The Lives of the Greek Poets PDF
Preview The Lives of the Greek Poets
The Lives of the Greek Poets This page intentionally left blank The Lives of the Greek Poets Second Edition mary r. lefkowitz The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2012 Mary R. Lefkowitz All rights reserved. Published 2012 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lefkowitz, Mary R., 1935– The lives of the Greek poets / Mary R. Lefkowitz. — 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-1-4214-0463-9 (hdbk. : acid-free paper) isbn-13: 978-1-4214-0464-6 (pbk. : acid-free paper) isbn-10: 1-4214-0463-X (hdbk. : acid-free paper) isbn-10: 1-4214-0464-8 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Poets, Greek—Biography. I. Title. pa3064.l44 2012 881'.0109—dc23 2011029772 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible. For Hugh Lloyd-Jones In Memoriam This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 chapter 1 Hesiod 6 chapter 2 Homer 14 chapter 3 Eight Archaic Poets 30 chapter 4 Solon 46 chapter 5 Simonides 55 chapter 6 Pindar 61 chapter 7 Aeschylus 70 chapter 8 Sophocles 78 chapter 9 Euripides 87 chapter 10 Comic Poets 104 chapter 11 Hellenistic Poets 113 Conclusion 128 Appendixes 133 Notes 159 Bibliography 197 Index 213 This page intentionally left blank Preface This is a short book about a topic that has been considered to be peripheral to mainstream classical studies, the ancient biographies of the Greek poets. In the first edition of this book (1981), I argued that these biographies preserved only a relatively small amount of historical information and that therefore stu- dents of the ancient world should not try to use the biographies as a guide to the interpretation of ancient poetry, even though that had been the standard practice up to that time. I suggested that much of the material in all of the lives was a kind of fiction and that if any factual information survived it was usually because the poet himself provided it for a different purpose than that intended by his or her biographers. I argued that even plausible-sounding ma- terial should be regarded with suspicion. In particular I wanted to interrogate certain commonly held assumptions, for example, that Sophocles was more pious than Euripides, whose dramas appeared to his biographers to question the existence of the gods, and that the poet Callimachus specifically disap- proved of the work of his younger contemporary Apollonius of Rhodes. In- stead, I sought to show (and still believe) that literary analysis of these works ought to be based not on the poets’ biographies but on the poems themselves. Since the appearance of the first edition of this book, even scholars who do not agree with everything that I have said have nonetheless tended not to use the ancient biographies as a guide to understanding ancient poetry. I wrote the original version of this book because, in the course of my work on the fifth-century B.C. poet Pindar (collected in Lefkowitz 1991), I had dis- covered that much of what the ancient commentators said about the histori- cal setting and performance of his poetry did not derive from independent sources but rather had been deduced by inference from the text of his poems. When the “I” in Pindar’s odes insists on his superiority to others, the com- mentators did not observe that archaic poets regularly made such claims, to establish their authority. Rather, these commentators supposed that hostile
The list of books you might like
