The polar dichotomy between man and god, and the insurmountable gulf between them, are considered a fundamental principle of archaic and classical Greek religion. Greek Praise Poetry and the Rhetoric of Divinity argues that poetry produced between the eighth and the fifth centuries BC does not present such a uniform view of the world, demonstrating instead that particular genres of poetry may assess the distance between humans and gods differently. Discussion focuses on genres where the boundaries appear to be more flexible, with wedding songs, victory odes, and selected passages from tragedy and comedy taken as case studies that illustrate that some human individuals may, in certain situations, be presented as enjoying a state of happiness, a degree of beauty, or an amount of power comparable to that of the gods. A central question throughout is whether these presentations stem from an individual poet's creative ingenuity or from the conventional ideological repertoire of the respective genre, and how this difference might shape the comparison of a human with the gods. Another important question concerns the ritual contexts in which some of these songs would have been performed, expanding the scope of the analysis beyond merely a literary device to encompass a fundamental aspect of archaic and classical Greek culture.

About the Author
Felix J. Meister studied Classics at the University of Leipzig and the University of Oxford, where he received his DPhil in 2015. He has worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Cologne since 2014 and lives in Cologne with his wife and their Golden Retriever, Nestor.

Reviews
The book is lucid and very readable. It is far from narrow, especially when the footnotes with additional parallels are taken into account - a glance at the Index Locorum shows a range far beyond the genres and chronological limits of its main discussion, including post-classical Greek, Latin poetry, inscriptions, and papyri. * Ruth Scodel, GNOMON *
Through the guise of these heroes - Achilles, Agamemnon, Ajax, Heracles - we can grasp the multi-valent personification of the human/divine dichotomy in Greek poetry. Meister does a superb job of exploring both the rhetoric and aspects of divinity used to portray this. * Cliff Cunningham, Book Reviews, Sun News Tucson *
From his doctoral thesis titled Momentary immortality: Greek Praise Poetry and Rhetoric of Divinity, revised and enriched, this monograph is introduced by F. J. Meister under the title Greek Praise Poetry and the Rhetoric of Divinity. * Maria Papadopoulos, Hellenic Religion *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198847687
Author Felix J. Meister
Format Hardback
Page Count 272
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 472g
Dimensions(mm) 222mm * 146mm * 23mm