Graham Zanker - Böcker

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to 20 BC, Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences. Zanker offers exciting new interpretations by closely comparing poetry and art for the light each sheds on the other.

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the Romans' defeat of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences.Zanker's exciting new interpretations closely compare poetry and art for the light each sheds on the other. He finds, for example, an exuberant expansion of subject matter in the Hellenistic periods in both literature and art, as styles and iconographic traditions reserved for grander concepts in earlier eras were applied to themes, motifs, and subjects that were emphatically less grand.

In The Heart of Achilles, Graham Zanker addresses the task of reconstructing the ethical thought-world in which the characters of the Iliad live and move. It is only against this background, Zanker argues, that we can convincingly place the ethical status of the heroes and their actions. This in turn helps us to form a comprehensive view of the Iliad'scharacterization of its people, especially that of Achilles, by examining all his responses to the question of allegiance, the value of heroic prowess, and of life itself."[Zanker] investigates altruistic behavior in the epic with professional sophistication but in a way that makes his investigation available to a wide audience from undergraduates to advanced scholars. . . . [A] very useful interpretative study." --ChoiceGraham Zanker is Senior Lecturer in Classics, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Before the publication of the second-century AD papyrus containing eight and a fragmentary ninth of the Mimiambs of Herodas in 1891, Herodas was known only through approximately twenty lines which had survived in quotations found principally in Athenaios and Stobaios. Even after the publication of the papyrus and subsequent work on it, scarcely anything is known of their author. The scant evidence that has survived suggests that he lived in during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphos (285-247 BC), on the island of Kos, and was a direct contemporary of the greatest of the Hellenistic poets, Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius. His Mimiambs are short humorous dramatic scenes written in verse, often bawdy, reflecting everyday life and dialect.In this Aris & Phillips Classical Text , Graham Zanker explores what we do know of the poet including the language, dialect and metre that he uses. Each poem is translated and accompanied by an individual commentary with synopsis, information on date, setting, sources and purpose, as well as close examination of vocabulary and grammar. This edition reveals Herodas' work in all its skill and subtlety.

This book explores how Virgil in his Aeneid incorporates the ancient Stoics' thinking about how humans can exercise moral responsibility and how this can affect providential world fate. The third-century BC philosopher Chrysippus of Soli located this freedom in the way we can assent to courses of action, and Graham Zanker innovatively demonstrates how Virgil appropriates this concept in the way that Jupiter and Aeneas can assent to the world fate in which they have discovered they must play a part, or Juno and Dido can withhold their assent to it. Indeed, Virgil even offers the model to no-one less than Augustus: the emperor is invited to give his assent to ruling what was believed to be his 'world-wide' empire justly. The book is accessible to both students and professional scholars of the Aeneid, with all Greek and Latin translated into idiomatic English.

The poetry of Alexandria under the first three Ptolemies represents a second golden age of Greek literature. The eminence grise of poetic circles was Callimachus, whose poetic manifesto in favour of small scale, meticulously detailed and mannered works was to be of great influence on Augustan poetry in Rome. The stylistic aims of the Alexandrian poets have been much discussed, as has their reliance on literary tradition.First published in 1987, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry covers less familiar ground. Taking the whole canon of Alexandrian poetry as his starting point, Dr Zanker surveys the use of the realistic mode in works like The Idylls of Theocritus (were these real shepherds?), including such matters as the humorous elements of Callimachus Hymns, the love-story in Apollonius’ ‘Argonautica’, and the low-life sketches of epyllia like Hecale as well as the Mimes of Herodas. The striving for realism and minute detail is set in the context of the admiration of pictorialism in the plastic arts, the new valuation of science as a measure of human experience, and the deliberate mingling of high and low genres. All this is in turn placed in the cultural context of early Alexandria. Few books take the whole of Alexandrian poetry as their canvas. This one which does will be as valuable a study of the Alexandrian poets as it will be a forceful contribution to literary criticism.