A D Knox - Böcker

First published in 1966 as a reprint of a 1922 original, this book contains the ancient Greek text of the fifteen surviving mimes of Herodas, which were originally written in the late 3rd century BC. An English translation is provided on each facing page, and Headlam and Knox have supplied an exhaustive commentary for each work and fragment. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Hellenistic poetry and the works of Herodas.

The surviving short mimes of Hero(n)das share much of their aims and background with the Alexandrian poetry of the first half of the third century BC, especially that of Callimachus and Theocritus. They are at once acutely aware of their literary ancestry, their choliambic metre based on archaic Hipponax, their genre on the traditions of Sophron, and their characters largely on the stock of New Comedy. They are literary and learned pieces but at the same time purport to present 'real life', particularly its seamier side - the bawd, the brothel-keeper, the purveyor of leather dildos. The mimes, comparable with but also interestingly different from the hexametre town mimes of Theocritus (and the Iamboi of Callimachus), present comic vignettes of life in Cos and Alexandria.