Böcker i Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches-serien

First published in 1974, this is a generic and diachronic study of learned and popular lament and its socio-cultural contexts throughout Greek tradition, and a variety of sources are integrated to offer a comprehensive synthesis. This edition includes an updated bibliography.

In this study, Marian Demos seeks to demonstrate the significance of three famous lyric quotations within their respective contexts in the dialogues of Plato. These passages include the Simonides poem in the "Protagoras" and the misquotation of Pindar in the "Gorgias".

This study represents a radical rethinking of traditional distinctions involving the term "religion" in the ancient Greek world and beyond, through late antiquity to the 17th century, and promotes the fluidity of such concepts as religion and magic.

An examination of Sophocles' "Antigone" in the context of its setting in 5th-century Athens. The authors attempt to create an interpretive environment that is true to the issues and interests of 5th-century Athenians, as opposed to those of modern scholars and philosophers.

The Philosopher's Song is a full-length treatment of Plato and the dynamic course of his philosophical thought, regarded from a distinctly poetic point of view. Kevin Crotty demonstrates how Plato's invention of philosophy needs to be situated within the context of a society where poets were cultural authorities, whose teachings emphasized such tragic themes as the instability of things and the indeterminacy of moral terms. The interest of Plato's philosophy lies to a great extent in the compelling interest of what he sought to repress-the poetic and political heritage of a world tragically conceived. Plato's attacks on the poets are notorious. Despite his apparently frank hostility, however, his relation to the poets was exceedingly complex, argues Crotty. Even the banishment of the poets in the Republic turns out to be, more deeply, a recruitment of mimetic poetry for Plato's metaphysics. Once endowed with a metaphysical significance, however, the poets posed a serious challenge to Platonic idealism, and spurred Plato to revise considerably his metaphysical scheme. Crotty ultimately concludes that the views of politics and ethics in Plato's later works return in many ways to the insights of the poets.

This collection of essays examines the linguistic and rhetorical features of Homer's work. Arguing that there can be no purely historical interpretation, Pucci focuses on two features of Homer's rhetoric - repetition of expression and its effects on meaning, and the issue of intertexuality.

This study is an interpretation of the choices the tragedians made in regard to certain forms of standardized variations in word order and prosody. Those choices were made in response to the competing demands of metrical constrain and the poets' sense of what was stylistically appropriate for tragic trimeters.

This book explores the ramifications of understanding the similarities and differences between the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles and realistic Japanese noh. First, it looks at the relationship of Aristotle's definition of tragedy to the tragedies he favored. Next, his definition is applied to realistic noh, in order to show how they do and do not conform to his definition. In the third and fourth chapters, the focus moves to those junctures in the dramas that Aristotle considered crucial to a complex plot - recognitions and sudden reversals -, and shows how they are presented in performance. Chapter 3 examines the climactic moments of realistic noh and demonstrates that it is at precisely these moments that a third actor becomes involved in the dialogue or that an actor in various ways steps out of character. Chapter 4 explores how plays by Euripides and Sophocles deal with critical turns in the plot, as Aristotle defined it. It is not by an actor stepping out of character, but by the playwright's involvement of the third actor in the dialogue. The argument of this book reveals a similar symbiosis between plot and performance in both dramatic forms. By looking at noh through the lens of Aristotle and two Greek tragedies that he favored, the book uncovers first an Aristotelian plot structure in realistic noh and the relationship between the crucial points in the plot and its performance; and on the Greek side, looking at the tragedies through the lens of noh suggests a hitherto unnoticed relationship between the structure of the tragedies and their performance, that is, the involvement of the third actor at the climactic moments of the plot. This observation helps to account for Aristotle's view that tragedy be limited to three actors.

In 'The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis', Becker explores how Homeric poetry shapes its own reception: how Homer's reaction to a visual image creates his audience's response to a literary description. Becker also enters into a fiercely raging literary debate about the modernist, self-conscious elements of Homeric narrative.