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This book provides a comprehensive study of the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, an influential ancient Greek text that narrates the lives of Homer and Hesiod and their legendary poetic contest. It offers new perspectives on the nature, uses, and legacy of the text and its tale of literary competition. Located within a recent trend in scholarship that treats ancient biographies as modes of literary reception, the first chapter discusses how, for authors throughout antiquity and beyond, staging an imaginary competition between Homer and Hesiod was an adaptable and flexible way to convey a diverse range of speculations on epic poetry. The study of the manuscript tradition reassesses the relationshi...
A fresh and wide-ranging exploration across the whole of early Greek hexameter poetry, focusing on issues of poetics and metapoetics.
This collection of essays sheds new light on the relationship between two of the main drivers of intellectual discourse in ancient Greece: the epic tradition and the Sophists. The contributors show how throughout antiquity the epic tradition proved a flexible instrument to navigate new political, cultural, and philosophical contexts. The Sophists, both in the Classical and the Imperial age, continuously reconfigured the value of epic poetry according to the circumstances: using epic myths allowed the Sophists to present themselves as the heirs of traditional education, but at the same time this tradition was reshaped to encapsulate new questions that were central to the Sophists' intellectua...
This edited volume explores the intermediality of image and text in Graeco-Roman sculpture. Through its choice of authors, disciplinary backgrounds are deliberately merged in order to bridge the traditional gap between archaeologists, epigraphists and philologists, who for a long time studied statues, material inscriptions and literary epigrams within the closely confined borders of their individual disciplines. Through its choice of objects, privileging works of which there are significant material remains, through its inclusion of all kinds of figural-cum-inscriptional designs, ranging from grand sculpture to reliefs and ‘decorative’ marble-objects, and through its methodological empha...
How does Europe’s economic crisis affect the ways in which industry and entrepreneurship are experienced on a grassroots level? The book offers an answer to this question by exploring the Italian jewellery town of Valenza and the downturn of its principal industry. Through the experiences of its inhabitants, the study investigates the social role that jewellery production had in Valenza and provides an ethnographic account of the crisis the city endures. This analysis delves into the relationship between a community and its industry in order to understand the social and cultural challenges Italy and Europe will face in the future.
This collection brings together twenty eight chapters written by Stephen Harrison’s colleagues and former students from around the globe to celebrate both his distinguished teaching and research career as a classicist and his outstanding and admirable service to the international classical community. The wide variety of original contributions on topics ranging from Greek to Latin and ancient literature’s reception in opera and contemporary writing is divided into five parts. Each corresponds to the staggering publication record of the honorand, encompassing, as it does, a broad literary spectrum, starting from the literature of the end of the Roman Republic and coming down to Neo-Latin and the reception of Classics in Irish, in English poetry and in European literature and culture in general. This corpus of compelling chapters is hoped to match Stephen Harrison’s rich research output in an illuminating dialogue with it.
Hesiod's Works and Days was often performed in its entirety, but was also relentlessly excerpted, quoted, and reapplied. This volume situates the poem within these two modes of reading and argues that the text itself sustains both treatments, advocating not blind adherence to Hesiod's teachings but thinking for oneself and working for one's lesson.
The papyri transmit a part of the testimonia relevant to pre-Socratic philosophy. The ʼCorpus dei Papiri Filosofici‛ takes this material only partly into account. In this volume, a team of specialists discusses some of the most important papyrological texts that are major instruments for reconstructing pre-Socratic philosophy and doxography. Furthermore, these texts help to increase our knowledge of how pre-Socratic thought – through contributions to physics, cosmology, ethics, ontology, theology, anthropology, hermeneutics, and aesthetics – paved the way for the canonic scientific fields of European culture. More specifically, each paper tackles (published and unpublished) papyrological texts concerning the Orphics, the Milesians, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the early Atomists, and the Sophists. For the first time in the field of pre-Socratics studies, several papers are devoted to the Herculanean sources, along with others concerning the Graeco-Egyptian papyri and the Derveni Papyrus.
Scholars have recognized that fake news is not a phenomenon peculiar to the 21st century. While efforts for a more focused approach to fake news in the ancient world have been carried out in the field of Roman history, the phenomenon of fake news in ancient Greece has received limited attention. The contributions in this volume offer a selective approach to this phenomenon by applying media and cultural studies instruments to ancient texts. They pinpoint parallels and differences between ancient and modern fake news by employing methods of literary and cultural studies, as well as historical-documentary analysis of ancient sources. In particular, they explore questions such as: To what exten...
The story of our ongoing fascination with Homer, the man and the myth. Homer, the great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is revered as a cultural icon of antiquity and a figure of lasting influence. But his identity is shrouded in questions about who he was, when he lived, and whether he was an actual person, a myth, or merely a shared idea. Rather than attempting to solve the mystery of this character, James I. Porter explores the sources of Homer’s mystique and their impact since the first recorded mentions of Homer in ancient Greece. Homer: The Very Idea considers Homer not as a man, but as a cultural invention nearly as distinctive and important as the poems attributed to him, following the cultural history of an idea and of the obsession that is reborn every time Homer is imagined. Offering novel readings of texts and objects, the book follows the very idea of Homer from his earliest mentions to his most recent imaginings in literature, criticism, philosophy, visual art, and classical archaeology.