Stuart Douglas Olson – författare

The Prolegomena provide an introduction to the Basler Iliad commentary. The volume includes essays on the history of Iliad commentaries and the text, formulaic language and the oral tradition, grammar, meter, characters, plot and chronological structure, narrative technique, and developments in Homeric criticism, as well as an Index of Mycenaean words with brief explanations.

This commentary on the 6th book of the Iliad concentrates on the interpretation of two episodes which have received a great deal of scholarly attention: the encounter between Diomedes and Glaukos, which surprisingly ends with an exchange of weapons and not a duel, and the series of scenes ‘Hector in Troy’, which reveal the hero’s conflicting roles as defender of the city and father of his family.

Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists (The Learned Banqueters) is a major Imperial period Greek text in and of itself, but also a source of thousands of fragments by hundreds of authors, many of whom would otherwise be entirely unknown to us. This is the first full new critical edition of the text since that of Georg Kaibel well over a hundred years ago. Kaibel’s text is outdated in many ways, including the fact that he undervalued the Epitome manuscripts, which he thought had no independent significance for the constitution of the text. The new edition is based on a full collation of the manuscripts, including not just Venetus Marcianus 447 (A, the sole surviving witness to the complete text) and the various Epitome manuscripts, but also a number of 15th-century hybrid versions of Athenaeus already known in Kaibel’s time but ignored by him. Systematic review of the latter set of manuscripts, as well as of early editions also ignored by Kaibel, has allowed numerous conjectures to be reassigned, radically altering our sense of the Early Modern history of the text. A separate, parallel edition of the Epitome is also included. This now becomes the standard text of the Deipnosophistae and a basic reference work.

Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists (The Learned Banqueters) is a major Imperial period Greek text in and of itself, but also a source of thousands of fragments by hundreds of authors, many of whom would otherwise be entirely unknown to us. This is the first full new critical edition of the text since that of Georg Kaibel well over a hundred years ago. Kaibel’s text is outdated in many ways, including the fact that he undervalued the Epitome manuscripts, which he thought had no independent significance for the constitution of the text. The new edition is based on a full collation of the manuscripts, including not just Venetus Marcianus 447 (A, the sole surviving witness to the complete text) and the various Epitome manuscripts, but also a number of 15th-century hybrid versions of Athenaeus already known in Kaibel’s time but ignored by him. Systematic review of the latter set of manuscripts, as well as of early editions also ignored by Kaibel, has allowed numerous conjectures to be reassigned, radically altering our sense of the Early Modern history of the text. A separate, parallel edition of the Epitome is also included. This now becomes the standard text of the Deipnosophistae and a basic reference work.

The renowned Basler Homer-Kommentar of the Iliad, edited by Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz and originally published in German, presents the latest developments in Homeric scholarship. Through the English translation of this ground-breaking reference work, edited by S. Douglas Olson, its valuable findings are now made accessible to students and scholars worldwide.

Our knowledge of the ancient theatre is limited by the textual and iconographic character of the evidence available to us: we cannot watch or otherwise experience an Athenian tragedy or comedy. These essays, by a distinguished group of international scholars, bridge the gap between the surviving literary and iconographic evidence and the realities of performance on the ancient Greek stage. This ambitious goal is reached by means of a detailed examination of several case-studies: the construction of dramatic space in Sophocles’ Antigone; the significance of the use of deictic pronouns in Sophocles’ Trachiniae; the theatrical and religious dynamics of the appearance of divine figures on stage; the relationship between the victory celebrations at the end of Aristophanic comedies and their counterparts in the after-performance real world; the investigation of nude or semi-nude female characters in Aristophanes; the staging of Clouds and the opening scene of Acharnians; the meditation on the metapoetics of the use of props in 5th-century comedy; the relationship between performance context and text through a close reading of a number of Aristophanic fragments; the way the scholia vetera on Frogs imagine and use questions of staging practice; and the potential Aeschylean authorship of some of stage-direction traceable in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Diktoulkoi.

The renowned Basler Homer-Kommentar of the Iliad, edited by Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz and originally published in German, presents the latest developments in Homeric scholarship. Through the English translation of this ground-breaking reference work, edited by S. Douglas Olson, its valuable findings are now made accessible to students and scholars worldwide.

Our knowledge of the ancient theatre is limited by the textual and iconographic character of the evidence available to us: we cannot watch or otherwise experience an Athenian tragedy or comedy. These essays, by a distinguished group of international scholars, bridge the gap between the surviving literary and iconographic evidence and the realities of performance on the ancient Greek stage. This ambitious goal is reached by means of a detailed examination of several case-studies: the construction of dramatic space in Sophocles’ Antigone; the significance of the use of deictic pronouns in Sophocles’ Trachiniae; the theatrical and religious dynamics of the appearance of divine figures on stage; the relationship between the victory celebrations at the end of Aristophanic comedies and their counterparts in the after-performance real world; the investigation of nude or semi-nude female characters in Aristophanes; the staging of Clouds and the opening scene of Acharnians; the meditation on the metapoetics of the use of props in 5th-century comedy; the relationship between performance context and text through a close reading of a number of Aristophanic fragments; the way the scholia vetera on Frogs imagine and use questions of staging practice; and the potential Aeschylean authorship of some of stage-direction traceable in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Diktoulkoi.