Time, Tense, and Genre in Ancient Greek Literature

This collection of 24 essays provides the first comprehensive study of the way the passing of time, temporal setting, and the relationship between past, present, and future are presented in diverse genres of ancient Greek literature over the span of nearly a millennium.

The 24 essays collected in this book address the complex interactions between concepts of time, grammatical tense, and type of genre of prose or poetry in ancient Greek literature. The chronological scope stretches across nearly a millennium from archaic epic to the Second Sophistic, from the emotional intensity of Homer to Plutarch and the playfulness of Lucian, tracing patterns, developments, contrasts, and intertextual allusiveness across diverse texts and authors. These include dramatists (Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes), philosophers (Plato), lyricists (Alcman and Sappho), ancient literary critics (Dionysius of Halicarnassus), orators (whose lawcourt speeches were delivered literally ''against the clock'' in the form of the clepsydra), Hellenistic poets (Apollonius and Lycophron), historiographers (Herodotus) and the fabulist Aesop. The structure is informed by Greek philosophical categories, exploring discrete metaphysical, psychological, aetiological, and ethical ideas about temporality; the collective project of the volume is to investigate how authors manipulated not only tenses but imagery, moods, and metres, as well as generic conventions, in shaping and articulating notions about orality, literariness, subjectivity, immediacy, presence, futurity, causation, gender, sexuality, ethnography, cosmology, and remotest prehistory. The result is a pioneering, unique, and multifaceted volume that throws light not only on the rich linguistic resources of the ancient Greek language in evoking time, but on surprising interconnections between genres often studied in isolation.