Meander

This article discusses passages in the works of Greek and Roman writers, from Homer to the Church Fathers and Procopius, in which the seaside is a place of carefree play, those in which looking at the sea seems to have a good influence on the human mind, those in which walking on the shore is an opportunity for a philosophical dispute, and those in which pleasure is derived from being alone near the sea.

This article shows how the Iliad is an object of creative reception by Callimachus in his sixth hymn, the "Hymn to Demeter".

Rufinus, the author of erotic epigrams appearing in book 5 of the Palatine Anthology, remains a mysterious personage since scholars have divergent opinions on the period in which he lived. The article relates those discussions and analyses the contents and style of the poems, ten of which are translated here into Polish.

The Typhonomachia, the episode from Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, in which the poet forcefully depicts the commotion in the universe resulting from the monster’s efforts to subdue Zeus and other gods, is here translated into Polish with a concise introduction and notes.

The poems opening the second and third book of Martial’s epigrams are printed here in Joanna Stadler’s Polish translation, with notes and a short introduction.

Agata Łuka’s free Polish translation of a passage of Petronius.

The article analyses Tacitus’ description of Petronius’ suicide (Ann. XVI 18–19).

This article traces the origin of legends concerning Julian the Apostate’s death and the fate of his body, appearing in such works as The Golden Legend and Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium.

This paper focuses on the magnum opus of the well-known Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957), The Odyssey, which even in the author’s country is still astonishingly neglected due to its complexity and obscure language. First published in 1938, in more than 30,000 seventeen-syllable verses, the work describes the subsequent history of Homer’s Odysseus who after killing the suitors, bored with life in Ithaca, sets out on a quest for metaphysical transcendence. Attention is given not only to the reinterpretation of the Homeric hero who becomes the alter ego of the writer, but to a larg extent also to the successive phases of metamorphoses of the epic poem’s protagonist. As it turns out, the latter-day Odysseus, negating everything and yet not ceasing to fight, on his way goes through three stages proposed by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855): the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.

A history of Russian translations of Aristophanes’ comedies, with a deeper analysis of those produced by Adrian Piotrovsky (1898–1937).

A review of Jerzy Danielewicz’s Antologia liryki hellenistycznej, an anthology that not only makes Hellenistic poetry accessible for Polish readers, but also supplies a critical text and, thanks to the introduction and commentaries, is an important contribution to studies of that literary period.

A review of Filip Taterka’s Polish translation of the preserved fragments of Manetho’s History of Egypt.

An account of the conference organised by the Ancient History Committee of the Polish Historical Society in Poznań on 20–22 September 2017.