Dirk Obbink

Christopher A. Faraone

This collection challenges the tendency among scholars of ancient Greece to see magical and religious ritual as mutually exclusive and to ignore "magical" practices in Greek religion. The contributors survey specific bodies of archaeological, epigraphical, and papyrological evidence for magical practices in the Greek world, and, in each case, determine whether the traditional dichotomy between magic and religion helps in any way to conceptualize the objective features of the evidence examined. Contributors include Christopher A. Faraone, J.H.M. Strubbe, H.S. Versnel, Roy Kotansky, John Scarborough, Samuel Eitrem, Fritz Graf, John J. Winkler, Hans Dieter Betz, and C.R. Phillips.

Ancient Greek Magic and Religion

Magika Hiera

Vanessa Cazzato

Enrico Emanuele Prodi

Contains revised versions of some papers that were presented at the Sympotic Poetry conference held at Oxford in January 2011--Cited from the Acknowledgements and https://rogueclassicism.com/2011/01/21/conf-sympotic-poetry-2/ (viewed on 12/12/1

Studies on Poetry and the Symposion

The Cup of Song

Mary Depew

The literary genres given shape by the writers of classical antiquity are central to our own thinking about the various forms literature takes. Examining those genres, the essays collected here focus on the concept and role of the author and the emergence of authorship out of performance in Greece and Rome. In a fruitful variety of ways the contributors to this volume address the questions: what generic rules were recognized and observed by the Greeks and Romans over the centuries; what competing schemes were there for classifying genres and accounting for literary change; and what role did authors play in maintaining and developing generic contexts? Their essays look at tragedy, epigram, hymns, rhapsodic poetry, history, comedy, bucolic poetry, prophecy, Augustan poetry, commentaries, didactic poetry, and works that "mix genres." The contributors bring to this analysis a wide range of expertise; they are, in addition to the editors, Glenn W. Most, Joseph Day, Ian Rutherford, Deborah Boedeker, Eric Csapo, Marco Fantuzzi, Stephanie West, Alessandro Barchiesi, Ineke Sluiter, Don Fowler, and Stephen Hinds. The essays are drawn from a colloquium at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies.

Authors, Canons, and Society

Matrices of Genre

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.

Poetry, Magic, and Mystery in Ancient Selinous

The Getty Hexameters

John Rea

Peter Parsons

N. Gonis

This volume publishes a selection of texts prepared to highlight recent work on the Oxyrhynchus Collection. Part I includes papyri of the Old and New Testaments. Part II offers Comedy Old and New: Aristophanes, a sizeable chunk of Menander's Epitrepontes and Georgos . Part III presents previously unknown Greek literature, including a new papyrus of Empedocles, a work by Thrasyllus (Tiberius' court astrologer and philosopher in residence) on the classification of Plato's dialogues, as well as Dictys of Crete's account of the Trojan War in unpretentious prose, complete with its 'author's' own subscription. These add two new papyri of the Greek original to the two already known. They show more clearly the relation of the Greek original to the Latin version, casting doubt on the status of the letter as a straightforward translation. Part IV showcases texts of previously known Greek literature of the Roman period uncommon among the papyri, while Part V presents texts at the subliterary level. On the documentary side, Part VI includes: themes of extortion in petitions; a military muster, in Latin; a letter on recovery from illness in high-flown Greek; a certified copy of a petition to a prefect, which besides its impressive format has interesting though enigmatic implications for the use of Roman Law.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri

John Fitzgerald

Glenn Holland

The fifteen essays in this volume, rooted in the work of the Hellenistic Moral Philosophy and Early Christianity Section of the SBL, examine the works of the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus and how they illuminate the cultural context of early Christianity.

Philodemus and the New Testament World

Building on recent advances in the reconstruction of the charred papyri of Philodemus of Gadara (ca. 110-40 B.C.) excavated from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, this volume presents eleven new chapters in the history of literary criticism in antiquity. The essays, written by noted scholars, treat the papyrus texts of Philodemus' treatises on poetry and the related subjects of rhetoric and music, establishing links with his Roman contemporaries Lucretius, Catullus, Horace, and Vergil. The study offers a critical survey of current trends and developments in recent scholarship on Philodemus in particular and Hellenistic literary theory in general. The volume contains a complete translation of a new text of Philodemus' On Poems book 5. Individual essays evaluate the philosophical and historical importance of these Epicurean treatises and of Philodemus as a literary theorist, as they document connections between Greek philosophy and Roman literary production in the first century B.C. The recent papyrus discoveries of Ennius, Lucretius, and Posidippus make this an especially topical volume.

Poetic Theory and Practice in Lucretius, Philodemus, and Horace

Philodemus and Poetry

The symposion is arguably the most significant and well-documented context for the performance, transmission, and criticism of archaic and classical Greek poetry, a distinction attested by its continued hold on the poetic imagination even after its demise as a performance setting. The Cup of Song explores the symbiotic relationship of poetry and the symposion throughout Greek literary history, considering the latter both as a literal performance context and as an imaginary space pregnant with social, political, and aesthetic implications. This collection of essays by an international group of leading scholars illuminates the various facets of this relationship, from Greek literature's earliest beginnings through to its afterlife in Roman poetry, ranging from the Near Eastern origins of the Greek symposion in the eighth century to Horace's evocations of his archaic models and Lucian's knowing reworking of classic texts. Each chapter discusses one aspect of sympotic engagement by key authors across the major genres of Greek poetry, including archaic and classical lyric, tragedy and comedy, and Hellenistic epigram; discussions of literary sources are complemented by analysis of the visual evidence of painted pottery. Consideration of these diverse modes and genres from the unifying perspective of their relation to the symposion leads to a characterization of the full spectrum of sympotic poetry that retains an eye to both its shared common features and the specificity of individual genres and texts.

Dirk Obbink

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