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"Greek poetry Themes, motives."
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The image of the artist in archaic and classical Greece : art, poetry, and subjectivity
\"This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Embattled
An incisive exploration of the way Greek myths empower us to defeat tyranny.
As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian tragedies exposed the tyrannical potential of individuals and groups large and small. These stories identified abuses of power as self-defeating. They initiated and fostered a movement away from despotism and toward broader forms of political participation.
Following her highly praised book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, the classicist Emily Katz Anhalt retells tales from key ancient Greek texts and proceeds to interpret the important message they hold for us today. As she reveals, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and Sophocles's Antigone encourage us—as they encouraged the ancient Greeks—to take responsibility for our own choices and their consequences. These stories emphasize the responsibilities that come with power (any power, whether derived from birth, wealth, personal talents, or numerical advantage), reminding us that the powerful and the powerless alike have obligations to each other. They assist us in restraining destructive passions and balancing tribal allegiances with civic responsibilities. They empower us to resist the tyrannical impulses not only of others but also in ourselves.
In an era of political polarization, Embattled demonstrates that if we seek to eradicate tyranny in all its toxic forms, ancient Greek epics and tragedies can point the way.
eBook
Von Den Toren des Hades Zu Den Hallen des Olymp. Artemiskult Bei Theokrit und Kallimachos
This study investigates the reception of contemporary religion in Hellenistic poetry. Using the cult of Artemis as a paradigm, it analyses Callimachus' and Theocritus' references to contemporary religious phenomena and their contextualization and transformation in literature.
eBook
The death and afterlife of Achilles
Achilles' death—by an arrow shot through the vulnerable heel of the otherwise invincible mythic hero—was as well known in antiquity as the rest of the history of the Trojan War. However, this important event was not described directly in either of the great Homeric epics, the Iliad or the Odyssey. Noted classics scholar Jonathan S. Burgess traces the story of Achilles as represented in other ancient sources in order to offer a deeper understanding of the death and afterlife of the celebrated Greek warrior.
Through close readings of additional literary sources and analysis of ancient artwork, such as vase paintings, Burgess uncovers rich accounts of Achilles' death as well as alternative versions of his afterlife. Taking a neoanalytical approach, Burgess is able to trace the influence of these parallel cultural sources on Homer's composition of the Iliad.
With his keen, original analysis of hitherto untapped literary, iconographical, and archaeological sources, Burgess adds greatly to our understanding of this archetypal mythic hero.
eBook
Sylvia plath's disquieting muses
Sylvia Plath's commitment to the craft of writing has been given extraordinary attention since her suicide in February 1963. What is not widely known is that the poet had once considered art, not poetry, as her first calling and that she was passionate about the work of Surrealists Giorgio de Chirico and Leonor Fini. I first look at how Plath incorporated her sketches into her verse; then at her ekphrastic responses to specific paintings, such as de Chirico's \"Ariadne\" (1913) and \"The Disquieting Muses\" (1916-18). Finally, I examine the symbols of female power and disempowerment in Plath's poems as compared to the revolutionary vision of female power present in all of Fini's work, but especially her self-portrait of the artist as warrior in \"The Ideal Life.\" I argue that in her final Ariel poems, Plath embraces the notion of the artist as a Lady Lazarus, who has burned the fantasies of romantic love and emerged at one with God's lioness, the art that carries her.
Journal Article
PINDAR AND EURIPIDES ON SEX WITH APOLLO
Among the most characteristic motifs in Greek mythology is the sexual union of a god with a mortal woman and the resultant birth of a hero. The existence of hexameter poetry listing the women thus favoured – the famous women in the underworld in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, and above all the Eoiai – is evidence of an interest in the women involved, not only in their heroic sons, and suggests that already at an early date the theme was the object not merely of passive reception but of an active consciousness. The Eoiai, indeed, saw such unions as an integral part of an earlier and better age, when mortals and immortals were closer:
ξυναὶ γὰρ τότε δαῖτες ἔσαν, ξυνοὶ δὲ θόωκοιἀθανάτων τε θεῶν καταθνητοῖς τ' ἀνθρώπων(fr. 1 Μ–W)
But it was not to be supposed that such a potentially rich theme would receive a unitary treatment. Already in their first appearances – at least, the first appearances for us – many individual stories are clearly distinguished by their different circumstances. A common variable is the existence, the kind and the degree of difficulty experienced by the woman as a result of the encounter. Polymele, for instance, mother of Eudorus by Hermes at Iliad 16.179–92, has seemingly no difficulty in leaving her child to be brought up by her father while she goes on to marry a mortal husband. But suffering of some sort is perhaps more usual, and famous sufferers include Cassandra, punished for spurning Apollo's advances; Danae, first imprisoned by her father in a brazen tower to prevent her pregnancy, and then locked in a chest with her baby and set afloat on the waves; and Semele, destroyed when her lover Zeus appeared to her in his true form. Such different experiences could suggest further multiple versions of the same general theme, diverging especially in the consequences of the union (or attempted union) for the mortal partner. Even the same characters could potentially undergo quite different variants of the story; the chief constant is the unfailing popularity of the mythical motif.
Journal Article
In Byron's Shadow
This book examines the significance of what Victor Hugo called the “Greece of Byron” or modern Greece in English and American literature. Although ancient Greece, Hugo's “Greece of Homer”, and modern Greece occupy the same geographical space on the map, they are two distinct entities in the Western imagination. Modern Greece, constructed by the early 19th-century ideals and ideas associated with Byron, has been “haunted, holy ground” in literature for almost two centuries. This book analyzes how authors employ ideas about romantic nationalism, gender politics, shifts in cultural constructions, and literary experimentation to create variations of “Greece” to suit changing eras.
eBook