History of Ancient Greek Literature: Volume 1: The Archaic and Classical Ages. Volume 2: The Hellenistic Age and the Roman Imperial Period

1196 Pages·2022·6.126 MB·English

by  Franco Montanari, Orla Mulholland, Rachel Barritt Costa

Franco Montanari
History of Ancient Greek Literature

Franco Montanari
History of Ancient
Greek Literature
Volume 1: The Archaic and Classical Ages
With the collaboration of
Fausto Montana
Translated from the Italian original
by Rachel Barritt Costa
with revision by Orla Mulholland
Italian original: Franco Montanari, Storia della letteratura greca, con la collaborazione
di Fausto Montana: nuova edizione Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2022.
ISBN 978-3-11-041992-4
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-042632-8
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-042634-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935008
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Cover image: Musa reading a volumen (scroll), at the left an open chest. Attic red-figure lekythos,
ca. 435–425 BC. From Boeotia. Musée du Louvre, Collection of Samuel Jean de Pozzi, 1919 © Wiki-
media commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muse_reading_Louvre_CA2220.jpg)
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
Preface
It is a great satisfaction for me to see the publication of this English edition of my
History of Greek Literature, written in collaboration with Fausto Montana, which ap-
peared in a first edition in 1998 (published by Laterza) and in a second (revised and
expanded) Italian edition in 2017 with the distinguished publisher Edizioni di Storia
e Letteratura in Rome: a volume that aims to provide a reference manual for university
and for consultation by scholars and by anyone with an interest in ancient Greek lit-
erature, now entrusted to a publishing house of great international prestige, namely
De Gruyter (Berlin/Boston). The English translation was the occasion for a revision of
the text, which is now leading to the publication of a new Italian edition, aligned with
this English edition.
I believe that some things I wrote in the 1998 preface remain entirely valid, so I
repeat them without any hesitation. I remain firmly convinced of the utility of the
manual of literary history, despite what has been said against it and its supposed neg-
ative effects also in recent years – convinced that it is essential to keep at hand and
make use of an instrument that is capable of providing the connecting historical
threads of a discipline, within which only certain parts can ever be approached
through deeper specific study (which is true of literature, history, philosophy, the fig-
urative arts and every field of knowledge), and convinced too that it is appropriate
and useful to continue to produce manuals and to renew them, if for no other reason
than that the underlying orientations and ideas differ depending on the authors (and
to have a greater choice is certainly a boon) and because there is a need to update
them, both from the point of view of content (since research advances) and from the
point of view of form and presentation.
A manual should be concerned above all with providing data, information and
basic concepts, which in their entirety form the discipline’s connecting historical
threads: it should aim to be a work of reference. It is important to seek a balance
(which is certainly not easy) between this aspect and the expression of personal ori-
entations and interpretations, chiefly when it concerns a topic that is (or has been)
the object of particular research by the author of the manual. Of course we know well
that there can be no neutral manual, just as there can be no pure and aseptic infor-
mation, especially when the area of interpretation is both wide and fascinating.
The fundamental line adopted in the exposition in this manual of ancient Greek
literature is historical: I believe that the historical development is the indispensable
starting point. The structure of the book is therefore essentially chronological, aiming
to highlight the connections between the phenomena in a diachronic sense, tracing
the path and development of the literary forms over time. However, within this frame-
work we have endeavoured to take account as far as possible also of the system of
literary genres, trying not to fragment them more than necessary, in order not to lose
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110426328-201
VI  Preface
sight of the importance that genre, whether respected or contested, has played in the
literary creation of ancient Greece.
Each of the four parts into which the treatment of the History has been organised
(The Archaic Age, The Classical Age, The Hellenistic Age, The Roman Imperial Period)
begins with a chapter entitled “The Period,” which presents a historical picture and
brief synopsis of its literary production, with the aim of picking out the key points of
reference that will be useful to keep in mind while reading the comprehensive treat-
ment.
My debt to Fausto Montana is great and is summarised, at least symbolically, in
the fact that the title page identifies him in fact as the co-author of this manual. Very
important help in the preparation of the English version was provided by Valeria
Bacigalupo and Elena Squeri: I owe them gratitude also for the frequent suggestions
that they have given me in the course of the work. Elena Squeri also provided the
index of authors and the list of translations used. Fabio Acerbi has generously pro-
vided his expertise on scientific texts. I would also like to thank Serena Perrone for
her support in revising the English language. Unless otherwise noted, all translations
of the ancient works cited are taken from published translations by expert Hellenists:
the reader is invited to consult the list at the end of this volume (bearing in mind that
the translation indirectly informs about the Greek text used).
I am grateful to the publisher De Gruyter who accepted this History for publica-
tion and to Serena Pirrotta, Marco Michele Acquafredda and Anne Hiller for the assis-
tance that they have given me in the final phases of preparation of the book for print.
Of course, responsibility for what is published in these pages remains entirely
mine.
Franco Montanari
Università degli Studi di Genova, July 2021
Contents
Preface  V
Introduction: Ancient Greek Literature and its Transmission  1
1 Greece, the Greeks and the Greek language  1
1.1 The first Greeks: the Mycenaeans  1
1.2 The Doric migration and the Hellenic Middle Ages  3
1.3 The polis and the expansion of Greek culture in the
Mediterranean  6
1.4 The Greek dialects and literature  7
1.5 The κοινὴ διάλεκτος (koinē dialektos)  9
2 Chronology of ancient Greek literature  10
2.1 The periods  10
2.2 The Archaic Age  11
2.3 The Classical Age  12
2.4 The Hellenistic Age  13
2.5 The Roman Imperial Period  13
2.6 The Byzantine Period  14
3 The conservation and transmission of the texts  15
3.1 Direct tradition and indirect tradition  15
3.2 Greek literature and the writing system  17
3.3 Books in the Greek world  20
3.4 Readers in the Greek world  23
3.5 Tradition and selection  26
The Archaic Age
I The Period  33
1 Early and Middle Archaic Period (Eighth to Seventh Century B.C.)  33
1.1 The polis  33
1.2 Colonisation of the Mediterranean  35
1.3 Conflicts within the poleis  36
2 The Sixth Century and the Persian Wars (490–479 B.C.)  37
2.1 Athens in the Sixth Century  37
2.2 Sicily and Magna Graecia  39
2.3 The Asian colonies and the Persian expansion  40
3 Circulation of ideas and literary communication  41
VIII  Contents
II Archaic Greek Epic  47
1 Homer  47
1.1 Before Homer: the problem of the pre-Homeric  47
1.1.1 Poets prior to Homer  47
1.1.2 The reconstruction of a pre-Homeric literary history  48
1.1.3 Evidence concerning pre-Homeric literary forms  49
1.2 Biographical traditions about Homer  50
1.3 The Homeric poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey  52
1.3.1 Two masterpieces at the outset of Greek literature  52
1.3.2 The Iliad: structure and content  53
1.3.3 The Odyssey: structure and content  57
1.3.4 Iliad and Odyssey: an initial comparison  59
1.3.5 Relative and absolute chronology of the poems  63
1.4 Myth vs. history: from the Mycenaean world to the Homeric
poems  64
1.4.1 Heinrich Schliemann and Homeric archaeology  64
1.4.2 Mycenaean society  68
1.4.3 The historical-linguistic problem and the historical-archaeological
problem  70
1.4.4 Conclusion: distant reminiscences and the world of poetry  81
1.5 The gods, the heroes, the world of the divine and the ethical
background of Homer  83
1.5.1 The role of the world of the divine  83
1.5.2 The Homeric representation of the divine  84
1.5.3 Interaction between men and the gods  85
1.5.4 The world of heroes-men  88
1.6 Homeric poetics  89
1.7 Language and metre  93
1.7.1 The language of Homer  94
1.7.2 The metre of epic  97
1.8 Style and diction, orality and the written form. The poet and the
public  99
1.9 The Homeric question and its present-day aspect  108
1.9.1 The poems during antiquity  108
1.9.2 The poems in the Modern Age  110
1.9.3 The modern Homeric question  111
1.9.4 The present-day picture of the Homeric question  122
1.10 Homer “Minor”  126
1.10.1 Pseudo-Homeric works  126
1.10.2 The Homeric Hymns  127
1.10.3 The Margites  130
1.10.4 The Batrachomyomachia  130
Contents  IX
1.10.5 The Homeric Epigrams  131
2 The epic cycles and post-Homeric epic  132
2.1 The epic cycles  132
2.1.1 Characteristics and themes  132
2.1.2 The formation of the epic Cycles  137
2.1.3 Relations between the Cyclic poems and Homer. Attribution
problems  139
2.1.4 Composition and “publication” of the cyclical poems  141
2.1.5 The reception of the epic themes  143
2.2 Later figures of archaic epic poetry  143
2.2.1 The themes  143
2.2.2 Historically grounded authors  143
2.2.3 Semi-legendary authors  144
2.2.4 Legendary authors  145
2.2.5 Historical epic  147
3 Hesiod and “didactic” epic  147
3.1 Hesiod  147
3.1.1 The first individuality  147
3.1.2 Theogony and Works and Days  148
3.1.3 The structure of the two poems  152
3.1.4 The poet, his production and his thought  154
3.1.5 Other works attributed to Hesiod  159
3.1.6 The reception of Hesiod  161
3.2 Didactic poetry: the problem of the genre  162
III Lyric Poetry  164
1 Occasions, contexts, modes of execution  164
1.1 Lyric Poetry  164
1.2 Settings and occasions: manner of execution and genres  165
1.2.1 The occasions of song. Monody and chorus  165
.. Recitative and melodic song  167
1.2.3 The genres of melic poetry  170
1.2.4 Metre, language, content  171
1.3 Individuality, convention, biography  173
1.4 The tradition of archaic lyric poetry  176
2 Iambic and trochaic poetry and the elegy  176
2.1 Iambic and trochaic lyric poetry  176
2.1.1 Terminology, metres, language  176
2.1.2 The occasions for song and the poets  178
2.2 Archilochus of Paros  179
2.2.1 Biographical information  179
2.2.2 Forms and themes of Archilochus’ poetry  180
X  Contents
2.2.3 Language and style  184
2.3 Semonides of Amorgos  184
2.3.1 Biographical information  184
2.3.2 The themes of the surviving fragments  185
2.3.3 Language and style  186
2.4 Hipponax of Ephesus  187
2.4.1 Biographical information  187
2.4.2 Themes from daily and private life  187
2.4.3 Language and style  189
2.5 Elegy  190
2.5.1 Terminology, metre, language  190
2.5.2 The occasions of song performance and the elegiac poets  191
2.6 Callinus of Ephesus and paraenetic elegy in archaic Ionia  192
2.6.1 Life and fragments  192
2.6.2 Language and style  192
2.7 Tyrtaeus: a poet in archaic Sparta  193
2.7.1 Biographical information  193
2.7.2 The warrior ethic of the hoplite polis  193
2.7.3 Language and style  195
2.8 Mimnermus of Colophon, poet of the human condition  196
2.8.1 The poet and the historical context  196
2.8.2 The themes of his poetry  197
2.8.3 Language and style  198
2.9 Solon of Athens: a complex historical figure  199
2.9.1 Life  199
2.9.2 An elegy with political content  201
2.9.3 The fragments in iambic and trochaic metre  203
2.9.4 Language and style  204
2.10 Theognis of Megara and gnomic elegy  204
2.10.1 An author known via the direct tradition  204
2.10.2 Biographical information  205
2.10.3 The themes of the Theognidean corpus. The gnomic elegy  205
2.10.4 Language and style  207
2.11 Phocylides of Miletus: the gnomic elegy in Ionia  208
2.11.1 Chronology  208
2.11.2 The fragments  208
2.12 Xenophanes of Colophon, a philosopher-poet  208
2.12.1 A singular figure  208
2.12.2 The elegies  209
2.12.3 The Silloi and other works  210
2.12.4 Language and style  211