Greek Poetry Research Articles

From poem and song to cultural diplomacy: challenges and opportunities for place branding and tourism promotion

The concept of place branding in this paper is examined in respect to place identity. More specifically, it is argued that poems and songs are cultural elements of place identity that can help in the place branding process. Poetry and especially that set to music offers a powerful cross-platform that enables communication among people, creating common understanding and bridging linguistic and cultural differences. Greece has reached a juncture where the sun and sea model, on which it had based its tourist campaign in the past, is not sufficient anymore. Thus, it must face the options of altering its current product. Towards this direction, the present paper focuses on poetry, lyrics, and song as viable alternatives that can help reformulate the country’s projected identity and image. Representative examples of Greek poetry in general and of Greek poetry set to music in particular are analyzed and examined in this vein.

El diálogo intertextual entre Las Argonáuticas de Apolonio de Rodas y las epopeyas homéricas

Apolonio de Rodas fue uno de los principales representantes de la poesía griega del período helenístico. En su única obra conservada, Las Argonáuticas, este autor estableció un significativo diálogo con la tradición literaria anterior, especialmente con las epopeyas homéricas. Debido a la desatención que durante mucho tiempo existió con respecto a la literatura helenística, así como a la ausencia de un estudio integrador acerca de la obra de Apolonio en relación con sus antecedentes épicos, este trabajo se propuso realizar un análisis de la intertextualidad (particularmente la hipertextualidad) entre Las Argonáuticas y los poemas de Homero. Los aspectos examinados permitieron concluir que el poeta helenístico conjugó en su epopeya elementos de tradición y de innovación, y estableció un creativo diálogo intertextual con el antiguo aedo, pues a la vez que asimiló magistralmente los principales recursos y motivos de la épica tradicional, incorporó características estéticas propias de su tiempo.

Homer meets nano: Shrinking 2700 year old Greek poetry with state-of-the-art nanotechnology

• Homer's Odyssey was written with e-beam lithography on a piece of silicon • All 303 pages of the poem fit in an area of less than 138μmX184μm or 0.025mm 2 • Diacritic marks of the Greek language were printed with resolution of a few nanometers • We predict that 130 million books existing today could be printed on only 186 wafers using this approach • Implications on preservation of human cultural heritage are discussed

Tradução dos escólios da parábase de Acarnenses


 
 
 O presente trabalho consiste numa compilação e tradução dos escólios dos versos 626-718 de Acarnenses, comédia de Aristófanes. Os referidos versos compõem a parábase daquela comédia. A compilação do texto grego dos escólios foi produzida a partir das edições de I. Bekker (1829), G. Dindorf (1838), F. Dübner (1855), M. A. Martin (1882), W. G. Rutherford (1896) e N. G. Wilson (1975). A tradução dos escólios, inédita em língua portuguesa, foi feita diretamente do texto grego aqui compilado. Precedendo os textos e as traduções dos escólios, também foram colocados os versos gregos de Acarnenses, conforme a edição S. D. Olson (2002), e suas respectivas traduções, igualmente de nossa autoria.
 
 

Recognizing Differences: The Politics of Meaning in Hesiod’s Theogony

The claim Greek poetry deserves attention in the history of political thought no longer needs justification. That the same poetry warrants interpretive scrutiny similar to more traditional philosophical texts, however, requires more evidence than currently exists. I attempt to justify such scrutiny in at least one case—Hesiod’s Theogony—based on an important point not otherwise recognized: the argument of Hesiod’s epic has a political dimension relevant not only to subsequent developments in classical political thought, but also to the practices, language, and ideas about politics still manifest in contemporary political discourse. Attending to Hesiod’s epic with greater interpretive scrutiny thus yields a pregnant possibility: not only was Greek poetry grounded in the formative political experiences from which it arose, but it in turn formulated those experiences in ways that altered the subsequent trajectories of the associated practices, thoughts, and ideas, including within classical political theory itself.

Suicidal tendencies prediction in Greek poetry

Natural language processing (NLP) has been successfully used to predict a writer’s tendency of committing suicide, using various text types: suicide notes, micro-blog posts, lyrics and poems. This paper is an extended version of earlier work. We extend our previous work on text mining in Greek Poetry by employing more sophisticated approaches. More specifically we have applied (i) Deep Neural Networks (DNN), (ii) additional morphosyntactic and semantic features based on writers' emotions and Big Five personality traits and (iii) feature selection, for suicide prediction in Greek poetry. We extend previous research to Greek, i.e. a language that has not been tackled before in this setting, using both language-dependent (but easily portable across languages) and language-independent linguistic features in order to represent the poems of 13 Greek poets of the twentieth century. Our results differ significantly from previous literature. In general, our proposed DNN model offers promising results for suicide prediction, despite the fact that this task poses multiple difficulties, especially for a language with limited related research support.

(Micro-)Performing Ancient Weaving in the PENELOPE project

What does an ancient weaver know, when she knows how to weave? How is this complex knowledge graspable and representable? The article presents the research practice of the PENELOPE project as it sets to explore the distinctive logic and order of ancient weaving − an inferential dimension embedded in the material and thus mainly implicit, which is best grasped through performing and which we address here as microperformative. In archaic Greek literary and philosophical sources, weaving is cast as a technology capable of imposing order, creating complex structure, and providing a model for cosmic generation. This pre-scientific ‘knowledge through order’ that weaving affords is in turn embedded in a performance culture where notions like kosmos and poikilia refer to woven fabrics, performances of song-and-dance, patterns in nature and in craft. The production of textile patterns incorporates the organization of elements into wholes in a way that is logical and algorithmic yet still unsuited to be laid down in writing. The mode of knowing specific to weaving is a liminal notion at the intersection of technology, knowledge, and embodied practice. Labelling this mode of ordering as microperformativity, one implication is that reflective decision-making, non-propositional knowledge and material agency all have a bearing on how in weaving threads perform together with the algorithm employed by the weaver, who needs to make decisions on repeats and recursion to generate a coherent whole. Using self-made technology, we then attempt to convey through performances the elements included as separate acts in weaving on the warp-weighted loom of antiquity. The order and patterns of weaving circulate through a multimodal and multimedial performance where the rhythms of ancient Greek poetry, manipulated as musical pattern by the live coder, govern the choreography of a set of synchronized arachnoid robots plaiting a braid by dancing around a maypole.

القدر بین أنتیجونی لسوفوکلیس والمدینة المیتة لجابریلى دانونسیو

يهدف هذا البحث إلى توضيح ملامح التأثير والتأثر بين المسرحيتين اليونانية والإيطالية من خلال عرض أوجه التشابه والاختلاف للقدر فى مسرحيتى أنتيجوني لسوفوکليس والمدينة الميتة(1) لجابريلى دانونسيو، من حيث علاقته بالحب، وهل للإنسان القدرة على اختيار قدره أم هو أمر حتمي يجب على الإنسان الاستسلام له دون محاولة تغيره أو حتى الحد من وطأته؟، وهل هناک رثاء للقدر؟ فقد بدأت أحداث مسرحية المدينة الميتة بأسلوب التناص أى بترجمة إيطالية نصية للأبيات اليونانية (781-814) التي تتحدث عن (الحب الذي لا يقهر) “Ἔρως ἀνίκατe μάχαν” /“Eros nella pugna invitto” ، التي تلقيها الجوقة عند سوفوکليس، بينما تقرأها بيانکا ماريا على أنا عند دانونسيو، مما يدل على تأثر دانونسيو بالفکر اليونانى عامة وبفکرة الحب الذي لا يقهره القدر - من وجهة نظرهم- بصفة خاصة. وسوف أوضح ملامح التأثير والتأثر بين المسرحيتين من خلال صورة القدر معتمدة على شواهد من الأبيات المسرحية ومستعينة بالمنهجين التحليلى والمقارن. حيث أوضحت الدراسة المقارنة بين المسرحيتين الآتى: کان الحب الأخوي بالمسرحيتن الدافع لنفس القدر وهو الموت. القدر قوة لا يستطيع الإنسان التغلب عليها أو إيقاف تنفيذها، ولکن يستطيع الحد من وطأتها بتقبلها والتعامل معها بحکمة. أما فکرة رثاء القدر التي تعد فى الحقيقة ضعف بشرى تميل إليه کل شخصية عند حدوث قدر قاسي کما فى شخصية أنتيجوني سوفوکليس، وأحيانا يتحول إلى ندم أى ندم الإنسان على أعماله کما فى شخصيتى کريون عند سوفوکليس وليوناردو عند دانونسيو. وقد تناول الکتاب هذه الأفکار بالمسرحيتين، ولکن اختلفت المعالجة الدرامية بين الکاتبين نتيجة لاختلاف عصرهما. Abstract: This research aims at clarifying features the affect and influence in the Greek and Italian plays, By presenting the similarities and differences of fate in the the Sophocles play and the dead city of D’Annunzio, Through relation to love, Has the human ability to choose his fate or is inevitable. One must surrender to it without trying to change it or even limit it. Is there a lamentation for the inevitable fate? The events of the play Dead City began with an Italian text translation of Greek verses (781-814), About invincible love/ Ἔρως ἀνίκατe μάχαν” / Eros nella pugna invitto, Which was received by the chorus at Sophocles while read by Bianca Maria to Anna in D’Annunzio, Which shows that D’Annunzio was influenced by Greek thought in general, And by the idea of invincible love​​ - in their view - in particular. I will explain the affect and influence between the two plays, through the fate based on evidence of theatrical verses, And using analytical and comparative methods. The comparison between the two plays showed: The brotherly love in the both plays was the same motive as death, The fate is power the human not able to overcome them or stop them, But can limit it by acceptance and wisdom in dealing with them. Lamenting fate is in fact the human weakness, same as in the character of Antigone Sophocles and the human regret for his work, As in the personalities of Creon Sophocles and Leonardo D’Annunzio. The three elements were found in the two plays, But the dramatic treatment between the two writers differed as a result of their different age.

WITHDRAWN: Homer meets Nano: Shrinking 2700 year old Greek poetry with state-of-theart nanotechnology

WITHDRAWN: Homer meets Nano: Shrinking 2700 year old Greek poetry with state-of-theart nanotechnology

Paschalis Nikolaou, The Return of Pytheas: Scenes from British and Greek Poetry in Dialogue. Bristol: Shearsman Books2017. Pp. 159.

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Shoes, Slippers and Sandals: Feet and Footwear in Classical Antiquity ed. by Sadie Pickup and Sally Waite

Reviewed by: Shoes, Slippers and Sandals: Feet and Footwear in Classical Antiquity ed. by Sadie Pickup and Sally Waite Tyler Jo Smith Shoes, Slippers and Sandals: Feet and Footwear in Classical Antiquity. Edited by Sadie pickup and Sally Waite. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. Pp. xvii + 337. Hardback, $155.00. ISBN: 978-147288763. Like other items of clothing and adornment, shoes are bearers of meaning. Cultural anthropologists, social historians and fashion designers have studied footwear across the globe, from high heels to trainers, binding to fetishism. Classical scholars have shied away from calceology, tending to view shoes as extensions of dress history or as stylistic components for dating or identifying sculptures (i.e. Hermes of Praxiteles from Olympia). Such limitations have left no shortage of unanswered questions about ancient foot coverings. This illustrated volume derives from a conference held at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Great Northern Museum in summer 2015. Though neither a survey nor a complete history, it will nevertheless be consulted as a point of reference for many years to come. The contributors from the UK, Europe and elsewhere approach feet and footwear from archaeological, historical and literary perspectives. Following a general introduction that reviews past scholarship, fifteen core chapters are divided into four parts and cover a broad swathe of Greek and Roman evidence for shoes, sandals, slippers and boots. Readers learn where and how shoes were represented in antiquity through a series of object-based and thematic case studies. Ancient terminology is covered in the editor’s introduction and again by Caspers (“Pantāi Krēpides: Shoe-talk from Homer to Herodas”) whose focus is Greek poetry. Ancient footwear, being made of perishable materials (like textiles), rarely survives in the archaeological record. Thus, Greene’s chapter, “Metal Fittings on the Vindolanda Shoes: Footwear and Evidence for Podiatric Knowledge in the Roman World,” which looks at evidence from the site in northern England (famous for its handwritten tablets) where over 4000 shoes were discovered, is especially welcome. Here we encounter the look and material of a unique assemblage and the practice of Roman podiatry: metal bars were fitted onto shoes to correct gait or lend additional support. Throughout the volume it becomes evident that shoes are missing from our notice in other ways. In sculpture, shoes or sandals may have once been painted on, are concealed beneath long and heavy drapery or have broken off. Despite these limitations, the visual arts remain our most informative ancient source. As one author puts it: “Like dress, posture and [End Page 506] attributes, footwear is part of the visual and metaphorical language of ancient art” (Christof, “The Footwear of the Antonine Monument from Ephesus,” 296). Predictably, several chapters rely on Greek vases-painting as documentary evidence of ancient footwear. Waite and Gooch’s chapter, “Sandals on the Wall: The Symbolism of Footwear on Athenian Painted Pottery,” collects examples of hanging sandals on Athenian vases, breaking down the evidence by object, iconography, artist, provenance and shape. Despite the Etruscan context for just over 50% of their data-set, the authors believe that “the images reflect an Athenian mind-set” (41). Two other chapters, Toillon’s, “At the Symposium: Why Take off our Boots? The Significance of Boots placed underneath the Kline on Attic Red- figure Vase Painting (c.500–440 BC),” and Young’s “Donning Footwear: The Invention and Diffusion of an Iconographic Motif in Archaic Athens,” reveal further instances where object agency and human action reflect social and political contexts on vases. Smith’s essay (“The Left Foot Aryballos wearing a Network Sandal”) bridges archaeology and visual art by exploring an archaic vase shape of uncertain fabric found at many Greek sites and perhaps related to funerary cult. By comparison, Phillippo’s chapter, “Stepping onto the Stage: Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Tragic Footwear,” employs vases alongside terracotta reliefs to analyze the import of barefoot Orestes approaching his father’s tomb in the context of ancient performance. “Monosandalism” is a theme treated by several authors. The most famous attestation in Greek myth is the hero Jason who enters a marketplace unrecognized and wearing one sandal (monokrepis), a story alluded to in art...

Stationary Epithalamia in Hexameters? The Evidence from Sappho, Theocritus, and Catullus

Three ancient poets—Sappho, Theocritus, and Catullus—provide neglected evidence for Greek wedding poems composed in hexameters. Theocritus, Idyll 18 and Catullus in Carmen 62 are usually thought to reflect Greek wedding songs originally sung in lyric or choral meters; but why did Sappho, herself a lyric poet extraordinaire, compose some of her wedding poems in hexameters, a meter that she hardly uses elsewhere? This paper suggests that the Greeks traditionally performed at least one kind of wedding poem in dactylic hexameters. This in turn leaves open the possibility that when Theocritus and Catullus use hexameters in their wedding poems, they, too, are imitating the content and the form of this neglected genre. This is a circular argument of sorts, but one familiar to scholars seeking to make sense of the earliest fragments of ancient Greek poetry.

Unapprehended relations

AbstractThis article addresses P.B. Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Mercury’ and allusions to classical literature in ‘Ode to Liberty’. Congruities emerge between Shelley’s poetic practice, his conception of poetry’s social role, and his understanding of the relationship between antiquity and the present. When translating and reshaping ancient Greek poetry, he brings to the surface morally significant features of that poetry which only emerge in the dialogues that his writing creates. In doing so, he enacts literary history as a process that both reflects and enables expansions of the moral imagination.

The Immortality Theme in the Odyssey and the Telegony

This article examines the different ways in which the Odyssey and the Telegony represent the relationships between immortals and mortals—the immortality theme. They draw upon that common theme but inflect it in contrasting ways: whereas the Odyssey’s protagonist rejects immortality and embraces mortality, the protagonist of the Telegony does the opposite. In the end, though, both of these poems critique immortality. Analysis of these poems’ different inflections of the immortality theme provides insights into how themes could be used competitively in archaic Greek poetry as well as how the same theme operated similarly and differently in various traditions.

Epithets and Metaphors of War in Ancient Greek Poetry until the End of the Fifth Century

In this paper I scrutinize epithets and metaphors used for war in ancient Greek poetry up to the end of the fifth century. War may be spoken of directly and literally (πόλεμος) or in a religious and metonymical sense (Ἄρης, á¼˜Î½Ï Î¬Î»Î¹Î¿Ï‚). I focus on all these ways of rendering it, while being aware of the fact that the latter prevail in poetry. My objective is to create a catalogue of expressions pertaining to the term ‘war’ in order to map the range and possibilities of language in this respect. Nonetheless this undertaking should not be taken as an attempt at comprehensive analysis of the discourse of war.

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece ed. by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Reviewed by: Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece ed. by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips Joel Lidov Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips (eds.). Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 315. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-19-880582-3. The editors invite us to consider how we can appreciate the "literary" character of archaic Greek poetry. They open with a quote from Bowra that expresses his enthusiasm for the pleasure given by Sappho's artistry, emotional and imaginative power, and her exceptional character, and they suggest that, however out-of-date, it points our attention to the ways in which poetry fascinates, engages, challenges, and changes us when we experience it as audiences or readers. They urge such an appreciation as a complement to what they consider the now dominant "anthropological paradigm" (3; it includes the "New Historicism"), which focuses on the social function of performance and which they and other contributors associate especially with Bruno Gentili. Some contributors place themselves more in opposition to what Mark Payne defines as the paradigm's "characteristic hermeneutic position . . . the assumption that the discursive ambitions of Greek lyric poetry were so radically constrained by their original performance context that valid interpretation consists solely in relating them to that context" (257). The apologetics for different methods can seem excessive or unnecessary, but I found particularly valuable Anna Uhlig's extended critique (chapter 3). She starts from an analysis of the confusion of context and content in interpretations of Alcaeus's maritime poem as metaphors for the symposium, and then demonstrates the weaknesses of the scholarly justification and of the historicist argument in the allegorical mode central to Gentili's thesis. All eleven contributors respond to the editors' call for an investigation of the audience's encounter with lyric—the "event" of the title—with distinctive theses and emphases, and they select a variety of proof texts for illustration. Two overlapping procedures are recurrent. One looks at the internal dynamics of a poem: the relation among its parts rather than between the poem and its context, and the ways it draws the audience's attention to its status as a constructed object. The other rebuts a corollary of the performance paradigm, that a reperformance of a written text requires an interpretation different from the original. I will mention here the chapters I found most broadly useful. The first section of the book, "Occasionality," emphasizes the problem of context. Uhlig supplements her critique of previous theory with a "superficial" reading in which Alcaeus's attention to detail in imagined scenes creates a compelling "maritime aesthetics." The sea's mobility and the poems' lack of specific geographical position provide, by contrast and similarity, a means of expressing various experiences of terrestrial life. Gregory Hutchinson takes on the question of a poem's "setting," the internal placement often used as an index of its context. He demonstrates how writers in fact alter the setting within the poem as an expressive device, and illustrates this with insightful readings of Alcaeus and Horace. Somewhat oddly, he takes his readings as a prompt to propose that we [End Page 223] look for those "underlying features and forms" (132) that make literary analysis possible as if this were a new thing. The second section, "Conceptual Contexts," looks to implicit literary history. Henry Spelman's study, one rich in implications for the history of texts, takes on the core problem of reperformance. Starting with the poet's self-presentation in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, he demonstrates how it illustrates the way in which a lyric, even one which must have had an original presentation, presents itself as an instance in a tradition of performances, making the distinction between an original and later readings moot. Tom Phillips, in a dense reading, takes up the opening description of the terror of a past eclipse as if it were present in Paean 9, and the shift to a mythic narrative and prayer. He teases apart the multiple voices inherent in the poetic language that alert the audience to the paean's artistic expansion of the tradition of eclipse poems and to its own...

The Epigrams of Crinagoras of Mytilene: Introduction, Text, Commentary ed. by Maria Ypsilanti

Reviewed by: The Epigrams of Crinagoras of Mytilene: Introduction, Text, Commentary ed. by Maria Ypsilanti Kathryn Gutzwiller Maria Ypsilanti (ed.). The Epigrams of Crinagoras of Mytilene: Introduction, Text, Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 578. $130.00. ISBN 978-0-19-956582-5. More than a half century ago the field of Greek literary epigram was made accessible to a wider range of scholars and readers by two editions with basic commentaries: A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams (Cambridge 1965) and The Greek Anthology: The Garland of Philip and Some Contemporary Epigrams (Cambridge 1968). Scholarship made possible by these foundational collections has since advanced in two directions. One involves development of methods for reading epigrams as legitimate literary objects, particularly when treated in groups or in poetic contexts. The other involves publication of comprehensive commentaries on the epigrams of individual epigrammatists, which include textual issues and explanations of the finer points of poetry, as well as literary readings. The two approaches are complementary, and Ypsilanti's commentary on Crinagoras is an excellent example of blending traditional editorial subjects with literary interpretation. Crinagoras is a figure of note who should be better known to both Greek and Latin scholars. Inscriptions from Mytilene indicate that he belonged to a prominent family of Lesbos and that he made at least three trips to Rome on [End Page 233] official business between c. 48 and 25 bce. His literary output makes it likely he spent a significant amount of time in Italy, where he clearly received literary patronage from high-status Romans, including members of the imperial family. A fair number of his epigrams reflect these relationships, such as poems that accompany gifts (as later in Martial)—a silver pen, a toothpick, a bronze oil flask, and a garland of roses (3–6). Of particular interest are epigrams that concern a gift of Greek poetry: a box holding five books of Anacreon's poetry presented to Antonia (36 bce–37 ce) on a special occasion (7), and a copy of Callimachus' Hecale given to Marcellus, to encourage him to follow the example of the young Theseus (11), the latter epigram perhaps being Crinagoras' best known. The fifty-one epigrams that remain to us were preserved in Philip's Garland, intermingled with others of the Julio-Claudian era in a rough alphabetical order. Ypsilanti argues that Crinagoras' "preference for personal experiences and current events over the traditional topoi of the genre" led to a "'renovated' type of court-epigram" that breathed "new life" into the epigrammatic tradition (13). Although she does not say so, it is highly likely that Philip selected from a collection of epigrams made by Crinagoras himself, mirroring his own gifts of Anacreon and Callimachus. In her Introduction Ypsilanti presents the usual series of topics: life and work, language and style, meter, and manuscript tradition. Her presentation of the two main manuscripts from the Byzantine era is rather barebones, reasonably enough, however, since descriptions of these are available in other editions. She focuses rather on the lesser-known apographa of the Palatine Codex, manuscript copies of epigrams that were rediscovered at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Saumaise but first fully published only in Brunck's edition of 1772. The value of these apographa lies mainly in their marginal emendations, which have been but rarely acknowledged in modern editions. Ypsilanti's principal contribution to the topic is the attention she calls to Parisinus Coislinanus 352, which has escaped the notice of most other editors. She argues at length that this apographon, written c. 1633 and ascribed to Philaras, bridges the two branches of apographa, the French and the Dutch, and possibly derives directly from the famous lost copy made by Saumaise. Oddly, however, in her apparatus criticus she cites, in the traditional manner, the select apographa that were the basis for the first printed editions, when in my view it is better practice to cite the earliest apographon that contains a given reading. Quibbles with such a full and well-presented commentary are just that, and therefore I limit my examples. Three epigrams that are of doubtful authorship because of differing attributions...

SUNG POEMS AND POETIC SONGS: HELLENISTIC DEFINITIONS OF POETRY, MUSIC AND THE SPACES IN BETWEEN

Simply by formulating a question about the nature of ancient Greek poetry or music, any modern English speaker is already risking anachronism. In recent years especially, scholars have reminded one another that the words ‘music’ and ‘poetry’ denote concepts with no easy counterpart in Greek. μουσική in its broadest sense evokes not only innumerable kinds of structured movement and sound but also the political, psychological and cosmic order of which song, verse and dance are supposed to be perceptible manifestations. Likewise, ποίησις and the ποιητικὴ τέχνη can encompass all kinds of ‘making’, from the assembly of a table to the construction of a rhetorical argument. Of course, there were specifically artistic usages of these terms—according to Plato, ‘musical and metrical production’ was the default meaning of ποίησις in everyday speech. But even in discussions which restrict themselves to the sphere of human art, we find nothing like the neat compartmentalization of harmonized rhythmic melody on the one hand, and stylized verbal composition on the other, which is often casually implied or expressly formulated in modern comparisons of ‘music’ with ‘poetry’. For many ancient theorists the City Dionysia, a dithyrambic festival and a recitation of Homer all featured different versions of one and the same form of composition, a μουσική or ποιητική to which λόγοι, γράμματα and συλλαβαί were just as essential as ἁρμονία, φθόγγοι, ῥυθμός and χρόνοι.

ЭТНОКУЛЬТУРНЫЕ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ ЖЕНСКОГО ОБРАЗА В ГРЕЧЕСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

The article describes ethno-cultural characteristics of female images in the Greek language. The paper aims to reveal the main features of female images in the Greek poetry of the XX century and to identify how the image of an ideal woman (her inner qualities, appearance) correlates with the stages in the development of the ethno-cultural community. For the first time, the authors provide a comprehensive multi-aspect analysis of the female image in poetical works of this period. Relying on the findings, the paper reveals the diversity of female images in the Greek poetry of the XX century, identifies five thematic groups and classifies them according to semantic density. The provided examples represent the specificity of the female image perception in the Greek linguo-culture; reveal interrelation of historical, cultural and linguistic components.

On Rimbaud’s "Vowels," Again: Vowels or Colors?

Arthur Rimbaud’s sonnet Vowels presents a poetic vision based ostensibly on a quasi-psychedelic or synesthetic experience. It has inspired writers, critics, painters, and singers for over a century mainly because of its often obscure form and content. From the first verse of the text, for instance, the author juxtaposes each of the normal five French vowels printed in capital letters with what appears to be a random choice of an appropriate color. As a result, the majority of readers assume that these colors somehow correspond, semantically speaking, to the selected vowels. In making such connections, however, our poet suggests that his specific fusion of basic colors and sounds is capable of generating not just one but multiple significations, be they religious, erotic, aesthetic, even anthropological. Yet the poem itself - an irregular French sonnet - already derives much of its obscurity from another odd feature: the faulty order of French vowels used by Rimbaud: A to O instead of A to U or Y. Formal explanations are often cited to justify this so-called mistake. This paper demonstrates that his poem hides a different interpretation of the words used to expand upon these sound/color combinations. After all, vowels are metonymically linked to sounds, since they constitute the minimal elements of the latter. Contemporary linguists have discovered, however, that in almost all languages, colors come in the same fixed order of words - Black, White, Red, Green and Blue - that Rimbaud proposes. Indeed, in countless documents created over millennia, people in dissimilar societies have tended to identify the same basic colors in the same sequence, for reasons we can only begin to explore here. This previously unnoticed coincidence thus provides further proof that Rimbaud’s sonnet thematically conflates ideas about the historical Beginnings and Endings of various civilizations. Thanks to this chronological conflation, the poem also develops more effectively than previously thought three major themes: the Apocalypse, the Final Judgment, and the future of poetic language. Through its form and content, it thus specifically illustrates the future of French poetry, which Rimbaud compares elsewhere, paradoxically, to Ancient Greek poetry.