GREEK PRAISE POETRY & RHET DIVIN OCM C

Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-884768-7
Verlag: ACADEMIC

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 470 g

The polar dichotomy between man and god, and the insurmountable gulf between them, are considered a fundamental principle of archaic and classical Greek religion. Greek Praise Poetry and the Rhetoric of Divinity argues that poetry produced between the eighth and the fifth centuries BC does not present such a uniform view of the world, demonstrating instead that particular genres of poetry may assess the distance between humans and gods differently. Discussion focuses on genres where the boundaries appear to be more flexible, with wedding songs, victory odes, and selected passages from tragedy and comedy taken as case studies that illustrate that some human individuals may, in certain situations, be presented as enjoying a state of happiness, a degree of beauty, or an amount of power comparable to that of the gods. A central question throughout is whether these presentations stem from an individual poet's creative ingenuity or from the conventional ideological repertoire of the respective genre, and how this difference might shape the comparison of a human with the gods. Another important question concerns the ritual contexts in which some of these songs would have been performed, expanding the scope of the analysis beyond merely a literary device to encompass a fundamental aspect of archaic and classical Greek culture.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meister, Felix J.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike Klassische Archäologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Frontmatter

- List of Illustrations

- Texts, Translations, Abbreviations

- 1: Introduction

- Notions of divinity in archaic and classical literature

- Approximations to divinity after the fifth century

- The human and the divine in archaic and classical literature

- 2: Divine Happiness and Beauty in Wedding Songs

- Introduction

- Traditions of weddings songs

- Explicit comparisons with heroic and divine beauty

- Implicit comparisons with divine happiness

- Hymnic register

- Heroes and gods as bridal couples

- Wedding ceremonies

- Wedding iconography

- Conclusion

- 3: Divine Happiness in the Victory Ode

- Introduction

- Myth and immortality

- Moment and eternity

- Victory sculpture

- Nemean 1

- Isthmian 4

- Pythian 10

- Conclusion

- 4: Divine Power in Tragedy

- Introduction

- The ritual of supplication

- Supplication in tragedy

- Comic entries

- Tragic illusions

- Illusions induced

- Conclusion

- 5: Epilogue

- Endmatter

- Iconographical Appendix

- References

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Felix J. Meister studied Classics at the University of Leipzig and the University of Oxford, where he received his DPhil in 2015. He has worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Cologne since 2014 and lives in Cologne with his wife and their Golden Retriever, Nestor.