Volume 14, Issue 1

In this article I explore a selection of texts from Greece and Mesopotamia that either recount or comment on the succession myth. I argue that representations of violence in those texts differ considerably within the same culture and time period. I explain these variations as social deixis, positing that ancient authors and interpreters of the succession myth used different representations of violence to present themselves as innovative figures. I argue that both mythmakers and myth-interpreters increased and decreased the intensity and number of violent features to mark a position in the competitive field of cosmological knowledge. Through the comparison of the sources, I show that there was as much competition and innovation in Greece as in Mesopotamia within the field of cosmology. The similarity of social contexts and practices may explain the cross-cultural transfer of knowledge between specialists of these two regions.

In this paper, I examine the formulaic system of the catalogue of men in Odyssey 11. The discursive means at work whenever a catalogue entry is introduced, rest on vision and kinetics. These are two cardinal notions that establish themselves in narrative contexts of male catalogue poetry in the Iliad . Scrutinising the formula-based linguistic register pertaining to visual perception and movement/ stasis shows that entry introductory formulas serve as mechanisms of meticulous inner structuring and co-ordination of the narrative material and of outer framing with regard to the preceding free-floating entries and the catalogue of women.

This is the second and last part of a study on Timocreon of Ialysos. In the first part I offered an up-to-date presentation of and running commentary on fragments 1–4 of his poetry. In this second part, I discuss and comment on the rest of his extant fragments.<fnote> The numeration is continuous: frr. 1–4 PMG were presented in Tsagalis 2020, 228–266; frr. 5–8 PMG and 9–11 (= 7, 9, and 10 IEG ) are analyzed in this study.</fnote>

This paper examines the use of prayers that are denoted by the verb euchomai , and their function as a means of affecting the cognitive/emotional disposition of people in forensic, symbouleutic and epideictic orations. It is argued that (references to) prayers may be of explicit or implicit character, and that they serve a variety of purposes: to secure the goodwill of the audience for the speaker; to present his character and civic/political qualities positively, while attacking, undermining and incriminating opponents for religious and political misconducts; to invite people in court or in the Assembly to think they are inspected by an invisible yet omnipresent divine audience; to refer to patriotism; and to triangulate relations between the speaker, his opponents and the audience.

Publication of a new gold epistomion unearthed during rescue excavations in the property of IRIS Hotel Inc. in the Sfakaki region near Rethymno. The new epistomion from Grave 7 belongs to category E, the so-called chaire-texts, and is identical to that incised on E4, bringing the total number of epistomia from Crete to sixteen (see Appendix).

Among the astronomical texts devoted (in various ways) to the description/explanation of the stars and their phenomena, the sources allow us to identify a somehow ‘specific textual current’ that consists in those texts which were variously used or conceived as tools to convey knowledge of the ‘star map’ to a non-specialist public, even if they are different from each other in terms of structure and ‘technical-scientific’ level (especially in relation to the presence or not of the specific coordinates of the stars). The success of these texts over the course of the tradition is one of the main signs that suggest the diffusion of this subject matter in non-specialist contexts. According to the sources, the practical-applied benefit of such knowledge, above all in terms of ‘time reckoning’, seems to be at least one of the – certainly multiple and varied – reasons for this diffusion, and perhaps not the least significant one.

This article seeks to investigate the cultural and ideological processes conditioning the reception of Prometheus Bound ascribed to Aeschylus in the so far unexplored poetic drama Prometheus or The Play of a Day (1978) by the renowned Modern Greek poet Nikiforos Vrettakos. It is argued that his rewriting of the tragic myth bears the features of a palimpsest, whose layers include archetypal features of Prometheus Bound, such as the Titan’s dignified struggle, his philanthropy, and the concept of human progress, filtered in varying ways through the mediating receptions (Goethe, Camus, Kazantzakis, Sikelianos, Varnalis, Michalakeas) of the ancient exemplum . At the same time, Vrettakos chooses to deploy Prometheus as his self-image and grafts the poetic ego onto the title-character to raise critical awareness and convey his ideological and ethical stance. These elements contribute to the play’s distinctiveness, as well as its power to move beyond the immediate socio-political circumstances of the military dictatorship in Greece (1967–1974) and offer a diachronic perspective on intrinsic aspects of the human condition: the dignified resistance to oppression, the limits of human intellect and the sense of humanism emerging from the perception of mankind and nature as an inseparable entity – a feature of Vrettakos’ poetics par excellence.