Alcman and the Cosmos of Sparta

Alcman and the Cosmos of Sparta PDF Author: Gloria Ferrari
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226668673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The Partheneion, or “maiden song,” composed in the seventh century BCE by the SpartanpoetAlcman, is the earliest substantial example of a choral lyric. A provocative reinterpretation of the Partheneion and its broader context, Alcman and the Cosmos of Sparta excavates the poem’s invocations of widespread and long-lived cosmological ideas that cast the universe as perfectly harmonious and invested its workings with an ethical dimension. Moving far beyond standard literary interpretations, Gloria Ferrari uncovers this astral symbolism by approaching the poem from several angles to brilliantly reconstruct the web of ancient drama, music, religion, painting, and material culture in which it is enmeshed. She shows, for example, that by stringing together images of horses, stars, and birds, the poem evokes classical antiquity’s beloved dance of the constellations. Instrumental in shaping the structure of the lyric, this dance symbolizes the cosmic order reflected in the order of the state, which the chorus would have enacted in a ritual performance of the song. With broad implications for archaeology, art history, and ancient science, Ferrari’s bold new analysis dramatically deepens our understanding of Greek poetry and the rich culture of archaic Sparta.

Alcman and the Cosmos of Sparta

Alcman and the Cosmos of Sparta PDF Author: Gloria Ferrari
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226668673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The Partheneion, or “maiden song,” composed in the seventh century BCE by the SpartanpoetAlcman, is the earliest substantial example of a choral lyric. A provocative reinterpretation of the Partheneion and its broader context, Alcman and the Cosmos of Sparta excavates the poem’s invocations of widespread and long-lived cosmological ideas that cast the universe as perfectly harmonious and invested its workings with an ethical dimension. Moving far beyond standard literary interpretations, Gloria Ferrari uncovers this astral symbolism by approaching the poem from several angles to brilliantly reconstruct the web of ancient drama, music, religion, painting, and material culture in which it is enmeshed. She shows, for example, that by stringing together images of horses, stars, and birds, the poem evokes classical antiquity’s beloved dance of the constellations. Instrumental in shaping the structure of the lyric, this dance symbolizes the cosmic order reflected in the order of the state, which the chorus would have enacted in a ritual performance of the song. With broad implications for archaeology, art history, and ancient science, Ferrari’s bold new analysis dramatically deepens our understanding of Greek poetry and the rich culture of archaic Sparta.

 PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 0521633095
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description


A History of Alcman’s Early Reception

A History of Alcman’s Early Reception PDF Author: Vasiliki Kousoulini
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527533271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
This book constructs a history of Alcman’s early reception from the Archaic times until the Hellenistic period, from the composition of his poetry until its first attested systematic edition, taking into consideration the existence of a tradition of partheneia and its implications. Can it be suggested that the emerging book culture killed the “song culture”? Was Alcman an archetypal prototype of an archaic genre (partheneia) and regarded as a historical figure? This book answers such questions, arguing that the tradition of partheneia was never powerful enough, especially outside Sparta, in order to completely absorb the poet.

The Shipwreck Sea

The Shipwreck Sea PDF Author: Jeffrey M. Duban
Publisher: CLAIRVIEW BOOKS
ISBN: 1912992000
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Sappho, in the words of poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), was “simply nothing less – as she is certainly nothing more – than the greatest poet who ever was at all.” Born over 2,600 years ago on the Greek island of Lesbos, Sappho, the namesake lesbian, wrote amorously of men and women alike, exhibiting both masculine and feminine tendencies in her poetry and life. What’s left of her writing, and what we know of her, is fragmentary, and thus ever subject to speculation and study. The Shipwreck Sea highlights the love poetry of the soulful Sappho, the impassioned Ibycus, and the playful Anacreon, among other Greek lyric poets of the age (7th to 5th centuries BC), with verse translations into English by author Jeffrey Duban. The book also features selected Latin poets who wrote on erotic themes – Catullus, Lucretius, Horace, and Petronius – and poems by Charles Baudelaire, with his milestone rejoinder to lesbian love (“Lesbos”) and, in the same stanzaic meter, a turn to the consoling power of memory in love’s more frequently tormented recall (“Le Balcon”). Duban also translates selected Carmina Burana of Carl Orff, the poems frequently Anacreontic in spirit. The book’s essays include a comprehensive analysis with a new translation of Horace’s famed Odes 1.5 (“To Pyrrha”), in which the theme of (love’s) shipwreck predominates, and an opening treatise-length argument – exploring painting, sculpture, literature, and other Western art forms – on the irrelevance of gender to artistic creation. (No, Homer was not a woman, and it would make no difference if she were.) Twenty full-color artwork reproductions, masterpieces in their own right, illustrate and bring Duban’s argument to life. Finally, Duban presents a selection of his own love poems, imitations and pastiches written over a lifetime – these composed in the “classical mode”, which is the leitmotif of this volume. The Shipwreck Sea is a delightful and continually thought-provoking companion to The Lesbian Lyre, both books vividly demonstrating that classicism yet thrives in our time, despite the modernism marshaled against it.

The Birth and Development of the Idealized Concept of Arcadia in the Ancient World

The Birth and Development of the Idealized Concept of Arcadia in the Ancient World PDF Author: Antonio Corso
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803271655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Bringing together for the first time all the available evidence for the origination and development of the concept of Arcadia, from the Homeric period to the early Roman Empire, this book brings to light a treasure-trove of evidence, both well-known and obscure or fragmentary, filling a significant gap in the scholarly bibliography.

Phaethon

Phaethon PDF Author:
Publisher: Kronos Press
ISBN: 0917994507
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
Phaethon offers a comparative study of the Phaethon myth.

Cities Called Athens

Cities Called Athens PDF Author: Kevin F. Daly
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611486181
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 495

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Book Description
The fourteen essays in this volume share new and evolving knowledge, theories, and observations about the city of Athens or the region of Attica. The contents include essays on topography, architecture, religion and cult, sculpture, ceramic studies, iconography, epigraphy, trade, and drama. This volume is dedicated to John McK. Camp II, to acknowledge the extraordinary impact he has had on the field of Greek archaeology through his work in the Athenian Agora, as a scholar of ancient Greece, and as Mellon Professor at the American School of Classical Studies. The contributors' work represents current research by the latest generation of scholars with ties to Athens. All of the contributors were students of Professor Camp in Greece, and their essays are dedicated to him in gratitude for his profound influence on their lives and careers.

A Companion to Sparta

A Companion to Sparta PDF Author: Anton Powell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119072387
Category : History
Languages : de
Pages : 839

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Book Description
A Companion to Sparta umfasst zwei Bände und präsentiert erstmals umfassend Essays unterschiedlichster Autoren über sämtliche Aspekte der Geschichte und Gesellschaft Spartas, von den Anfängen in den Dunklen Jahrhunderten Griechenlands bis zum Römischen Kaiserreich. - Bietet eine klare und umfassende Einführung in sämtliche Aspekte von Sparta als eine Gemeinschaft, die von Städten aus dieser Zeit als eine der einflussreichsten Mächte im klassischen Griechenland angesehen wurde. - Präsentiert ausführlich die Geschichte und Kultur Spartas in Beiträgen internationaler Autoren, darunter nahezu alle Experten und Wissenschaftler des Fachgebiets. - Enthält über ein Dutzend Abbildungen zur Kunst Spartas, die die Entwicklung des alltäglichen Lebens in Sparta zeigen. - Beleuchtet die heutige Kontroverse über Veränderungen in der Gesellschaft Spartas, von der archaischen bis zur klassischen Periode, aus einem neuen Blickwinkel.

Cosmography and the Idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece

Cosmography and the Idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece PDF Author: Renaud Gagné
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108976956
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
Cosmography is defined here as the rhetoric of cosmology: the art of composing worlds. The mirage of Hyperborea, which played a substantial role in Greek religion and culture throughout Antiquity, offers a remarkable window into the practice of composing and reading worlds. This book follows Hyperborea across genres and centuries, both as an exploration of the extraordinary record of Greek thought on that further North and as a case study of ancient cosmography and the anthropological philology that tracks ancient cosmography. Trajectories through the many forms of Greek thought on Hyperborea shed light on key aspects of the cosmography of cult and the cosmography of literature. The philology of worlds pursued in this book ranges from Archaic hymns to Hellenistic and Imperial reconfigurations of Hyperborea. A thousand years of cosmography is thus surveyed through the rewritings of one idea. This is a book on the art of reading worlds slowly.

The World Underfoot

The World Underfoot PDF Author: Hallie M. Franks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190863161
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Drawing on discourses in the sociology and anthropology of space, the author presents an innovative new interpretation of pebble mosaic imagery as an active contributor to the ancient Greek symposium as a metaphorical experience.