Oppian's Halieutica: Charting a Didactic Epic

by Emily Kneebone

Overview

Oppian's Halieutica is a dazzling five-book Greek didactic poem about the sea and its wily, chaotic inhabitants. This book offers the first sustained reading of the poem as a didactic epic that meditates on the place of human beings within the cosmos at large, and on the lessons we can learn from fish. Using a combination of close reading and wider interpretative lenses, this book examines the literary texture and cultural relevance of the Halieutica by analysing its sophisticated refraction of earlier literary-critical theories and hexameter traditions, its commentary on human-animal relations, and its contribution to imperial Greek literary, political, and cultural debates. The book demonstrates the importance and cultural centrality of this understudied Greek didactic epic; it is written for students and scholars of imperial Greek literature and culture (including the ancient novel), ancient heroic and didactic epics, and those interested in human-animal relations in the ancient world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108893619
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/08/2020
Series:	Greek Culture in the Roman World
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Emily Kneebone is an Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek Literature in the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Nottingham. She works primarily on Greek literature of the Roman imperial period and has published on heroic ethics in posthomeric Greek epic, diaspora Jewish identity in Josephus' adaptation of the Hebrew Bible for a Greco-Roman audience, mortal expertise in didactic poetry, and animals in later Greek poetry and prose.

Table of Contents

Introduction. On fishing; I. Didactic poetry: 1. Didactic epic; 2. Knowledge and pleasure; 3. Mapping the sea; II. Morality at sea: 4. Guile; 5. Greed; 6. Lust; III. Humans and animals: 7. Epic similes; 8. Analogical animals; 9. Humans and other animals; IV. Seas real and unreal: 10. Locating monsters; 11. An empire of fish; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

‘This study is deeply researched and amply annotated; it may not be much help to those seeking to catch a fish dinner, but it opens up a work unfamiliar even to those many scholars of Greek literature under the Roman empire.’ James Romm, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher