Luigi Battezzato – författare

Hecuba was the most widely read play of Euripides from antiquity to the Renaissance, appealing to readers and spectators for its controversial treatment of moral themes: revenge, war and slavery, violence, human sacrifice, gender and ethnic relations. It narrates the death of Hecuba's daughter Polyxena, sacrificed by the Greeks to placate the ghost of Achilles, and that of her son Polydorus, killed out of greed by the Thracian king who was supposed to protect him. Hecuba successfully plots a cruel and shocking revenge against the killer. The play is now at the centre of the attention of scholars and performing artists. This edition offers new textual and interpretive suggestions, and provides detailed guidance on problems of language as well as employing conceptual tools from contemporary linguistics. It will be useful for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, as well as of interest to scholars.

Hecuba was the most widely read play of Euripides from antiquity to the Renaissance, appealing to readers and spectators for its controversial treatment of moral themes: revenge, war and slavery, violence, human sacrifice, gender and ethnic relations. It narrates the death of Hecuba's daughter Polyxena, sacrificed by the Greeks to placate the ghost of Achilles, and that of her son Polydorus, killed out of greed by the Thracian king who was supposed to protect him. Hecuba successfully plots a cruel and shocking revenge against the killer. The play is now at the centre of the attention of scholars and performing artists. This edition offers new textual and interpretive suggestions, and provides detailed guidance on problems of language as well as employing conceptual tools from contemporary linguistics. It will be useful for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, as well as of interest to scholars.

In this book, Luigi Battezzato argues that Homer's poem is a tightly woven narrative of motives, misreadings, and reversals. Bringing cognitive 'mind-reading' into dialogue with ancient scholia and close attention to the text, he shows how Achilles, Hector, and Zeus pursue honour and care - yet, through failures of communication, achieve the opposite. The book reframes Zeus's 'plan', the Embassy to Achilles, and Hector's fatal choices as examples of Aristotelian peripeteia, or reversal, grounded in human (and divine) fallibility rather than simple fate. Two chapters examine anger and gender, tracing how the poem stages women's constrained speech and how ancient critics policed it, while one of the appendices dismantles the modern myth of a Homeric 'heroic code'. Clear, compact, and argumentative, the book offers students, scholars, and curious readers a new way to follow the plot and to hear Homer's characters think. In order to ensure a wide readership, all Greek texts have been translated.