This is the first complete commentary for ninety years on the surviving poems of Bacchylides. Part I, covering the Victory Odes, was published in 1982. Part II, with the Dithyrambs and the fragments of Bacchylides' other books, now completes the work.
Like the first part, this volume contains an introduction, the Greek text with facing German prose translation, the commentary, and the indices to Parts I and II.
Bacchylides, a contemporary of Pindar, was one of the nine "classical" lyric poets whose songs were collected, edited and studied by the scholars of Alexandria. The commentary,...

This volume discusses Greek subliterary papyri containing mythical catalogues, stories of the Mythographus Homericus, and summaries of Iliad, Odyssey tragedies, comedies, and poems of Callimachus. The first part of the book explores the following questions: what kind of knowledge is transmitted in the papyri and how is this done? How is the knowledge related to that found in other literature? What do we know about the function and readership of these papyri? Although comparable questions have been asked before regarding some papyri, this study attempts to present a more precise and...

A study of three epinicia of Pindar, which have in common that they celebrate victories of Aeginetan athletes and that they respond to the contemporary political situation in Aegina and to circumstances of the victory. The primary objective of this book is to provide an interpretation of each of the three odes as meaningful, coherent works of the literary art. For each ode, it provides a commentary in which problems of text and interpretation are discussed in detail, a structural and metrical analysis, and an interpretative essay, in which the observations of detail are brought...

The Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna is the only surviving Greek epic that gives a full narrative of the Trojan War between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Book V covers the contest between Ajax and Odysseus over the armour of Achilles, leading to Ajax' madness, suicide and funeral. The book gives balanced treatment to matters of text, language, literary qualities and sources. An introduction discusses the poem's main features. The commentary is punctuated by introductions to sections. There are indexes of subjects, ancient and mediaeval literature and Greek words. The work's major areas...

The contributions in this volume cover most of the issues that have been at the centre of scholarly interest in Apollonius and his epic "Argonautica," ranging from the history of the text through questions of literary technique to the epic's reception.

This study investigates the reception of Ovid's heroines in Metamorphoses commentaries written between 1100 and 1618. The Ovidian heroine offers a telling window onto medieval and early modern clerical constructions of gender and selfhood. In the context of classical representations of the feminine, the book examines Ovid's engagement of the heroine to explore problems of intentionality. The second part of the study presents commentaries by such clerics as William of Orleans, the "Vulgate" commentator, Thomas Walsingham, and Raphael Regius, illustrating the reception of the Ovidian...

This book considers the relationship between the Fasti, Ovid's long poem on the Roman calendar, and the calendar itself, conceived of as consisting both in the rites and commemorations it organizes and in its graphic representation. The Fasti treats the calendar, recently revised by Caesar and Augustus, as its most important cultural model and as a quasi-literary 'intertext': the poem simultaneously reshapes and is itself shaped by the calendar. The study includes chapters on Book 4 and the rites of April, on the addition of Julio-Claudian holidays to the calendar, and on the...