In the last decades the field of research on ancient Greek scholarship has been the object of a remarkable surge of interest, with the publication of handbooks, reference works, and new editions of texts. This partly unexpected revival is very promising and it continues to enhance and modify both our knowledge of ancient scholarship and the way in which we are accustomed to discuss these texts and tackle the editorial and exegetical challenges they pose. This volume deals with some pivotal aspects of this topic, being the outcome of a three-year project funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR) on specific aspects of the critical re-appraisal of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Aeschylus in Greek culture throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. It tackles issues such as the material form of the transmission of the exegesis from papyri to codices, the examination of hitherto unexplored branches of the manuscript evidence, the discussion of some important scholia, and the role played by the indirect tradition and the assimilation of the exegetical heritage in grammatical and lexicographical works. Some strands of the ancient and medieval scholarship are here re-evaluated afresh by adopting an interdisciplinary methodology which blends modern editorial techniques developed for ‘problematic’ or ‘non-authorial’ medieval texts with current trends in the history of philology and literary criticism. In their diversity of subject matter and approach the papers collected in the volume give intended readers an excellent overview of the topics of the project.

In the last decades the field of research on ancient Greek scholarship has been the object of a remarkable surge of interest, with the publication of handbooks, reference works, and new editions of texts. This partly unexpected revival is very promising and it continues to enhance and modify both our knowledge of ancient scholarship and the way in which we are accustomed to discuss these texts and tackle the editorial and exegetical challenges they pose. This volume deals with some pivotal aspects of this topic, being the outcome of a three-year project funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR) on specific aspects of the critical re-appraisal of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Aeschylus in Greek culture throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. It tackles issues such as the material form of the transmission of the exegesis from papyri to codices, the examination of hitherto unexplored branches of the manuscript evidence, the discussion of some important scholia, and the role played by the indirect tradition and the assimilation of the exegetical heritage in grammatical and lexicographical works. Some strands of the ancient and medieval scholarship are here re-evaluated afresh by adopting an interdisciplinary methodology which blends modern editorial techniques developed for ‘problematic’ or ‘non-authorial’ medieval texts with current trends in the history of philology and literary criticism. In their diversity of subject matter and approach the papers collected in the volume give intended readers an excellent overview of the topics of the project.

“A handy introduction to some of the more useful methodological approaches to and the previous scholarship on the subject of Greek myths.” —Phoenix Since the first edition of Approaches to Greek Myth was published in 1990, interest in Greek mythology has surged. There was no simple agreement on the subject of “myth” in classical antiquity, and there remains none today. Is myth a narrative or a performance? Can myth be separated from its context? What did myths mean to ancient Greeks and what do they mean today? Here, Lowell Edmunds brings together practitioners of eight of the most important contemporary approaches to the subject. Whether exploring myth from a historical, comparative, or theoretical perspective, each contributor lucidly describes a particular approach, applies it to one or more myths, and reflects on what the approach yields that others do not. Edmunds’s new general and chapter-level introductions recontextualize these essays and also touch on recent developments in scholarship in the interpretation of Greek myth. Contributors are Jordi Pàmias, on the reception of Greek myth through history; H. S. Versnel, on the intersections of myth and ritual; Carolina López-Ruiz, on the near Eastern contexts; Joseph Falaky Nagy, on Indo-European structure in Greek myth; William Hansen, on myth and folklore; Claude Calame, on the application of semiotic theory of narrative; Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, on reading visual sources such as vase paintings; and Robert A. Segal, on psychoanalytic interpretations. “A valuable collection of eight essays . . . Edmunds’s book provides a convenient opportunity to grapple with the current methodologies used in the analysis of literature and myth.” —New England Classical Newsletter and Journal

In this subtle, learned, and daring book, Claude Calame subverts common assumptions about the relationships between poet and audience, challenging his readers to rethink the very principles of mythmaking in the poetry and art of the ancient Greeks.

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetryforegrounds innovative approaches to the question of genre, what it means, and how to think about it for ancient Greek poetry and performance. Embracing multiple definitions of genre and lyric, the volume pushes beyond current dominant trends within the field of Classics to engage with a variety of other disciplines, theories, and models. Eleven papers by leading scholars of ancient Greek culture cover a wide range of media, from Sappho's songs to elegiac inscriptions to classical tragedy. Collectively, they develop a more holistic understanding of the concept of lyric genre, its relevance to the study of ancient texts, and its relation to subsequent ideas about lyric.

In The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext, a team of international scholars consider the afterlife of early Greek lyric poetry (iambic, elegiac, and melic) up to the 12th century CE, from a variety of intersecting perspectives: reperformance, textualization, the direct and indirect tradition, anthologies, poets’ Lives, and the disquisitions of philosophers and scholars. Particular attention is given to the poets Tyrtaeus, Solon, Theognis, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Pindar, and Timotheus. Consideration is given to their reception in authors such as Aristophanes, Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, Athenaeus, Aelius Aristides, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and Statius, as well as their discussion by Peripatetic scholars, the Hellenistic scholia to Pindar, Horace’s commentator Porphyrio, and Eustathius on Pindar.

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events'. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems' formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece examines how Greek men presented themselves and their social groups to one another. The author examines identity rhetoric in sympotic lyric: how Greek poets constructed images of self for their groups, focusing in turn on the construction of identity in martial-themed poetry, the protection of group identities in the face of political exile, and the negotiation between individual and group as seen in political lyric. By conducting a close reading of six poems and then a broad survey of martial lyric, exile poetry, political lyric, and sympotic lyric as a whole, Jessica Romney demonstrates that sympotic lyric focuses on the same basic behaviors and values to construct social identities regardless of the content or subgenre of the poems in question. The volume also argues that the performance of identity depends on the context as well as the material of performance. Furthermore, the book demonstrates that sympotic lyric overwhelmingly prefers to use identity rhetoric that insists on the inherent sameness of group members. All non-English text and quotes are translated, with the original languages given alongside the translation or in the endnotes.

Called variously the ’Byzantine epic’, the ’epic of Modern Greece’, an ’epic-romance’ and ’romance’, the poem of Digenes Akrites has, since its rediscovery towards the end of the nineteenth century, exerted a tenacious hold on the imagination of scholars from a wide range of disciplines and from many countries of the world, as well as of writers and public figures in Greece. There are many reasons for this, not least among them the prestige accorded to ’national epics’ in the nineteenth century and for some time afterwards. Another reason must surely be the work’s uniqueness: there is nothing quite like Digenes Akrites in either Byzantine or Modern Greek literature. However, this uniqueness is not confined to its problematic place in the literary ’canon’ and literary history. As historical testimony, and in its complex relationship to later oral song and to older myth and story-telling, Digenes Akrites again has no close parallels of comparable length in Byzantine or Modern Greek culture. Whether as a literary text, a historical source, or a manifestation of an oral popular culture, Digenes Akrites remains, more than a century after its rediscovery, persistently enigmatic. This Byzantine ’epic’ or ’romance’ has now become the focus of new research across a range of disciplines since the publication in 1985 of a radically revised edition based on the Escorial text of the poem, by Stylianos Alexiou. The papers in this volume, derived from a conference held in May 1992 at King’s College London, seeks to present and discuss the results of this new research. Digenes Akrites: New Approaches to Byzantine Heroic Poetry is the second in the series published by Variorum for the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London.