This comprehensive and in-depth examination of Aristotle's poetry is focused on his ode for Hermias of Atarneus. The song's relation to earlier poetry is illustrated with unprecedented thoroughness and the remarkable story of its reception is studied in the context of fourth-century politics, religious history, and literary theory.

These essays treat a heterogeneous group of texts: alongside On the Sublime and How the young man should listen to poetry are an Attic comedy, a satyr play, a Plutarchan fragment, and the epitome of a lost work by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. It is a mixed bag, which is the point. Hunter offers "moments" in the history of criticism because we lack evidence to write a linear narrative . Given the lacunose record, he suggests the best way forward is to (...) lower the barrier separating "literary" from "critical" texts and to look for general patterns of similarity. Thereby he hopes to explain antiquity's predominantly "utilitarian" approach to literature, its "concern with what literature was for" . Although individual chapters show Hunter's characteristic inventiveness and wide range of reference, this reviewer found many of his claims overbroad. Indeed, the general approach recommended here seems less likely to enrich "our understanding of the ways in which the ancients sought to explain and use creative art" than to impede progress toward that worthy goal. (shrink)