Benjamin Acosta-Hughes – författare

This book provides a new literary treatment of an often-overlooked collection of fragmentary poems from the third century B.C.E. Alexandrian poet Callimachus. Callimachus' Iambi form a collection of thirteen poems, which rework archaic Greek iambography and look forward to Roman satire and other genres, especially to such collections as Horace's Epodes. The poems are especially significant as examples of cultural memory since they are composed both as an act of commemorating earlier poetry and as a manipulation of traditional features of iambic poetry to refashion the iambic genre. This book fills a significant gap by providing the first complete translation of several of these fragmentary poems in English, along with line-by-line commentary, notes, and literary analysis. The structure of the book is thematic, with chapters focusing on such topics as poetic voice, fable, ethical criticism, and statuary. Each chapter consists of an introduction, text and selected critical apparatus, translation, and comprehensive thematic discussion.Acosta-Hughes focuses especially on Callimachus' manipulation of traditional features of archaic iambic poetry such as persona loquens, ethical and critical message, and eristic dialogue. He also includes a detailed analysis of the Alexandrian poet's artistic relationship with the earlier iambic poets Archilochus and Hipponax. Polyeideia will interest not only readers of Greek and Hellenistic poetry but also readers of Roman satire and invective verse, as well as those intrigued by the processes of memorializing and fashioning poetic culture.

Arion's Lyre examines how Hellenistic poetic culture adapted, reinterpreted, and transformed Archaic Greek lyric through a complex process of textual, cultural, and creative reception. Looking at the ways in which the poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Anacreon, and Simonides was preserved, edited, and read by Hellenistic scholars and poets, the book shows that Archaic poets often look very different in the new social, cultural, and political setting of Hellenistic Alexandria. For example, the Alexandrian Sappho evolves from the singer of Archaic Lesbos but has distinct associations and contexts, from Ptolemaic politics and Macedonian queens to the new phenomenon of the poetry book and an Alexandrian scholarship intent on preservation and codification. A study of Hellenistic poetic culture and an interpretation of some of the Archaic poets it so lovingly preserved, Arion's Lyre is also an examination of how one poetic culture reads another--and how modern readings of ancient poetry are filtered and shaped by earlier readings.

Scholarly reception has bequeathed two Callimachuses: the Roman version is a poet of elegant non-heroic poetry (usually erotic elegy), represented by a handful of intertexts with a recurring set of images - slender Muse, instructing divinity, small voice, pure waters; the Greek version emphasizes a learned scholar who includes literary criticism within his poetry, an encomiast of the Ptolemies, a poet of the book whose narratives are often understood as metapoetic. This study aims to situate these Callimachuses within a series of interlocking historical and intellectual contexts in order better to understand how they arose. In this narrative of his poetics and poetic reception four main sources of creative opportunism are identified: Callimachus' reactions to philosophers and literary critics as arbiters of poetic authority, the potential of the text as a venue for performance, awareness of Alexandria as a new place, and finally, his attraction for Roman poets.

Scholarly reception has bequeathed two Callimachuses: the Roman version is a poet of elegant non-heroic poetry (usually erotic elegy), represented by a handful of intertexts with a recurring set of images - slender Muse, instructing divinity, small voice, pure waters; the Greek version emphasizes a learned scholar who includes literary criticism within his poetry, an encomiast of the Ptolemies, a poet of the book whose narratives are often understood as metapoetic. This study aims to situate these Callimachuses within a series of interlocking historical and intellectual contexts in order better to understand how they arose. In this narrative of his poetics and poetic reception four main sources of creative opportunism are identified: Callimachus' reactions to philosophers and literary critics as arbiters of poetic authority, the potential of the text as a venue for performance, awareness of Alexandria as a new place, and finally, his attraction for Roman poets.

In this open access book, leading Greek scholars explore the rich and diverse poetry and prose of the long Hellenistic period. Chapters focus on the poets of Alexandria such as Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, and Posidippus and on prose texts written in Greek in the Roman Empire. This volume demonstrates the versatility of this literature and examines its multiple cultural affiliations. The Hellenistic writers emerge from this volume as complex, playful, and politically engaged figures, interested in the relationship between culture and society, and far removed from the stereotype of them as distant or elitist. This book makes a major contribution to the study of Hellenistic Greek culture.Susan Stephens is the Sarah Hart Kimball Emerita Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, USA. Her contributions to the study of Hellenistic literature and culture are immense. She is the author of over fifty articles and the author or editor of ten books. Many of these publications have made a significant impact on the study of the ancient world. Her research on the poets of Alexandria and on ancient Greek prose fiction is widely regarded as path-breaking. She is an inspiring and influential teacher who guided and mentored generations of students and is closely associated with Stanford, where she obtained her undergraduate and doctoral degrees and where she taught from 1978 until her retirement.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Stanford University.

In this open access book, leading Greek scholars explore the rich and diverse poetry and prose of the long Hellenistic period. Chapters focus on the poets of Alexandria such as Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, and Posidippus and on prose texts written in Greek in the Roman Empire. This volume demonstrates the versatility of this literature and examines its multiple cultural affiliations. The Hellenistic writers emerge from this volume as complex, playful, and politically engaged figures, interested in the relationship between culture and society, and far removed from the stereotype of them as distant or elitist. This book makes a major contribution to the study of Hellenistic Greek culture.Susan Stephens is the Sarah Hart Kimball Emerita Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, USA. Her contributions to the study of Hellenistic literature and culture are immense. She is the author of over fifty articles and the author or editor of ten books. Many of these publications have made a significant impact on the study of the ancient world. Her research on the poets of Alexandria and on ancient Greek prose fiction is widely regarded as path-breaking. She is an inspiring and influential teacher who guided and mentored generations of students and is closely associated with Stanford, where she obtained her undergraduate and doctoral degrees and where she taught from 1978 until her retirement.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Stanford University.

Recent decades have seen a flourishing of interest in Hellenistic epigram (short poems usually in elegiac couplets), an interest fostered in part by the appearance of several ground-breaking new studies of these poems and the history of their collection, as well as by the publication in 2001 of a newly found papyrus, P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309, that preserves over 100 epigrams of Posidippus of Pela. Missing hitherto in this proliferation of new scholarship on epigram is an edition and commentary in English on the epigrams of Callimachus, one of the leading and most widely imitated creative figures of this period, an artist who composed in a wide variety of poetic genres, one of which was epigram. Callimachus' epigrams adumbrate a broad selection of types, among them sepulchral, dedicatory, epideictic and erotic poems; the poems are brilliant artworks themselves and are among the most illuminating examples of this poetic genre. Scholarship on Callimachus tends to favor the fragmentary poems (the Aetia, the Hecale, the Iambi etc.) over the extant; our study seeks to redress this imbalance, and to cast a new interpretive light upon these glittering gems, which came to be widely admired and imitated in both later Greek and Latin poetry.

A central, much-studied feature of the poetry of 3rd cent. BCE Alexandria is the artistic treatment of the cultural past, the reception of earlier Greek poetry and artwork in the artistic creations of a new, Greco-Egyptian world deracinated both geographically and temporally from the heroes and models of Archaic and Classical Greece. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes has devoted a 30+ year professional scholarly career to the study of this reception, one of both imitation and variation, which took place concurrently with the massive collection and categorization of earlier Greek literature in the work of the scholars gathered under royal patronage at the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria, a truly revolutionary new effort of cultural memorialization. The poets of this period, among them Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius and Posidippus, vied in their efforts to compose works that at once celebrated their poetic heritage and at the same time marked their own poetry as original artistic creation and as critical commentary upon their earlier models. This collection will be of interest not only for readers of Archaic and Hellenistic poetry, but also for readers interested in the later reception of the Alexandrians at Rome.