Search Results

The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics

A. P. David

This book develops an authentic and revolutionary musical analysis of ancient Greek poetry. It brings the interpretation of ancient verse into step with the sorts of analyses customarily enjoyed by ... More

This book develops an authentic and revolutionary musical analysis of ancient Greek poetry. It brings the interpretation of ancient verse into step with the sorts of analyses customarily enjoyed by works in all the more recent poetical and musical traditions. It departs from the abstract metrical analyses of the past in that it conceives the rhythmic and harmonic elements of poetry as integral to the whole expression, and decisive in the interpretation of its meaning. Such an analysis is now possible because of a new theory of the Greek tonic accent, set out in the third chapter, and its application to Greek poetry understood as choreia — the proper name for the art and work of ancient poets in both epic and lyric, described by Plato as a synthesis of dance rhythm and vocal harmony, in disagreement moving toward agreement. The book offers a thorough-going treatment of Homeric poetics: here some remarkable discoveries in the harmonic movement of epic verse, when combined with some neglected facts about the origin of the hexameter in a ‘dance of the Muses’, lead to essential new thinking about the genesis and the form of Homeric poetry. The book also gives a foretaste of the fruits to be harvested in lyric by a musical analysis, applying the new theory of the accent and considering concretely the role of dance in performance.Less

Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire

Ralph Rosen

This book explores the dynamics of comic mockery and satire in Greek and Latin poetry, and argues that poets working in such genres composed their “attacks” on targets, and constructed their ... More

This book explores the dynamics of comic mockery and satire in Greek and Latin poetry, and argues that poets working in such genres composed their “attacks” on targets, and constructed their relationships with audiences, in accordance with a set of common poetic principles, protocols, and tropes. It encourages a synoptic, synchronic view of such poetry, from archaic iambus through Roman satire, and argues that only when we appreciate how an abstracted “poetics of mockery” governs individual poets can we fully understand how such poetry functioned diachronically in its own historical moment. The book examines in particular the strategies deployed by satirical poets to enlist the sympathies of a putative audience and convince them of the legitimacy of their personal attacks. It discusses the tension deliberately created by such poets between self-righteous didactic claims and a persistent desire to undermine them, and concludes that such poetry was felt by ancient audiences to achieve its greatest success as comedy precisely when they were left unable to ascribe to the satirist any consistent moral position. Several early chapters look to Greek myth for paradigms of comic mockery, and argue that these myths can illuminate the ways in which ancient audiences conceptualized specifically poeticized forms of satire. Poets addressed in this part of the book include Archilochus, Hipponax, Horace, Homer, Aristophanes, and Theocritus. Two chapters follow which address the satirical poetics of Callimachus and Juvenal, and a final chapter on the question of how ancient audiences responded the inherently controversial elements of such poetry.Less

The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue

Benjamin Sammons

This study takes a fresh look at a familiar element of the Homeric epics—the poetic catalogue. It aims to uncover the great variety of functions fulfilled by catalogue as a manner of speech within ... More

This study takes a fresh look at a familiar element of the Homeric epics—the poetic catalogue. It aims to uncover the great variety of functions fulfilled by catalogue as a manner of speech within very different contexts, ranging from celebrated examples such as the poet’s famous “Catalogue of Ships,” to others less commonly treated under this rubric, such as catalogues within the speech and rhetoric of Homer’s characters or seemingly unassuming catalogues of objects. It shows that catalogue poetry is no ossified or primitive relic of the old tradition, but a living subgenre of poetry that is deployed by Homer in a creative and original way. The catalogue form may be exploited by the poet or his characters to reflect or distort the themes of the poem as a whole, to impose an interpretation on events of the narrative as they unfold, and possibly to allude to competing poetic traditions or even contemporaneous poems. Throughout, the study focuses on how Homer uses the catalogue form to talk about the epic genre itself: As a compendious and venerable poetic form, it allows the poet to explore the boundaries of the heroic world, the limits of heroic glory, and the ideals and realities of his own traditional role as an epic bard.Less

The Literary Mind

Mark Turner

This book ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and ... More

This book ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, to explain how story and projection — and their powerful combination in parable — are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, the author reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. This book argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, and that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. The author concludes that language is the child of the literary mind. Offering revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy.Less

The Augustan Art of Poetry: Augustan Translation of the Classics

Robin Sowerby

Where previous studies of ‘Augustanism’ have concentrated largely upon political concerns, this book explores the translation of the Roman Augustan aesthetic into a vernacular equivalent by English ... More

Where previous studies of ‘Augustanism’ have concentrated largely upon political concerns, this book explores the translation of the Roman Augustan aesthetic into a vernacular equivalent by English neoclassical poets and does so through the analysis of translations. It has its genesis in the claim made implicitly by Dryden at the conclusion of his Virgil that he had given English poetry the kind of refinement in language and style that Virgil had given the Latin. The opening chapter explores the mediation of the Augustan aesthetic to the early Renaissance by way of the De Arte Poetica of the neo Latin Renaissance poet Vida, represented here in the Augustan version of Pitt. The second chapter charts early English engagements with the classical inheritance before moving on to its chief focus, Dryden's relation to his early predecessors in the refinement of the heroic couplet, Denham and Waller, and the establishment of the full Augustan aesthetic represented in Dryden's Virgil. The third and fourth chapters consider the effect of the Augustan aesthetic upon the translation of silver Latin poets, concentrating on Dryden's Persius and Juvenal, Rowe's Lucan and Pope's Statius and finally on the climactic Augustan achievement, Pope's Homer. The distinguishing strengths of Augustan poetic artistry are shown to advantage in a brief epilogue juxtaposing Augustan and modern versions.Less

Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender

Elizabeth Minchin

Although there has been considerable interest over time in the composition of narrative sections of the Homeric epics, there have been very few studies of the composition of the speeches and ... More

Although there has been considerable interest over time in the composition of narrative sections of the Homeric epics, there have been very few studies of the composition of the speeches and exchanges of speech that Homer depicts in his songs. This book attempts to redress the balance. Drawing on research in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cognitive psychology, the book considers the speeches in Homer from two perspectives, as cognitive and as social phenomena. Part I explores the role of memory in the generation of Homer's speech forms; and the relationship between Homeric voices and the speech of the poet's everyday world. It is suggested that speech acts such as rebukes and the declining of invitations, and question forms and the pattern of hysteron-proteron so familiar to us in Homer, have their origins in pre-patterned forms of everyday speech; and that even the discourse strategies that underpin Homeric questions are recognizable to us from everyday talk. Part II formulates responses to the question of whether Homer reveals consistent differences in his representation of men's and women's talk. Men's and women's speech-habits are examined in order to detect whether there is a male preference for speech acts such as rebukes (a dominant mode) and a female preference for protests (a co-operative mode); and whether the use of information questions, directives, interruption, and even storytelling content and style can be identified with men's and women's different speaking styles. The absence of clearcut and consistent findings on this question does not diminish the value of the original question.Less

The Poetry of Pathos: Studies in Virgilian Epic

Gian Biagio Conte

S. J. Harrison (ed.)

This volume presents a collection of pieces from a celebrated world-class scholar and interpreter of Latin poetry, focusing on the interpretation of Virgil's Aeneid. It forms the sequel to two widely ... More

This volume presents a collection of pieces from a celebrated world-class scholar and interpreter of Latin poetry, focusing on the interpretation of Virgil's Aeneid. It forms the sequel to two widely influential earlier books on Virgil by the same author and translates and adds to a collection of papers published in Italian in 2002. Its central concern is the way in which Virgil reworks earlier poetry (especially that of Homer) at the most detailed level to produce very broad literary and emotional effects. Through detailed scholarly analysis, the book explores a central issue in Virgilian studies, that of how the Aeneid manages to create a new and effective mode of epic in a period when the genre appears to be debased or exhausted.Less

The Homeric Hymns: Interpretative Essays

Andrew Faulkner (ed.)

This book is the first collection on the Homeric Hymns, a corpus of 33 hexameter poems celebrating gods that were probably recited at religious festivals, among other possible performance venues, and ... More

This book is the first collection on the Homeric Hymns, a corpus of 33 hexameter poems celebrating gods that were probably recited at religious festivals, among other possible performance venues, and were frequently attributed in antiquity to Homer. After a general introduction to modern scholarship on the Homeric Hymns, the chapters of the first part of the book examine in detail aspects of the longer narrative poems in the collection, while those of the second part give critical attention to the shorter poems and to the collection as a whole. The contributors to the volume offer a wide range of views on questions central to our understanding of the Homeric Hymns, which have attracted much interest in recent years.Less

Homer's Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the Iliad

Bruce Heiden

Although scholars routinely state that the Iliad is an “oral poem,” it has circulated as a text stabilized in writing since near the time of its composition. Thus, the Iliad undoubtedly has features ... More

Although scholars routinely state that the Iliad is an “oral poem,” it has circulated as a text stabilized in writing since near the time of its composition. Thus, the Iliad undoubtedly has features that render it satisfactory to readers and reading. But the question of what these features might be has been difficult for Homeric scholarship to address within the research paradigm of “oral poetics.” This book delineates a new approach aimed at evaluating what the Iliad furnishes to readers. Its program conceptualizes the act of reading as a repertoire of cognitive functions a reader might deploy in collaboration with the poem's signs. By positing certain functions hypothetically and applying them to the poem, its experiments uncover the kind and degree of suitable “reading material” the poem provides. These analyses reveal that the trajectory of events in the Iliad manifests the central agency of one character, Zeus, and that the transmitted articulation of the epic into “books” conforms to distinct narrative subtrajectories. The analyses also show that the sequence of “books” functions as a design that cues attention to the major crises in the story, as well as to themes that develop its significance. The transmitted arrangement therefore furnishes an implicit cognitive map that both eases comprehension of the storyline and indicates pathways of interpretation.Less

Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus

Emily Baragwanath

Herodotus sought to communicate not only what happened, but also the background of thoughts and perceptions that shaped those events and was also critical to their interpretation in retrospect. This ... More

Herodotus sought to communicate not only what happened, but also the background of thoughts and perceptions that shaped those events and was also critical to their interpretation in retrospect. This book examines the representation of human motivation in Herodotus' Histories, building on recent work that views the historian against the background of the sophists and exploring the implications of this for the Histories' narrative books. Working from the theoretical basis of reader response criticism, it uses Plutarch's insights to plot Herodotus' narrative strategies for guiding his readers' response to questions of motives. Its focus is the sophisticated narrative techniques with which Herodotus represents this elusive variety of historical knowledge; but through illustrating and analyzing a range of such techniques across a wide selection of narratives, it supplies a method for reading the Histories more generally. Herodotus is revealed as a master of both narrative and historiography, able tell a lucid story of the past while nonetheless exposing the methodological and epistemological challenges it presented. Subjects discussed include the influence of Homer as a narrative model; the account of Leonidas and Thermopylae—where the subtle interweaving of heroic and more pragmatic motivations contribute to the historian's self-characterization; the Samian and Persian stories, with their depiction of irrational motivation; the Athenian stories, which reveal Herodotus' polarizing technique of presentation; the complications of rhetoric, with its slogans of ‘freedom’ and ‘Greek unity’, in the Ionian Revolt narrative—which proves a touchstone for assessing the later campaign; motives and necessity in the Greek states' response to the Persian threat; and the characterization of the Histories' most prominent individuals, Xerxes and Themistocles.Less

The Ship of State: Statecraft and Politics from Ancient Greece to Democratic America

Norma Thompson

This book provides a new perspective on the development of political thought from Homer to Machiavelli, Tocqueville, and Gertrude Stein (who is introduced here, for the first time, as a writer of ... More

This book provides a new perspective on the development of political thought from Homer to Machiavelli, Tocqueville, and Gertrude Stein (who is introduced here, for the first time, as a writer of political significance). Providing nuanced readings of key texts by these and other thinkers, it locates a powerful theme: that the political health of organized political communities—from the ancient polis to the modern state to contemporary democracy—requires a balance between masculine and feminine qualities. Although most critics view the Western tradition as a progression away from misogyny and toward rights for women, the book contends that the need for balance in the political community was well understood in earlier eras, and only now has it been almost entirely overlooked in our focus on surface indications of strict gender equality. It argues that political rhetoric must once again promote the reconciliation of masculine and feminine forces in order to achieve effective politics and statecraft.Less