"One of the most prominent figures in American Hellenistic poetry scholarship, Peter Bing has long served as a model for acute criticism and careful reading. He has a marvelous ability to make readers rethink their preconceptions; his work is always beautifully argued and documented and his writing style is a pleasure to engage with." ---Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Ohio State University
While people of previous ages relied on public performance as their chief means of experiencing poetry, the Hellenistic age developed what one may term a culture of reading. This was the first era in which poets consciously shaped their works with an eye toward publication and reception not just on the civic stage but in several media---in performance, on inscribed monuments, in scrolls. The essays in Peter Bing's collection explore how poetry accommodated various audiences and how these audiences in turn experienced the text in diverse ways. Over the years, Bing's essays have focused on certain Hellenistic authors and genres---particularly on Callimachus and Posidippus and on epigram. His themes, too, have been broadly consistent. Thus, although the essays in The Scroll and the Marble span some twenty years, they offer a coherent vision of Hellenistic poetics as a whole.
Peter Bing is Professor of Classics at Emory University and editor, most recently, of the Companion to Hellenistic Epigram: Down to Philip (coedited with Jon Steffen Bruss).
Jacket illustration: Film still from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, directed by Frank Capra, Columbia Pictures 1939. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.

The Scroll and the Marble: Studies in Reading and Reception in Hellenistic Poetry

Literature & Fiction

Bing, Peter

History & Criticism

University of Michigan Press

Blood sacrifice, the ritual slaughter of animals, has been basic to religion through history, so that it survives in spiritualized form even in Christianity. How did this violent phenomenon achieve the status of the sacred? This question is examined in Walter Burkert's famous study.

Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth

Burkert, Walter

University of California Press

"Tradition and originality, the interplay of present and past, are a concern of poets in any age. " Peter Bing's seminal monograph, The Well-Read Muse: Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets , chases this idea through the thickets of Hellenistic poetry and particularly among the lines of Callimachus' Hymn to Delos . In this carefully argued and stimulating study, the author investigates the era in which the written work - the book - superseded the assumption of oral composition and performance. In this and in other respects, as this study demonstrates, Hellenistic poets saw themselves as now being part of a new world, remote from the great genres and achievements of the earlier literary tradition. That sense of distance from the past gave authors freedom to experiment. At the same time, it incited them to view their poetic heritage as something deserving intense scholarly study. The author examines one fundamental result of this attitude, the Hellenistic tendency toward learned allusion, and what this meant to a period pursuing a different literary approach. The Well-Read Muse concludes with an analysis of Callimachus' Hymn to Delos as a paradigmatic instance of the play between present and past, tradition and originality that typified the age. Here the author sheds important light on the poet's choice not to make Apollo his theme, as his models had, but to focus rather on the diminutive, slender island, through which the god of song was born. Accompanied by a new Introduction by the author and corrections to the text and notes, as well as by an extensive bibliography and indices of passages and subjects discussed, The Well-Read Muse provides an important understanding of this turning point in Greek poetical development. There was no escaping the new world of which these poets were a part: Peter Bing's impressive work examines the ways in which poets confronted this new reality.

The Well-Read Muse: Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets

Michigan Classical Press

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