Books and Literary Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-142
Author(s):  
Peter Thonemann
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Greek World

Quotations from earlier Greek literary works are very frequent in the Oneirocritica, and it is possible to reconstruct in some detail Artemidorus’ knowledge of (and tastes in) ‘classical’ Greek literature. As one might expect, Homer is particularly prominent, but in a manner that suggests that Artemidorus may not have been equally acquainted with all parts of the Iliad and Odyssey. His knowledge of early Greek poetry, tragedy, and comedy, and other ‘high’ Greek literature appears at first sight to be impressively extensive, but patterns of quotation in the Oneirocritica imply that he in fact knew little of this literature at first-hand. It is suggested that Artemidorus provides us with an unusually clear and representative picture of the intellectual and literary horizons of an ordinary ‘middling’ member of the civic elite in the Greek world during the high Roman imperial period.

scholarly journals Bodies Out of Time: Sculpting Queer Poetics and Queering Classical Sculpture in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Raw Material ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greek World

AbstractTwo major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy’s poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy’s incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy’s homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy’s poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy’s beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, ‘created’ using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω [‘to make’] in descriptions of ‘those made like me’) and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called ‘Greek desire’, placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men.

Greek Philosophy

Classics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Preus
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Ancient Greek Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
Hellenistic Philosophy ◽  
Greek World

The title “Ancient Greek Philosophy” may be applied to philosophical texts written in Greek over a period of somewhat more than one thousand years, from the Milesian Anaximander before 500 bce to the Alexandrian John Philoponus, who died in 570 ce. The bibliography of the available texts, and translations, is significantly large, and the bibliography of secondary literature written about those texts in subsequent centuries is vast. This article is necessarily highly selective, designed primarily to give access to some of the basic works in each area of investigation. Separate bibliographies on individual philosophers, periods, and schools will follow. This article begins with a section on philosophy before Plato, including the Presocratics and Socrates, with some references to philosophers who were contemporaries of Plato and Aristotle. The second section focuses on Plato and early Platonists; the third section, on Aristotle and his immediate successors in the Peripatetic school. The fourth section focuses on philosophy after Aristotle, often called “Hellenistic” philosophy. This period notably includes Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics, as well as followers of Plato and Aristotle during the period from 322 bce until the Roman Empire engulfed the Greek world. The fifth section includes access to philosophy written in Greek during the Roman Imperial period, from the middle of the 1st century bce until the closing of the philosophical schools in the 5th and 6th centuries ce. It was during this time that many of the texts that provide our information about the earlier periods were written; many of the surviving texts are commentaries on works by Plato or Aristotle, for example, but significant original philosophical work was written, for instance, by Neoplatonists such as Plotinus and Porphyry, by Aristotelians such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, and by the medical philosopher Galen. This bibliography includes something of a combination of introductory texts suitable for someone beginning a study of a particular field, plus a significant number of texts and translations of the ancient authors, and a few more-specialized studies, where those may be of special interest.

Bishop-Poets in the Shadow of the Council of Trent: Antonio Sebastiani Minturno and the Poemata Tridentina

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Largaiolli
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
International Conference ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Reformation

The atmosphere of the Council of Trent was permeated by literature. Italian bishops at the time of Reformation were acquainted with the most significant humanistic literary culture of the sixteenth century. Antonio Sebastiano Minturno (1500–1574), an Italian bishop who actively attended the last phases of the Council, was author of two treatises on poetics, secular and sacred poems in vernacular (1559, 1561) and Latin poems. The importance of literature in his life can be seen in the network of his intellectual and political relations as well as in the use of poetry and literature in order to assert spiritual values and to represent the main events of his times. In particular, the Poemata Tridentina (1564), a collection of poems about the Council and its protagonists, can be read as a document of his spiritual life and of the catholic perception of the Council itself, since they are one of the rare literary works which explicitly deal with the Council of Trent as main theme. A different version of the paper was presented at the International Conference "More than Luther: The Reformation and the Rise of Pluralism in Europe" (Seventh Annual RefoRC Conference 2017, Wittenberg 10–12 May 2017).

Greek

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Morales
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Romance Novels ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
The Third ◽  
Critical Issues

This article offers an overview of Greek literature of the Roman Empire. The first section discusses ways in which Greek writing responds to Roman rule. This section ranges widely and takes snapshots from six writers—Artemidorus, Plutarch, Lucian, Basil of Caesarea, Galen, and Josephus—from which to show the complexities involved in thinking about Greek literature and its attendant critical issues, including how we might read ‘resistance’ and how Hellenisms relate to Christianities, and Jewish and other identities. The second section focuses more closely on Greek poetry and pantomime, and the third section on the romance novels and Greek prose fiction, including a brief look at a couple of texts that possibly show Egyptian influences.

V. The Second Sophistic and Imperial Greek Literature

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 74-89
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
Roman Greece ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

This book has focused so far upon the extraordinary popularity of epideictic oratory in the first three centuries of the Roman empire, the ‘Second Sophistic’ in Philostratus’ sense (notwithstanding its distant roots in the fourth century BCE). We have seen that these declamations were performance pieces, and that issues of identity were explored through the observation of the sophist’s body; that language and style were heavily theorized, but also highly experimental; and that the interpretation of these ingenious, mobile texts demands considerable resourcefulness and attentiveness. What I want to explore in this final chapter is the points of intersection between these aspects of sophistic literature and the wider literary culture of Roman Greece. I shall focus particularly on two areas, which are central to both oratorical declamation and wider literary culture: ‘the self and exotic narrative.

scholarly journals Piotr Potiomkin’s “Green Hat” and Russian Émigré children’s literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-229
Author(s):  
Andrei Ustinov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Franz Kafka ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Leading Position ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Revolution

The essay reconstructs history of the 1924 publication of Piotr Potiomkin’s (1886—1926) poem for children Green Hat in a wider context of the Russian émigré literary culture. A well-known writer before the revolution, the author of two books of poetry Funny Love and Geranium, Potiomkin found himself after emigrating to Chishinau and further to Prague, on the periphery of the Russian Diaspora. In 1922 he slowly started to publish his works in the periodicals of “Russian Berlin.” Sasha Chiornyi, his friend from the era of the Satyricon magazine, included two of Potiomkin’s poems in the Rainbow, the first children’s anthology which Chiornyi edited for the Slovo publishing house. By that time Chiornyi occupied a leading position in the émigré children’s literature. He began to invite Potiomkin’s partici- pation in the publishing enterprises of “Russian Berlin,” and recommended the poet to the Volga publishing house as a potentially valuable author. Potiomkin was one of the creators of the genre of “a poem for children” in pre-revolutionary children’s literature—-in 1912 the magazine Galchionok published his “story in verse” Boba Skvozniakov in the Country. Therefore, Potiomkin offered the Volga to publish another “poem for children” Green Hat. As a book designer he invited Hans Fronius (1903—1988) who at the time was a student at the Kunstakademie in Vienna. Later Fronius became the first illustrator of the literary works of Franz Kafka.

sexuality, textual representation of

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn B. Skinner
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Love Elegy ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Hellenistic Poetry ◽  
City State

The basic dominance-submission model of sexual relations, involving a hierarchical distinction between the active and passive roles, was the same in Greek and Roman cultures and remained unchanged throughout classical antiquity. However, we find subtle modifications reflected in the literary tradition from the Homeric age to imperial Rome. In Homer and Hesiod, heterosexual relations are the only recognized form of sexual congress, and consensual sex is mutually pleasurable. Forced sex, in the form of abduction and rape, also occurs in epic narrative. Pederasty became a literary theme in Greek lyric poetry of the archaic age. In classical Athens, discourses of sexuality were tied to political ideology, because self-control was a civic virtue enabling the free adult male householder to manage his estate correctly and serve the city-state in war and peace. Tragedy illustrates the dire impact of unbridled erōs, while comedy mocks those who trespass against moderation or violate gender norms, and forensic oratory seeks to disqualify such offenders from participating in government. Philosophical schools disagreed over the proper place of erōs in a virtuous life. While pederastic relations dominated discussions of love in philosophic works, romantic affairs between men and women received greater attention in Hellenistic poetry, in keeping with an increased emphasis on shared pleasure and reciprocal emotional satisfaction. During the late Republic and the Augustan age, Roman authors incorporated erotic motifs from archaic lyric and Hellenistic epigram into their own first-person love poems. The genre of love elegy, in which the poet-lover professes himself enslaved to a harsh mistress, became widely popular during Augustus’ reign but disappeared shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, Lucretius’ didactic epic On the Nature of Things, and Vergil’s Aeneid, a heroic account of the founding of Rome, both treat erotic obsession as destructive. In the Imperial period, elite anxieties were displaced onto concerns about gender deviance on the part of males and females alike: the figures of the cinaedus and the tribas were castigated in moralizing poetry, especially satire and satiric epigram. Roman novels focused upon the sexual escapades of marginal displaced types. Under Roman rule, on the other hand, Greek literature saw a new flowering in the Second Sophistic movement. While pederasty remained a favorite subject, hotly championed against heterosexual relations in prose treatises, the Greek novel explored a new model of heterosexuality in which premarital chastity and mutual fidelity appear to anticipate later Christian values.

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