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Sappho fr. 44 presents the wedding of Hector and Andromache. The young bride arrives on the shores of Troy, laden with the riches of her dowry; the citizens of Troy rush joyfully to meet her; and finally, they all celebrate the marriage with festivities. The poem draws heavily on Homer and has been considered a “prequel” to the Iliad (Spelman 2017). Scholars have argued that the wedding of fr. 44 foreshadows Hector’s funeral in Iliad 22-24. (Bowie 2010, Schrenk 1994, Segal 1971). Scholars are correct in connecting fr.

Timotheus’ Persians provides a dramatic example of the ways in which the theory of the sublime, couched in naturalism and blended reality, is contingent upon the reader’s confrontation with or dissimulation of the ‘Other’ within the narrative inscape. A first century C.E. treatise that espouses composite experiences, Longinus’ On the Sublime incorporates the heightened imagery favored by the New Music lyric poets in order to highlight the unification of and re-affectation between the author, audience, and text.

M.L. West maintains that the “ideal properties” of fame (kleos) “are volume and extent over space and time” (406). Recently, Henry Spelman has leveraged this insight for his own work on secondary audiences in Pindar. For Spelman, the epinician poet self-consciously seeks to transform an ode’s transient debut performance into a lasting literary artefact. Pindar effects this transformation in no small part by lacing his odes with light.

This paper argues that the myth of Ajax’s suicide in Isthmian 4 provides a commentary on the nuances of wisdom (sophia), a fundamental yet obscure motif throughout Pindar’s oeuvre (Gladigow 1965: 39). I suggest that Pindar renders the two heroes Ajax and Odysseus as archetypes of corresponding kinds of wisdom. Odysseus represents a dangerous wisdom associated with the deceptive power of eloquence, while Ajax represents wisdom and skill arising from true virtue. Pindar never names Odysseus, despite the central role he plays in Ajax’s death.

Theocritus’ Idyll 18, which is an epithalamium for Helen and Menelaus, contains a description of Helen’s future cult in Sparta (lines 39-48). As part of the cult, a group of maidens who are Helen’s former playmates will worship a shady plane tree, which represents Helen in her absence.

In this paper I propose a post-colonial reading of Bacchylides’ Epinikion 11. I argue that, when read through the lenses of post-colonial critical theory, this ode can be understood as an expression of the anxiety of the Metapontine elite to claim belonging to the panhellenic cultural world in response to the social encounters, métissage, and middle-ground negotiations attested archaeologically in the Greek poleis of Southern Italy. Revealing in this sense are the mythological materials chosen to celebrate the victor of this ode, Alexidamos of Metapontum.

That Greco-Roman accounts of wondrous or “monstrous” races at the far-flung corners of the oikumene—from giants to dog-headed cynocephaloi to headless blymmyae—shaped medieval Europeans’ conceptions of regions distant to their own may not be entirely surprising to casual observers: many modern interpreters remain primed to see a medieval “Dark Age” rather than the era of rich global interconnectedness recent scholarship has emphasized.

Peter Martyr of Anghiera has always been classified as a humanist, but more recently as an ‘anthropologist’, due to the originality of his thought and the novelty of his position on various aspects of history and culture of his time and on humankind. Both in De Orbe Novo Decades (1530) and in the Opus Epistolarum (1488-1525) a ‘New Humanism’ comes to light, which sees in the novelty of the encounter with the ‘Other’ a way to reconsider the traditional canons of human values.