Abstract:What immediately strikes the reader’s ear in A. E. Stallings’s excellent translation of Hesiod’s great song of the earth, and divine justice, and human labour is the setting of the Greek to rhymes – h...What immediately strikes the reader’s ear in A. E. Stallings’s excellent translation of Hesiod’s great song of the earth, and divine justice, and human labour is the setting of the Greek to rhymes – heroic couplets, no less. Milton insisted that English heroic verse should follow with ‘judicious ears’ the epic model of Homer and Virgil by eschewing rhyme. Nevertheless, it was the very circumspections of rhyme, and the elasticity of the balanced, end-stopped couplet’s stringencies, that was music to the ears of Dryden and Pope. Still, one does not normally associate the lyric dexterities of ancient Greek verse with rhyme. In the Alcestis, Euripides puts rhyming speech into the mouth of a drunken Hercules in order, perhaps, to evoke his slurred, insulting speech. Hesiod’s Works and Days, however, may be the one ancient Greek narrative work particularly well suited to the straitjacketed freedoms of rhyme. As Robert Lamberton notes:Read More
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-05-28
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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