In this Book
- The Scroll and the Marble: Studies in Reading and Reception in Hellenistic Poetry
- Book
- 2010
- Published by: University of Michigan Press
---Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Ohio State University
While people of previous ages relied on public performance as their chief means of experiencing poetry, the Hellenistic age developed what one may term a culture of reading. This was the first era in which poets consciously shaped their works with an eye toward publication and reception not just on the civic stage but in several media---in performance, on inscribed monuments, in scrolls. The essays in Peter Bing's collection explore how poetry accommodated various audiences and how these audiences in turn experienced the text in diverse ways. Over the years, Bing's essays have focused on certain Hellenistic authors and genres---particularly on Callimachus and Posidippus and on epigram. His themes, too, have been broadly consistent. Thus, although the essays in The Scroll and the Marble span some twenty years, they offer a coherent vision of Hellenistic poetics as a whole.
Peter Bing is Professor of Classics at Emory University and editor, most recently, of the Companion to Hellenistic Epigram: Down to Philip (coedited with Jon Steffen Bruss).
Jacket illustration: Film still from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, directed by Frank Capra, Columbia Pictures 1939. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.
Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- p. ix
- List of Abbreviations
- pp. xi-xii
- Introduction
- pp. 1-8
- Part 1: Reader and Voice in Callimachus and Hellenistic Poetry
- 4. Reconstructing Berenike's Lock
- pp. 65-82
- Part 2: Epigram and Its Audiences
- Part 3: Inscription and Bookroll in Posidippus
- 9. Reimagining Posidippus
- pp. 177-193
- 10. Between Literature and the Monuments
- pp. 194-216
- 11. Posidippus' Iamatika
- pp. 217-233
- Bibliography
- pp. 273-292
- Index of Ancient Passages Cited
- pp. 293-301
- Subject Index
- pp. 302-304