Archive

Hellenic Studies Series

The Epic City: Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome

As Greek and Trojan forces battled in the shadow of Troy’s wall, Hephaistos created a wondrous, ornately decorated shield for Achilles. At the Shield’s center lay two walled cities, one at war and one at peace, surrounded by fields and pasturelands. Viewed as Homer’s blueprint for an ideal, or utopian, social order, the Shield reveals that restraining and taming Nature would be fundamental to the Hellenic urban quest. It is… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Plato’s Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception

In his Symposium, Plato crafted a set of speeches in praise of love that has influenced writers and artists from antiquity to the present. Early Christian writers read the dialogue’s “ascent passage” as a vision of the soul’s journey to heaven. Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium inspired poets and artists throughout Renaissance Europe and introduced “a Platonic love” into common speech. Themes or images from the dialogue have appeared in paintings or… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History

This book probes the narratives of poets who are exiled, tried or executed for their satire. Aesop, fabulist and riddle warrior, is assimilated to the pharmakos—the wretched human scapegoat who is expelled from the city or killed in response to a crisis—after satirizing the Delphians. In much the same way, Dumezil’s Indo-European heroes, Starkathr and Suibhne, are both warrior-poets persecuted by patron deities. This book views the scapegoat as a… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel

This work offers the first systematic and interdisciplinary study of the poetics of the twelfth-century medieval Greek novel. This book investigates the complex ways in which rhetorical theory and practice constructed the overarching cultural aesthetics that conditioned the production and reception of the genre of the novel in twelfth-century Byzantine society. By examining the indigenous rhetorical concept of amphoteroglossia, this book probes unexplored aspects of the re-inscription of inherited allegorical,… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Homeric Conversation

Homeric Conversation is the first full-length study of conversation in the Homeric poems. Deborah Beck argues that conversation should be considered a traditional Homeric type scene, alongside recognized types such as arrival, sacrifice, battle, and hospitality. Drawing on both linguistics and previous work on type scenes and oral aesthetics, the book describes the typical conversational patterns that characterize a range of situations, including one-on-one conversation, formal assemblies, battlefield encounters, and laments. Departures from… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics

Epic is not only a nostalgic memory of a remote past, but also, as performance, a deliberate act in the present. In fact, as this book argues, memory is itself a deliberate act when it is turned into epic language. With numerous fresh linguistic observations, Egbert Bakker shows that the epic narrator makes the epic past come to the present: epic is not only a verbal artifact that points to the past;… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

The Life and Miracles of Thekla: A Literary Study

The Life and Miracles of Thekla offers a unique view on the reception of classical and early Christian literature in Late Antiquity. This study examines the Life and Miracles as an intricate example of Greek writing and attempts to situate the work amidst a wealth of similar literary forms from the classical world. The first half of the Life and Miracles is an erudite paraphrase of the famous second-century Acts of Paul and… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians

In Greek thought, barbaroi are utterers of unintelligible or inarticulate sounds. What importance does the text of Herodotus’s Histories attribute to language as a criterion of ethnic identity? The answer to this question illuminates the empirical foundations of Herodotus’s pluralistic worldview. The first translator of cultures also translates, describes, and evaluates foreign speech to a degree unparalleled by other Greek ancient authors. For Herodotus, language is an area of interesting but surprisingly unproblematic difference,… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Master of the Game: Competition and Performance in Greek Poetry

The interest in the performance of ancient Greek poetry has grown dramatically in recent years. But the competitive dimension of Greek poetic performances, while usually assumed, has rarely been directly addressed. This study provides for the first time an in-depth examination of a central mode of Greek poetic competition—capping, which occurs when speakers or singers respond to one another in small numbers of verses, single verses, or between verse units… Read more

Hellenic Studies Series

Labored in Papyrus Leaves: Perspectives on an Epigram Collection Attributed to Posidippus (P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309)

This colloquium volume celebrates a new Hellenistic epigram collection attributed to the third-century BCE poet Posidippus, one of the most significant literary finds in recent memory. Included in this collection are an unusual variety of voices and perspectives: papyrological, art historical, archaeological, historical, literary, and aesthetic. These texts are considered as individual poems and as collective artifact, an early poetry book. The volume will be of interest to readers of… Read more