Late Hellenistic Greek Literature in Dialogue

Offers new insights into late Hellenistic literary culture and its relationship with imperial Greek literature.

Jason König (Edited by), Nicolas Wiater (Edited by)

9781316516683, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 May 2022

380 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.6 cm, 0.76 kg

Late Hellenistic Greek literature, both prose and poetry, stands out for its richness and diversity. Recent work has tended to take an author-by-author approach that underestimates the interconnectedness of the literary culture of the period. The chapters assembled here set out to change that by offering new readings of a wide range of late Hellenistic texts and genres, including historiography, geography, rhetoric and philosophy, together with many verse texts and inscriptions. In the process, they offer new insights into the various ways in which late Hellenistic literature engaged with its social, cultural and political contexts, while interrogating and revising some of the standard narratives of the relationship between late Hellenistic and imperial Greek literary culture, which are too often studied in isolation from each other. As a whole the book prompts us to rethink the place of late Hellenistic literature within the wider landscape of Greek and Roman literary history.

Introduction Jason König and Nicolas Wiater
1. The empire becomes a body: power, space and movement in Polybius' Histories Nicolas Wiater
2. Pyrenaean mountains and deep-valleyed alps: geography and empire in the Garland of Philip Thomas A. Schmitz
3. Sailing the sea, sailing an image: periplus and mediality in Diodorus' Bibliotheke and Philostratus' Imagines Mario Baumann
4. Ecocritical readings in late Hellenistic literature: landscape alteration and hybris in Strabo and Diodorus Jason König
5. Civic and counter-civic cosmopolitanism: Diodorus, Strabo and the later Hellenistic polis Benjamin Gray
6. The Wrath of the Sibyl: Homeric reception and contested identities in the Sibylline Oracles 3 Emma Greensmith
7. Imagining belonging: the use of Athens in Hellenistic Rome Joy Connolly
8. Philosophical self-definition in Strabo's Geography Myrto Hatzimichali
9. Narrating 'the swarm of possibilities': Plutarch, Polybius and the idea of contingency in history Felix K. Maier
10. 'Asianist' style in Hellenistic oratory and Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists Lawrence Kim
11. Greek reading lists from Dionysius to Dio: rhetorical imitation in the Augustan age and the Second Sophistic Casper C. de Jonge
12. Envoi: To live in Hellenistic times Simon Goldhill.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literary theory [DSA]