Graham Zanker (born 16 December 1947) is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Canterbury and an affiliate at the University of Adelaide. [1]
He has published widely on Hellenistic poetry and art, Homeric ethics, and Virgilian epic. [2]
Zanker received his B.A. from the University of Adelaide before proceeding to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in Classical Philology. [3] [4]
He has undertaken research at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Cincinnati, [5] and been a resident scholar at the Fondation Hardt (Geneva), Center for Hellenic Studies, Institute of Classical Studies. He has also been an academic visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study. [6]
Zanker's first book, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry: A Literature and Its Audience (1987), was a groundbreaking investigation of the interrelation of Hellenistic poetry and art. [7] [8] Zanker then moved to Homeric ethics in The Heart of Achilles: Characterization and Personal Ethics in the Iliad (1994), amending the schematic view of the psychological drives behind the behavior of the Homeric heroes by (e.g.) focusing on the reconciliation scene between Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24. [9] [10] He then returned to the interaction of Hellenistic art and literature in Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art (2004). [11] [12] He has recently written on Stoic fate in Virgil's Aeneid . [13]
He has also translated Thomas Szlezak's Platon Lesen (Reading Plato, 2005), [14] [15] [16] and authored an edition, translation, and commentary to Herodas’ Mimiambs (2009). [17] [18] [19]
Zanker is currently working on a collaboration on Ch. G. Heyne's De Genio Saeculi Ptolemaeorum (1763), establishing its place in modern concepts of Hellenistic civilization. [20]
Homer was an Ancient Greek poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the most revered and influential authors in history.
Greek literature dates back from the ancient Greek literature, beginning in 800 BC, to the modern Greek literature of today.
In Greek mythology, Coeus, also called Polus, was one of the Titans, one of the three groups of children born to Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth).
In Greek mythology, Tethys was a Titan daughter of Uranus and Gaia, a sister and wife of the Titan Oceanus, and the mother of the river gods and the Oceanids. Although Tethys had no active role in Greek mythology and no established cults, she was depicted in mosaics decorating baths, pools, and triclinia in the Greek East, particularly in Antioch and its suburbs, either alone or with Oceanus.
Callimachus was an ancient Greek poet, scholar, and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period, he wrote over 800 literary works, most of which do not survive, in a wide variety of genres. He espoused an aesthetic philosophy, known as Callimacheanism, which exerted a strong influence on the poets of the Roman Empire and, through them, on all subsequent Western literature.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three ancient Greek hymns and one epigram. The hymns praise deities of the Greek pantheon and retell mythological stories, often involving a deity's birth, their acceptance among the gods on Mount Olympus, or the establishment of their cult. In antiquity, the hymns were generally, though not universally, attributed to the poet Homer: modern scholarship has established that most date to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, though some are more recent and the latest, the Hymn to Ares, may have been composed as late as the fifth century CE.
The Epic Cycle was a collection of Ancient Greek epic poems, composed in dactylic hexameter and related to the story of the Trojan War, including the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the so-called Little Iliad, the Iliupersis, the Nostoi, and the Telegony. Scholars sometimes include the two Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, among the poems of the Epic Cycle, but the term is more often used to specify the non-Homeric poems as distinct from the Homeric ones.
An aristeia or aristia is a scene in the dramatic conventions of epic poetry as in the Iliad, where a hero in battle has his finest moments. Aristeia may result in the death of the hero, and therefore suggests a "battle in which he reaches his peak as a fighter and hero".
Ancient Greek literature is literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, set in an idealized archaic past today identified as having some relation to the Mycenaean era. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, the Theogony and Works and Days, constituted the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods.
Christianity and Hellenistic philosophies experienced complex interactions during the first to the fourth centuries.
Scholia are grammatical, critical, or explanatory comments – original or copied from prior commentaries – which are inserted in the margin of the manuscript of ancient authors, as glosses. One who writes scholia is a scholiast. The earliest attested use of the word dates to the 1st century BC.
Herodas, or Herondas, was a Greek poet and the author of short humorous dramatic scenes in verse, probably written in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC.
The Homeric Question concerns the doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey, and their historicity. The subject has its roots in classical antiquity and the scholarship of the Hellenistic period, but has flourished among Homeric scholars of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
Homeric scholarship is the study of any Homeric topic, especially the two large surviving epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. It is currently part of the academic discipline of classical studies. The subject is one of the oldest in education.
The Argonautica is a Greek epic poem written by Apollonius Rhodius in the 3rd century BC. The only entirely surviving Hellenistic epic, the Argonautica tells the myth of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to retrieve the Golden Fleece from remote Colchis. Their heroic adventures and Jason's relationship with the dangerous Colchian princess/sorceress Medea were already well known to Hellenistic audiences, which enabled Apollonius to go beyond a simple narrative, giving it a scholarly emphasis suitable to the times. It was the age of the great Library of Alexandria, and his epic incorporates his research in geography, ethnography, comparative religion, and Homeric literature. However, his main contribution to the epic tradition lies in his development of the love between hero and heroine – he seems to have been the first narrative poet to study "the pathology of love". His Argonautica had a profound impact on Latin poetry: it was translated by Varro Atacinus and imitated by Valerius Flaccus, it influenced Catullus and Ovid, and it provided Virgil with a model for his Roman epic, the Aeneid.
The shield of Achilles is the shield that Achilles uses in his fight with Hector, famously described in a passage in Book 18, lines 478–608 of Homer's Iliad. The intricately detailed imagery on the shield has inspired many different interpretations of its significance.
The Iliad is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the Odyssey, the poem is divided into 24 books and was written in dactylic hexameter. It contains 15,693 lines in its most widely accepted version. Set towards the end of the Trojan War, a ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Mycenaean Greek states, the poem depicts significant events in the siege's final weeks. In particular, it depicts a fierce quarrel between King Agamemnon and a celebrated warrior, Achilles. It is a central part of the Epic Cycle. The Iliad is often regarded as the first substantial piece of European literature.
Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the ancient Greeks, and a genre of ancient Greek folklore, today absorbed alongside Roman mythology into the broader designation of classical mythology. These stories concern the ancient Greek religion's view of the origin and nature of the world; the lives and activities of deities, heroes, and mythological creatures; and the origins and significance of the ancient Greeks' cult and ritual practices. Modern scholars study the myths to shed light on the religious and political institutions of ancient Greece, and to better understand the nature of mythmaking itself.
Angus Morton Bowie is a British academic, Emeritus Lobel fellow in Classics at The Queen's College, Oxford. His research interests include Homer, Herodotus, Greek lyric, tragedy and comedy, Virgil, Greek mythology, structuralism, narratology, and other theories of literature.
Rachel Barney is a Canadian philosopher and Professor and Acting Associate Chair at the department of philosophy at the University of Toronto. She is known for her works on ancient philosophy.
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