This is the first book to give an introduction to all genres of early Greek hexameter poetry; not only heroic legend and the origins of the gods, but also wisdom literature, genealogy, oracles, and epigraphy. It introduces both apprentice and expert readers to the extant poems and to the fragments of some lost poems. Some useful tools can be found here which do not exist anywhere else: a list of all known early hexameter inscriptions; a catalogue of evidence for 'cropping and splicing' of poems in ancient editions; an index of the editions of over a hundred fragmentary poets and poems. This book offers the most up-to-date research on literary criticism and literary form, mythology and genre, language and metre, and performance and music.

The first study to examine the role and character of Homer's people in Homeric story-telling.

A fresh and wide-ranging exploration across the whole of early Greek hexameter poetry, focusing on issues of poetics and metapoetics.

This book should be of interest to classicists and to specialists in literary theory in departments of English, Linguistics and Comparative Literature.

This book explores the representation of the gods in Greek hexameter poetry in its many forms, including epic, hymnic and didactic poetry, from the archaic period to late antiquity. Its twenty-five chapters, written by an international team of experts, trace a broad historical arc, reflecting developments in religious thought and practice, and ongoing philosophical and literary-critical engagement with the nature and representation of the divine and the relationship between humans and gods. They proceed from the poems ascribed to Hesiod and Homer and the so-called Cyclic epics, via the Hellenistic poets Apollonius, Callimachus, Aratus and Moschus, to the poets and poems of the third to sixth centuries CE, including Quintus of Smyrna, Triphiodorus, the Cynegetica, Nonnus, Eudocia, Colluthus, the Argonautica of Orpheus and the Sibylline Oracles. An epilogue explores the reception of the Greek "epic" gods by the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid, and by the English poets Tennyson, Walcott and Oswald.

Looks in detail at a series of 44 verses inscribed on a recently discovered lead tablet from 5th century BC Sicily. This the first complete critical edition of the Greek text to appear in print.

This book investigates the relative chronology of early Greek poetry through linguistic and literary analyses of the texts themselves.

A new interpretation of sacrifice based on Greek myth and poetics in conjunction with recent research in anthropology.