Patricia A. Rosenmeyer

Chapter INTRODUCTION -- chapter 1 CLASSICAL GREEK LITERARY LETTERS -- chapter 2 HELLENISTIC LITERARY LETTERS -- chapter 3 Letters and prose fictions of the Second Sophistic -- chapter 4 THE EPISTOLARY NOVELLA -- chapter 5 PSEUDO-HISTORICAL LETTER COLLECTIONS OF THE SECOND SOPHISTIC -- chapter 6 INVENTED CORRESPONDENCES, IMAGINARY VOICES.

Selections in Translation

Ancient Greek Literary Letters

The first referenece to letter writing occurs in the first text of western literature, Homer's Iliad. From the very beginning, Greeks were enthusiastic letter writers, and letter writing became a distinct literary genre. Letters were included in the works of historians but they also formed the basis of works of fiction, and the formal substructure for many kinds of poem. Patricia Rosenmeyer, an authority on the history of the Greek letter, assembles in this book a representative selection of such 'literary letters', from Aelian and Alciphron to Philostrartus and the supposed letters of Themistocles. The book will be valuable for all students of Greek literature especially those studying Greek (and Latin) letter.

Anacreon

Western literature knows the anacreontic poems best in the translations or adaptations of such poets as Ronsard, Herrick and Goethe. This collection of poems, once assumed to be the work of Anacreon himself, was considered unworthy of serious attention after the poems were proved to be late Hellenistic and early Roman imitations by anonymous writers. This full-length treatment of the anacreontic corpus, first published in 1992, explores the complex poetics of imitation which inspired anacreontic composition for so many centuries in antiquity. The author reassesses Anacreon's own oeuvre, and then discusses the system of selective imitation practised by the anacreontic poets. The book explores what light the corpus can shed on ancient literary genres, intertextual influences, and the literary manifestations of symposiastic and erotic ideals in a post-classical society which looks back to an archaic model as its guiding force.A full translation of the anacreontic collection is included as an appendix and all Greek and Latin is translated.

Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition

The Poetics of Imitation

A comprehensive look at the use of imaginary letters in Greek literature, first published in 2001.

The Letter in Greek Literature

Ancient Epistolary Fictions

A colossal statue, originally built to honor an ancient pharaoh, still stands today in Egyptian Thebes, with more than a hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions covering its lower surfaces. Partially damaged by an earthquake, and later re-identified as the Homeric hero Memnon, it was believed to "speak" regularly at daybreak. By the middle of the first century CE, tourists flocked to the colossus of Memnon to hear the miraculous sound, and left behind their marks of devotion (proskynemata): brief acknowledgments of having heard Memnon's cry; longer lists by Roman administrators; and more elaborate elegiac verses by both amateur and professional poets. The inscribed names left behind reveal the presence of emperors and soldiers, provincial governors and businessmen, elite women and military wives, and families with children. While recent studies of imperial literature acknowledge the colossus, few address the inscriptions themselves. This book is the first critical assessment of all the inscriptions considered in their social, cultural, and historical context. The Memnon colossus functioned as a powerful site of engagement with the Greek past, and appealed to a broad segment of society. The inscriptions shed light on contemporary attitudes toward sacred tourism, the role of Egypt in the Greco-Roman imagination, and the cultural legacy of Homeric epic. Memnon is a ghost from the Homeric past anchored in the Egyptian present, and visitors yearned for a "close encounter" that would connect them with that distant past. The inscriptions thus idealize Greece by echoing archaic literature in their verses at the same time as they reflect their own historical horizon. These and other subjects are expertly explored in the book, including a fascinating chapter on the colossus's post-classical life when the statue finds new worshippers among Romantic artists and poets in nineteenth-century Europe.

Patricia A. Rosenmeyer

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