Pindar's Poetics of Immortality

Pindar's Poetics of Immortality PDF Author: Asya C. Sigelman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110713501X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Offers a new approach to Pindar's victory odes by focusing on their poetic aim of immortalization.

Pindar's Poetics of Immortality

Pindar's Poetics of Immortality PDF Author: Asya C. Sigelman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110713501X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Offers a new approach to Pindar's victory odes by focusing on their poetic aim of immortalization.

Pindar and the Poetics of Permanence

Pindar and the Poetics of Permanence PDF Author: Henry Spelman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192554409
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Whereas the last several decades of scholarship on early Greek lyric have been primarily concerned with the immediate contexts of first performance, this volume turns its attention instead to the rhetoric and realities of poetic permanence, providing the first book-length study devoted to this topic. Taking Pindar and archaic Greek literary culture as its focus, it offers a new reading of Pindar's victory odes which explores not only how they were received by those who first experienced them, but also what they can mean to later audiences like us. Divided into two parts, the discussion first investigates Pindar's relationship to both of these audiences, demonstrating how Pindaric epinicia address the listeners present at their premiere performance and also a broader secondary audience across space and time, with Part One arguing that a full appreciation of these texts involves simultaneously assuming the perspectives of both of these audiences. Following on from this, Part Two describes how Pindar engages with a wide variety of other poetry, particularly earlier lyric, in order to situate his work both within an immanent poetic history and a contemporary poetic culture. In setting out his vision of the literary world, both past and present, the volume ably shows how this framework shaped the meaning of his work and illuminates the context within which he anticipated its permanence, offering new insights into the texts themselves and, more broadly, a re-thinking of the nature of early Greek poetic culture through a combination of historical and literary perspectives.

Pindar and the Poetics of Permanence

Pindar and the Poetics of Permanence PDF Author: Henry Lawlor Spelman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198821271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Taking Pindar as its focus, this volume offers the first book-length study devoted to the rhetoric and realities of literary permanence in early Greek poetry. It explores how Pindar's odes address their first and later audiences, and how the poet's vision of his literary world illuminates the context within which he anticipated its permanence.

Studies in the Reception of Pindar in Ptolemaic Poetry

Studies in the Reception of Pindar in Ptolemaic Poetry PDF Author: Alexandros Kampakoglou
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110648741
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in the influence of archaic lyric poetry on Hellenistic poets. However, no study has yet examined the reception of Pindar, the most prominent of the lyric poets, in the poetry of this period. This monograph is the first book to offer a systematic examination of the evidence for the reception of Pindar in the works of Callimachus of Cyrene, Theocritus of Syracuse, Apollonius of Rhodes and Posidippus of Pella. Through a series of case studies, it argues that Pindaric poetry exercised a considerable influence on a variety of Hellenistic genres: epinician elegies and epigrams, hymns, encomia, and epic poetry. For the poets active at the courts of the first three Ptolemies, Pindar's poetry represented praise discourse in its most successful configuration. Imitating aspects of it, they lent their support to the ideological apparatus of Greco-Egyptian kingship, shaped the literary profile of Pindar for future generations of readers, and defined their own role and place in Greek literary history. The discussion offered in this book suggests new insights into aspects of literary tradition, Ptolemaic patronage, and Hellenistic poetics, placing Pindar's work at the very heart of an intricate nexus of political and poetic correspondences.

Pindar's Eyes

Pindar's Eyes PDF Author: David Fearn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191065552
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
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. It draws on case studies of classical art and texts to open up analysis of the genre 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 its ancient consumers.

Myth, Locality, and Identity in Pindar's Sicilian Odes

Myth, Locality, and Identity in Pindar's Sicilian Odes PDF Author: Virginia M. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019091033X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Myth, Locality, and Identity argues that Pindar engages in a striking, innovative style of mythmaking that represents and shapes Sicilian identities in his epinician odes for Sicilian victors in the fifth century BCE. While Sicily has been thought to be lacking in local traditions for Pindar to celebrate, Lewis argues that the Sicilian odes offer examples of the formation of local traditions: the monster Typho whom Zeus defeated to become king of the gods, for example, now lives beneath Mt. Aitna; Persephone receives the island of Sicily as a gift from Zeus; and the Peloponnesian river Alpheos travels to Syracuse in pursuit of the local spring nymph Arethusa. By weaving regional and Panhellenic myth into the local landscape, as the book shows, Pindar infuses physical places with meaning and thereby contextualizes people, cities, and their rulers within a wider Greek framework. During this time period, Greek Sicily experienced a unique set of political circumstances: the inhabitants were continuously being displaced, cities were founded and resettled, and political leaders rose and fell from power in rapid succession. This book offers the first sustained analysis of myth in Pindar's odes for Sicilian victors across the island that accounts for their shared context. The nodes of myth and place that Pindar fuses in this poetry reinforce and develop a sense of place and community for citizens locally; at the same time, they raise the profile of physical sites and the cities attached to them for larger audiences across the Greek world. In addition to providing new readings of Pindaric odes and offering a model for the formation of Sicilian identities in the first half of the fifth century, the book contributes new insights into current debates on the relationship between myth and place in classical literature.

Pindar and the Sublime

Pindar and the Sublime PDF Author: Robert L. Fowler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350198137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Pindar-the 'Theban eagle', as Thomas Gray famously called him-has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), arguably Pindar's greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar's odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar's odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar's astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet's persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar's views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.

Poetics before Plato

Poetics before Plato PDF Author: Grace M. Ledbetter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825288
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Combining literary and philosophical analysis, this study defends an utterly innovative reading of the early history of poetics. It is the first to argue that there is a distinctively Socratic view of poetry and the first to connect the Socratic view of poetry with earlier literary tradition. Literary theory is usually said to begin with Plato's famous critique of poetry in the Republic. Grace Ledbetter challenges this entrenched assumption by arguing that Plato's earlier dialogues Ion, Protagoras, and Apology introduce a distinctively Socratic theory of poetry that responds polemically to traditional poets as rival theorists. Ledbetter tracks the sources of this Socratic response by introducing separate readings of the poetics implicit in the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar. Examining these poets' theories from a new angle that uncovers their literary, rhetorical, and political aims, she demonstrates their decisive influence on Socratic thinking about poetry. The Socratic poetics Ledbetter elucidates focuses not on censorship, but on the interpretation of poetry as a source of moral wisdom. This philosophical approach to interpreting poetry stands at odds with the poets' own theories--and with the Sophists' treatment of poetry. Unlike the Republic's focus on exposing and banishing poetry's irrational and unavoidably corrupting influence, Socrates' theory includes poetry as subject matter for philosophical inquiry within an examined life. Reaching back into what has too long been considered literary theory's prehistory, Ledbetter advances arguments that will redefine how classicists, philosophers, and literary theorists think about Plato's poetics.

Pindar and Greek Religion

Pindar and Greek Religion PDF Author: Hanne Eisenfeld
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108831192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Demonstrates the theological power of Pindar's victory songs by interpreting them within their contemporary religious landscapes.

Theatrical Reenactment in Pindar and Aeschylus

Theatrical Reenactment in Pindar and Aeschylus PDF Author: Anna Uhlig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108481833
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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