Search

We try to show from a few examples of the fragmentary collection of the Aitia that Callimachus is also sensitive to sound effects (alliterations, assonances, anagrams, sound chiasms) in the composition of his poetry and that this inclination is linked to the power of names which is the base of his poetic writing.

This study refuses to read the Hellenistic poems through the concept of genre as it is the product necessarily subsequent to the reception, but suggests to search in the texts brands of genericity as indices of the generic variation. Two poems of Theocritus (idylls 13 and 24) are studied as examples of this genericity under construction: the new epic story we call Epyllion appears as a parenthesis proposed in the common epic tradition for a decisive poetic experimentation.

Iphigeneia can be conceived of as a very Hellenistic figure: her fate and several of her features were indeed very likely to become a matter of deep interest for the Hellenistic poet-scholars who keenly studied recondite mythological details and alternative versions of myths. In the 3rd century BC, the legend of Iphigeneia was still a matter of debate: her name, her genealogy, the circumstances of her sacrifice and her whereabouts after the sacrifice were uncertain and were known through different versions of the myth. As the first victim of the Greek expedition against Troy, she was also bound to find an important place in Lycophron’s Alexandra. In Cassandra’s prophecy, Iphigeneia could easily become the Greek pendant to Cassandra’s personal tragedy. This paper will analyse the characteristics of the version chosen by Lycophron and set it against the better-known version of the myth known through the tragedies of Euripides. It will then explore the possible parallels to the version chosen by Lycophron in ancient iconography.

In this article I show how Nicander, in his Alexipharmaca, reappropriates a standard epic practice, the use of similes, and how he uses these for ends that are not purely ornamental, but which answer as much to the construction of his hexameter poem as to the mythological or metapoetic discourse into a technical one. But the similes are not only a window open on another discursive type: they are also at times fully operative in the technical discourse and so take full part in medical description.

Christophe Cusset and Benjamin Acosta-Hughes focus here on the widely different parallel treatments that two major poets, Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes, give in their respective works to the figure of Heracles, symbol of the archaism that can be reinvented, resized or otherwise discarded, according to the choices that appear, on each occasion, meaningful for the one who questions aesthetics of these poets. Apollonius indeed expells from his renewed epic a hero who is famous as a figure attached to an archaic form of epic heroism, whereas in Theocritus Heracles, while being recognizably an archaic hero, is seen in a perspective that is not archaic, but totally transformed by the new perspective that focuses on the poet himself.

In this paper I consider first the possible points of tangent between Aratus and Stoicism as far as the biographical point of view is concerned, and secondly read the opening of the Phaenomena in the light of the Hymn to Zeus of Cleanthes again. Aratus’ links with Stoicism ultimately prove to be quite thin in the writing of the poet. Stoic Aratus is especially the creation of the interest that Stoics did manifest to his work, a work which was composed in an environment quite widely influenced by the philosophy of the Stoa.