Master of the Game : Competition and Performance in Greek Poetry

by: Collins, D.

Price: 33,00 EURO

1 copy in stock

The interest in the performance of ancient Greek poetry has grown dramatically in recent years. But the competitive dimension of Greek poetic performances, while usually assumed, has rarely been directly addressed. This study provides for the first time an in-depth examination of a central mode of Greek poetic competition--capping, which occurs when speakers or singers respond to one another in small numbers of verses, single verses, or between verse units themselves. With a wealth of descriptive and technical detail, Collins surveys the wide range of genres that incorporated capping, including tragic and comic stichomythia, lament, forms of Platonic dialectic and dialogue, the sympotic performance of elegy, skolia, and related verse games, Hellenistic bucolic, as well as the rhapsodic performance of epic. Further, he examines historical evidence for actual performances as well as literary representations of live performances to explore how the features of improvisation, riddling, and punning through verse were developed and refined in different competitive contexts.
Anyone concerned with the performance of archaic and classical Greek poetry, or with the agonistic social, cultural, and poetic gamesmanship that prompted one performer to achieve "mastery" over another, will find this authoritative volume indispensable

Introduction : toward an understanding of Greek poetic contestation
pt. I. Dramatic representations of verse competition
1. Stichomythia
2. The [actual symbol not reproducible] and Aristophanes' Frogs 1198-1248
3. Stichomythia and [actual symbol not reproducible] : Euripides' Cyclops, Aristophanes' Wealth, and Plato's Euthydemus
4. Excursus : Theocritus and the problem of judgment
5. Conclusion
pt. II. Sporting at Symposia : verse and Skolia competitions
6. Play and the seriousness of sympotic poetry games
7. The Skolion game
8. Aristophanes' Wasps 1222-49
9. The attic Skolia, Theognis, and riddles
10. Symposiasts versus Rhapsodes
11. Xenophanes
12. Heraclitus
13. Solon
14. Anacreon
15. Conclusion
pt. III. Epic competition in performance : Homer and Rhapsodes
16. The amoebaean muses
17. From written to oral
18. Modes of innovation
19. The Panathenaia and beyond
20. Ptolemaic Homers
21. Conclusions and prospects
App. I. Ritual [actual symbol not reproducible]
App. II. The discourse of disputation : three comparative typologies

Master of the Game : Competition and Performance in Greek Poetry

by: Collins, D.

• ISBN-13: 9780674016446 / 978-0-674-01644-6
• ISBN-03: 0674016440 / 0-674-01644-0
• Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004

Price: 33,00 EURO

1 copy in stock