Greek Poetry Research Articles

Greek Poetry in a Multicultural Society: Sicily and Salento in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

Abstract In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, southern Italy experienced a period of relative political stability and economic prosperity under the Normans as well as the Hohenstaufen dynasty that succeeded them. These cultural conditions fostered a cultural resurgence, which included the composition of Greek poetry. Poets in Sicily wrote from within a multicultural context, including the presence of Arabic- and Latin-speaking communities. Many of their poems illustrate the generative intersections between the Byzantine-Constantinopolitan, Latin, and Arabic traditions. Later in Salento, poetry was written in a rather closed Greek-speaking, Orthodox society. Comparing Greek poetry from Sicily and Salento shows some differences between composition in the two regions. Whereas Sicilian poetry includes especially creative narrative poems, composed for the rich and sophisticated courts of the island, the Salentine poetry bears the stamp of the schoolroom. In fact, most poems from both Sicily and Salento survive in manuscripts that can be traced to a pedagogical environment. While the circulation of these poems was limited to their surrounding regions, their literary sophistication betrays remarkable creativity and the multicultural conditions of composition, further evidence of the vitality of Greek literary culture far from the heartland of the Byzantine Empire.

Objects and Memory in Sappho and Alcaeus

The present paper discusses the (im)permanence of objects and memory in Sappho and Alcaeus in the context of archaic Greek poetry and of their reception in antiquity. After a methodological introduction, the paper analyzes several texts by Alcaeus and Sappho, with special attention to the dynamics of proper names, family memories, and female kleos. The main texts analyzed are: Alcaeus fr. 140 Voigt; the unnoticed allusion to this fragment in Virgil, Aeneid 7.170–86; and Sappho fr. 98 Voigt.

Increase of Complexity from Classical Greek to Latin Poetry

In this paper a method is developed to analyze the increase of complexity from classical Greek poetry to classical Latin poetry by mapping large samples of poems onto a symbolic time series. This mapping setup intends to characterize the regular succession of rhythms, that is, the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in a verse. Using techniques from information theory; more precisely, the mutual information function, it is shown how the rhythmical patterns in Greek poetry evolve to more complex behavior in Latin poetry. Some interesting results are reported.

Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry by Thomas J. Nelson (review)

Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry by Thomas J. Nelson (review)

“Heard Melodies are sweet, but those unheard are Keatsean”: Linguistic Blind Spots in Ode on a Grecian Urn

John Keats’s famous Ode, although well-received by the critical fraternity at large, continues to baffle many, as it anxiously unites the ekphrastic with the epigrammatic, the unheard with the overheard, and most controversially, beauty with truth, towards its end. The blind spot, created through an inapparent harmony is, I argue, the result of a misreading of Keatsean ideology in general. Ode on a Grecian Urn is the product of an intellectual and ideological entanglement with the philosophers of the German Enlightenment, especially Friedrich Schlegel, whose On the Study of Greek Poetry (originally published in 1797) remains the most prominent influence of Germanic Hellenization on Keats. Furthermore, the Ode must not be read as an allusive perpetuation of aforementioned influences, but a conscious departure from it, vis-à-vis allusion and the false consciousness of reality birthed within the linguistic perfection of epigrammatic utterances in the poem. This is complicated by the manifold references to psycho-physiological exhaustion across the poem whose origins, I emphasize, are to be comprehended linguistically, for Keats carefully resists third-order ideology through punctuated lines and their subsequent parentheses, where Keatsean counter-argument exists in-between ideologically approved, rhetorical exuberance and pauses that should ideally symbolize an inside-out reading, or reading the text backwards. Particular emphasis is laid on the second and fifth stanzas of the Ode, and the connotative implications of words like “goal”, “cloyed” and “wilt”. Through close-reading and textual analysis, I further argue how Keatsean resistance often exposes the written lie without uttering the textual truth. By way of a conclusion, I shall present the different adaptations of an apparent dialectic harmony between “beauty” and “truth” amongst the Victorians, early and late, but also how the transcendental illusion of dialectic harmony, in essence, is the mutual contradiction of an antinomian sublime, fabricated to indulge in the false consciousness of Germanic Hellenization while re-textualizing itself palimpsestically in an analytic reading. Keywords: Greek Poetry; Keats; Grecian Urn; Germanic Hellenization; Ideology

On some ancient Greek and Latin medical recipes in verse. Their position in the world. Part A

In Part A of our article, we examine medical recipes in verse within Greek literature, spanning from the Hellenistic period to the Roman Imperial era. We also briefly touch upon analogous recipes in Classical and Late Latin, as these two literary forms were intertwined for centuries. A comprehensive analysis of Latin literature in this domain remains a necessity. We explore the motivations behind these didactic poems and the metrical patterns employed in their composition. The article presents fragments of these recipes, all translated into English and several retained in their original language as well, arranged chronologically alongside succinct biographical details of their authors. These include Homer, considered their distant forebear, followed by Ovid, Aglaias of Byzantium, Andromachus the Elder, Philo of Tarsus, Damocrates, Nicander, Rufus of Ephesus, Eudemus of Pergamum, Galen, Serenus Sammonicus, The Carmen graecum de herbis, and Marcellus Empiricus. In Part B, we will continue to explore similar recipes from the Middle and Late Byzantine periods. This section will also feature examples from Medieval Latin and Islamic medical literature, illustrating the intercultural context in which these Greek verses stood. A General Discussion and Conclusions will be provided at the end of Part B.

The ethics of war leadership as seen through ancient Greek poetry

The ethics of war leadership as seen through ancient Greek poetry

The poetics of mourning or loss: a study in Angeliki Sidira’s poetry

ABSTRACT This study aims to present lament in contemporary Greek poetry as it emerges through Angeliki Sidira’s poems. The poetics of mourning allows poets to highlight a multitude of other themes around death (existential anguish, illness and therapy, social anguish and protest). Angeliki Sidira is the main contemporary Greek representative of the subgenre, connecting lamentation and rage through a feminine perspective and domestic poetry. Her poetry opposes the traditional image of a woman in poetry and replaces her at home as a mother, wife and daughter. Sidira’s poetry expands the way in which the dynamics of the feminine can be understood, through the pain of loss and its place in the home; it offers new ways of reading the relationship between emotional life and the broader social and political contexts that have shaped gender perceptions. Poetics of mourning or loss abandon the elegiac praise of the dead highlighting memory and pain. The autobiography of a female writer is an act of liberation, as it reveals political aspects through personal experience and social gender roles.

Looking Back: Ancient Greek Poetry in the Age of AIDS

Looking Back: Ancient Greek Poetry in the Age of AIDS

Roger Ascham’s Latin–Greek Code-Switching: A Philosophical Phenomenon

The Englishman Roger Ascham (c.1515–68) was an expert Latinist and Hellenist, and an inveterate code-switcher. This article will assess Ascham’s careful incorporation of Greek into his writing, be it single words, phrases or quotations. It will consider his extensive Latin correspondence and theological treatises that were inflected with Greek; his Latin and Greek poetry; and also one of his most famous tracts composed in the vernacular. I will explore how his use of Greek heightened a sense of sociability at both micro- and macro-levels through the establishment of a network of ‘belonging’. Ascham’s conspicuous cultivation of royalty and nobles also implicated his Greek code-switches in the business of State governance. Yet many of Ascham’s Greek references were religiously freighted through his frequent engagement with the Greek New Testament; this was especially true of his two theological Latin tracts, each of which broached sensitive doctrinal topics and used Greek as a guarantor of religious veracity. In addition to probing the meanings of discrete parcels of Greek, this article will also broach the significant role Greek might play in terms of linguistic enhancement, both for Latin and also the vernacular. Taking this further, I will additionally suggest that Greek could be instrumental in effecting a broader programme of moral formation. Hence a fundamental premise and arrival-point of this paper is that code-switching was more than just a practice; it was a mentality.

The Music of Tragedy: Implications of the Reconstructed Orestes Papyrus

Abstract: Evidence for the musical and dance elements of Attic tragedy is extremely scarce. However, a papyrus fragment dating from around 300 bc contains a section of a chorus from Euripides’ Orestes with musical notation (possibly the dramatist’s own); it may be analysed, both in its lacunose state and in a proposed reconstruction for performance, to throw light on these very elements. The papyrus markings and associated commentary offer clues to the melodisation of Greek poetry, performance effects in choral song, the nature of dochmiac rhythm, and the kind of dance movements that might have accompanied vigorous passages in tragic lyric.

ПОЕТИЧНИЙ ПРОСТІР ТВОРУ ДІОГЕНА ЛАЕРЦІЯ «ЖИТТЯ ТА ДУМКИ СЛАВНОЗВІСНИХ ФІЛОСОФІВ»

The article examines the poetic component in the discourse of the work of Diogenes Laertius "Life and Thoughts of Famous Philosophers" in the aspect of ancient biography and doxography and in correlation with the cultural and historical realities of ancient Greek panegyrics and invective. The stylistic features of epigrammatic poetry about philosophers are characterized: apotheosis, heroization and glorification or, on the contrary, satire, invective and parody. Panegyristics is embodied in the form of deification, ascension to heaven to the Olympians, invective - in ridiculing human flaws and the shortcomings of philosophers and discrediting their teachings. In the studied epigrams, philosophers, along with prominent historical figures and winners of all-Greek competitions, became objects of public worship for the first time. The poetic works of the philosophers themselves (Solon, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles, Epicharmus, Plato, Arkesilaus, Cratetus, Bion) are also analyzed. , quotations by various philosophers of ancient Greek poetry, their paraphrases and parodies of famous poets. The poetic discourse is described, presented both in the diachrony of the authors involved by Diogenes, starting from Homer and ending with late Hellenistic epigrammatists (more than 250 poems by 32 well-known and little-known authors), and in their genre diversity (epic, lyric, elegy, tragedy, comedy, canticles, oracles , epigram, epitaph, dialogue-diatribe). The metric schemes of poetic works, both quoted by Diogenes and the author's original poetry (dactylic hexameter, pentameter, logaeds, in particular, Archebulian measure, meliamb, prokeleusmatic, holiamb) are indicated; the source base of poetic works used by Diogenes is indicated, from ancient and Byzantine collections (Palatine Anthology, Planudеa Anthology) to scholarly editions of ancient Greek poetry. The rhetorical devices of the panegyric and much more often mocking epigrams of Diogenes himself, of which there are 52 works, are considered.

HORACE, ODES 3.13: INTERTEXTS AND INTERPRETATION

AbstractThis article argues that the literary contexts of Horace's Odes 3.13, especially archaic Greek poetry, have been relatively neglected by scholars, who have focussed on identifying the location of the fons Bandusiae and on understanding the significance of the sustained description of the kid sacrifice. This study presents a more holistic interpretation of the ode by exploring Horace's interactions with previously unnoticed (Alcaeus, frr. 45 and 347) and underappreciated (Hes. Op. 582–96) archaic Greek poetic intertexts, which also offer a fresh perspective on earlier debates. Horace's use of Alcaeus’ fr. 45, a key intertext, firmly places the fons Bandusiae within the literary landscape of Horace's Sabine estate, and offers a structural and argumentative model for Odes 3.13; further, Alcaean and Hesiodic allusions also suggest that the kid is sacrificed as a surrogate for Horace for keeping him safe. These conclusions are used to offer a new interpretation of the ode on metapoetic, political and philosophical levels, and to explore how these different aspects of the ode interact with Horace's other odes.

ODYSSEAN MEDIATIONS IN EUDOCIA'SMARTYRDOM OF ST CYPRIAN

ὑμετέρης γενεῆς τε καὶ αἵματος εὔχομαι εἶναι(Eudocia'sLaudes Antiochiae; cf.Il. 6.211, 20.241).1The article argues that in Eudocia's fifth-centuryMartyrdom of St Cyprian– the only surviving Greek verse paraphrase of a hagiography – certain Odyssean lexical items and intertexts may be thematically grouped. A new category, the ‘diatext’, is introduced to describe this function of theOdysseyas an intermediate thematic model used to transpose the Cyprianic hagiographies (the ‘hypotext’) into Eudocia's verse paraphrase (the ‘hypertext’). A particularly important and complex example is the way in which Eudocia's metapoetic/narratorial and biographical alter ego, the ex-pagan Christian convert Cyprian, is modelled after Odysseus (especially in book 2).

A journey through communication research on transportation: the future of narrative transportation on emerging forms of media

ABSTRACT This essay discusses how storytelling conventions and entertainment delivery methods have evolved with the advent of new technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality. This paper aims to explore the psychological mechanisms involved in narrative processing for users of augmented and virtual reality spaces, focusing on transportation as an important construct. A history of presence through art performances and Greek poetry is discussed. Connections are established between Greek tragedies and audience scholarship, highlighting Nietzsche’s framework for understanding the impact of Greek tragedies on audiences and the concept of the fourth wall. The fourth wall is used to assess the similarities and differences between traditional and emerging forms of media. Finally, future research on transportation with narratives on virtual and augmented reality is proposed. These recommendations include: adapting the transportation measure to fit the affordances of emerging tech better, clarifying the relationship between transportation and flow in the context of narrative exposure within emerging tech, and conceptualizing transportation at a macro level to include transmedia experiences.

Contemporary Greek prose: An anthology; Contemporary Greek poetry: An anthology

The review discusses two anthologies of contemporary Greek literature (prose and poetry), comprising works of the authors distinguished with the country’s State Prize for Literature in the years from 2010 to 2018. The two books succeed in capturing the multidimensional character of Greece’s modern life and literature in small forms (short stories, novellas and poems). The first anthology features short stories and novellas by fourteen authors. The second contains works by twenty poets, each represented by five poems. While some authors were rewarded for their literary debut, others received the prize for lifetime achievements. Thanks to the anthologies, characterised by a diversity of subjects, artistic methods and poetic messages, the Russian audiences can join in the polylogue between classics and avant-gardists, realists and surrealists, and gurus and novices, as well as broaden their knowledge of the latest developments in a literature rooted in ancient history that remains unique and inspired through the oeuvre of its masters.

A Century of Scholarly Neglect: Shakespeare and Greek Drama

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of Shakespeare scholars, including Israel Gollancz (1894), H.R.D. Anders (1904), J. Churton Collins (1904), and Gilbert Murray (1914) wrote convincingly of Shakespeare’s debt to classical Greek drama. However, in the century since, most scholars and editors have repeatedly held that Shakespeare was not familiar with Greek drama. In Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (1903), Robert Kilburn Root expressed the opinion on Shakespeare’s ‘lesse Greek’ that presaged this enduring dismissal: “It is at any rate certain that he nowhere alludes to any characters or episodes of Greek drama, that they extended no influence whatsoever on his conception of mythology.” (p. 6) This century-long consensus against Attic dramatic influence was reinforced by A.D. Nutall, who wrote, “that Shakespeare was cut off from Greek poetry and drama is probably a bleak truth that we should accept.” (Nutall, 2004, p.210) Scholars have preferred to maintain that Plutarch or Ovid were Shakespeare’s surrogate literary mediators for the playwright’s adaptations from Greek myth and theatre. Other scholars, however, have questioned these assumptions, including Laurie Maguire, who observed that “invoking Shakespeare’s imagined conversations in the Mermaid tavern is not a methodology likely to convince skeptics that Shakespeare knew Greek drama.” (p. 98) This near-universal rejection of Greek drama as Shakespeare sources have profound philological implications. Indeed, this essay argues that the proscription against recognizing the Attic canon as an influence in Shakespeare has been driven by the belief that Will Shakspere of Stratford had, at most, an education that was Latin-based. The examples show that the real author had to have been exposed to both the Greek language and the Greek dramatists. Evidence for alternative candidates, including Edward de Vere, shows that many were schooled in Greek and that some even collected and supported translations of Greek works. It is my contention that Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination was actually fired by the Greeks, and Shakespeare research has clearly suffered from a century of denial.

Alliteration as a mechanism of cohesion: a new way of concatenation of adjacent lines in Latin poetry

This article aims to analyse the cohesive function of Latin alliteration in cases in which it serves as an element for linking together the hemistichs in the same line or hemistichs in adjacent lines. At an extra-versal level, three forms of alliterative cohesion are distinguished: 1) by enjambment (the words sounding the same at the start that belong to the same syntactical unit flow over the limits of the line); 2) by vertical correspondence (the words sounding the same at the start are placed in successive lines where they occupy the same metric position); 3) by concatenation at the end of each line and the beginning of the subsequent line (… X/X… X/X…, etc., or … X/X… Y/Y…, etc.). The alliterative cohesion by concatenation at the end of each line and the beginning of the subsequent line has been studied due to its systematic use in ancient Irish poetry, but not in Latin, where, as it is shown in this article, there is evidence of the phenomenon. The existence of this cohesive procedure in Latin is verified in poets from different literary periods: Lucretius, Vergilius, Silius Italicus, Prudentius and Claudius Claudianus. This type of studied concatenation is also found in Greek poetry (Homer, Hesiod, and Aeschylus). This leads us to surmise that it is a phenomenon inherent to the Indo-European tradition.

Translating Modern Greek poetry of the 2008 financial crisis

ABSTRACT Since Greece’s 2008 economic collapse, four poetry anthologies on the financial crisis have been published. Editors, translators, publishers, and writers involved in the production and sale of poetry of the financial crisis for an Anglophone market benefit from the construction of this new literary category – be it financially or in terms of acquiring or consolidating cultural capital. However, these anthologies function within a language landscape in which Greek and English occupy different positions of power. This article argues that although the anthologies’ editors are largely conscious of the uneven power dynamic between Greek and English, some of the translation strategies adopted in the anthologies do not serve to create an equal playing field between the two languages. The use of a poststructuralist approach is specifically critiqued, based on the assertion that it loses sight of the ethical complexity of translating from a marginalized language into a dominant tongue.

Xenitia, the Nation, and Intralingual Translation

AbstractModern Greek poets often imagine interlingual translation as intralingual—that is, as rewording within the same language when two distinct languages are involved. George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos provide two cases, Seferis in translating Ancient Greek poetry and Ritsos in translating Romanian, Czech, and Slovakian poetry. For these poet-translators on opposite sides of the political spectrum, the claim of intralingualism responds to different experiences of exile: Seferis as a refugee from Asia Minor and then as an overseas diplomat, Ritsos as a political prisoner and then as a Communist Party emissary. Intralingual translation assuages xenitia, the pain of not being able to go home, but it also masks interlingual differences that serve other cultural and political functions, whether imagining a national language that continues a valuable cultural past or serving as a transnational vehicle for unifying minor cultures.