Description
Book SynopsisOppian''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 wo
Trade Review'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
Table of ContentsIntroduction. 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.
