Early Greek Mythography: Volume 2: Commentary

ISBN-13: 9780198147411 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 848 str.

Robert L. Fowler

Opis

Greek mythology is known to us from various artistic and literary sources. Of the latter, the poetic sources (such as Homer and tragedy) are familiar to many readers, but the prose sources are much less so. Early Greek Mythography: Volume 2 is a detailed commentary on the texts of Early Greek Mythography: Volume 1, which provided a critical edition of the twenty-nine authors of this genre of Greek prose from the late sixth to the early fourth centuries BC.
After a general introduction, this volume offers in its first part a mythological commentary on the texts, arranged according to the major topics of Greek mythology (the Trojan Cycle, Herakles, the Argonauts, etc.). The aim is to recover, so far as possible, what each writer said about the stories, with full consideration of their historical context and significance for Greek literature, mythology, and religion. The synoptic, topic-by-topic approach allows all the fragments pertinent to any given myth to be treated together, so that one can more easily identify variants and trends, and plot the history of the myth. The second part of the volume is a philological commentary on the separate authors, discussing their life, works, and contribution to the genre, as well as textual problems and non-mythological questions raised by individual fragments.

Recenzje

Fourteen years ago, Robert Fowler presented a collection of the fragments of Early Greek Mythography, giving us the outline and all the recoverable details of a lost continent of early Greek prose; we were grateful for an important and accessible volume. Now, he has followed up with a commentary that shows how important these lost treatises and their authors were for the beginnings and development of the Greek prose book, the appropriation and systematization of mostly local narratives, and the emergence of Greek historiography ... [it] leaves us with a truly three-dimensional view of the landscape we have lost ... It seems almost certain that "Fowler" will become yet another household name

O autorze

Robert Fowler is the Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol.