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Pelops And Hippodamia Racing
In Greek mythology, Pelops (; ) was king of Pisa in the Peloponnesus region (, lit. "Pelops' Island"). He was the son of Tantalus and the father of Atreus. He was venerated at Olympia, where his cult developed into the founding myth of the Olympic Games, the most important expression of unity, not only for the people of Peloponnesus, but for all Hellenes. At the sanctuary at Olympia, chthonic night-time libations were offered each time to "dark-faced" Pelops in his sacrificial pit (''bothros'') before they were offered in the following daylight to the sky-god Zeus (Burkert 1983:96). Genealogy Pelops was a son of Tantalus and either Dione, Euryanassa, Eurythemista,Scholia ad Euripides, ''Orestes'11/ref> or Clytia. In some accounts, he was called a bastard son of Tantalus while others named his parents as Atlas and the nymph Linos. Others would make Pelops the son of Hermes and Calyce while another says that he was an Achaean from Olenus. Of Phrygian or Lydian birth, ...
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Niobe
In Greek mythology, Niobe (; grc-gre, Νιόβη ) was a daughter of Tantalus and of either Dione, the most frequently cited, or of Eurythemista or Euryanassa, the wife of Amphion and the sister of Pelops and Broteas. Her father was the ruler of a city located near Manisa in today's Aegean Turkey that was called "Tantalis" or "the city of Tantalus", or "Sipylus". The city was located at the foot of Mount Sipylus and its ruins were reported to be still visible at the beginning of the 1st century AD, although few traces remain today. Pliny reports that Tantalis was destroyed by an earthquake and the city of Sipylus (Magnesia ad Sipylum) was built in its place. Niobe's father is referred to as " Phrygian" and sometimes even as "King of Phrygia", although his city was located in the western extremity of Anatolia where Lydia was to emerge as a state before the beginning of the first millennium BC, and not in the traditional heartland of Phrygia, situated more inland. There are r ...
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Founding Myth
An origin myth is a myth that describes the origin of some feature of the natural or social world. One type of origin myth is the creation or cosmogonic myth, a story that describes the creation of the world. However, many cultures have stories set in a time after a first origin - such stories aim to account for the beginnings of natural phenomena or of human institutions within a preexisting universe. In Graeco-Roman scholarship, the terms etiological myth and ''aition'' (from the Ancient Greek αἴτιον, "cause") are sometimes used for a myth that explains an origin, particularly how an object or custom came into existence. Nature of origin myths Every origin myth is a tale of creation: origin myths describe how some reality came into existence.Eliade, p. 21 In many cases, origin myths also justify the established order by explaining that it was established by sacred forces (see section on "Social function" below). The distinction between cosmogonic myths and orig ...
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Lycophron
Lycophron (; grc-gre, Λυκόφρων ὁ Χαλκιδεύς; born about 330–325 BC) was a Hellenistic Greek tragic poet, grammarian, sophist, and commentator on comedy, to whom the poem ''Alexandra'' is attributed (perhaps falsely). Life and miscellaneous works He was born at Chalcis in Euboea, and flourished at Alexandria in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285–247 BC). According to the ''Suda'', the massive tenth century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopaedia, he was the son of Socles, but was adopted by Lycus of Rhegium. He was entrusted by Ptolemy with the task of arranging the comedies in the Library of Alexandria; as the result of his labours he composed a treatise ''On Comedy''. Lycophron is also said to have been a skilful writer of anagrams. Tragedies The poetic compositions of Lycophron chiefly consisted of tragedies, which secured him a place in the Pleiad of Alexandrian tragedians. The ''Suda'' gives the titles of twenty tragedies, of which a very few fragm ...
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Tzetzes
John Tzetzes ( grc-gre, Ἰωάννης Τζέτζης, Iōánnēs Tzétzēs; c. 1110, Constantinople – 1180, Constantinople) was a Byzantine poet and grammarian who is known to have lived at Constantinople in the 12th century. He was able to preserve much valuable information from ancient Greek literature and scholarship. Biography Tzetzes described himself as pure Greek on his father's side and part Iberian (Georgian) on his mother's side. In his works, Tzetzes states that his grandmother was a relative of the Georgian Bagratid princess Maria of Alania who came to Constantinople with her and later became the second wife of the ''sebastos'' Constantine Keroularios, ''megas droungarios'' and nephew of the patriarch Michael Keroularios. He worked as a secretary to a provincial governor for a time and later began to earn a living by teaching and writing. He was described as vain, seems to have resented any attempt at rivalry, and violently attacked his fellow grammarians. Owin ...
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Euryanassa
In Greek mythology, Euryanassa (Ancient Greek: Εὐρυάνασσα) is a name that may refer to: *Euryanassa, daughter of the river-god Pactolus. She was the wife of Tantalus, and one of the possible mothers of Pelops, Broteas and Niobe. *Euryanassa, daughter of Hyperphas, leader of the Phlegyans and thus, sister to Euryganeia, wife of Oedipus. She was the mother of Minyas by Poseidon. *Euryanassa, a surname of HebeHesychius of Alexandria, s.v. ''Euryanassa'' Notes References * Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, ''Moralia'' with an English Translation by Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1936Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.Greek text available from the same website
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Gaius Julius Hyginus
Gaius Julius Hyginus (; 64 BC – AD 17) was a Latin author, a pupil of the scholar Alexander Polyhistor, and a freedman of Caesar Augustus. He was elected superintendent of the Palatine library by Augustus according to Suetonius' ''De Grammaticis'', 20. It is not clear whether Hyginus was a native of the Iberian Peninsula or of Alexandria. Suetonius remarks that Hyginus fell into great poverty in his old age and was supported by the historian Clodius Licinus. Hyginus was a voluminous author: his works included topographical and biographical treatises, commentaries on Helvius Cinna and the poems of Virgil, and disquisitions on agriculture and bee-keeping. All these are lost. Under the name of Hyginus there are extant what are probably two sets of school notes abbreviating his treatises on mythology; one is a collection of ''Fabulae'' ("stories"), the other a "Poetical Astronomy". ''Fabulae'' The ''Fabulae'' consists of some three hundred very brief and plainly, even crudely, to ...
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Pindar's First Olympian Ode
The Greek lyric poet Pindar composed odes to celebrate victories at all four Panhellenic Games. Of his fourteen ''Olympian Odes'', glorifying victors at the Ancient Olympic Games, the First was positioned at the beginning of the collection by Aristophanes of Byzantium since it included praise for the games as well as of Pelops, who first competed at Elis (the polis or city-state in which the festival was later staged). It was the most quoted in antiquity and was hailed as the "best of all the odes" by Lucian. Pindar composed the epinikion in honour of his then patron Hieron I, tyrant of Syracuse, whose horse Pherenikos and its jockey were victorious in the single horse race in 476 BC. Poetry The ode begins with a priamel, where the rival distinctions of water and gold are introduced as a foil to the true prize, the celebration of victory in song. Ring-composed, Pindar returns in the final lines to the mutual dependency of victory and poetry, where "song needs deeds to celeb ...
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Pindar
Pindar (; grc-gre, Πίνδαρος , ; la, Pindarus; ) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian wrote, "Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar is by far the greatest, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence, characteristics which, as Horace rightly held, make him inimitable." His poems can also, however, seem difficult and even peculiar. The Athenian comic playwright Eupolis once remarked that they "are already reduced to silence by the disinclination of the multitude for elegant learning". Some scholars in the modern age also found his poetry perplexing, at least until the 1896 discovery of some poems by his rival Bacchylides; comparisons of their work showed that many of Pindar's idiosyncrasies are typical of archaic genres rather than of only the poet himself. ...
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Simonides Of Ceos
Simonides of Ceos (; grc-gre, Σιμωνίδης ὁ Κεῖος; c. 556–468 BC) was a Greek lyric poet, born in Ioulis on Ceos. The scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria included him in the canonical list of the nine lyric poets esteemed by them as worthy of critical study. Included on this list were Bacchylides, his nephew, and Pindar, reputedly a bitter rival, both of whom benefited from his innovative approach to lyric poetry. Simonides, however, was more involved than either in the major events and with the personalities of their times. Lessing, writing in the Enlightenment era, referred to him as "the Greek Voltaire." His general renown owes much to traditional accounts of his colourful life, as one of the wisest of men; as a greedy miser; as an inventor of a system of mnemonics; and the inventor of some letters of the Greek alphabet (). Such accounts include fanciful elements, yet he had a real influence on the sophistic enlightenment of the Classical era. His fame ...
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Cypria
The ''Cypria'' (; grc-gre, Κύπρια ''Kúpria''; Latin: ''Cypria'') is a lost epic poem of ancient Greek literature, which has been attributed to Stasinus and was quite well known in classical antiquity and fixed in a received text, but which subsequently was lost to view. It was part of the Epic Cycle, which told the entire history of the Trojan War in epic hexameter verse. The story of the ''Cypria'' comes chronologically at the beginning of the Epic Cycle, and is followed by that of the ''Iliad''; the composition of the two was apparently in the reverse order. The poem comprised eleven books of verse in epic dactylic hexameters. Date and authorship The ''Cypria'', in the written form in which it was known in classical Greece, was probably composed in the late seventh century BCE, but there is much uncertainty. The Cyclic Poets, as the translator of Homerica, Hugh G. Evelyn-White noted "were careful not to trespass upon ground already occupied by Homer," one of the reasons ...
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Tyrtaeus
Tyrtaeus (; grc-gre, Τυρταῖος ''Tyrtaios''; Floruit, fl. mid-7th century BC) was a Greeks, Greek Elegy, elegiac poet from Sparta. He wrote at a time of two crises affecting the city: a civic unrest threatening the authority of kings and elders, later recalled in a poem named ''Eunomia'' ("Law and Order"), where he reminded citizens to respect the divine and constitutional roles of kings, council, and ''demos''; and the Second Messenian War, during which he served as a sort of "state poet", exhorting Spartans to fight to the death for their city. In the 4th century BC, when Tyrtaeus was an established classic, Spartan army, Spartan armies on campaign were made to listen to his poetry, and the ''Suda'' states that he wrote Martial music, martial songs, probably referring to the chants escorting armed dances and processions during some Spartan festivals. Life Sources Virtually all that is known about the life of Tyrtaeus is found in two entries of the ''Suda'', a Byzantine ...
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Bothros
Bothros (Greek βόθρος, plural ''bothroi'') is the Ancient Greek word for "hole", "pit" or "trench". In contemporary use it can refer to a variety of holes or depressions found at ancient sites and referred to in literature, and has also been utilized in biological taxonomy to describe species or structures that have similar characteristics. Historic / Archaeological uses In Greek antiquity, a ''bothros'' was an artificially-created or formed depression in the ground, which could serve various purposes. In archaeology, similar items are also referred to by this name and interpreted depending on their context as altars, locations for sacrifice or storage pits. In the works of Homer, ''bothros'' generally refers to a depression or pit in the ground. In the Odyssey, the handmaidens of Nausicaa wash their clothes in one, and at the advice of Circe Odysseus digs one for the offering of libations to the dead in the underworld - first honey and milk, then wine, then water. They we ...
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