Henry Spelman
Biographic Data
| ID | 5626959 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Henry Spelman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Henry |
| FAMILY NAME | Spelman |
| SIGNATURE | SPELMAN H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Christ University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8934-0671 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Cambridge Companion to Pindar
Pindar was the single most important, canonical and influential lyric poet in the ancient Greek world, and he remains one of the most demanding and rewarding poets whose work has come down to us from antiquity. This volume represents the most comprehensive introduction to the poet and his reception yet published. Eighteen leading contemporary scholars contribute individual chapters that together help to provide a holistic understanding of Pindar'…
Writing the Beginnings of Greek Literary History
This chapter considers the nature and development of Greek literary history before Aristotle, a generally acknowledged watershed. It covers all sorts of reflections on the literary past and studies the assumptions and paradigms at work in our earliest sources. While highlighting the continuity of tropes and stock narratives, it also seeks to understand the development of literary history in relation to the technology of writing and in relation to…
Invoking Homer
This chapter argues for and interprets allusions to the invocation before the Catalogue of Ships ( Il . 2.484-93) in Ibycus’ ’Polycrates Ode’, Pindar’s Paean 6 and Paean 7b, and Simonides’ ’Plataea Elegy’. It then considers these four poems together as a unique case study for the early reception of Homer. For no other passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey can we trace an equally extensive afterlife in early Greek lyric. The author argues that the…
The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Epic
Ancient Greek literature begins with the epic verses of Homer. Epic then continued as a fundamental literary form throughout antiquity and the influence of the poems produced extends beyond antiquity and down to the present. This Companion presents a fresh and boundary-breaking account of the ancient Greek epic tradition. It includes wide-ranging close readings of epics from Homer to Nonnus, traces their dialogues with other modes such as ancient…
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…
Texts and Intertexts in Archaic and Classical Greece
Encompassing the period from the earliest archaic epics down through classical Athenian drama, this is the first concerted, step-by-step examination of the development of allusive poetics in the early Greek world. Recent decades have seen a marked rise in intertextual approaches to early Greek literature; as scholars increasingly agree on the need to read these texts in a comparative way, this only makes all the more urgent the question of how be…
Heraclitus on First (and Further) Hearings
The words τὸ πρῶτον in Heraclitus B1 have been subjected to competing construals, yet this dilemma, and its stakes, are almost never discussed. We argue that the common translation of ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον , ‘when once they have heard it’, faces insurmountable philosophical, stylistic, and linguistic objections. We make a new case for the alternative construal, ‘after they have heard it for the first time’. This yields a linguistically better acco…
Xenophanes B6 Dk
Uncertainty about the pragmatic context, the fundamental content and hence the philosophical significance of Xenophanes B6 DK prevents this comparatively extensive fragment from playing much of a role in scholarly discussions. This essay reviews interpretations of that difficult text and then offers a new reading which arguably better accords with the preserved Greek, Xenophanes’ other fragments and ritual custom. It is also suggested how B6 fits…
Alcidamas and the Idea of Literary History
The problematic and important P. Mich. Inv. 2754 is generally agreed to preserve part of Alcidamas’ Mouseion, and that work is in turn generally agreed to lie behind the extant Contest of Homer and Hesiod. Building on and sometimes diverging from James Porter’s recent contribution in this journal, this essay offers new answers to long-standing problems. Section 1 interprets the difficult final lines of the Michigan papyrus. Section 2 adduces corr…
Classicising ‘Pindar’
This essay examines the earliest quotations of Pindar in order to shed light on the social and historical dynamics through which he first emerged as a classic author. Pindaric quotations from the classical period point to his stratified and multi-faceted reception: as a figure within popular memory, as an emblem of elite culture and as an intellectual ancestor. Indeed, a capacity to appeal to different audiences for different but interconnected r…
Staging Literary History in Old Comedy
This article comprehensively examines one early chapter in the history of literary history which has not previously been studied as such. Setting aside issues of seriousness, accuracy, and consistency, I consider how characters and authors in Old Comedy organize the poetic past and position new works in relation to it. Section 1 considers the pre-institutional comic past. Section 2 discusses periodization. Sections 3 and 4 chart narratives of pro…
The View From Olympus
Apollo travels from Pytho to Olympus, and the other gods greet his arrival (186–93): ἔνθεν δὲ πρὸς Ὄλυμπον ἀπὸ χθονὸς ὥς τε νόημα εἶςι Διὸς πρὸς δῶμα θεῶν μεθ’ ὁμήγυριν ἄλλων⋅ αὐτίκα δ’ ἀθανάτοιςι μέλει κίθαρις καὶ ἀοιδή. Μοῦςαι μέν θ’ ἅμα πᾶςαι ἀμειβόμεναι ὀπὶ καλῇ ὑμνεῦςίν ῥα θεῶν δῶρ’ ἄμβροτα ἠδ’ ἀνθρώπων τλημοςύνας, ὅς’ ἔχοντες ὑπ’ ἀθανάτοιςι θεοῖςι ζώους’ ἀφραδέες καὶ ἀμήχανοι, οὐδὲ δύνανται εὑρέμεναι θανάτοιό τ’ ἄκος καὶ γήραος ἄλκαρ. From …
Schools, Reading and Poetry in the Early Greek World
This essay explores the practices through which a thin stratum of society acquired deep experience with written literature in the early Greek world. Combining a pessimistic view about the popularity of schools with an optimistic view about the stability of institutional patterns, I argue that from an early date elite ideology valorised education through the intensive study of certain written texts. Schools thus worked to institutionalise an endur…
Event and Artefact
This chapter examines the interplay between first performance and subsequent reception in fifth-century lyric and especially in Pindar’s epinicians. It describes how poems trace their own travels from unrepeatable event to perpetuated artefact and draws conclusions about the shape of the literary culture behind Pindar’s odes. Six sections discuss six passages that map their journey from performance into permanence. A concluding section then uses …
Secondary Audiences
Chapter I lays the groundwork by showing how Pindar’s epinicians, despite being occasional poetry, take into account audiences beyond their first performance. Using the texts themselves as evidence, it first shows how Pindar’s poems anticipate and accommodate secondary audiences. Two sections then examine types of knowledge necessary for understanding the poems: first, knowledge of debut performance contexts; secondly, knowledge of external data …
Epilogue
This epilogue briefly highlights the unity of this work as a whole and then takes a broader view over ancient literature in order to trace some potential connections between Pindar and other sorts of poetry, both earlier and later. The Pindar who emerges from this monograph is a poet who looks with supreme self-consciousness to the past, the present, and the future simultaneously. To grasp Pindar’s vision of his place in the traditions of archaic…
Genre and Tradition
Whereas previous chapters focused on Pindar’s epinicians, this chapter broadens the scope of inquiry to consider Pindar’s other genres and also earlier lyric. First, it turns to Pindar’s fragmentary cultic poetry to see what can be determined about the representations and realities of secondary reception as they relate to genre. The conclusion emerges that, though the rhetoric of permanence is less common outside the epinicians, Pindar’s other ge…
The Poetics of Permanence
This chapter explores ways in which the idea of permanence matters for understanding Pindar. Each section focuses on one ode in order to bring out a broader feature of his poetics. Section 1 (Pythian 1) illustrates how the aesthetics of traditionality can enrich the experience of a secondary audience. Section 2 (Nemean 4) shows how the possibility of participating in a tradition might have mattered to Pindar’s first audiences. Section 3 (Pythian …
The Lyric Past
Whereas the last two chapters focused on epinician, Chapter VIII expands the scope of inquiry and studies the lyric past in Pindar most generally. Section 1 discusses the mainly fragmentary evidence for his knowledge and use of the history of lyric. Section 2 interprets three epinicians which prominently engage with the work of other lyric poets (Pythian 2, Pythian 1, and Isthmian 2). Pindar defines his authorial project through comparisons with …
Introduction to Part One
The introduction situates this work within scholarship and outlines an approach to some larger issues including literature, literary history, canons, periodization, and historical contexts. It then broaches the question of how Pindaric epinician related to its public and offers a preview of the next five chapters. Studying Pindar’s ode within a literary culture rather than the immediate circumstances of their production and initial reception migh…
Introduction to Part Two
This introduction announces the theme of the next three chapters: Pindar’s sense of literary history and specifically his use of other lyric poetry. Pindar capitalizes on his audiences’ familiarity with other lyric to an extent that has perhaps not yet been adequately recognized. His poems use related poetry to tell stories about themselves and their place in life. By examining different sorts of references and allusions across the corpus, one ca…
The Epinician Past
This chapter explores the beginnings of epinician in history and as represented in Pindar’s odes. We may enrich our understanding of his victory odes by investigating how he presents the past of his genre and situates himself within contemporary practices. Section 1 investigates the historical origins of epinician. Section 2 explores the distant generic past as depicted within Pindar’s poems. It is argued that the poet displays a view of the hist…
Vital Light in Isthmian 4
Isthmian 4 is very interested in light imagery. This chapter offers an interpretation of this ode focused on the interplay between fire and celestial light in order to show how these images invite audiences to reflect on the paradoxical nature of this poem and indeed all of Pindaric epinician as simultaneously an utterance forming part of a transitory revel and an enduring artefact. Isthmian 4 highlights a paradox central to Pindaric epinician: t…
The Epinician Present
Chapter VII discusses epinician as a living social practice in Pindar’s day. By assembling clues from across his corpus one can see further into a cultural and literary context which shapes the meaning of many passages and indeed the significance of Pindar’s authorial project as a whole. The texts themselves provide our best evidence for the contours of that context. This chapter analyses different sorts of references and draws conclusions from e…
Event and Artefact
This chapter examines the Homeric Hymn to Apollo as a case study in order to explore early Greek ideas of authorship, occasionality, literary permanence, and reception. The comparanda deployed come from archaic lyric and especially from Pindar’s epinicians. The first section claims that the speaker identifies himself as Homer and discusses some implications for how audiences conceptualize the hymn. The second section describes how the hymn antici…
Pindar and the Poetics of Permanence
This work is concerned with Pindar and archaic Greek literary culture. Part One discusses Pindar’s relationship to his audiences. It demonstrates how his victory odes address an audience present at their premiere performance and also a broader secondary audience throughout space and time. I argue that getting the most out of these texts involves simultaneously assuming the perspectives of both. Part Two describes how Pindar uses other lyric to si…
Schools, Reading and Poetry in the Early Greek World
This essay explores the practices through which a thin stratum of society acquired deep experience with written literature in the early Greek world. Combining a pessimistic view about the popularity of schools with an optimistic view about the stability of institutional patterns, I argue that from an early date elite ideology valorised education through the intensive study of certain written texts. Schools thus worked to institutionalise an endur…
Sappho 44
This paper explores what the most substantial remnant of Sappho’s poetry could have meant to its first audiences. Scholars often approach fr. 44 as a response to the Homeric Iliad , but for Sappho’s contemporaries the Iliad would not have constituted the sole horizon for intertextual engagement. I suggest that the description of the wedding of Hector and Andromache would have brought to mind the wedding of Paris and Helen, a parallel traditional …
Event and Artefact
This chapter examines the interplay between first performance and subsequent reception in fifth-century lyric and especially in Pindar’s epinicians. It describes how poems trace their own travels from unrepeatable event to perpetuated artefact and draws conclusions about the shape of the literary culture behind Pindar’s odes. Six sections discuss six passages that map their journey from performance into permanence. A concluding section then uses …
Secondary Audiences
Chapter I lays the groundwork by showing how Pindar’s epinicians, despite being occasional poetry, take into account audiences beyond their first performance. Using the texts themselves as evidence, it first shows how Pindar’s poems anticipate and accommodate secondary audiences. Two sections then examine types of knowledge necessary for understanding the poems: first, knowledge of debut performance contexts; secondly, knowledge of external data …
Epilogue
This epilogue briefly highlights the unity of this work as a whole and then takes a broader view over ancient literature in order to trace some potential connections between Pindar and other sorts of poetry, both earlier and later. The Pindar who emerges from this monograph is a poet who looks with supreme self-consciousness to the past, the present, and the future simultaneously. To grasp Pindar’s vision of his place in the traditions of archaic…
Genre and Tradition
Whereas previous chapters focused on Pindar’s epinicians, this chapter broadens the scope of inquiry to consider Pindar’s other genres and also earlier lyric. First, it turns to Pindar’s fragmentary cultic poetry to see what can be determined about the representations and realities of secondary reception as they relate to genre. The conclusion emerges that, though the rhetoric of permanence is less common outside the epinicians, Pindar’s other ge…
The Poetics of Permanence
This chapter explores ways in which the idea of permanence matters for understanding Pindar. Each section focuses on one ode in order to bring out a broader feature of his poetics. Section 1 (Pythian 1) illustrates how the aesthetics of traditionality can enrich the experience of a secondary audience. Section 2 (Nemean 4) shows how the possibility of participating in a tradition might have mattered to Pindar’s first audiences. Section 3 (Pythian …
The Lyric Past
Whereas the last two chapters focused on epinician, Chapter VIII expands the scope of inquiry and studies the lyric past in Pindar most generally. Section 1 discusses the mainly fragmentary evidence for his knowledge and use of the history of lyric. Section 2 interprets three epinicians which prominently engage with the work of other lyric poets (Pythian 2, Pythian 1, and Isthmian 2). Pindar defines his authorial project through comparisons with …
Introduction to Part One
The introduction situates this work within scholarship and outlines an approach to some larger issues including literature, literary history, canons, periodization, and historical contexts. It then broaches the question of how Pindaric epinician related to its public and offers a preview of the next five chapters. Studying Pindar’s ode within a literary culture rather than the immediate circumstances of their production and initial reception migh…
Introduction to Part Two
This introduction announces the theme of the next three chapters: Pindar’s sense of literary history and specifically his use of other lyric poetry. Pindar capitalizes on his audiences’ familiarity with other lyric to an extent that has perhaps not yet been adequately recognized. His poems use related poetry to tell stories about themselves and their place in life. By examining different sorts of references and allusions across the corpus, one ca…
The Epinician Past
This chapter explores the beginnings of epinician in history and as represented in Pindar’s odes. We may enrich our understanding of his victory odes by investigating how he presents the past of his genre and situates himself within contemporary practices. Section 1 investigates the historical origins of epinician. Section 2 explores the distant generic past as depicted within Pindar’s poems. It is argued that the poet displays a view of the hist…
Vital Light in Isthmian 4
Isthmian 4 is very interested in light imagery. This chapter offers an interpretation of this ode focused on the interplay between fire and celestial light in order to show how these images invite audiences to reflect on the paradoxical nature of this poem and indeed all of Pindaric epinician as simultaneously an utterance forming part of a transitory revel and an enduring artefact. Isthmian 4 highlights a paradox central to Pindaric epinician: t…
The Epinician Present
Chapter VII discusses epinician as a living social practice in Pindar’s day. By assembling clues from across his corpus one can see further into a cultural and literary context which shapes the meaning of many passages and indeed the significance of Pindar’s authorial project as a whole. The texts themselves provide our best evidence for the contours of that context. This chapter analyses different sorts of references and draws conclusions from e…
Event and Artefact
This chapter examines the Homeric Hymn to Apollo as a case study in order to explore early Greek ideas of authorship, occasionality, literary permanence, and reception. The comparanda deployed come from archaic lyric and especially from Pindar’s epinicians. The first section claims that the speaker identifies himself as Homer and discusses some implications for how audiences conceptualize the hymn. The second section describes how the hymn antici…
Pindar and the Poetics of Permanence
This work is concerned with Pindar and archaic Greek literary culture. Part One discusses Pindar’s relationship to his audiences. It demonstrates how his victory odes address an audience present at their premiere performance and also a broader secondary audience throughout space and time. I argue that getting the most out of these texts involves simultaneously assuming the perspectives of both. Part Two describes how Pindar uses other lyric to si…
Schools, Reading and Poetry in the Early Greek World
This essay explores the practices through which a thin stratum of society acquired deep experience with written literature in the early Greek world. Combining a pessimistic view about the popularity of schools with an optimistic view about the stability of institutional patterns, I argue that from an early date elite ideology valorised education through the intensive study of certain written texts. Schools thus worked to institutionalise an endur…
The View From Olympus
Apollo travels from Pytho to Olympus, and the other gods greet his arrival (186–93): ἔνθεν δὲ πρὸς Ὄλυμπον ἀπὸ χθονὸς ὥς τε νόημα εἶςι Διὸς πρὸς δῶμα θεῶν μεθ’ ὁμήγυριν ἄλλων⋅ αὐτίκα δ’ ἀθανάτοιςι μέλει κίθαρις καὶ ἀοιδή. Μοῦςαι μέν θ’ ἅμα πᾶςαι ἀμειβόμεναι ὀπὶ καλῇ ὑμνεῦςίν ῥα θεῶν δῶρ’ ἄμβροτα ἠδ’ ἀνθρώπων τλημοςύνας, ὅς’ ἔχοντες ὑπ’ ἀθανάτοιςι θεοῖςι ζώους’ ἀφραδέες καὶ ἀμήχανοι, οὐδὲ δύνανται εὑρέμεναι θανάτοιό τ’ ἄκος καὶ γήραος ἄλκαρ. From …
Classicising ‘Pindar’
This essay examines the earliest quotations of Pindar in order to shed light on the social and historical dynamics through which he first emerged as a classic author. Pindaric quotations from the classical period point to his stratified and multi-faceted reception: as a figure within popular memory, as an emblem of elite culture and as an intellectual ancestor. Indeed, a capacity to appeal to different audiences for different but interconnected r…
Staging Literary History in Old Comedy
This article comprehensively examines one early chapter in the history of literary history which has not previously been studied as such. Setting aside issues of seriousness, accuracy, and consistency, I consider how characters and authors in Old Comedy organize the poetic past and position new works in relation to it. Section 1 considers the pre-institutional comic past. Section 2 discusses periodization. Sections 3 and 4 chart narratives of pro…
Alcidamas and the Idea of Literary History
The problematic and important P. Mich. Inv. 2754 is generally agreed to preserve part of Alcidamas’ Mouseion, and that work is in turn generally agreed to lie behind the extant Contest of Homer and Hesiod. Building on and sometimes diverging from James Porter’s recent contribution in this journal, this essay offers new answers to long-standing problems. Section 1 interprets the difficult final lines of the Michigan papyrus. Section 2 adduces corr…
Writing the Beginnings of Greek Literary History
This chapter considers the nature and development of Greek literary history before Aristotle, a generally acknowledged watershed. It covers all sorts of reflections on the literary past and studies the assumptions and paradigms at work in our earliest sources. While highlighting the continuity of tropes and stock narratives, it also seeks to understand the development of literary history in relation to the technology of writing and in relation to…
Invoking Homer
This chapter argues for and interprets allusions to the invocation before the Catalogue of Ships ( Il . 2.484-93) in Ibycus’ ’Polycrates Ode’, Pindar’s Paean 6 and Paean 7b, and Simonides’ ’Plataea Elegy’. It then considers these four poems together as a unique case study for the early reception of Homer. For no other passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey can we trace an equally extensive afterlife in early Greek lyric. The author argues that the…
The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Epic
Ancient Greek literature begins with the epic verses of Homer. Epic then continued as a fundamental literary form throughout antiquity and the influence of the poems produced extends beyond antiquity and down to the present. This Companion presents a fresh and boundary-breaking account of the ancient Greek epic tradition. It includes wide-ranging close readings of epics from Homer to Nonnus, traces their dialogues with other modes such as ancient…
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…
Texts and Intertexts in Archaic and Classical Greece
Encompassing the period from the earliest archaic epics down through classical Athenian drama, this is the first concerted, step-by-step examination of the development of allusive poetics in the early Greek world. Recent decades have seen a marked rise in intertextual approaches to early Greek literature; as scholars increasingly agree on the need to read these texts in a comparative way, this only makes all the more urgent the question of how be…
Heraclitus on First (and Further) Hearings
The words τὸ πρῶτον in Heraclitus B1 have been subjected to competing construals, yet this dilemma, and its stakes, are almost never discussed. We argue that the common translation of ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον , ‘when once they have heard it’, faces insurmountable philosophical, stylistic, and linguistic objections. We make a new case for the alternative construal, ‘after they have heard it for the first time’. This yields a linguistically better acco…
Classical Antiquity Studies (27 works) · Art (25 works) · Literature (25 works) · History (21 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Poetry (17 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Linguistics (11 works)