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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Ancient Western philosophy to c 500
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Greek Mythography in the Roman World (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R5,396
Discovery Miles 53 960
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Greek Mythography in the Roman World (Hardcover)
Series: Society for Classical Studies American Classical Studies
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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By the Roman age the traditional stories of Greek myth had long
since ceased to reflect popular culture. Mythology had become
instead a central element in elite culture. If one did not know the
stories one would not understand most of the allusions in the poets
and orators, classics and contemporaries alike; nor would one be
able to identify the scenes represented on the mosaic floors and
wall paintings in your cultivated friends' houses, or on the
silverware on their tables at dinner.
Mythology was no longer imbibed in the nursery; nor could it be
simply picked up from the often oblique allusions in the classics.
It had to be learned in school, as illustrated by the extraordinary
amount of elementary mythological information in the many surviving
ancient commentaries on the classics, notably Servius, who offers a
mythical story for almost every person, place, and even plant
Vergil mentions. Commentators used the classics as pegs on which to
hang stories they thought their students should know.
A surprisingly large number of mythographic treatises survive from
the early empire, and many papyrus fragments from lost works prove
that they were in common use. In addition, author Alan Cameron
identifies a hitherto unrecognized type of aid to the reading of
Greek and Latin classical and classicizing texts--what might be
called mythographic companions to learned poets such as Aratus,
Callimachus, Vergil, and Ovid, complete with source references.
Much of this book is devoted to an analysis of the importance
evidently attached to citing classical sources for mythical
stories, the clearest proof that they were now a part of learned
culture. So central were these source references that the more
unscrupulous faked them, sometimes on the grand scale.
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