Collectanea Alexandrina

Collectanea Alexandrina
Author: Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 902
Release: 1983
Genre: History
ISBN: 9783110081718

The series publishes important new editions of and commentaries on texts from Greco-Roman antiquity, especially annotated editions of texts surviving only in fragments. Due to its programmatically wide range the series provides an essential basis for the study of ancient literature.

The Argonautika

The Argonautika
Author: Apollonius (Rhodius.)
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520076877

The Argonautika, the only surviving epic of the Hellenistic era, is a retelling of the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece, probably the oldest extant Greek myth. Jason, a young prince, is sent on a perilous expedition but comes through various ordeals with the aid of the king's daughter, Medeia, winning the golden fleece and carrying off Medeia herself. He is a very modern figure, not at all Achillean: almost an anti-hero. Along the way, the story incorporates vivid accounts of early exploration and colonizing ventures. Peter Green's lively, readable verse translation captures the swift narrative movement of Apollonios's epic Greek. Apollonios Rhodios (c. 305-235 B.C.), the author of the Argonautika, was appointed Chief Librarian in the legendary library at Alexandria around 265 B.C. His first draft of this poem, composed when he was a very young man, drew scornful reactions from the literati of the day, Kallimachos in particular, who thought epic passé and long poems vulgar. Apollonios withdrew to the maritime island of Rhodes (his work is notable for its nautical expertise), where he hammered out the text as we know it today, returning to eventual success in the city that had rejected him. The compromise that resulted is a fascinating combination of age-old myth and modern treatment that produces a gripping and unforgettable narrative. Peter Green has translated this renowned poem with skill and wit, offering a refreshing interpretation of a timeless story. Alternate spelling: Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodius

Cosmography and the Idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece

Cosmography and the Idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece
Author: Renaud Gagné
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108976956

Cosmography is defined here as the rhetoric of cosmology: the art of composing worlds. The mirage of Hyperborea, which played a substantial role in Greek religion and culture throughout Antiquity, offers a remarkable window into the practice of composing and reading worlds. This book follows Hyperborea across genres and centuries, both as an exploration of the extraordinary record of Greek thought on that further North and as a case study of ancient cosmography and the anthropological philology that tracks ancient cosmography. Trajectories through the many forms of Greek thought on Hyperborea shed light on key aspects of the cosmography of cult and the cosmography of literature. The philology of worlds pursued in this book ranges from Archaic hymns to Hellenistic and Imperial reconfigurations of Hyperborea. A thousand years of cosmography is thus surveyed through the rewritings of one idea. This is a book on the art of reading worlds slowly.

Seeing Double

Seeing Double
Author: Susan A. Stephens
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2003-01-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520927389

When, in the third century B.C.E., the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt, they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Ptolemaic rule. Her work successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively. The Alexandrian poets were image-makers for the Ptolemaic court, Seeing Double suggests; their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor to subvert the status quo, but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively re-created, examined, and critiqued. Seeing Double depicts Alexandrian poetry in its proper context—within the writing of foundation stories and within the imaginative redefinition of Egypt as "Two Lands"—no longer the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of a shared Greek and Egyptian culture.

Euhemerism and Its Uses

Euhemerism and Its Uses
Author: Syrithe Pugh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2021-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000356604

Euhemerism and Its Uses offers the first interdisciplinary, focussed, and all-round view of the long history of an important but understudied phenomenon in European intellectual and cultural history. Euhemerism – the claim that the Greek gods were historically mortal men and women – originated in the early third century BCE, in an enigmatic and now fragmentary text by the otherwise unknown author Euhemeros. This work, the Sacred Inscription, has been read variously as a theory of religion, an atheist’s manifesto, as justifying or satirizing ruler-worship, as a fantasy travel-narrative, and as an early ‘utopia’. Influencing Hellenistic and Roman literature and religious and political thought, and appropriated by early Christians to debunk polytheism while simultaneously justifying the continued study of classical literature, euhemerism was widespread in the middle ages and Renaissance, and its reverberations continue to be felt in modern myth-theory. Yet, though frequently invoked as a powerful and pervasive tradition across several disciplines, it is still under-examined and poorly understood. Filling an important gap in the history of ideas, this volume will appeal to scholars and students of classical reception, mediaeval and Renaissance literature, historiography, and theories of myth and religion.

Neurological Concepts in Ancient Greek Medicine

Neurological Concepts in Ancient Greek Medicine
Author: Thomas M. Walshe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190218568

Neurologic concepts in the Homeric epics -- Hippocrates and the Corpus Hippocraticum -- A neurology text before there was neurology -- On the sacred disease -- Surgical texts and diagnosis guides -- Wounds of the head -- Hippocratic medicine and neurologic conditions -- Ancient Greek ideas of cognition -- The separation of the nerves from other fibers -- The Hellenistic pursuit of neuroanatomy -- The Hippocratic oath and a modern digression

Structures of Epic Poetry

Structures of Epic Poetry
Author: Christiane Reitz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 2760
Release: 2019-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110492598

This compendium (4 vols.) studies the continuity, flexibility, and variation of structural elements in epic narratives. It provides an overview of the structural patterns of epic poetry by means of a standardized, stringent terminology. Both diachronic developments and changes within individual epics are scrutinized in order to provide a comprehensive structural approach and a key to intra- and intertextual characteristics of ancient epic poetry.

Hellenistic Science at Court

Hellenistic Science at Court
Author: Marquis Berrey
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-09-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110541939

The development of science in the modern world is often held to depend on such institutions as universities, peer-reviewed journals, and democracy. How, then, did new science emerge in the pre-modern culture of the Hellenistic Egyptian monarchy? Berrey argues that the court society formed around the Ptolemaic pharaohs Ptolemy III and IV (reigned successively 246-205/4 BCE) provided an audience for cross-disciplinary, learned knowledge, as physicians, mathematicians, and mechanicians clothed themselves in the virtues of courtiers attendant on the kings. The multicultural Greco-Egyptian court society prized entertainment that drew on earlier literature, mixed genres and cultures, and highlighted motion and sound. New cross-disciplinary science in the Hellenistic period gained its social currency and subsequent scientific success through its entertainment value as court science. Ancient court science sheds light on the long history of scientific interdisciplinarity.

Authors, Authority and Interpreters in the Ancient Novel

Authors, Authority and Interpreters in the Ancient Novel
Author: Gareth L. Schmeling
Publisher: Barkhuis
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 907792213X

For most of us there are many masters and varied causes for intellectual peregrinations. For the editors of this volume, for many scholars of the ancient novel, and for an uncounted number of students of Classics and the Humanities, Gareth Lon Schmeling is a master and motivator of our scholarly and academic careers, especially of our forays into the ancient novel. And above all Gareth is a true friend. This volume of essays is a small, and, we hope, representative offering of our thanks to Gareth for his contributions to the study of the ancient novel in particular and Classics in general, for his guidance and support in our own endeavors, and for his own special humanity.

Zeugnisse ägyptischer Religionsvorstellungen für Ephesus

Zeugnisse ägyptischer Religionsvorstellungen für Ephesus
Author: Günther Hölbl
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2015-08-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 900429550X

Preliminary material -- BEMERKUNGEN ZU DEN AEGYPTIACA AUS DEM VORHELLENISTISCHEN EPHESUS -- DAS HELLENISTISCHE UND RÖMISCHE EPHESUS -- INDICES -- Photonachweis -- TAFELN I-XVI.