Research Catalog

Title

Victim of the muses : poet as scapegoat, warrior, and hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European myth and history / Todd M. Compton.

Author

Compton, Todd, 1952-

Publication

Washington, DC : Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University ; Cambridge : Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2006.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xv, 432 p.; 23 cm.

Summary

This book, which has relevance both for literary history and comparative religion, probes the narratives of poets who are exiled, tried or executed for their satire. Aesop, fabulist and riddle warrior, is assimilated to the pharmakos - the wretched human scapegoat who is expelled from the city or killed in response to a crisis - after satirizing the Delphians. Other prominent legendary and historical Greek and Roman poets, such as Archilochus, Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Tyrtaeus, Euripides, Socrates, Naevius, Cicero, Ovid, and Juvenal, are also considered in this context. In much the same way, Dumezil's Indo-European heroes, Starkathr and Suibhne, are both warrior-poets persecuted by patron deities. This book views the scapegoat as a group's dominant warrior, sent out to confront predators or besieging forces. Both poets and warriors specialize in madness and aggression, are necessary to society, yet dangerous to society.

Series Statement

Hellenic studies ; 11

Uniform Title

Hellenic studies 11.

Subject

• Authors, Classical > Biography
• Poets, Greek > Biography
• Poets, Latin > Biography
• Scapegoat

Genre/Form

Biographies

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliography (p. 363-414) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

The pharmakos in archaic Greece -- Aesop : satirist as pharmakos in archaic Greece -- Archilochus : sacred obscenity and judgment -- Hipponax : creating the pharmakos -- Homer : the trial of the rhapsode -- Hesiod : consecrate murder -- Shadows of Hesiod : divine protection and lonely death -- Sappho : the barbed rose -- Alcaeus : poetry, politics, exile -- Theognis : faceless exile -- Tyrtaeus : the lame general -- Aeschylus : little ugly one -- Euripides : sparagmos of an iconoclast -- Aristophanes : satirist versus politician -- Socrates : the new Aesop -- Victim of the muses : mythical poets -- Kissing the leper : the excluded poet in Irish myth -- The stakes of the poet : Starkaðr/suibhne -- The sacrificed poet : Germanic myths -- "Wounded by tooth that drew blood" : the beginnings of satire in Rome -- Naevius : dabunt malum metelli Naevio poetae -- Cicero maledicus, Cicero exul -- Ovid : practicing the studium fatale -- Phaedrus : another fabulist -- Seneca, Petronius, and Lucan : neronian victims -- Juvenal : the burning poet -- Transformations of myth : the poet, society, and the sacred.

ISBN

• 067401958X (pbk.)
• 9780674019584

LCCN

^^2006002331

OCLC

• 62307761
• SCSB-12705136

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library