Hellenistic Poetry in its Cultural Context

The "Homeric patina" of the poems of Leonidas of Tarentum describes a poetic technique of Homeric allusion found in many of his epigrams (De Stefani 2005: 157). Leonidas' signature is likewise the reinvention of these allusions within contexts of everyday, humble craftsmen. This paper examines one such epigram, Leon. 2 G-P = AP 6.211, a dedication to Aphrodite, which provides "window allusion" (Hinds 1998: 48; Sens 2007: 380; Conte 2012: 170) to Homeric poetry through its allusion to Sappho fr. 44.

Aratus’ Phaenomena is commonly read as a poem about the constellations, but it has in fact a much broader scope: the signs in the universe and our ability to read them. Although recent scholarship (such as Volk 2012) has argued for this re-orientation of our understanding of the poem, the theory of signs advanced in the poem have garnered little attention. This paper will describe Aratus’ semiology in detail, as explained in key passages in the poem.

The aim of my research is to give a new interpretation of the Exagoge of Ezekiel, the only surviving Hellenistic tragedy apart from the Alexandra of Lycophron.

In this paper, I consider the flourishing of Greek ‘book-label’ epigram, a sub-type of the genre first attested in the early 3^rd Century BCE, which - as the designation suggests - take the form of blurb-like laudations of poets, purportedly affixed to book-rolls containing their works.