Little is known of Sappho's life. She was from a wealthy family from Lesbos, though the names of both of her parents are uncertain. Ancient sources say that she had three brothers; the names of two of them are mentioned in the
Brothers Poem discovered in 2014. She was exiled to Sicily around 600 BC, and may have continued to work until around 570.
Sappho's poetry was well-known and greatly admired through much of
antiquity, and she was among the
nine lyric poets deemed major by scholars of
Hellenistic Alexandria. Today, Sappho's poetry is still considered extraordinary, and her works have continued to influence other writers up until the modern day. Outside of academic circles, she is perhaps best known as a symbol of same-sex desire, particularly between women.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ibycus (
;
Greek:
Ἴβυκος; fl. 2nd half of 6th century BC) was an
Ancient Greek lyric poet, a citizen of
Rhegium in
Magna Graecia, probably active at
Samos during the reign of the tyrant
Polycrates[1] and numbered by the scholars of
HellenisticAlexandria in the
canonical list of
nine lyric poets. He was mainly remembered in antiquity for
pederastic verses but he also composed lyrical narratives on mythological themes in the manner of
Stesichorus.
[2] His work survives today only as quotations by ancient scholars or recorded on fragments of papyrus recovered from archaeological sites in Egypt, yet his extant verses include what are considered some of the finest examples of Greek poetry.
[3] The following lines, dedicated to a lover, Euryalus, were recorded by
Athenaeus as a famous example of amorous praise:
-
-
- Εὐρύαλε Γλαυκέων Χαρίτων θάλος, Ὡρᾶν
- καλλικόμων μελέδημα, σὲ μὲν Κύπρις
- ἅ τ' ἀγανοβλέφαρος Πει-
- θὼ ῥοδέοισιν ἐν θρέψαν.
The rich language of these lines, in particular the accumulation of epithets, typical of Ibycus, is shown in the following translation:
-
-
- Euryalus, offshoot of the blue-eyed Graces, darling of the lovely-haired Seasons, the Cyprian and soft-lidded Persuasion nursed you among rose-blossoms.[4]
This mythological account of his lover recalls
Hesiod's account of
Pandora[5] who was decked out by the same goddesses (the Graces, the Seasons and Persuasion) so as to be a bane to mankind—an allusion consistent with Ibycus's view of love as unavoidable turmoil.
[6]
As is the case with many other major poets of ancient Greece, Ibycus became famous not just for his poetry but also for events in his life, largely the stuff of legend: the testimonia are difficult to interpret and very few biographical facts are actually known.
[2]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aesop's Fables or the
Aesopica is a collection of
fables credited to
Aesop, a
slave and storyteller believed to have lived in
ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal
registers and in popular as well as artistic media.
The fables originally belonged to the oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop’s death. By that time a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the later Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably more recent work and sometimes from known authors.
Manuscripts in
Latin and
Greek were important avenues of transmission, although poetical treatments in European vernaculars eventually formed another. On the arrival of printing, collections of Aesop’s fables were among the earliest books in a variety of languages. Through the means of later collections, and translations or adaptations of them, Aesop’s reputation as a fabulist was transmitted throughout the world.
Initially the fables were addressed to adults and covered religious, social and political themes. They were also put to use as ethical guides and from the
Renaissance onwards were particularly used for the education of children. Their ethical dimension was reinforced in the adult world through depiction in sculpture, painting and other illustrative means, as well as adaptation to drama and song. In addition, there have been reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over time.
Confucianism, also known as Ruism, is described as tradition, a philosophy, a religion, a humanistic or rationalistic religion, a way of governing, or simply a way of life.[1] Confucianism developed from what was later called the Hundred Schools of Thought from the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE), who considered himself a retransmitter of the values of the Zhou dynasty golden age of several centuries before.[2] In the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE), Confucian approaches edged out the "proto-Taoist" Huang-Lao, as the official ideology while the emperors mixed both with the realist techniques of Legalism. The disintegration of the Han political order in the second century CE opened the way for the doctrines of Buddhism and Neo-Taoism, which offered spiritual explanations lacking in Confucianism.
