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This book considers what evidence the "new Simonides" fragments offer for Simonides' elegiac compositions on the Persian Wars. The current orthodoxy is that they represent three separate elegies on individual battles, one on Artemisium, one on Salamis, and one on Plataea. Kowerski evaluates what evidence these fragments provide for these compositions, and in doing so, questions the validity of the current interpretation of the "new Simonides."
The name 'Simonides' has long been associated with the Persian Wars. More specifically, Simonides is famous in large part because of his commemoration of the Persian War dead in the form of epigrams. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a set of four of the most famous and most distinctively 'Simonidean' poems to the end of delineating their stylistic deviations from conventional epitaphic speech. This paper argues that the specific ways in which Simonides departs from the conventions of epigrammatic language serve to convey a distinctively democratic ethos. This ethos is clear in that Simonides' epigrams privilege the mass efforts of the collective, and do not praise any particular individuals over another. Moreover, that these poems do not include the sort of identifying details that we would normally expect to find in epigrams anticipates a readership that is uniformly knowledgeable about the events of the Persian Wars. This represents another facet of the egalitarian ethos evident in this group of epigrams, as Simonides treats his readers as equally aware of the events of the Persian Wars. Thus, Simonides assumes a unified, panhellenic identity that characterizes both the subjects of his poems as well as his readers: they are all part of the same entity that defeated the Persians. Simultaneously, however, Simonides, or at the very least, the Simonidean name, achieves his own kleos as an individual poet through his distinctive commemorations of the Persian War dead. With these poems comes the emergence of a Simonidean poetic persona that renders the poet's voice unique because of the way in which Simonides diverges from epigrammatic convention. The allotment of immortal kleos both to the anonymous, undifferentiated masses of Persian War dead and to the name 'Simonides' reflects two distinctive ideologies, the latter archaic and the former classical. My reading of these epigrams thus demonstrates how the commemoration of the Persian Wars is poised between two different eras and two different ideologies.
In his examination of the public life and poetic career of Simonides, Molyneux has provided a thorough examination of all the documentary evidence available with respect to one of history's major choral lyric poets.
Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars addresses the huge impact on subsequent culture made by the wars fought between ancient Persia and Greece in the early fifth century BC. It brings together sixteen interdisciplinary essays, mostly by classical scholars, on individual trends within the reception of this period of history, extending from the wars' immediate impact on ancient Greek history to their reception in literature and thought both in antiquity and in the post-Renaisssance world. Extensively illustrated and accessibly written, with a detailed Introduction and bibliographies, this book will interest historians, classicists, and students of both comparative and modern literatures.
Boedecker and Sider's edited volume gathers the best of the recent research on Simonides' newly expanded oeuvre into this collection, which is a useful reference for scholars of Greek poetry.
Scots translations of epitaphs by the ancient Greek poet Simonides, composed for civilians and soldiers killed during the Persian Wars, coupled with black and white photographs.
Herodotus, the great Greek historian, wrote this famous history of warfare between the Greeks and the Persians in a delightful style. Herodotus portrays the dispute as one between the forces of slavery on the one hand and freedom on the other. This work covers the rise of the Persian influence and a history of the Persian empire, a description and history of Egypt, and a long digression on the landscape and traditions of Scythia. Because of the comprehensiveness of this work, it was considered the founding work of history in Western literature. A must-have for history enthusiasts.
Simonides is tantalising and enigmatic, known both from fragments and from an extensive tradition of anecdotes. This monograph, the first in English for a generation, employs a two-part diachronic approach: Richard Rawles first reads Simonidean fragments with attention to their intertextual relationship with earlier works and traditions, and then explores Simonides through his ancient reception. In the first part, interactions between Simonides' own poems and earlier traditions, both epic and lyric, are studied in his melic fragments and then in his elegies. The second part focuses on an important strand in Simonides' ancient reception, concerning his supposed meanness and interest in remuneration. This is examined in Pindar's Isthmian 2, and then in Simonides' reception up to the Hellenistic period. The book concludes with a full re-interpretation of Theocritus 16, a poem which engages both with Simonides' poems and with traditions about his life.
The Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE is one of world history's unjustly neglected events. It decisively ended the threat of a Persian conquest of Greece. It involved tens of thousands of combatants, including the largest number of Greeks ever brought together in a common cause. For the Spartans, the driving force behind the Greek victory, the battle was sweet vengeance for their defeat at Thermopylae the year before. Why has this pivotal battle been so overlooked? In After Thermopylae, Paul Cartledge masterfully reopens one of the great puzzles of ancient Greece to discover, as much as possible, what happened on the field of battle and, just as important, what happened to its memory. Part of the answer to these questions, Cartledge argues, can be found in a little-known oath reputedly sworn by the leaders of Athens, Sparta, and several other Greek city-states prior to the battle-the Oath of Plataea. Through an analysis of this oath, Cartledge provides a wealth of insight into ancient Greek culture. He shows, for example, that when the Athenians and Spartans were not fighting the Persians they were fighting themselves, including a propaganda war for control of the memory of Greece's defeat of the Persians. This helps explain why today we readily remember the Athenian-led victories at Marathon and Salamis but not Sparta's victory at Plataea. Indeed, the Oath illuminates Greek anxieties over historical memory and over the Athens-Sparta rivalry, which would erupt fifty years after Plataea in the Peloponnesian War. In addition, because the Oath was ultimately a religious document, Cartledge also uses it to highlight the profound role of religion and myth in ancient Greek life. With compelling and eye-opening detective work, After Thermopylae provides a long-overdue history of the Battle of Plataea and a rich portrait of the Greek ethos during one of the most critical periods in ancient history.