrasts, as well as exchanges of thought and transmission of eschatological ideas across Antiquity. Cross-referencing, high quality illustrations and extensive indexing contribute to a rich resource on a topic of contemporary interest and relevance. Eschatology in Antiquity is aimed at readers from a wide range of academic disciplines, as well as non-specialists including seminary students and religious leaders. The primary audience will comprise researchers in relevant fields including Biblical Studies, Classics and Ancient History, Ancient Philosophy, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Art History, Late Antiquity, Byzantine Studies and Cultural Studies. Care has been taken to ensure that the essays are accessible to undergraduates and those without specialist knowledge of particular subject areas.
Download or read book Textual Events written by Felix Budelmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events'. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems' formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within in them, but as well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.
Download or read book The Politics of Identity in Greek Sicily and Southern Italy written by Mark R. Thatcher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This analysis of the relationship between collective identities and politics in ancient Greece focuses on four key types of identity - polis identity, ethnicity (e.g., Dorian or Achaean), regional, and Greek - and places these multiple and flexible self-perceptions at the center of a new account of politics in the Greek West.
Download or read book Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry written by Thomas J. Nelson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-30 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a new view of literary history by demonstrating how the earliest known Greek poets signposted their allusions to tradition.
Download or read book Approaches to Greek Myth written by Lowell Edmunds and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Segal, on psychoanalytic interpretations.
Download or read book Pindar Song and Space written by Richard Neer and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking study of the interaction of poetry, performance, and the built environment in ancient Greece. Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Classics by the Association of American Publishers In this volume, Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke develop a new, integrated approach to classical Greece: a "lyric archaeology" that combines literary and art-historical analysis with archaeological and epigraphic materials. At the heart of the book is the great poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his magnificent odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other competitions. Unlike the quintessentially personal genre of modern lyric, these poems were destined for public performance by choruses of dancing men. Neer and Kurke go further to show that they were also site-specific: as the dancers moved through the space of a city or a sanctuary, their song would refer to local monuments and landmarks. Part of Pindar's brief, they argue, was to weave words and bodies into elaborate tapestries of myth and geography and, in so doing, to re-imagine the very fabric of the city-state. Pindar's poems, in short, were tools for making sense of space. Recent scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology. But Neer and Kurke show that these distinctions are artificial. Poems, statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and buildings worked together as a "suite" of technologies for organizing landscapes, cityscapes, and territories. Studying these technologies in tandem reveals the procedures and criteria by which the Greeks understood relations of nearness and distance, "here" and "there"—and how these ways of inhabiting space were essentially political. Rooted in close readings of individual poems, buildings, and works of art, Pindar, Song, and Space ranges from Athens to Libya, Sicily to Rhodes, to provide a revelatory new understanding of the world the Greeks built—and a new model for studying the ancient world.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Tragedy in Antiquity written by Emily Wilson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments, and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different visions of what the most serious kind of dramatic story might be, and the most appropriate ways of telling those stories on stage. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual, and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
Download or read book Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture written by Georgia Petridou and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ancient Greece, epiphanies were embedded in cultural production, and employed by the socio-political elite in both perpetuating pre-existing power-structures and constructing new ones. This volume is the first comprehensive survey of the history of divine epiphany as presented in the literary and epigraphic narratives of the Greek-speaking world. It demonstrates that divine epiphanies not only reveal what the Greeks thought about their gods; they tell us just as much about the preoccupations, the preconceptions, and the assumptions of ancient Greek religion and culture. In doing so, it explores the deities who were prone to epiphany and the contexts in which they manifested themselves, as well as the functions (narratives and situational) they served, addressing the cultural specificity of divine morphology and mortal-immortal interaction. Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture re-establishes epiphany as a crucial mode in Greek religious thought and practice, underlines its centrality in Greek cultural production, and foregrounds its impact on both the political and the societal organization of the ancient Greeks.
Download or read book Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B C written by Kathryn A. Morgan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-02 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 composed by Pindar for the Sicilian tyrant were part of an extensive cultural program that included athletic competition, coinage, architecture, sanctuary dedication, city foundation, and much more. In the tumultuous years following the Persian invasion of Greece in 480, elite Greek leaders and their cities struggled to capitalize on the Greek victory and to define themselves as free peoples who triumphed over the threat of Persian monarchy. Pindar's victory odes are an important contribution to Hieron's goal of panhellenic pre-eminence, redescribing contemporary tyranny as an instantiation of golden-age kingship and consonant with best Greek tradition. In a delicate process of cultural legitimation, the poet's praise deploys athletic victories as a signs of more general preeminence. Three initial chapters set the stage by presenting the history and culture of Syracuse under the Deinomenid tyrants, exploring issues of performance and patronage, and juxtaposing Hieron to rival Greek leaders on the mainland. Subsequent chapters examine in turn all Pindar's preserved poetry for Hieron and members of his court, and contextualizes this poetry by comparing it to the songs written for Hieron by Pindar's poetic contemporary, Bacchylides. These odes develop a specifically "tyrannical" mythology in which a hero from the past enjoys unusual closeness with the gods, only to bring ruin on him or herself by failing to manage this closeness appropriately. Such negative exemplars counterbalance Hieron's good fortune and present the dangers against which he must (and does) protect himself by regal virtue. The readings that emerge are marked by exceptional integration of literary interpretation with the political/historical context.
Download or read book Pindar in Sicily written by Virginia Lewis and published by . This book was released on 2021-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Horace s Epodes written by Philippa Bather and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horace's Epodes rank among the most under-valued texts of the early Roman principate. Abrasive in style and riddled with apparent inconsistencies, the Epodes have divided critics from the outset, infuriating and delighting them in equal measure. This collection of essays on the Epodes by new and established scholars seeks to overturn this work's ill-famed reputation and to reassert its place as a valid and valued member of Horace's literary corpus. Building upon a recent surge in scholarly interest in the Epodes, the volume goes one step further by looking beyond the collection itself to highlight the importance of intertext, context, and reception. Covering a wide range of topics including the iambic tradition and aspects of gender, it begins with a consideration of the influences of Greek iambic upon the Epodes and ends with a discussion on their reception during the seventeenth century and beyond. By focusing on the connections that can be drawn between the Epodes and other (ancient) works, as well as between the Epodes themselves, the volume will appeal to new and seasoned readers of the poems. In doing so it demonstrates that this smallest, and seemingly most insignificant, of Horace's works is worthy of a place alongside the much-lauded Satires and Odes.
Download or read book Mercury s Wings written by Richard J. A. Talbert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mercury's Wings: Exploring Modes of Communication in the Ancient World is the first-ever volume of essays devoted to ancient communications. Comparable previous work has been mainly confined to articles on aspects of communication in the Roman empire. This set of 18 essays with an introduction by the co-editors marks a milestone, therefore, that demonstrates the importance and rich further potential of the topic. The authors, who include art historians, Assyriologists, Classicists and Egyptologists, take the broad view of communications as a vehicle not just for the transmission of information, but also for the conduct of religion, commerce, and culture. Encompassed within this scope are varied purposes of communication such as propaganda and celebration, as well as profit and administration. Each essay deals with a communications network, or with a means or type of communication, or with the special features of religious communication or communication in and among large empires. The spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries of the volume take in the Near East as well as Greece and Rome, and cover a period of some 2,000 years beginning in the second millennium BCE and ending with the spread of Christianity during the last centuries of the Roman Empire in the West. In all, about one quarter of the essays deal with the Near East, one quarter with Greece, one quarter with Greece and Rome together, and one quarter with the Roman empire and its Persian and Indian rivals. Some essays concern topics in cultural history, such as Greek music and Roman art; some concern economic history in both Mesopotamia and Rome; and some concern traditional historical topics such as diplomacy and war in the Mediterranean world. Each essay draws on recent work in the theory of communications.
Download or read book The Hidden Chorus written by L. A. Swift and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-01-07 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hidden Chorus investigates the relationship between the chorus of Greek tragedy and other types of choral song in Greek society. Choruses performed on a range of occasions in Greek culture, ranging from private weddings and funerals to large-scale religious festivals, yet the relationship between these everyday or 'ritual' choruses and the choruses of tragedy has never been systematically examined. L. A. Swift discusses choruses from five ritual genres: paian (religious songs of celebration or healing), epinikion (songs for athletic victors), partheneia (songs for the transitions of young girls), hymenaios (wedding song), and thrênos (funerary song), and explores how these choral forms are evoked in tragedy. By examining the relationship between tragic and non-tragic choral song, she not only provides new insights into individual plays, but also enriches our understanding of the role poetry and song played in Greek life.
