Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.
Book

Book
Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought
DOI link for Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought
Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought book
Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought
DOI link for Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought
Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought book
Get Citation
ABSTRACT
Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought follows the construction of reality from Homer into the Hellenistic era and beyond. Not only in didactic poetry or philosophical works but in practically all genres from the time of Homer onwards, Greek literature has shown an awareness of the relationship between verbal art and the social, historical, or cultural reality that produces it, an awareness that this relationship is an approximate one at best and a distorting one at worst. This central theme of resemblance and its relationship to reality draws together essays on a range of Greek authors, and shows how they are unified or allied in posing similar questions to classical literature.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |8 pages
Introduction: Resemblance and reality as interpretive lens
part |2 pages
PART I Greek poetry: Verbal resemblance as incomplete reality
chapter 1|20 pages
Mētis on a mission: Unreliable narration and the perils of cunning in Odyssey 9
chapter 3|19 pages
Failure of the textual relation: Anacreon’s purple ball poem (PMG 358)
chapter 4|15 pages
Reality, illusion, or both? Cloud-women in Stesichorus and Pindar
chapter 5|15 pages
Neither beast nor woman: Reconstructing Callisto in Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus
part |2 pages
PART II Greek tragedy: Reality, expectation, tradition
chapter 6|19 pages
Necessity and universal reality: The use of χρή in Aeschylus
chapter 7|14 pages
The arms of Achilles: Tradition and mythmaking in Sophocles’ Philoctetes
chapter 9|14 pages
The “Hymn to Zeus” (Agamemnon 160–83) and reasoning from resemblances
part |2 pages
PART III Greek prose: Reality and appearances
chapter 10|19 pages
Stereotypes as faulty resemblance: Humorous deception and ethnography in Herodotus
chapter 12|12 pages
Wives, subjects, sons, and lovers: Phthonos and resemblance in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia
part |2 pages
Epilogue: Echoes of resemblance and reality in Latin literature