Alexander Sens
Biographic Data
| ID | 950948 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander Sens |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander |
| FAMILY NAME | Sens |
| SIGNATURE | SENS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
A furious prophecy
Lycophron’s extensive debt to Aeschylus is exemplified by his engagement with the Agamemnon and the Choephori in Cassandra’s prediction of her own death and that of Agamemnon and in the brief ensuing synopsis of Orestes’ vengeance on Clytemnestra. This paper argues that the next stage of Cassandra’s prophecy, in which she discusses two rites instituted in the aftermath of her death, continues the reworking of the Oresteia by exploiting themes pro…
Theocritus’ Hymns and “Epyllia”
Four genuinely Theocritean poems (13, 22, 24, and 26) include compressed narratives on the deeds of gods and other mythological figures in dactylic hexameter. These share a number of verbal and thematic connections and interact with one another in interesting ways. All of them focus on divine figures of symbolic importance for the Ptolemies, and there is a good reason to suppose that they implicitly participate in the construction and disseminati…
Greek Epigram and Byzantine Culture
344 PHOENIX could also constitute restrained criticism of the rulers of his own time would have benefited from broader discussion. Closs’s approach is chronological and her focus on motifs of fire and politics is very broad. It is a strength of the book that it unites consideration of various forms of fire in one tome: fires caused by lightning, arson, the burning of books and records, cremation; fires in everyday life, history, myth, and philoso…
They Keep It All Hid
Party or Perish
The end of life looms over the Greek symposion and its literature, which regularly frames drinking and death as a binary pair. In their engagement with archaic literature, Hellenistic epigrammatists frequently subvert this traditional opposition, while simultaneously making explicit the connection, implicitly present already in earlier poetry, between sympotic activity and poetic composition. This chapter explores a selection of Hellenistic epigr…
The Labors of Odysseus
The Alexandra of Lycophron
The obscurity of Lycophron's Alexandra was already notorious in antiquity and has long hampered a holistic approach to the poem. Through a series of distinct but closely integrated literary studies of major aspects of the work, including its style, its engagement with the traditions of epic and tragedy, and its treatment of heroism and of the gods, the book explores the way the Alexandra reconfigures Greek mythology, particularly as presented in …
Hedylus (4 and 5 Gow–Page) and Callimachean Poetics
The phrase λεπτὸν καί τι μελιχρὸν ἔπος in Hedylus 5 Gow–Page has been read as engaging with Callimachean esthetic language, though its precise significance has been debated. This paper argues that Hedylus’ engagement with Callimachean esthetic imagery and language is best understood by juxtaposing Hedylus 4 and 5 Gow–Page. The structure of the former, on a gold rhyton dedicated to Arsinoe Zephyritis, pointedly treats two Egyptian deities—one mini…
Lycophron, Alexandra 261–2 and Homeric Αγκυλοχηλης
An abstract 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
Hellenistic Poetry
This article examines Hellenistic poetry by outlining the gradual separation between literary genres and the performance contexts within which they originally developed. The Hellenistic poets felt the gap and tried to reconstruct a literary past from which they felt separated. In a city like Alexandria, where different cultures and ethnicities coexisted, Greek identity was increasingly seen as a matter of cultural and literary competence, rather …
One Things Leads (Back) to Another
Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici (review)
Reviewed by: Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici Alexander Sens Hugh Lloyd-Jones . Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici. Texte und Kommentare, 26. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2005. Pp. xiv, 159. $89.60. ISBN 978-3-11-018537-9. When it was published in 1983, H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons' magisterial Supplementum Hellenisticum (SH) brought together and made easily available for the first time a large number of texts that had never been col…
Language and Literature
The army that marched through Asia under Alexander’s command included speakers of many regional Greek dialects, but its official, administrative language, spoken by its Macedonian leaders and used in formal documents, was a version of Attic, the dialect spoken at Athens. The evidence for a native “Macedonian” language is shadowy, but suggests that it was either an idiosyncratic variant of Greek or a closely related Indo-European language. Althoug…
The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World
This Companion volume offers fifteen original essays on the Hellenistic world and is intended to complement and supplement general histories of the period from Alexander the Great to Kleopatra VII of Egypt. Each chapter treats a different aspect of the Hellenistic world - religion, philosophy, family, economy, material culture, and military campaigns, among other topics. The essays address key questions about this period: To what extent were Alex…
Eros und Distanz
Reviewed by: Eros und Distanz: Untersuchungen zu Asklepiades in seinem Kreis Alexander Sens Sibylle Ihm . Eros und Distanz: Untersuchungen zu Asklepiades in seinem Kreis. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, 167. Munich: K. G. Saur, 2004. Pp. 156. €78.00. ISBN 3-598-77716-7. Of the almost fifty epigrams with which the name of the early Hellenistic poet Asclepiades is associated in the Greek Anthology, more than half have to do with erotic matters. Whethe…
Eros und Distanz
Gli Epigrammi degli Antipatri (review)
Reviewed by: Gli Epigrammi degli Antipatri Alexander Sens Lorenzo Argentieri . Gli Epigrammi degli Antipatri. Le Rane, 35. Bari: Levante, 2003. Pp. 265. €29.00 (pb.). ISBN 88-7949-325-6. When, sometime around 100 B.C., Meleager published his anthology of Greek epigrams, the Garland, he included compositions by a Sidonian poet named Antipater. Somewhat more than a century later, probably about A.D. 40, Philip of Thessalonica produced another Garla…
Gli Epigrammi degli Antipatri
The Boastful Chef
Poetae Comici Graeci. Volume 6, part 2
Matro of Pitane and the Tradition of Epic Parody in the Fourth Century
The fragments of Matro of Pitane (c. 300 BC) offer insights not only into the largely forgotten and obscure late-classical genre of epic parody, but also into 4th-century Athenian history, the role of food and dining in antiquity, and the history of the text of Homer and the reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the pre-Alexandrian period. Sens and Olson offer a new text of the 144 surviving lines of Matro's parodies based on a fresh examinat…
Archestratos of Gela
Archestratos of Gela was the author of a mock-epic poem, most likely entitled the Hedupatheia or Life of Luxury, that presented itself as a gastronomic tour of the Mediterranean world. Written sometime in the first two-thirds of the fourth century BCE, the Hedupatheia was widely read in the late classical and early Hellenistic periods and was translated into Latin by Ennius, through whom it influenced the work of later Roman poets including Horac…
Theocritus: Dioscuri (Idyll 22)
Hellenistic reference in the proem of Theocritus, Idyll 22
Theocritus' twenty-second idyll is cast in the form of a hymn to the Dioscuri, who are addressed in the proem as saviours of men, horses, and ships. This opening section of the idyll is modelled loosely on the short thirty-third Homeric hymn, and like that hymn contains an expanded account of the twins' rescue of ships about to be lost in a storm. As is hardly surprising, Theocritus in reworking the Homeric hymn draws on other literary antecedent…
The Luck of the Draw
In the penultimate scene of the Ecclesiazusae , the young man who has come to see his lover is accosted in succession by three old women, each insisting that the new legal code requires him to sleep with her first. In lines 999–1000, the first of these old women, faced with his refusal to cooperate sexually, swears by Aphrodite
The Alexandra of Lycophron
The obscurity of Lycophron's Alexandra was already notorious in antiquity and has long hampered a holistic approach to the poem. Through a series of distinct but closely integrated literary studies of major aspects of the work, including its style, its engagement with the traditions of epic and tragedy, and its treatment of heroism and of the gods, the book explores the way the Alexandra reconfigures Greek mythology, particularly as presented in …
Gli Epigrammi degli Antipatri
Matro of Pitane and the Tradition of Epic Parody in the Fourth Century
The fragments of Matro of Pitane (c. 300 BC) offer insights not only into the largely forgotten and obscure late-classical genre of epic parody, but also into 4th-century Athenian history, the role of food and dining in antiquity, and the history of the text of Homer and the reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the pre-Alexandrian period. Sens and Olson offer a new text of the 144 surviving lines of Matro's parodies based on a fresh examinat…
Hellenistic reference in the proem of Theocritus, Idyll 22
Theocritus' twenty-second idyll is cast in the form of a hymn to the Dioscuri, who are addressed in the proem as saviours of men, horses, and ships. This opening section of the idyll is modelled loosely on the short thirty-third Homeric hymn, and like that hymn contains an expanded account of the twins' rescue of ships about to be lost in a storm. As is hardly surprising, Theocritus in reworking the Homeric hymn draws on other literary antecedent…
The Luck of the Draw
In the penultimate scene of the Ecclesiazusae , the young man who has come to see his lover is accosted in succession by three old women, each insisting that the new legal code requires him to sleep with her first. In lines 999–1000, the first of these old women, faced with his refusal to cooperate sexually, swears by Aphrodite
Hellenistic reference in the proem of Theocritus, Idyll 22
Theocritus' twenty-second idyll is cast in the form of a hymn to the Dioscuri, who are addressed in the proem as saviours of men, horses, and ships. This opening section of the idyll is modelled loosely on the short thirty-third Homeric hymn, and like that hymn contains an expanded account of the twins' rescue of ships about to be lost in a storm. As is hardly surprising, Theocritus in reworking the Homeric hymn draws on other literary antecedent…
Theocritus: Dioscuri (Idyll 22)
Archestratos of Gela
Archestratos of Gela was the author of a mock-epic poem, most likely entitled the Hedupatheia or Life of Luxury, that presented itself as a gastronomic tour of the Mediterranean world. Written sometime in the first two-thirds of the fourth century BCE, the Hedupatheia was widely read in the late classical and early Hellenistic periods and was translated into Latin by Ennius, through whom it influenced the work of later Roman poets including Horac…
Poetae Comici Graeci. Volume 6, part 2
Matro of Pitane and the Tradition of Epic Parody in the Fourth Century
The fragments of Matro of Pitane (c. 300 BC) offer insights not only into the largely forgotten and obscure late-classical genre of epic parody, but also into 4th-century Athenian history, the role of food and dining in antiquity, and the history of the text of Homer and the reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the pre-Alexandrian period. Sens and Olson offer a new text of the 144 surviving lines of Matro's parodies based on a fresh examinat…
The Boastful Chef
Gli Epigrammi degli Antipatri (review)
Reviewed by: Gli Epigrammi degli Antipatri Alexander Sens Lorenzo Argentieri . Gli Epigrammi degli Antipatri. Le Rane, 35. Bari: Levante, 2003. Pp. 265. €29.00 (pb.). ISBN 88-7949-325-6. When, sometime around 100 B.C., Meleager published his anthology of Greek epigrams, the Garland, he included compositions by a Sidonian poet named Antipater. Somewhat more than a century later, probably about A.D. 40, Philip of Thessalonica produced another Garla…
Gli Epigrammi degli Antipatri
Language and Literature
The army that marched through Asia under Alexander’s command included speakers of many regional Greek dialects, but its official, administrative language, spoken by its Macedonian leaders and used in formal documents, was a version of Attic, the dialect spoken at Athens. The evidence for a native “Macedonian” language is shadowy, but suggests that it was either an idiosyncratic variant of Greek or a closely related Indo-European language. Althoug…
The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World
This Companion volume offers fifteen original essays on the Hellenistic world and is intended to complement and supplement general histories of the period from Alexander the Great to Kleopatra VII of Egypt. Each chapter treats a different aspect of the Hellenistic world - religion, philosophy, family, economy, material culture, and military campaigns, among other topics. The essays address key questions about this period: To what extent were Alex…
Eros und Distanz
Reviewed by: Eros und Distanz: Untersuchungen zu Asklepiades in seinem Kreis Alexander Sens Sibylle Ihm . Eros und Distanz: Untersuchungen zu Asklepiades in seinem Kreis. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, 167. Munich: K. G. Saur, 2004. Pp. 156. €78.00. ISBN 3-598-77716-7. Of the almost fifty epigrams with which the name of the early Hellenistic poet Asclepiades is associated in the Greek Anthology, more than half have to do with erotic matters. Whethe…
Eros und Distanz
One Things Leads (Back) to Another
Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici (review)
Reviewed by: Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici Alexander Sens Hugh Lloyd-Jones . Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici. Texte und Kommentare, 26. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2005. Pp. xiv, 159. $89.60. ISBN 978-3-11-018537-9. When it was published in 1983, H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons' magisterial Supplementum Hellenisticum (SH) brought together and made easily available for the first time a large number of texts that had never been col…
Hellenistic Poetry
This article examines Hellenistic poetry by outlining the gradual separation between literary genres and the performance contexts within which they originally developed. The Hellenistic poets felt the gap and tried to reconstruct a literary past from which they felt separated. In a city like Alexandria, where different cultures and ethnicities coexisted, Greek identity was increasingly seen as a matter of cultural and literary competence, rather …
Lycophron, Alexandra 261–2 and Homeric Αγκυλοχηλης
An abstract 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
Hedylus (4 and 5 Gow–Page) and Callimachean Poetics
The phrase λεπτὸν καί τι μελιχρὸν ἔπος in Hedylus 5 Gow–Page has been read as engaging with Callimachean esthetic language, though its precise significance has been debated. This paper argues that Hedylus’ engagement with Callimachean esthetic imagery and language is best understood by juxtaposing Hedylus 4 and 5 Gow–Page. The structure of the former, on a gold rhyton dedicated to Arsinoe Zephyritis, pointedly treats two Egyptian deities—one mini…
Party or Perish
The end of life looms over the Greek symposion and its literature, which regularly frames drinking and death as a binary pair. In their engagement with archaic literature, Hellenistic epigrammatists frequently subvert this traditional opposition, while simultaneously making explicit the connection, implicitly present already in earlier poetry, between sympotic activity and poetic composition. This chapter explores a selection of Hellenistic epigr…
The Labors of Odysseus
The Alexandra of Lycophron
The obscurity of Lycophron's Alexandra was already notorious in antiquity and has long hampered a holistic approach to the poem. Through a series of distinct but closely integrated literary studies of major aspects of the work, including its style, its engagement with the traditions of epic and tragedy, and its treatment of heroism and of the gods, the book explores the way the Alexandra reconfigures Greek mythology, particularly as presented in …
They Keep It All Hid
Greek Epigram and Byzantine Culture
344 PHOENIX could also constitute restrained criticism of the rulers of his own time would have benefited from broader discussion. Closs’s approach is chronological and her focus on motifs of fire and politics is very broad. It is a strength of the book that it unites consideration of various forms of fire in one tome: fires caused by lightning, arson, the burning of books and records, cremation; fires in everyday life, history, myth, and philoso…
Theocritus’ Hymns and “Epyllia”
Four genuinely Theocritean poems (13, 22, 24, and 26) include compressed narratives on the deeds of gods and other mythological figures in dactylic hexameter. These share a number of verbal and thematic connections and interact with one another in interesting ways. All of them focus on divine figures of symbolic importance for the Ptolemies, and there is a good reason to suppose that they implicitly participate in the construction and disseminati…
A furious prophecy
Lycophron’s extensive debt to Aeschylus is exemplified by his engagement with the Agamemnon and the Choephori in Cassandra’s prediction of her own death and that of Agamemnon and in the brief ensuing synopsis of Orestes’ vengeance on Clytemnestra. This paper argues that the next stage of Cassandra’s prophecy, in which she discusses two rites instituted in the aftermath of her death, continues the reworking of the Oresteia by exploiting themes pro…
Art (24 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (22 works) · Literature (15 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · History (11 works) · Poetry (10 works) · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies (9 works) · Classics (7 works) · Byzantine Studies and History (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works)