This book provides a new literary treatment of an often-overlooked collection of fragmentary poems from the third century B.C.E. Alexandrian poet Callimachus. Callimachus' Iambi form a collection of thirteen poems, which rework archaic Greek iambography and look forward to Roman satire and other genres, especially to such collections as Horace's Epodes. The poems are especially significant as examples of cultural memory since they are composed both as an act of commemorating earlier poetry and as a manipulation of traditional features of iambic poetry to refashion the iambic genre. This book fills a significant gap by providing the first complete translation of several of these fragmentary poems in English, along with line-by-line commentary, notes, and literary analysis. The structure of the book is thematic, with chapters focusing on such topics as poetic voice, fable, ethical criticism, and statuary. Each chapter consists of an introduction, text and selected critical apparatus, translation, and comprehensive thematic discussion. Acosta-Hughes focuses especially on Callimachus' manipulation of traditional features of archaic iambic poetry such as persona loquens, ethical and critical message, and eristic dialogue. He also includes a detailed analysis of the Alexandrian poet's artistic relationship with the earlier iambic poets Archilochus and Hipponax. Polyeideia will interest not only readers of Greek and Hellenistic poetry but also readers of Roman satire and invective verse, as well as those intrigued by the processes of memorializing and fashioning poetic culture.

Polyeideia: The Iambi of Callimachus and the Archaic Iambic Tradition (Hellenistic Culture and Society) (Volume 35)

Literature & Fiction

Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin

Humor & Satire

University of California Press

Arion's Lyre examines how Hellenistic poetic culture adapted, reinterpreted, and transformed Archaic Greek lyric through a complex process of textual, cultural, and creative reception. Looking at the ways in which the poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Anacreon, and Simonides was preserved, edited, and read by Hellenistic scholars and poets, the book shows that Archaic poets often look very different in the new social, cultural, and political setting of Hellenistic Alexandria. For example, the Alexandrian Sappho evolves from the singer of Archaic Lesbos but has distinct associations and contexts, from Ptolemaic politics and Macedonian queens to the new phenomenon of the poetry book and an Alexandrian scholarship intent on preservation and codification.
 A study of Hellenistic poetic culture and an interpretation of some of the Archaic poets it so lovingly preserved, Arion's Lyre is also an examination of how one poetic culture reads another--and how modern readings of ancient poetry are filtered and shaped by earlier readings.

Arion's Lyre: Archaic Lyric into Hellenistic Poetry

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

Now available in English for the first time, Franco Ferrari's important Sappho's Gift: The Poet and Her Community offers extraordinary new insight into the life and works of Sappho, one of the ancient world's most brilliant poets. One of the very few women writers whose works have survived from antiquity, Sappho occupies a unique spot in literature in part because of her gender but more importantly because of the light she sheds on her time and place - Archaic Greece. Ferrari's study begins with the fragmentary evidence about the poems provided by papyri, and moves on to consider Sappho's iconography, the types of poems and their occasions, and her audience, meaning both her immediate circle of companions as well as competing groups and people in the larger community.

Sappho's Gift: The Poet and Her Community

Ferrari, Franco

Prauscello, Lucia

Michigan Classical Press

Scholarly reception has bequeathed two Callimachuses: the Roman version is a poet of elegant non-heroic poetry (usually erotic elegy), represented by a handful of intertexts with a recurring set of images - slender Muse, instructing divinity, small voice, pure waters; the Greek version emphasizes a learned scholar who includes literary criticism within his poetry, an encomiast of the Ptolemies, a poet of the book whose narratives are often understood as metapoetic. This study does not dismiss these Callimachuses, but situates them within a series of interlocking historical and intellectual contexts in order better to understand how they arose. In this narrative of his poetics and poetic reception four main sources of creative opportunism are identified: Callimachus' reactions to philosophers and literary critics as arbiters of poetic authority, the potential of the text as a venue for performance, awareness of Alexandria as a new place, and finally, his attraction for Roman poets.

Callimachus in Context: From Plato to the Augustan Poets

Stephens, Susan A.

Cambridge University Press

Scholarly reception has bequeathed two Callimachuses: the Roman version is a poet of elegant non-heroic poetry (usually erotic elegy), represented by a handful of intertexts with a recurring set of images - slender Muse, instructing divinity, small voice, pure waters; the Greek version emphasizes a learned scholar who includes literary criticism within his poetry, an encomiast of the Ptolemies, a poet of the book whose narratives are often understood as metapoetic. This study does not dismiss these Callimachuses, but situates them within a series of interlocking historical and intellectual contexts in order better to understand how they arose. In this narrative of his poetics and poetic reception four main sources of creative opportunism are identified: Callimachus' reactions to philosophers and literary critics as arbiters of poetic authority, the potential of the text as a venue for performance, awareness of Alexandria as a new place, and finally, his attraction for Roman poets.

Avec le poete alexandrin Callimaque, Euphorion de Chalcis partage ce paradoxe: sa reception a Rome constitue, pour tout lecteur d'aujourd'hui, le premier point de rencontre. Pourtant ce poete grec du IIIe siecle avant J.-C., qui composait en hexametres, merite plus que cela: il faudrait pouvoir connaitre, d'abord et directement, sa production poetique avant de l'apprecier ou de le denigrer en fonction de sa reception ulterieure. C'et le but de cet ouvrage que de donner a lire directement le texte d'Euphorion. Dans les uvres ici presentees et commentees, on essaiera de chercher d'abord ce qui fait l'originalite de ce poete hellenistique: son gout pour les termes rares et les particularites mythologiques, sa pratique de poete " homerique "...

Euphorion: Oeuvre poétique et autres Fragments (French Edition)

Genre Fiction

Les Belles Lettres

A central, much-studied feature of the poetry of 3rd cent. BCE Alexandria is the artistic treatment of the cultural past, the reception of earlier Greek poetry and artwork in the artistic creations of a new, Greco-Egyptian world deracinated both geographically and temporally from the heroes and models of Archaic and Classical Greece. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes has devoted a 30+ year professional scholarly career to the study of this reception, one of both imitation and variation, which took place concurrently with the massive collection and categorization of earlier Greek literature in the work of the scholars gathered under royal patronage at the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria, a truly revolutionary new effort of cultural memorialization. The poets of this period, among them Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius and Posidippus, vied in their efforts to compose works that at once celebrated their poetic heritage and at the same time marked their own poetry as original artistic creation and as critical commentary upon their earlier models. This collection will be of interest not only for readers of Archaic and Hellenistic poetry, but also for readers interested in the later reception of the Alexandrians at Rome.

The Laurel and the Olive: Collected Essays on Archaic and Hellenistic Poetry (Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes, 152)

Walter de Gruyter

When is "closure" in fact "false closure," the deceptive opposite of apparent conclusion or perfection? 2009 marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Don Fowler's seminal essay "First Thoughts on Closure: Problems and Prospects" (MD 22: 75-122), a work that contributed greatly to bringing about a broad reconsideration in Ancient literary studies of the concept of closure whether understood as an ontological feature, an aesthetic concept, an appreciative inclination on the part of a work's audience or a psychological desire of the individual to control the "text" at hand. The present volume, 'The Door Ajar: False Closure in Greek and Roman Literature and Art', seeks to mark both a debt to the ongoing influence of Fowler's work, and to frame a future discourse on false closure in particular as an artistic phenomenon.

The Door Ajar: False Closure in Greek and Roman Literature and Art (Bibliothek Der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaften, Neue Folge, 2. Reihe)

Universitatsverlag Winter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Polyeideia: The Iambi of Callimachus and the Archaic Iambic Tradition (Hellenistic Culture and Society) (Volume 35)

Arion's Lyre: Archaic Lyric into Hellenistic Poetry

Sappho's Gift: The Poet and Her Community

Callimachus in Context: From Plato to the Augustan Poets

Callimachus in Context: From Plato to the Augustan Poets

Euphorion: Oeuvre poétique et autres Fragments (French Edition)

The Laurel and the Olive: Collected Essays on Archaic and Hellenistic Poetry (Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes, 152)

The Door Ajar: False Closure in Greek and Roman Literature and Art (Bibliothek Der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaften, Neue Folge, 2. Reihe)