Mary R Lefkowitz
Biographic Data
| ID | 272037 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mary R Lefkowitz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mary R |
| FAMILY NAME | Lefkowitz |
| SIGNATURE | LEFKOWITZ M R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wellesley College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 272 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1963 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Writing Literary History in the Greek and Roman World
Covering a wide variety of Greek and Latin texts that span from the Archaic period down to Late Antiquity, this volume represents the first concerted attempt to understand ancient literary history in its full complexity and on its own terms. Abandoning long-standing misconceptions derived from the misleading application of modern assumptions and standards, the volume rehabilitates an often neglected but fundamentally important subject: the Greeks…
Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho
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Perpetua
Vibia Perpetua was martyred along with her slave Felicitas and other Christians, in the amphitheater at Carthage, on March 7, 203. Like other martyrs Perpetua was willing to cut herself off from her family on behalf of her religious beliefs and faced death with extraordinary courage
Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece: Reflections on Literature, Society and Religion
Taking a wide selection of Greek funerary epigrams from the 6th to 4th centuries BC, this volume considers their historical and chronological contexts to draw out information about the society that created them. Using both Hansen’s corpus of epigrams and wider examples, it gives priority to those cases where the whole monument ensemble is preserved, both text and image, enabling a much better understanding of the significance of the texts
Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece: Reflections on Literature, Society and Religion
"Taking a wide selection of Greek funerary epigrams from the 6th to 4th centuries BC, this volume considers their historical and chronological contexts to draw out information about the society that created them. A thematic structure within a broader chronological framework provides a valuable lens on the epigrams, allowing readers to compare particular types across the time period. The focus is on epitaphs of individuals in the most significant …
Euripides and the Gods
Athena
Athena, the goddess of Athens, appears in more of Euripides’ extant dramas than any other god. When angry, Athena can be ruthless, as she is in the Trojan Women, but in most other dramas she is more willing than other gods to communicate with mortals, especially when the interests of her own city are concerned, appearing ex machina in Euripides’ dramas Suppliants, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion, and Erechtheus. In these dramas the goddess help…
Conclusion
At the end of dramas the gods may not have solved all problems, that does not mean that Euripides sought to have his original audiences cease to honor them. On the contrary, it reminds us that the gods exist to please themselves, not in order to make humans happy. The codas to five dramas (even though they were probably not written by Euripides) state explicitly and without any hedging that the gods do what they choose to do and that humans only …
Women's Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation
This highly acclaimed collection provides a rare look into the private lives and legal status of Greek and Roman women of all social classes -- wet nurses, prostitutes, poets, gladiators, musicians, intellectuals, priestesses, and housewives. The third edition offers new texts in nearly every section, vividly describing women's sentiments and circumstances through readings on love, bereavement, and friendship, but also on property rights, breast …
Perpetua
Born around 183 ce , Vibia Perpetua was martyred along with her slave Felicitas and other Christians in the amphitheater at Carthage on March 7, 203, during games celebrating the birthday of Geta, son of the emperor Septimius Severus. who had banned conversion to either Judaism or Christianity during the previous year (Scriptores Historiae Augustae Sev. 17.1).
The Lives of the Greek Poets
Renowned scholar Mary R. Lefkowitz has extensively revised and rewritten her 1981 classic to introduce a new generation of students to the lives of the Greek poets. Thoroughly updated with references to the most recent scholarship, this second edition includes new material and fresh analysis of the ancient biographies of Greece's most famous poets. With little or no independent historical information to draw on, ancient writers searched for biogr…
A Herodotus for Our Time
History Lesson: A Race Odyssey
Myth and History in the Biography of Apollonius
In the Hellenistic age, the writing of literary biography was not more scientific than it was in the fifth and fourth centuries. Most of the most reliable information we have about ancient poets comes from those poets who tell us about themselves, like Hesiod or Archilochus. Everything we know about Apollonius of Rhodius comes from other sources, the two brief lives that are attached to the scholia to the Voyage of the Argo , an entry in the Suda…
Women in Greek Myth
Women's life in Greece & Rome: A Source Book in Translation
Women's Life in Greece and Rome is the standard source book for courses in women in antiquity, which have become a regular feature in Classical Studies curricula since the publication of the first edition in 1982. This new third edition includes an extensive new Appendix, taking account of recent scholarship and touching on such topics of contemporary interest as ageing, clitoridectomy, Late Antiquity, the geographic periphery of the Graeco-Roman…
Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths
Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism
"Predatory" Goddesses
Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens - Volume 71, Number 4, October-December 2002
Predatory” Goddesses
It is often assumed that depictions on Attic vases of the goddess Eos carrying off young mortals were meant to convey a strong negative message about the dangers of female sexuality. But can we be sure that the myths about Eos and her lovers, like those of abductions of mortals by other gods, were intended as commentaries on human sexual conduct? Goddesses (unlike women) are immortal, ageless, and powerful. Evidence from the ancient sources sugge…
Myth and History in the Biography of Apollonius
Books in review
Ancient African Civilizations: Kush and Axum
On teachers for whom the earth is flat
To the Editor
The Lives of the Greek Poets
Renowned scholar Mary R. Lefkowitz has extensively revised and rewritten her 1981 classic to introduce a new generation of students to the lives of the Greek poets. Thoroughly updated with references to the most recent scholarship, this second edition includes new material and fresh analysis of the ancient biographies of Greece's most famous poets. With little or no independent historical information to draw on, ancient writers searched for biogr…
Not out of Africa: How Afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as history
Les choeurs de jeunes filles en Grece archaique. II: Alcman
Women's Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation
This highly acclaimed collection provides a rare look into the private lives and legal status of Greek and Roman women of all social classes -- wet nurses, prostitutes, poets, gladiators, musicians, intellectuals, priestesses, and housewives. The third edition offers new texts in nearly every section, vividly describing women's sentiments and circumstances through readings on love, bereavement, and friendship, but also on property rights, breast …
The Poet as Hero: Fifth-Century Autobiography and Subsequent Biographical Fiction
The old proverb (‘poets tell a lot of lies’) can still more accurately be applied to their biographers.‘ Even the more plausible and psycho logically tempting details in the lives of literary figures derive from these authors’ fictional works, poems, and dramas, and not from the kind of source material biographers use today, letters, documents, eyewitness testimony. Critics and readers eager to establish some historical correlation between any an…
Euterpe, An Anthology of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac, and Iambic Poetry
First-Person Fictions: Pindar's Poetic 'I
The first person in Pindar the influential fictions in the Scholia to Pindar's Pythian 8 Pindar's lives the poet as hero autobiographical fiction in Pindar the Pindar Scholia the poet as athlete Pindar's Pythian 5 who sang Pindar's victory odes
The Influential Fictions in the Scholia to Pindar's Pythian 8
First-Person Fictions: Pindar’s Poetic ‘I’
This collection of essays, written over a period of almost thirty years, deals with one problem: who is the `I' in the odes of the most celebrated ancient Greek poet, Pindar? Since antiquity, the complex and allusive language of the first-person statements has provoked many different answers. Professor Lefkowitz describes the function and nature of Pindar's `I'-statements and proposes a controversial solution that would cause some histories of Gr…
Epinician Performance
Impiety’ and ‘Atheism’ in Euripides' Dramas
In the surviving plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles the gods appear to men only rarely. In the Eumenides Apollo and Athena intervene to bring acquittal to Orestes. In Sophocles' Philoctetes Heracles appears ex machina to ensure that the hero returns to Troy, and we learn from a messenger how the gods have summoned the aged Oedipus to a hero's tomb. In Sophocles' Ajax Athena drives Ajax mad and taunts him cruelly. Prometheus Bound (assuming that it …
Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism
Women in Greek Myth
Modern critics often interpret ancient literature according to their own standards ad preoccupations, as if they were reading the works of a contemporary author. Most recently, feminists have applied their own criteria to the rich variety of female characters in Greek mythology. The Amazons are seen as representatives of an original matriarchy, Clytemnestra as a frustrated individualist, Antigone an oppressed revolutionary. The Greek myths reflec…
Who Sang Pindar's Victory Odes
Greek Lyric Poetry. A Selection of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry
Predatory” Goddesses
It is often assumed that depictions on Attic vases of the goddess Eos carrying off young mortals were meant to convey a strong negative message about the dangers of female sexuality. But can we be sure that the myths about Eos and her lovers, like those of abductions of mortals by other gods, were intended as commentaries on human sexual conduct? Goddesses (unlike women) are immortal, ageless, and powerful. Evidence from the ancient sources sugge…
The First Person in Pindar Reconsidered — Again
Journal Article THE FIRST PERSON IN PINDAR RECONSIDERED — AGAIN Get access MARY R. LEFKOWITZ MARY R. LEFKOWITZ Wellesley College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Volume 40, Issue 1, December 1995, Pages 139–150, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.1995.tb00468.x Published: 12 March 2010
Ethnocentric history from aristobulus to bernal
The Poet as Athlete
The subject of the greatest surviving lyric poetry is not love nor death but athletic games. That we have manuscripts only of Pindar’s Victory Odes is a result of a selection made by schoolmasters in late antiquity, but we are lucky to have victory odes rather than hymns or dithyrambs or paeans, because unlike most other Greek public poetry they are written for and about contemporary men, rather than gods or the great heroes of the past. As such …
Dreams in Greek Tragedy
The Victory Ode: An Introduction
The Motivations for St. Perpertua's Martyrdom
Psycho-historical analysis of The Acts of SS. Perpetua and Felicity indicates that the reasons why Perpetua was willing to give up both her life and her infant child in the service of her faith were political and emotional as well as doctrinal. The possibility within the third-century Church of fraternal friendships with men, and visions of their continuation after death, offered relief from the demands of an intense relationship with her father,…
The Religion of the Greeks and Romans
Greek Lyric Poetry. A Selection of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry
Sapphostudien. Forschungsgeschichtliche, biographische und literarästhetische Untersuchungen
Euterpe, An Anthology of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac, and Iambic Poetry
Die Funktion des Mythos bei Pindar. Interpretationen zu sechs Pindargedichten
The Influential Fictions in the Scholia to Pindar's Pythian 8
Pindar's Odes
Epinikion. General Form in the Odes of Pindar
The Motivations for St. Perpertua's Martyrdom
Psycho-historical analysis of The Acts of SS. Perpetua and Felicity indicates that the reasons why Perpetua was willing to give up both her life and her infant child in the service of her faith were political and emotional as well as doctrinal. The possibility within the third-century Church of fraternal friendships with men, and visions of their continuation after death, offered relief from the demands of an intense relationship with her father,…
Dreams in Greek Tragedy
Epigrammata Graeca
Frühgriechische Lyriker. Dritter Teil. Sappho, Alkaios, Anakreon
The Victory Ode: An Introduction
Females of the Species: Semonides on Women. Hugh Lloyd-Jones
The Poet as Hero: Fifth-Century Autobiography and Subsequent Biographical Fiction
The old proverb (‘poets tell a lot of lies’) can still more accurately be applied to their biographers.‘ Even the more plausible and psycho logically tempting details in the lives of literary figures derive from these authors’ fictional works, poems, and dramas, and not from the kind of source material biographers use today, letters, documents, eyewitness testimony. Critics and readers eager to establish some historical correlation between any an…
Les choeurs de jeunes filles en Grece archaique. II: Alcman
Dichter und Gruppe. Eine Untersuchung zu den Bedingungen und zur historischen Funktion früher griechischer Lyrik am Beispiel Alkaios
The Lives of the Greek Poets
The Pindar Scholia
Women in Greek Myth
Women in Greek Myth
Modern critics often interpret ancient literature according to their own standards ad preoccupations, as if they were reading the works of a contemporary author. Most recently, feminists have applied their own criteria to the rich variety of female characters in Greek mythology. The Amazons are seen as representatives of an original matriarchy, Clytemnestra as a frustrated individualist, Antigone an oppressed revolutionary. The Greek myths reflec…
Who Sang Pindar's Victory Odes
Impiety’ and ‘Atheism’ in Euripides' Dramas
In the surviving plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles the gods appear to men only rarely. In the Eumenides Apollo and Athena intervene to bring acquittal to Orestes. In Sophocles' Philoctetes Heracles appears ex machina to ensure that the hero returns to Troy, and we learn from a messenger how the gods have summoned the aged Oedipus to a hero's tomb. In Sophocles' Ajax Athena drives Ajax mad and taunts him cruelly. Prometheus Bound (assuming that it …
Women in Greek Myth
Should Women Receive a Separate Education
LTHOUGH IN THEORY most university courses deal with material that concerns both male and female students, most universities also have specific programs in Like American studies, peace studies, black studies, and now ethnic studies, the women's studies programs came into being primarily as a result of the civil rights movement in the late sixties. But even though these programs were created for political purposes, there are other more subtle but n…
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