HoneyVoiced

HoneyVoiced
Author: James Bradley Wells
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2024-03-07
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1350226416

This new translation of Pindar's songs for victorious athletes marries philological rigour with poetic sensibility in order to represent the beauty of his language for a modern audience as closely as possible. Pindar's poetry is synonymous with difficulty for scholars and students of classical studies. His syntax stretches the limits of ancient Greek, while his allusions to mythology and other poetic texts assume an audience that knows more than we now possibly can, given the fragmentary nature of textual and material culture records for ancient Greece. It includes an authoritative introduction, both to the poet and his art and to ancient athletics, alongside brief orientations to the historical context and mythological content of each victory song. The inclusion of a glossary supplies additional mythological and historical information necessary to understanding Pindar's poetry for those coming to the works for the first time. His is the largest body of textual remains that exists for ancient Greece between Homer (conventionally dated to 750 BCE) and the Classical Period (480–323 BCE), and constitutes a rich resource for politics, history, religion, and social practices.

Theatrical Reenactment in Pindar and Aeschylus

Theatrical Reenactment in Pindar and Aeschylus
Author: Anna Uhlig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2019-07-18
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1108481833

Argues that the songs of Pindar and Aeschylus share a "theatrical" spirit that illuminates choral performance in Classical Greece.

The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture

The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture
Author: Richard Neer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2010-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226570657

In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer offers a new way to understand the epoch-making sculpture of classical Greece. Working at the intersection of art history, archaeology, literature, and aesthetics, he reveals a people fascinated with the power of sculpture to provoke wonder in beholders. Wonder, not accuracy, realism, naturalism or truth, was the supreme objective of Greek sculptors. Neer traces this way of thinking about art from the poems of Homer to the philosophy of Plato. Then, through meticulous accounts of major sculpture from around the Greek world, he shows how the demand for wonder-inducing statues gave rise to some of the greatest masterpieces of Greek art. Rewriting the history of Greek sculpture in Greek terms and restoring wonder to a sometimes dusty subject, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the art of sculpture or the history of the ancient world.

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds
Author: Lauren Curtis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2021-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108923704

In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connection between music and memory in Graeco-Roman culture, but how was this connection understood and experienced by ancient authors, artists, performers, and audiences? How is music remembered and how does it memorialize in a world before recording technology, where sound accumulated differently than it does today? This volume explores music's role in the discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies. It reveals the many and varied ways in which musical memory formed a fundamental part of social, cultural, ritual, and political life in ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking communities, from classical Athens to Ptolemaic Alexandria and ancient Rome. Drawing on the contributors' interdisciplinary expertise in art history, philology, performance studies, history, and ethnomusicology, eleven original chapters and the editors' Introduction offer new approaches for the study of Graeco-Roman music and musical culture.

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry
Author: Margaret Foster
Publisher: Mnemosyne, Supplements
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9789004411425

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetryforegrounds innovative approaches to the question of genre, what it means, and how to think about it for ancient Greek poetry and performance. Embracing multiple definitions of genre and lyric, the volume pushes beyond current dominant trends within the field of Classics to engage with a variety of other disciplines, theories, and models. Eleven papers by leading scholars of ancient Greek culture cover a wide range of media, from Sappho's songs to elegiac inscriptions to classical tragedy. Collectively, they develop a more holistic understanding of the concept of lyric genre, its relevance to the study of ancient texts, and its relation to subsequent ideas about lyric.

Naming and Mapping the Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean

Naming and Mapping the Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean
Author: Thomas Galoppin
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 1080
Release: 2022-12-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110798433

Ancient religions are definitely complex systems of gods, which resist our understanding. Divine names provide fundamental keys to gain access to the multiples ways gods were conceived, characterized, and organized. Among the names given to the gods many of them refer to spaces: cities, landscapes, sanctuaries, houses, cosmic elements. They reflect mental maps which need to be explored in order to gain new knowledge on both the structure of the pantheons and the human agency in the cultic dimension. By considering the intersection between naming and mapping, this book opens up new perspectives on how tradition and innovation, appropriation and creation play a role in the making of polytheistic and monotheistic religions. Far from being confined to sanctuaries, in fact, gods dwell in human environments in multiple ways. They move into imaginary spaces and explore the cosmos. By proposing a new and interdiciplinary angle of approach, which involves texts, images, spatial and archeaeological data, this book sheds light on ritual practices and representations of gods in the whole Mediterranean, from Italy to Mesopotamia, from Greece to North Africa and Egypt. Names and spaces enable to better define, differentiate, and connect gods.

Pindar, Song, and Space

Pindar, Song, and Space
Author: Richard Neer
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421429799

A groundbreaking study of the interaction of poetry, performance, and the built environment in ancient Greece. Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Classics by the Association of American Publishers In this volume, Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke develop a new, integrated approach to classical Greece: a "lyric archaeology" that combines literary and art-historical analysis with archaeological and epigraphic materials. At the heart of the book is the great poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his magnificent odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other competitions. Unlike the quintessentially personal genre of modern lyric, these poems were destined for public performance by choruses of dancing men. Neer and Kurke go further to show that they were also site-specific: as the dancers moved through the space of a city or a sanctuary, their song would refer to local monuments and landmarks. Part of Pindar's brief, they argue, was to weave words and bodies into elaborate tapestries of myth and geography and, in so doing, to re-imagine the very fabric of the city-state. Pindar's poems, in short, were tools for making sense of space. Recent scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology. But Neer and Kurke show that these distinctions are artificial. Poems, statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and buildings worked together as a "suite" of technologies for organizing landscapes, cityscapes, and territories. Studying these technologies in tandem reveals the procedures and criteria by which the Greeks understood relations of nearness and distance, "here" and "there"—and how these ways of inhabiting space were essentially political. Rooted in close readings of individual poems, buildings, and works of art, Pindar, Song, and Space ranges from Athens to Libya, Sicily to Rhodes, to provide a revelatory new understanding of the world the Greeks built—and a new model for studying the ancient world.

Pindar's Poetics of Immortality

Pindar's Poetics of Immortality
Author: Asya C. Sigelman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2016-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316565270

Modern scholarship tends to focus on the social, political and economic information that can be gleaned from Pindar's treatment of the subject of his victory odes - the athlete who brings immortality to his family and polis. In this book, Asya C. Sigelman offers a new approach to the odes, exploring the fact that Pindar's language and imagery suggest that the athlete's victory is only a weaker version of the poet's immortalizing feat. Examining several central Pindaric images, Sigelman shows that they are fundamentally reflexive, structured as expressions of poetic creativity engaged in a perpetual synthesis of intra-poetic time - of the unity of the past, present and future of the world of Pindar's song. As the book's case studies of several of the odes demonstrate, this synthesis is key to Pindar's notion of immortalization and constitutes the central poetic subject of Pindar's song which underlies and informs its praise of the victorious athlete.

Pindar's Eyes

Pindar's Eyes
Author: David Fearn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2017
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0198746377

Pindar's Eyes is a ground-breaking interdisciplinary exploration of the interactions between Greek lyric poetry and visual and material culture in the early fifth century BCE. Its aim is to open up analysis of lyric to the wider theme of aesthetic experience in early classical Greece, with particular focus on the poetic mechanisms through which Pindar's victory odes use visual and material culture to engage their audiences. Complete readings of Nemean 5, Nemean 8, and Pythian 1 reveal the poet's deep interest in the relations between lyric poetry and commemorative and religious sculpture, as well as other significant visual phenomena, while literary studies of his evocation of cultural attitudes through elaborate use of the lyric first person are combined with art-historical treatments of ecphrasis, of image and text, and of art's framing of ritual experience in ancient Greece. This specific aesthetic approach is expanded through fresh treatments of Simonides' and Bacchylides' own engagements with material culture, as well as an account of Pindaric themes in the Aeginetan logoi of Herodotus' Histories. These come together to offer not just a novel perspective on the relationship between art and text in Pindaric poetry, but to give rise to new claims about the nature of classical Greek visuality and ritual subjectivity, and to foster a richer understanding of the ways in which classical poetry and art shaped the lives and experiences of their consumers.

Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture
Author: Kate Gilhuly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2014-09-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139992716

This book brings together a collection of original essays that engage with cultural geography and landscape studies to produce new ways of understanding place, space, and landscape in Greek literature from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The authors draw on an eclectic collection of contemporary approaches to bring the study of ancient Greek literature into dialogue with the burgeoning discussion of spatial theory in the humanities. The essays in this volume treat a variety of textual spaces, from the intimate to the expansive: the bedroom, ritual space, the law courts, theatrical space, the poetics of the city, and the landscape of war. And yet, all of the contributions are united by an interest in recuperating some of the many ways in which the ancient Greeks in the archaic and classical periods invested places with meaning and in how the representation of place links texts to social practices.