To Tamar Acknowledgements I never dreamt of writing a book on the Parian Marble, but intellectual adventures are not always foreseen. It was on the very soil of Paros, at a conference on Archilochus in 2005, that the inscription beckoned and the fields of poetry and… Read more
Preface For most philologists working on ancient Greek poetry, the Parian Marble is not usually a final destination, but a series of stopovers. Indeed, a chronological list is hardly the kind of thing that one reads from beginning to end. Hence, the common tendency to approach the… Read more
List of Abbreviations BNJ = I. Worthington, ed., Brill’s New Jacoby: The Fragments of the Greek Historians I–III (Jacoby Online), http://www.brill.com/publications/online-resources/jacoby-online. BNP = H. Cancik, M. Landfester, H. Schneider, Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World, (New Pauly Online), http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/brill-s-new-pauly. … Read more
Chapter 1. The Parian Marble 1. Introduction The Parian Marble is a monumental inscription written in Attic Greek on a stele that was originally over two meters tall, [1] dating from some time after 264/3 BCE. [2]… Read more
10. From Philology to Theater: The Construction of Meaning in Sophocles’ Antigone* The problem facing the contemporary translator of a Greek tragedy may be found in its historical dimension. I try to put myself in the playwright’s shoes: he wrote at a certain… Read more
11. Accursed from Birth* Enigma and enigmatization The plot of Oedipus Tyrannus is the story of an unveiling, a “tragic analysis,” as Schiller calls it, [1] but the dénouement discloses that the play’s story has a prehistory… Read more
12. Two Phases of Recognition in Sophocles’ Electra* Preamble Electra hates her mother, Clytemnestra, and she does not hesitate to tell her so. Their confrontation will represent the play’s major contest (agōn), a merciless struggle between the two women, up to the… Read more
13. Reading the Cosmogonies* There is not just one cosmogony, there are many, a whole typology of cosmogonies; every philosopher could have his own: a typical form could be taken up again and knowingly modified. It was a major step forward when, instead… Read more
14. Empedocles: A Single Project, Two Theologies* Recent discussions, in part linked to the publication of the Strasbourg papyrus in 1999, [1] encourage a reconsideration of the relation between Empedocles’ two poems, On Nature, or The Origins, and… Read more
15. The Parmenidean Cosmology of Parmenides* Cosmology has been treated as a poor relation. Here we shall study it for itself, according to its own logic—which is not exclusive to cosmology—without bringing in the question of the relation it necessarily maintains with the… Read more
