Amidst conflicting information and personal experiences, how can someone distinguish between truth and falsehood? Criteria of Truth: Representations of Truth and Falsehood in Hellenistic Poetry tackles this fundamental question through a study of five Hellenistic poems dated to the third and second centuries BCE: Aratus’s Phaenomena, Nicander’s Theriaca, Callimachus’s Aetia, Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica, and Lycophron’s Alexandra.
Situating these poetic works in their intellectual and literary milieu, Kathleen Kidder applies the philosophic concept of the criterion of truth, arguing that each poetic persona represents a different criterion for interrogating truth and falsehood. Moreover, by analyzing the poems’ allusions, myths, and poetic language, Kidder demonstrates how this poetry can encapsulate the tensions not only between truth and falsehood, but also between order and chaos, certainty and doubt, clarity and obscurity, seen and unseen, and being and seeming.
An accomplished poet and classical scholar, Barbara Hughes Fowler brings Hellenistic poetry to life for the contemporary reader. Her selections engage us with the full range of Hellenistic poetic genres, styles, themes, and moods. The anthology includes Fowler’s new translation of the entire Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, and eight of Theocritus’ Idylls, including the beautiful, sensuous description of late summer in Idyll VII and the shrewdly comical description of two young matrons venturing into the noisy streets of Alexandria in Idyll XV. There are translations of four hymns of Callimachus, as well as poems by Aratus, Bion, Herodas, Moschus, Pseudo-Moschus, and a substantial selection from the Greek Anthology.
An ideal companion to her recently published book, The Hellenistic Aesthetic, Barbara Fowler’s Hellenistic Poetry is both a major contribution to classical studies and an invitation to all interested readers to discover the beauty and richness of Hellenistic poetry.
Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the Romans’ defeat of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences.
Zanker’s exciting new interpretations closely compare poetry and art for the light each sheds on the other. He finds, for example, an exuberant expansion of subject matter in the Hellenistic periods in both literature and art, as styles and iconographic traditions reserved for grander concepts in earlier eras were applied to themes, motifs, and subjects that were emphatically less grand.
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