The Politics of Form in Greek Literature

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Greek Literature ◽  
Politics Of Form

How Wilde Read John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gideon Nisbet
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon

As a student at Oxford, the young Oscar Wilde was often seen with his copies of an acclaimed (and locally infamous) new popular survey of Greek literature, John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (in two series, 1873/6). Those copies survive, and are extensively annotated. Although they must be read with caution, these annotations show Wilde to have been a widely read and increasingly confident young classicist, and hint at his nascent ambition as a translator. Together with relevant manuscript material, the annotations take on more than merely academic significance: they show how the young Wilde, at Symonds’s prompting, was turning ancient Greek cultural insights into present-day possibilities. His intense formative engagement with Studies was to prove fundamental to the mature Wilde’s self-fashioning as a novelist, playwright, and cultural phenomenon.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Hornblower ◽  
Giulia Biffis
Keyword(s):  
Greek Literature

The Introduction begins by briefly summarizing the remaining chapters. After a prefatory section, it examines the word nostos and cognates. A long section on nostos in Greek literature and history pays special attention to the Argonauts and to Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, and seeks to fill other gaps in the coverage of the remaining chapters. A section on exile and return from it, and the special vocabulary it attracted, is followed by a Conclusion: were nostoi always happy?

Rhythmic Prose in Imperial Greek Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. O. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
System A ◽  
First Time

The chapter looks at the division between poetry and prose in ancient and other literatures, and shows the importance of rhythmic patterning in ancient prose. The development of rhythmic prose in Greek and Latin is sketched, the system explained and illustrated (from Latin). It is firmly established, for the first time, which of the main Greek non-Christian authors 31 BC–AD 300 write rhythmically. The method takes a substantial sample of random sentence-endings (usually 400) from each of a large number of Imperial authors; it compares that sample with one sample of the same size (400) drawn randomly from a range of authors earlier than the invention of this rhythmic system. A particular sort of X2-test is applied. Many Imperial authors, it emerges, write rhythmically; many do not. The genres most likely to offer rhythmic writing are, unexpectedly, narrative: historiography and the novel.

Plutarch's Rhythmic Prose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. O. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Prose Rhythm ◽  
First Time

Greek literature is divided, like many literatures, into poetry and prose; but in the earlier Roman Empire, 31 BC to AD 300, much Greek (and Latin) prose was written in one organized rhythmic system. Whether most, or hardly any, Greek prose adopted this patterning has been entirely unclear; this book for the first time adequately establishes an answer. It then seeks to get deeper into the nature of prose-rhythm through one of the greatest Imperial works, Plutarch’s Lives. All its phrases, almost 100,000, have been scanned rhythmically. Prose-rhythm is revealed as a means of expression, which draws attention to words and word-groups. (Online readings are offered too.) Some passages in the Lives pack rhythms together more closely than others; the book looks especially at rhythmically dense passages. These do not occur randomly; they attract attention to themselves, and are marked out as climactic in the narrative, or as in other ways of highlighted significance. Comparison emerges as crucial to the Lives on many levels. Much of the book closely discusses particular dense moments, in commentary form, to show how much rhythm contributes to understanding, and is to be integrated with other sorts of criticism. These remarkable passages make apparent the greatness of Plutarch as a prose-writer: a side not greatly considered amid the huge resurgence of work on him. The book also analyses closely rhythmic and unrhythmic passages from three Greek novelists. Rhythm illuminates both a supreme Greek writer, Plutarch, and three prolific centuries of Greek literary history.

An Ancient Dream Manual

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Thonemann
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Dream Interpretation ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Road Map ◽  
The Social ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Life Career

Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica (‘The Interpretation of Dreams’) is the only dream-book which has been preserved from Graeco-Roman antiquity. Composed around AD 200, it is a treatise and manual on dreams, their classification, and the various analytical tools which should be applied to their interpretation. Artemidorus travelled widely through Greece, Asia, and Italy to collect people’s dreams and record their outcomes, in the process casting a vivid light on social mores and religious beliefs in the Severan age. This book aims to provide the non-specialist reader with a readable and engaging road-map to this vast and complex text. It offers a detailed analysis of Artemidorus’ theory of dreams and the social function of ancient dream-interpretation; it also aims to help the reader to understand the ways in which Artemidorus might be of interest to the cultural or social historian of the Graeco-Roman world. The book includes chapters on Artemidorus’ life, career, and worldview; his conceptions of the human body, sexuality, the natural world, and the gods; his attitudes towards Rome, the contemporary Greek polis, and the social order; and his knowledge of Greek literature, myth and history. The book is intended to serve as a companion to the new translation of The Interpretation of Dreams by Martin Hammond, published simultaneously with this volume in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

Phoenician Literature

2019 ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Carolina López-Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Historical Records ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Great Loss ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Travel Accounts

There was, without a doubt, a Phoenician and Punic literature. Very little of it is extant, but we have enough of it to gauge the great loss. Lacking the advantage of its own manuscript tradition and later cultures devoted to it, Phoenician literature was not systematically preserved, unlike that of the Greeks, Romans, and Israelites. What we have are small pieces that surface among the Classical literary corpus. Despite these unfavorable conditions, an impressive range of literary genres is attested, concentrated in particular genres. Some of this literature aligned with broader ancient Near Eastern tradition: cosmogony, foundation stories, historical records, and other areas that correspond with Phoenician expertise (travel accounts or itineraries, agricultural treatises). Other genres were likely adopted through Greek influence (narrative histories, philosophy). Moreover, from Hellenistic times onward, works by Phoenician authors had to be written and transmitted in Greek in order to survive. Nonetheless, the chapter cautions that we should not lightly categorize them as merely “Greek” literature, at least in the cases in which we know the authors are Phoenicians (including Carthaginians) writing about Phoenician matters.

scholarly journals Hiketeia

1973 ◽  
Vol 93 ◽  
pp. 74-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gould
Keyword(s):  
Dominant Role ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Working Out

To Professor E. R. Dodds, through his edition of Euripides'Bacchaeand again inThe Greeks and the Irrational, we owe an awareness of new possibilities in our understanding of Greek literature and of the world that produced it. No small part of that awareness was due to Professor Dodds' masterly and tactful use of comparative ethnographic material to throw light on the relation between literature and social institutions in ancient Greece. It is in the hope that something of my own debt to him may be conveyed that this paper is offered here, equally in gratitude, admiration and affection.The working out of the anger of Achilles in theIliadbegins with a great scene of divine supplication in which Thetis prevails upon Zeus to change the course of things before Troy in order to restore honour to Achilles; it ends with another, human act in which Priam supplicates Achilles to abandon his vengeful treatment of the dead body of Hector and restore it for a ransom. The first half of theOdysseyhinges about another supplication scene of crucial significance, Odysseus' supplication of Arete and Alkinoos on Scherie. Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called simplySuppliants, and two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants, the cases of the coup of Kylon and that of Pausanias, the one dating from the mid-sixth century, the other from around 470 B.C. or soon after, played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War.

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