Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought

Arum Park is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on Archaic and Classical Greek poetry, but she has published on a wide range of authors, including Hesiod, Pindar, Ovid, and Longus. Her current book project, supported by a 2012-13 fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies, treats the concepts of truth, gender, and genre in Pindar and Aeschylus.

• ContentsPaideiaBy Sue GuineyContributorsIntroduction: Resemblance and Reality as Interpretive LensBy Arum Park and Mary PendergraftPart OnePoetry: Verbal Resemblance as Incomplete RealityChapter 1: Mētis on a Mission: Unreliable Narration and the Perils of Cunning in Odyssey 9By Peter AicherChapter 2: Little Things Mean a Lot: Odysseus’ Scar and Eurycleia’s MemoryBy Jeffrey BenekerChapter 3: Failure of the Textual Relation: Anacreon’s Purple Ball Poem (PMG 358)By T. H. M. Gellar-GoadChapter 4: Reality, Illusion, or Both? Cloud-Women in Stesichorus and Pindar.By Arum ParkChapter 5: Neither Beast Nor Woman: Reconstructing Callisto in Callimachus’ Hymn to ZeusBy Keyne CheshirePart TwoGreek Tragedy: Reality, Expectation, TraditionChapter 6: Necessity and Universal Reality: The Use of XPH in AeschylusBy David C.A. WiltshireChapter 7: The Arms of Achilles: Tradition and Mythmaking in Sophocles’ PhiloctetesBy Sheila MurnaghanChapter 8: The Bad Place: The Horrific House of Euripides’ HeraclesBy Derek Smith KeyserChapter 9: The "Hymn to Zeus" (Agamemnon 160-83) and Reasoning from ResemblancesBy Edwin CarawanPart ThreeGreek Prose: Reality and AppearancesChapter 10: Stereotypes as Faulty Resemblance: Humorous Deception and Ethnography in Herodotus By Mark C. MashChapter 11: The Rational Religion of Xenophon’s SocratesBy David JohnsonChapter 12: Wives, Subjects, Sons, and Lovers: Phthonos and Resemblance in Xenophon’s CyropaediaBy Norman Sandri

With sophistication and originality evident throughout, Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought presents fourteen studies of a dichotomy pervasive in Greek literature and thought and refracted in Roman epic. The authors study, inter alia, the artistry of spaces constructed within the antimony, inconsistencies in the Greek literary and philosophical tradition, ambiguities within the Greek language itself, and philosophical challenges to the Theory of Forms. This is an altogether original and well-crafted book.- Professor Victor Bers, Yale University, USA