Epic Lessons

An Introduction to Ancient Didactic Poetry
1. Auflage 1996
ISBN: 978-0-415-08897-8
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 282 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 563 g

Didactic Epic was enormously popular in the ancient world. It was used to teach Greeks and Romans technical and scientific subjects, but in verse. Epic Lessons shows how this scientific poetry was intended not just to instruct but also to entertain.

Praise for its predecessor, Reading Epic

'Toohey's erudition makes the complexities and the strangeness of these ancient poems appear as clear as daylight and his enthusiasm renders them as attractive as the latest blockbuster.' - JACT Review

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Toohey, Peter

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction. 1. Who Reads Didactic Epic? 2. Word of Mouth. Orality and Didactic Poetry from Hesiod to Empedocles 3. The Universe as a Book. Alexandrian Literacy and the Poems of Aratus and Nicander 4. Roman Renewal. Cicero and Lucretius 5. Politics, Power and Play. Polyphony in Virgil's Georgics and Ovid's Fasti 6. Amusements for a Smoky December. Horace on Poetry and Ovid on Eros 7. Humans, Nature and God. Epic Lessons in the First Century 8. Resisting Instinct. Hunting, Fishing, Science, and God 9. Didactic Dinners. Instruction in Narrative Epic and in the Novel 10. A Literary History of Leisure? The Didactic Epic. Bibliography.

Über Autor(innen)

Peter Toohey is Associate Professor in Classics and Ancient History at the University of New England, New South Wales. He is the author of Reading Epic: An Introduction to the Ancient Narratives (1992), and has edited, with Mark Golden Reconstructing the Past: Historicism, Periodisation and the Ancient World (1996).