Author: Virginia LewisPublisher:
ISBN: 9781942495406
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Pindar in Sicily
Author: Virginia LewisPublisher:
ISBN: 9781942495406
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Pindar, Song, and Space
Author: Richard NeerPublisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421429799
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 475
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.
Myth, Locality, and Identity in Pindar's Sicilian Odes
Author: Virginia M. LewisPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019091033X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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.
Pindar
Author: Anne Pippin BurnettPublisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472521471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176
Book Description
Of all the lyric poets of ancient Greece, Pindar is the one whose work has been best preserved. His odes to victorious Greek athletes were entertainments designed for performance in a hospitable atmosphere of drinking, dining and jokes. The victor has known the favour of the god whose contest he entered, and has brought back pan-Hellenic fame to his family, friends and city. To extend this glory and make it permanent, he has commissioned a song of praise, had dancers trained to sing it, and summoned an audience of kinsmen, neighbours and friends to enjoy it. Pindar's odes contain invocations and prayers, but their most characteristic effects are achieved thhrough the depiction of fragments of myth. Anne Pippin Burnett argues that these passages were meant neither as mere decoration nor as moral instruction, but served rather as a dramatic mechanism by which dancers brought an experience of another world to guests gathered in the banqueting suite of the victor.
A History of Greek Literature
Author: Frank Byron JevonsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Greek literature
Languages : en
Pages : 540
Book Description
A Dictionary of the Ancient Greek World
Author: David SacksPublisher:
ISBN: 9780195112061
Category : Greece
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Book Description
More than four thousand years ago, a warrior people invaded the rugged hills and fertile plains of the Balkan Peninsula. These people were the ancient Greeks, and their legacy to modern global society is immense. The Greeks invented democracy, narrative history writing, stage tragedy and comedy, philosophy, biological study, and political theory. They introduced the alphabet to European languages and they developed monumental styles of architecture still used throughout the United States for museums, courthouses, and other public buildings. They created a system of sports competitions and a cult of physical fitness, both of which we have inherited. In sculpture, they perfected the representation of the human body. In geometry, they developed theorems and terminology that are still taught in schools. They created the idea of national literature, with its recognized great writers and the libraries to preserve their work. And, perhaps what most people would think of first, the Greeks bequeathed to us their treasure trove of myths, including a hero who remains a favorite today--Hercules. A Dictionary of the Ancient Greek World assembles the people, places, events, and ideas of this spectacular civilization in one easy-to-use source. With over five hundred entries and more than seventy line-drawings, this essential A-Z reference covers every aspect of Greek civilization, from the beginning of Minoan civilization in the third millennium B.C. to the Roman annexation of mainland Greece in 146 B.C. Detailing not only the loftiest achievements of the Greeks but also the ordinary facets of their everyday life--from the philosophy of Plato to Greek sexual attitudes--this extraordinary compendium illuminates the vitality and genius of that influential culture.
Pindar's Eyes
Author: David FearnPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192506498
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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.
Pindar's Verbal Art
Author: James Bradley WellsPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674036277
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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.
Carnivalizing Difference
Author: Peter I. BartaPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134697694
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
It has seemed at times that there is no neutral territory between those who see Bakhtin as the practitioner of a kind of neo-Marxist, or at least materialist, deconstruction and those who look at the same texts and see a defender of traditional, liberal humanist values and classical conceptions of order, a conservative in the true sense of the term. Arising from a conference under the same title held at Texas Tech University, Carnivalizing Difference seeks to explore the actual and possible relationships between Bakhtinian theory and cultural practice. The introduction explores the changing configurations of our understanding of Bakhtin's work in the context of recent theory and outlines how that understanding can inform, and be informed by, culture both ancient and modern. Eleven articles, spanning a wide range of periods and cultural forms, then address these issues in detail, revealing the ways in which Bakhtinian thought illuminates, sometimes obfuscates, but always challenges.
Pindar's Poetry, Patrons, and Festivals
Author: Simon HornblowerPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199296723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490
Book Description
Ancient sport made a huge if indirect contribution to the literature of ancient Greece, since some sixty poems by Pindar and Bacchylides ('epinikian odes'), written to commemorate victories, survive from the Classical period. This book is a collection of essays about that literature, and about the social and physical context for which it was written. The editors assembled an internationally distinguished team of speakers for the original 2002 seminar series held in London, and thesepapers form the backbone of the book. But to ensure coherence and comprehensive coverage, they have commissioned three further papers, and have themselves written a long thematic Introduction. The result is a stellar team of authors, and a book which looks at an important literary phenomenon inlight of the latest archaeological and sociological insights, as well as evaluating the poetry both as poetry and as a performance genre with distinctive characteristics.
