Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama

This collection presents 19 interconnected studies on the language, history, exegesis, and cultural setting of Greek epic and dramatic poetic texts ("Text") and their afterlives ("Intertext") in Antiquity. Spanning texts from Hittite archives to Homer to Greek tragedy and comedy to Vergil to Celsus, the studies here were all written by friends and colleagues of Margalit Finkelberg who are experts in their particular fields, and who have all been influenced by her work. The papers offer close readings of individual lines and discussion of widespread cultural phenomena. Readers will encounter Hittite precedents to the Homeric poems, characters in ancient epic analysed by modern cognitive theory, the use of Homer in Christian polemic, tragic themes of love and murder, a history of the Sphinx, and more. Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama offers a selection of fascinating essays exploring Greek epic, drama, and their reception and adaption by other ancient authors, and will be of interest to anyone working on Greek literature.

Jonathan J. Price is the Fred and Helen Lessing Professor of Ancient History at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and the author of books and articles on Greek and Roman historiography, Jewish history of the Roman period, and Jewish epigraphy. Among his publications are Jerusalem Under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State, 66-70 C.E. (1992), Thucydides and Internal Conflict (2001), and editions of the Jewish inscriptions in Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae: A Multi-lingual Corpus of the Inscriptions from Alexander to Muhammad, Volumes I-V (2010-2019). Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz is Associate Professor at the Department of Classics, Tel-Aviv University, Israel. She is the author of Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World (2005), of Taxing Freedom in Thessalian Manumission Inscriptions (2013), and of several articles on the status of slaves and free non-citizens, on the working of Athenian democracy, and Greek historiography.

Introduction Part I A. Epic - Text 1. Homer's Innocent Aeneas and Traditions of the Troad 2. Formulaic Diction and Contextual Relevance: Notes on the Meaning of Formulaic Epithets in Iliad 1 3. Babies in the Iliad Book 6: Astyanax and Dionysus 4. Reading Emotional Intelligence: Antilochus and Achilles in the Iliad 5. Two Mothers: Eos and Thetis in the Aithiopis 6. Seeing the Unseen in the Iliad B. Epic - Intertext 7. The melody of Homeric Performance 8. Helen of Troy-or of Lacedaemon? The Trojan War and Royal Succession in the Aegean Bronze Age 9. Substitute, Sacrifice and Sidekick: A Note on the Comparative Method and Homer 10. The Birth of Literary Criticism (Herodotus 2.116-17) and the Roots of Homeric Neoanalysis 11. Iopas, Vergil's Phoenician Bard (on Aeneid 1.740-747) 12. Homer between Celsus, Origen and the Jews of Late Antique Palaestina 13 Unreportable Tokens, Speech Representation and Conventions of Textual Composition Part II A. Drama - Text 14. Boughs and Daggers: Reading "Hand" in Aeschylus' Suppliants and the Danaid Trilogy 15. Episodic Tragedy, Antigone, and Indeterminacy at the End of Euripides' Phoenissae 16. Dramatic Contexts and Literary Fiction in Euripides, Heracles 1340-46 17. Fictions of Space from Old to New Comedy B. Drama - Intertext 18. The Sphinx: A Greco-Phoenician Hybrid 19 Inviting Socrates: the prologs of Republic and the two Symposia