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The Art of Reading is the first-long overdue-collection of essays by the French classical philologist and humanist Jean Bollack to be published in English. As the scope of the collection shows, Bollack felt equally at home thinking in depth about both the classics of Greek poetry and philosophy and modern, including contemporary, poetry.

Inscribed after 264 BCE, the Parian Marble gives a chronological list of events, emphasizing literary matters. It has not been the subject of a comprehensive study for almost a century. Andrea Rotstein offers new analysis and updated information about the inscription, including a revision of Felix Jacoby's Greek text and a complete translation.

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.

This book probes the narratives of poets who are exiled, tried or executed for their satire. It views the scapegoat as a group's dominant warrior, sent out to confront predators or besieging forces. Both poets and warriors specialize in madness and aggression and are necessary, yet dangerous, to society.

Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece looks at the anthropology of the Greeks and other cultures across space and time, and in the process discovers aspects of the art of comparability. Marcel Detienne tries to see how cultural systems react not just to a touchstone category, but also to the questions and concepts that arise from the reaction.

"What if truth were a woman?" asked Nietzsche. In ancient Greek thought, truth in language has a special relation to the female by virtue of her pre-eminent art-form-the one Freud believed was even invented by women-weaving. The essays in this book explore the implications of this nexus: language, the female, weaving, and the construction of truth.

After a theoretical introduction that also serves as a general introduction to the dramatic chorus from the comic vantage point, a reading of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae shows that ritual is present in both the micro- and macrostructure of Attic comedy as part of a still existing performative choral culture.

Restraining and taming Nature was fundamental to the Hellenic urban quest. Classical Athens, with her utilitarian view of Nature, exemplified this ideal, which also informed the urban endeavors of Rome and was expressed through the domestication of Nature in villas and gardens, and through primitivist and Epicurean tendencies in Latin literature.

In his Symposium, Plato crafted speeches in praise of love that has influenced writers and artists from antiquity to the present. But questions remain concerning the meaning of specific features, the significance of the dialogue as a whole, and the character of its influence. Here, an international team of scholars addresses such questions.

This is a study of the twelve small gold lamellae from Crete that were tokens for entrance into a golden afterlife. The lamellae are placed within the context of a small corpus of similar texts, and published with extensive commentary on their topography, lettering and engraving, dialect and orthography, meter, chronology, and usage.

This book offers the first interdisciplinary and in-depth study of the cultural practices and ideological paradigms that conditioned the politics of the "reading" of Sappho's songs in the early and most pivotal stages of her reception-the late archaic, classical, and early Hellenistic periods.

Tsagalis argues that just as the discarded text of a palimpsest still carries traces of its previous writing, so the Homeric tradition unfolds its awareness of alternate versions as it reveals signs of their erasure.

"What is a Greek priest?" This volume, which has its origins in a symposium at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC, focuses on the question through several lenses: the visual representation of cult personnel, priests as ritual experts, variations of priesthood, ideal concepts and their transformation, and the role of manteis.

The crisis of Spartan power in the first half of the fourth century has been connected to Spartan inability to manage the hegemony built on the ruins of the Athenian Empire. This book offers a new perspective, suggesting that the crisis that finally leveled Sparta was in vital ways a result of centrifugal impulses within the Peloponnesian League.

This book is about the Homeric figure Nestor, and reveals a level of deliberate irony in the Homeric poems hitherto unsuspected. Frame argues that because Nestor's role in the poems is built on this irony, he is a key to the circumstances of the poems' composition.

This is the first collection of essays in English devoted to discussion of a newly recovered Sappho poem and two other incomplete texts on the same papyri. The contributions demonstrate how the "New Sappho" can be appreciated as a complete, gracefully spare poetic statement regarding the painful inevitability of death and aging.

This book is about the reception of Homeric poetry from the fifth through the first century BCE. The aim of this book, which centers on ancient concepts of Homer as the author of a body of poetry that we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey, is to show how Homer's work became a classic in the days of the Athenian empire and later.

This edition, commentary, and accompanying essays focus on the tenth book of the Iliad, which has been doubted, ignored, and even scorned. Casey Due and Mary Ebbott use approaches based on oral traditional poetics to illuminate many of the interpretive questions that strictly literary approaches find unsolvable.

This colloquium volume celebrates a new Hellenistic epigram collection attributed to the third-century B.C.E. poet Posidippus, one of the most significant literary finds in recent memory. Included in this collection are an unusual variety of voices and perspectives: papyrological, art historical, archaeological, historical, literary, and aesthetic.

Examines a small group of early papyrus manuscripts of Homer's Iliad, known as the Ptolemaic papyri, which, although fragmentary, are the oldest surviving physical evidence of the text of the Iliad, dating from the third to the first centuries BCE.

A study of Homeric myth-making in the first and longest dialogue of Penelope and Odysseus ("Odyssey 19"). It makes a case for seeing virtuoso myth-making as an essential part of this conversation, a register of communication important for the interaction between the two speakers.

Arguing for the importance of the first-century historian Josephus to the study of classical and Hellenistic literature, this title investigates letters in Josephus' texts. It analyzes classical, Hellenistic, and Jewish texts' use of letters, comparing those texts to Josephus' narratives, a virtual archive containing hundreds of letters.

Readers of Herodotus' Histories are familiar with its reports of bizarre portents, riddling oracles, and striking dreams. This book represents an examination of signs and their interpreters, as well as the terminology Herodotus uses to describe sign transmission, reception, and decoding.

Studies Homeric performance from archaic to Roman imperial times. This title argues that oracular utterance, dramatic acting, and rhetorical delivery powerfully elucidate the practice of epic rhapsodes. It shows that rhapsodic practice is best understood as an evolving combination of revelation, interpretation, recitation, and dramatic delivery.

Explores the place of the sophists within the Greek wisdom tradition, and argues against their almost universal exclusion from serious intellectual traditions. This book offers a revised history of the development of Greek philosophy, as well as of the potential - yet never realized - courses it might have followed.

As scholars have remarked, the word kleos in the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" alike refers to something more substantive and complex than 'fame' or 'glory'. This book presents a meditation on this concept as expressed and experienced in the adult society Telemachos find himself in.

This book examines the overall testimony of Plato as an expert about the cultural legacy of these Homeric performances. Plato's fine ear for language--in this case the technical language of high-class artisans like rhapsodes--picks up on a variety of authentic expressions that echo the talk of rhapsodes as they once practiced their art.

In the first full-length study of conversation in the Homeric poems, Beck argues that conversation should be considered a traditional Homeric type scene, alongside recognized types such as arrival, sacrifice, battle, and hospitality. This book is a wide-ranging, closely argued aesthetic analysis of repetition and variation in the Homeric epics.

This book makes the case that the plot of the Odyssey is represented within the narrative as a plan of Zeus, Dios boule, that serves as a guide for the performing poet and as a hermeneutic for the audience. The "Zeus-centric" reading proposed here offers fresh perspectives on the tenor of interactions among the Odyssey's characters.

Anna Bonifazi examines the evocative power of linguistic elements in the Homeric text-in particular, the use of - adverbs and particles to signal upcoming content and the ambiguous use of pronouns to evoke the complexity of Odysseus' identity. She shows that, by deliberately merging distinct meanings, the text incorporates different viewpoints.