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A Short History of Greek Literature provides a concise yet comprehensive survey of Greek literature - from Christian authors - over twelve centuries, from Homer's epics to the rich range of authors surviving from the imperial period up to Justinian. The book is divided into three parts. The first part is devoted to the extraordinary creativity of the archaic and classical age, when the major literary genres - epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, oratory and philosophy - were invented and flourished. The second part covers the Hellenistic period, and the third covers the High Empire and Late Antiquity. At that tine the masters of the previous age were elevated to the rank of 'classics'. The works of the imperial period are replete with literary allusions, yet full of references to contemporary reality.
Karl Marx observed that "just when people seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves..., they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service." While the Greek east under Roman rule was not revolutionary, perhaps, in the sense that Marx had in mind, it was engaged in creating something that had not previously existed, in part just through the millennia-long involvement with its own tradition, which was continually being remodelled and readapted. It was an age that was intensely self-conscious about its relation to history, a consciousness that manifested itself not only in Attic purism and a reverence for antique literary models but also in ethnic identities, educational and religious institutions, and political interactions with - and even among - the Romans. In this volume, which represents a selection of the papers presented at the colloquium, "Greeks on Greekness: The Construction and Uses of the Greek Past among Greeks under the Roman Empire," held at the Center for Hellenic Studies on 25-28 August 2001, seven scholars explore some of the forms that this preoccupation with the Greek past assumed under Roman rule. Taken together, the chapters in this volume offer a kaleidoscopic view of how Greeks under the Roman Empire related to their past, indicating the multiple ways in which the classical tradition was problematised, adapted, transformed, and at times rejected. They thus provide a vivid image of a lived relation to tradition, one that was inventive rather than conservative and self-conscious rather than passive. The Greeks under Rome played with their heritage, as they played at being and not being the Greeks they continually studied and remembered.
Who was Homer? This book takes us beyond the legends of the blind
bard or the wandering poet to explore an author about whom nothing
is known, except for his works. It offers a reading of the ancient
biographies as clues to the reception of the Homeric poems in
Antiquity and provides an introduction to the oral tradition which
lay at the source of the Homeric epics. Above all, it takes us into
the world of the Odyssey, a world that lies between history and
fiction. It guides the reader through a poem which rivals the
modern novel in its complexity, demonstrating the unity of the poem
as a whole. It defines the many and varied figures of otherness by
which the Greeks of the archaic period defined themselves and
underlines the values promoted by the poem's depictions of men,
women, and gods. Finally, it asks why, throughout the centuries
from Homer to Kazantzakis and Joyce, the hero who never forgets his
homeland and dreams constantly of return has never ceased to be the
incarnation of what it is to be human.
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