Greek Poems Research Articles

Rape, Violence, Complicity: Colluthus’s Abduction of Helen

Rape, Violence, Complicity:Colluthus’s Abduction of Helen Helen Morales The Abduction of Helen (Ἁρπαγὴ Ἑλένης) concerns sexual behavior and responsibility.1 The Greek word harpage means theft or snatching away, but because abduction often involved or implied sexual violation, the title is often translated the Rape of Helen.2 The poem is a short, episodic hexameter work (392 lines) that dramatizes the Judgment of Paris, Paris’ journey to Sparta (more of a short cruise than an exacting odyssey), the theft of Helen, the grief of Hermione, Helen’s daughter, and a short coda in which Helen and Paris arrive at Troy.3 The poem presents two different accounts of Helen’s abandonment of her family and home: the first, told in the poet’s voice, describes how Helen desires Paris and encourages him to take her to Troy. The second is envisaged by Hermione in a dream in which Helen appears and despairs that she had been taken by Paris against her will and by force. The main aim of this article is to analyze the sexual politics of the Abduction of Helen. This will necessarily [End Page 61] involve the challenge of attempting to situate the poem in its late fifth- or sixth-century c.e. contexts.4 We know very little about Colluthus. The tenth-century encyclopedia, the Suda, says that he came from Lycopolis in Egypt and was an epic poet who lived, or flourished, in the time of the emperor Anastasius (who ruled from 491–518). According to the Suda, Colluthus wrote a Calydoniaca, an Encomia in epic verse, and a Persica. This information is repeated in a codex from the fifteenth century, which adds that Colluthus is also thought to be the author of the Abduction of Helen, “a poem familiar and well known in Apulia, where also the poetry of the Homeric Quintus [i.e., the Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna] was discovered.”5 The Abduction of Helen is the only one of Colluthus’s works to survive. Colluthus may have been what Alan Cameron calls a “wandering poet”; he may also have been a grammarian.6 Late imperial Greek poems are not easily understood as part of a coherent genre, or as emerging from a particular institution, or as having a uniform cultural function. Even if we limit our focus to mythological narrative epics from the third to the sixth centuries, Quintus’s Posthomerica, Nonnus’s Dionysiaca, the Orphic Argonautica, Triphiodorus’s Sack of Troy, Colluthus’s Abduction of Helen, and Musaeus’s Hero and Leander (to name the major works that survive), we find considerable disparities in style and scale, and know little about the poets themselves and their milieux.7 This article will present a literary analysis of some key scenes, characters, and relationships in the poem, from which, I argue, various interpretative contexts suggest themselves: literary and mythological engagements (notably those with Claudian and Dracontius), generic and performance contexts (the relationship between the poem and the pantomime), and historical, religious, philosophical, and legal contexts that [End Page 62] emerge from foregrounding the subject matter of the poem: an abduction. All too often, Colluthus’s subject matter is disregarded in favor of focusing on the poem’s positioning in relation to different literary traditions or its poetic texture. Of course, the abduction of Helen or the rape of Helen or the seduction of Helen—the myth always evokes these divergent accounts of itself—is a literary topos, familiar from epic, oratory, drama, pastoral, philosophy, and declamation, and its familiarity and contrivance can militate against a reader’s sensitivity to its sexual politics. However, it is a topos about rape, violence, and complicity, and in the period when the Abduction of Helen was being written and first read or performed, there was a heightened awareness of, and controversy about, abduction, rape, and the moral, legal, social, and emotional ramifications of abduction and rape. Reading the Abduction of Helen within these contexts can profitably expand our understanding and appreciation of the poem. HELEN AND PARIS I want briefly to look at how Helen and Paris are described, before turning our attention to the relationship between Helen and her daughter Hermione. Colluthus’s Paris is...

COUNTING ON EPIC: MATHEMATICAL POETRY AND HOMERIC EPIC IN ARCHIMEDES' CATTLE PROBLEM

In 1773, the celebrated enlightenment thinker G.E. Lessing discovered in Wolfenbüttel's Herzog August Library a manuscript which contained a previously unknown Ancient Greek poem. The manuscript identified the author as Archimedes (c.287-212 BCE), and the work became known as the Cattle Problem (henceforth CP). On the surface, its twenty-two couplets capitalise on Homer's depiction of the ‘Cattle of the Sun’ in Book 12 of the Odyssey and its numerical aspect. A description of the related proportions of black, white, brown and dappled herds of cattle, which are then configured geometrically on Sicily, creates a strikingly colourful image. The author's decision to encode a number into the figure of the Cattle of the Sun styles the poem as a response to, and expansion of, Homer's scene. Reading through the work, though, it becomes clear that the mathematics is more complex than that of Homer's Odyssey.

«Три греческих стихотворения» Бруно Мадерны: к вопросу о развитии серийно-додекафонного метода в итальянской музыке конца 1940-х годов

The article pursues the goal of partially illing up the blank spaces in the study of the legacy of one of the most outstanding composers from the mid-20th century, a representative of the Darmstadt School, Bruno Maderna (1920–1973). The focus of attention is geared on Maderna’s irst achievement in the sphere of serial technique – the cycle “Tre Liriche Greche” [“Three Greek Poems”], examined in the context of the main tendencies of development of Italian classical music of the late 1940s. This period is marked by a special interest on the part of young composers in the musical legacy of the Second Viennese School, most notably, the serial-dodecaphonic method of Arnold Schoenberg. The decisive role of disseminating the dodecaphonic technique in Italy belongs to Bruno Maderna, along with Luigi Dallapicolla. The author of the article comes to the conclusion, based on his detailed study of the music score, of the original way of interpreting Schoenberg’s method in Maderna’s composition, which explains in many ways the evolution of serial writing in the music of the leading serialist composer of Italy in the second half of the 20th century, Luigi Nono. Keywords: dodecaphony, Second Viennese School, Darmstadt School, Klangfarbenmelodie, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono

The Hesiodic Catalogue of women and archaic Greece

This book examines the extant fragments of the archaic Greek poem known in antiquity as Hesiod's Catalogue of Women. Kirk Ormand shows that the poem should be read intertextually with other hexameter poetry from the eighth to sixth century BCE, especially Homer, Hesiod, and the Cyclic epics. Through literary interaction with these poems, the Catalogue reflects political and social tensions in the archaic period regarding the production of elite status. In particular, Ormand argues that the Catalogue reacts against the 'middling ideology' that came to the fore during the archaic period in Greece, championing traditional aristocratic modes of status. Ormand maintains that the poem's presentation of the end of the heroic age is a reflection of a declining emphasis on nobility of birth in the structures of authority in the emerging sixth century polis.

Hegel e o jovem Lukács: da consonância estética à dissonância política

Este trabalho desenvolve a concordância estética e a diferença política entre Hegel e o jovem Lukács da "Teoria do romance". O jovem autor húngaro se apropria da estrutura conceitual da "Estética" de Hegel, pois entende as formas poéticas em sua relação com o desenvolvimento do conteúdo histórico. Lukács e Hegel concebem, desse modo, as duas formas da grande épica (epopeia e romance) em estreita conexão com o momento histórico que as fundamenta: a Grécia arcaica configurada por Homero e a experiência da fragmentação e da consolidação da subjetividade lírica que a modernidade traz consigo. Não obstante a assunção da herança estética de Hegel, o jovem Lukács se afasta das conclusões positivas de Hegel acerca da modernidade, a saber: da suspensão da liberdade fragmentada e lírica da sociedade civil burguesa pela liberdade objetiva na unidade e totalidade da forma Estado, unidade e totalidade verdadeiramente apreendidas pela forma filosófica. Lukács, ao contrário de Hegel, entende a modernidade a partir do ponto de partida negativo, isto é, não a vê como a consumação da liberdade do homem, mas a compreende como a experiência do sujeito fragmentado e separado das estruturas sociais.

Hesiod and Hávamál : Transitions and the Transmission of Wisdom

Hesiod and Hávamál:Transitions and the Transmission of Wisdom Lilah Grace Canevaro1 (bio) Study of Hesiod’s Works and Days has long profited from comparative analyses.2 Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, and Hebrew wisdom literature has all been brought to bear on the archaic Greek poem. Many of the Works and Days’ maxims find parallels in, for example, the Akkadian Counsels of Wisdom, or the Egyptian Instruction texts. Hesiod’s myths about the creation of mankind recall stories such as the Babylonian Enuma Eliš and the first part of Atrahasis, or the Biblical narrative of Adam and Eve. Studies such as those of Penglase (1994), West (1997), and Haubold (2013) have tracked the influence of the Near East on Greek literature and culture, positing the fourteenth and the ninth centuries BCE as particular hot-beds of intercultural exchange. It is not too much of a stretch to posit that an archaic Greek poet would have been aware of Near Eastern poetry. However, this is not necessarily the case. Whether parallels between the Works and Days and extant Near Eastern wisdom literature indicate diachronic reception or synchronic cultural similarity is a bit of a grey area. For example, Hesiod is concerned throughout the Works and Days with ideas of measure and balance.3 Egyptian wisdom texts have the same preoccupation: The Instruction of Amen-em-Opet chapter 16 reads “Do not lean on the scales nor falsify the weights, / Nor damage the fractions of the measure …,” and indeed they have the ape god Thoth guarding the balance (“Which god is as great as Thoth?”). Was Hesiod’s interest piqued by the Egyptian wisdom tradition, or was due measure in all things simply a common cultural concern?4 It is not only the possibility of direct influence that makes these comparative studies so compelling. They also give us a glimpse into another tradition: a tradition developing along similar lines and at a similar stage, being guided by poets with similar preoccupations, and being shaped for audiences with similar concerns. They show us that the handing down of wisdom is a cultural inevitability and that certain forms of its expression are constants. In this article I too offer a comparative analysis. However, I step away from the Near East and away from any suggestion of a chain of transmission. I aim to offer fresh insights into Hesiod’s Works and Days by comparing it to the Eddic Hávamál, a poem far removed in terms of geography and date, but compellingly close in subject matter, construction, and transmission. Those who have studied Hávamál, just like Hesiodic scholars, have tied themselves in knots trying to disentangle the strands of authorship and the narrative threads. Hávamál is, like the Works and Days, a wisdom poem with a composite structure. It is made up not only of precepts and maxims but also elaborate mythological sections. It is associated with catalogic elements which may be original or later accretions, just like Hesiod’s Days, or the Catalogue of Women, or the Ornithomanteia. And most interestingly it is, like the Works and Days, a poem rooted in oral tradition, but poised at that crucial juncture: the advent of writing. Hesiod’s Works and Days is unique in archaic poetry. In particular, it is the balance between modes of reading which Hesiod maintains throughout the Works and Days that proves truly striking. Both wisdom texts and epic poems can be (and were) read in their entirety and excerpted. But the Works and Days is unique in inviting these two modes of reading in roughly equal measure. I have yet to find an archaic wisdom text from Greece or the Near East with such a strong narrative framework as the Works and Days—one with dynamic threads evolving over the course of the poem and with an addressee whose behaviour gradually changes or a focus which consistently and inexorably narrows.5 Wisdom texts may be read from beginning to end, but they definitely lend themselves more readily to division and cherry-picking. They fall apart far more easily than they hang together. At the other end of the scale is heroic epic. Homer was...

Krzysztof Dorohostajski’s activities dedicated to the Muses

Krzysztof Moniwid Dorohostajski is known as the author of the work Hippica to jest o koniach ksiegi ( Hippica or the books about horses ). In a manuscript preserved in the Ossolineum collections in Wroclaw (ms. II 185) one can find Dorohostajski’s poems in Latin, Greek and Polish, inscribed by him personally. The longest piece is Lament Rzeczypospolitej Matki po rozjachaniu z nierządnej elekcyjej anno 1587 (T he Motherland’s lamentation after leaving the mismanaged election in 1587 ). This commemorative work inspired by the election of the king of Poland during the third interregnum shows not only the author’s writing technique but also his political affinities. Another Dorohostajski’s poem is entitled Wiosny opisanie ( The description of spring ). It contains Horatian motifs such as a description of the world awaking after winter, mythological references and reflections on transience. These previously unpublished works have been included in the appendix to the article.

La moralización del «Leandro» de Boscán: orígenes, difusión e interpretación de una fábula

Boscan carries out a clear moral standards to the fable of Leandro and Hero by eliminating certain elements of its main source, the epilio of Museum, and add others that had not found in the Greek poem. Deleted, for example, the scene in which Leander has released the Hero’s belt and expands instead of the anointing of the body that the bride carried out in the body of the boyfriend, especially through other classical sources (the anointing of Aeneas by his mother Venus to become a God) and also biblical (the anointing of Christ at Bethany for a sinful woman). At the end she decided to save the lovers by placing them after their deaths by suicide in the Elysian fields when one of their sources, Bernardo Tasso, had located them not in those places but also in the forests of Myrtle. If Boscán has moralized the fable it is because he wanted to defend the conjugal above another type of love, as he had done in book II of his works (Barcelona, 1543) and to commemorate your wedding with Ana Girón de Rebolledo in September 1939.

I The Poems

The early Greek hexameter poems that survive intact are the two Homeric epics; the Hesiodic Theogony, Works and Days, and Shield; thirty-one Homeric Hymns; and about two hundred short inscriptions. Homer comprises 27,803 lines of verse; the other poems comprise another 5,000 lines or so. But we can safely infer that there was once much more. For one thing, we are lucky to have what we do: as a general principle, the texts we have inherited through mediaeval manuscripts represent only a sample of what was available in ancient libraries. For another, in ancient authors who do survive we find references to over a hundred other poems or poets that were available to them but are now lost. In several cases we have indications of considerable length.

A MUSA E HOMERO

It is a work about some ideas which appear both in poems of Homero and Hesíodo: the statueof the poet, the poem and its public, considering the features of the greek poem since its origins. Thoeseideas will have essential importance in posterior theories.

Μοσα Ἁλληνική. Griechische Gedichte hallescher Gelehrter

The article deals with the volume Fasciculus poematum Graecorum edited in 1715 for the first time by Hieronymus Freyer. Freyer's volume contains not only poems written by ancient poets, but also some by modern scholars, such as the polymath Johann Heinrich Schulze who taught as professor at the university of Halle. The poems of Schulze and Freyer are presented as examples of Posthumanist Greek Versification and of the phenomenon we would like to call ‘New Ancient Greek Literature’. At the end there is discussion of three modern Greek poems written by Robert, Friedländer and Peek, whose work is also linked with the university of Halle.

Homer's War Experiences Resonate With Today's Troops

Homer's War Experiences Resonate With Today's Troops

POESIA E MAGIA

This study intends to show, through esoteric analysis related to cabala and mandala, how the structure of visual Greek poems and Hebraic pentacles follow a creative process which is typical of the poetic text, even though they were created with religious intentions aiming at magic.

Homer'sIliadand theMeghanādbadha Kābyaof Michael Madhusūdan Datta

AbstractThe debt owed to Homer'sIliadby theMeghanādbadha Kābya(1861), Michael Madhusūdan Datta's Bengali epic and masterpiece, has long been recognized but has never been examined with any close or academically sensitive reference to the Greek poem. This study sets out to examine the use of the Homeric epic as a model for the Bengali poem, with particular regard to character correspondences, the figure of the simile and narrative structure. In addition to this close analysis, Datta's response to theIliadwill be set in the context of contemporary (and earlier) British receptions of the Homeric poem: the Bengali poet's reading of the Greek epic, far from being idiosyncratic (“colonial”), in fact bears the marks of a close engagement with contemporary British appreciation of the poem.

The Image of Love (La Imagen Del Amor)

It is an essay of the image of love through all times. It is supported by several texts: some Greek poems by Safo, The Banquet by Plato, The New Life by Dante Alighieri, and the Occidental Decay by Spengler, among others.

From Between Terror and Tourism : An Overland Trip Across North Africa

from Between Terror and Tourism: An Overland Trip Across North Africa Michael Mewshaw (bio) The unwritten rule—well sometimes it’s written prescriptively by reviewers—is that a travel writer must never sound letdown or disappointed. He has to remain resolutely upbeat. Negative impressions, any hint of whininess, has to be suppressed. Unless of course the Bad Trip is presented humorously. The British are best at this. Lose a leg to an alligator, stagger through the jungle bled white by leeches, starve to the brink of death in the desert, and all is well as long as you leave everybody laughing. Yet I’ll be honest. My first hours in Alexandria left me depressed. I wondered how I’d last there for a week. Maybe longer if the Libyans didn’t hurry and grant me a visa. At noon, men unrolled carpets on the sidewalk, knelt down and murmured their midday prayers. Careful not to step on their fingers, I returned to Midan Saad Zaghloul and traipsed past exhaust-spewing buses, taxis and trolleys. Café Trianon, a landmark of the Cosmopolitan Era when the city was an international melting pot, not an Egyptian backwater, had been one of C.P. Cavafy’s favorite haunts. A Greek expatriate and lifelong resident of Alex, Cavafy was a poet remarkable for the variety of his subject matter and his vernacular style. Although a deeply learned man well versed in Classical Greek, he wrote in the living language of the streets. His themes were loneliness, the passage of time, the quicksilver nature of love and the spiraling history of the city from its ancient gods to the boys he brought home to his bed. The Trianon had a faded Art Deco interior, with beige and brown walls, a stained wooden ceiling, four cobwebby chandeliers and a floor of scuffed grey linoleum. In the background Louis Armstrong sang “What a Wonderful World.” But I recalled the yearning words of Cavafy, desperate “to be gone / to some other land, some other sea / to a city lovelier far than this . . .” I didn’t care to dwell on the poem’s conclusion. “Just as you’ve ruined your life in this / One plot of ground you’ve ruined its worth / Everywhere now—over the whole earth?” Fortunately, the waitress soon brought my food and the soundtrack switched to Jim Morrison’s “Light My Fire.” The coffee was strong, the [End Page 38] yoghurt and honey delicious, the chicken sandwich fortifying. My blood sugar and spirits soared. When the bill arrived with each price higher by an Egyptian pound or two than listed on the menu, I didn’t protest. I was grateful to be feeling better. I paid at the cash register where one fellow dug my change out of the drawer and a second handed it to me. In Egypt where there were never enough jobs to go around, everybody got to play a role. Cavafy’s apartment was around the corner from a Greek church and a hospital, and the building used to house a brothel on the ground floor. Cavafy liked to joke that he lived in the perfect location, one that provided for all his physical and spiritual and emotional needs. Now a museum, his flat is spacious and bright, with two rooms furnished as Cavafy left them. The rest of the rooms are filled with random pieces of memorabilia, photos and portraits of the author, two death masks and Xeroxes of his manuscripts and copies of his books in glass display cases. On a non-stop tape, a husky female voice recited Cavafy’s poems in Greek. All that seemed missing was . . . everything. Though I always visit them, writer’s houses strike me as melancholy places. They’re like locust shells. The fragile shape endures, but the guts are gone, along with any sense of the singing, of the cyclical sleep and frenzied flight, the long underground burial followed by a short burst of brilliant adventure. Still, Cavafy’s apartment had none of the bogusness of Karen Blixen’s house in Nairobi, which is decorated with stage dressings and posters from the film version of Out of Africa. Nor was it thronged with...

Illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitriten (Catul. 64.11): The Dynamic Intertextual Connotations of a Metonymy

AbstractThis paper examines the role and importance of Amphitrite in Catullus c. 64, the epyllion on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Catullus intends to conjure up Amphitrite's rich mythological background for the needs of his poem. Amphitrite's story contains thematic elements that recur in both narratives of c. 64, namely the main story of Peleus and Thetis, and the embedded story of Theseus and Ariadne. At the same time Amphitrite's meaningful presence in the prologue of c. 64 is a pointer to Bacchylides' Dithyramb 17, which treats Theseus' outbound journey to Crete and the test of his divine paternity, imposed by Minos. The several points of contact between B. Dith. 17 and Catul. c. 64 show that this Greek poem is an important subtext for c. 64, which has gone unnoticed so far.

Sinon in Roman Drama

This article investigates the probable sources of the version of the Sinon myth found in Plautus� Bacchides 938, where Sinon hides in busto Achilli. The Vatican Epitome of Pseudo-Apollodorus knows this version of the story, but Plautus seems to have followed a different source. He borrowed the motif not from a Greek play or poem, but from Roman tragedy, probably the Equos Troianus of Naevius, who in turn got it from a post-classical Greek drama.

Intellectual property rights: a critical history

With intellectual property widely acknowledged today as a key component of economic development, those accused of stealing knowledge and information are also charged with undermining industrial innovation, artistic creativity, and the availability of information itself. How valid are these claims? Has the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPs) Agreement ushered in a new, better era? Christopher May and Susan Sell trace the history of social conflict and political machinations surrounding the making of property out of knowledge. Ranging from ancient commerce in Greek poems to present-day controversies about on-line piracy and the availability of AIDS drugs in the poorest countries, May and Sell present intellectual property law as a continuing process in which particular conceptions of rights and duties are institutionalized; each settlement prompts new disputes, policy shifts, and new disputes again. They also examine the post-TRIPs era in the context of this process. Their account of two thousand years of technological advances, legal innovation, and philosophical arguments about the character of knowledge production suggests that the future of intellectual property law will be as contested as its past.

Troy between Greece and Rome: local tradition and imperial power

Troy linked Greece and Rome. It was once the subject of the greatest of Greek poems and the mother city of the Romans. It gave the Romans a place in the mythical past of the Greeks, it gave Greeks a way of approaching Rome, and it gave the emperor Augustus, descendant of Aeneas, a suitably elevated ancestry. In this book Andrew Erskine examines the role and meaning of Troy in the changing relationship between Greeks and Romans, as Rome is transformed from a minor Italian city into a Mediterranean superpower. In contrast to earlier studies the emphasis is on the Greek rather than the Roman perspective. The book seeks to understand the significance of Rome's Trojan origins for the Greeks by considering the place of Troy and Trojans in Greek culture. It moves beyond the more familiar spheres of art and literature to explore the countless, overlapping, local traditions, the stories that cities told about themselves, a world often neglected by scholars.