In the Mists of Time: Negotiating the Past in Ancient Literature

Studies in Honor of Antonios Rengakos

Franco Montanari, Theodore D. Papanghelis, Bernhard Zimmermann, Evina Sistakou, Theodore Papanghelis, Evanthia Sistakou

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111501895
• Subtopic: Ancient Languages
• Index: Literature

The idea of the past, far from suggesting a nostalgic longing or an antiquarian curiosity for ages and cultures irrevocably lost, is essential to the human perception of the world. The volume at hand, entitled In the Mists of Time: Negotiating the Past in Ancient Literature, explores pastness as expressed through myth and early history and as reflected in sophisticated concepts and epistemological questions in Ancient Greek and Latin literature. The eighteen contributions illustrate how the ancients addressed the past through poetry, history and philosophy and lend insight into the metaliterary, self-reflexive way of dealing with past texts through scholarship.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Contents
• Antonios Rengakos: κριτικῶν τε ἀριδείκετος πρηκτήρ τε ἔργων ἄριστος
• Publications by Antonios Rengakos
• List of Figures
• Part I: Poetry
• Shifting Paradigms: Peleus in the Iliad
• Competitive Suffering in Odyssey 14 and Iliad 24
• The Fatal Combat (Iliad 7.206–312), the Sick Frenzy of Ajax (Soph. Αjαx 59), and a Relevant Addendum
• Points of Departure: Toward a New Retelling. Hellenistic Poetry and the ‘Invention’ of the New
• Anachronism, Prophecy, and Local History in the Mists of Time
• Nonnus, Amymone, and the Poetics of Hydrology
• The Gods in Early Modern Historical Epics on the Spanish Armada: Christopher Ocland’s Elizabetheis (1589) and Thomas Campion’s Ad Thamesin (1595)
• Part II: History
• After Alexander: Plutarch on Being a Successor
• Not So Ancient History: Paris, Antony and Allegory in Horace Odes 1.15 and 3.3
• Romulus: A Transtextual Figure between Myth and History
• Part III: Philosophy
• Prehistory in Plato’s Laws, with Apologies to Democritus
• How to Construct a Remote Imaginary Past: Primeval Athens in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias
• Need as a Category of Ancient Economic Thought
• A True Philosopher: Dogs in the Eyes of Socrates and His Colleagues
• Part IV: Scholarship
• Scholars, Antiquarians, Historians, and More: Towards a New Solution for an Old Problem
• Did Aristarchus Have a Sense of Humour?
• More Heads for Ap. Rh. fr. 13 Michaelis (v.l. κεφαλάς in Hom. Il. 1.3)
• Bringing Light into the Darkness of the Past: Some Remarks on the Handbuch der griechischen Literatur der Antike
• List of Contributors
• Index