Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition (Oxford Classical Monographs)

David Fearn; David Fearns

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199215502 ISBN 13: 9780199215508

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2007

Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition combines close literary analysis of Bacchylides' poetry with detailed discussion of the central role poetry played in a variety of differing political contexts throughout Greece in the early fifth century BC. In Bacchylides' praise poetry, David Fearn argues, the poet manipulates a wide range of earlier Greek literature not only to elevate the status of his wealthy patrons, but also to provoke thought about the nature of political power and aristocratic society. New light is also shed on Bacchylides' Dithyrambs, through detailed discussion of the evidence for the kuklios khoros ('circular chorus') and its relation to a variety of different religious festivals, especially within democratic Athens. The links created between literary concerns and cultural contexts reinvigorate these underappreciated poems and reveal their central importance for the self-definition of political communities.

Review:

...throughly researched, wide-ranging...an extremely stimulating and thorough reading of some of Bacchylides' poems...and should be consulted by everyone interested not only in archaic Greek poetry, nut also in Athenian performance culture (Giambattista D'Alessio, Bryn Mawr Classical Review)

...the first English-language monograph on Bacchylides in more than twenty years. This book is interesting...for the questions it asks as well as the possible answers it offers. (Barbara Graziosi, The London Review of Books)

About the Author:

David Fearn is P. S. Allen Junior Research Fellow in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.