Late Hellenistic Greek Literature in Dialogue
Late Hellenistic Greek Literature in Dialogue
Late Hellenistic Greek literature, both prose and poetry, stands out for its richness and diversity. Recent work has tended to take an author-by-author approach that underestimates the interconnectedness of the literary culture of the period. The chapters assembled here set out to change that by offering new readings of a wide range of late Hellenistic texts and genres, including historiography, geography, rhetoric and philosophy, together with many verse texts and inscriptions. In the process, they offer new insights into the various ways in which late Hellenistic literature engaged with its social, cultural and political contexts, while interrogating and revising some of the standard narratives of the relationship between late Hellenistic and imperial Greek literary culture, which are too often studied in isolation from each other. As a whole the book prompts us to rethink the place of late Hellenistic literature within the wider landscape of Greek and Roman literary history.
- Brings a wide variety of genres and texts of late Hellenistic Greek literature into dialogue with each other
- Applies sophisticated literary-critical approaches which enhance our appreciation and understanding of the role of late Hellenistic Greek literature within ancient literary history more broadly
- Prompts us to rethink the relationship between late Hellenistic and imperial Greek literature, challenging the notion of a clear dividing line between the two periods
Product details
December 2023Paperback
9781009015950
430 pages
230 × 150 × 21 mm
0.639kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction Jason König and Nicolas Wiater
- 1. The empire becomes a body: power, space and movement in Polybius' Histories Nicolas Wiater
- 2. Pyrenaean mountains and deep-valleyed alps: geography and empire in the Garland of Philip Thomas A. Schmitz
- 3. Sailing the sea, sailing an image: periplus and mediality in Diodorus' Bibliotheke and Philostratus' Imagines Mario Baumann
- 4. Ecocritical readings in late Hellenistic literature: landscape alteration and hybris in Strabo and Diodorus Jason König
- 5. Civic and counter-civic cosmopolitanism: Diodorus, Strabo and the later Hellenistic polis Benjamin Gray
- 6. The Wrath of the Sibyl: Homeric reception and contested identities in the Sibylline Oracles 3 Emma Greensmith
- 7. Imagining belonging: the use of Athens in Hellenistic Rome Joy Connolly
- 8. Philosophical self-definition in Strabo's Geography Myrto Hatzimichali
- 9. Narrating 'the swarm of possibilities': Plutarch, Polybius and the idea of contingency in history Felix K. Maier
- 10. 'Asianist' style in Hellenistic oratory and Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists Lawrence Kim
- 11. Greek reading lists from Dionysius to Dio: rhetorical imitation in the Augustan age and the Second Sophistic Casper C. de Jonge
- 12. Envoi: To live in Hellenistic times Simon Goldhill.
