Abstract
The present article aims to show that several passages of Greek tragedy make use of language present in the Getty Hexameters, especially in contexts where incantations and protection of the city are mentioned. The Getty Hexameters were written on a lead tablet at the end of the fifth century BC in Sicily (Selinus or, more likely, Himera). The article argues that the composition of the text predates the lead tablet by several decades (section 2). It focuses on similarities in structure and language that involve Soph. fr. 535 (section 4), Aeschylus’ Oresteia (section 5), Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (section 6) and Euripides’ Hecuba (section 8). It also suggests that Plato (section 7) and late antique poetry and prose (section 9) reuse some of the linguistic elements of the incantatory tradition of the Getty Hexameters.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics,Classics
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