David Sider - Böcker

Over the course of his life (550-460 BC), the Greek poet Simonides produced poetic work of every kind then extant: elegies, threnodies, choral odes, countless epigrams, even a small epic. Unfortunately, Simonides' corpus has survived only in fragments, though classical scholars have been studying his work for generations. In 1992, a new fragment of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri was discovered to contain a substantial and previously undiscovered chunk of Simonides' work, and this fragment enabled papyrologists to attribute an earlier unearthed fragment to Simonides as well. Together, the two fragments revolutionized the study of Simondies, casting particular light on the epic of Plataea. Boedecker and Sider's edited volume gathers the best of the recent research on Simonides' newly expanded oeuvre into a single collection which will be an important reference for scholars of Greek poetry.

Simonides of Ceos, one of the nine lyric poets enshrined in what is conventionally thought of as the Hellenistic Lyric Canon, is a relatively mysterious figure despite his renown in the classical world. Few historical and biographical facts about him have survived, and only fragments of his non-epigrammatic poetry.This volume is intended to complement Orlando Poltera's full-scale text and commentary on Simonides' lyrics (Schwabe, 2008), offering an up-to-date edition and commentary covering, for the most part, those poems in elegiac distichs now called epigrams and elegies. In addition to these forms, Simonides wrote in a few other non-lyric metrical patterns involving dactyls and iambs: these are also included for the sake of completeness, since they are properly absent from Poltera's edition. As authenticity is in question for all but a very few of the epigrams ascribed to Simonides, the volume's scope extends to cover every poem ascribed to him in antiquity, including some poems that are surely not by him: these poems have never before been treated in such detail and the large body of scholarship generated by the corpus as a whole is taken into account here for the first time. Each poem and fragment is accompanied by a new English translation, where applicable, and detailed exegetic line-by-line commentary; a comprehensive general Introduction sets Simonides and his works into their historical context and provides a thorough examination of the textual transmission of the elegies and epigrams.

Pythagoras and Heraclitus developed theories of the universe and mankind’s place in it which were taken seriously by all later Greek thinkers. None of their works remains, however, except in later paraphrases that all too often are misrepresentations. Pythagoras had followers who attributed their own ideas to their master; Heraclitus wrote in a prose style so ambiguous that he came to be known as the Shadow, so that even the most earnest attempts to paraphrase his views had to smooth out his intentional rough edges. Nonetheless, enough remains to allow the authors of this volume, edited by David Sider and Dirk Obbink (Oxford), to offer new ways of viewing their views and the way others perceived them. The contributors are Gábor Betegh (Budapest), Roman Dilcher (Heidelberg), Aryeh Finkelberg (Tel Aviv), Daniel Graham (Brigham Young University), Herbert Granger (Wayne State University), Carl Huffman (DePauw), Enrique Hülsz Piccone (Mexico City), Anthony Long (Berkeley), Richard McKirahan (Pomona), Catherine Rowett (East Anglia), David Sider (New York), and Leonid Zhmud (St. Petersberg).