This is the first full-scale companion on Hesiod to appear in English. The twelve contributions included in this volume cover a wide range of aspects of Hesiodic poetry, such as the relation between Hesiod and the literary traditions of the Near East and the entire span of works comprising the Hesiodic corpus, from the Theogony and the Works and Days to the Melampodia and the Aigimios. They also explore the language, style, poetics, and narrative art of Hesiod, as well as his influence on Hellenistic and Roman poetry, but also his reception by the ancient biographical traditions and scholia. The aim of this volume is to supply all those interested in Greek poetry with an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of scholarly approaches to Hesiod and various other works which have come down to us under his name.
This volume is the first English-language survey of Homeric studies to appear for more than a generation, and the first such work to attempt to cover all fields comprehensively. Thirty leading scholars from Europe and America provide short, authoritative overviews of the state of knowledge and current controversies in the many specialist divisions in Homeric studies. The chapters pay equal attention to literary, mythological, linguistic, historical, and archaeological topics, ranging from such long-established problems as the "Homeric Question" to newer issues like the relevance of narratology and computer-assisted quantification. The collection, the third publication in Brill's handbook series, "The Classical Tradition," will be valuable at every level of study - from the general student of literature to the Homeric specialist seeking a general understanding of the latest developments across the whole range of Homeric scholarship.
Few figures from Greco-Roman antiquity have undergone as much reassessment in recent decades as Callimachus of Cyrene, who was active at the Alexandrian court of the Ptolemies during the early third century BC. Once perceived as a supreme example of ivory tower detachment and abstruse learning, Callimachus has now come to be understood as an artificer of the images of a powerful and vibrant court and as a poet second only to Homer in his later reception. For the modern audience, the fragmentation of his texts and the diffusion of source materials has often impeded understanding his poetic achievement. Brill’s Companion to Callimachus has been designed to aid in negotiating this scholarly terrain, especially the process of editing and collecting his fragments, to illuminate his intellectual and social contexts, and to indicate the current directions that his scholarship is taking.
Brill's Companion to the Reception of Euripides provides a comprehensive account of the influence and appropriation of all extant Euripidean plays since their inception: from antiquity to modernity, across cultures and civilizations, from multiple perspectives and within a broad range of human experience and cultural trends, namely literature, intellectual history, visual arts, music, opera and dance, stage and cinematography. A concerted work by an international team of specialists in the field, the volume is addressed to a wide and multidisciplinary readership of classical reception studies, from experts to non-experts. Contributors engage in a vividly and lively interactive dialogue with the Ancient and the Modern which, while illuminating aspects of ancient drama and highlighting their ever-lasting relevance, offers a thoughtful and layered guide of the human condition.
Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship aims at providing a reference work in the field of ancient Greek and Byzantine scholarship and grammar, thus encompassing the broad and multifaceted philological and linguistic research activity during the entire Greek Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The first part of the volume offers a thorough historical overview of ancient scholarship, which covers the period from its very beginnings to the Byzantine era. The second part focuses on the disciplinary profile of ancient scholarship by investigating its main scientific topics. The third and final part presents the particular work of ancient scholars in various philological and linguistic matters, and also examines the place of scholarship and grammar from an interdisciplinary point of view, especially from their interrelation with rhetoric, philosophy, medicine and nature sciences.
This volume brings together 29 junior and senior scholars to discuss aspects of Hesiod's poetry and its milieu and to explore questions of reception over two and half millennia from shortly after the poems' conception to Twitter hashtags. Rather than an exhaustive study of Hesiodic themes, the Handbook is conceived as a guide through terrain, some familiar, other less charted, examining both Hesiodic craft and later engagements with Hesiod's stories of the gods and moralizing proscriptions of just human behavior. The volume opens with the "Hesiodic Question," to address questions of authorship, historicity, and the nature of composition of Hesiod's two major poems, the Theogony and Works and Days. Subsequent chapters on the archaeology and economic history of archaic Boiotia, Indo-European poetics, and Hesiodic style offer a critical picture of the sorts of questions that have been asked rather than an attempt to resolve debate. Other chapters discuss Hesiod's particular rendering of the supernatural and the performative nature of the Works and Days, as well as competing diachronic and synchronic temporalities and varying portrayals of female in the two poems. The rich story of reception ranges from Solon to comic books. These chapters continue to explore the nature of Hesiod's poetics, as different writers through time single out new aspects of his art less evident to earlier readers. Long before the advent of Christianity, classical writers leveled their criticism at Hesiod's version of polytheism. The relative importance of Hesiod's two major poems across time also tells us a tale of the age receiving the poems. In the past two centuries, artists and writers have come to embrace the Hesiodic stories for themselves for the insight they offer of the human condition but even as old allegory looks quaint to modern eyes new forms of allegory take form.
This handbook is a guide to the reading of elegiac, iambic, personal and public poetry of early Greece. Intended as a teaching manual or as an aid for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, it presents the major scholarly debates affecting the reading of these poetic texts, such as the effect of genre, the question of the poetic persona, or the impact of modern literary theory.
Brill's Companion to Theocritus offers an up-to-date guide to a thorough understanding of Theocritus’ literary output. Exploring his corpus from a variety of novel perspectives, it presents a detailed account of the intricacy of Theocritus’ poetic art.
This volume on Apollonius of Rhodes, whose Argonautica is the sole full-length epic to survive from the Hellenistic period, comprises articles by fourteen leading scholars from Europe and America. Their contributions cover a wide range of issues from the history of the text and the problems of the poet's biography through questions of style, literary technique and intertextual relations to the epic's literary and cultural reception. The aim is to give an up-to-date outline of the scholarly discussion in these areas and to provide a survey of recent and current trends in Apollonian studies which will be useful to students of Hellenistic poetry in general as well as to scholars with a specialised interest in Apollonius.
