Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature
Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature

Author: Barry B. Powell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-04-16

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780521036313

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Professor Powell ties the origin and nature of archaic Greek literature to the special technology of Greek alphabetic writing. In building his model he presents chapters on specialized topics - text, orality, myth, literacy, tradition and memorization - and then shows how such special topics relate to larger issues of cultural transmission from East to West. Several chapters are devoted to the theory and history of writing, its definition and general nature as well as such individual developments as semasiography and logosyllabography, Chinese writing and the West Semitic family of syllabaries. He shows how the Greek alphabet put an end to the multiliteralism of Eastern traditions of writing, and how the recording of Homer and other early epic poetry cannot be separated from the alphabetic revolution. Finally, he explains how the creation of Greek alphabetic texts demoticized Greek myth and encouraged many free creations of new myths based on Eastern images.

History of Greek Literature
History of Greek Literature

Author: Albrecht Dihle

Publisher:

Published: 2013-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780415865449

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The most up-to-date history of Greek literature from its Homeric origins to the age of Augustus. Greek literary production throughout this period of some eight centuries is embedded in its historical and social context, and Professor Dihle sees this literature as a historical phenomenon, a particular mode of linguistic communication, with its specific forms developing both in an organic way and in response to the changing world around. In this it differs from conventional humanist approaches to Greek and Latin literature which analyse the works as objects of timeless value independent of any historical setting or purpose. This magisterial survey by one of the leading European authorities on classical literature will establish itself, as it already has in Germany, as the standard account of the subject.

The Library of Greek Mythology
The Library of Greek Mythology

Author: Apollodorus

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780192839244

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A new translation of an important text for Greek mythology used as a source book by classicists from antiquity to Robert Graves, The Library of Greek Mythology is a complete summary of early Greek myth, telling the story of each of the great families of heroic mythology, and the various adventures associated with the main heroes and heroines, from Jason and Perseus to Heracles and Helen of Troy. Using the ancient system of detailed histories of the great families, it contains invaluable genealogical diagrams for maximum clarity.

Ancient Greek Literature
Ancient Greek Literature

Author: Tim Whitmarsh

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780745627915

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In this book, Tim Whitmarsh offers an innovative new introduction to ancient Greek literature. The volume integrates cutting-edge cultural theory with the latest research in classical scholarship, providing a comprehensive, sophisticated and accessible account of literature from Homer to late antiquity. Whitmarsh offers new readings of some of the best-known and most influential authors of Greek antiquity, including Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Aristophanes and Plato, as well as introducing many lesser-known figures. Unlike conventional narrative histories, this volume focuses on the profound effects of literature within Greek society. Whitmarsh shows that literature, distributed via a range of social institutions, such as festivals, theatres, symposia and book production, played an important role in the legitimization – and challenging – of ideologies of gender, class and cultural identity. The volume also addresses the legacy of Greek literature: how the Victorian cult of Hellenism and its successors have structured the reception of ancient texts, and how and why the modern West has adopted the Greeks as its ancestors. This book will be important reading for undergraduates, in their first year and above, of ancient Greek literature and culture. All texts in the volume are translated, and no knowledge of ancient Greek literature is assumed.

Beyond Greek
Beyond Greek

Author: Denis Feeney

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-01-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0674496043

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A History Today Best Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, and other authors of ancient Rome are so firmly established in the Western canon today that the birth of Latin literature seems inevitable. Yet, Denis Feeney boldly argues, the beginnings of Latin literature were anything but inevitable. The cultural flourishing that in time produced the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and other Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history. “Feeney is to be congratulated on his willingness to put Roman literary history in a big comparative context...It is a powerful testimony to the importance of Denis Feeney’s work that the old chestnuts of classical literary history—how the Romans got themselves Hellenized, and whether those jack-booted thugs felt anxiously belated or smugly domineering in their appropriation of Greek culture for their own purposes—feel fresh and urgent again.” —Emily Wilson, Times Literary Supplement “[Feeney’s] bold theme and vigorous writing render Beyond Greek of interest to anyone intrigued by the history and literature of the classical world.” —The Economist

The Greek Search for Wisdom
The Greek Search for Wisdom

Author: Michael K. Kellogg

Publisher: Prometheus Books

Published: 2012-07-10

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 1616145765

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The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that all of Western philosophy was "but a series of footnotes to Plato." By the same token, one could argue that all of Western civilization is but an extension of the ancient Greek cultural legacy. The Greeks invented tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, philosophy, and democracy. They also made remarkable advances in science, medicine, and mathematics. In the author’s view, what ties this wide-ranging intellectual ferment together is a restless search for wisdom. The author looks at ten outstanding examples of Greek wisdom, offering fresh and engaging portraits of the epic poets (Homer, Hesiod); dramatists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes); historians (Herodotus, Thucydides); and philosophers (Plato, Aristotle) against the background of Greek history. In each case he asks what the author has to tell us— regardless of genre—about our place in the world and how we should live our lives. By surveying some of the highest peaks of ancient civilization, the author argues that we gain perspective on the historical terrain that lies below. This book presents an eloquent and convincing case that a study of the Greek classics, as Gustave Flaubert explained, makes us "greater, wiser, purer."

Why Homer Matters
Why Homer Matters

Author: Adam Nicolson

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Published: 2014-11-18

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1627791809

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"Adam Nicolson writes popular books as popular books used to be, a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat, but humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt...and his excitement is contagious."—James Wood, The New Yorker Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greek—and our—consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time. Why Homer Matters is a magical journey of discovery across wide stretches of the past, sewn together by the poems themselves and their metaphors of life and trouble. Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims "to bind the wounds that time inflicts." The Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea, but emerging at a time around 2000 B.C. when the people who would become the Greeks came south and both clashed and fused with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean. The poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.

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

Published: 2014-09-22

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1139992716

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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.

Ancient Greek Letter Writing
Ancient Greek Letter Writing

Author: Paola Ceccarelli

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 0199675597

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Ceccarelli offers a history of the development of letter writing in ancient Greece from the archaic to the early Hellenistic period. Highlighting the specificity of letter-writing, the volume looks at documentary letters and traces the role of embedded letters in the texts of the ancient historians, in drama, and in the speeches of the orators.