Robert L. Fowler - Böcker

This volume collects together the scattered quotations of the Greek writers of the sixth to the fourth centuries BC who first recorded in prose the tales of Greek mythology (the 'mythographers'). Volume 1 is an edition of the texts, whilst Volume 2, which provides the commentary, will follow in a couple of years' time. Here Professor Fowler presents new texts of Hekataios' Genealogies, Akousilaos, Pherekydes of Athens, the mythographical works of Hellanikos, Andron of Halikarnassos, pseudo-Epimenides, Herodoros, and many other ancient Greek mythographers. The texts are based on a fresh examination of manuscripts and papyri, particularly of the minor scholia to Homer. Read together for the first time, these texts represent an important and understudied genre of early Greek literature.

Greek mythology is known to us from various artistic and literary sources. Of the latter, the poetic sources (such as Homer and tragedy) are familiar to many readers, but the prose sources are much less so. Early Greek Mythography: Volume 2 is a detailed commentary on the texts of Early Greek Mythography: Volume 1, which provided a critical edition of the twenty-nine authors of this genre of Greek prose from the late sixth to the early fourth centuries BC. After a general introduction, this volume offers in its first part a mythological commentary on the texts, arranged according to the major topics of Greek mythology (the Trojan Cycle, Herakles, the Argonauts, etc.). The aim is to recover, so far as possible, what each writer said about the stories, with full consideration of their historical context and significance for Greek literature, mythology, and religion. The synoptic, topic-by-topic approach allows all the fragments pertinent to any given myth to be treated together, so that one can more easily identify variants and trends, and plot the history of the myth. The second part of the volume is a philological commentary on the separate authors, discussing their life, works, and contribution to the genre, as well as textual problems and non-mythological questions raised by individual fragments.

Pindar—the ‘Theban eagle’, as Thomas Gray famously called him—has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), arguably Pindar’s greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar’s odes as literature.Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar’s odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar’s astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet’s persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar’s views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.

Three important literary questions in early Greek lyrics are addressed in this study. First, Fowler attempts to determine the extent that Homer and epic poetry generally influenced the lyric poets, with respect to both the style of compositions and their content. Identifying the certain examples of influence – which are far fewer than often thought – he analyses the technique of imitation, tracing a development from simpler to more complex as the archaic period proceeds. Throughout this and the following chapter, he often finds occasion to take issue with the famous and influential view of the early Greek mind championed by Bruno Snell and Hermann Fränkel.In the second chapter Fowler studies the organization of individual poems, identifying compositional principles that may be used to solve literary and textual problems. Some of these principles, like ring-composition, are old familiars; others are not. All are found to be more pervasive than is often realized, and reflect an attitude to composition rather different from the disorderly and associative techniques traditionally ascribed to the lyrics poets.The last chapter explores the nature of genres in the archaic period, starting from the vexed question of the definition of elegy. In all the genres associated with particular occasions, the author finds that the poets' professional skills and self-consciousness became more important than the purely occasional aspects of their composition. Observations of interest are made on, among others, citharodic songs, epigrams and epinician odes; and elegy in the end turns out, paradoxically, not to be a true genre at all.

Pindar—the ‘Theban eagle’, as Thomas Gray famously called him—has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), arguably Pindar’s greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar’s odes as literature.Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar’s odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar’s astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet’s persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar’s views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.