The Greek Poetry of Summons and Invitation assembles and studies for the first time the numerous poetic invitations and summonses of Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greece. These poems and passages come from epic, lyric, dramatic, epigrammatic, and epigraphic sources. Most of them are by celebrated Greek poets ― Homer, Sappho, Alcaeus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Theocritus, Callimachus, Apollonius, among others. Analysis of this poetic corpus associates it with the ‘kletikon’, an ancient rhetorical genre of content, and reveals everywhere in it the commonplaces of that genre, thus allowing new sub-types of the kletikon to be discovered, and the development of the genre over the centuries to be charted. When individual invitations and summonses are viewed against this generic background, their originality and merits emerge along with their poets’ unique voices. Each summons and invitation is presented, translated, discussed in detail, and, when part of a longer work, linked to its context. This volume is directed to scholars and students of Classics; scholars of the Latin equivalent genre, the ‘vocatio’, which persisted into the Renaissance, can also find in it an intellectual model.

The Greek Poetry of Summons and Invitation assembles and studies for the first time the numerous poetic invitations and summonses of Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greece. These poems and passages come from epic, lyric, dramatic, epigrammatic, and epigraphic sources. Most of them are by celebrated Greek poets ― Homer, Sappho, Alcaeus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Theocritus, Callimachus, Apollonius, among others. Analysis of this poetic corpus associates it with the ‘kletikon’, an ancient rhetorical genre of content, and reveals everywhere in it the commonplaces of that genre, thus allowing new sub-types of the kletikon to be discovered, and the development of the genre over the centuries to be charted. When individual invitations and summonses are viewed against this generic background, their originality and merits emerge along with their poets’ unique voices. Each summons and invitation is presented, translated, discussed in detail, and, when part of a longer work, linked to its context. This volume is directed to scholars and students of Classics; scholars of the Latin equivalent genre, the ‘vocatio’, which persisted into the Renaissance, can also find in it an intellectual model.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1857. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.