Peter Burian

This book is a guide to the poetics of the two Greek fountainheads of Western literary theory. Part I traces the development of Plato's great themes of inspiration and imitation but makes no attempt to reduce his disparate statements to a system. Part II demonstrates that Aristotle's Poetics embodies a powerful theory of literature that answers Plato's objections to poetry as an emotionally powerful, and therefore dangerous, communication of false opinion. Originally published in 1987. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 1.1 (2000) 149-153 [Access article in PDF] Sophie Mills. Theseus, Tragedy and the Athenian Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. x 1 293 pp. Cloth, $98. Interest in Theseus continues to run high; this decade alone has seen the publication of three books devoted to the hero and his meaning for Athens: Claude Calame's Thésée et l'imaginaire athénien (Lausanne 1990), Henry Walker's Theseus and Athens (New York 1995), and now Sophie Mills's revision of her 1992 Oxford dissertation. Calame's brilliant study is in a different category from those of Mills and Walker, since his central focus is the relation of myth and cult, for which Theseus provides a rich and complex example. Walker and Mills are much closer in aim and scope, but their intellectual styles are different, as are many of their conclusions. Walker probes the sources for signs of internal tensions and contradictions, and finds them. Mills looks for ideologically consistent elements, and finds them. Both approaches have value. Mills footnotes particular items of convergence or disagreement with Walker but does not attempt a full-scale confrontation of views, which is no doubt just as well.Mills's first two chapters canvass a wide range of evidence for the myth of Theseus and its meanings. "Images of Theseus before Tragedy" is devoted to showing how Athenian or Athenian-inspired sources of the Late Archaic period take the often unpromising material found in the oldest strata of the legend and transform it to produce a national hero, that is, a figure who embodies "the best qualities of the nation in its own eyes" and can be recreated as the idealized image of Athens changes, "so as to present consistently an ideal standard of conduct" (25). "The Athenian Image of Athens" surveys the ideal of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries, arguing that a consistent image (essentially that of the surviving epitaphioi logoi) can be found in nearly every relevant source. For Mills, the funeral encomia present in exaggerated form an ideology that "pervades mainstream Athenian thought about Athens and Athenian identity" (52). She argues that Thucydides stands outside the mainstream; his "cynicism and desire to expose the falsehood of popular ideology should... not be used as an indication of what the average Athenian generally felt about the empire" (85).The ideal Athens is portrayed in the "mainstream" tradition, with only changes of emphasis over time, as a civilizing force, whose military strength and cultural superiority go hand in hand. Stories and imagery combine to present Athens as "the only truly Greek city" (59) in its courage and daring, its steadfast pursuit of justice, and its generosity in dealing with others, and thus support the claim that Athenians are not merely superior to barbarians (as are all [End Page 149] Greeks) but different from and better than other Greeks. And if Athens is a super-Greek city, "Theseus, as its representative in tragedy, is a kind of super-Greek" (60). All of this is to some degree a useful corrective to the emphasis on discomfort and equivocation in many recent studies of Athenian ideology. One may not be entirely convinced (I shall express some of my own reservations below), but the case is made intelligently, using a wide array of ancient sources and relevant modern scholarship.The heart of the book is a sequence of three chapters devoted to Mills's analysis of three tragedies (Euripides' Suppliants and Heracles and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus) in which Theseus appears in his role of Athenian king and embodiment of the Athenian ideal. Given the views I have just outlined, there is little that surprises in these interpretations and, indeed, little that could be called new, but no one else has made the case that Theseus embodies a coherent image of the ideal Athens with such thoroughness or argued for its significance with such cogency. Discussing Heracles, Mills is careful to recognize that Theseus and Athens can only go so far in alleviating the suffering that seems to be an inevitable part of human...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.2 (2000) 299-307 [Access article in PDF] Brief Mention Translation, the Profession, and the Poets Peter Burian Amidst all the questions being raised these days about the health of classical studies in this country, one fact is undisputed: there is an enormous amount of translation going on. Much of it is good, and some of it sells extraordinarily well. Still, none of this is guaranteed to make classicists happy, and for more than one reason. Some may be inclined to contrast the proliferation of translations with falling enrollments in language courses and to regard the emphasis on translation as misplaced or even as a sign of how far knowledge of Greek and Latin has declined. Others no doubt continue to feel that translation is a second-rate activity and somehow unworthy of the attention of serious scholars.The traditions of our discipline seem to have encouraged this disdain: translation is treated in our pedagogical practice as the most elementary stage of understanding a text. There is thus a somewhat shameful association of translation with trot. Translations are what we were constantly required to make and forbidden to use when we studied Latin and Greek, and they are what most of us still require our students to make and forbid them to use. But if the writing of translations is not very highly regarded within the profession, we reserve particular scorn for translations done by those who are not members of our guild. Conditioned as we are to value fidelity to the letter above all else, we may actually find ourselves professing admiration for the sort of musty and flaccid writing that seems to guarantee "accuracy" at the expense of style.Fortunately, despite such perhaps unconscious biases, translation of the classics is flourishing. For this we can thank, in the first instance, an active and able group of dedicated writers within and without the field who have made translating from Greek and Latin central to their creative lives. And we should acknowledge that--to borrow a phrase [End Page 299] from the great rogue translator Ezra Pound--"the thought of what America would be like if the classics had a wide circulation" is only thinkable about the classics in translation. Less than half a century ago, Bernard Knox still felt it necessary to begin the preface to his Oedipus at Thebes (1957) with the disarming notice that his book was intended not only for the classical scholar but also for "the 'Greekless reader,' a category which, once treated with scorn by the professors of more educated ages, now includes the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the planet." Truth to tell, of course, the overwhelming majority of humankind never knew Greek, or for that matter Latin, but the number--or at least the proportion--of those who do has certainly shrunk. Professorial scorn is no longer an option. Translation is our lifeline, and great literatures need great translations.In what follows, I simply raise a few questions about the translation of literary texts and its role in our profession and, in the process, mention (purely by way of example) a number of the recent American translations from Greek and Latin that I have found particularly useful, satisfying, and/or provocative.First, what is the right way to approach the translation of an ancient, canonical text? My answer is simply that there is no one right way. We must understand that different translations serve different purposes and need to be judged by different criteria. The first, or only readily available, translation into English of a little-known work is likely to have a different purpose from the retranslation of a text that has appeared in English many times, perhaps over many centuries; and the translators are likely to feel different obligations to the works and to their prospective readers. A "literal" version done properly remains one of the most useful contributions a classicist can make. Such recent additions to the Loeb Library as William Race's Pindar (1997) and the ongoing Aristophanes of Jeffrey Henderson (1998-) and Euripides of David Kovacs (1994...