Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Hittite and Greek perspectives on travelling poets, texts and festivals
- 3 Thamyris the Thracian: the archetypal wandering poet?
- 4 Read on arrival
- 5 Wandering poets, archaic style
- 6 Defining local identities in Greek lyric poetry
- 7 Wandering poetry, ‘travelling’ music: Timotheus' muse and some case-studies of shifting cultural identities
- 8 Epigrammatic contests, poeti vaganti and local history
- 9 World travellers: the associations of Artists of Dionysus
- 10 Aristodama and the Aetolians: an itinerant poetess and her agenda
- 11 Travelling memories in the Hellenistic world
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Hittite and Greek perspectives on travelling poets, texts and festivals
- 3 Thamyris the Thracian: the archetypal wandering poet?
- 4 Read on arrival
- 5 Wandering poets, archaic style
- 6 Defining local identities in Greek lyric poetry
- 7 Wandering poetry, ‘travelling’ music: Timotheus' muse and some case-studies of shifting cultural identities
- 8 Epigrammatic contests, poeti vaganti and local history
- 9 World travellers: the associations of Artists of Dionysus
- 10 Aristodama and the Aetolians: an itinerant poetess and her agenda
- 11 Travelling memories in the Hellenistic world
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
TRAVELLING POETS
This volume explores the phenomenon of the itinerancy of ancient Greek poets, their movements around and engagement with the cities and cultural networks of the ancient Mediterranean and, more broadly, themes of travel and poetic itinerancy in Greek literature.
Travel and ‘wandering’ are persistent elements in both the reality and the imaginaire of Greek poetry, and intellectual and cultural life more generally, from the earliest days. They are, for example, central to the figure of Orpheus, usually regarded by the Greeks as the first major poet and/or holy man (cf., e.g. Aristophanes, Frogs 1030–2), whether in his rôle as a teacher of holy rites, as an Argonaut, or as a lover grieving for the double loss of his wife Eurydice:
nulla Venus, non ulli animum flexere hymenaei:
solus Hyperboreas glacies Tanaimque niualem
aruaque Riphaeis numquam uiduata pruinis
lustrabat, raptam Eurydicen atque inrita Ditis
dona querens.
No love, no wedding-songs bent his soul. Alone he roamed over the icy wastes of the Hyperboreans, the snowy Tanais, and the fields which are never free of Riphaean frosts, as he lamented the loss of Eurydice and the gifts of Dis brought to naught.
(Virgil, Georgics 4.516–20)In some versions it was that wandering which led to Orpheus' death,
Men say that the wives of the Thracians plotted Orpheus' death, because he had persuaded their husbands to follow him in his wanderings (πλανωμένωι).
(Pausanias 9.30.5)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Wandering Poets in Ancient Greek CultureTravel, Locality and Pan-Hellenism, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
- 5
- Cited by