Peter Bing - Böcker

Recent attacks on contemporary art have portrayed the erotic content of works by Robert Mapplethorpe and others as if it were a deviation from the Western artistic tradition. On the contrary, there is a rich tradition of eroticism in the arts beginning with the erotic verse of ancient Greek and Roman poets.Games of Venus, the first comprehensive anthology in English of ancient Greek and Roman erotic verse, revives this tradition for the modern reader.Games of Venus presents the whole spectrum of erotic poetry from Sappho to Ovid in translations which evoke the full range of styles and tones present in the original Greek and Latin.Brief biographical sketches accompany the work of each poet as do notes referring to the myths, geography, historical events, personages, and sexual and social customs mentioned in the verse.

Tradition and originality, the interplay of present and past, are a concern of poets in any age. Peter Bing's seminal monograph, The Well-Read Muse: Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets, chases this idea through the thickets of Hellenistic poetry and particularly among the lines of Callimachus' Hymn to Delos. In this carefully argued and stimulating study, the author investigates the era in which the written work - the book - superseded the assumption of oral composition and performance. In this and in other respects, as this study demonstrates, Hellenistic poets saw themselves as now being part of a new world, remote from the great genres and achievements of the earlier literary tradition. That sense of distance from the past gave authors freedom to experiment. At the same time, it incited them to view their poetic heritage as something deserving intense scholarly study. The author examines one fundamental result of this attitude, the Hellenistic tendency toward learned allusion, and what this meant to a period pursuing a different literary approach. The Well-Read Muse concludes with an analysis of Callimachus' Hymn to Delos as a paradigmatic instance of the play between present and past, tradition and originality that typified the age. Here the author sheds important light on the poet's choice not to make Apollo his theme, as his models had, but to focus rather on the diminutive, slender island, through which the god of song was born. Accompanied by a new Introduction by the author and corrections to the text and notes, as well as by an extensive bibliography and indices of passages and subjects discussed, The Well-Read Muse provides an important understanding of this turning point in Greek poetical development. There was no escaping the new world of which these poets were a part: Peter Bing's impressive work examines the ways in which poets confronted this new reality.

Recent attacks on contemporary art have portrayed the erotic content of works by Robert Mapplethorpe and others as if it were a deviation from the Western artistic tradition. On the contrary, there is a rich tradition of eroticism in the arts beginning with the erotic verse of ancient Greek and Roman poets.Games of Venus, the first comprehensive anthology in English of ancient Greek and Roman erotic verse, revives this tradition for the modern reader. Itpresents the whole spectrum of erotic poetry from Sappho to Ovid in translations which evoke the full range of styles and tones present in the original Greek and Latin.Brief biographical sketches accompany the work of each poet as do notes referring to the myths, geography, historical events, personages, and sexual and social customs mentioned in the verse.