Ewen Bowie
Biographic Data
| ID | 5118482 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ewen Bowie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ewen |
| FAMILY NAME | Bowie |
| SIGNATURE | BOWIE E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Corpus Christi College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Fabric of Hellenism: Hellenic Culture and Civic Identity in the Imperial Greek World
Literary Sources for Greek Cities of the Roman Empire
This chapter reviews the chief literary texts that transmit information about the political and cultural life of Greek cities in the Roman Empire, noting where their information is especially important for understanding civic life. After sketching, with examples, the scanty contribution of narrative histories and imperial biographies, it gives pride of place to Philostratus’ Lives of the sophists, adding some sentences about his largely fictional…
Essays on Ancient Greek Literature and Culture: Comedy, Herodotus, Hellenistic and Imperial Greek Poetry, the Novels
In this book one of the world's leading Hellenists brings together his many contributions over four decades to our understanding of major genres of Greek literature, above all the Greek novel, but also Attic Comedy, fifth-century historiography, and Hellenistic and Imperial Greek poetry. Many are already essential reading, such as the chapter on the figure of Lycidas in Theocritus' Idyll 7, or two chapters on the ancient readership of Greek novel…
Tradition and Authority in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists
As the terms ‘authority’ and ‘tradition’ in my title suggest, in this chapter I try to ask of Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists some of the questions asked of Greek and Latin historians by John Marincola in his influential book Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography . These questions are related to ones that were asked by Thomas Schmitz in his chapter ‘Narrator and Audience in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists ’, published in 2009 …
Odyssean and Herodotean Threads in the Tainia of Heliodorus’ Opening Chapters (1.1–5)
This chapter revisits the Aethiopica ’s début, noting its imprecise time-frame implies Persian control of Egypt, eventually confirmed by Oroondates’ introduction (2.24.2). Persian threads are first visible in Charicleia’s mnēstērophonia -like slaughter, evoking Polygnotus’ painting described by Pausanias in an Athena-temple constructed from Plataean spoils won at Marathon, and fostering expectations of Greek–barbarian polarities, Athenian aretē a…
Greek High Culture in Hellenistic and Early Imperial Bithynia: Towards a Prosopography of Practitioners of Greek Culture in Bithynia Down to the Middle of the Third Century AD
The article attempts to set out evidence for various forms of Greek high culture in Bithynia from the fifth century BC to the middle of the third century AD , taking as a cut-off point the tetrarchic period in which Diocletian’s choice of Nicomedia as a capital had a marked impact on its and other Bithynian cities’ cultural life. The preliminary prosopography lists representatives of Greek culture by city, subdividing into the categories doctor, …
Theatre and Autocracy in the Ancient World
Why did ancient autocrats patronise theatre? How could ancient theatre – rightly supposed to be an artform that developed and flourished under democracy – serve their needs? Plato claimed that poets of tragic drama "drag states into tyranny and democracy". The word order is very deliberate: he goes on to say that tragic poets are honoured "especially by the tyrants, and secondly by the democracies" ( Republic 568c). For more than forty years scho…
Sappho in Imperial Greek Literature
As a famous representative of the Greek literary heritage, Sappho is both a source of tremendous literary meaning and recreation in the Imperial period, for e.g. Achilles Tatius and Longus, but at the same time an object of censure from Christian moralists, as in Tatian’s Oratio ad Graecos. Chapter 22 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho discusses her transmission and reception as the ancient world began to change into a Christian one.
Essays on Ancient Greek Literature and Culture
In this book one of the world's leading Hellenists brings together his many contributions over four decades to our understanding of early Greek literature, above all of elegiac poetry and its relation to fifth-century prose historiography, but also of early Greek epic, iambic, melic and epigrammatic poetry. Many chapters have become seminal, e.g. that which first proposed the importance of now-lost long narrative elegies, and others exploring the…
Phoenician games in Heliodorus’ Aithiopika
Hadrian, Favorinus, and Plutarch
Herodotus - Narrator, Scientist, Historian
Marcus Aurelius, Greek Poets, and Greek Sophists: Friends or Foes
The article explores Marcus Aurelius’ attitudes to Greek poets and sophists. His philosophical Meditations express contempt for poetry and rhetoric, but like the Roman governing class as a whole, Marcus had great respect for the world of Greek culture in which poets and sophists were leading figures. It is noted that Marcus probably knew and may have had to approve Marcellus’ poems for Herodes Atticus, inscribed ca. 160 near the Via Appia outside…
The Performance Contexts of Trochaic Tetrameters Catalectic
The paper explores the evidence for the archaic performance context or contexts of Archilochus’ and Solon’s trochaic tetrameter catalectic poems, noting that they were chanted rather than sung or spoken and thus different from both elegy and iambic trimeters. It argues that in Archilochus’ fragments apparently lengthy battle-narratives, concern with the polis as a whole, and addresses to elite individuals point to their first audience being a for…
The Lesson of Book 2
This chapter first explores the ways in which Book 2 resists its characterization by Fornara in 1971 as marked by ‘the utter absence in II of the moral or philosophical element’. It picks out several features that link it with other parts of Herodotus’ work (e.g. moral judgements, direct speech, divine retribution), and then draws attention to elements in Herodotus’ presentation already found in archaic and early classical narrative elegy, culmin…
Generic Play in Lucian’s Philopseudes
What is Lucian’s game in the Philopseudes ? This dialogue received remarkably little attention from Bompaire in 1958 or Reardon in 1971. But there has been much scholarship since then, especially in the last fifteen years, a high proportion focusing on Philopseudes’ handling of the supernatural, either on Lucian’s sources in literature and popular culture (e.g. Daniel Ogden in 2007) or on what is at stake when a writer claims to be vouching for ἄ…
Xenophon’s Influence in Imperial Greece
Stesichorus at Athens
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Teachers and Students in Roman Athens
This chapter explores the educational patterns the young Plutarch encountered when he went from Boeotia to study with Ammonius in Athens, developing in the middle of the first century AD into a University city. Despite only a few hints in Plutarch’s own writings, Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae and Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists help to reconstruct many features of rhetorical and philosophical education. Thus light is cast on the teachers’ edu…
Rediscovering Sacadas
This chapter explores the power and relevance of the epic tradition in ancient Greece in relation to poetic performance. More specifically, it considers the reconstruction of some of the work and of the ancient reception of the poet and aulos-player Sacadas of Argos, along with the relevance of his poetry to the politics and culture of Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greece. It examines the importance of the tradition of the sack of Troy in co…
Becoming Wolf, Staying Sheep
The Greeks' vision of the Roman empire seems to have been very different from that of Romans or other westerners. This chapter examines the enrolment in legionaries. One index of imperial Greeks' apparent lack of enthusiasm for pursuing military distinction is their very low representation in the equestrian militiae . The chapter presents a rapid overview of voluminous and complex data of the long-Hellenised provinces of Asia. The phenomenon of m…
The Aithiopika of Heliodoros: Narrative as Riddle
Stesichorus and Ibycus: Plain Tales From the Western Front
Epinicians and ‘patrons’
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Reading the Victory Ode
The victory ode was a short-lived poetic genre in the fifth century BC, but its impact has been substantial. Pindar, Bacchylides and others are now among the most widely read Greek authors precisely because of their significance for the literary development of poetry between Homer and tragedy and their historical involvement in promoting Greek rulers. Their influence was so great that it ultimately helped to define the European notion of lyric fr…
Archaic and Classical Choral Song: Performance, Politics and Dissemination
This book addresses the many interlocking problems in understanding the modes of performance, dissemination, and transmission of Greek poetry of the seventh to the fifth centuries BC whose first performers were a choral group, sometimes singing in a ritual context, sometimes in more secular celebrations of victories in competitive games. It explores the different ways such a group presented itself and was perceived by its audiences; the place of …
The Ancient Readers of the Greek Novels
Scholars who ascribe isolation and deracinement to Hellenistic man are doubtless influenced by our image of these two huge cities. Tomas Hagg is happy to allow that Achilles Tatius, Longus and Heliodorus were themselves highly educated and envisaged similarly educated readers as the primary readership of their works. The argument is based on the frequency and subtlety of intertextuality with earlier literature, some of it more recondite than the …
Literature and sophistic
Before Latin literature had staggered its first imitative steps, Greek education and culture had been diffused by Alexander's conquests not simply across the eastern Mediterranean but as far as Afghanistan and India. This chapter discusses the Greek philosophy of the empire. It is important to note that many sophists and philosophers saw each other as rivals in the provision of tertiary education. Mannered style and Atticist language suggest that…
Ionian Iambos and Attic Komoidia: Father and Daughter, or Just Cousins?
This chapter reconsiders the old problem of the relationship between iambus and comedy. By comparing three possible hypotheses of dependence, it rejects the view that Cratinus introduced into Attic comedy certain iambic features which then continued to live there throughout the epoch of Old Comedy. The chapter underlines the substantial differences between iambus and comedy on the macroscopic level of discourse parameters such as length, audience…
The Ancient Readers of the Greek Novels
The geography of the Second Sophistic: Cultural variations
A reader of Philostratus' Lives is offered a unified world of Greek sophistic culture, stretching from the Orontes to the Rhone, from Antioch to Arelate. Within that world we might expect some marked differences in the sophistic habit -in matters social, literary or linguistic. We might, for example, expect different cities or provinces to have different estimations of sophistic rhetors and rhetoric and different ways of recognising sophistic dis…
The Limits of Ancient Biography
Brian McGing (Trinity College, Dublin and Judith Mossman (University of Nottingham), Introduction Andrew D. H. Mayes (Trinity College, Dublin), Biography in the Ancient World: the Story of the Rise of David Elizabeth Irwin (Columbia University), The Biographies of Poets: the Case of Solon Richard A. Burridge (King's College, London), Reading the Gospels as Biography: Mark Edwards (Christ Church, Oxford), Gospel and Genre: Some Reservations Sean F…
From Archaic Elegy to Hellenistic Sympotic Epigram
Literary milieux
'Am I always to be a listener? Am I never to get my own back?' With these words the Latin poet Juvenal in the early second century CE opened the first of his Satires , purporting to give his readers a reason for his taking up writing. He goes on to give 'reasons' for his choice of satire. These can be only some of the factors we might want to see as contributing to an explanation for his writing what he did, but his opening offers us a good way i…
Wandering poets, archaic style
In this paper I explore archaic wandering poets' representation in their poetry of themselves and of their performances. I confine myself (some comparanda apart) to non-hexameter poetry of the period down to 500 BC and to pieces that I take to be in the first instance for monodic rather than choral performance. That is one of the reasons I have decided to exclude Stesichorus; another is that in his surviving poetry itself there is almost nothing …
Quotation Of Earlier Texts In Τα Εσ Τον Τυανεα Απολλωνιον
This chapter explores the contribution made to the overall effect of Philostratus' VA by its citation of and allusion to earlier literary texts - which for a Greek writer of the 230s CE of course means earlier Greek literary texts. Its aim is to help us understand better how Philostratus wanted to position his generically ambiguous Ta e^ tov Tuavea Ano^roviov, and how he tried to construct (or reconstruct) its hero Apollonius. It draws attention …
Wandering Poets in Ancient Greek Culture: Travel, Locality and Pan-Hellenism
Although recent scholarship has focused on the city-state as the context for the production of Greek poetry, for poets and performers travel was more the norm than the exception. This book traces this central aspect of ancient culture from its roots in the near Eastern societies which preceded the Greeks, through the way in which early semi-mythical figures such as Orpheus were imagined, the poets who travelled to the brilliant courts of archaic …
Alcman's first Partheneion and the song the Sirens sang
Archaic and Classical Choral Song: Performance, Politics and Dissemination
This book addresses the many interlocking problems in understanding the modes of performance, dissemination, and transmission of Greek poetry of the seventh to the fifth centuries BC whose first performers were a choral group, sometimes singing in a ritual context, sometimes in more secular celebrations of victories in competitive games. It explores the different ways such a group presented itself and was perceived by its audiences; the place of …
Stesichorus and Ibycus: Plain Tales From the Western Front
Epinicians and ‘patrons’
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Reading the Victory Ode
The victory ode was a short-lived poetic genre in the fifth century BC, but its impact has been substantial. Pindar, Bacchylides and others are now among the most widely read Greek authors precisely because of their significance for the literary development of poetry between Homer and tragedy and their historical involvement in promoting Greek rulers. Their influence was so great that it ultimately helped to define the European notion of lyric fr…
The Aithiopika of Heliodoros: Narrative as Riddle
Rediscovering Sacadas
This chapter explores the power and relevance of the epic tradition in ancient Greece in relation to poetic performance. More specifically, it considers the reconstruction of some of the work and of the ancient reception of the poet and aulos-player Sacadas of Argos, along with the relevance of his poetry to the politics and culture of Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greece. It examines the importance of the tradition of the sack of Troy in co…
Becoming Wolf, Staying Sheep
The Greeks' vision of the Roman empire seems to have been very different from that of Romans or other westerners. This chapter examines the enrolment in legionaries. One index of imperial Greeks' apparent lack of enthusiasm for pursuing military distinction is their very low representation in the equestrian militiae . The chapter presents a rapid overview of voluminous and complex data of the long-Hellenised provinces of Asia. The phenomenon of m…
Stesichorus at Athens
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Teachers and Students in Roman Athens
This chapter explores the educational patterns the young Plutarch encountered when he went from Boeotia to study with Ammonius in Athens, developing in the middle of the first century AD into a University city. Despite only a few hints in Plutarch’s own writings, Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae and Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists help to reconstruct many features of rhetorical and philosophical education. Thus light is cast on the teachers’ edu…
Xenophon’s Influence in Imperial Greece
Generic Play in Lucian’s Philopseudes
What is Lucian’s game in the Philopseudes ? This dialogue received remarkably little attention from Bompaire in 1958 or Reardon in 1971. But there has been much scholarship since then, especially in the last fifteen years, a high proportion focusing on Philopseudes’ handling of the supernatural, either on Lucian’s sources in literature and popular culture (e.g. Daniel Ogden in 2007) or on what is at stake when a writer claims to be vouching for ἄ…
Hadrian, Favorinus, and Plutarch
Herodotus - Narrator, Scientist, Historian
Classical Antiquity Studies (35 works) · Art (28 works) · History (26 works) · Literature (24 works) · Classics (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Ancient history (10 works) · Poetry (10 works) · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies (9 works) · Law (9 works)