Bücher der Reihe Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes

Contributions to this volume explore the interconnections between ancient Greek mythographers and their contemporaries working in non-mythographic genres of both poetry and prose. Focus on this dynamic intersection illuminates the Greco-Roman intellectual world in which both operated and highlights for scholars and students of Greek and Latin literature the variety and complexity of ancient Greek mythographic practice.

This monograph examines the reception of Pindar in the poetry produced at the court of the first three Ptolemies (ca. 305¿222 BCE). Through active engagement with the works of Pindar, poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, and Posidippus responded to the encomiastic needs of their Ptolemaic patrons and fashioned an image of Pindar as the praise poet par excellence.

This book argues that Xenophon has crafted his narrative in such a way as to reinforce the opinion of his predecessor Thucydides that the development of the Peloponnesian War depended to a great extent on Persian money, but the factors that ultimately determined its outcome were the moral virtues and the skills of the military leaders of Athens and Sparta.

This book explores for the first time the relation between Atticist lexicography and the pronunciation of Greek, an aspect of Atticism that has never been studied thouroughly before. It examines the ideas of the Atticist about what Greek should sound like, drawing on Atticist lexicography as the main source of information on the special pronunciation of the Atticist. The book addresses all scholars with an interest in Atticism, Greek in the Imperial period, and linguistic purism more in general. It sheds new light on an aspect of Atticism that is otherwise poorly attested, and complements the existiting study on later Greek and the impact of Atticism in the history of the Greek language.

This book looks at witnesses to suffering and death in ancient Greek epic (Homer's Iliad) and tragedy. Internal spectators abound in both genres, and have received due scholarly attention. The present monograph covers new ground by dealing with a specific subset of characters: those who are put in the position of spectator to (and, often, commentator on) their own deed(s). By their very nature, protagonists are confined to the role of witness to the suffering (or deaths) they have caused only for brief stretches of time - often a single scene or even just the length of a speech - but every instance is of central importance, not just to our understanding of the characters in question, but also to the articulation of fundamental themes within the poetic works under examination. As they shift from the status of agent to that of witness, these protagonists, qua spectators to the consequences of their actions, give voice to, dramatize, and enact the tragic motifs of human helplessness and mortal fallibility that lie at the core of Homeric epic and Greek tragedy and that define the human condition, in a manner that leads the audience looking on to ponder their own.

Fourth-century Attic grave epigrams reflect a transitional phase in the evolution of the genre of epigram. They testify to a shift of interest towards social issues such as the family, the deceased's age and profession. In a turbulent period of restlessness and uncertainty that followed the devastating Peloponnesian war, the commemoration of the departed in private monuments became an effective mechanism of displaying publicly a new set of social concerns. It is within these contexts that special emphasis has been put on the composition of sepulchral epigrams, their gradual autonomization and sophistication. This book explores this decisive phase in the evolution of the epigram by reconstructing as many ancient contexts as possible on the one hand, and studying sepulchral epigrams as a poetic art on the other.

Addressing classicists, philosophers, students, and general readers alike, this volume emphasizes the unity of Seneca's work and his originality as a translator of Stoic ideas in the literary forms of imperial Rome. Prominent Seneca scholars publishing in other languages are for the first time made accessible to anglophone readers.

This volume brings together fifteen papers which address key issues in the field of Hellenistic studies. By reassessing conventional views and methods the volume aims at providing new insights into Hellenistic literature.

The categories of classical narratology have been successfully applied to ancient texts in the last two decades, but in the meantime narratological theory has moved on. In accordance with these developments, Narratology and Interpretation draws out the subtler possibilities of narratological analysis for the interpretation of ancient texts.

This book addresses the performance and dissemination of Greek poems of the seventh to the fifth centuries BC. individuals' and communities' roles in funding performances and securing the circulation of texts; and how such performances contributed to transmission of the poems' texts.