Seeing Double

Fülszöveg

71
\ A.
^^hen the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt in the third century B.C.E., they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Calli-machus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Rolemaic rule. Her work successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively.
Seeing Double suggests that the Alexandrian poets were image makers for the Ptolemaic court, and that their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor subvert the status quo but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively recreated, examined, and critiqued. Through her nu-anced... Tovább

Fülszöveg

71
\ A.
^^hen the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt in the third century B.C.E., they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Calli-machus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Rolemaic rule. Her work successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively.
Seeing Double suggests that the Alexandrian poets were image makers for the Ptolemaic court, and that their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor subvert the status quo but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively recreated, examined, and critiqued. Through her nu-anced readings, Stephens shows how the Alexandrian poets experimented by adapting existing Greek mythological and historical models to articulate a novel kind of kingship—a kingship no longer of the upper
and lower Nile but of an interconnected Greek and Egyptian culture.
SUSAN A. STEPHENS is Professor of Classics at Stanford University, author of Yale Papyri in the Bei necke Rare Book and Manuscript Library 11 (1985), coeditor of Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments (1995), and author of a number of recent articles on Hellenistic poetry.
HELLENISTIC CULTURE AND SOCIETY, 37
Jacket design: Sandy Drooker Jacket illustration: Profile of Ptolemy I Soter as Pharaoh from an Egyptian cartouche (courtesy of the British Museum); Greek terracotta profile of Ptolemy I Sotqr (courtesy of Aliard Piersbn Museum, Amsterdam) Vissza