Herodas

Barnaby Chesterton (Texas Tech University)

Ed. by Emily Kneebone, University of Nottingham
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.1.1: Greek Writing and Culture: Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic and Imperial, -800--100.
Vol. editors: Jonathan Burgess (University of Toronto), Anca Dan (École Practique de Hautes Études PSL), Martine Diepenbroek (University of Johannesburg), Giacomo Fedeli (University of Exeter), Victoria Fendel (University of Oxford), Emily Kneebone (University of Nottingham), Vaios Liapis (Open University of Cyprus), Elodie Paillard (University of Sydney), Mali Skotheim (Ashoka University), Laura Swift (The Open University), Guendalina Daniela Maria Taietti (University of Liverpool)

Dates

Activity c. 280-c. 265
Born c. 300
Died c. 250

Places

Active in Roman Greece& Asia Minor

Activities

Primary

Poet

Resources

Herodas' Works

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Active in the early 3rd Century BCE, Herodas (or ‘Herondas’, as his name is sometimes given) is known foremost as the author of the

Mimiambs

, a corpus of poems so titled because of their juxtaposition of subject-matter drawn from mime with the choliambic metre employed by the sixth-century BCE poet Hipponax. Herodas appears to have been the first author to compose such mimic-iambic (or ‘mimiambic’) poems: his work is particularly notable for this fusion of dramatic and non-dramatic genres.

Little of biographical certainty is known about the poet. Internal references attest that several of the Mimiambs must have been composed in the period 280-265 BCE, suggesting that Herodas was contemporaneous with the most famous Hellenistic poets, Callimachus and Theocritus, but we possess no

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1689 words

Citation: Chesterton, Barnaby. "Herodas". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 July 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13934, accessed 22 November 2024.]

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