We are happy to share the following publications that will soon be available through Harvard University Press.
Gregory Nagy
Masterpieces of Metonymy
In Masterpieces of Metonymy, Gregory Nagy analyzes metonymy as a mental process that complements metaphor. If metaphor is a substitution of something unfamilar for something familiar, then metonymy can be seen as a connecting of something familiar with something else that is already familiar. Applying this formulation, Nagy offers close readings of over one hundred examples of metonymy as it comes to life in the verbal and the visual arts of Greek culture, as well as in the arts of other cultures. Though it is debatable whether all the selected examples really qualify as masterpieces, what they all have in common is their potential for artistic greatness. A close reading of the verbal and the visual evidence, Nagy argues, leads to a fuller appreciation of this greatness.
John Franklin
Kinyras: The Divine Lyre
Kinyras, in Greco-Roman sources, is the central culture-hero of early Cyprus: legendary king, metallurge, Agamemnon’s (faithless) ally, Aphrodite’s priest, father of Myrrha and Adonis, rival of Apollo, ancestor of the Paphian priest-kings (and much more). Kinyras increased in depth and complexity with the demonstration in 1968 that Kinnaru—the divinized temple-lyre—was venerated at Ugarit, an important Late Bronze Age city just opposite Cyprus on the Syrian coast. John Curtis Franklin seeks to harmonize Kinyras as a mythological symbol of pre-Greek Cyprus with what is known of ritual music and deified instruments in the Bronze Age Near East, using evidence going back to early Mesopotamia. Franklin addresses issues of ethnicity and identity; migration and colonization, especially the Aegean diaspora to Cyprus, Cilicia, and Philistia in the Early Iron Age; cultural interface of Hellenic, Eteocypriot, and Levantine groups on Cyprus; early Greek poetics, epic memory, and myth-making; performance traditions and music archaeology; royal ideology and ritual poetics; and a host of specific philological and historical issues arising from the collation of classical and Near Eastern sources.
Kinyras includes a vital background study of divinized balang-harps in Mesopotamia by Wolfgang Heimpel. Illustrations and artwork by Glynnis Fawkes.
Andrea Rotstein
Literary History in the Parian Marble
Inscribed some time after 264 BCE, the Parian Marble offers a chronological list of events with an exceptional emphasis on literary matters. Literary History in the Parian Marble explores the literary and historiographical qualities of the inscription, the genre to which it belongs, and the emerging patterns of time. Endorsing the hypothesis that the inscription was originally displayed at a Parian shrine honoring Archilochus, Andrea Rotstein argues that literary history was one of its main concerns. Though it may be conventional in its focus on the chronology of poets, their inventions and victories, the Parian Marble is nonetheless idiosyncratic in the range of authors displayed. By reconstructing the methods by which information might have been obtained, Rotstein contributes to an understanding of the way literary history was practiced within the local communities of ancient Greece, away from the major Hellenistic centers of scholarship.
The Parian chronicle has not been the subject of a comprehensive study for almost a century. Literary History in the Parian Marble brings to the English-speaking audience up-to-date information about the inscription, including a revision of Felix Jacoby’s Greek text and a complete translation.