Text and Commentary

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Puett
Keyword(s):  
Early Period ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

This essay traces the notions of text, authorship, and commentary in the early Chinese literary tradition, exploring how the notions were debated and redefined from the fourth century bce to the fourth century ce in an endless process of accretion, in which poetic lines were utilized in new ways and stories were constantly varied according to context. The analysis shows how the texts of the classical period emerged together with the commentaries to them and literary production in the early period developed out of contested visions of how to define text and commentary, author and interpreter; it opens up comparative possibilities for thinking through the development of other early literary traditions as well.

Mousikoi Agones and the Conceptualization of Genre in Ancient Greece

2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Rotstein
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

This article inquires into the shaping force that competition at musical contests exercised on ancient perceptions of literary genres, particularly for the non-choral and non-dramatic kinds of the Classical Period. Three musical contests of the fourth century BCE, the Panathenaia, the Amphiaraia, and the Artemisia, are taken as case studies. After a reconstruction of their programs, principles of categorization that spectators might have inferred from the contests are deduced, and modes in which categories of competition and literary genres interacted are put forward. The article concludes by suggesting that, by enacting taxonomies, either strengthening or weakening the specificity of traditional types, institutionalized poetic and musical competitions contributed to the ancient conceptualization of literary genres.

The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy C. M. M. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Positive Evidence ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
Fourth Century Bce ◽  
The City

The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE seeks to upend conventional thinking about the development of drama from the fifth to the fourth centuries. Set in the context of a theatre industry extending far beyond the confines of the City Dionysia and the city of Athens, the identity of choral performers and the significance of their contribution to the shape and meaning of drama in the later Classical period (c.400–323) as a whole is an intriguing and under-explored area of enquiry. Drawing together the fourth-century historical, material, dramatic, literary, and philosophical sources that attest to the activity and quality of dramatic choruses, the book provides a new way of talking and thinking about the choruses of drama after the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. Having considered the positive evidence for dramatic choral activity, the book provides a radical rethinking of two oft-cited yet ill-understood phenomena that have traditionally supported the idea that the chorus of drama ‘declined’ in the fourth century: the inscription of χοροῦ μέλος‎ in papyri and manuscripts in place of fully written-out choral odes, and Aristotle’s invocation of embolima (Poetics 1456a25–32). The book goes on to explore how influential fourth-century authors such as Plato, Demosthenes, and Xenophon, as well as artistic representations of choruses on fourth-century monuments, have had an important role in shaping later scholars’ understanding of the dramatic chorus throughout the Classical period. The book’s conclusions, too, have implications for the broader story we wish to tell about Attic drama, and its most enigmatic and fundamental element, the chorus.

The Population of the Piraeus in the Roman Period: A Re-Assessment of the Evidence of Funerary Inscriptions

2009 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
DIMITRIS GRIGOROPOULOS
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Roman Army ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Fourth Century Bce ◽  
Funerary Inscriptions ◽  
Augustan Age ◽  
The Town

In 87–86 BCE, the Roman army under L. Cornelius Sulla invaded Attica and, after a long siege, sacked Athens and the Piraeus. In both ancient and modern eyes, Sulla's sack has been seen as a key event, which marked not only the end of Athenian independence but also the beginning of an irreversible decline for its port, the Piraeus, in antiquity. Ancient literary testimonies in the decades following the Sullan sack portray the Piraeus as an urban wasteland, crammed with ruins but devoid of life. Strabo, writing in the Augustan age, notes that the town of his time endured, but had shrunk between the two harbours (the Kantharos and Zea); Pausanias, writing later in the second century CE, mentions a number of monuments but pays more attention to the old, ‘Classical’, town than to the contemporary ‘Roman’ Piraeus. Rescue excavations in the last few decades have provided corroboration for Strabo's remark. Building remains dating to the Classical period (mainly the fourth century BCE) extend over a larger area than those of Roman date, which tend to concentrate on the isthmus between the Kantharos and Zea harbours. Nevertheless, more recent finds and a reconsideration of the available archaeological evidence has shown that settlement clustering around the main harbour did not result from the destruction of the port by Sulla but had started in Hellenistic times and was intensified in the Roman period.

Prose versus Poetry in Early Greek Theories of Style

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Graff
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Acceptable Level ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Fourth Century Bce ◽  
Rhetorical Performance ◽  
Poetic Style

Abstract The rise of prose in Greece has been linked to broader cultural and intellectual developments under way in the classical period. Prose has also been characterized as challenging poetry's traditional status as the privileged expression of the culture. Yet throughout the classical period and beyond, poetry was still regularly invoked as the yardstick by which innovation was measured. This paper investigates how poetry figures in the earliest accounts of prose style. Focusing on Isocrates, Alcidamas, and Aristotle, it argues that although each author distinguishes between the styles of prose and poetry, none is able to sustain the distinction consistently. The criteria for what constitutes an acceptable level of poeticality in prose were unstable. The diverse conceptions of poetic style were tied to intellectual polemics and professional rivalries of the early- to mid-fourth century bce and reflect competing aims and ideals for rhetorical performance in prose.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Fragmented Landscape ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Bengali Literature

The introduction opens with a reflection on the relative marginality of the kingdom of Arakan and what it entailed in terms of historiography. I observe a reconfiguration of cosmographical imaginaries around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that conditioned the formation of vernacular literary traditions in eastern South Asia and around the Bay of Bengal. Then I provide a brief overview of the Bengali poet Ālāol’s life and works and discuss what the study of his poetics brings to our knowledge of Middle Bengali literature. I highlight the fragmented landscape of Middle Bengali literary production and the need to study Middle Bengali poems as literary texts and not only as sources for social or religious history. The last section of the introduction provides an overview of the contents of the book.

Hesiod and Comedy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Cultural Currency ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

Comic dramas, attested as early as the later sixth century bce in Sicily and from ca. 486 bce in Attica, reflect familiarity with Hesiodic poetry from the time our actual documentation begins in the 470s for Sicily and 430s for Attica and into the mid-fourth century bce. Comic poets engaged with Hesiodic poetry at the level of specific allusion or echo and (more frequently) with Hesiodic stories, thought, themes, ideas, and style, now common cultural currency. They also engaged with the poet and his poetic persona, whether bracketed with Homer as a great cultural authority, distinguished as the anti-Homer in subjects or style, or showcased as an emblematic persona of poet and (didactic) sage. Aristophanes, for one, adopted elements of the Hesiodic persona in fashioning his own.

Plato’s Hesiods

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Folch
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Fourth Century Bce ◽  
The Status

This chapter surveys Hesiodic reception in fourth-century bce prose, with emphasis on Plato and especially the Laws. Passages of the Laws are read in context and used to illuminate the status of Hesiodic poetry in the fourth century. Topics discussed include rhapsodic performance, Hesiod’s relationship to Homer, study of Hesiodic poetry in schools, the fourth-century manuscript tradition, citation of Hesiod’s poems in conversation and Athenian courtrooms, and the politics of Hesiodic quotation. Whether understood as part of the rhapsode’s canon, a gnomic poet, a proto-sophist or proto-philosopher, or an allegorist, Hesiod remained a dynamic site for the production of the philosophical, literary, and political debates that animated fourth-century prose.

Comparative Examination of Motifs and the Representation of Identies in Selected Works of Kamau Brathwaite and Helene Johnson

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-42
Author(s):  
Adetunji Adelokun
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Identity Renegotiation ◽  
Comparative Examination

This paper is an attempt to consider the deployment of literary motifs to discuss the representation of identities in the selected works of Kamau Brathwaite and Helene Johnson. The analysis was informed by the need to identify the adherence to the preponderant theme of the quest for identity and the representation of identities in American Literary tradition. This study critically appraised and analyzed the development of the African-American and Caribbean literary traditions within the conscious space of displacement and identity renegotiation. The study revealed that the selected and critically pieces of the writers amplify the similarity or uniformity in the sociohistorical experiences of displacement from the root, search for identity and reinstatement of lost values in the enabling milieus of the writers.

scholarly journals From Commentary to paribhāṣās: Kātyāyana and Patañjali vis-à-vis Vyāḍi

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 515-566
Author(s):  
Maria Piera Candotti ◽  
Tiziana Pontillo
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Integrative Approach ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

Abstract The present paper is targeted on three landmarks in the long story of the paribhāṣās’ development. Two of these landmarks descended from the earliest testimony of Vyākaraṇa meta-rules, i. e. those included in Pāṇini’s grammar (fifth–fourth century BCE), and one which has been handed down as the first independent collection of paribhāṣās and attributed to Vyāḍi. In particular a shift is highlighted between Kātyāyaṇa’s (third century BCE) integrative approach (vacana) and Patañjali’s (second century BCE) recourse to implicit paribhāṣās in the Aṣṭādhyāyī as a powerful hermeneutical tool. A shift that helps in interpreting the need for a validation and collection of implicit pāṇinian paribhāṣās as carried out by authors such as Vyāḍi.

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