By Richard Hunter, Ian Rutherford

Even if contemporary scholarship has eager about the city-state because the context for the creation of Greek poetry, for poets and performers commute used to be extra the norm than the exception. This publication strains this primary element of historic tradition from its roots within the close to jap societies which preceded the Greeks, during the means during which early semi-mythical figures akin to Orpheus have been imagined, the poets who travelled to the bright courts of archaic tyrants, and on into the fluid mobility of imperial and overdue vintage tradition. The emphasis is either on why poets travelled, and on how neighborhood groups used the talents of those outsiders for his or her personal reasons. Wandering poets also are set in the wider context of historic networks of trade, patronage and association among groups and are visible as one fairly robust manifestation of a function of old existence that is too usually missed.

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Extra info for Wandering Poets in Ancient Greek Culture: Travel, Locality and Pan-Hellenism

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34 The Hittite material presents exactly the opposite set of problems from the Greek material. It has often been said about tragedy, for example, that we have only a dim reflection of the spectacle that it must have presented, with only the words and no music, no stage directions, no description of the costumes. With the Hittite material we have detailed descriptions of the pageantry of festivals and the dr¯omena of rituals, but for the most part the festival descriptions (less so the rituals) rarely include the words spoken, and almost never the words sung.

Heraclitus of Halicarnassus was a poet (one epigram survives) and is celebrated as such in a famous epigram of Callimachus;70 he is, however, very likely also the Heraclitus who appears on proxenos inscriptions from Euboean Histiaia and Chios and was honoured in the sanctuary of Amphiaraos at Oropos in northern Attica; a modern study calls him ‘poet and diplomat’,71 and this does not seem unfair. Professional poets, or poets in so far as they are professionals, travel in order to perform. This was a simple fact of life, though as we have seen it does not exhaust the possibilities of poetic circulation.

83 As the case of Callimachus makes particularly clear, both local and foreign poets played a rˆole in celebrating local traditions; there is indeed a degree of productive cross-fertilisation between local traditions and poets from elsewhere, who bring to those traditions an external and pan-Hellenic perspective. What we call ‘ancient Greece’ was in fact a loose network of several hundred city-states of varying size, stretching from Ionia to Sicily and from Thrace to Libya,84 a far from homogeneous area, ethnically, linguistically or religiously, and one lacking major political centres to impose a unified tradition.

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