A01=Susan A. Stephens
alexandrian court
alexandrian poetry
alexandrian poets
ancient egypt
ancient greece
apollonius
argonautica
Author_Susan A. Stephens
callimachus
Category=DC
Category=DSBB
Category=DSC
Category=NHC
egypt
egyptian culture
egyptian history
egyptian people
egyptian poetry
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
greek poetry
helen
hellenism
heracles
hiero of syracuse
hymns
literary criticism
literary theory
mythology
nonfiction
pharoah
poetics
poetry
political values
ptolemaic court
ptolemies
ptolemy philadelphus
regencies
royalty
rulers
theocritus
theogonies
Product details
- ISBN 9780520229730
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 27 Jan 2003
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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When, in the third century B.C.E., the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt, 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 Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Ptolemaic 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. The Alexandrian poets were image-makers for the Ptolemaic court, "Seeing Double" suggests; their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor to subvert the status quo, but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively re-created, examined, and critiqued.
"Seeing Double" depicts Alexandrian poetry in its proper context - within the writing of foundation stories and within the imaginative redefinition of Egypt as 'Two Lands' - no longer the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of a shared Greek and Egyptian culture.
Susan A. Stephens is Professor of Classics at Stanford University, author of Yale Papyri in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library II (1985), and coeditor of Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments (1995) and Didymus in Demosthenem: Commenta (1985).
