Many years ago Wilamowitz desiderated a systematic collection of the texts which relate to the different types of poetry composed by the great lyric poets of Greece. He hoped that if we could only crystallize our admittedly scanty information about the characteristics of, say, the Paean or the Dirge, we might be able to reach a slightly better understanding than we have now of the formal structure and artistic design of the poems and fragments which have come down to (...) us under these titles. Indeed, this kind of knowledge is very important. (shrink)

One of the ways in which a poet may show his quality is by discrimination and originality in his choice of adjectives. Poetry likes to adorn the bare noun; a noun such as ‘the sky’ calls out for an attribute. But in practice the poet has to take care to avoid the cliche. He can seldom write ‘the blue sky’; even ‘the azure sky’ has become trite. He has to search for the epithet which will be both apt and original.

This article reconsiders the methodological issues posed by the reception of archaic and classical poetry in imperial rhetorical texts. It argues that references to ancient poems and poets in the works of imperial sophists are always already the product of appropriation and rewriting, and that the study of sophists’ engagement with poetry should go beyond Quellenforschung to explore how and why poetic models were transformed in light of their new rhetorical and imperial contexts. To illustrate this approach and its contribution (...) to our understanding of both ancient-reception phenomena and imperial rhetorical culture, the article focusses on Himerius of Athens, a fourth-century c.e. sophist and teacher of rhetoric whose fondness for lyric poetry has caused his Orations to be used as a quarry for lyric fragments and testimonia. Himerius’ treatment of carefully chosen lyric models is here discussed with attention to his self-presentation and rhetorical agenda to show how the sophist appropriated the voices of diverse lyric icons to promote his school and negotiate his position in relation to the imperial administration. This analysis restores Himerius’ intellectual significance within late imperial culture and society, but it also demonstrates how a more in-depth study of the reception of ancient poetry in imperial sophistic literature has the potential to illuminate the strategies of cultural politics used by imperial authors to (re)construct Greek tradition. (shrink)

What kind of Theory of Music and Theory of Metric was taught to the young Pindar or the young Sophocles? So far are we from an answer to this question that we do not even know how far extra study was necessary, or usual, for the professional poet as compared with the ordinary educated Greek citizen. The interdependence of music and metric in lyric poetry gave complexity to the word-rhythms but kept the study of music, the subordinate partner, (...) theoretically simple. Doubtless by the time the young poet had learnt by heart the words of past masters of lyric verse, sung or accompanied them on the lyre, and danced them in choir or κ⋯μος, he had absorbed by practice and somewhat rule-of-thumb methods of training a great deal of the τ⋯χενη which his calling would require. He would have to learn, in common with the χοροδιδ⋯σκαλος, how to read and write a simple score, and so he must know the symbols of pitch in such scales as were then in use. The notation of arsis and thesis may have been required too, and if we knew that this was so, and how he was taught to apply it, we might be in a much better position to assess the kind of theory he learnt. But of one thing we may be sure: genius apart, it was his practical training, as performer and spectator, rather than theoretical teaching which gave his ear its cunning and technical skill to compose new rhythms. (shrink)

What kind of Theory of Music and Theory of Metric was taught to the young Pindar or the young Sophocles? So far are we from an answer to this question that we do not even know how far extra study was necessary, or usual, for the professional poet as compared with the ordinary educated Greek citizen. The interdependence of music and metric in lyric poetry gave complexity to the word-rhythms but kept the study of music, the subordinate partner, (...) theoretically simple. Doubtless by the time the young poet had learnt by heart the words of past masters of lyric verse, sung or accompanied them on the lyre, and danced them in choir or κμος, he had absorbed by practice and somewhat rule-of-thumb methods of training a great deal of the τχενη which his calling would require. He would have to learn, in common with the χοροδιδσκαλος, how to read and write a simple score, and so he must know the symbols of pitch in such scales as were then in use. The notation of arsis and thesis may have been required too, and if we knew that this was so, and how he was taught to apply it, we might be in a much better position to assess the kind of theory he learnt. But of one thing we may be sure: genius apart, it was his practical training, as performer and spectator, rather than theoretical teaching which gave his ear its cunning and technical skill to compose new rhythms. (shrink)

The article deals with a hitherto largely neglected group of poetic texts that is characterized by the representation of the vicissitudes and deeds of a single hero through a third-person omniscient authorial voice, henceforth called ‘aretalogical poetry’. I want to demonstrate that in terms of form, contents, intertextual ‘self-awareness’ and long-term influence, aretalogical poetry qualifies as a fully-fledged epic genre comparable to bucolic or didactic poetry. In order not to blur my argument, I will focus on heroic aretalogies, and on (...) Heracleids and Theseids in particular, because of their prominence in the minds of ancient literary critics. In the case of Heraclean aretalogies, it is expedient to distinguish further between aretalogies of ‘epic’ and ‘lyric epic’. (shrink)

European thought begins with the Greeks. Scientific and philosophic thinking--the pursuit of truth and the grasping of unchanging principles of life--is a historical development, an achievement; and, as Bruno Snell writes in The Discovery of the Mind, nothing less than a revolution. The Greeks did not take mental resources already at their disposal and merely map out new subjects for discussion and investigation. In poetry, drama, and philosophy they in fact discovered the human mind. The stages in man's gradual understanding (...) of himself are revealed in the course of ancient literature from Homer to Virgil. A rational view of the nature of man slowly established itself in the creations of epic and lyric poetry, tragedy and literary criticism, pre-Socratic thought, and early Greek ethics all the way to the discovery of humanitas and the spiritual landscape of Virgil's Arcadia. The Discovery of the Mind is a landmark work in tracing this evolution of consciousness--one of the distinguishing characteristics of the history of man. (shrink)

The period from the eighth to the fifth centuries B.C. was one of extraordinary creativity in the Greek-speaking world. Poetry was a public and popular medium, and its production was closely related to developments in contemporary society. At the time when the city states were acquiring their distinctive institutions epic found the greatest of all its exponents in Homer, and lyric poetry for both solo and choral performance became a genre which attracted poets of the first rank, writers (...) of the quality of Sappho, Alcaeus and Pindar, whose influence on later literature was to be profound. This volume covers the epic tradition, the didactic poems of Hesiod and his imitators, and the wide-ranging work of the iambic, elegiac and lyric poets of what is loosely called the archaic age. The contributors make use of recent papyrus finds to fill out the picture of a cosmopolitan and highly sophisticated literary culture which had not yet found its intellectual centre in Athens. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Epigram into Lyric: Francis Bacon Translates from the Greek Anthology GORDON BRADEN If sir francis bacon did not exactly invent modern science and technology, he did predict it, with remarkable accuracy. The unfinished project of which the writings of his later years were to be component parts is a reformation of the life of the human mind from the ground up—“a complete Instauration of the arts and (...) sciences and all the learning of mankind, raised upon proper foundations ”1—and the most (arguably the only) successful such plan ever drafted. It foresaw both the previously unimaginable worldly triumph of the human race over nature in the centuries that followed and the intellectual means by which that triumph was to be achieved. He also wrote poetry. It is no surprise that someone of his time and place and station should have done so, and its existence is not in itself remarkable. Not much of it has survived, and we have no particular reason to think there was more; and, despite the extensive scholarly and critical scrutiny that Bacon’s work has received, very little attention has been given to this part of it. Still, one poem has achieved something of an afterlife and is worth attention, especially alongside the triumphalism of Bacon’s Magna Instauratio. It concerns hopelessness. Serious attention has been given to Bacon’s remarks on literature and the imagination, including his proposal, amid all his other plans, for what he calls “literary history” (historia literarum).2 But his poems are a different matter. They can be found in the great 19th-century edition of Bacon’s collected works, tucked in between his Prayers and his Christian Paradoxes.3 Most of the poems are from a small volume of psalm translations published under his own name the year before arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 his death; these are now available in one of the published volumes of the new Oxford edition of Bacon’s works.4 There is also 12-line poem in hexameter couplets that begins sounding like a translation of Horace’s Integer vitae but goes on to be a fairly straightforward completion of its opening thesis and never gets around to sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking Lalage; a manuscript in the British Library attributes it to Bacon, though it is also printed in two of Thomas Campion’s books of airs as if it were one of his.5 My own interest is in the one remaining poem, a 32-line translation of a 10-line poem from the Greek Anthology (9.359 in the Palatine Anthology, though known in Bacon’s time from the Planudean). It first appears in print in 1626, anonymously, as “Certaine verses concerning the present estate of Man,” appended with other “characters, and many other witty conceits ” to an edition of Thomas Overbury’s poem “A Wife.”6 Three years later the classical scholar Thomas Farnaby prints it with an ascription to Bacon in a selection of poems from the Greek Anthology, along with the original text of the Greek poem, a Latin translation of it, and the editor’s facing translation of Bacon’s poem back into Greek.7 Bacon’s poem can also be found, both complete and in fragmentary form, in quite a few manuscripts, which are being collated for the first time for The Oxford Francis Bacon, though the editors have not yet decided where to put it. Isolated citations and quotations of the poem occur over the next several centuries; Francis Turner Palgrave includes it in his much-reprinted Golden Treasury, with the title “Life.”8 But there has been little discussion of the poem. It is the subject of an excellent scholarly article by Herbert Grierson, but that was over a hundred years ago.9 Paul Fussell has some sharp observations on Bacon’s use of his stanza form, but they fit onto a single page.10 Other comment is mostly incidental. I want to gather and slightly enhance what has been learned or said about the poem, and explore why it has snagged my interest. The Greek original is variously attributed; the most commonly mentioned name is Posidippus, probably the Mace50 epigram into... (shrink)

In an interesting paper read some time ago to the Cambridge Philological Society , H. J. M. Milne analysed the first Ode of Sappho and showed that it is constructed according to those principles of poetical form which we should expect to find in the work of so delicate a Greek artist. If more of these lyrics had survived in their entirety, the task of expounding the technique of Greek poetry would be simpler than it is, because naturally (...) the principles are more easily grasped in a short lyric than in epic or drama. (shrink)

Open any history or hand-book of Greek literature in general, or Greek lyric in particular, and you will very soon come across several references to monody and choral lyric as important divisions within the broader field of melic poetry. And the terms loom larger than the mere question of handy labels: they permeate and pervade the whole approach to archaic Greek poetry. Chapters or sub-headings in literary histories bear titles like ‘Archaic choral lyric’ or (...) ‘Monody’. Indeed it is possible to write a whole book and call it Early Greek Monody. Diehl's Anthologia Lyrica Graeca was structured around this distinction, which it adopted in preference to the chronological arrangement that is the obvious alternative. Indeed, it went so far as ‘to invent Greek titles “μονωιδίαι” and “χορωιδίαι” ’. Most scholars would now agree that this is to go too far. But most would also continue to accept the validity and importance of the division, which a scholar has recently termed ‘the most fundamental generic distinction within ancient lyric poetry’. (shrink)

Pindar's victory songs teem with divinity. By exploring them within the lived religious landscapes of the fifth century BCE, Hanne Eisenfeld demonstrates that they are in fact engaged in theological work. Focusing on a set of mythical figures whose identities blur the boundaries between mortality and immortality, she newly interprets the value of immortality in the epinician corpus. Pindar's depiction of these figures responds to and shapes contemporary religious experience and revalues mortality as a prerequisite for the glory found in (...) victory. The book combines close reading and philological analysis with religious historical approaches to Pindar's songs and his world. It highlights the inextricability of Greek literature and Greek religion, and models a novel approach to Greek lyric poetry at the intersection of these fields. (shrink)

The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions and performed by its (...) citizens. But eh conquests of Alexander had altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer, lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was incomparable and inimitable, to be studied—but not to be copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric, epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the grandeur of the past. James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton University and editor of the Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity and, with Anthony T. Grafton and Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum. (shrink)

The Pseudo-Plutarchan De musica provides us with the oldest history of Greek lyric poetry from the pre-Homeric epic poetry to the lyric poetry of the fourth century B.C. Importantly, the work contains also an evaluation of the role of music in the process of educating and training the citizens. Ps. Plutarch considers the καλόν in the aesthetic and ethical sense, which makes it incompatible with the καινόν dictated by the new poetic and musical season.

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete's thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete's life-long engagement with (...) one thinker in particular -Plato. The Platonic dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of that periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers. The core of The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays Benardete produced in his last years; the collection provides at the same time an entry into that world through some of Benardete's earliest articles on Plato and on Greek poetry. Benardete's earlier path of close textual analysis always reflected his intimate philosophic dialogue with the thinker in whose work he was immersed; later, he drew on resources of erudition acquired over a lifetime to present a broader picture, on a theme like the dialectics of eros or freedom and necessity. In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic thinkers. He had become increasingly aware that the discovery of philosophy through the "Socratic turn" was really the rediscovery of an understanding already present in some form in the Greek poets and that awareness guided his last years of study of the pre-Socratic philosophers. According to the standard view of the history of Greek philosophy, the Socratic turn, with its focus on "the human things," marks a point of radical change in philosophy's history. Benardete's late studies led him to the conclusion that the kind of pivotal reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark of what it means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or Parmenides is a genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent that a Socratic turn can be found in some form within his own thought. At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what it means to be "post-Platonic." As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, the Platonic notion of a "second sailing" gave Benardete a key to the relation between Greek and Latin thought - and with that to a comprehensive under-standing of antiquity-as it did to the relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Ronna Burger teaches philosophy at Tulane University; she is the author of The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth from St. Augustine's Press and Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics. Michael Davis teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College; he authored Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics and, with Seth Benardete, translated Aristotle - On Poetics, both from St. Augustine's Press. Burger and Davis collaborated on editing Seth Benardete's Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. (shrink)

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete's thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete's life-long engagement with (...) one thinker in particular -Plato. The Platonic dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of that periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers. The core of The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays Benardete produced in his last years; the collection provides at the same time an entry into that world through some of Benardete's earliest articles on Plato and on Greek poetry. Benardete's earlier path of close textual analysis always reflected his intimate philosophic dialogue with the thinker in whose work he was immersed; later, he drew on resources of erudition acquired over a lifetime to present a broader picture, on a theme like the dialectics of eros or freedom and necessity. In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic thinkers. He had become increasingly aware that the discovery of philosophy through the "Socratic turn" was really the rediscovery of an understanding already present in some form in the Greek poets and that awareness guided his last years of study of the pre-Socratic philosophers. According to the standard view of the history of Greek philosophy, the Socratic turn, with its focus on "the human things," marks a point of radical change in philosophy's history. Benardete's late studies led him to the conclusion that the kind of pivotal reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark of what it means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or Parmenides is a genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent that a Socratic turn can be found in some form within his own thought. At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what it means to be "post-Platonic." As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, the Platonic notion of a "second sailing" gave Benardete a key to the relation between Greek and Latin thought - and with that to a comprehensive under-standing of antiquity-as it did to the relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Ronna Burger teaches philosophy at Tulane University; she is the author of The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth from St. Augustine's Press and Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics. Michael Davis teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College; he authored Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics and, with Seth Benardete, translated Aristotle - On Poetics, both from St. Augustine's Press. Burger and Davis collaborated on editing Seth Benardete's Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. (shrink)

The emotions have long been an interest for those studying ancient Greece and Rome. But while the last few decades have produced excellent studies of individual emotions and the different approaches to them by the major philosophical schools, the focus has been almost entirely on negative emotions. This might give the impression that the Greeks and Romans had little to say about positive emotion, something that would be misguided. As the chapters in this collection indicate, there are representations of positive (...) emotions extending from archaic Greek poetry to Augustine, and in both philosophical works and literary genres as wide-ranging as lyric poetry, forensic oratory, comedy, didactic poetry, and the novel. Nor is the evidence uniform: while many of the literary representations give expression to positive emotion but also describe its loss, the philosophers offer a more optimistic assessment of the possibilities of attaining joy or contentment in this life.The positive emotions show some of the same features that all emotions do. But unlike the negative emotions, which we are able to describe and analyze in great detail because of our preoccupation with them, positive emotions tend to be harder to articulate. Hence the interest of the present study, which considers how positive emotions are described, their relationship to other emotions, the ways in which they are provoked or upset by circumstances, how they complicate and enrich our relationships with other people, and which kinds of positive emotion we should seek to integrate. The ancient works have a great deal to say about all of these topics, and for that reason deserve more study, both for our understanding of antiquity and for our understanding of the positive emotions in general. (shrink)

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equippedwith a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law (...) with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government,along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. Athird connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in thistroubled domain.The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. Thecumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quitesane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin aconversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature. (shrink)

The early Greek understanding of time is characterized by the fact that it develops various concepts of different forms of time but it is itself not exhausted by the total sum of its own concepts. Homer already employs a differentiated concept of time, depending on whether he speaks of chronos, émar or aión. From Hesiod comes the earliest literary record of the concept kairós. Even richer than substantivized time is time in its epic form, unfolding three-dimensionally, historically. That is (...) why an adequate understanding of the early Greek conception of time can only be reached through literature. Pre-socratic philosophy is embedded in a context which includes lyric poetry and tragedy as well as Homer and Hesiod. Predominant here is Pindar, whose work supplied Plato with key words and who resolved the traditional concepts of time in the movement of his fundamental idea. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 80-83 [Access article in PDF] Response to Yiannis Miralis, "Manos Hadjidakis: The Story of an Anarchic Youth and a 'Magnus Eroticus'" Lenia Serghi Ionian University, Corfu Manos Hadjidakis and his work are like his song, "O Mythos," for they take you from reality to fantasy and bring you back again. For my generation Hadjidakis was a myth with substance, since he was (...) a real person and his work represented our reality.The first time I heard of Hadjidakis was in relation to his song, "The Children of Pireas," that won him an Oscar for Best Song in 1960-61 as the main theme of his music for the film, Never on Sunday. The first record, a 45-single in the early 1960s, aroused a strong emotional response in the youth of the time.My next and most important experience with Hadjidakis' music was in London during the International Theatre Festival in the Spring of 1964. The Art Theatre of Greece under the Direction of the acclaimed Karolos Koun gave its first performances outside Greece. They presented Aristophanes' comedy, The Birds, and the Aeschylean tragedy, The Persaes. After forty years these performances are still topics of discussion in theater and musical circles. The performance of The Birds took the audience by surprise. The strong, vivid rhythm with the superb [End Page 80] melodies and the chorus filling the stage with its movements and dance gave a new perspective to the production of ancient comedy and drama. The audience was exuberant and the clapping went on without end. It was the unveiling of a new world of music for the theater, a music which could create strong emotions.Perhaps one of the most important works of Hadjidakis is the cycle of songs, The Megalos Eroticos-Magnus Eroticus, composed in 1972 for two voices, choir, and twelve instruments. The song cycle consists of eleven songs based on the lyrics of Greek poets from antiquity till the present time, like Sappho, Euripides, Solomos, Sepheris, Gatsos, Elytis, and Kavafis. Included in the collection is the famous poem, "S'agapo" [I love you], by Myrtiotissa, one of the important women poets of the twentieth century, which according to Hadjidakis was his inspiration for writing Magnus Eroticus. As he says: I think I succeeded [in creating] a beautiful piece of work, and deeply, it belongs to her as a whole. If Magnus Eroticus belongs to somebody it belongs to the memory of Myrtiotissa.1In Magnus Eroticus the combination of lyrics and music is at the highest level of sensibility and the musical style of each song is superb. Music follows the verse to express its deepest meaning while maintaining its uniqueness. In 1973, Pantelis Voulgaris made Magnus Eroticus into a film of the same title.Without doubt Hadjidakis was one of the troubadours of love; in fact he considered himself as a tragoudopoios. Etymologically tragoudopoios comes from the words tragoudi (song) and the verb poio (make, create), and is the root of the word poieses (poetry). A tragoudopoios could be a follower of the rhapsodoi of Homer's time, or the troubadours of medieval times who created songs.In my view, the comparison made by some critics of Hadjidakis' songs with those of Schubert and Brahms is not so successful, especially for the songs written in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, songs that were very popular and represented the reality of Greek life of that period. Similarities to these composers may exist in his later work of the 80s, when his style of art song had become more sophisticated.As a person and composer, Hadjidakis himself could be considered a Magnus Eroticus. I am not sure, though, that he could be considered an anarchist, as Miralis suggests. As Hadjidakis used to say, "[P]erhaps I would have been an anarchist if I didn't have my mother." I would say he was more a lover of democracy in its wider sense.One could say, perhaps, that Hadjidakis was an anarchist in spirit... (shrink)

Gyges was the first tyrant reigning in Lydia by the Mermenadae's around the seventh century BC. He was also the first great barbarian whom the Greeks made contact to. His complex character has made the development of several stories about him, and the most famous was the one which tells how he came to power. His glory traveled the Greek world and influenced the lyric poetry of his age. Thereafter, history, philosophy and rhetoric were likely influenced, mostly about (...) his power and wealth. In Plato Gyges appear in Glaucon's narrative in Book II of Republic (359b-360b) which tells the deeds of the one to become the sovereign of Lydia. However, one difficulty on the passage 359d which makes the direct identification of Gyges with the narrative has been mistaken. We aim through this work to present some proposals to the passage mentioned using not only Plato's text, but the lyric and historical sources before him. (shrink)

Gyges was the first tyrant reigning in Lydia by the Mermenadae's around the seventh century BC. He was also the first great barbarian whom the Greeks made contact to. His complex character has made the development of several stories about him, and the most famous was the one which tells how he came to power. His glory traveled the Greek world and influenced the lyric poetry of his age. Thereafter, history, philosophy and rhetoric were likely influenced, mostly about (...) his power and wealth. In Plato Gyges appear in Glaucon's narrative in Book II of Republic (359b-360b) which tells the deeds of the one to become the sovereign of Lydia. However, one difficulty on the passage 359d which makes the direct identification of Gyges with the narrative has been mistaken. We aim through this work to present some proposals to the passage mentioned using not only Plato's text, but the lyric and historical sources before him. (shrink)

This paper's aim is to study the Greek simile of the ship of state, since it was born in the Lyric Poetry until its definitive drawing by Plato's hands. It describes the image of Paros' ship, by Archilochus, or the ship of city by Alcaeus and by Theognis. Analyzes how this image improves through the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and their moral comprehension of it. And, at last, explains the excellence achieved as the central image on Plato's (...) politic project. (shrink)

This paper's aim is to study the Greek simile of the ship of state, since it was born in the Lyric Poetry until its definitive drawing by Plato's hands. It describes the image of Paros' ship, by Archilochus, or the ship of city by Alcaeus and by Theognis. Analyzes how this image improves through the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and their moral comprehension of it. And, at last, explains the excellence achieved as the central image on Plato's (...) politic project. (shrink)