Böcker i Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches-serien

This book shows how Plato's Statesman and Thucydides' presentation of the moral collapse in Athenian political discourse reveal many points of agreement between Plato and Thucydides.

This book investigates the chaotic end of the Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean through the lens of Homeric poetry, with an emphasis on the description of piratical activities described in the Odyssey's "Second Cretan Lie," and on the impact of revolutionary seafaring technology in this watershed period in Mediterranean history.

An examination of how the major themes of the "Iliad" -Achilleus' "wrath", heroic values such as honour and glory, and human mortality and suffering, to mention the most widely recognized - are connected to each other in a way that reveals the poem's structural coherence and unity.

This text forms an enquiry into the poetics of authenticity and authority in Sophocles' "Electra". The author reveals "Electra" as a self-referential play about play-writing.

This volume investigates the idea of comic seriousness in Old Comedy. Attempting to set Old Comedy in its proper context, Riu explores the myth and ritual of Dionysus in the city state and relates the patterns found in those myths to the works of Aristophanes.

This volume brings torether poetics and psychology to study the tragic chorus in Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus". Employing a flexible combination of Lacanian and object-relations psychoanalytic theory, Travis investigates the tragic text's conception of the problems of human existence.

Diachronic Dialogues considers central aspects of Homer's poetry, such as truth, knowledge, gender, virtue and the heroic code, authorship, memory and song, diction and formula. This book makes the case for performative, rather than essential values in the Illiad and the Odyssey.

S.E. Bassett's classic work The Poetry of Homer investigates the rhetorical techniques that enable the Iliad and the Odyssey speak to both ancient and modern audiences. Somewhat neglected in the decades after its posthumous publication in 1938, it has become an immensely influential work and has left its mark on a generation of Classicists.

Greek Heroes in and out of Hades is a study on heroism and mortality from Homer to Plato. Through systematic readings of a wide range of ancient Greek texts, Stamatia Dova offers innovative hermeneutic approaches to heroic character and a comprehensive overview of the theme of descent to the underworld in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Bacchylides 5, Plato's Symposium, and Euripides' Alcestis.

A study of the nurse in Greek literature from Homer to Euripides. Depicted as a central figure of authority, the author focuses on the verbal manifestations of the nurse's authority - advice, approval, diasapproval, directions and orders.

This collection of essays examines the linguistic and rhetorical features of Homer's work. Arguing that there can be no purely historical interpretation, Pucci focuses on two features of Homer's rhetoric - repetition of expression and its effects on meaning, and the issue of intertexuality.

This study is an interpretation of the choices the tragedians made in regard to certain forms of standardized variations in word order and prosody. Those choices were made in response to the competing demands of metrical constrain and the poets' sense of what was stylistically appropriate for tragic trimeters.

An examination of Sophocles' "Antigone" in the context of its setting in 5th-century Athens. The authors attempt to create an interpretive environment that is true to the issues and interests of 5th-century Athenians, as opposed to those of modern scholars and philosophers.

This text looks at Euripides' "Hippolytus" and offers an examination of the ancient preference for the implicit style, and suugests a possible reading of Euripides' first treatment of the myth which would account for The Athenian audience's reservations about his "Hippoytus Veiled".

In this study, Marian Demos seeks to demonstrate the significance of three famous lyric quotations within their respective contexts in the dialogues of Plato. These passages include the Simonides poem in the "Protagoras" and the misquotation of Pindar in the "Gorgias".

This text examines the theme of heroic exile and return in Greek poetic tradition, from the archaic epic of Homer to modern Greek folk poetry and song. The author argues that the hero's reputation, his glory, is managed by women - especially his wife and mother.

Lowell Edmunds combines two readings of the "Oedipus at Colonus" to arrive at a fresh way of looking at Greek tragedy. He sets forth a semiotic theory of theatrical space and then applies his theory to the visual and spacial dimensions of the "Oedipus at Colonus".

In The Visual Poetics of Power, Nassos Papalexandrou illuminates the early history of the tripod cauldron, the most sacred symbol of the Greeks. He also explores the performative dimensions of the figurative arts in the preliterate contexts of early Greek sanctuaries.

Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey reveals the significance of the Odyssey's plot, in particular the many scenes of recognition that make up the hero's homecoming and dramatize the cardinal values of Homeric society, an aristocratic culture organized around recognition in the broader senses of honor, privilege, status, and fame. Odysseus' identity is seen to be rooted in his family relations, geographical origins, control of property, participation in the social institutions of hospitality and marriage, past actions, and ongoing reputation. At the same time, Odysseus' dependence on the acknowledgement of others ensures attention to multiple viewpoints, which makes the Odyssey more than a simple celebration of one man's preeminence and accounts in part for the poem's vigorous afterlife. The theme of disguise, which relies on plausible lies, highlights the nature of belief and the power of falsehood and creates the mixture of realism and fantasy that gives the Odyssey its distinctive texture. The book contains a pioneering analysis of the role of Penelope and the questions of female agency and human limitation raised by the critical debate about when exactly she recognizes that Odysseus has come home.

This book explores the ramifications of understanding the similarities and differences between the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles and realistic Japanese noh. First, it looks at the relationship of Aristotle's definition of tragedy to the tragedies he favored. Next, his definition is applied to realistic noh, in order to show how they do and do not conform to his definition. In the third and fourth chapters, the focus moves to those junctures in the dramas that Aristotle considered crucial to a complex plot - recognitions and sudden reversals -, and shows how they are presented in performance. Chapter 3 examines the climactic moments of realistic noh and demonstrates that it is at precisely these moments that a third actor becomes involved in the dialogue or that an actor in various ways steps out of character. Chapter 4 explores how plays by Euripides and Sophocles deal with critical turns in the plot, as Aristotle defined it. It is not by an actor stepping out of character, but by the playwright's involvement of the third actor in the dialogue. The argument of this book reveals a similar symbiosis between plot and performance in both dramatic forms. By looking at noh through the lens of Aristotle and two Greek tragedies that he favored, the book uncovers first an Aristotelian plot structure in realistic noh and the relationship between the crucial points in the plot and its performance; and on the Greek side, looking at the tragedies through the lens of noh suggests a hitherto unnoticed relationship between the structure of the tragedies and their performance, that is, the involvement of the third actor at the climactic moments of the plot. This observation helps to account for Aristotle's view that tragedy be limited to three actors.

A Penelopean Poetics looks at the relationship between gender ideology and the self-referential poetics of the Odyssey through the figure of Penelope. She is a cunning story-teller; her repeated reweavings of Laertes' shroud a figurative replication of the process of oral poetic composition itself. Penelope's web is thus a discourse and it can be construed specifically as feminine. Her gendered poetics celebrates process, multiplicity, and ambiguity and it resists phallocentric discourse by undermining stable and fixed meanings. Penelope's poetics become a discursive thread through which different feminine voices can realize their resistant capacities. Author Barbara Clayton's work contributes to discussions in the classics as well as literary criticism, sex and gender studies, and women's studies.

Anger is central to the Homeric epic, but few scholarly interventions have probed HomerOs language beyond the study of the IliadOs first word: menis. Yet Homer uses over a dozen words for anger. Fighting Words and Feuding Words engages the powerful tools of Homeric poetic analysis and the anthropological study of emotion in an analysis of two anger terms highlighted in the Iliad by the Achaean prophet Calchas. Walsh argues that kotos and kholos locate two focal points for the study of aggression in Homeric poetry, the first presenting HomerOs terms for feud and the second providing the native terms that designates the martial violence highlighted by the Homeric tradition. After focusing on these two terms as used in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Walsh concludes by addressing some post-Homeric and comparative implications of Homeric anger.

The Philosopher's Song is a full-length treatment of Plato and the dynamic course of his philosophical thought, regarded from a distinctly poetic point of view. Kevin Crotty demonstrates how Plato's invention of philosophy needs to be situated within the context of a society where poets were cultural authorities, whose teachings emphasized such tragic themes as the instability of things and the indeterminacy of moral terms. The interest of Plato's philosophy lies to a great extent in the compelling interest of what he sought to repress-the poetic and political heritage of a world tragically conceived. Plato's attacks on the poets are notorious. Despite his apparently frank hostility, however, his relation to the poets was exceedingly complex, argues Crotty. Even the banishment of the poets in the Republic turns out to be, more deeply, a recruitment of mimetic poetry for Plato's metaphysics. Once endowed with a metaphysical significance, however, the poets posed a serious challenge to Platonic idealism, and spurred Plato to revise considerably his metaphysical scheme. Crotty ultimately concludes that the views of politics and ethics in Plato's later works return in many ways to the insights of the poets.

The Classical Moment is a reexamination of the concept of a supreme moment in the literatures of Greece, Mesopotamia, India, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Taking the case of Greece as its starting point, it examines what such "moments" have in common, how they are created, and what effect they have on subsequent literary creation.

This study of the "Odyssey" argues that Athena's wrath is central to both the structure and the theme of the poem. It shows how an appreciation of the thematic role of Athena's anger elucidates the poem's narrative organisation and its conception of the hierarchical relations between gods and men.

This study of the construction of intellectual authority examines the impact of Thucydides's "History". It argues that Thucydides's work succeeded for two main reasons: he refined the language of administration, and drew upon the abstract philosophical rhetoric that arose in the 5th century.

Reconsiders the origins of the Ancient Greeks' ideas and practices concerning their own past. This study demonstrates that hero cult and ancestor cult persisted throughout the Iron Age. Practices such as visiting tombs to make offerings were common.

These essays examine innovations in both the theory and practice of classical philosophy. The chapters address interdisciplinary methods in a variety of ways.