Search Results

The New Posidippus and Latin Poetry

G. O. Hutchinson

in Talking Books: Readings in Hellenistic and Roman Books of Poetry

This piece was the first to relate the new book of Posidippus' epigrams to Latin poetry. It discusses the nature of the collection, which arranges epigrams in groups with titles. Connections with ... More

This piece was the first to relate the new book of Posidippus' epigrams to Latin poetry. It discusses the nature of the collection, which arranges epigrams in groups with titles. Connections with Latin poetry are investigated: specific allusions, thematic networks, problems of intertextuality with Hellenistic poetry. The relation of elegy to epigram is then discussed; Latin elegy uses its small relative both to separate itself from epic and to mark its own ambitions. Latin poets turn elegy into love-elegy, and then aspire to go further. The structure of Posidippus and the Fasti can be compared and contrasted.Less

excursus Epigram at Rome

in Martial: The World of the Epigram

This chapter provides a brief survey of the epigram at Rome. When we use the term “epigram” today what comes to mind is more or less what Martial made of the form: closure, pointedness, wit, ... More

This chapter provides a brief survey of the epigram at Rome. When we use the term “epigram” today what comes to mind is more or less what Martial made of the form: closure, pointedness, wit, concision, and satire. Martial chose the term “epigram” from a range of expressions used by Roman poets more or less interchangeably for collections of short, light, and personal verse—besides epigrammata, the list includes nugae, lusus, and ioci. The word epigramma means “inscription,” and examples of verse inscriptions on objects and monuments informing us who dedicated this votive offering or who is buried here survive from as early as the archaic period. When epigrams migrate to books in the Hellenistic period, epitaphs, along with dedications and other “anathematic” epigrams, remain a significant component of the new literary form. New evidence that Hellenistic poets published books of epigrams before the anthology of Meleager has surfaced in the form of the Milan papyrus, a third-century manuscript containing one hundred epigrams of Posidippus.Less

The Great and the Marvellous

Jessica Priestley

in Herodotus and Hellenistic Culture: Literary Studies in the Reception of the Histories

This chapter discusses the distinctiveness of Herodotus' interest in the wondrous and the peculiarities of the rhetoric he employs in describing wonders, through comparisons with Thucydides and ... More

This chapter discusses the distinctiveness of Herodotus' interest in the wondrous and the peculiarities of the rhetoric he employs in describing wonders, through comparisons with Thucydides and Aristotle. It examines Herodotus' relationship to Hellenistic paradoxography. It also considers evidence that Herodotus influenced both the types of works that came to be included in Hellenistic lists of the Seven Wonders of the World, as well as some of the descriptions of these works. Additionally, it argues that Callimachus and Posidippus sometimes appropriated or rejected Herodotus' rhetoric of wonder to highlight their own aesthetic concerns, such as the relative merits of the small and the large scale, and the appropriate criteria for evaluating the works of humans and gods. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of a possible parallels between Herodotus' attitude towards wonders and wonder as an impulse for Hellenistic scholarly inquiry.Less

Death of a Child: Grief Beyond the Literary?

Richard Hunter

in Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era

Chapter 9 explores the interrelationship between literary and inscriptional epigram, principally through a study of GV 1159 = SGO 03/05/04, a poem from imperial Notion on a young boy who drowned in a ... More

Chapter 9 explores the interrelationship between literary and inscriptional epigram, principally through a study of GV 1159 = SGO 03/05/04, a poem from imperial Notion on a young boy who drowned in a well. The analysis pays particular attention to versification, narrative technique, the characterization of the boy’s speaking voice and language, and explores the poem’s use of AP 7.170 (attributed to Posidippus or Callimachus) as a way of enfolding the drowned boy within literary tradition. Attention is also paid to the debt of the epitaphic tradition both to Homer and to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. The analysis sheds light on what important features at stake in the attempt to distinguish between ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ epigram.Less

The Seal of Polycrates: A Discourse on Discourse Channel Conditions

Verity Platt

in Classics and Media Theory

This chapter explores Kittler’s claim that media provide models and metaphors for the senses, as well as ‘gadgets’ for conceptualizing the soul. Drawing on the role of the seal-ring (daktylios), in ... More

This chapter explores Kittler’s claim that media provide models and metaphors for the senses, as well as ‘gadgets’ for conceptualizing the soul. Drawing on the role of the seal-ring (daktylios), in Greek philosophical models of sense perception, memory, and knowledge acquisition, together with examples of classical intaglios, it explores how practices of sealing were fundamental to the ‘cultural techniques’ (Kulturtechniken) through which Greek society reflected upon its own practices of transmission and communication. As ‘indexical’ devices, seals anticipate the later development of printing, sound recording, photography, and film, offering a prehistory of analogue technologies that operate by means of the stamp, imprint, or trace. These themes are explored in relation to Herodotus’ tale of the seal of Polycrates, which is read as a Kittlerian ‘discourse on discourse channel conditions’ in which the materiality, facture, and instrumentality of the tyrant’s ring invite reflection upon the text’s formation of its own systems of inscription and communication. The episode’s later reappearance in Posidippus’ ekphrastic Lithika demonstrates how, in operating as an interface for the transmission of data between different media, the seal and its impression also constituted antiquity’s archetypal intermedial device across the ‘discourse networks’ of the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods.Less