Böcker i Hellenic Studies (HUP)-serien

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.

Equine Poetics is a literary analysis of horses and horsemanship in early Greek epic and lyric poetry. Drawing from the fields of comparative poetics and historical linguistics, the book sheds new light on fascinating and puzzling aspects of these central figures in early Greek verbal art.

Andrea Capra reconstructs Plato's authorial self-portrait through a fresh reading of the Phaedrus. Capra maintains that Socrates's conversion to "demotic" music in the Phaedo closely parallels the Phaedrus and is apologetic in character, since Socrates was held responsible for dismissing traditional mousike.

Scholars of the literary aspect of Plato try to reconcile his dialogue form with the expository imperative of philosophical argument. Classicists and philosophers explain this form in terms of rhetorical devices serving didactic goals. David Schur brings literary and classical studies into debate, questioning modern views of Plato's dialogue form.

The Derveni Papyrus, discovered accidentally in 1962, is the oldest known European "book." Papers in Poetry as Initiation address many open questions about the papyrus, including its authorship, the context of the peculiar chthonic ritual described in the text, and the relationship of the author and the ritual to the so-called Orphic texts.

Priene provides a complete picture of life in an ancient Greek city of the late Classical and Hellenistic period. This study presents the first comprehensive look at the architecture of the city, combining material from the first excavation of 1894 and more recent work at the site. It includes redrawn architectural plans and reconstructions.

One of the most significant contributors to late antique literary culture, Eusebius of Caesarea has received only limited attention as a writer and thinker in his own right. Focusing on the full range of Eusebius's works, the new studies in Eusebius of Caesarea will change how classicists, theologians, and historians think about this major figure.

The Ancient Greeks not only spoke of time unfolding in a specific space, but also projected the past upon the future in order to make it active in the social practice of the present. This book shows how the Ancient Greeks' collective memory was based on a remarkable faculty for the creation of ritual and narrative symbols.

Schwartz's analysis of the Catechetical Homilies of Theodore of Mopsuestia explores the role of education and worship in the complex process of conversion and Christianization. Catechesis emerges here as invaluable for comprehending clergy's ability to initiate new members as Christianity gained increasing prominence within the late Roman world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.