Peter Bing – författare

While people of previous ages relied on public performance as their chief means of experiencing poetry, the Hellenistic age developed what one may term a culture of reading. This was the first era in which poets consciously shaped their works with an eye toward publication and reception not just on the civic stage but in several media---in performance, on inscribed monuments, in scrolls. The essays in Peter Bing''s collection explore how poetry accommodated various audiences and how these audiences in turn experienced the text in diverse ways. Over the years, Bing''s essays have focused on certain Hellenistic authors and genres---particularly on Callimachus and Posidippus and on epigram. His themes, too, have been broadly consistent. Thus, although the essays in The Scroll and the Marble span some twenty years, they offer a coherent vision of Hellenistic poetics as a whole.

Peter Bing is Professor of Classics at Emory University and editor, most recently, of the Companion to Hellenistic Epigram: Down to Philip (coedited with Jon Steffen Bruss).

Jacket illustration: Film still from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, directed by Frank Capra, Columbia Pictures 1939.  Courtesy of Sony Pictures.

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.

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.