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The book discusses short, non-epic, and under-appreciated hexametrical genres, such as oracles, incantations, and laments, and gains new insight into their ritual performance, their early history, and how poets from Homer to Theocritus embedded or imitated these genres to enrich their own poems.
List of contents
- Chapter One: Introduction
- Chapter Two: Some Preliminary Soundings
- Chapter Three: The Chryses Episode as an Epichoric Hymn
- Chapter Four: Circe's Instructions as a Sibylline Oracle
- Chapter Five: Helen's Pharmakon as a Disguised Incantation
- Chapter Six: Like Golden Aphrodite: Female Lament in the Iliad
- Chapter Seven: Conclusions
- Appendices:
- Appendix A: Curse-Prayers in Hexameters
- Appendix B: Necromantic Prayers in Hexameters
- Appendix C: Empedocles Goês
- Appendix D: Early Anthologies of Hexametrical Incantations
- Appendix E: Instructional Oracles as a Frame for the Hesiodic Calendars
- Bibliography
About the author
Christopher Athanasious Faraone is the Edward Olson Professor of Classics at University of Chicago. His publications include Ancient Greek Love Magic, The Stanzaic Architecture of Archaic Greek Elegy, and The Getty Hexameters: Poetry, Magic and Mystery in Ancient Greek Selinous
Summary
The book discusses short, non-epic, and under-appreciated hexametrical genres, such as oracles, incantations, and laments, and gains new insight into their ritual performance, their early history, and how poets from Homer to Theocritus embedded or imitated these genres to enrich their own poems.
Additional text
Faraone brings an extraordinary command of everything written in (and about) hexameters from the archaic to the Hellenistic periods: major and minor poetry, inscriptions and incisings, incantations, laments, oracles, and ritual prayers, as well as of their accompanying ritual practices. He very carefully reconstructs individual hexameter genres that pre-existed the epics, were put to use within them, and continued to influence the poetic tradition. The result is a significant revision of how we understand Homeric and Hellenistic composition.
