Solon The Athenian The Poetic Fragments

This book illuminates the authoritative voice of Solon of Athens by an integrated literary, historical, and philological approach and the use of a range of hermeneutic frameworks, from literary theory to oral poetics.

Excerpt from Solon the Athenian The present work falls into two distinct parts, a biography of Solon and an edition of the fragments of his poems. 'the biographical essay should not be regarded as an introduction to the text of the poems and the commentary upon them. Since our knowledge of Solon's life is not extensive and since the fragments of his poems are few, it is possible to include within one small book two things which in other cases would offer material for two separate books. This is in one sense a happy circumstance, because the reader can have before him in brief space all that can be brought together about Solon. The biographical essay presents the results of a critical study of all the evidence available on the life of Solon. A sceptical attitude has been adopted alike toward ancient legend and modern hypothesis. If the attitude seems oversceptical, this is not much to be regretted it is better in such a business to tell nothing but the truth than to risk falsehood through fear of not telling the whole truth. But whatever has been rejected has received due consideration in footnotes or appendices. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext, twenty-one international scholars discuss the afterlife of early Greek lyric poetry (iambic, elegiac, and melic) from the 5th century BCE to the 12th century CE.

This volume offers a range of innovative approaches to Solon of Athens, legendary law-giver, statesman, and poet of the early sixth century B.C. In the first part, Solon’s poetry is reconsidered against the background of oral poetics and other early Greek poetry. The connection between Solon’s alleged roles as poet and as politician is fundamentally questioned. Part two offers a reassessment of Solon’s laws based on a revision of the textual tradition and recent views on early Greek lawgiving. In part three, fresh scrutiny of the archeological and written evidence of archaic Greece results in new perspectives on the agricultural crisis and Solon’s role in the social and political developments of sixth-century Athens. Originally published in hardcover

In Solon the Thinker, John Lewis presents the hypothesis that Solon saw Athens as a self-governing, self-supporting system akin to the early Greek conceptions of the cosmos. Solon's polis functions not through divine intervention but by its own internal energy, which is founded on the intellectual health of its people, depends upon their acceptance of justice and moderation as orderly norms of life, and leads to the rejection of tyranny and slavery in favour of freedom. But Solon's naturalistic views are limited; in his own life each person is subject to the arbitrary foibles of moira, the inscrutable fate that governs human life, and that brings us to an unknowable but inevitable death. Solon represents both the new rational, scientific spirit that was sweeping the Aegean - and a return to the fatalism that permeated Greek intellectual life. This first paperback edition contains a new appendix of translations of the fragments of Solon by the author.

This handbook is a guide to the reading of elegiac, iambic, personal and public poetry of early Greece. Intended as a teaching manual or as an aid for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, it presents the major scholarly debates affecting the reading of these poetic texts, such as the effect of genre, the question of the poetic persona, or the impact of modern literary theory.