Dear Salmoneous

OUT OF PRINT

This book is a follow up to the author's successful first book on the show. In this, he writes about the final three seasons. The author's passionate introspection contains cast profiles and commentary from the stars on each episode.

In the last fifty years major developments have taken place, both in the field of Homeric studies and in the rest of early Greek epic. These developments have not only created a more solid basis for studying the Homeric epics, but they have also broadened our horizons with respect to the place of Homeric poetry within a larger cultural milieu. The impressive advances in Hesiodic studies, the more systematic approach to the Epic Cycle, the more nuanced use and re-evaluation of dominant twentieth-century theories like Neoanalysis and Oral Theory, the study of other fragmentary Greek epic, the cognitive turn, narratology, the performance of epic poetry in the ancient and modern world, the fruitful utilization of Indo-European material, and the widely accepted recognition of the close relation between Homer and the mythology and literature of the ancient Near East have virtually shaped anew the way we read and understand Homer, Hesiod, and early Greek epic. The studies collected in this volume are informed by most of the aforementioned sub-fields and span four research areas: (i) Homer; (ii) Hesiod; (iii) the Epic Cycle; (d) the performance of epic.

It is called the Theater of Fun. Run by Hercules's friend Slamoneus, the traveling troupe has dancing girls, jugglers, comedians, and a first-rate magician named Dragar. But Dragar is far more dangerous than anyone realizes. And Hercules is about to discover that there's a fine line between magic and sorcery.

The concept of the afterlife has always been prominent in both Greek literature and modern scholarship alike. The fate of man after his/her allotted time has come to an end has a central position in poetry, philosophy and religion, often leading to questions and answers as to how one can best live one's life, and how can one deal with the burden of mortality that is inherent in every human being. The Greeks devoted a considerable amount of their literary production in an attempt to answer these questions through a variety of different media, whereas similar concerns appear to have been at the core of the ancient world in general. This volume represents the first to examine the influences, intersections, and developments of understandings of death and the afterlife between poetic, religious, and philosophical traditions in ancient Greece in one resource. Greek thinking on death and the afterlife was neither uniform, simple, nor static, and by offering an examination of these matters in a properly interdisciplinary context this collection of papers aims to demonstrate the full richness, complexity, and flexibility of these ideas in the ancient Greek world, and illuminate how freely writers from various genres drew inspiration from each other's thinking concerning eschatological matters. Contributors: Alberto Benarbé; Rick Benitez; Nicolo Benzi; Chiara Blanco; Radcliffe Edmonds; George Alexander Gazis; Anthony Hooper; Vaios Liapis; Alex Long; Ioannis Ziogas.

Next to the Theogony and the Works and Days stands an entire corpus of fragmentary works attributed to the Boeotian poet Hesiod that has during the last thirty years attracted growing scholarly interest. Whereas other studies have concentrated either on the interpretation of the best preserved work of this corpus, the Catalogue of Women, or have offered detailed commentaries, this volume aims at bringing together studies focusing on generic and contextual factors pertaining to the various works of the Hesiodic corpus, the Catalogue of Women included, and the corpus' afterlife in Rome and Byzantium.

Though attributed to Hesiod (eighth or seventh century BCE) in antiquity, the "Catalogue of Women," a presentation of legendary Greek heroes and episodes according to maternal genealogy; "The Shield," a counterpoint to the Iliadic shield of Achilles; and certain poems that survive as fragments were likely not composed by Hesiod himself.

In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the importance of the poem to his writing, noting that 'there's one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas's venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years - the golden bough, Charon's barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father.' In this new translation, Heaney employs the same deft handling of the original combined with the immediacy of language and flawless poetic voice as was on show in his translation of Beowulf, a reimagining which, in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue, brought the ancient poem back to life in 'a miraculous mix of the poem's original spirit and Heaney's voice'.