1st Edition
Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought Essays in Honor of Peter M. Smith
Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought follows the construction of reality from Homer into the Hellenistic era and beyond. Not only in didactic poetry or philosophical works but in practically all genres from the time of Homer onwards, Greek literature has shown an awareness of the relationship between verbal art and the social, historical, or cultural reality that produces it, an awareness that this relationship is an approximate one at best and a distorting one at worst. This central theme of resemblance and its relationship to reality draws together essays on a range of Greek authors, and shows how they are unified or allied in posing similar questions to classical literature.
Contents
Paideia
By Sue Guiney
Contributors
Introduction: Resemblance and Reality as Interpretive Lens
By Arum Park and Mary Pendergraft
Part One
Poetry: Verbal Resemblance as Incomplete Reality
Chapter 1: Mētis on a Mission: Unreliable Narration and the Perils of Cunning in Odyssey 9
By Peter Aicher
Chapter 2: Little Things Mean a Lot: Odysseus’ Scar and Eurycleia’s Memory
By Jeffrey Beneker
Chapter 3: Failure of the Textual Relation: Anacreon’s Purple Ball Poem (PMG 358)
By T. H. M. Gellar-Goad
Chapter 4: Reality, Illusion, or Both? Cloud-Women in Stesichorus and Pindar.
By Arum Park
Chapter 5: Neither Beast Nor Woman: Reconstructing Callisto in Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus
By Keyne Cheshire
Part Two
Greek Tragedy: Reality, Expectation, Tradition
Chapter 6: Necessity and Universal Reality: The Use of XPH in Aeschylus
By David C.A. Wiltshire
Chapter 7: The Arms of Achilles: Tradition and Mythmaking in Sophocles’ Philoctetes
By Sheila Murnaghan
Chapter 8: The Bad Place: The Horrific House of Euripides’ Heracles
By Derek Smith Keyser
Chapter 9: The "Hymn to Zeus" (Agamemnon 160-83) and Reasoning from Resemblances
By Edwin Carawan
Part Three
Greek Prose: Reality and Appearances
Chapter 10: Stereotypes as Faulty Resemblance: Humorous Deception and Ethnography in Herodotus
By Mark C. Mash
Chapter 11: The Rational Religion of Xenophon’s Socrates
By David Johnson
Chapter 12: Wives, Subjects, Sons, and Lovers: Phthonos and Resemblance in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia
By Norman Sandri
Biography
Arum Park is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on Archaic and Classical Greek poetry, but she has published on a wide range of authors, including Hesiod, Pindar, Ovid, and Longus. Her current book project, supported by a 2012-13 fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies, treats the concepts of truth, gender, and genre in Pindar and Aeschylus.
With sophistication and originality evident throughout, Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought presents fourteen studies of a dichotomy pervasive in Greek literature and thought and refracted in Roman epic. The authors study, inter alia, the artistry of spaces constructed within the antimony, inconsistencies in the Greek literary and philosophical tradition, ambiguities within the Greek language itself, and philosophical challenges to the Theory of Forms. This is an altogether original and well-crafted book.- Professor Victor Bers, Yale University, USA
