Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama by Jonathan J Price

Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama by Jonathan J Price

This collection presents 19 interconnected studies on the language, history, exegesis, and cultural setting of Greek epic and dramatic poetic texts ("Text") and their afterlives ("Intertext") in Antiquity.

Spanning texts from Hittite archives to Homer to Greek tragedy and comedy to Vergil to Celsus, the studies here were all written by friends and colleagues of Margalit Finkelberg who are experts in their particular fields, and who have all been influenced by her work. The papers offer close readings of individual lines and discussion of widespread cultural phenomena. Readers will encounter Hittite precedents to the Homeric poems, characters in ancient epic analysed by modern cognitive theory, the use of Homer in Christian polemic, tragic themes of love and murder, a history of the Sphinx, and more.

Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama offers a selection of fascinating essays exploring Greek epic, drama, and their reception and adaption by other ancient authors, and will be of interest to anyone working on Greek literature.

Jonathan J. Price is the Fred and Helen Lessing Professor of Ancient History at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and the author of books and articles on Greek and Roman historiography, Jewish history of the Roman period, and Jewish epigraphy. Among his publications are Jerusalem Under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State, 66-70 C.E. (1992), Thucydides and Internal Conflict (2001), and editions of the Jewish inscriptions in Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae: A Multi-lingual Corpus of the Inscriptions from Alexander to Muhammad, Volumes I-V (2010-2019).

Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz is Associate Professor at the Department of Classics, Tel-Aviv University, Israel. She is the author of Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World (2005), of Taxing Freedom in Thessalian Manumission Inscriptions (2013), and of several articles on the status of slaves and free non-citizens, on the working of Athenian democracy, and Greek historiography.