Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus

Description

"This book focuses on the evidence for short, non-epic hexametrical genres as a way of gaining new insights into the variety of their often ritual performance, their early history and how poets from Homer to Theocritus embedded or imitated these genres to enrich their own poems, by playing with and sometimes overturning the generic expectations of their audiences or readers. In doing so it combines literary and ritual studies to produce a rich and detailed picture of a number of genres performed in temples, such as hymns and laments for Adonis, or in other spaces likewise dedicated to traditional speech-acts, such as epithalamia, oracles or incantations. It deals primarily with the recovery of a number of lost or under-appreciated hexametrical genres, which are usually left out of modern taxonomies of archaic hexametrical poetry, either because they survive only in fragments or because the earliest evidence for them dates to the classical period and beyond. Of central importance will be the surviving hexametrical poets, especially those of archaic and Hellenistic date, who embed or imitate traditional hexametrical genres of shorter duration either to give a recognizable internal structure to a shorter poem or to an episode or speech within a longer one"-- Title_Pages (1) Dedication Preface_and_Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Some_Preliminary_Soundings The_Chryses_Episode_as_an_Epichoric_Hymn Circes_Instructions_as_a_Sibylline_Oracle Helens_Pharmakon_as_a_Disguised_Incantation Like_Golden_AphroditeFemale_Lament_in_the_Iliad Conclusions Appendix_A_Curse_Prayers_in_Dactylic_Hexameters Appendix_B_Necromantic_Prayers_in_Dactylic_Hexameters Appendix_C_Empedocles_the_Gos Appendix_D_Early_Anthologies_of_Hexametrical_Incantations Appendix_E_Instructional_Oracles_as_a_Frame_for_the_Hesiodic_Calendars Bibliography Subject_Index Index_of_Proper_Nouns Index_of_Discussed_Passages Index_of_Foreign_Words