Academic literature on the topic 'Elegiac poetry, Greek'

Abstract: This essay analyses conversation at archaic and classical Greek banquets and symposia, using first epic, then elegiac and lyric poetry, and finally Old Comedy. Epic offers few topics, mostiy arising from the situation of a guest. Those of sympotic poetry, from which prose exchanges may cautiously be inferred, are more numerous:reflection, praise of the living and the dead, consolation of the bereaved, proclamations of likes and dislikes, declarations of love,narrative of one's own erotic experiences or (scandalously) of others',personal criticism and abuse, and the telling of fables. Many of these verbal interventions are competitive. Comedy reinforces the prevalence of an ethos of entertainment, corroborating the telling of fables and adding creditable anecdotes about one's career, singing skolia,and playing games of "comparisons" and riddles.

The aim of the present article is to discuss the relation between the philosophy and poetry in archaic Greece on the example of Xenophanes of Colophon (6th century BC), the poet best known for a critique of anthropomorphic imagery of the traditional religion. The initial problem lies in understanding the performative aspect of the elegiac poems of Xenophanes; analysis of the fragment 1W and 2W has revealed that the Xenophanes’ literary output can be situated within the framework of the aristocratic symposium. This sympotic context determines the second question, wiz. how the poetic fragments fi t with the Xenophanes’ compositions in which he attacks the traditional beliefs and poetic ideas of Homer or Hesiod. The particular focus has been on the fragments of elegies that are presumed to belong to the collection named Sylloi: as the author has suggested, the critique of traditional mythical narratives, as well as undermining the authority of other poets, can be interpreted as an expression of performative practices functioning at the symposia of the archaic and classical epochs. By removing the division between the „philosophy” and „poetry”, the different aspects of Xenophanes’ fragments start to coincide with the phenomenon of ancient symposium, understood as a space for the intellectual competition.

AbstractThis study seeks to revive, defend and further illustrate the suggestion of Weil (1862) (adopted by Rossi (1953/4)) that the longer fragments of Tyrtaeus (nos. 10-12 in West 1992) were composed in five-couplet units (Weil called them 'strophes' but I prefer 'stanzas') that either alternate between exhortation and meditation (e.g. 10.1-30 or 11.1-20) or contrast, for example, the defensive and offensive modes of hoplite warfare (11.21-38), men skilled and unskilled in warfare (12.1-20) or the differing honors that await those war-heroes who die on the battlefield and those who return home alive (12.21-30 and 35-44). These units, moreover, often display a kind of responsion (similar to that found in ancient Greek choral poetry), which allows the poet to draw attention to the stanzaic architecture of the poem and emphasize parallels and contrasts between the individual stanzas. Weil's theory, moreover, provides us with evidence of later re-performances of these poems, especially Tyrtaeus 12, where the transmitted text shows clear signs of a subsequent performance (perhaps in classical Athens as the Platonic paraphrases in the Laws suggest) by a poet who was ignorant or careless of the earlier archaic practice.

AbstractThis article revisits the question of how elegy was performed at the symposion, and argues that, rather than being either musical or non-musical, elegy situates itself between speech and song. None of the passages in which elegy mentions song are clearly self-referential: they tend to be generic, set in the future, concerned with other performers and other compositions or altogether too slippery in their language to pin them down. Moreover, there are a number of elegiac pieces that appear designed to allow symposiasts to shift from song to speech or speech to song, thereby introducing a new mode of performance, and so are themselves transitional. These observations about the way elegiac texts position their own performance are complemented by considerations about their actual performance. Evidence both from ancient musicologists and from other tonal languages suggests that inbetween modes of delivery were common in Greek poetry and the metrical shape makes elegy a prime candidate. The final section of the article turns to the difficult term elegos in fifth-century drama. It argues that several of these passages draw on inbetweenness as one association of elegos and thus decreases the gap between elegos and surviving elegy. A coda points out that the elegiacs in Euripides' Andromache are a further example of elegy transitioning between two modes of performance.

For Homer's Circe the story of Argo's voyage was already well known. Although we cannot be sure that the Odyssey's first audience was aware of Medea's role in Jason's story, we do know that by the time that Ovid came to write Heroides, she had already appeared in numerous Greek and Latin texts, in epic and lyric poetry and on the tragic stage. Given her complex textual and dramatic history, it seems hardly likely that any Ovidian Medea could actually be ‘a simple girl'. And yet precisely this charge of ‘simplicity’ has been levelled against Heroides 12 and its Active author. I propose to argue that the Medea of Heroides 12 is complex, not simple, and that her complexity derives from the fact that Ovid has positioned his elegiac heroine between past and future, guilt and innocence, epic and tragedy.Like all of Ovid's heroines, Medea writes at a critical juncture in her mythic life. But Medea's myth differs significantly from those of her fellow authors, for it requires her to play five distinct roles in four separate locations. Thus while Penelope, for example, plays only the part of Ulysses' loyal wife on Ithaca immediately before and during her husband's return, Medea plays the ‘simple girl’ in Colchis, the murderous wife in Iolcus, the abandoned mother in Corinth, the poisonous stepmother in Athens and the potential filicide back in Colchis. She is a heroine with a well-known and extensive history and so it is not surprising that the first line of Heroides 12 invokes the concept of memory: memini (‘I remember’).

Discussions of Clare's engagement with botany often trace his fraught relationship with taxonomy, exploring his admiration for common names over the ‘dark system’ of Linnaean classification. This essay expands understanding of Clare's botanical imagination by considering how he brings his botanical ‘taste’ to bear on the flower as a key figure of elegiac consolation. I refocus attention on his formative preference for pre-Linnaean herbalism and explore how it informs his engagement with elegiac tradition and imagery, especially in relation to Gray's ‘Elegy’. I attend to how herbalism is brought into relationship with poetic representations of the floral, focussing especially on the connection between Clare's preference for herbals and Elizabeth Kent's Flora Domestica. I then discuss ‘Cauper Green’ and ‘The Village Doctress’ (Clare's most sustained poetic discussions of herbalism) as elegies that try to reconcile the finite temporality of human life with the regenerative life cycles of plants and their flowers.

The subject of this research is the heritage of Indo-European poetics in works of the Ancient Greek poet Solon. The object of this research is the elegies and fragments of his hexametric oeuvres. The authors examine such aspects of the topic as: 1) retention in Solon’s poetry of the structures similar to exposition of hymns in Ancient Greek and Ancient Indian traditions; 2) preservation of stylistic figures widely represented in the poetry of ancient Indo-European peoples; 3) preservation of poetic expressions and mythological ideas that may date back to Indo-European times. For achieving the set goals, the author employ the methods of text hermeneutics, semantic analysis, and comparative-historical linguistics. The following conclusions are made: in the corpus of Solon’s texts there are fragments very similar to expositions of hymns in the Ancient Greek and Vedic traditions; Solon’s poetry contains stylistic approaches that can be reconstructed to the level of Indo-European poetics; poetic expressions and mythological representations dated back to Indo-European times are retained in Solon’s texts.

<div class="page" title="Page 116"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>O presente trabalho consiste de um exame breve das correntes teóricas que propõem o simpósio aristocrático como ocasião única e evidente da <em>performance</em> de poemas elegíacos arcaicos de pequena extensão. Igualmente, considera testemunhos antigos sobre a recepção da poesia de Tirteu e a presença de tópicas militares em elegias notadamente simposiais. Por conseguinte, visa a oferecer, liminarmente, pressupostos para uma compreensão outra da elegia exortativa marcial, na medida em que verifica a relação entre esta poesia, o contexto que a motiva, e a sua similaridade formal e temática com textos pertencentes à tradição épica. </span></p><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><strong>Martial elegy and performance </strong></p><p><strong>Abstract </strong></p><p><span>This work consists in a brief exam of academical studies which assume the aristocratic symposion as an exclusive occasion for early greek </span><span>elegies’ performance. It also considers historical evidence about the reception of Tyrtaeus’ poetry and the p</span><span>resence of military topics in typical symposion environment. Therefore, this paper raises preliminary conjectures for a different comprehension on martial exhortative elegy, along with the inspection of relations among this poetry, its context, and its formal and thematic resemblances with epic texts. </span></p><p><span><strong>Keywords:</strong> early greek elegy; epic tradition; performance; Tyrtaeus. </span></p></div></div></div><p><span><br /></span></p></div></div></div>

AbstractThis article provides a detailed interpretation and suggests a literary background for the brief (26 verses) elegiac recipe against colic (SH690), written by Philo of Tarsus in the first centuryAD. Although on one level it is a serious pharmacological prescription, on another level it is also a literary piece, concerned with a marked tone of voice, Homeric play, and general display ofpaideia. Particularly its play of substituting certain ingredients with mythological riddles is striking. Its appeal to both doctors and men of culture fits the intellectual pattern of the culture of the Second Sophistic. As a poetic hybrid it also plays on different genres inherited from the previous Hellenistic era. Moreover, it constitutes a telling example of the late subgenre of elegiac pharmacology, in an era in which elegiac had all but vanished from Greek literature.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1996.
"This dissertation is a combination of a critical essay and an original collection of poetry" -- P. ii. Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 42-43). Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation is a study of the rhetorical uses of evaluative language in Greek lyric and elegiac poetry and inscribed epigram of the period from the seventh to the fifth century B.C.E. The discussion focuses on the poets' evaluations of human worth in three areas, each of which forms a separate chapter: martial valour, the relationship between physical appearance and inner virtue, and political or social values. Within each chapter, particular aspects of the subject under discussion are treated under separate headings. Although the literary material has been treated in various ways in the past, the inclusion of inscribed epigram alongside the other literature in this case offers evidence from a related but distinct branch of poetic tradition for the development and expression of these values; divergences between the literary and the inscriptional tradition can be quite marked, as can the different approaches taken by poets of various genres within the literary material. The attempts of previous scholarship to define clear and consistent systems or codes of value represented in the poetry and to trace their development over this period have been generally unconvincing, but the poets' deployment of evaluative language does show some discernible patterns which appear to be related more to genre and poetic tradition than to the purely chronological processes of development that have been proposed by other scholars.

Pour montrer la richesse des représentations poétiques de la mer, l’époque augustéenne constitue un moment clef. Avec la bataille d’Actium, la mer occupe une place nouvelle à Rome et devient un enjeu majeur, lieu de victoires et de pouvoir dans le discours d’Auguste et dans l’imaginaire romain, à un moment de refondation aussi bien politique que morale de la cité après les guerres civiles. C’est la manière dont cet objet s’est constitué en tant que catalyseur de toutes les grandes mutations de l’époque augustéenne qui retient notre attention. Nous étudions la mer comme locus, c’est-à-dire comme un objet poétique susceptible de refléter ou de modifier le lieu réel où l’activité humaine se déploie durant l’histoire grecque et romaine, mais aussi les représentations socioculturelles. Dans notre première partie, nous entreprenons une comparaison des rapports à la mer chez les Grecs et les Romains, dans leur histoire, leurs mentalités et leur littérature. Il apparaît que d’un point de vue axiologique, si la mer des poètes augustéens reçoit un traitement négatif en grande partie influencé par la poésie grecque, ce motif est enrichi d’un élément inédit : la condamnation de la navigation. Reliée aux guerres et à la luxuria, elle s’inspire chez les poètes augustéens d’une synthèse entre les influences de la philosophie grecque et de la morale traditionnelle : elle devient le lieu d’expression des passions humaines, depuis la cupidité jusqu’à la colère du Prince. Mais les poètes augustéens ont aussi été sensibles à l’héritage grec du motif épique de la mer : Virgile, dans l’Énéide, élabore à partir des modèles grecs un héroïsme nouveau, adapté à l’arrière-plan culturel romain, où prime la pietas, dans des errances où les épreuves maritimes sont systématiquement désamorcées. Ovide, dans ses Métamorphoses, relit Virgile pour déconstruire cette mer de la fabrique des héros et proposer une nouvelle représentation de la mer, miroir de la Pax Augusta. Pourtant, c’est l’élégie qui, en transférant toute ses ambiguïtés au locus marin, en fait le mieux le miroir troublant des changements politiques et des mutations morales que connaît Rome au début du Principat : la réélaboration élégiaque du motif épique de la mer est l’occasion du questionnement et de la réaffirmation des valeurs du mos maiorum, d’expérimentations génériques et surtout de la construction d’un nouvel héroïsme en mer, celui d’Auguste à Actium
To show the richness of the poetic representations of the sea, the Augustan epoch is considered a key period. With the battle of Actium, the sea holds a new place in Rome and becomes a major stake, place of victories and power in the speech of Augustus and in the Roman imagination, during a political and moral city rebuilding after the civil wars. It is the way this object was established as a catalyst of all the great changes of the Augustan period that holds our attention. We study the sea as locus, that is to say as a poetic object likely to reflect or modify the real place where the human activity spreads out during the Greek and Roman history, but also the socio-cultural representations. In our first part, we undertake a comparison of the relationships with the sea for Greeks and Romans, in their history, their mentalities and their literature. It appears that from an axiological point of view, if the sea of Augustan poets receives a negative treatment as in Greek poetry, this pattern is enriched by a previously unseen element: the navigation condemnation. Linked with war and luxuria, it is inspired for the Augustan poets by a synthesis between the influences of Greek philosophy and traditional morality: it becomes the place of expression of the human passions, from greed to anger of the Prince. But the Augustan poets have also carried the Greek heritage of the epic motif of the sea Virgil, in the Aeneid, develops from the Greek models a new heroism, adapted to the Roman cultural background, where the pietas takes the central part through wanderings where sea trials are systematically undone. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, rereads Virgil to deconstruct this sea of heroes and to build a new representation of the sea, mirror of the Pax Augusta. However, the elegy, as the most ambiguous genre, introduces the most original and complex vision of the marine locus. Elegiac poets makes it the most disturbing mirror of the political changes and moral mutations that Rome experienced at the beginning of the Principate: the elegiacre-elaboration of the epic motif of the sea is an opportunity to question and reaffirm the values of the mos maiorum, generic experiments and especially the construction of a new heroism at sea, that of Augustus to Actium

Chapter 2 establishes Ovid’s Heroides, Tristia, and Epistulae ex Ponto as central to a number of specific features of Chariton’s novel (especially the embedded letters). Section 2.2 focuses on the Heroides and the following epistolary motifs: the processes of composition and reception; the presence of tears; the recognition of handwriting; the role of memory and possessive adjectives; and the eroticization of the letter’s materiality. These contribute to the characterization of Chaereas and Dionysius as lamenting and abandoned heroines. Section 2.3 argues that Chariton has digested a number of motifs that characterize the exilic persona in Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, such as the role of finger rings and various psychosocial neuroses. As in Chapter 1, thematic proximities between Chariton and the elegiac corpus are supported by strikingly close points of verbal contact.

Chapter 1 establishes Latin love elegy (especially Propertius) as an important frame of reference for Chariton, and explores a number of characteristics (lexical and thematic) that all constitute an extreme or ‘totalizing’ attitude towards love on the part of the lover. Section 1.2 addresses the language of wholeness and exclusion (ὅλος‎ and μόνος‎; totus and solus) on display in Chariton and elegy, which is suggestive of a direct link. Section 1.3 approaches the conceptual analogy between love and death in Chariton and elegy, and argues that Chariton looks to the Latin poets for his characterization of Chaereas and Dionysius as obsessed with death and erotically motivated thoughts of suicide (especially in connection with the lover who imagines his own funeral). Section 1.4 similarly approaches the characters of Chaereas and Dionysius as susceptible to overwhelming jealousy, the quintessential ‘elegiac passion’; as well as a number of Propertian poems, this section also argues for an extended allusion to Ovid’s treatment of the Procris and Cephalus myth as narrated in Ars 3 and the Metamorphoses. Thematic proximities between Chariton and the Latin poets are supported by strikingly close points of verbal contact.