By Vanessa Cazzato, Dirk Obbink, Enrico Emanuele Prodi

The symposion is arguably the main major and well-documented context for the functionality, transmission, and feedback of archaic and classical Greek poetry, a contrast attested through its persisted carry at the poetic mind's eye even after its dying as a functionality context. The Cup of Song explores the symbiotic dating of the symposion and poetry all through Greek literary heritage, contemplating the previous either as a literal functionality context and as an imaginary area pregnant with social, political, and aesthetic implications.

This number of essays through a world team of best students illuminates many of the aspects of this courting, from Greek literature's earliest beginnings via to its afterlife in Roman poetry, starting from the close to jap origins of the Greek symposion within the 8th century to Horace's evocations of his archaic types and Lucian's figuring out remodeling of vintage texts. every one bankruptcy discusses one element of sympotic engagement through key authors around the significant genres of Greek poetry, together with archaic and classical lyric, tragedy and comedy, and Hellenistic epigram; discussions of literary assets are complemented through research of the visible facts of painted pottery. attention of those varied modes and genres from the unifying standpoint in their relation to the symposion results in a characterization of the complete spectrum of sympotic poetry from its very beginnings via to the Hellenistic age that keeps a watch either to its shared universal beneficial properties and to the specificity of person genres and texts.

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Extra info for The Cup of Song: Studies on Poetry and the Symposion

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G. Herington (1985), Nagy (1990), Currie (2004), Hubbard (2004). OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 27/8/2016, SPi 30 Ewen Bowie Pythian 7 for Megacles might be composed both for initial performance in a symposion and for later reperformance also in symposia, while a longer epinician might be given a public première by a more or less comastic chorus and might then be sung by an individual in a symposion, either in its entirety or in excerpt. ) to last. Hence the initial excitement that a historian of symposia might feel on encountering the passage I have cited from Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists.

585) This is a passage bound to catch the eye of historians of the symposion, since it seems to offer a rare indication bearing upon the matter of timing of sympotic activities, a subject on which we remain depressingly ill-informed. The combined evidence of texts, vase-painting, and the archaeology of private and public buildings has contributed greatly to our understanding of many material aspects of the symposion. But on the question of how long symposia 1 Despite an apparent lacuna in the text, it is clear from Philostratus’ sketch that the waterclock was set for the time needed both for the lines’ recitation and for their interpretation by Herodes.

Thus the sympotic matrix for organizing knowledge is mapped onto the wider Greek world in a manner which inverts the conceit of bringing the Sages into a sympotic gathering as in the various versions of the meeting of the Seven. In Callimachus’ version of the story, which he puts in the mouth of Hipponax in the first Iambos, once this cup has come full circle it is emblazoned with a dedicatory inscription (ll. 76–7). This dedication can be read as an enactment of the Seven Sages’ dedication of their wisdom as an ἀπαρχή in Protagoras 343a–b (though to a different divinity).

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