Author: Richard Neer Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421429799 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 475
Book Description
A groundbreaking study of the interaction of poetry, performance, and the built environment in ancient Greece. Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Classics by the Association of American Publishers In this volume, Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke develop a new, integrated approach to classical Greece: a "lyric archaeology" that combines literary and art-historical analysis with archaeological and epigraphic materials. At the heart of the book is the great poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his magnificent odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other competitions. Unlike the quintessentially personal genre of modern lyric, these poems were destined for public performance by choruses of dancing men. Neer and Kurke go further to show that they were also site-specific: as the dancers moved through the space of a city or a sanctuary, their song would refer to local monuments and landmarks. Part of Pindar's brief, they argue, was to weave words and bodies into elaborate tapestries of myth and geography and, in so doing, to re-imagine the very fabric of the city-state. Pindar's poems, in short, were tools for making sense of space. Recent scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology. But Neer and Kurke show that these distinctions are artificial. Poems, statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and buildings worked together as a "suite" of technologies for organizing landscapes, cityscapes, and territories. Studying these technologies in tandem reveals the procedures and criteria by which the Greeks understood relations of nearness and distance, "here" and "there"—and how these ways of inhabiting space were essentially political. Rooted in close readings of individual poems, buildings, and works of art, Pindar, Song, and Space ranges from Athens to Libya, Sicily to Rhodes, to provide a revelatory new understanding of the world the Greeks built—and a new model for studying the ancient world.
Author: Robert L. Fowler Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350198137 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
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.
Author: Agis Marinis Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1351610961 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
This book delves into the intricate and, as argued, essential relationship between poetics and religion in Pindar. It explores how performance, cult, and religious attitudes intersect, offering readers a nuanced approach to Pindaric poetry concerning the relationship between mortals and the divine. Marinis approaches the world of Pindaric poetry within its historical context, enabling readers to explore the cultural and religious foundations of Pindar’s lyric verse. The chapters examine both epinician poetry and cultic songs, the two major genres of the Pindaric corpus. This monograph focuses on the interconnectedness of poetics and religion, a central question that is essential for understanding the distinctive nature of Pindaric poetry. It examines the diverse ways in which Pindaric poetic tropes intersect with religious themes through detailed analysis and scholarly research. Readers gain an understanding of the significance of performance and cult in the public enactment of Pindar’s works, exploring the relations between mortals – the composer of the song, its performer, and the victor in the case of epinician poetry – and the divine, highlighting the complexities of ancient Greek literature regarding religious practices and attitudes. Through its rigorous examination of Pindaric poetics and religious themes, this book offers readers a profound insight into the religious dimensions of ancient Greek poetry and the enduring legacy of Pindar’s oeuvre. Poetics and Religion in Pindar is suitable for scholars and students working on ancient Greek literature, particularly the works of Pindar and lyric poetry, as well as those interested in classical literature and ancient Greek religion and culture more broadly.
Author: Richard Neer Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226570657 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 287
Book Description
In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer offers a new way to understand the epoch-making sculpture of classical Greece. Working at the intersection of art history, archaeology, literature, and aesthetics, he reveals a people fascinated with the power of sculpture to provoke wonder in beholders. Wonder, not accuracy, realism, naturalism or truth, was the supreme objective of Greek sculptors. Neer traces this way of thinking about art from the poems of Homer to the philosophy of Plato. Then, through meticulous accounts of major sculpture from around the Greek world, he shows how the demand for wonder-inducing statues gave rise to some of the greatest masterpieces of Greek art. Rewriting the history of Greek sculpture in Greek terms and restoring wonder to a sometimes dusty subject, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the art of sculpture or the history of the ancient world.
Author: Hanne Eisenfeld Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108924352 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
Pindar's victory songs teem with divinity. By exploring them within the lived religious landscapes of the fifth century BCE, Hanne Eisenfeld demonstrates that they are in fact engaged in theological work. Focusing on a set of mythical figures whose identities blur the boundaries between mortality and immortality (Herakles, the Dioskouroi, Amphiaraos, and Asklepios), she newly interprets the value of immortality in the epinician corpus. Pindar's depiction of these figures responds to and shapes contemporary religious experience and revalues mortality as a prerequisite for the glory found in victory. The book combines close reading and philological analysis with religious historical approaches to Pindar's songs and his world. It highlights the inextricability of Greek literature and Greek religion, and models a novel approach to Greek lyric poetry at the intersection of these fields.
Author: Lauren Curtis Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108923704 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 381
Book Description
In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connection between music and memory in Graeco-Roman culture, but how was this connection understood and experienced by ancient authors, artists, performers, and audiences? How is music remembered and how does it memorialize in a world before recording technology, where sound accumulated differently than it does today? This volume explores music's role in the discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies. It reveals the many and varied ways in which musical memory formed a fundamental part of social, cultural, ritual, and political life in ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking communities, from classical Athens to Ptolemaic Alexandria and ancient Rome. Drawing on the contributors' interdisciplinary expertise in art history, philology, performance studies, history, and ethnomusicology, eleven original chapters and the editors' Introduction offer new approaches for the study of Graeco-Roman music and musical culture.
Author: Carolyn Laferrière Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009315943 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
This book examines representations of divine music to argue that visual arts could communicate the sound of divine music being depicted.
Author: Margaret Foster Publisher: Mnemosyne, Supplements ISBN: 9789004411425 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 408
Book Description
Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetryforegrounds innovative approaches to the question of genre, what it means, and how to think about it for ancient Greek poetry and performance. Embracing multiple definitions of genre and lyric, the volume pushes beyond current dominant trends within the field of Classics to engage with a variety of other disciplines, theories, and models. Eleven papers by leading scholars of ancient Greek culture cover a wide range of media, from Sappho's songs to elegiac inscriptions to classical tragedy. Collectively, they develop a more holistic understanding of the concept of lyric genre, its relevance to the study of ancient texts, and its relation to subsequent ideas about lyric.
Author: James Bradley Wells Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350226416 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
This new translation of Pindar's songs for victorious athletes marries philological rigour with poetic sensibility in order to represent the beauty of his language for a modern audience as closely as possible. Pindar's poetry is synonymous with difficulty for scholars and students of classical studies. His syntax stretches the limits of ancient Greek, while his allusions to mythology and other poetic texts assume an audience that knows more than we now possibly can, given the fragmentary nature of textual and material culture records for ancient Greece. It includes an authoritative introduction, both to the poet and his art and to ancient athletics, alongside brief orientations to the historical context and mythological content of each victory song. The inclusion of a glossary supplies additional mythological and historical information necessary to understanding Pindar's poetry for those coming to the works for the first time. His is the largest body of textual remains that exists for ancient Greece between Homer (conventionally dated to 750 BCE) and the Classical Period (480323 BCE), and constitutes a rich resource for politics, history, religion, and social practices.
Author: Richard Neer
Author: Robert L. Fowler
Author: Agis Marinis
Author: Anna Uhlig
Author: Richard Neer
Author: Hanne Eisenfeld
Author: Lauren Curtis
Author: Carolyn Laferrière
Author: Margaret Foster
Author: James Bradley Wells