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Kallimachos
The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography
Rudolf Blum
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

The famous library of Alexandria, founded around 295 BCE by Ptolemaios I, housed the greatest collection of texts in the ancient world and was a fertile site of Hellenistic scholarship. Rudolf Blum’s landmark study, originally published in German in 1977, argues that Kallimachos of Kyrene was not only the second director of the Alexandrian library but also the inventor of two essential scholarly tools still in use to this day: the library catalog and the “biobibliographical” reference work. Kallimachos expanded the library’s inventory lists into volumes called the Pinakes, which extensively described and categorized each work and became in effect a Greek national bibliography and the source and paradigm for most later bibliographic lists of Greek literature. Though the Pinakes have not survived, Blum attempts a detailed reconstruction of Kallimachos’s inventories and catalogs based on a careful analysis of surviving sources, which are presented here in full translation.

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The Kannada Mahabharata
Kumaravyasa
Harvard University Press, 2024

The classic Kannada version of the Mahabharata, a jewel of world literature, translated into English.

The Mahabharata, a cornerstone of ancient Indian literature, recounts the rivalry between branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, culminating in a cataclysmic war. It has inspired numerous adaptations across languages and artistic media.

The Kannada Mahabharata, known as Kumāravyāsa Bhārata, is an innovative retelling where Krishna occupies center stage, composed by the fifteenth-century poet Kumaravyasa. His powerful verses critique kingship and caste and remain popular in musical performances and improvisational folk theatre today.

Volume 1 comprises “The Book of Beginnings” and “The Book of the Assembly,” including Pandu’s tragic death, the marriage of the Pandavas to Draupadi, Arjuna’s fiery destruction of the Khandava forest, the slaying of King Shishupala, and the dice game plotted by the Kauravas leading to the Pandavas’s exile.

This edition, which abridges the Kannada classic, presents a new English translation and the most reliable text of the original in the Kannada script.

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Keeping the Feast
Metaphors of Sacrifice in 1 Corinthians and Philippians
Jane Lancaster Patterson
SBL Press, 2015

Develop a keener ear for Paul’s rhetorical strategy

Patterson uses cognitive metaphor theory to trace the apostle Paul’s use of metaphors from the Jewish sacrificial system in his moral counsels to the Philippians and the Corinthians. In these letters, Paul moves from the known (the practice of sacrifice) to the unknown (how to live in accord with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ). Patterson illustrates that the significant sacrificial metaphors in 1 Corinthians and Philippians are not derived from Jewish sacrifices of atonement, but rather from the Passover and sacrifices of thanksgiving. Attention to these metaphors demonstrates that imagery drawn from these sacrifices shapes the overall moral counsel of the letters, reveals more varied and nuanced interpretations of sacrificial references in Paul’s letters, and sheds light on Paul’s continuity with Jewish cultic practice.

Features

  • Clarification of the strategic function of metaphors as a means of establishing an imaginative framework for ethical deliberation
  • Evidence of Paul’s active processes of theological reflection
  • Exploration of the intertwining of Jewish cultic practice with the rhetoric of moral commitment within early Christian churches
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Kinesis
The Ancient Depiction of Gesture, Motion, and Emotion
Christina A. Clark, Edith Foster, and Judith P. Hallett, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Donald Lateiner, in his groundbreaking work The Sardonic Smile, presented the first thorough study of nonverbal behavior in Homeric epics, drawing a significant distinction between ancient and modern gesture and demonstrating the intrinsic relevance of this “silent language” to psychological, social, and anthropological studies of the ancient world.

Using Lateiner’s work as a touchstone, the scholars in Kinesis analyze the depiction of emotions, gestures, and other nonverbal cues in ancient Greek and Roman texts and consider the precise language used to depict them. Individual contributors examine genres ranging from historiography and epic to tragedy, philosophy, and vase decoration. They explore evidence as disparate as Pliny’s depiction of animal emotions, Plato’s presentation of Aristophanes’ hiccups, and Thucydides’ use of verb tenses. Sophocles’ deployment of silence is considered, as are Lucan’s depiction of death and the speaking objects of the medieval Alexander Romance.

This collection will be valuable to scholars studying Greek and Roman society and literature, as well as to those who study the imitation of ancient literature in later societies. Jargon is avoided and all passages in ancient languages are translated, making this volume accessible to advanced undergraduates.

Contributors in addition to the volume editors include Jeffrey Rusten, Rosaria Vignolo Munson, Hans-Peter Stahl, Carolyn Dewald, Rachel Kitzinger, Deborah Boedeker, Daniel P. Tompkins, John Marincola, Carolin Hahnemann, Ellen Finkelpearl, Hanna M. Roisman, Eliot Wirshbo, James V. Morrison, Bruce Heiden, Daniel B. Levine, and Brad L. Cook.

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King of Sacrifice
Ritual and Royal Authority in the Iliad
Sarah Hitch
Harvard University Press, 2009
Descriptions of animal sacrifice in Homer offer us some of the most detailed accounts of this attempt at communication between man and gods. What is the significance of these scenes within the framework of the Iliad? This book explores the structural and thematic importance of animal sacrifice as an expression of the quarrel between Akhilleus and Agamemnon through the differing perspectives of the primary narrative and character speech. In the Iliad, animal sacrifice is incorporated into the primary narrative to bolster the royal authority of Agamemnon and further emphasize Akhilleus' isolation. The sacrifices embedded in character speech express frustration with the failure of reciprocity and the inability of sacrifice to influence the course of human events.
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Kleos in a Minor Key
The Homeric Education of a Little Prince
J. C. B. Petropoulos
Harvard University Press, 2011

As scholars have remarked, the word kleos in the Iliad and the Odyssey alike refers to something more substantive and complex than “fame” or “glory.” Kleos distinctly supposes an oral narrative—principally an “oral history,” a “life story” or ultimately an “oral tradition.” When broken down into its twin constituents, “words” and “actions” or “deeds,” a hero’s kleos serves to define him as a fully gendered social being.

This book is a meditation on this concept as expressed and experienced in the adult society Telemachos find himself in. Kleos is the yardstick by which his psychological change was appreciated by Homer’s audiences. As this book shows through philological and interdisciplinary analysis, Prince Telemachos grows up in the course of the Telemachy and arguably even beyond (in book 24): his education, which is conceived largely as an apprenticeship on land and sea, admits him gradually if unevenly to a full-fledged adult kleos—a kleos that nonetheless necessarily remains minor in comparison to that of his father and other elders.

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Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism
Cathy Gere
University of Chicago Press, 2009

In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans’s excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle. 

Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Cathy Gere paints an unforgettable portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.

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