The Hero's Life Choice. Studies on Heracles at the Crossroads, the Judgement of Paris, and Their Reception

Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-90-04-67894-1
Verlag: World Bank Publications

Buch, Englisch, Band 24, 274 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 576 g

Reihe: Metaforms

Two allegorical ancient Greek stories about a young hero’s career- defining choice are shown in this book to have later been appropriated to radically differing effects. E.g. a male’s choice between female personifications can morph into a female’s choice between the same, or between various male personifications. Never before have so many instances of this process from art, literature, music, even landscape gardening, been culled. Illustrations, mainly colour, many brought into this context for the first time, are conveniently incorporated into the text, thus mimetically mirroring a central theme of the book, the process of ‘visualising the verbal, verbalising the visual.’

Autoren/Hrsg.

Davies, Malcolm

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Griechische & Byzantinische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

Preface

List of Illustrations

Editions and Translations, Restricted to Heracles at the Crossroads

Part 1: Heracles at the Crossroads

A Note on Nomenclature

1 Visual Art

Introduction

Appendix: Reynolds’ Parody Itself Parodied

Transition

A Precocious Heracles at the Crossroads

The Encounter as Dream-Vision

Heracles as Christ

Christ as Heracles

Variations on the Theme

Two Iconographically Eccentric Versions: Veronese and Dürer

Appendix: Georg Stiernhielm’s Hercules

Heracles at the Crossroads in Eighteenth-Century English Landscape Gardening

2 Music

Appendix: The Illustrations to Metastasio’s Libretto for Alcide Al Bivio

3 Literature and Drama

Prodicus and The Judgement of Paris

Appendix: DE SILENO ET CHROMI ET MNASYLO

4 Pleasure and Virtue Reconciled

Appendix: Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House

5 Parody and Pastiche

Final Reflections on Prodicus’ Heracles at the Crossroads

Appendix: Panofsky’s Hercules Am Scheidewege

Endnote: The Absence of Visual Depictions of Heracles at the Crossroads from Antiquity

Part 2: The Judgement of Paris

A Note on Nomenclature

6 The Judgement of Paris: The Story’s Original Form

The Story’s Original Form

7 Medieval Literature and Art

8 Renaissance Art Onwards

Appendix: Raphael to Manet and Beyond

9 Literature and Drama

10 Music

Appendix: ‘The Frost, the Sun, and the Wind’

11 Parody and Pastiche

Endnote: Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress II: The Rake’s Levée

Postscript and Transition

Annex

1 Xenophon’s Memorabilia in Modern English Translation

2 Addison’s Translation of Heracles at the Crossroads

3 William Shenstone The Judgement of Hercules

4 Robert Lowth The Choice of Hercules

5 Georg Friedrich Handel The Choice of Hercules

6 James Beattie The Judgement of Paris

7 Thomas Parnell The Judgement of Paris

8 William Congreve Libretto for The Judgement of Paris

Richmond Lattimore Hercules at the Crossroads

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Professor Malcolm Davies Ph. D. (1979) has spent his entire academic life at Oxford. He has published 10 books and numerous articles on a wide range of Greek literature, most recently a commentary on lesser and anonymous fragments of Greek lyric poetry (2021).