Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity
Journal Data
| Type | SOURCE_BOOK |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (US) |
| ISBN-13 | 9781316670651 |
| Open Library | OL21131790W |
| Total publications | 7 |
| Coverage period | 2016 - 2016 |
| Language | EN |
| Impact factor | 0.286 |
What happened when creative biographers took on especially creative subjects (poets, artists and others) in Greek and Roman antiquity? Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity examines how the biographical traditions of ancient poets and artists parallel the creative processes of biographers themselves, both within antiquity and beyond. Each chapter explores a range of biographical material that highlights the complexity of how readers and viewers imagine the lives of ancient creator-figures. Work in the last decades has emphasized the likely fictionality of nearly all of the ancient evidence about the lives of poets, as well as of other artists and intellectuals; this book now sets out to show what we might nevertheless still do with the rich surviving testimony for 'creative lives' - and the evidence that those traditions still shape how we narrate modern lives too
Recognizing Virgil
credimus? an qui amant, ipsi sibi somnia fingunt? Virgil, Eclogue 8.108 Lascia parlare a me, ch’ i'ho concetto ciò che tu vuoi Virgil's words to Dante, Inferno Canto 26.73–4 The idea of recognition can connote respect as well as identification based on previous encounters. When it comes to recognizing Virgil, deference to the poet is very evident in the practices and behaviour of his early readers, along with forms of personal recognition. The ti…
Imagination dead imagine
Mourning: not a crushing oppression, a jamming (which would suppose a ‘refill’), but a painful availability: I am vigilant , expectant, awaiting the onset of a ‘sense of life’. The deaths of Roland Barthes: his deaths, that is, those of his relatives, those deaths that must have inhabited him, situating places and solemn moments, orienting tombs in his inner space (ending – and probably even beginning – with his mother's death). His deaths, those…
Lives from stone
Inscriptions of the classical and, especially, Hellenistic periods can be a rich source of information for those interested in reconstructing the details of the lives of statesmen, as well as the creative lives of poets and philosophers. This is not, of course, a novel observation: the potential utility of inscriptions as a source for biography and biographers has been recognised since antiquity. But this turn to epigraphic evidence seems often t…
A poetic possession
What does it mean to write a life? For most of us, our initial tendency is to conceive of biography in terms of genre. We look, with Momigliano, for ‘an account of the life of a man from birth to death’. But Aristotle's insight that the full span of a single life is not the only, or best, means of achieving a totality is no less relevant to the study of biography than to the epics about which the judgement was originally conceived. The form of a …
The artist as anecdote
In 2007, the Musée du Louvre devoted an exhibition to the fourth-century BC Greek sculptor Praxiteles that gathered together important evidence for famed works such as his Aphrodite of Knidos and Apollo Sauroktonos. Unlike conventional shows devoted to the work of single artists, the Louvre's curators were faced with a critical problem, for despite Praxiteles’ renown, not a single object survives that can be securely attributed to his hand. Inste…
Close encounters with the ancient poets
In his Autobiography, Malcolm X claims that the Homeric Question is something that preoccupied him during his incarceration
Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity
What happened when creative biographers took on especially creative subjects (poets, artists and others) in Greek and Roman antiquity? Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity examines how the biographical traditions of ancient poets and artists parallel the creative processes of biographers themselves, both within antiquity and beyond. Each chapter explores a range of biographical material that highlights the complexity of how readers and viewers i…
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Recognizing Virgil
credimus? an qui amant, ipsi sibi somnia fingunt? Virgil, Eclogue 8.108 Lascia parlare a me, ch’ i'ho concetto ciò che tu vuoi Virgil's words to Dante, Inferno Canto 26.73–4 The idea of recognition can connote respect as well as identification based on previous encounters. When it comes to recognizing Virgil, deference to the poet is very evident in the practices and behaviour of his early readers, along with forms of personal recognition. The ti…
Imagination dead imagine
Mourning: not a crushing oppression, a jamming (which would suppose a ‘refill’), but a painful availability: I am vigilant , expectant, awaiting the onset of a ‘sense of life’. The deaths of Roland Barthes: his deaths, that is, those of his relatives, those deaths that must have inhabited him, situating places and solemn moments, orienting tombs in his inner space (ending – and probably even beginning – with his mother's death). His deaths, those…
Lives from stone
Inscriptions of the classical and, especially, Hellenistic periods can be a rich source of information for those interested in reconstructing the details of the lives of statesmen, as well as the creative lives of poets and philosophers. This is not, of course, a novel observation: the potential utility of inscriptions as a source for biography and biographers has been recognised since antiquity. But this turn to epigraphic evidence seems often t…
A poetic possession
What does it mean to write a life? For most of us, our initial tendency is to conceive of biography in terms of genre. We look, with Momigliano, for ‘an account of the life of a man from birth to death’. But Aristotle's insight that the full span of a single life is not the only, or best, means of achieving a totality is no less relevant to the study of biography than to the epics about which the judgement was originally conceived. The form of a …
The artist as anecdote
In 2007, the Musée du Louvre devoted an exhibition to the fourth-century BC Greek sculptor Praxiteles that gathered together important evidence for famed works such as his Aphrodite of Knidos and Apollo Sauroktonos. Unlike conventional shows devoted to the work of single artists, the Louvre's curators were faced with a critical problem, for despite Praxiteles’ renown, not a single object survives that can be securely attributed to his hand. Inste…
Close encounters with the ancient poets
In his Autobiography, Malcolm X claims that the Homeric Question is something that preoccupied him during his incarceration
Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity
What happened when creative biographers took on especially creative subjects (poets, artists and others) in Greek and Roman antiquity? Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity examines how the biographical traditions of ancient poets and artists parallel the creative processes of biographers themselves, both within antiquity and beyond. Each chapter explores a range of biographical material that highlights the complexity of how readers and viewers i…