Aglaia

The Poetry of Alcman, Sappho, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Corinna

Charles Segal

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 1997
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780742569676
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

In this landmark collection of essays, renowned classicist Charles Segal offers detailed analyses of major texts from archaic and early classical Greek poetry; in particular, works of Alcman, Mimnermus, Sappho, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Corinna. Segal provides close readings of the texts, and then studies the literary form and language of early Greek lyric, the poets' conception of their aims and their art, the use of mythical paradigms, and the relation of the poems to their social context. A recurrent theme is the recognition of the fragility and brevity of mortal happiness and the consciousness of how the immortality conferred by poetry resists the ever-threatening presence of death and oblivion, fixing in permanent form the passing moments of joy and beauty. This is an essential book for students and scholars of ancient Greek poetry.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations and Selected Short Titles
• Introduction
• 1 Poetry, Performance, and Society in Early Greek Literature
• 2 Sirius and the Pleiades in Alcman’s Louvre Partheneion
• 3 Eros and Incantation: Sappho and Oral Poetry
• 4 Beauty, Desire, and Absence: Helen in Sappho, Alcaeus, and Ibycus
• 5 The Gorgon and the Nightingale: The Voice of Female Lament and Pindar’s Twelfth Pythian Ode
• 6 Naming, Truth, and Creation in the Poetics of Pindar
• 7 Messages to the Underworld: An Aspect of Poetic Immortalization in Pindar
• 8 Pindar, Mimnermus, and the “Zeus-given Gleam”: The End of Pythian 8
• 9 Time and the Hero: The Myth of Nemean 1
• 10 Arrest and Movement: Pindar’s Fifth Nemean
• 11 Pindar’s Seventh Nemean
• 12 Myth, Cult, and Memory in Pindar’s Third and Fourth Isthmian Odes
• 13 Bacchylides Reconsidered: Epithets and the Dynamics of Lyric Narrative
• 14 Croesus on the Pyre: Herodotus and Bacchylides
• 15 The Myth of Bacchylides 17: Heroic Quest and Heroic Identity
• 16 Pebbles in Golden Urns: The Date and Style of Corinna
• Index Locorum
• General Index
• About the Author