Essays on Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

Description

In this book one of the world's leading Hellenists brings together his many contributions over four decades to our understanding of early Greek literature, above all of elegiac poetry and its relation to fifth-century prose historiography, but also of early Greek epic, iambic, melic and epigrammatic poetry. Many chapters have become seminal, e.g. that which first proposed the importance of now-lost long narrative elegies, and others exploring their performance contexts when papyri published in 1992 and 2005 yielded fragments of such long poems by Simonides and Archilochus. Another chapter argues against the widespread view that Sappho composed and performed chiefly for audiences of young girls, suggesting instead that she was a virtuoso singer and lyre-player, entertaining men in the elite symposia whose verbal and musical components are explored in several other chapters of the book. Two more volumes of collected papers will follow devoted to later Greek literature and culture.

EWEN BOWIE is the Emeritus E. P. Warren Praelector and Fellow in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and Emeritus Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. He writes on early Greek poetry; Old Comedy; Hellenistic poetry; and the Greek literature and culture of the Roman Empire. He co-edited volumes on Philostratus (Cambridge, 2009) and Archaic and Classical Choral Song (2011), edited one on Herodotus (2018), and published a commentary on Longus' Daphnis and Chloe (Cambridge, 2019).