Journal articles on the topic 'Mimiambi (Herodas)'

The mimiamboi of Herodas reveal familiar hallmarks of the poetry of the third century: characters drawn from socially humble backgrounds; a literary re-casting of sub-literary ‘genres’; the revival of an archaic metre; the free reconstruction of an artificial literary dialect; the reaching back to claim authority for poetic practice in a great figure of the past. Obvious links between the mimiamboi and the roughly contemporary ‘mime’ poems of Theocritus (especially Idylls 2, 3, 14, and 15) have always attracted attention since the publication of the major papyrus in 1891. No subject has, however, so dominated discussion of the mimiambs as the question of how they were intended to be presented to the public, and how indeed they were so. Were they merely to be read (privately), or to be ‘performed’ either by a solo performer (with or without the assistance of mute extras), or by a ‘troupe’ of actors? We must not assume, of course, that the mode of reception of all the mimiambs was the same, or that one poem was not at different times ‘performed’ in different ways. Moreover, the history of the debate since 1891, a history of which Giuseppe Mastromarco has given a full account, suggests that it is hardly possible on internal grounds alone to prove to general satisfaction that the poems were presented in one way rather than another.

AbstractIn Herondas' mimiamb 8, a poem particularly concerned with questions of generic identity and reception, the poet defends his work and puts forward his literary program by means of a dream dominated by images related to Dionysiac myth and cult. The interpretation of the dream at ll. 66-79 is seen in terms of the generic affinities between Herondas' mimiambs, the iambographic tradition of Hipponax and the mime. In this paper the Dionysiac character of those images is not considered as an indication of a hypothetically dramatic nature of Herondas' work. It is argued, by contrast, that the poem's Dionysiac imagery and its subsequent interpretation are linked with the associations of Herondas' work with the mime and, more specifically, with the non-literary mime. Mimiamb 8 is considered as part of a long process through which the latter was eventually regarded as a dramatic genre. Herondas seems to be conscious of the disreputable character of that part of his sources, but attempts by means of a masterful use of images pertaining to Dionysiac myth and ritual to persuade his critics of the dramatic nature of the mimic origins of his work so as to invest his poetry with the authority and prestige of dramatic poetry.

The first part of the article offers a metapoetic interpretation of Herondas’ Mimiamb 3, suggesting that the Hellenistic poet describes Cottalos and his passion for dice with allusion to Alexander Aetolus that wrote Astragalistai. In the second part, starting from some touch points between Mimiamb 3 and Calliamchus’ Iambus 2 (in particular the presence of three mysterious characters with similar names), the author gives some evidence for the identification of that characters with three poets who lived at that time and had undoubted contacts both with Alexander Aetolus and Callimachus: they are Antagoras of Rhodes, Philicus of Corcyra and Timon of Phlius. L’articolo offre nella prima parte un’interpretazione metapoetica del Mimiambo 3 di Eronda, suggerendo che il poeta ellenistico descriva Cottalo e la sua passione per i dadi con allusione ad Alessandro Etolo che scrisse gli Astragalistai. Nella seconda parte, prendendo le mosse da alcuni punti in comune tra il Mimiambo 3 ed il Giambo 2 di Callimaco (in particolare la presenza di tre misteriosi personaggi con nomi simili), vengono fornite alcune prove per l’identificazione di tali personaggi con tre poeti che vissero in quel periodo ed ebbero sicuri contatti sia con Alessandro Etolo che con Callimaco: si tratta di Antagora di Rodi, Filisco di Corcira e Timone di Fliunte.

Herodas' Mimiamb 7 has often attracted scholarly attention on account of its thematic preoccupation with the sexuality of ordinary people, thus offering a realistic and exciting glimpse of everyday life in the eastern Mediterranean of the third century b.c.e. In addition, his obscure reference in lines 62–3 to the obsession of women and dogs with dildos has been the focus of long-standing scholarly debate: while most scholars agree that the verses employ a metaphor, possibly of obscene nature, their exact meaning is still to be clarified. In response, this article offers an additional paradigm which stresses the cultural osmosis between the Greeks and their eastern neighbours in the Hellenistic period; in my view, Herodas' peculiar choice of expression could be explained more aptly through this hitherto unnoticed perspective. Despite having frustratingly little information about the poet and his life, his familiarity with the Hellenistic East is often implied in his poetic settings: for example, Cos in Mimiamb 2 and probably locations in Asia Minor in Mimiambs 6 and 7 are considered likely to reflect the places where he lived. Hence, it is reasonable to assume that Herodas spent periods of his life in areas of the eastern Aegean where cultural interaction was practically unavoidable. Moreover, his first poem exhibits a certain amount of knowledge and admiration for Ptolemaic Egypt and, although this does not necessarily mean that he lived there, he must have been very familiar with Alexandria and its erudite circles. After all, Herodas, a contemporary of Theocritus who subscribed to his preference for short, elegant poetic forms, shared the latter's interest in the lowly mime, which both of them invested with learned language. Thus, specific motifs, such as the visit of an abandoned mistress to the witches in a desperate attempt to coax back a cruel lover, are treated by both poets and ultimately derive from the literary corpus of mimes by the influential Sophron. Theocritus was also familiar with locations in Cos, an island that appears to have been culturally diverse. One of the foreign communities that increasingly made its presence felt in third-century b.c.e. Asia Minor and the nearby islands of the eastern Aegean was that of the Jews, although the history of particular communities is often difficult to recover. Nevertheless, we do know that as early as the third century b.c.e. ‘various Jewish authors writing in Greek had adopted the prevailing patterns of Greek literature in its many forms, filling them with Jewish content’. The Jews had a prominent and well-documented presence at Alexandria, where their interaction with the Greeks was promoted by the Ptolemies. There, already by the middle of the third century b.c.e., the Pentateuch (the Hebrew Torah) had been translated into Koine Greek by royal request, which probably indicates a sizeable community able to participate dynamically in the cultural interface of Ptolemaic Alexandria. In the following pages, I shall revisit the past interpretations of the aforementioned verses in Mimiamb 7 before arguing that the key to their understanding lies in the interaction of the Greeks with near eastern cultures, particularly the Jews, who seemed to have employed a distinctive metaphor about ‘dogs’ and their perceived sexual habits.

En este trabajo se identifican y describen los procedimientos de cortesía y descortesía verbal que se emplean en el tercer Mimiambo de Herodas y se estudia el papel que estos parámetros lingüísticos juegan como medios para la caracterización.

Herodas' Mimiamb VII is now generally admitted to be a sequel to VI insofar as Metro is a main character of both and Kerdon, the ‘Shoemaker’ who gives to VII its title, is a main topic of VI. Controversy remains as to whether the leather ‘baubons’ (dildoes) which Kerdon makes with consummate skill (VI 68–73) and purveys in secret (VI 63) is also an underlying topic of VII

The present publication contains the first translation of VI Herodas’s mimiambus into Russian. The Herodas was a Hellenistic poet of the third century BCE, whose eight mimiambos have been preserved on a papyrus of the first century CE. The commented translation is based on the authoritative editions of O. Crusius (1914) and J. Cunningham (1971).