Exemplum and Myth, Criticism and Creation : Papers on Early Greek Literature

These papers, composed over a period of nearly thirty years, starting in the mid-1970s, are collected in this volume with a new chapter, other additional material, a combined bibliography, and full indexes. Book jacket.

J. Gordon Howie's seminal papers on Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Pindar, Euripides, Thucydides, and Xenophon document the vitality and influence of cultural and intellectual patterns first visible in the homeric epics and early Greek lyric, and reveal the impact of those patterns on Attic drama and historical writing. A focal figure in this process, and throughout Howie's papers, is Pindar, who transmitted his poetic past while transforming it in ways that made it acceptable to fifth-century Athenian culture.