Classical Continuum – serie

In Ancient Greek Heroes, Athletes, Poetry, Gregory Nagy continues where The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours left off. This book is also centered on some of the greatest masterpieces of ancient Greek literature—including the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey and seven tragedies stemming from the grand masters of the Classical Age of Athens. It returns to the same grand era and then moves beyond, in both time and space, with a new emphasis: how did the heroes of ancient Greek poetry relate to athletes, female as well as male, who competed in the athletic festivals of ancient Greece? A primary point of interest here is the seasonally recurring festival of the ancient Olympics, notionally founded by the hero Herakles.

Classical reception has always implied a parenthetical relationship insofar as Antiquity appears to be inserted into (en) while remaining alongside (para) Modernity. As in any parenthetical statement, the ancient source can be said to be a part of and apart from modern revisions and reworkings, recontextualizations and reorientations, belonging to a present discourse by maintaining its status beyond it. Through this rhetorical figure, Without Within broaches fresh questions and offers new lines of inquiry in the ever-growing and disparate field of Reception Studies, a field that itself continues to occupy an intriguingly ambivalent position within Classical Studies overall: simultaneously inside and outside, profane and sacred, an included exclusion.As Quintilian defines it, a parenthesis is a figure of thought (figura sententiae) that occurs “when some thought in the middle interrupts [intervenit] the continuation of a discourse” (Inst. orat. 9, 3.23). In modern typography, this interruption or intervention is generally marked by brackets which introduce a further element of difference or heteronomy vis-à-vis the body of the text. As for specific cases of classical reception, a contrast is thereby staged between the essence of the ancient material and its modern purpose, between the what-is and the what-for. By investigating a series of exemplary instances of reception across several epochs, languages, and cultures, Hamilton aims to delineate and assess the varying contours of Antiquity’s challenge to Modernity and vice versa. What strategies of inclusion and exclusion are operative, and how might they be evaluated? What are the theoretical implications of considering the received past as both external and internal to the present day? How might we qualify the disruption and/or relevance of the past in modern contexts?

Beginning Again with the Classical Orders reconsiders well-established understandings of the Corinthian, Doric, and Ionic architectural orders that emerged during the Archaic and Classical periods in ancient Greece. The orders were significant not only in architecture, but also in myth and ritual, cosmology, and philosophical thought, informed by the ancient Greeks’ relation to nature as kosmos, “orderly, harmonious arrangement.” Antonios Thodis looks at uses of the orders in temples and material remains as well as in ancient literature, showing their relationship to practical affairs and cultural practices such as the hōrai, “hours and seasons,” dikē, “justice,” and temenos, “sacred space.” The orders were compatible and complementary, tied through the overarching theme of seasonality.

Time, Tripods, Textiles, and Trees focuses on metaphorical and metonymical elements in key episodes and passages of the Odyssey to better understand the architecture of the epic and its causation. Beginning with an investigation of the trees gifted by Laertes to Odysseus and moving to the reunion of father and son in Book 24, Aldo Bottino combines cognitive science and discourse studies, along with oral poetics frameworks developed by Parry-Lord, Gregory Nagy, and Douglas Frame, to offer a new interpretation of the imaginative devices at the core of crucial episodes in Homer’s poem.

Grammatika vases, one of the most distinctive varieties of Hellenistic relief pottery, present modern scholars with compelling research opportunities, as they document the reception of ancient Greek literature in the Hellenistic world in various ways. Focusing on the group of grammatika vases that feature citations, By Heart or From the Scroll offers new insights into the archaeological material within its broader literary and historical contexts.This study is based on a collection of six vases—two Boeotian bowls and four Macedonian fragments—all of which depict scenes inspired by Book 22 of the Odyssey, detailing the slaughter of the suitors by Odysseus. These vases provide a direct glimpse into the transmission of the ancient text within a particularly intriguing—and in some cases well-dated—archaeological context, establishing a reference point for other vases of the same category. The thorough examination of the script used in the citations, coupled with its juxtaposition to the epigraphic and calligraphic literary scripts found on contemporary papyri, reveals a remarkable correspondence and offers a key to understanding this type of pottery, shedding light on the people behind its production and use.Drawing on both archaeological and epigraphic evidence, and guided by Athenaeus’ testimony regarding Dionysius Thrax and his silver Νεστορίς, this interdisciplinary approach provides a novel interpretation of the literary sources cited on these grammatika vases and a reliable terminus post quem for dating excavation efforts in Macedonia and beyond.