Book Chapter

Literature in the Hellenistic World

Mori, Anatole

2015

Overview

In the Hellenistic period Greek poets played a role in the preservation of what was gradually becoming a literary (rather than oral) tradition, and not just within the ambit of patronage and royal libraries. Production and consumption were not so closely linked, spatially and temporally, as they had been in previous years. With the loss of original performance contexts, familiarity with works that were increasingly seen as canonical (e.g., Homeric epic) became a more mobile sign of Greek identity. Literary culture in Asia and northern Africa has often been perceived as a marker of (newly imported) Hellenic sophistication, yet institutional libraries, both the collections housed in temples and palaces and the readers and writers associated with them, had long existed in those lands. This chapter accordingly situates third‐century Greek poetry in the shifting social and political contexts of literary cultures in the Seleucid Empire as well as intellectual communities of Ptolemaic Egypt, Macedonia, and Pergamon.

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc
• Subject: Alexandrian library / Antioch / Apollonius Rhodius / Babylon / Callimachus / Pergamon / Posidippus / Ptolemaic Egypt / Seleucid Empire / Theocritus
• ISBN: 1444339427, 9781444339420