Brill's Companion to Theocritus

Through the variety of its scholarly perspectives, Brill Companion to Theocritus offers a tool for the study of one of antiquity’s foremost poets. Offering a thorough examination of textual transmission, ancient commentaries, literary dialect, and poetic forms, the present volume considers Theocritus’ work from novel theoretical perspectives, such as gender and emotions. It expands the usual field of inquiry to include religion, and the poet’s reception in Late Antiquity and early modern times. The various chapters promote Theocritus’ profile as an erudite poet, who both responds to and inaugurates a rich and variegated tradition. The combination of these various perspectives places Theocritus at the crossroads of Ptolemaic patronage, contemporary society, and art.

Poulheria Kyriakou is Professor of Greek Literature at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the author of Homeric Hapax Legomena in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (1995), A Commentary on Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (2006), The Past in Aeschylus and Sophocles (2011), and Theocritus and His Native Muse. A Syracusan Among Many (2018). She has also co-edited Wisdom and Folly in Euripides (2016).
Evina Sistakou is Professor of Greek Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the author of The Geography of Callimachus and Hellenistic Avant-Garde Poetry (2005, in Modern Greek), Reconstructing the Epic. Cross-Readings of the Trojan Myth in Hellenistic Poetry (2008), The Aesthetics of Darkness. A Study of Hellenistic Romanticism in Apollonius, Lycophron and Nicander (2012) and Tragic Failures. Alexandrian Responses to Tragedy and the Tragic (2016).
Antonios Rengakos is Professor of Greek Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Member of the Academy of Athens. His major works are Form und Wandel des Machtdenkens der Athener bei Thukydides (1984), Der Homertext und die hellenistischen Dichter (1993), Apollonios Rhodios und die antike Homererklärung (1994). He is the co-editor of A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius (2001) Brill’s Companion to Thucydides (2006), Brill's Companion to Hesiod (2009), Homer Handbuch (2011), Brill’s Companion to Ancient Scholarship (2015).

Contributors are: Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Annemarie Ambühl, Ewen Bowie, Brian W. Breed, Dee L. Clayman, Taylor S. Coughlan, Christophe Cusset, Frederick T. Griffiths, Thomas K. Hubbard, Richard Hunter, Alexandros Kampakoglou, Evangelos Karakasis, Jacqueline Klooster, David Konstan, Jan Kwapisz, Poulheria Kyriakou, Giulio Massimilla, Claudio Meliadò, Sarah Miles, Andrew D. Morrison, Lara Pagani, Viola Palmieri, Juan C. Pellicer, Ivana Petrovic, Tom Phillips, Évelyne Prioux, Joseph D. Reed, Alexander Sens, Evina Sistakou, Karl-Heinz Stanzel, William G. Thalmann, Olga Tribulato.

"This companion to Theocritus reflects important developments in the last few decades and offers a valuable basis for future research. (...) A strength of the volume is its willingness to engage with not only the Idylls but also the epigrams attributed to Theocritus. (...) Another strength of the volume is its attention to textual history and the Theocritean scholia.(...) Anyone who wishes to contribute to the future of Theocritean studies is advised to start by consulting this volume."
Matthew Chaldekas in BMCR 24.05.39