How (Not) to Write

The association of Herodotus with the colony at Thurii in southern Italy is generally accepted (Murray 2001: 323-24) based on Aristotle's quotation of the first line of the Histories (Rhet.

Most of the scholarship on the Archaeology--the inquiry into the Greek past that opens Thucydides' history (1.2-1.19)--has emphasized its programmatic qualities. It is the Archaeology, for instance, which introduces the idea of the Athenians and Spartans' opposing national characters (Luginbill 1999). It is likewise the Archaeology where the relationship between ships, money and imperial power is first foregrounded, anticipating Athens' hegemony and establishing its pillars (Connor 1984: 23-27).

This paper analyzes Xenophon’s Hiero as a piece of literary criticism akin to Plato’s Ion. It argues that Xenophon interrogates poetic modes of advice-giving as a way to propose a prose alternative to didactic poetry addressed to leaders. It concludes that Xenophon uses his engagement with praise poetry to transform epinician χάρις into a political tool.

Scholars generally consider the Homeric Hymns to be without organization.  Exceptions are Van der Valk (1976), who argues that the Homeric Hymns are arranged according to “archaic religious principles,” and Torres-Guerra (2003), who believes they are arranged by narrative type.  I outline a new organization for the Homeric Hymns, one which alters our understanding of the Hymns as a group and suggests that the collection is much older than is generally thought.

In ancient literary criticism the name of the Greek rhetorician and historian Hegesias of Magnesia is inextricably connected to bad taste. We find fierce criticisms of his style in Cicero (Brut. 286, Or. 226, 230) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Comp. 4.11, 18.21-29). According to the latter, Hegesias epitomizes bad composition: “In the large volume of writing which the man has left behind, you could not find a single page that has been felicitously composed” (Comp. 18.23).

Phthonos is a recurrent theme in Pindar’s epinician odes. Pindar invokes envy prominently in his poems, to the extent that this negative emotion is presented as inherent in praise poetry (e.g. Kirkwood 1984; Bulman 1992; Most 2003). The presence of phthonos affects the way epinician poetry is received by Plato, in that phthonos was in all probability perceived as a built-in negative emotion in epinician poems.