{"title":"Epigrammatic Variations/Debate on the Theme of Cybele’s Music","authors":"Marco Fantuzzi","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198836827.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198836827.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on a cluster of epigrams connected with Cybele’s cult and her priests and priestesses, in particular her galli (emasculated priests). In most of these poems, the galli make a dedication to Cybele that is related to the restraining of a lion in a cave through music typical of the goddess’ orgiastic rites. The chapter examines the relation of the epigrams to Catullus 63, which intriguingly comes before a string of negative or indignant portrayals of Cybele’s galli in imperial Rome and after critical remarks on the lack of control caused by her music in various literary sources. The chapter argues that Catullus reversed the motif of the lion’s encounter with the gallus in the cave, which was used in several epigrams to offer a defensive or eulogistic presentation of Cybele’s cult, in order to express an opposing position.","PeriodicalId":296664,"journal":{"name":"Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133038428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Epigrams on the Persian Wars","authors":"F. Giommoni","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0016","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the use of literary epigrams as a vehicle for promoting a victorious image of emperors and for spreading political ideologies through the use of traditional symbols of Greek supremacy and victory over the Persians. The chapter argues that Hellenistic epigrams recall the victories of Alexander the Great against the Persians in order to cast the same light on the Ptolemies, while in Agathias’ Cycle legendary episodes concerning the Battle of Marathon and its heroes construct a triumphant image of Justinian against the Sassanians and contribute to his representation as the ultimate heir of the celebrated Greek past.","PeriodicalId":296664,"journal":{"name":"Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122278529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mythological Burlesque and Satire in Greek Epigram—A Case Study","authors":"Kanellou Maria","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 15 acts as a connecting link between the last two parts, since, by taking as its case study Zeus’ love affair with Danae, it investigates the diachronic usage, in epigrams, of mythological burlesque for mockery turned against human and divine targets. After exploring the use of burlesque in mythological comedies that lampooned Zeus’ affair with Danae, the chapter turns to examine the adaptation of the myth and the refiguration of relevant techniques and motifs in the work of the epigrammatists. The analysis of selected poems reveals the skoptic dimension of epigrams categorized as erotic. The chapter finds that no hermeneutically sealed boundaries existed between the two subgenres.","PeriodicalId":296664,"journal":{"name":"Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115877429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Greek Skoptic Epigram, Ecphrasis, and the Visual Arts","authors":"L. Floridi","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 18 explores the interaction of skoptic epigram with the ecphrastic subgenre and the visual arts. It argues that skoptic epigram satirizes unskilled artists or the subject of their works of art, reversing ecphrastic topoi; sometimes motifs and devices closely tied with specific works of art or iconographic motifs are adapted, altering the role that they hold in ecphrastic models. In spite of its jocular character, skoptic epigram thus elicits the same kind of response prompted by an actual ecphrastic epigram, since it implicitly requests its audience to supplement the poet’s words with mental images of specific iconographic models. Such a visualisation serves the purpose of enhancing the effect of the joke.","PeriodicalId":296664,"journal":{"name":"Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era","volume":"35 7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130780149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lessons in Reading and Ideology","authors":"A. Petrović","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 3 explores the transmission of Greek epigrams outside poetic books, that is, in compilations of texts designed to satisfy an individual’s needs and not for widespread distribution. Therefore the chapter analyses in particular the papyri with selections of and excerpts from literary texts assembled for a use on specific occasions and following personal tastes, collections used in school contexts, as well as ostraca and templates for stonemasons. The chapter detects in such Hellenistic ‘paraliterary’ contexts resonances of contemporary literary production and argues that already in the third century BCE school anthologies trained young readers in the sequential reading of epigrams and served as a means of disseminating Ptolemaic ideology.","PeriodicalId":296664,"journal":{"name":"Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131199150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sea and Land","authors":"A. Michael","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 12 examines literary sepulchral epigrams where the themes of boundaries and death are intermingled in intriguing and complex ways. The chapter illustrates how these poems bridge, strengthen, or obscure these topics, which originate in inscribed epigram in the form of separation of the dead from the living or of the body from one’s soul. As this theme develops, the boundary between sea and land emerges prominently, sometimes mapping onto, and sometimes attempting to resolve, these other separations; this theme spills out into further divisions, between flesh and bone, or between man and fish. Even epigrams seemingly unrelated, such as Agathias’s poem (AP 7.204) on a caged partridge eaten by a pet cat, can be seen as clever variations of this scheme, in a never-ending game of poetic debt and competition.","PeriodicalId":296664,"journal":{"name":"Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era","volume":"136 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131211533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘From atop a lofty wall…’","authors":"J. M. Romero","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 17 examines how poets engage with philosophers and philosophy in epigram, at times modelling and championing the views of the philosopher, at others distancing themselves sharply from their subjects. The theme is sufficiently pronounced as to constitute a thematic subgenre from Callimachus to the end of classical antiquity. Careful study is paid to individual poems representative of different periods and to the techniques most commonly employed, ‘praise’ and ‘blame’. The chapter further argues that in several epigrams poets employ the recusatio to disavow philosophy both as a genre and as a discursive medium and champion instead epigram and poetry writ large as humbler and superior discursive modes.","PeriodicalId":296664,"journal":{"name":"Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128870545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tears and Emotions in Greek Literary Epitaphs","authors":"M. Doris","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 11 examines emotions in literary epigrams that employ the motifs of grief and weeping, starting with selected funerary epigrams by Callimachus and Posidippus and concluding with subversive and renewed uses in Lucillius and Gregory of Nazianzus. The investigation is based on ancient philosophical and rhetorical theories and modern studies on emotions, including the sociocultural approach of ‘emotional history’. As a result, we can see how much Hellenistic poets were influenced by philosophical concepts of the fourth and third centuries BCE and how they reinterpreted their literary models to suit the requirements of their own times. The literary epitaphs of Lucillius, the satirist, condemn false emotions of presumptuous intellectuals in Rome during the first century CE, while the Christian epigrams of Gregory are shown to be inspired by bucolic and biblical motifs.","PeriodicalId":296664,"journal":{"name":"Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era","volume":"363 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132677787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Art, Nature, Power","authors":"S. Smith","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0020","url":null,"abstract":"This final chapter demonstrates the importance of contextualizing epigrams into the sociohistorical circumstances of their era if we want to achieve a deeper comprehension of the transformations that various motifs undergo through space and time. The chapter analyses a cluster of epigrams on imperial gardens that date from the first to the seventh century CE, and shows how these poems reflect diverse views about imperial power, aesthetics, pagan culture, and Christianity. The chapter discusses first an epigram from the Neronian era, then moves forward to late antiquity to consider a sequence of garden epigrams from the age of the Emperor Justinian (sixth century CE). The chapter concludes with an explicitly Christian garden epigram from the reign of the Emperor Heraclius (seventh century CE).","PeriodicalId":296664,"journal":{"name":"Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124766598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dreadful Eros, before and after Meleager","authors":"G. Kathryn","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198836827.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 14 exemplifies how Greek epigrams, despite their small size, develop larger topics, especially when interacting with one another in an epigrammatic series. The chapter argues, further, that Hellenistic epigrams influenced not only imperial epigram but Greek and Latin literature more generally. It examines a sequence of Meleager’s epigrams, AP 5.176–80, which represent a discourse on the nature of love. Meleager draws on Greek poetry, philosophy, and art and personalizes and focalizes earlier philosophical ideas about Eros through the lover’s figure. In turn, Meleager’s reshaping of philosophical ideas about Eros served as a model for representing the lover’s emotions in the later Greek and Latin tradition, including for Vergil, Propertius, and Ovid.","PeriodicalId":296664,"journal":{"name":"Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117010060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}