Journal articles on the topic 'Poetry; Hellenistic period'

Scholarship has long argued that theBatrachomyomachia(BM) is to be dated to the Hellenistic period or later, but the question of its literary affiliations in this context has only recently been addressed. Usually considered an example of παρωιδία, the poem is a unique example of that genre in several respects, including the extent to which it develops its own formularity rather than merely mirroring the Homeric exemplar with minimal change, and the fact that it was passed off as the work of Homer himself instead of being self-consciously distanced from the parodied author. It is therefore fitting that theBMis also unusual for ancient parody in dealing with the scholarly discourse surrounding its primary exemplar. This note offers, as an(other) example of this tendency, theBM's engagement with the Homeric arming scene, and its reception in Hellenistic poetry and scholarship.

Abstract:In this paper, I explore the literary aesthetics of Attalid Pergamon, one of the Ptolemies’ fiercest cultural rivals in the Hellenistic period. Traditionally, scholars have reconstructed Pergamene poetry from the city’s grand and monumental sculptural programme, hypothesizing an underlying aesthetic dichotomy between the two kingdoms: Alexandrian ‘refinement’ versus the Pergamene ‘baroque’. In this paper, I critically reassess this view by exploring surviving scraps of Pergamene poetry: an inscribed encomiastic epigram celebrating the Olympic victory of a certain Attalus (IvP I.10) and an inscribed dedicatory epigram featuring a speaking Satyr (SGO I.06/02/05). By examining these poems’ sophisticated engagements with the literary past and contemporary scholarship, I challenge the idea of a simple opposition between the two kingdoms. In reality, the art and literature of both political centres display a similar capacity to embrace both the refined and the baroque. In conclusion, I ask how this analysis affects our interpretation of the broader aesthetic landscape of the Hellenistic era and suggest that the literature of both capitals belongs to a larger system of elite poetry which stretched far and wide across the Hellenistic world.

Dionysios gehört zu den interessantesten Problemen der griechischen Literaturgeschichte.Knaack (1905) 916.34f.Within the general context of increasing interest in Greek literature in the Roman period, interest in Dionysius the Periegete is certainly on the rise. Our knowledge of his extensive textual tradition is still expanding, and further editions are under way; the ideologies that structure his work have been explored in a series of publications by Christian Jacob (1990, 1991); and the welcome increase in the volume of publications over the last five years or so includes a collection of essays which is especially geared to one of my themes in this essay, Dionysius' relations with Hellenistic poetry and poets. Yet there are some basic aspects of his poetics that remain un-, or under-, studied. At the heart of the matter, I suggest, are two major backgrounds that need to be explored further.The first is the reception of Hellenistic poetry in the imperial period. Dionysius is a neo-Hellenistic poet. Indeed, he is so convincing a neo-Hellenistic poet that a critic as astute as Tycho Mommsen placed him in the first century BCE on the basis of a whole array of stylistic and metrical and other sorts of linguistic criteria. Dionysius' true date has been known for a century and a quarter; but we are really none the wiser about what it was that gave rise to this extraordinarily competent and convincing Hellenistic imitation. It is not only that he imitates Apollonius, Callimachus, Nicander, Aratus and others in purple passages of his own, but that so many of his techniques of composition and allusion, and—as this paper will demonstrate—his formal evocation of certain styles of writing, are thoroughly Hellenistic. So the first thing that is needed is an exploration of the various ways in which imperial writers respond to the masters of the high Hellenistic period, and their successors: is Dionysius a representative of a special and distinctive strain in imperial poetics, or is he a particular instance of something more multiform and complex?

AbstractThis article sets up a dialogue between two bodies of ancient texts, i.e. Jewish wisdom literature and Greco-Roman didactic of the Hellenistic period, with an awareness of the scholarly and interpretive communities that have studied, taught and transformed these bodies of texts from antiquity until the present. The article does not claim direct influence or cross-pollination across intellectual, religious or social communities in the Hellenistic period. Instead, the article suggests four discrete frameworks for thinking about comparative antiquity: creation, the law, the sage and literary form. The comparative model proposed here intends to create the conditions for noticing parallels and kindred concepts. However, the article resists the temptation to repeat earlier scholarly arguments for dependency or priority of influence. Instead, the essay demonstrates remarkable alignments, suggestively similar developments, and synergies. Perhaps, the ideal first reader for this article is none other than Philo of Alexandria.

AbstractThis paper investigates how Gregory of Nazianzus imitates and responds to the Greek literary tradition in the autobiographical poem ‘On his own affairs’ (2.1.1). Through six case studies, it contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of Gregory’s literary merit. With learning, wit, subtle humour and faith, Gregory adapts and reinvents earlier poetry to express Christian themes. Imitation is at the heart of his poetic technique, but his imitations are never straight-forward. They include imitating both Homer and other poets’ imitations of Homer, learned word-play and combining references to non-Christian literature and the Septuagint. Gregory’s references add nuance to ‘On his own affairs’ and give pleasure to readers trained to judge poetry by comparing it to earlier poetry, especially the Homeric epics. They also demonstrate the breadth of his scholarship, which extends to Homeric variants, Platonic epigrams and the entirety of the New Testament and Septuagint. Above all, Gregory insists that he is a rightful participant in a living poetic tradition. He writes Greek poetry for the fourth century AD, just as Oppian did in the second century and Apollonius and Callimachus did in the Hellenistic period.

The article discusses the role of biography in the reception of archaic poetry in the classical period. As it is illustrated by a fragment of Critias (295W), in the fi fth century B.C. the archaic poetic traditions, previously transmitted orally through performance, began to be interpreted from a biographical perspective: fi rst-person statements were mostly associated with the poets themselves and treated as a source of biographical information; in other words, archaic poetry came to be seen as a kind of autobiography. Anecdotes about poets were used to interpret the same poems which had provided the basis for these false stories: as an interpretative tool, they simplifi ed old compositions, not always clear for the reader. Until the 1980s, classical philologists often relied on false testimonies from the classical and Hellenistic era, limited by their attachment to the biographical perspective.

Abstract This contribution examines musical and poetic tradition, in so far as it influenced the culture and society of the Hellenistic period. Epigraphy attests to the recollection of traditional heritage as one driving force for public-at-large performances. Extra-agonistic and agonistic performances pursued by the so-called poeti vaganti, travelling all over the cultural centres of Greece chasing fame and rewards, attest to different ways to preserve the legacy of musical and poetic tradition, by lingering on it or re-modulating its facies. Re-performing ancient times, through selections of dramas and lyric poetry, and demonstrating the musical structures and poetic ways of former days, had the purpose of strengthening social identity and reinvigorating communal knowledge. Inscriptions allow us to envisage the nuances and potentialities of these thoughtful revivals, highlighting the ways this concept could shift with time, context, and place.

Early Greek lyric poetry was composed for and performed on specific occasions. Instead o f a general term such as our 'lyric particular forms of 'lyric’ were composed for particular occasions and for particular ways of performance. In this article such distinctions as are encountered among the poets themselves, as well as the theoretical classifications of the 'lyric' forms in the Classical period (5th to late 4th century) as exemplified by Plato and Aristotle, and in the Hellenistic or Alexandrian period (late 4th to 1st century B.C.) - as reflected, inter alia, in the Chrestomatheia of Proclus (410-485 C.E.) are examined.

If we had no idea which parts of Greek literature in a certain period were poetry or prose, we would regard it as our first job to find out. How much of the Greek prose of the Imperial period is rhythmic has excited less attention; and yet the question should greatly affect both our reading of specific texts and our understanding of the whole literary scene. By ‘rhythmic’ prose, this article means only prose that follows the Hellenistic system of rhythm started, it is said, by Hegesias, and adopted by Cicero and by many Latin writers of the Imperial period. Estimates of how much Greek Imperial prose is rhythmic have long varied drastically. Some experts suggest that all or much artistic Greek prose in the period is rhythmic, others that what little there is fades out after the first century a.d., as part of the victory of Atticism. There has been fairly little substantial work on rhythmic prose in the first three centuries a.d. for over fifty years (more on accentual prose from the fourth). The object of this article is to investigate a large part of one author's work thoroughly, and to establish that that part is rhythmic. It will also aim to show how that conclusion should greatly affect our whole conception of the author as a writer, and our reading of his every sentence.

Intense scrutiny can raise chimaeras, and Virgil is the most scrutinized of Roman poets, but he may have engineered coincidences in line number (‘stichometric allusions’) between certain of his verses and their Greek models. A handful of potential examples have now accumulated. Scholars have detected Virgilian citations of Homer, Callimachus and Aratus in this manner, as well as intratextual allusions by both Virgil and Ovid, and references to Virgil's works by later Roman poets using the same technique. (For present purposes I disregard the separate, though related, phenomenon of corresponding numbers of lines in parallel passages: G. Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer (Göttingen, 1964) suggests several examples of such correspondences between Homer and Virgil, especially in speeches. Another purely formal mode of allusion faintly present in Roman poetry is homophonic translation (the technique which Louis Zukofsky's 1969 translations of Catullus pursue in extenso); thus Virgil's fagus, beech, corresponds with Theocritus' phagos, oak.) If genuine, the phenomenon lacks any consistent method or regular pattern (and the degree of plausibility varies); if genuine, it is very rare, even if accidents in textual transmission could have obscured some examples; if genuine, it probably originated in the Hellenistic period, although such a case has yet to be made. Virgil presently seems the earliest and most copious practitioner of stichometric allusion. A previously undetected example in the Aeneid is proposed below.

Abstract This contribution discusses a selection of remarkable verse inscriptions from the city of Athens. Such inscriptions should not be evaluated as subliterary pieces of poetry exclusively relevant within their local, spatial context. Instead, we argue that it makes sense to compare them with other poetry known from antiquity. We point at formal and thematic relationships between poems known from stones and via manuscripts, and also analyse a few Athenian verse inscriptions from Roman times that clearly reflect literary developments known from Hellenistic and Second Sophistic periods.

The paper looks at the ancient Greek thymiateria and aims at finding data in literary, epigraphic and visual sources that would cast light on the use of thymiateria in private and public rituals of the VIІ th century BC – IVth century AD. Systematic collection of data and its comparative historical analysis were in the core of the methodology. Among the main methods of analysing the collected sources, one should mention empirical, analytical, structural-typological and iconographical methods. A thymiaterion (an incense burner) is firstly mentioned in the Vth century BC in Herodotus’ Historia. In centuries to come, the panhellenic name of thymiaterion would dominate and enter to Roman and Germanic languages. This device was used solely with fire, charcoal or heated pebbles to burn aromatic compounds, incense and aromatic plants and flowers in particular. Thymiateria didn’t have any fixed shapes or sizes. In narrative sources, they were also named bomiskos, libanotis (libanotris), escharis, tripodiskos etc. In this paper, I examine the basic constructive elements of thymiateria. As visual sources and lyric poetry suggest, they were used in the archaic period. The earliest instance of the use of thymiateria in the ritual practice date late to the VIth century BC in the Phanagoria of the Bosporus. The thymiateria is depicted on mostly in mythological scenes on the Athenian red-figure pottery late of the Vth – IVth centuries BC found in Panticapaeum and in the surrounding area. The Greek iconography of mythological scenes on the vases was clear for the locals. The majority of visual, numismatics and epigraphic sources that reveal the use of thymiateria on the Bosporus are dating to the IVth–ІІth centuries BC, when they were spread in Hellenistic Greece and, especially in sanctuaries of Delos. Although aroma was an essential part of thymiateria culture, only Orphic Hymns cast light on the use of particular incenses (in pure form or in compound) for each gods or heroes. One important question persists: which aromas were burnt in thymiateria and from which countries were they brought to Greece? From literary sources, we know that plant-based aromas, namely incense and myrrh were brought from South Arabia and Syria. Thymiateria were used during rituals in sanctuaries and temples, during religious processions, funerals, symposiums and wedding that were accompanied by aromatic smoke. The present essay should be regarded as a starting point for the further in-depth study of thymiateria from the Northern Black sea region and Olbia in particular.

If one wants to know what happened in Hellenistic poetic theory, Philodemus' survey of poetic theories in the fifth book of his On Poems is an excellent guide. Even though I the survey is well preserved, it has been neglected. Jensen, who published the first complete edition of On Poems 5 in 1923, did not discuss this part of the text; and it has been treated only briefly by others. This is a pity because, as Philodemus shows, the Hellenistic period was an era of great diversity and innovation in literary theory. Philodemus gives evidence of: (1) a refined and highly systematic critical vocabulary; (2) a new concern with verbal form; (3) a new notion of mimesis; and (4) in general, a great proliferation of theories that present alternatives to those of Plato and Aristotle. Hellenistic literary theorists studied Plato and Aristotle critically; some revised or elaborated their views, whereas others opposed them. Ancient poetic theory did not come to a standstill with Aristotle any more than philosophy did.

Whatever Luca Giuliani writes is usually worth reading. Image and Myth, a translation and revision of his Bild und Mythos (Munich, 2003), is no exception. This monograph engages with a topic germane to the origins and development of classical archaeology – the relation of art to text. Giuliani begins, rather ponderously, with an exposition of G. E. Lessing's 1766 essay Laokoon, ‘on the limits of painting and poetry’. Lessing, a dramatist, predictably considered poetry the more effective medium for conveying a story. A picture, in his eyes, encapsulates the vision of a moment – likewise a statue. The Laocoon group, then, is a past perfect moment. A poet can provide the beginning, middle, and end of a story; the artist, only the representation of a fleeting appearance. Giuliani shows that this distinction does not necessarily hold – works of art can be synoptic, disobedient of Aristotelian laws about unity of place and time (and scale). Yet he extracts from Lessing's essay a basic dichotomy between the narrative and the descriptive. This dichotomy dictates the course of a study that is most illuminating when its author is being neither narrative nor descriptive but analytical – explaining, with commendable care for detail, what we see in an ancient work of art. But is the distinction between narrative and descriptive as useful as Giuliani wants it to be? One intellectual predecessor, Carl Robert, is scarcely acknowledged, and a former mentor, Karl Schefold, is openly repudiated; both of these leave-takings are consequent from the effort on Giuliani's part to avoid seeking (and finding) ‘Homeric’ imagery in early Greek art. The iconography of Geometric vases, he maintains, ‘is devoid of narrative intention: it refers to what can be expected to take place in the world’ (37). In this period, we should not be asking whether an image is ‘compatible’ with a story, but rather whether it is incomprehensible without a story. If the answer is ‘no’, then the image is descriptive, not narrative. Thus the well-known oinochoe in Munich, clearly showing a shipwreck, and arguably intending to represent a single figure astride an overturned keel, need not be read as a visual allusion to Odyssey 12.403–25, or some version of the tale of Odysseus surviving a shipwreck. It is just one of those things that happens in the world. Well, we may be thinking – let us be glad that it happens less frequently these days, but double our travel insurance nevertheless. As Giuliani commits himself to this approach, he is forced to concede that certain Geometric scenes evoke the ‘heroic lifestyle’ – but, since we cannot admit Homer's heroes, we must accept the existence of the ‘everyman aristocrat’ (or aristocratic everyman: either way, risking oxymoron). Readers may wonder if Lessing's insistence on separating the descriptive from the narrative works at all well for Homer as an author: for does not Homer's particular gift lie in adding graphic, descriptive detail to his narrative? And have we not learned (from Barthes and others) that ‘descriptions’, semiotically analysed, carry narrative implications – implications for what precedes and follows the ‘moment’ described? So the early part of Giuliani's argument is not persuasive. His conviction, and convincing quality, grows as artists become literate, and play a ‘new game’ ‘in the context of aristocratic conviviality’ (87) – that of adding names to figures (as on the François Vase). Some might say this was simply a literate version of the old game: in any case, it also includes the possibility of ‘artistic licence’. So when Giuliani notes, ‘again we find an element here that is difficult to reconcile with the epic narrative’ (149), this does not, thankfully, oblige him to dismiss the link between art and text, or art and myth (canonical or not). Evidently a painter such as Kleitias could heed the Muses, or aspire to be inspired; a painter might also enjoy teasing his patrons with ‘tweaks’ and corrigenda to a poet's work. (The latter must have been the motive of Euphronios, when representing the salvage of the body of Sarpedon as overseen by Hermes, rather than by Apollo, divergent from the Homeric text.) Eventually there will be ‘pictures for readers’, and a ‘pull of text’ that is overt in Hellenistic relief-moulded bowls, allowing Giuliani to talk of ‘illustrations’ – images that ‘have surrendered their autonomy’ (252).

Abstract This article treats a composition that was probably dedicated to Nergal, a god with a long cultic tradition in ancient Mesopotamia who was mainly related to war and death. The text was first edited by Böhl (1949; 1953: 207–216, 496–497), followed by Ebeling (1953: 116–117). Later, Seux (1976: 85–88) and Foster (2005: 708–709) translated and commented upon it. I will present a new reading of the invocation on the tablet’s upper edge, which confirms that the tablet originated in Uruk during the Hellenistic period. Furthermore, I will discuss the many Neo-Babylonian and Late Babylonian grammatical elements of this composition. The high frequency of these elements, typical of the vernacular language, is unusual for a literary text and suggests that not only the tablet, but also the composition of the text stems from the first millennium BCE, and perhaps, just like the tablet, from Hellenistic Uruk. The purpose of this contribution is, therefore, to show through an analysis of this text, that the conservative and poetic literary language was reworked and adapted to the cultural situation of the late period in Mesopotamian literary production.

Euphorion SH 417 (fr. 36 Van Groningen) deserves to be better known. A curiosity in itself—an apparent poetic reference to number theory—it is also, potentially, one of our earliest references to Euclidean material. On the authority of a late commentator on Aristotle, Euphorion, a mid-third-century b.c. Euboean poet who was also active in Athens and Antioch, is said to have mentioned perfect numbers—i.e. numbers which equal the total of all their factors, including 1 (but obviously excluding the number itself). It is a pity that the context in Euphorion does not survive, and that the line is only preserved, and indeed interpreted, by so late a source. But the wording of the fragment—if Westerink's restoration of its various corruptions (again, a pity) is plausible—would strongly suggest a reference to the notion of perfect number. The fragment has been known since Westerink published it in 1960, and was included both in Van Groningen's edition of Euphorion in 1977 and in Supplementum Hellenisticum (1983). But its implications have still not been discussed, and when David Fowler came to gather the evidence for references to Euclidean material in and after the third century b.c. in The Mathematics of Plato's Academy, his attention, unsurprisingly, was not drawn to it. Euphorion has had a bad press, as a poet of rebarbatively obscure myth and intractable vocabulary; yet he holds some interest, and we may be missing more insights into the intellectual life of the Hellenistic period which the perverse intelligence and baneful wit of the fragments display.

AbstractInscriptions concerning musicians in and from Magna Graecia illuminate the musical life of the Western Greeks. There are chronological restrictions; all the inscriptions were written in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, none in Archaic and Classical times. We shall consider resemblances and differences between them and those of mainland Greece and Asia Minor, and relationships between Magna Graecia and Rome. Many inscriptions are honorific decrees for victors in local and Panhellenic musical contests, notably at Delphi. Others are lists of participants, whose commonest musical specialisms were also, perhaps, the most popular. Some reveal the functions of musicians in sanctuaries. Funerary inscriptions, not always evoking the music of the elites, mention composers as well as performers, identifying their gender, age and social status. Some are in verse, elucidating the Western Greeks’ conception of µουσική itself, and their poetic techniques for expressing on a stone the feelings of a musical soul.

C. P. Cavafy‟s dramatic monologues “Going Back Home from Greece” and “Philhellene” are approached by way of their form: the genre of the dramatic monologue that the Greek poet adopted and adapted from Victorian sources, which delimits and historicises the poetic utterance by staging it in a dramatic frame. Drawing on a theory of Michel Foucault, the two texts‟ discursive context of Hellenism is construed as part of their speakers‟ binding situation, the social and historical environment (i.e. the literary representation of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods) that is shown to both condition and enable their respective utterances. Furthermore, it will be argued that the speakers‟ attempts to assert and/or construct their identities involves a complex, tense process of subjection and simultaneous resistance to restraining definitions inherent to the discourse of Hellenism that have persisted throughout the latter‟s long history, such as its self- constitutive, inexorable, division between Greek and barbarian.

Greek had held an important place in Roman society and culture since the Late Republican period, and educated Romans were expected to be bilingual and well versed in both Greek and Latin literature. The Roman school ‘curriculum’ was based on Hellenistic educational culture, and in the De grammaticis et rhetoribus Suetonius says that the earliest teachers in Rome, Livius and Ennius, were ‘poets and half Greeks’ (poetae et semigraeci), who taught both Latin and Greek ‘publicly and privately’ (domi forisque docuisse) and ‘merely clarified the meaning of Greek authors or gave exemplary readings from their own Latin compositions’ (nihil amplius quam Graecos interpretabantur aut si quid ipsi Latine composuissent praelegebant, Gram. et rhet. 1–2). Cicero, the Latin neoteric poets and Horace are obvious examples of bilingual educated Roman aristocrats, but also throughout the Imperial period a properly educated Roman would be learned in utraque lingua. The place of Greek in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria reveals the importance and prevalence of Greek in Roman education and literature in the late first century a.d. Quintilian argues that children should learn both Greek and Latin but that it is best to begin with Greek. Famously, in the second century a.d. the Roman author Apuleius gave speeches in Greek to audiences in Carthage, and in his Apologia mocked his accusers for their ignorance of Greek.

AbstractHomeric archaeology long dominated the study of early Greece, but new approaches have recently revolutionized the field. Drawing from these approaches, I offer a regional and diachronic analysis of Homeric stories about Crete, an assessment of the reception of these stories by the island's inhabitants throughout antiquity and an account of their impact on medieval to modern literature and art. I find that Cretan interest in Homer peaks in the Hellenistic period, but also argue for the much earlier familiarity of some Cretans with stories that underlie the Homeric epics. This argument relies on an analysis of the archaeological assemblage of a Knossian tomb of the 11th century BC, which includes a range of arms that is exceptional for both Aegean archaeology and the Homeric epics. In the epics, this equipment is carried by the Knossian hero Meriones, whose poetic persona can be traced back to the Late Bronze Age on philological and linguistic grounds. Based on this, and on current understandings of performance at death, I argue that the Knossian burial assemblage was staged to reference the persona of Meriones, therefore suggesting the familiarity of some Cretans with early stories that eventually filtered into the Homeric epics.

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.

The paper is the first part of S. Barbantani’s contribution Lyric for the Rulers, Lyric for the People: The Transformation of Some Lyric Subgenres in Hellenistic Poetry, in E. Sistakou (ed.), Hellenistic Lyricism: Traditions and Transformations of a Literary Mode (Trends in Classics 9, 2), Berlin - Boston 2017, 339-399 (which discusses encomiastic lyric, epinikion in Callimachus, Posidippus and inscriptional epigram, literary epithalamia, threnoi and epikedeia, poems in stichic lyric meters, Carmina popularia, anthologies for symposiastic use and mimes). This contribution analyses how some of the main lyric genres, developed in archaic and classical Greek poetry, underwent transformation in the Hellenistic period, following social, political and cultural changes. The paper specifically explores lyric poetry produced ‘for the gods’ (hymns, esp. paeans, preserved on stone and on papyrus).

This funerary verse inscription, found in 1976, is for the previously unknown dramatist Diokles of Rhodes. This entry re-examines the text based on visual autopsy, proposes a new supplement on the last line, and sets the poem within the literary and inscribed epitaphic traditions for deceased poets (tragedians in particular). It also considers what this poem tells us about Rhodian dramatic competitions in the Hellenistic period. It looks at the interplay between inscribed and literary epigrams, what this epigram tells us about poetry of the south-east Aegean, and the reception of literary funerary epigrams of Classical authors in the Hellenistic era.

Abstract A treatise on rhetorical tropes is attributed in manuscripts to the first-century grammarian Trypho: this article considers for the first time a fifteenth-century manuscript of this work (Leiden, BPG 74G), which turns out to be the only complete witness of its hitherto unknown original version; this version (very fragmentarily transmitted by a fifth-century papyrus scrap) is also partly found in another fifteenth-century manuscript now kept in Olomouc (M 79). Four interesting poetic fragments are quoted in this newly discovered, fuller version of Ps.-Trypho's De Tropis: some lines from Callimachus’ fifth and fourth Iambi (23–9 and 90–2 respectively: a radically new light is shed by this new witness on the parallel papyrus fragments carrying Callimachus’ text), an epigram dubiously attributed to Simonides (FGE 44 Page, probably to be dated to the Hellenistic period: the text can be now restored to its complete form), and some enigmatic lines of “Hesiod”'s Wedding of Keyx, which the new witness finally makes fully understandable.