Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books
Title
Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books
Collection Items
Poetics II: On Comedy
The second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, with a Latin translation and a commentary on the Greek text by Antonio Montecatini. The first book dealt with tragedy and epic poetry; this volume explained comedy. The two books together had an incalculable…
Margites
Homer wrote three epic poems: a tragedy in the Iliad, an adventure in the Odyssey, and a comedy, the Margites, the story of the eponymous bonehead of whom Plato said that he knew many things, but all badly. Aristotle said “...the Margites is to…
The Girls Who Changed Ship
Nichomachus was the name of three ancient Greek playwrights, one of whom is known to have written comedy. This play and the Ειλείθυια (Eileithyia) are attributed to him. The sole mention in ancient testimony is in the Suda.
The resistance of…
The resistance of…
The Poems of Sappho
The editio princeps of Sappho. Her songs rank her with Pindar among the Greek lyric poets. Raised in Mytilene on Lesbos, but exiled to Sicily, she is known to have written more than 10,000 lines of poetry (about two-thirds the length of the Iliad),…
Dorkis: The Lip-Smacking Woman
Alexis was a Greek comic poet. He is said to have been a great gourmand, but to have lived to one hundred six and to have died on stage while receiving an award. His son Stephanus and his nephew Menander were both comic poets. Of his 245 comedies,…
Epistles to St. Paul
Paul (originally Saul) of Tarsus was an early Christian theologian and Evangelist. He wrote a broad range of correspondence with fledgling churches in the Eastern Mediterranean. These epistles, in koine Greek, are significant because they show Paul’s…
The Art of Cookery c. 250 B.C.E.
Athenaeus retells a story from Alexis’ lost work Linos. Mighty Heracles (think Archie’s Moose) visits his teacher, Linos. Linos shows Heracles his sophisticated library and allows him to choose a book. Browed furrowed, Heracles searches and finally…
In Praise of Hercules
Besides his Commentaries, bane of so many young scholars, the Divine Julius wrote, as a youth, a tragedy on Oedipus and a long poem praising Hercules. Pompeius Macer, Augustus’ librarian, proposed to the emperor that these works be published in…
Lives of the Famous Whores
This set of twelve biographies, written in the same manner as his Lives of the Caesars, was rather hot stuff: even the Caesars had been pretty racy. Because this book includes biographies of Cytheris, Lais, Aspasia, Thaïs and Rhodopis, it is…