A collection of largely unpublished papers by the distinguished Hellenist W. S. Barrett.They include detailed discussions of Stesichorus' Geryoneis and various odes of Pindar and Bacchylides, a major study of Pindar's metrical practice, substantial pieces on Tragedy, and notes on other authors including Thucydides, Menander, and Seneca.

A collection of essays on Virgil's 'Aeneid' by a celebrated scholar and interpreter of Latin poetry. Gian Biaggio Conte focuses on the way in which Virgil reworks earlier poetry (especially that of Homer) to create a new and effective mode of epic in a period when the genre appeared to be debased or exhausted.

Paths of Song: The Lyric Dimension of Greek Tragedy analyzes the multiple and varied evocations of choral lyric in fifth-century Greek tragedy using a variety of methodological approaches that illustrate the myriad forms through which lyric is present and can be presented in tragedy. This collection focuses on different types of interaction of Greek tragedy with lyric poetry in fifth-century Athens: generic, mythological, cultural, musical, and performative. The collected essays demonstrate the dynamic and nuanced relationship between lyric poetry and tragedy within the larger frame of Athenian song- and performance-culture, and reveal a vibrant and symbiotic co-existence between tragedy and lyric. Paths of Song illustrates the effects that this dynamic engagement with lyric possibly had on tragic performances, including performances of satyr drama, as well as on processes of survival and reputation, selection and refiguration, tradition and innovation. The volume is of particular interest to scholars in the field of classics, cultural studies, and the performing arts, as well as to readers interested in poetic transmission and in cultural evolution in antiquity.

Introduction to this wide-ranging body of poetry, which includes work by such famous poets as Sappho and Pindar.

This book addresses the many interlocking problems in understanding the modes of performance, dissemination, and transmission of Greek poetry of the seventh to the fifth centuries BC whose first performers were a choral group, sometimes singing in a ritual context, sometimes in more secular celebrations of victories in competitive games. It explores the different ways such a group presented itself and was perceived by its audiences; the place of tyrants, of other prominent individuals and of communities in commissioning and funding choral performances and in securing the further circulation of the songs' texts and music; the social and political role of choral songs and the extent to which such songs continued to be performed both inside and outside the immediate family and polis-community, whether chorally or in archaic Greece's important cultural engine, the elite male symposium, with the consequence that Athenian theatre audiences could be expected to appreciate allusion to or reworking of such poetic forms in tragedy and comedy; and how various types of performance contributed to transmission of written texts of the poems until they were collected and edited by Alexandrian scholars in the third and second centuries BC.

The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West examines the relationship between epinician and the heroizing narratives about athletes, or "hero-athlete narratives," that circulated orally in Sicily and Italy in the late archaic and early classical period. Drawing on the colorful stories told about athletes in later sources, the fragments of Simonides, and the surviving odes of Pindar and Bacchylides, it argues that epinician was formed in opposition to orally transmitted narratives and that these two forms-epinician and the hero-athlete narrative-promoted opposed political visions, with epinician promoting the Deinomenid empire and its structures and the hero-athlete narrative opposing Deinomenid rule. Combining an intimate knowledge of the material culture of the Greek West with an innovative use of available source material, The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West exposes the rich intersections between athletics and politics in Sicily and Italy, offering a new and compelling account of Deinomenid self-promotion and of the varied and complex communities that operated under the Deinomenids' control or within their shadow. Further, by establishing models of production and interpretation for the orally transmitted narratives and bringing them into dialogue with epinician, The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West reveals much about epinician as a form, how it developed in the Greek West, what meanings it already carried, and what meanings it accrued as it was appropriated by Hieron the second Deinomenid ruler.

The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE seeks to upend conventional thinking about the development of drama from the fifth to the fourth centuries and to provide a new way of talking and thinking about the choruses of drama after the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. Set in the context of a theatre industry extending far beyond the confines of the City Dionysia and the city of Athens, the identity of choral performers and the significance of their contribution to the shape and meaning of drama in the later Classical period (c.400-323) as a whole is an intriguing and under-explored area of enquiry. This volume draws together the fourth-century historical, material, dramatic, literary, and philosophical sources that attest to the activity and quality of dramatic choruses and, having considered the positive evidence for dramatic choral activity, provides a radical rethinking of two oft-cited yet ill-understood phenomena that have traditionally supported the idea that the chorus of drama 'declined' in the fourth century: the inscription of χοŕο*u~ με ́λο*s in papyri and manuscripts in place of fully written-out choral odes, and Aristotle's invocation of embolima (Poetics 1456a25-32). It also explores the important role of influential fourth-century authors such as Plato, Demosthenes, and Xenophon, as well as artistic representations of choruses on fourth-century monuments, in shaping later scholars' understanding of the dramatic chorus throughout the Classical period, reaching conclusions that have significant implications for the broader story we wish to tell about Attic drama and its most enigmatic and fundamental element, the chorus.