Dirk Obbink - Böcker

Building on recent advances in the reconstruction of the charred Papyri of Philodemus excavated from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, this volume presents eleven new chapters in the history of literary criticism in antiquity. Philodemus of Gadara (c.110-40 BC) shares with his Roman contemporaries Lucretius and Horace the fact that all excelled in the production of poetry, while all three were (at some stage in their careers) adherents of Epicureanism. Designed to offer a critical survey of trends and developments in recent scholarship on Philodemus in particular, and Hellenistic literary theory in general, the essays treat the newly published and re-edited papyrus texts of Philodemus' treatises on poetry and the related subjects of rhetoric and music. In addition, the volume contains a complete translation of a new text of Philodemus' On Poems book 5. The essays evaluate the philosophical and historical importance of these Epicurean treatises and of Philodemus as a literary theorist, and document connections between Greek philosophy and Roman literary production in the first century BC. The recent papyrus discoveries of Ennius, Lucretius, and Posidippus make this volume especially topical.Philodemus was himself a poet of considerable repute. His Epigrams were noticed by Cicero and have been shown to have influenced the poetry of his younger contemporaries Catullus, Vergil, and Horace. As a literary critic, Philodemus embraced a formalism which denied both the moral utility of poems and the separability of content from poetic form. At the same time Philodemus, especially for the benefit of his wealthy patron Piso, sought to demonstrate the convergence of the Epicurean and the traditionally poetic, to show how Homer's poetry, for example, could be seen as providing moral and political paradigms and personal guidance for the potential ruler. How Philodemus attempted to reconcile this position with standard Epicurean views and his own rejection of the moral utility of poetry is a question explored by the essays in this volume.

This volume originated in a conference of the same title, held in Oxford in September 2006, to celebrate the 70th birthday of Peter Parsons, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford from 1989 to 2003. The contributors, who are former pupils, colleagues or collaborators with Peter Parsons, share a deep admiration for him and his work. Peter Parsons has, throughout his career, been engaged in research on newly discovered papyrus texts, and such texts play an important part in this volume's discussions. He has also constantly sought to use these texts to illuminate the literary and cultural history of antiquity. The essays in this volume are suitably diverse, reflecting the broad interests of the honorand: they straddle prose and verse, literary and subliterary texts, addressing both theoretical issues and specific practical problems of interpretation which contribute to the difficulties faced in giving form and meaning to the diverse and fragmentary evidence of ancient literary history - to give some kind of partial unity to 'culture in pieces'. Broader topics considered include the methodology of editing fragments, the problems of identifying authorship (New Comedy being treated as a test case), the ambiguities of texts which may or may not be read as ironic, and the development of the Greek novel. Among major authors treated are Pindar, Euripides, Menander, Callimachus, and Ovid. The volume also includes an introduction outlining Peter Parsons's career and achievements, and a bibliography of his publications.

The Getty Hexameters looks in detail at a series of forty-four magical verses inscribed on a recently discovered lead tablet from Sicily in the fifth century BC, which is now in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Divided into two sections, the volume consists of a general introduction to the new inscriptions, together with a critical text and English translation, photographs, and drawings. The second section contains a collection of eleven interpretative essays which treat various aspects of the text, including religious and civic context, date and poetic language, transmission, and connections to ancient magic and ritual practice.The volume is the first complete critical edition of the Greek text to appear in print and contains important scholarship for the field of classics from an acclaimed list of contributors.

The symposion is arguably the most significant and well-documented context for the performance, transmission, and criticism of archaic and classical Greek poetry, a distinction attested by its continued hold on the poetic imagination even after its demise as a performance setting. The Cup of Song explores the symbiotic relationship of poetry and the symposion throughout Greek literary history, considering the latter both as a literal performance context and as an imaginary space pregnant with social, political, and aesthetic implications.This collection of essays by an international group of leading scholars illuminates the various facets of this relationship, from Greek literature's earliest beginnings through to its afterlife in Roman poetry, ranging from the Near Eastern origins of the Greek symposion in the eighth century to Horace's evocations of his archaic models and Lucian's knowing reworking of classic texts. Each chapter discusses one aspect of sympotic engagement by key authors across the major genres of Greek poetry, including archaic and classical lyric, tragedy and comedy, and Hellenistic epigram; discussions of literary sources are complemented by analysis of the visual evidence of painted pottery. Consideration of these diverse modes and genres from the unifying perspective of their relation to the symposion leads to a characterization of the full spectrum of sympotic poetry that retains an eye to both its shared common features and the specificity of individual genres and texts.

The literary genres given shape by the writers of classical antiquity are central to our own thinking about the various forms literature takes. Examining those genres, the essays collected here focus on the concept and role of the author and the emergence of authorship out of performance in Greece and Rome.In a fruitful variety of ways the contributors to this volume address the questions: what generic rules were recognized and observed by the Greeks and Romans over the centuries; what competing schemes were there for classifying genres and accounting for literary change; and what role did authors play in maintaining and developing generic contexts? Their essays look at tragedy, epigram, hymns, rhapsodic poetry, history, comedy, bucolic poetry, prophecy, Augustan poetry, commentaries, didactic poetry, and works that "mix genres."The contributors bring to this analysis a wide range of expertise; they are, in addition to the editors, Glenn W. Most, Joseph Day, Ian Rutherford, Deborah Boedeker, Eric Csapo, Marco Fantuzzi, Stephanie West, Alessandro Barchiesi, Ineke Sluiter, Don Fowler, and Stephen Hinds. The essays are drawn from a colloquium at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies.

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).