Time, Tense, and Genre in Ancient Greek Literature

by Connie Bloomfield-Gadêlha, Edith Hall

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192858498
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/29/2025
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

Connie Bloomfield-Gadêlha, Lecturer in Classics and Liberal Arts, University of Bristol,Edith Hall, Professor of Classics, University of Durham

Connie Bloomfield-Gadêlha is a Lecturer in Classics and Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol. Previously, Connie was the Drapers' Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She studied Classics at Oxford, Comparative Literature at Cambridge, and completed her doctorate on syncretic uses of Graeco-Roman antiquity in Northeast-Brazilian popular oral poetry at King's College, London. She continues to work on both Latin American classical receptions and ancient Greek and Latin literature, with particular interests in orality and popular culture. Connie collaborates with contemporary poets and visual artists in the UK, Brazil, and Mexico, and is translating Mexican poet Pura López Colomé's collection Via Corporis into English.

Edith Hall, Fellow of the British Academy, took up a Chair in Classics at Durham University in 2022, after holding posts at the Universities of Reading, Oxford, Cambridge, Royal Holloway, and King's College London. She has published more than thirty books, broadcasts on the BBC, and acts as consultant to professional theatres including the National Theatre, the Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She leads a campaign to increase access to classical subjects within state education. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by Athens and Durham Universities, the Erasmus Medal of the European Academy, and Honorary Citizenship of Palermo.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Time, Tense, and Genre through the Ages, Connie Bloomfield-GadêlhaSection A. Divine and Human Time2. Divine and Human Narratives: Time and Being, Esther Eidinow3. Evoking the Eternal: Perspective and Paradox in Iliadic Warfare, Tobias Myers4. Bending Time: Divine Transcendence and Mortal Limits in Pindar's Nemean 6, Peter Moench5. Sensing the Future in Lycophron's Alexandra, Isobel Higgins6. One Precise Day c.547 scbce/sc: Playing with Time in Lucian's Charon, Edith HallSection B. Temporalities of Knowledge7. Time and Genre: Cosmology and Verbal Tenses in Ancient Greek Literature, Carlo Delle Donne8. Nine Thousand Years Ago: The Erasure of the Navy from Plato's Atlantis Fictions, Edith Hall9. Aesop and the Future, Dimitar Dragnev10. The Living Past: Tense and Genre in the Critical Essays of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Alessandro Vatri11. Tense Usage and Temporal Form in Herodotean Conversation Scenes, Tobias Joho12. Perseid Wars and Notional Nostos in Herodotus' Histories, Keating P. J. McKeon13. Croak around the Clock: The Times and Tenses of Classical Attic Oratory, Alessandro Vatri14. Ethnography in the Past Tense: The Amazons in Apollonius' Argonautica, Brian McPhee15. Aetiology and Temporal Regimes in Greek Hymnic and Ethnographic Literature, Kenneth W. YuSection C. Present and Presence16. The Singularity of the Tragic Day, Sheila Murnaghan17. Tragic Temporalities in Euripides' Trojan Women, Edith Hall18. Cruel Futurity in Euripides' Bacchae: Dance, Impasse, Ecstasy, Marcus Bell19. Silenus and the Chorus of Satyr Drama as Time Travellers, Devan Turner20. The Past in a Present Genre: Nostalgia in Aristophanes, Peter Swallow21. Bardic Temporalities: Performing, Creating, and Contesting Time, Connie Bloomfield-Gadêlha22. Sappho, Alcman, and the 'Lyric Present', Alex Purves23. Songs for Parties or Parthenoi?: Homoerotic Temporalities and Genre in Sappho and Alcman, Rioghnach Sachs24. Lyric Imperatives, Consciousness, and the Present on the Move, Felix Budelmann