Translator’s Note This translation is long overdue, both in the sense that it has taken me a long time to complete it and in the sense that it is a book that I feel deserves a wider audience than the original German version may have found. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to have worked so closely with it. All translations of passages in… Read more
Abbreviations A & A – Antike und Abendland AION – Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli AJP – American Journal of Philology ARV – J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, I–III, Oxford 19632 Austin – C. Austin, ed., Nova Fragmenta Euripidea in Papyris Reperta (Kleine Texte für Vorlesungen und Übungen 187), Berlin 1968 … Read more
Introduction. The Choral Dance and Song as Ritual Action: A New Perspective Introductory Thoughts, Performativity, and the Twofold Composition of the Chorus To the extent that any kind of agreement can be attained in the irresolvable dispute about the origin of drama, this much is clear: tragedy as well as comedy developed out of choral and for the most part cultic festivities. [1]… Read more
Chapter 1. The Comic Chorus in the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes Using the approach demonstrated in the introduction I should now like to analyze the Thesmophoriazusae, a work that has been relatively little discussed. This comedy is particularly well-suited for showing the non-Aristotelian, pre-dramatic, and ritual character of the comic chorus. The deliberate, “ulterior” plot, or sujet, is not only overlaid by comic episodes on the part of… Read more
Chapter Two. Homer the Classic in the Age of Callimachus 2ⓢ1. An esthetics of fluidity 2§1 Homeric poetry imagines itself as rigid – that is, unchanging like the petrified serpent in Iliad II. That is what I was arguing in Chapter 1. But there is more to it. As I will now argue in Chapter 2, this three-dimensional vision of arrested motion is being expressed by… Read more
Chapter Three. Homer the Classic in the Age of Plato 3ⓢ1. The Koine of Homer as a model of stability 3§1 The Koine of Homer, as approximated by the base text of Aristarchus in the second century BCE, was more rigid and less fluid than the Homerus Auctus, as approximated by the base text of Zenodotus in the age of Callimachus in the third century BCE. Read more
Chapter Four. Homer the Classic in the Age of Pheidias 4ⓢ1. Homer as a spokesman for the Athenian empire 4§1 In Chapter 3, my argumentation was limited to showing that Plato’s Homer, as reflected in such virtual dialogues as the Ion and the Hippias Minor, was the Panathenaic Homer of his day, in the fourth century BCE. I used the internal evidence provided by Plato’s precise… Read more
Chapter 5. Tithonus in the “New Sappho” and the Narrated Mythical Exemplum in Archaic Greek Poetry Lowell Edmunds carminis fi nem statueram, nunc dubito —M.L. West [1] At present, some think that the twelve lines of the “New Sappho” are a complete poem; some think that the poem must have continued, as it appears to do in the… Read more
Chapter 6. No Way Out? Aging in the New (and Old) Sappho Deborah Boedeker I will not rehearse in detail the brief but exciting history of the “New Sappho” Cologne papyrus that was published in 2004 by Michael Gronewald and Robert Daniel, familiar as it is to readers of this volume. [1] Suffice it to say that P.Köln 21351 (with… Read more
Chapter 7. Acceptance or Assertion?Sappho’s New Poem in its Books Joel Lidov That time of year thou mayst in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. Shakespeare’s image of the absence of song neatly sums up the familiar notion that… Read more
