Malcolm Davies | |
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Nationality | British |
Alma mater | St. John's College, Oxford |
Malcolm Davies is a British classicist and textual critic of Ancient Greek literature, and is Emeritus Research Fellow in Classics at St John's College, Oxford. [1] He specialises in the Greek epic cycle, Greek lyric poetry and Greek tragedy, and has edited texts from various ancient Greek poets.
Antimachus of Colophon, or of Claros, was a Greek poet and grammarian, who flourished about 400 BC.
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.
The Naupactia is a lost epic poem of ancient Greek literature. In antiquity the title was also written Naupaktika, and it is also in the present day sometimes referred to among scholars by the Latin phrase carmen Naupactium. Naupactus is a city in Greece on the Corinthian Gulf.
The Cypria is a lost epic poem of ancient Greek literature, which has been attributed to Stasinus and was quite well known in classical antiquity and fixed in a received text, but which subsequently was lost to view. It was part of the Epic Cycle, which told the entire history of the Trojan War in epic hexameter verse. The story of the Cypria comes chronologically at the beginning of the Epic Cycle, and is followed by that of the Iliad; the composition of the two was apparently in the reverse order. The poem comprised eleven books of verse in epic dactylic hexameters.
The Theban Cycle is a collection of four lost epics of ancient Greek literature which tells the mythological history of the Boeotian city of Thebes. They were composed in dactylic hexameter verse and believed to be recorded between 750 and 500 BC. The epics took place before the Trojan War and centered around the Theban royal family.
Stesichorus was a Greek lyric poet native of today's Calabria. He is best known for telling epic stories in lyric metres, and for some ancient traditions about his life, such as his opposition to the tyrant Phalaris, and the blindness he is said to have incurred and cured by composing verses first insulting and then flattering to Helen of Troy.
Panyassis of Halicarnassus, sometimes known as Panyasis, was a 5th-century BC Greek epic poet from Halicarnassus in the Persian Empire.
Martin Litchfield West, was a British philologist and classical scholar. In recognition of his contribution to scholarship, he was awarded the Order of Merit in 2014.
Antimachus of Teos was an early Greek epic poet. According to Plutarch, he observed a solar eclipse in 753 BC, the same year in which Rome was founded. The epic Epigoni, a sequel to the legend of Thebes, was apparently sometimes ascribed to Antimachus of Teos. However, confusion is possible with the much later literary poet Antimachus of Colophon, who wrote an epic Thebais on what must have been an overlapping subject.
Cinaethon of Sparta was a legendary Greek poet to whom different sources ascribe the lost epics Oedipodea, Little Iliad and Telegony. Eusebius says that he flourished in 764–3 BC.
Epigoni was an early Greek epic, a sequel to the Thebaid and therefore grouped in the Theban cycle. Some ancient authors seem to have considered it a part of the Thebaid and not a separate poem.
The Thebaid or Thebais, also called the Cyclic Thebaid, is an Ancient Greek epic poem of uncertain authorship sometimes attributed by early writers to Homer, for example, by the poet Callinus and the historian Herodotus. It told the story of the war between the brothers Eteocles and Polynices, and was regarded as forming part of a Theban Cycle. Only fragments of the text survive.
The Alcmeonis is a lost early Greek epic which is considered to have formed part of the Theban cycle. There are only seven references to the Alcmeonis in ancient literature, and all of them make it clear that the authorship of the epic was unknown. It told the story of Alcmaeon's killing of his mother Eriphyle for having arranged the death of his father Amphiaraus, whose murder was narrated in the Thebaid. One of the surviving fragments is quoted by Athenaeus in the Deipnosophistae: he chose it because it describes a funeral banquet. The lines have very little in common with descriptions of feasts in the Iliad and Odyssey.
The Oedipodea is a lost poem of the Theban cycle, a part of the Epic Cycle. The poem was about 6,600 verses long and the authorship was credited by ancient authorities to Cinaethon (Κιναίθων), a barely known poet who lived probably in Sparta. Eusebius says that he flourished in 764/3 BC. Only three short fragments and one testimonium survived.
Asius of Samos was an ancient Greek poet whose work survives in the form of fragments quoted by other ancient authors. All that is known about the man is that he was from Samos and that his father's name was Amphiptolemus. His era is inferred from the style and content of the remains, which suit the archaizing movement of the sixth century BCE. Antiquity left no titles or synopses, so the number, scope and focus of his works is unknown, but to judge from the ancient testimonia and the content of the fragments themselves he appears to have specialized in genealogical epic comparable to the fragmentary Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Asius' preserved genealogies show a preoccupation with Hesiod's Boeotia, in addition to details concerning his own native Samos. Besides the 13 fragments surviving from his hexametric poetry, there is a short and enigmatic fragment in elegiacs.
The Lille Stesichorus is a papyrus containing a major fragment of poetry usually attributed to the archaic lyric poet Stesichorus, discovered at Lille University and published in 1976. It has been considered the most important of all the Stesichorus fragments, confirming his role as an historic link between genres as different as the epic poetry of Homer and the lyric poetry of Pindar. The subject matter and style are typical of his work generally but not all scholars have accepted it as his work. The fragment is a narrative treatment of a popular myth, involving the family of Oedipus and the tragic history of Thebes, and thus it sheds light on other treatments of the same myth, such as by Sophocles in Oedipus Tyrannos and Aeschylus in Seven Against Thebes. The fragment is significant also in the history of colometry since it includes lyric verses that have been divided into metrical cola, a practice usually associated with the later career of Aristophanes of Byzantium.
Angus Morton Bowie is a British academic, Emeritus Lobel fellow in Classics at The Queen's College, University of Oxford. His research interests include Homer, Herodotus, Greek lyric, tragedy and comedy, Virgil, Greek mythology, structuralism, narratology, and other theories of literature.
John Gordon Fitch is a classical scholar. He works chiefly on Roman poetry, especially Lucretius and the dramas of Seneca, and his interests also include Greek and Roman texts on agriculture and medicine. He is a professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria.
Graham Zanker is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Canterbury and an affiliate at the University of Adelaide.
Patrick J. Finglass is a British classicist of Ancient Greek literature and the Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol and former Fifty-Pound Fellow at All Souls College Oxford. His field of research includes Greek lyric poetry and Greek tragedy, with a particular interest in the authors Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, and Stesichorus. He is a current editor of The Classical Quarterly, and has penned numerous articles and critical editions of Greek texts with extensive commentary.