Essays on Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

Ewen Bowie

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781107058088
• eBook ISBN: 9781009213400
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In this book one of the world's leading Hellenists brings together his many contributions over four decades to our understanding of early Greek literature, above all of elegiac poetry and its relation to fifth-century prose historiography, but also of early Greek epic, iambic, melic and epigrammatic poetry. Many chapters have become seminal, e.g. that which first proposed the importance of now-lost long narrative elegies, and others exploring their performance contexts when papyri published in 1992 and 2005 yielded fragments of such long poems by Simonides and Archilochus. Another chapter argues against the widespread view that Sappho composed and performed chiefly for audiences of young girls, suggesting instead that she was a virtuoso singer and lyre-player, entertaining men in the elite symposia whose verbal and musical components are explored in several other chapters of the book. Two more volumes of collected papers will follow devoted to later Greek literature and culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustration and Tables
• List of Places of Original Publication
• Preface
• List of Editions and Abbreviations
• Introduction to Volume 1: Greek Poetry before 400 BC
• 1 Early Greek Elegy, Symposium and Public Festival (1986)
• 2 One That Got Away: Archilochus frr. 188–92 and Horace Odes 1.4 and 5 (1987)
• 3 Miles ludens? The Problem of Martial Exhortation in Early Greek Elegy (1990)
• 4 Lies, Fiction and Slander in Early Greek Poetry (1993)
• 5 Greek Table-Talk before Plato (1993)
• 6 The Theognidea: a Step towards a Collection of Fragments? (1997)
• 7 Early Greek Iambic Poetry: the Importance of Narrative (2001)
• 8 Ancestors of Historiography in Early Greek Elegiac and Iambic Poetry? (2001)
• 9 Sympotic Praise (2002)
• 10 Early Expatriates: Displacement and Exile in Archaic Poetry (2007)
• 11 From Archaic Elegy to Hellenistic Sympotic Epigram? (2007)
• 12 Sex and Politics in Archilochus’ Poetry (2008)
• 13 Wandering Poets, Archaic Style (2009)
• 14 Epigram as Narration (2010)
• 15 Historical Narrative in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Elegy (2010)
• 16 Stobaeus and Early Greek Melic, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry (2010)
• 17 Marathon in Fifth-Century Epigram (2010)
• 18 The Trojan War in Early Greek Melic, Iambic and Elegiac Poetry (2010)
• 19 Performing and Re-performing Helen:Stesichorus’ Palinode (2010)
• 20 Simonides of Eretria (redivivus?) (2010)
• 21 Alcman’s First Partheneion and the Song the Sirens sang (2011)
• 22 An Early Chapter in the History of the Theognidea (2012)
• 23 Stesichorus and Ibycus: Plain Tales from the Western Front (2012)
• 24 Epinicians and ‘Patrons’ (2012)
• 25 Unnatural Selection: Expurgation of Greek Melic, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry (2012)
• 26 Marathon, the 1500 Days after: Culture and Politics (2013)
• 27 The Sympotic Tease (2013)
• 28 Rediscovering Sacadas (2014)
• 29 Stesichorus’ Geryoneis and Greeks in the West (2014)
• 30 Stesichorus at Athens (2015)
• 31 Cultic Contexts for Elegiac Performance? (2016)
• 32 Quo usque tandem? How long were Sympotic Songs? (2016)
• 33 How did Sappho’s Songs get into the Male Sympotic Repertoire? (2016)
• 34 The Performance Contexts of Trochaic Tetrameters Catalectic (2018)
• 35 Alcaeus’ stasiotica: Catullan and Horatian Readings (2019)
• 36 Reconfiguring Archilochus: How have Papyri and Inscriptions changed Perceptions of Archilochus’ Iambic and Elegiac Poetry? (2020)
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• Index of Greek Terms
• General Index