Author: Charles Segal
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400853109
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Combining historical and philological method with contemporary literary analysis, this study of Pindar's longest and most elaborate victory ode, the Fourth Pythian, traces the underlying mythical patterns, implicit poetics, and processes of mythopoesis that animate his poetry. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Sarah Nooter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108547524
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Voice connects our embodied existence with the theoretical worlds we construct. This book argues that the voice is a crucial element of mortal identity in the tragedies of Aeschylus. It first presents conceptions of the voice in ancient Greek poetry and philosophy, understanding it in its most literal and physical form, as well as through the many metaphorical connotations that spring from it. Close readings then show how the tragedies and fragments of Aeschylus gain meaning from the rubric and performance of voice, concentrating particularly on the Oresteia. Sarah Nooter demonstrates how voice - as both a bottomless metaphor and performative agent of action - stands as the prevailing configuration through which Aeschylus' dramas should be heard. This highly original book will interest all those interested in classical literature as well as those concerned with material approaches to the interpretation of texts.
Author: David Fearn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191065552
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Pindar's Eyes is a ground-breaking interdisciplinary exploration of the interactions between Greek lyric poetry and visual and material culture in the early fifth century BCE. Its aim is to open up analysis of lyric to the wider theme of aesthetic experience in early classical Greece, with particular focus on the poetic mechanisms through which Pindar's victory odes use visual and material culture to engage their audiences. Complete readings of Nemean 5, Nemean 8, and Pythian 1 reveal the poet's deep interest in the relations between lyric poetry and commemorative and religious sculpture, as well as other significant visual phenomena, while literary studies of his evocation of cultural attitudes through elaborate use of the lyric first person are combined with art-historical treatments of ecphrasis, of image and text, and of art's framing of ritual experience in ancient Greece. This specific aesthetic approach is expanded through fresh treatments of Simonides' and Bacchylides' own engagements with material culture, as well as an account of Pindaric themes in the Aeginetan logoi of Herodotus' Histories. These come together to offer not just a novel perspective on the relationship between art and text in Pindaric poetry, but to give rise to new claims about the nature of classical Greek visuality and ritual subjectivity, and to foster a richer understanding of the ways in which classical poetry and art shaped the lives and experiences of their consumers.
Author: Virginia M. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019091033X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Myth, Locality, and Identity argues that Pindar engages in a striking, innovative style of mythmaking that represents and shapes Sicilian identities in his epinician odes for Sicilian victors in the fifth century BCE. While Sicily has been thought to be lacking in local traditions for Pindar to celebrate, Lewis argues that the Sicilian odes offer examples of the formation of local traditions: the monster Typho whom Zeus defeated to become king of the gods, for example, now lives beneath Mt. Aitna; Persephone receives the island of Sicily as a gift from Zeus; and the Peloponnesian river Alpheos travels to Syracuse in pursuit of the local spring nymph Arethusa. By weaving regional and Panhellenic myth into the local landscape, as the book shows, Pindar infuses physical places with meaning and thereby contextualizes people, cities, and their rulers within a wider Greek framework. During this time period, Greek Sicily experienced a unique set of political circumstances: the inhabitants were continuously being displaced, cities were founded and resettled, and political leaders rose and fell from power in rapid succession. This book offers the first sustained analysis of myth in Pindar's odes for Sicilian victors across the island that accounts for their shared context. The nodes of myth and place that Pindar fuses in this poetry reinforce and develop a sense of place and community for citizens locally; at the same time, they raise the profile of physical sites and the cities attached to them for larger audiences across the Greek world. In addition to providing new readings of Pindaric odes and offering a model for the formation of Sicilian identities in the first half of the fifth century, the book contributes new insights into current debates on the relationship between myth and place in classical literature.
Author: Asya C. Sigelman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316565270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
Modern scholarship tends to focus on the social, political and economic information that can be gleaned from Pindar's treatment of the subject of his victory odes - the athlete who brings immortality to his family and polis. In this book, Asya C. Sigelman offers a new approach to the odes, exploring the fact that Pindar's language and imagery suggest that the athlete's victory is only a weaker version of the poet's immortalizing feat. Examining several central Pindaric images, Sigelman shows that they are fundamentally reflexive, structured as expressions of poetic creativity engaged in a perpetual synthesis of intra-poetic time - of the unity of the past, present and future of the world of Pindar's song. As the book's case studies of several of the odes demonstrate, this synthesis is key to Pindar's notion of immortalization and constitutes the central poetic subject of Pindar's song which underlies and informs its praise of the victorious athlete.
Author: Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer
Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag
ISBN: 9783515075640
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 116
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Book Description
This book is about passages where Pindar uses the future tense with reference to himself or to his song. It addresses the question as to exactly what the function is of the future tense in those passages. This is a vexed problem, which has played a major role in Pindaric criticism for the last decades and which has recently gained relevance for the interpretation of other authors as well. This book offers a detailed examination of all the relevant passages in Pindar, as well as a generous amount of examples from other authors. It takes a firm stand against the communis opinio that first person futures in Pindar merely express a present intention: the so-called "encomiastic" or "performative" future. It demonstrates that the reference to a future moment is relevant in every single instance of a future verb in Pindar and concludes that there is no such thing as an "encomiastic" future. Inhalt: Futures with a text internal reference - Futures referring to a later moment in the ode - "Fictional" futures - Generic futures - Futures with a specific text external reference - The case of Olympian XI - First person futures in Theocritus' second Idyll & magical texts. (Franz Steiner 1999)
Author: James Bradley Wells
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674036277
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Wells argues that the victory song is a traditional art form that appealed to a popular audience and served exclusive elite interests through the inclusive appeal of entertainment, popular instruction, and laughter. Wells offers a new take on old Pindaric questions: genre, unity of the victory song, tradition, and epinician performance.
Author: Pfeijffer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004351248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 735
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Book Description
A study of three epinicia of Pindar, which have in common that they celebrate victories of Aeginetan athletes and that they respond to the contemporary political situation in Aegina and to circumstances of the victory. The primary objective of this book is to provide an interpretation of each of the three odes as meaningful, coherent works of the literary art. For each ode, it provides a commentary in which problems of text and interpretation are discussed in detail, a structural and metrical analysis, and an interpretative essay, in which the observations of detail are brought together in order to provide an answer to the question as to how the ode at hand could have functioned as a coherent, meaningful epinicion. The introduction addresses questions of method and provides a description of Pindar's style.
Author: Zsolt Adorjani
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004277390
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
Pindar’s Sixth Olympian Ode is considered one of the poet’s most brilliant victory odes. This is the first full-scale commentary on it. Adorjáni presents Greek text with critical apparatus, translation and metrical analysis. Three introductory chapters treat matters of history (background, date, performance) and literary criticism. Then follows a verse-by-verse commentary rooted in the tradition of philological exegesis, concentrating on grammatical, stylistic and interpretive features. Until now the Sixth Olympian has been praised chiefly for its magnificent and lucid presentation of the myth of Iamos, a seer of Arcadian origin and ancestor of the prophetic clan of the Iamidae. This commentary illuminates both the overwhelming depth of thought and the cunningly wrought structure of this masterpiece, contributing to a better understanding of Pindar’s verbal artistry. Pindars sechste olympische Ode ist einer der glänzendsten Siegesgesänge des Dichters. Hier wird der erste umfassende philologische Kommentar zum Gedicht vorgelegt. Adorjáni bietet einen griechischen Text mit kritischem Apparat, Übersetzung, metrischer Analyse und drei Einleitungskapiteln, die in die Probleme der Geschichtlichkeit (Hintergrund, Entstehungszeit, Aufführung) und der literarischen Interpretation hineinführen. Auf diesen Teil folgt ein von Vers zu Vers fortschreitender Kommentar, der gemäß den alten Traditionen der Texterklärung auf grammatische, stilistische und interpretatorische Fragen eingeht. Bisher wurde Olympie 6 zumeist als großartige und suggestive Erzählung des Mythos des Sehers Iamos, des Vorfahren der olympischen Iamiden, gewürdigt. Diesem Kommentar ist daran gelegen, die intrikate Gedankentiefe und vollkommenste Formkunst dieses Meisterwerks vor Augen zu führen.
Author: Charles Segal
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847686179
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
In this landmark collection of essays, renowned classicist Charles Segal offers detailed analyses of major texts from archaic and early classical Greek poetry; in particular, works of Alcman, Mimnermus, Sappho, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Corinna. Segal provides close readings of the texts, and then studies the literary form and language of early Greek lyric, the poets' conception of their aims and their art, the use of mythical paradigms, and the relation of the poems to their social context. A recurrent theme is the recognition of the fragility and brevity of mortal happiness and the consciousness of how the immortality conferred by poetry resists the ever-threatening presence of death and oblivion, fixing in permanent form the passing moments of joy and beauty. This is an essential book for students and scholars of ancient Greek poetry.
