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)

The article deals with a hitherto largely neglected group of poetic texts that is characterized by the representation of the vicissitudes and deeds of a single hero through a third-person omniscient authorial voice, henceforth called ‘aretalogical poetry’. I want to demonstrate that in terms of form, contents, intertextual ‘self-awareness’ and long-term influence, aretalogical poetry qualifies as a fully-fledged epic genre comparable to bucolic or didactic poetry. In order not to blur my argument, I will focus on heroic aretalogies, and (...) on Heracleids and Theseids in particular, because of their prominence in the minds of ancient literary critics. In the case of Heraclean aretalogies, it is expedient to distinguish further between aretalogies of ‘epic’ and ‘lyric epic’. (shrink)

This is a major study of conceptions of selfhood and personality in Homer and Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. The focus is on the norms of personality in Greek psychology and ethics. Gill argues that the key to understanding Greek thought of this type is to counteract the subjective and individualistic aspects of our own thinking about the person. He defines an "objective-participant" conception of personality, symbolized by the idea of the person as an interlocutor in a series (...) of psychological and ethical dialogues. (shrink)

This collection of essays sheds new light on the relationship between two of the main drivers of intellectual discourse in ancient Greece: the epic tradition and the Sophists. The contributors show how throughout antiquity the epic tradition proved a flexible instrument to navigate new political, cultural, and philosophical contexts. The Sophists, both in the Classical and the Imperial age, continuously reconfigured the value of epic poetry according to the circumstances: using epic myths allowed the Sophists to (...) present themselves as the heirs of traditional education, but at the same time this tradition was reshaped to encapsulate new questions that were central to the Sophists' intellectual agenda. This volume is structured chronologically, encompassing the ancient world from the Classical Age through the first two centuries AD. The first chapters, on the First Sophistic, discuss pivotal works such as Gorgias' Encomium of Helen and Apology of Palamedes, Alcidamas' Odysseus or Against the Treachery of Palamedes, and Antisthenes' pair of speeches Ajax and Odysseus, as well as a range of passages from Plato and other authors. The volume then moves on to discuss some of the major works of literature from the Second Sophistic dealing with the epic tradition. These include Lucian's Judgement of the Goddesses and Dio Chrysostom's orations 11 and 20, as well as Philostratus' Heroicus and Imagines. (shrink)

Although the influence of Homer on Western literature has long commanded critical attention, little has been written on how various generations of readers have found menaing in his texts. These seven essays explore the ways in which the Illiad and the Odyssey have been read from the time of Homer through the Renaissance. By asking what questions early readers expected the texts to answer and looking at how these expectations changed over time, the authors clarify the position of the Illiad (...) and the Odyssey in the intellectual world of antiqueity while offering historical insight into the nature of reading. The collection surveys the entire field of preserved ancient interpretations of Homer, beginning with the fictional audiences portrayed within the poems themselves, proceedings to readings by Aristotle, the Stoics, and Aristarchus and Crates, and culminating in the spritiualized allegorical reading current among Platonists of the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. The influence of these ancient interpretations is then examined in Byzantium and in the Latin West during the Renaissance. Contributors to this volume are Robert Browning, Anthony Grafton, Robert Lamberton, A.A. Long, James Porter, Nicholas Richardson, and Charles Segal. Robert Lamberton is Assistant Professor of Classics and John J. Keaney is Professor of Classics, both at Princeton University. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This paper examines the distribution of thematic infinitive endings in early Greek epic in the context of the long-standing debate about the transmission and development of Homeric epic diction. There are no aorist infinitives in - in Homer which would scan as -before a consonant or caesura (for example *). It is argued that this artificially ending - should be viewed as an actual analogical innovation of the poetic language, resulting from a proportional analogy to the futures. (...) The total absence of aoristic - in Hesiod is unlikely to be coincidental: the analogical form must have been the product of a specifically East Ionic Kunstsprache, and so could have been simply unknown in some other Ionian school of epic poetry where Hesiod was trained. Finally, the striking avoidance of anapaestic aorist infinitives in - is argued to be explained better under the approach to the Aeolic elements in Homeric diction than under the theory. (shrink)

How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods. Seaford argues (...) that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric by David SansoneJon P. HeskDavid Sansone, Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. xi + 258 pp. Cloth $99.95.The central claim of this book is that the development of the art of rhetoric in fifth-century Greece was directly inspired by the revolutionary new genre of tragic drama. This entails a radical departure from what Sansone (...) calls the “standard view” of the origins of Greek rhetoric. As Ruth Scodel has recently and quite rightly pointed out, however, it would be more accurate to call it the “traditional view” (Scodel, Bryn Mawr Classcial Review 2013.06.16). The “standard” view of most of us is to be agnostic about the alleged Sicilian “origins” of rhetorical education and “handbooks” which we find in various ancient sources.Sansone’s thesis, while undoubtedly bold and original, is not completely unexpected. It was only a matter of time before the tragedians became “first inventors” of rhetoric given that some scholars now argue that Tisias and Corax probably did not even exist and that the output of Gorgias and Antiphon is best described as “pre-disciplinary” rather than an instantiation of the discipline of “rhetoric” itself. In other words, Sansone’s argument dovetails nicely with the long-held view, particularly associated with the work of Thomas Cole and Edward Schiappa, that proper rhetoric does not really exist before it is given its name (rhētorikē) in the fourth century.How could tragedy possibly beget rhetoric? Sansone’s answer is ingenious. Because drama presents embodied characters before the eyes of its audience, it is radically different from narrative forms such as epic poetry or lyric. In the latter format, only one character can speak at any one time. In tragedy, the audience also pays attention to the characters on stage who are present but not speaking. This focus on interlocutors’ simultaneous reactions as well as the speaker himself is dubbed “the counterpoint.” For Sansone, this innovation goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Greek texts nearly always describe the audience of narrative forms as “hearers” while the audience of drama are spectators or “viewers.” Sansone gives a good account of the way in which the tragedians can be felt to play with audience expectations through drama’s capacity to direct their focus towards silent or expressive reactions which are simultaneous with another character’s speech. He also writes well on the way in which tragedy entails the dimunition of a Muse-inspired authorial “poet’s voice” in favour of a plurality of characters’ viewpoints. The upshot here is that the playwright is required to compose speeches for characters who are often in a state of conflict, to use in interaction with one another, and before an audience in the theater. For Sansone, this fresh [End Page 155] dynamic is “sufficient to account for the self-conscious theorizing about forms of argumentation that is the essential feature of formal rhetoric” (x).It seems silly to deny some credence to this thesis. Sansone does not discuss the early tragedians’ possible interactions with other elite communicators beyond the thought that Gorgias and his predecessors may have had direct exposure to Aeschylus in Sicily. But one can imagine that politician-orators like Cimon, Themistocles, and Pericles or litigants and intellectuals who predated Antiphon were interested in, and influenced by, the tragedians’ discipline of writing arguments in the voice of a character, not to mention the related requirement to imagine what another character or internal audience of characters might say in reply. There must have been some early discussions in which these people talked about techniques of delivery, persuasion, and argumentation at some level of general principle, self-consciousness, and in relation to shared imperatives between their respective fields. As Sansone shows well, Aeschylus Suppliants 191–203 betrays some self-awareness of the playwright’s ethopoetic mission. This speech from Danaus can also be seen as a moment of quasi-rhetorical instruction.But there is an unassailable problem with the idea that tragedy’s basic formal properties and dynamics constituted the sole driving force behind the invention of rhetorical discourse. Aside from... (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)

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: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)

The verb λάω is attested in two passages of early epic poetry, Homeric Hymn to Hermes 360, where the infant Hermes is hiding in a dark cave, and τ 229 ff., of a hound seizing a fawn on the brooch of Odysseus. Of the several meanings suggested by the ancient lexicographers for λάω, seeing, gazing, or crying, screeching would suit. These senses recur in their explanations of, with gripping or devouring as additional possibilities. The most extensive modern treatment of (...) λάω is by Leumann, who explains it as a present falsely formed from the perfect λ⋯ληkα, and originally intended to describe the cry of a bird of prey. The unfamiliarity of the form led to its being associated later on with the sharp-sightedness of such birds, as well as with the bark of a hound fastening on its quarry. (shrink)

In an interesting paper read some time ago to the Cambridge Philological Society , H. J. M. Milne analysed the first Ode of Sappho and showed that it is constructed according to those principles of poetical form which we should expect to find in the work of so delicate a Greek artist. If more of these lyrics had survived in their entirety, the task of expounding the technique of Greek poetry would be simpler than it is, because naturally (...) the principles are more easily grasped in a short lyric than in epic or drama. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.2 (2000) 324-328 [Access article in PDF] Michael C. J. Putnam. Virgil's Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. xii 1 257 pp. Cloth, $35. This is a book about ekphrasis, about the Aeneid, about ancient Greek and Latin literature, about poetry and poetics, and about the ways in which literature can affect the way we (...) live our lives. But most of all, it is a tremendous book on the Aeneid.The six chapters focus on notable points of ekphrasis: Dido's Murals, the Cloak of Cloanthus, Daedalus' Sculptures, Silvia's Stag, the Shield of Aeneas, and the Baldric of Pallas. The dominant figure characterizing ekphrasis in the Aeneid is synecdoche: that is, ekphrasis, Putnam shows us, serves as a mise en abîme in the Aeneid, in which the circularity of ekphrasis both interrupts and comments on the narrative linearity of epic (97, 204, passim). Ekphrasis and epic complement and analogize one another, and therein Virgil is teaching us about major themes of the Aeneid. The most abstract of these themes can perhaps be paraphrased as follows: epic poetry is linear, historical, teleological, and temporal; ekphrasis, something of a lyric mode within epic, is circular, repetitious, and atemporal. The linearity of history becomes a falsifying teleology, a deceptive myth of progress. This is counterbalanced by the ekphrases; their circularity, both in form and content, points to the circular, cyclical nature of history--there is, in the end, no progress (see, e.g., 31, 42, 46, 61, 154-55, 209).Most of what I think is important about ekphrasis is in this book; moreover, much that I had never considered before now seems obvious, after reading it. I cannot, however, summarize the book, and what follows is an exhortation, rather than an outline. The force of Putnam's analysis does not lend itself well to summary, even his own--it would be a mistake to read merely his introduction and conclusion. Reading Putnam I am reminded of William Blake's Assumption of Total Significance, as named and brought to us again by the linguist Háj Ross: this is the assumption that any and every aspect of a text (or other work of art) has the potential to be of the utmost importance. Putnam proves this by his own practice, tracing threads of meaning and resonance from the specific details of the language of the text, with interpretation both bold and securely grounded. In doing so, he shows and recommends a fruitful, almost Emersonian, faith in the individual passage as a microcosm (as synecdoche, as a mise en abîme), a faith borne out in spades by his analysis. At times, some readers will not accept his interpretations, but this is not a problem. Putnam invites [End Page 324] us to go with him on a slow, careful walk through the Aeneid; if we do not see what he sees, that is fine; but he tells us carefully, forcefully, and with great clarity why he himself sees it. Those who are rapid readers may thus not understand the significance of this book and may likely give it short shrift: the best of it cannot be skimmed. But then such rapid readers are very unlikely to understand or care about poetry, especially Virgilian poetry. The details of Virgil's language and the detail of Putnam's discussion are what will, in William Carlos Williams's phrase, "startle us anew."It is most useful, then, to give a sample, but it is not easy to choose. To my mind, the most compelling chapter is that on Daedalus. The association of Virgil and Daedalus is powerfully illustrated; Putnam argues that in Daedalus Virgil is giving us his own "spiritual and psychic" biography as an artist. Neither artist can idealize, neither can bring to completeness, neither can accept the tempting comfort of beauty, the "veneer of charm over terrible truths," and neither can help but see "nature's final pyrrhic triumph over art" (e.g., 84, 91, 94, 95). I quote an... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Epic and Tragic Music: The Union of the Arts in the Eighteenth CenturyJoshua BillingsI. The Union of the Arts in WeimarAround 1800 in Weimar, thought on Greek tragedy crystallized around the union of speech, music, and gesture—what Wagner would later call the Gesamtkunstwerk. Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottfried Herder both found something lacking in modern spoken theater in comparison with ancient tragedy’s synthesis of the arts. Schiller’s (...) 1803 “Trauerspiel mit Chören,” Die Braut von Messina, represents a radical experiment in recreating the ancient union of the arts.1 The Greek tragic chorus, revived in Schiller’s drama, becomes the modern locus for this union. In a preface appended to the published version of the play, Schiller writes,The tragic work of poetry first becomes a whole through its theatrical performance: the poet only gives the words; music and dance must be added as well to enliven them. As long as the chorus lacks this powerful sensory accompaniment, so long will it appear in the economy of a tragedy as an alien element, a foreign body, a retardation.2 [End Page 99]Exactly contemporary (and possibly in response), Herder’s discussion of drama in his journal Adrastea similarly views the union of the arts in ancient tragedy as a corrective for modern drama:3A Greek who attended our tragedy [Trauerspiel], used to the musical voice of his own, would have to find in it a sad play [trauriges Spiel]. “How wordy-mute,” he would say, “how dull and soundless! Have I stepped into a decorated grave? You shout and sigh and bluster! Move your arms, strain your facial features, reason, declaim; but does your voice and feeling never become song? Do you not miss the strength of this demonic expression? Do your rhythms, your iambs never urge you on to the accents of the true language of the gods?”4The focus on media distinguishes these Weimar discussions of tragedy both from the Jena aesthetics of the Schlegel brothers and from the Idealist “philosophy of the tragic” already underway in the works of Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel.5 Though both Schiller and Herder are relatively indifferent to dance, their writings reflect strong interests in music.6 Their considerations [End Page 100] of tragedy show a close engagement with the sensory experience of drama that is unusual for its time, and has little precedent in Germany.For Schiller’s late poetics, the union of words, music, and gesture is a means of radically dividing the experience of theater from daily life. The tragic chorus “should be for us a living wall, which tragedy sets up around itself in order to close itself off wholly from the real world.”7 It “justifies the tragic poet in this raising of tone, which fills the ear, which strains the spirit, which broadens the whole mind.”8 Musical speech, Schiller argues, allows for an expression that transcends conventional language and quotidian existence. Schiller had hoped “to let [the choral intermezzos] be recited in the way of song and to accompany them with an instrument,” though his wish went unfulfilled in the first, and subsequent performances.9 Yet even after relinquishing the real possibility of a union of the arts in performances of Braut, Schiller upheld it as an ideal in his preface.Herder is remembered today primarily for his elaboration of an organic historicism, which understands cultural phenomena according to the circumstances of their creation. Yet his concern was more than merely historical; especially in the Adrastea, he continually sought guidance for the present in the events of the past. A contemporary, writing shortly after Herder’s death, saw the two orientations, historical and critical, as equally important: investigation of the past was intended as “a didactic or warning image” for his own time.10 The guiding idea of the journal was similarly educative, based on Herder’s understanding of Adrastea as a principle of justice and moderation.11 In Herder’s thought, as in most writing on ancient literature of the eighteenth century, there is no absolute division between scholarly and critical concerns: the study of ancient works was both an end in itself and a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and ArtT. H. CarpenterMichael J. Anderson. The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. xii 1 283 pp. 21 figs. Cloth, $75. (Oxford Classical Monographs)The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and Art presents three extended essays on aspects of the Ilioupersis. The first, based on the Iliad, the Odyssey, (...) and surviving fragments of the lost epics, is an analysis of correlations between events from the fall of Troy and the body of epic material, correlations which can be signaled by narrative continuity, structural and compositional continuity (a neoanalytic tool), and/or allusion. The second essay focuses on three tragedies (Aischylos’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Andromache and Troades) in an attempt to see “how the tragedians further developed the mythic network constructed by the epic poets” (106). The third essay is a study of composite images of the Ilioupersis in Greek art, with a particular focus on Attic painted vases. Anderson’s underlying thesis is that elements of the Ilioupersis exert “a centripetal gravitational force” within the body of interconnected stories that comprise the epic cycle with “its grip extending deep into episodes at both ends of the saga and beyond” (102).The originality of the work, as well as the strengths and weakness of the approach in part 1, is illustrated by Anderson’s discussion of the tale of the wooden horse and the abduction of Helen as correlative episodes. Noting that both in Proklos’ summary of the Kypria and in the Iliad (5.59–64) reference is made to the building of ships for Paris’ voyage to Sparta, Anderson argues that “in conception, manufacture, and deployment, the horse is a precise narrative parallel to [those] ships” (20). The underlying narrative link is the “simple complementarity between beginning and end” (25). The building of the ships engenders conflict, the building of the horse brings the conflict to a close; both function as tools to capture Helen. This narrative link, he argues, is supported by a complex series of analogies. Both building processes (horse and ships) are undertaken for the specific occasions, both are inspired by goddesses, both have architects who earn fame from the projects, and both are accompanied by mixed tones of celebration and doom. Furthermore, since no mention of the building of the “thousand ships” of the Achaian fleet survives, “the building of Paris’ ships stands alone in the remains of the Trojan cycle as the most significant building project of its kind” (22). The horse, Anderson claims, is “a kind of ship in disguise”—both are large wooden structures designed to carry men—and the poets “sculpted the horse to resemble the ships and vice versa.” [End Page 453]Attractive as this correlation is, much of its strength hangs on the assumption that the building of Paris’ ships was treated in some considerable detail in the lost works of the epic cycle. Anderson argues that the ships “might easily have provided material for a substantial slice of poetry” (21) and that the launching of Paris’ ships “probably received a fair share of attention from the poets” (21), but “might easily” and “probably” make a weak base for such a powerful hypothesis. While I admire the ingenuity of the argument, as an archaeologist I crave more solid evidence to support it.Perhaps the greatest danger of such a study, focusing as it does on the relationship between myth and myth, comes from the lack of any external reference that might allow the writer to check, on occasion, the validity of perceived thematic or structural parallels. How does he determine when the links he sees are expressions of his own brilliance—like the creation of a new poem—and when they are links that the poets intended or contemporary Greeks might have perceived, which is presumably a goal of a scholarly work such as this? Anderson is aware of some of these dangers—early on he notes the risk of losing any “immediate social relevance” (10)—but he has difficulty guarding against them.He devotes fully one-third of the book to the study of images. Certainly no discussion... (shrink)

The focus of this essay is on Xenophanes’ criticism of anthropomorphic representation of the gods, famously sounding like a declaration of war against a constituent part of the Greek religion, and adopting terms and a tone that are unequalled amongst “pre-Socratic” authors for their directness and explicitness. While the main features of Xenophanes’ polemic are well known thanks to some of the most studied fragments of the pre-Socratic tradition, a different line of enquiry from the usual one is attempted (...) by considering the multi-layered background of the religious beliefs revolving around the idea that the gods have human form as outlined in the tradition of epic poetry or represented in cult statues: in the light of this consideration Xenophanes’ text can take on some new characteristics. In the second part of the article, emphasis is put on the importance of the correlation Xenophanes established between the issue of the appearance of the gods and that of the certainty of knowledge, in terms that have exerted tremendous influence on later thought, most notably on Plato in the Timaeus. (shrink)

Two Reasons to Study Ancient Greek Philosophy Ancient Greek philosophy began with Thales, who correctly predicted an eclipse that occurred in 585 BCE, and culminated in the monumental works of Aristotle, who died in 322.1 (Unless otherwise noted, all dates in this book are BCE.) The simple fact that these thinkers lived over 2,000 years ago should provoke a question: in the age of the microchip and the engineered gene, why bother with them? One good answer immediately springs (...) to mind: to become educated. The Greeks were the intellectual ancestors of western culture. They laid the foundations for all future developments in the natural sciences, medicine, mathematics, history, architecture, sculpture, tragic and comic drama, lyric and epic poetry, as well as philosophy. To the extent that one must know one's heritage in order to know oneself, it is imperative to study the ancient Greeks. (shrink)

A major desconstructive reading of Homer's Iliad by the well-known translator of Derrida and Lyotard.

Introduction The Odyssey is a poem of paradox. On the one hand, it is the "most teleologi- cal of epics,"' a story of a man's desire, long frustrated but ...

The Pseudo-Plutarchan De musica provides us with the oldest history of Greek lyric poetry from the pre-Homeric epic poetry to the lyric poetry of the fourth century B.C. Importantly, the work contains also an evaluation of the role of music in the process of educating and training the citizens. Ps. Plutarch considers the καλόν in the aesthetic and ethical sense, which makes it incompatible with the καινόν dictated by the new poetic and musical season.

European thought begins with the Greeks. Scientific and philosophic thinking--the pursuit of truth and the grasping of unchanging principles of life--is a historical development, an achievement; and, as Bruno Snell writes in The Discovery of the Mind, nothing less than a revolution. The Greeks did not take mental resources already at their disposal and merely map out new subjects for discussion and investigation. In poetry, drama, and philosophy they in fact discovered the human mind. The stages in man's gradual understanding (...) of himself are revealed in the course of ancient literature from Homer to Virgil. A rational view of the nature of man slowly established itself in the creations of epic and lyric poetry, tragedy and literary criticism, pre-Socratic thought, and early Greek ethics all the way to the discovery of humanitas and the spiritual landscape of Virgil's Arcadia. The Discovery of the Mind is a landmark work in tracing this evolution of consciousness--one of the distinguishing characteristics of the history of man. (shrink)

The most illustrious tradition of romantic poetry on oriental subjects, from the Westöstlicher Diwan to Rückert, Platen, Hugo and Leconte de Lisle, was inspired essentially by Indian and Persian epic, lyric and gnomic poetry, referring only to a minor degree to the ancient poetry of the Arabs—although it is precisely Rückert to whom we are indebted for a version of the Hamâsa, a famous anthology of pagan Arabic poetry. Goethe approached this anthology through the versions of Jones, described it (...) briefly in the “Notes and Commentary” to the Diwan, and among other sections retold one tale splendidly in verse: the “Song of Vengeance” of Taâbbata Sharran. Here the force of his genius lifted him well above the bristling Latin of Freytag, through whom he had come to know the song, and brought him very close in lyrical intuition to the original of this masterpiece of debated authenticity. But on the whole, the poetic heritage of the ancient Arabs was not adequately echoed in the literature of the romantic age. Rückert himself, inspired by pagan Arabic poetry, is read by few people today; and the poetry that was his model is studied rather by philologists, for its documentary value. Theodor Noeldeke, at the beginning of his classic study of the Mu'allakat, declared frankly: “It is questionable whether the aesthetic pleasure provided by the study of ancient Arabic poetry is worth the great pains required even to approach an understanding of the same.” It is difficult to stand in opposition to the authority of the “old master” of German orientalists, who confessed that “the more he studied the Semites, the more he loved the Greeks.” Even the most humble author of these lines dares to appropriate for himself the lines of Noeldeke; and yet, beyond every comparison, which cannot help resulting unfavorably for the ancient poets of the desert, he who knows how to love and seek out poetry will find in them authentic artistic values. Even the harsh pagan song can in certain passages interest us, fill us with enthusiasm, and move us. (shrink)

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete's thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete's life-long engagement with (...) one thinker in particular -Plato. The Platonic dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of that periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers. The core of The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays Benardete produced in his last years; the collection provides at the same time an entry into that world through some of Benardete's earliest articles on Plato and on Greek poetry. Benardete's earlier path of close textual analysis always reflected his intimate philosophic dialogue with the thinker in whose work he was immersed; later, he drew on resources of erudition acquired over a lifetime to present a broader picture, on a theme like the dialectics of eros or freedom and necessity. In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic thinkers. He had become increasingly aware that the discovery of philosophy through the "Socratic turn" was really the rediscovery of an understanding already present in some form in the Greek poets and that awareness guided his last years of study of the pre-Socratic philosophers. According to the standard view of the history of Greek philosophy, the Socratic turn, with its focus on "the human things," marks a point of radical change in philosophy's history. Benardete's late studies led him to the conclusion that the kind of pivotal reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark of what it means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or Parmenides is a genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent that a Socratic turn can be found in some form within his own thought. At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what it means to be "post-Platonic." As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, the Platonic notion of a "second sailing" gave Benardete a key to the relation between Greek and Latin thought - and with that to a comprehensive under-standing of antiquity-as it did to the relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Ronna Burger teaches philosophy at Tulane University; she is the author of The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth from St. Augustine's Press and Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics. Michael Davis teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College; he authored Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics and, with Seth Benardete, translated Aristotle - On Poetics, both from St. Augustine's Press. Burger and Davis collaborated on editing Seth Benardete's Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women Poets and the Origin of the Greek Hexameter W. ROBERT CONNOR A very considerable question has arisen, as to what was the origin of poetry. —Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.57 i. a road trip with pausanias Tennyson called the dactylic hexameter “the stateliest measure / ever moulded by the lips of man,” but he did not say whose lips first did the moulding. Despite much arguing (...) we do not know for sure where it came from, or who developed it. But some ancient Greeks did, or thought they did. For them, the hexameter came with a personal history, a legendary one to be sure, but no less powerful for that. The legend, moreover, started with a woman poet. The trail that leads to this is a long and devious one, but a good guide presents himself, Pausanias, author of A Greek Guidebook (Hellados Periegesis). Although he is now valued primarily as a quarry cordoned off for topographers and archaeologists, he had a strong interest in poets, especially women ones. These include Sappho, of course, the valiant Telesilla of Argos of whom he tells two stories (2.20.8, and 2.35.2), and Praxilla of Sicyon (3.13.5). In his account of Boeotia he mentions another woman poet of the fifth century before our era, Corinna of Tanagra. She, he says (9.22.3f.), once defeated Pindar in a poetry contest, and was, he thinks, the most beautiful woman of her time, judging by a statue of her he had seen. He also speaks of Myro of Byzantium (9.5.8). Pausanias was confident that she had written epic and elegiac verse. arion 27.2 fall 2019 Pausanias chooses, moreover, to end his work with an enigmatic story about another woman poet, Anyte of Tegea. He had not mentioned her in his lengthy account of her home town in the mountains of Arcadia, but now her story seems to speak to him. It is set at a ruined shrine of Asclepius near the port town of Naupactus. The reason that Anyte had come there was a strange one: She had had, he says, a vision—not a dream, but a real vision—at the end of which she found herself holding a sealed tablet addressed to one Phalysius of Naupactus. He was, it turns out, a prosperous citizen of the town, but was going blind. Anyte made the journey, surely not an easy one, and delivered the tablet. As soon as Phalysius broke its seal, he found he could make out the letters—a wondrous improvement in his vision, which he attributed to the healing god Asclepius. That is why he built the shrine that Pausanias saw many years later. And the content of the message? Give Anyte two thousand gold staters. Phalysius did so. End of story. End of the Guidebook. So, indeed, Pausanias paid attention to women poets, and there were plenty of them to pay attention to. There is good evidence of a vibrant tradition of women’s poetry among the ancient Greeks. Pausanias is not the only writer of his time to note this. In fact, if on his journeys Pausanias had encountered the well-travelled rhetorician Tatian, the two near-contemporaries could have challenged one another to see who could name the largest number of women poets and identify the sculptors of statues honoring them. Tatian might have won, to judge from his Address to the Greeks, ch 33. But then, Tatian had an agenda. As a convert to a “barbarian” cult he wanted to show that his co-religionists had precedents for respecting women’s intellects: “My object in referring to these women is, that you may not regard as something strange what you find among us, and that, comparing the statues which are before your eyes, you may not treat the women with scorn who among us pursue philosophy.” So much for the Christian Tatian. Did Pausanias have an agenda, too? His stories of two women from Delphi, Boio 86 women poets and the origin of the greek hexameter and Phemonoe, help answer that question. ii. boio’s disruptive poetry when pausanias’s work describes Delphi, the plot thickens. In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry by Pramit ChaudhuriMartin T. DinterPramit Chaudhuri. The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xvi + 386 pp. Cloth, $74.We are all fighting our own demons, but some of us—so Chaudhuri tells us—are even fighting our own gods. Accordingly, a wide range of theomachs and their representation in classical literature fills the ranks (...) of this excellent book that will certainly elbow its way onto Mt. Olympus to sit comfortably next to divine Feeney (1991 and 1998) and sublime Hardie (1986 and 1993). Indeed, Chaudhuri transcends the scope of Feeney (1991) by including not only Senecan (and Attic) tragedy but also texts and contexts ranging from panegyric to philosophy and from lyric to historiography.Chaudhuri’s book falls into three parts. Its first three chapters cover theomachy in Greek poetry (Homer and Attic tragedy), as well as the development of theomachy in Augustan epic, with chapters on Lucretius and Vergil and Ovid. Here, Chaudhuri introduces some of the main patterns and contexts that will be developed in later imperial poetry. Chaudhuri also states clearly what will not be covered here at length: the voyage myths of the Odyssey and the Argonauts, Aristophanes’ Birds, and the (pseudo-) Aeschylean Prometheus Bound. Part 2 covers Neronian literature with Seneca’s Hercules Furens and Lucan, while Part 3 focuses on the Flavian era, with Silius and Statius. Statius’ Capaneus forms a highpoint amongst the theomachs and thus deservedly receives extra attention. Chaudhuri rounds off the Flavian section with a chapter on the politics [End Page 177] of theomachy, in which he samples theomachy as a trope for the confrontation between subject and ruler, ruler and god, rival emperors and the confrontation of dynasties. After all, the Flavian poets had witnessed the principate develop over time, the struggles for the throne, and the rise and fall of dynasties. This is followed by a titillating epilogue showcasing how the themes developed in the previous chapters that breach the divide between mortal and immortal (such as fame, equanimity, skepticism, and poetic and imperial apotheosis) echo through the centuries. Rarely, however, do we find simple didactic moralism. Instead, “the theomach is instrumental in generating a dialogue on the broader symbolism of fighting the gods, its stakes and implications” (323). Chaudhuri can but hint at the rich afterlife of the theomach across Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a subject that would fill a second volume. He nevertheless whets the reader’s appetite by pointing to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Dante’s Inferno, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, as well as a host of epigraphs to each chapter, and concludes with a glance at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Richard Dawkins versus God, and modern physicists’ search for a God particle.Chaudhuri sets the volume off by contrasting theomachy with gigantomachy. While the feats of the Giants “remain far distant in time from the activities of humankind … the theomach speaks the language of humanity … offering a richer context for his radical aspirations and … inviting the audience to adopt an alternative view on the theological status quo” (5). He also places theomachy in its cultural context when he follows Momigliano’s (1984) suggestion that under Augustus poetry replaced antiquarianism and philosophy as the primary genre in which to think about the gods. The figure of the contemptor divum (despiser of the gods) thus comes to embody the contrast between piety and impiety which itself is grounded in the empirical basis of Roman religion. But rather than testing methods of communication with the divine, as the Romans so often did with divinatory practices and ritual protocols, the contemptor divum tackles the question of whether it is possible to know the divine at all and whether the gods even exist. “By placing these conflicts at the heart of their works, the epic poets expanded the cultural conversation to include the testing of the divine in the Romans’ attempts to make sense of the epistemological, theological, and political concerns pertaining... (shrink)

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete's thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete's life-long engagement with (...) one thinker in particular -Plato. The Platonic dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of that periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers. The core of The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays Benardete produced in his last years; the collection provides at the same time an entry into that world through some of Benardete's earliest articles on Plato and on Greek poetry. Benardete's earlier path of close textual analysis always reflected his intimate philosophic dialogue with the thinker in whose work he was immersed; later, he drew on resources of erudition acquired over a lifetime to present a broader picture, on a theme like the dialectics of eros or freedom and necessity. In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic thinkers. He had become increasingly aware that the discovery of philosophy through the "Socratic turn" was really the rediscovery of an understanding already present in some form in the Greek poets and that awareness guided his last years of study of the pre-Socratic philosophers. According to the standard view of the history of Greek philosophy, the Socratic turn, with its focus on "the human things," marks a point of radical change in philosophy's history. Benardete's late studies led him to the conclusion that the kind of pivotal reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark of what it means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or Parmenides is a genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent that a Socratic turn can be found in some form within his own thought. At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what it means to be "post-Platonic." As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, the Platonic notion of a "second sailing" gave Benardete a key to the relation between Greek and Latin thought - and with that to a comprehensive under-standing of antiquity-as it did to the relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Ronna Burger teaches philosophy at Tulane University; she is the author of The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth from St. Augustine's Press and Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics. Michael Davis teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College; he authored Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics and, with Seth Benardete, translated Aristotle - On Poetics, both from St. Augustine's Press. Burger and Davis collaborated on editing Seth Benardete's Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. (shrink)

Noted classicist Vivante explores the function of verse as a fundamental form of human expression, and argues that the force of Homer's poetry largely lies in the implicit significance of its verse-rhythm.

This short article pairs the realms of “Mathematics”, “Philosophy”, and “Poetry”, presenting some corners of intersection of this type of scientocreativity. Poetry have long been following mathematical patterns expressed by stern formal restrictions, as the strong metrical structure of ancient Greek heroic epic, or the consistent meter with standardized rhyme scheme and a “volta” of Italian sonnets. Poetry was always connected to Philosophy, and further on, notable mathematicians, like the inventor of quaternions, William Rowan Hamilton, or Ion Barbu, (...) the creator of the Barbilian spaces, have written appreciated poems. We will focus here on an avant-garde movement in literature, art, philosophy, and science, called Paradoxism, founded in Romania in 1980 by a mathematician, philosopher and poet, and on the laboured writing exercises of the Oulipo group, founded in Paris in 1960 by mathematicians and poets, both of them still in act. (shrink)

As well as producing one of the finest of all poetic traditions, ancient Greek culture produced a major tradition of poetic theory and criticism. Halliwell's volume offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the defining authors and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias's Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus' On Poems, and Longinus' On the Sublime. The volume's fundamental concern is with how the Greeks (...) conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the values of that experience. The book's organizing theme is a recurrent Greek dialectic between ideas of poetry as, on the one hand, a powerfully enthralling experience in its own right and, on the other, a medium for the expression of truths which can exercise lasting influence on its audiences' views of the world. Citing a wide range of modern scholarship, and making frequent connections with later periods of literary theory and aesthetics, Halliwell questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts analysed. The resulting perspective casts new light on ways in which the Greeks attempted to make sense of the psychology of poetic experience—including the roles of emotion, ethics, imagination, and knowledge—in the life of their culture. Readership: Scholars and students of Greek literature, Greek poetics, and literary theory and criticism. (shrink)

The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions and performed by its (...) citizens. But eh conquests of Alexander had altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer, lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was incomparable and inimitable, to be studied—but not to be copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric, epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the grandeur of the past. James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton University and editor of the Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity and, with Anthony T. Grafton and Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum. (shrink)

In this interpretation of the Odyssey, Seth Benardete suggests that Homer may have been the first to philosophize in a Platonic sense. He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings.

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 this paper I propose an emendation for a long-standing textual problem in the Satyricon. In the Cena Trimalchionis one of the freedmen, Niceros, recounts a bizarre story, culminating in a frightening encounter between him and a werewolf. In a desperate attempt to escape peril, Niceros draws his sword to repel horrific shadows and utters a sequence of eleven letters which has puzzled scholars for more than a century: matavitatau. I propose a correction which hypothesizes the presence of a verb (...) and an interjection, namely gladium strinxi etmatavi – tatae! –umbras cecidi. I support my proposal by analyzing the intersections between literary genres and poetic texts in the Satyricon. After analyzing the meanings and nuances of tatae, I argue that the presence of such an exclamation is perfectly suitable for the situation of fear and danger that Niceros is experiencing. I suggest that Homer’s Odyssey and Vergil’s Aeneid offer decisive indications to make the presence of an interjection plausible. Niceros’ dreadful encounter with the werewolf recalls epic models, namely the descent of Odysseus and Aeneas into the Underworld. Finally, I suggest that Petronius portrays Niceros as a mythomaniac narrator who fails to appropriate the conventions of Latin and Greek epic poetry. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 126.1 (2005) 135-138 [Access article in PDF] Jenny Strauss Clay. Hesiod's Cosmos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii + 202 pp. Cloth, $65. This book, following on The Wrath of Athena (1983), The Politics of Olympus (1989), and a number of articles, continues Clay's distinctive work on "early Greek theology" (1), that is, the nature of gods and their relations with human beings as (...) treated in archaic epic poetry. For Clay, the works of early Greek epos can be seen as a coherent and interconnected whole, in which the combined subject matter of the Homeric Hymns, Iliad, and Odyssey is book-ended, as it were, by the two major Hesiodic poems: Theogony tells the story from the beginning of things to the accession of Zeus, whereas Works and Days describes life in the post-heroic Iron Age. Hesiod's Cosmos argues for a closely interrelated and complementary relationship between these two works, in which one poem looks at the world from a divine standpoint, paying little attention to human life, while the other focuses on the here-and-now exigencies of human existence, considering the gods mainly as they intersect with those realities. Together they make up a view of the world that transcends any single perspective, displaying the superior skill, intelligence, and inspiration of their poet. As a pragmatic explanation for this thoroughly intertextual relationship, Clay proposes that Hesiod may have been at work simultaneously on both compositions.Dealing succinctly with the Hesiodic Question about authorship and authorial persona, Clay locates the composition of Theogony and Works and Days in a middle ground, somewhere between the work of a historical poet, whose biography is reflected in the poems, and the product of a didactic tradition in which "Hesiod" is the persona that a performer of this poetry adopts (a view developed especially by Gregory Nagy). A historical Hesiod seems likely to Clay, but even so, "the voice we hear is constructed within the text for its own ends" (3). Although she maintains that this question is not central to her analysis of the Hesiodic poems, the nuanced and subtle cross-references that she postulates between the two works prompt her to write as if there were an individual, thoughtful author behind the texts—one working with ideas that will be taken up later by acknowledged "philosophical" writers. Further, and central to her methodology, Clay maintains (9) that it is both possible and desirable, if hardly simple, to seek authorial intentions in the works under discussion. The admittedly provocative goal of Hesiod's Cosmos, then, is to "demonstrate a coherent plan that unites the poems into a consistent vision that is both thoughtful and subtle" and thereby "to recover the reputation the Hesiodic poems long enjoyed in antiquity" (2: a discussion of Hesiod's ancient reputation would have been welcome here). [End Page 135]The book is well organized to achieve that end. It begins with a general chapter on Theogony and another on Works and Days, summarizing each work while emphasizing its structural peculiarities and teasing out the meanings suggested thereby. The five chapters that follow compare salient aspects of the two poems: their divergent proems, what they say about the origins of humankind, their two versions of the Prometheus story, the presentation of gods in Works and Days and men in Theogony, and finally each poem's treatment of what Clay terms "hybrids" (monsters and heroes, both being of mixed birth) in a chapter that includes substantial discussion of the Hesiodic Catalogues. A brief conclusion, focusing on the ancient theme of a contest between Hesiod and Homer, argues that Hesiodic poetry makes a claim to broader knowledge and scope than Homeric.A conspicuous and valuable characteristic of Clay's approach is her insistence on treating both texts in their entirety. Each poem is reviewed in linear sequence in the two introductory chapters, with an eye to its "intratextual" content—especially the relation of digressions to the structural backbone. The Theogony's basic structure is obviously genealogical, but its narrative digressions come at unpredictable junctures, some of them (such... (shrink)

Argues for viewing Empedocles' work as a unified whole of religion and physics by showing how rebirth is a positive doctrine which underlies his cosmic system. Essential for all scholars of early Greek philosophy, but will also appeal to those of epic poetry, Plato and Pythagoras studies, and ancient religion.

Fiction and myth have been used for centuries in writing history as well as in making it. And this is not surprising; for Clio was not only the muse of history but also that of epic poetry. This personal union of the two functions shows that the Greeks may have felt what we know today, thanks to the additional experience of twenty-five hundred years: that in historiography as well as in its subject matter, history as reality, it is not (...) always possible to draw a neat line of demarcation between historical truth and poetical fiction. History as res scriptae is, and has to be, a product of documentation and imagination. If this imagination is subjected to logical methodology, it will result in “scientific” history, in which the word “science” has to be interpreted in that liberal sense proposed by Collingwood, as “any organized body of knowledge.” If, on the contrary, the imaginative component of historiography is abandoned to poetical fancy, it will result in mythological history. Finally, if the imagination of the historian is guided by the conscious, half-conscious or sub-conscious wish to influence and manipulate the readers’ minds, the result will be ideological history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliadby Lorenzo F. GarciaJonas GrethleinL orenzoF. G arcia. Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad. Hellenic Studies 57. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013. Distributed by Harvard University Press. viii + 321 pp. Paper, $22.50.The philosophy of Heidegger continues to cast a spell on some Classicists. It is less Heidegger’s own interpretations of Greek authors that serve as stimulus than (...) the main work of his early career, Sein und Zeit(Halle 1927), that seems to invite applications to ancient texts. Reading such studies as Shanske’s Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History(Cambridge 2007), I keep wondering to what extent the attractiveness of Heidegger to some Classicists ultimately derives from the impact that ancient texts may have had on the formation of his philosophy. Attending a humanistisches Gymnasium, Heidegger received a thorough training in Greek and must have read a fair amount of ancient texts in the original. Besides tying in with the existentialism of his day, the gloomy nature of Heidegger’s philosophy is highly reminiscent of what is traditionally referred to as Greek pessimism. It is easy, for instance, to sense in the concept of “ Sein zum Tode” an echo of the sentiment of the Herodotean Solon that “we must look to the conclusion of every matter and see how it will end” (Hdt. 1.32.9). The common tenor notwithstanding, applying Heidegger’s philosophy of Being to the interpretation of ancient literature is a daunting task.In Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad, Garcia draws on Heidegger to show that “the subject of the Iliad... is time itself and the durability of its objects to withstand time’s withering flow” (5). Garcia claims that the tenet of Heidegger’s philosophy of time plays out in the Iliadat various levels. For Heidegger, Daseinis defined by death, which is always impending and thereby constitutes its totality. Daseinis essentially Sein zum Tode(“being-toward-death”). This, Garcia argues, is reflected in the temporal economy of the Iliadwhich hinges on the notion of “not yet” already encapsulating a “no longer.” Various physical objects, humans, and, to some extent, also gods are presented as enduring, but fated to fade. Garcia’s central argument is that they thereby reflect the temporal dynamics of epic poetry itself. To him, kleos aphthitondoes not imply the idea of eternity, but a duration that entails its own ending. Before discussing the soundness of this argument in conjunction with its deployment of Heidegger, let me give a brief synopsis of the individual chapters.In chapter 1, Garcia elaborates on “the rhetoric of time and memory”; while “time has disintegrating effects..., memory in a pure or ideal form, on the other hand, preserves its object against time” (45). This dialectic comes to the fore in Iliad2 where the rotting of the ships and the flagging morale of the [End Page 481]Greeks indicate the “loss of cohesion through waiting” (55). At the same time, Garcia claims, Odysseus’ intervention illustrates the power of memory. Odysseus reminds the Achaeans of Calchas’ prophecy which he remembers as if “it was either yesterday or the day before” and “thereby seeks to undo the disintegration of the Achaeans’ emotional resolve” (63). The tension between the decaying force of time and the attempt at recuperation through memory yields the framework for the investigation of various entities and their temporal dynamics in the main part of the book.The second chapter is devoted to the fate of the bodies of Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector. In the eyes of Garcia, “the preservation of these exquisite corpses serves as an analogue within the poem for the very project of the epic commemoration of Achilles—as if the epic were a ‘freezing’ of temporal flow against the ravages of time” (66). However, neither the application of ambrosia and nectar nor funeral rites achieve permanent preservation: bodies can be removed from time only temporarily. They are subject to “the logic of the ‘still perfectly’ and ‘not yet’” (94) and thereby mirror the fame of Achilles which, despite its longevity, carries its termination in itself.In chapter... (shrink)

The Laws was Plato's last work, his longest, and one of his most difficult. In contrast to the Republic, which presents an abstract ideal not intended for any actual community, the Laws seems to provide practical guidelines for the establishment and maintenance of political order in the real world. With this book, the distinguished classicist Seth Benardete offers an insightful analysis and commentary on this rich and complex dialogue. Each of the chapters corresponds to one of the twelve books of (...) the Laws, illuminating the major themes and arguments, which have to do with theology, the soul, justice, and education. The Greek word for law, "nomos," also means musical tune. Bernardete shows how music--in the broadest sense, including drama, epic poetry, and even puppetry--mediates between reason and the city in Plato's philosophy of law. Most broadly, however, Benardete here uncovers the concealed ontological dimension of the Laws, explaining why it is concealed and how it comes to light. In establishing the coherence and underlying organization of Plato's last dialogue, Benardete makes a significant contribution to Platonic studies. (shrink)

In the Archaic Geek world of epic poetry, the causes of things are shrouded in divine mystery; the gods intervene in human affairs, and bring about events, in a cruel and capricious fashion, according to their whims; Apollo visits the devastating plague of Iliad 1 on the Greek host to avenge Agamemnon's ill-treatment of one of his priests; Poseidon shakes the earth and angers the sea, bringing to destruction those who have incurred his ire, as does Zeus himself (...) with his thunderbolts. The gods take on human shape and intervene in battle with devastating effect. In tragedy, the houses of Atreus and of Laius are brought low when men offend against the gods. This article focuses on the explorations of the fundamental concepts of reasons and causation, and the problems of explanation, and argues that it is indeed reasonable to see in Presocratic thought the foundations of Western scientific explanation. (shrink)

Mourelatos’ study of the fragments of Parmenides’ poem combines traditional philological reconstruction with the approaches of literary criticism and philosophical analysis in order to reveal the thought structure and expressive unity of the best preserved and most important, influential, and coherent text of Greek philosophy before Plato. Through philosophical, philological, and literary analysis, Mourelatos examines the morphology of images and metaphors in Parmenides’ text with the aim of articulating and interpreting the poem’s key concepts and component arguments. Relevant antecedents (...) and parallels from the tradition of epic poetry, especially from Homer’s Odyssey, are explored in depth. (shrink)