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Author: Kathryn A. Morgan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190266619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
This groundbreaking book attempts a fully contextualized reading of the poetry written by Pindar for Hieron of Syracuse in the 470s BC. It argues that the victory odes and other occasional songs composed by Pindar for the Sicilian tyrant were part of an extensive cultural program that included athletic competition, coinage, architecture, sanctuary dedication, city foundation, and much more. In the tumultuous years following the Persian invasion of Greece in 480, elite Greek leaders and their cities struggled to capitalize on the Greek victory and to define themselves as free peoples who triumphed over the threat of Persian monarchy. Pindar's victory odes are an important contribution to Hieron's goal of panhellenic pre-eminence, redescribing contemporary tyranny as an instantiation of golden-age kingship and consonant with best Greek tradition. In a delicate process of cultural legitimation, the poet's praise deploys athletic victories as a signs of more general preeminence. Three initial chapters set the stage by presenting the history and culture of Syracuse under the Deinomenid tyrants, exploring issues of performance and patronage, and juxtaposing Hieron to rival Greek leaders on the mainland. Subsequent chapters examine in turn all Pindar's preserved poetry for Hieron and members of his court, and contextualizes this poetry by comparing it to the songs written for Hieron by Pindar's poetic contemporary, Bacchylides. These odes develop a specifically "tyrannical" mythology in which a hero from the past enjoys unusual closeness with the gods, only to bring ruin on him or herself by failing to manage this closeness appropriately. Such negative exemplars counterbalance Hieron's good fortune and present the dangers against which he must (and does) protect himself by regal virtue. The readings that emerge are marked by exceptional integration of literary interpretation with the political/historical context.
Author: Kathryn A. Morgan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190266619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480
Get Book Here
Book Description
This groundbreaking book attempts a fully contextualized reading of the poetry written by Pindar for Hieron of Syracuse in the 470s BC. It argues that the victory odes and other occasional songs composed by Pindar for the Sicilian tyrant were part of an extensive cultural program that included athletic competition, coinage, architecture, sanctuary dedication, city foundation, and much more. In the tumultuous years following the Persian invasion of Greece in 480, elite Greek leaders and their cities struggled to capitalize on the Greek victory and to define themselves as free peoples who triumphed over the threat of Persian monarchy. Pindar's victory odes are an important contribution to Hieron's goal of panhellenic pre-eminence, redescribing contemporary tyranny as an instantiation of golden-age kingship and consonant with best Greek tradition. In a delicate process of cultural legitimation, the poet's praise deploys athletic victories as a signs of more general preeminence. Three initial chapters set the stage by presenting the history and culture of Syracuse under the Deinomenid tyrants, exploring issues of performance and patronage, and juxtaposing Hieron to rival Greek leaders on the mainland. Subsequent chapters examine in turn all Pindar's preserved poetry for Hieron and members of his court, and contextualizes this poetry by comparing it to the songs written for Hieron by Pindar's poetic contemporary, Bacchylides. These odes develop a specifically "tyrannical" mythology in which a hero from the past enjoys unusual closeness with the gods, only to bring ruin on him or herself by failing to manage this closeness appropriately. Such negative exemplars counterbalance Hieron's good fortune and present the dangers against which he must (and does) protect himself by regal virtue. The readings that emerge are marked by exceptional integration of literary interpretation with the political/historical context.
Author: Emily Wilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350154873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments, and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different visions of what the most serious kind of dramatic story might be, and the most appropriate ways of telling those stories on stage. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual, and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
Author: Virginia M. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190910321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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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: Richard Neer
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421429799
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 475
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Book Description
A groundbreaking study of the interaction of poetry, performance, and the built environment in ancient Greece. Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Classics by the Association of American Publishers In this volume, Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke develop a new, integrated approach to classical Greece: a "lyric archaeology" that combines literary and art-historical analysis with archaeological and epigraphic materials. At the heart of the book is the great poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his magnificent odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other competitions. Unlike the quintessentially personal genre of modern lyric, these poems were destined for public performance by choruses of dancing men. Neer and Kurke go further to show that they were also site-specific: as the dancers moved through the space of a city or a sanctuary, their song would refer to local monuments and landmarks. Part of Pindar's brief, they argue, was to weave words and bodies into elaborate tapestries of myth and geography and, in so doing, to re-imagine the very fabric of the city-state. Pindar's poems, in short, were tools for making sense of space. Recent scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology. But Neer and Kurke show that these distinctions are artificial. Poems, statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and buildings worked together as a "suite" of technologies for organizing landscapes, cityscapes, and territories. Studying these technologies in tandem reveals the procedures and criteria by which the Greeks understood relations of nearness and distance, "here" and "there"—and how these ways of inhabiting space were essentially political. Rooted in close readings of individual poems, buildings, and works of art, Pindar, Song, and Space ranges from Athens to Libya, Sicily to Rhodes, to provide a revelatory new understanding of the world the Greeks built—and a new model for studying the ancient world.
Author: Hanne Eisenfeld
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108831192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
Demonstrates the theological power of Pindar's victory songs by interpreting them within their contemporary religious landscapes.
Author: Theodora A. Hadjimichael
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192538934
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
The Hellenistic period was an era of literary canons, of privileged texts and collections. One of the most stable of these consisted of the nine (rarely ten) lyric poets: whether the selection was based on poetic quality, popularity, or the availability of texts in the Library of Alexandria, the Lyric Canon offers a valuable and revealing window on the reception and survival of lyric in antiquity. This volume explores the complexities inherent in the process by which lyric poetry was canonized, and discusses questions connected with the textual transmission and preservation of lyric poems from the archaic period through to the Hellenistic era. It firstly contextualizes lyric poetry geographically, and then focuses on a broad range of sources that played a critical role in the survival of lyric poetry - in particular, comedy, Plato, Aristotle's Peripatetic school, and the Hellenistic scholars - to discuss the reception of the nine canonical lyric poets and their work. By exploring the ways in which fifth- and fourth-century sources interpreted lyric material, and the role they played both in the scholarly work of the Alexandrians and in the creation of what we conventionally call the Hellenistic Lyric Canon, it elucidates what can be defined as the prevailing pattern in the transmission of lyric poetry, as well as the place of Bacchylides as a puzzling exception to this norm. The overall discussion conclusively demonstrates that the canonizing process of the lyric poets was already at work from the fifth century BC and that it is reflected both in the evaluation of lyric by fourth-century thinkers and in the activities of the Hellenistic scholars in the Library of Alexandria.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004339701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Authorship and Greek Song is a collection of papers dealing with various aspects of authorship in the song culture of Ancient Greece. In this cultural context the idea of the poet as author of his poems is complicated by the fact that poetry in archaic Greece circulated as songs performed for a variety of audiences, both local and “global” (Panhellenic). The volume’s chapters discuss questions about the importance of the singers/performers; the nature of the performance occasion; the status of the poet; the authority of the poet/author and/or that of the performer; and the issues of authenticity arising when poems are composed under a given poet’s name. The volume offers discussions of major authors such as Pindar, Sappho, and Theognis.
Author: David Fearn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192506498
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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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: Margaret Foster
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520401425
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Seers featured prominently in ancient Greek culture, but they rarely appear in archaic and classical colonial discourse. Margaret Foster exposes the ideological motivations behind this discrepancy and reveals how colonial discourse privileged the city’s founder and his dependence on Delphi, the colonial oracle par excellence, at the expense of the independent seer. Investigating a sequence of literary texts, Foster explores the tactics the Greeks devised both to leverage and suppress the extraordinary cultural capital of seers. The first cultural history of the seer, The Seer and the City illuminates the contests between religious and political powers in archaic and classical Greece.
Author: Almut Fries
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111128369
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
This is the first large-scale edition with introduction and commentary of Pindar’s First Pythian Ode. Composed for Hieron of Syracuse to mark his Delphic chariot victory of 470 BC and his recent foundation of the city of Aetna, the poem is not only a literary masterpiece, but also of central importance for our understanding of Greek history and culture in the early fifth century BC. As our only contemporary written source for the Sicilian Wars against the Carthaginians and Etruscans, it stands on a level with Simonides’ Plataea Elegy and Aeschylus’ Persians on the Persian Wars. This is a period where epoch-making Greek victories in the east and west were celebrated by the greatest poets in a way that reveals much about the atmosphere in which their works were created and received. The book offers a new edition of the text with a detailed introduction and commentary, which discuss textual problems, language, metre and transmission as well as a variety of literary questions, the historical background and the early performance and reception history of the ode. It will be of interest to scholars and students of archaic and classical Greek poetry and of Greek history of the early fifth century BC.
