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This book addresses the many interlocking problems in understanding
the modes of performance, dissemination, and transmission of Greek
poetry of the seventh to the fifth centuries BC whose first
performers were a choral group, sometimes singing in a ritual
context, sometimes in more secular celebrations of victories in
competitive games. It explores the different ways such a group
presented itself and was perceived by its audiences; the place of
tyrants, of other prominent individuals and of communities in
commissioning and funding choral performances and in securing the
further circulation of the songs' texts and music; the social and
political role of choral songs and the extent to which such songs
continued to be performed both inside and outside the immediate
family and polis-community, whether chorally or in archaic Greece's
important cultural engine, the elite male symposium, with the
consequence that Athenian theatre audiences could be expected to
appreciate allusion to or reworking of such poetic forms in tragedy
and comedy; and how various types of performance contributed to
transmission of written texts of the poems until they were
collected and edited by Alexandrian scholars in the third and
second centuries BC.
This book addresses the many interlocking problems in understanding
the modes of performance, dissemination, and transmission of Greek
poetry of the seventh to the fifth centuries BC whose first
performers were a choral group, sometimes singing in a ritual
context, sometimes in more secular celebrations of victories in
competitive games. It explores the different ways such a group
presented itself and was perceived by its audiences; the place of
tyrants, of other prominent individuals and of communities in
commissioning and funding choral performances and in securing the
further circulation of the songs' texts and music; the social and
political role of choral songs and the extent to which such songs
continued to be performed both inside and outside the immediate
family and polis-community, whether chorally or in archaic Greece's
important cultural engine, the elite male symposium, with the
consequence that Athenian theatre audiences could be expected to
appreciate allusion to or reworking of such poetic forms in tragedy
and comedy; and how various types of performance contributed to
transmission of written texts of the poems until they were
collected and edited by Alexandrian scholars in the third and
second centuries BC.
Iambic Ideas, explores the concept of the 'iambic' as a genre. In a
set of detailed studies, the contributors examine, across time, the
idea of iambic through a wide variety of cultural settings Greek,
Hellenistic, Roman, and late antiquity. What emerges most clearly
is that the 'iambic idea' is impossible to define in absolute
terms: rather, the form of iambic keeps varying in response to a
vast variety of historical contingencies. The variation is evident
in such critical terms as the 'iambic tendency' in Sappho, the
'reusing of iambi' for Roman epodes, and even the instances of
'iambic absence' in comedy and other such related forms. In the
end, what is most characteristic about the 'iambic' is its own
inherent variability.
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