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Odysseus Acanthoplex

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Odysseus Acanthoplex ( Ancient Greek : Ὀδυσσεὺς ἀκανθοπλήξ , Odysseus Akanthoplēx , "Odysseus wounded by a spine"; also known as Odysseus Wounded , Odysseus Spine-struck and Odysseus Wounded by the Spine ) is a lost play by the Athenian dramatist Sophocles . Several fragments are extant. The plot told of Odysseus ' death, accidentally killed by his son Telegonus . Some scholars believe that another Sophocles title, Niptra (Νιπτρα, "The Footwashing", "The Washing"), is the same play as Odysseus Acanthoplex . Dana Sutton, however, disputes this, suggesting that Niptra was a separate play dealing with Odysseus' return to Ithaca but not with his death.

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50-522: The plot of Odysseus Acanthoplex was derived from Telegony , part of the Epic Cycle . As background to the plot of the play, Homer 's Odyssey tells of Odysseus spending a year with the goddess Circe . In the version of the myth that Odysseus Acanthoplex was based on, Odysseus and Circe had a son from this dalliance, Telegonus . From what we know of the plot of the play, Telegonus arrived at Ithaca to reveal himself to his father. However,

100-524: A diptych form, i.e., in two parts, analogous to Sophocles' extant Ajax , Trachiniae and Antigone . Sutton speculated that the play partially unfolded as follows. Early in the play, Odysseus related the directions from Teiresias described in The Odyssey in which he was supposed to carry an oar far inland as a sacrifice to Poseidon. He also related an oracle he received at Dodona telling him that he would be killed by his son. Believing that

150-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

200-556: A character performs a horrific deed to a relative in ignorance and only learns the truth after the fact. The other examples Aristotle gave of this type of effective plot were Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and a play about Alcmaeon by 4th century BCE tragic playwright Astydamas . Roman philosopher Cicero praised Pacuvius ' play Niptra , which was an imitation of Sophocles' Odysseus Acanthoplex , because in Pacuvius' play Odysseus does not lament his wounds excessively, as Cicero believed

250-534: A death and multiple weddings at the end all assorted easily with the conventions of opera seria . Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ),

300-474: A fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as

350-423: A fight ensued and Telegonus killed Odysseus without knowing who Odysseus was. In the myth, Telegonus used a spear that had a venomous stingray spine to kill Odysseus. The plot also dealt with the subsequent marriages between Telegonus and Odysseus' wife Penelope and between Circe and Odysseus' son by Penelope, Telemachus . Two of the extant fragments from the play refer to the oar Odysseus carried to appease

400-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

450-542: A strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either

500-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

550-530: A whirlpool drowning as the mariners approach the mountain of Purgatory . No Greek source was available to Dante, only the Latin recensions of Dictys and Dares . Among the many operas based on the myths of Odysseus and those around him, there is but one based on Telegonus, Carlo Grua's Telegono (premiered in Düsseldorf, 1697) of which an aria "Dia le mosse a miei contenti" may be noted. Divine intervention,

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600-588: A year in the Odyssey (books 10-12), has borne his son, Telegonus (Τηλέγονος, "born far away"). He grows up living with Circe on the island of Aeaea . On the goddess Athena 's advice, Circe tells him the name of his father. In a detail inserted into the account in the Epitome of the Bibliotheke , she gives him a supernatural spear to defend himself, which is tipped with the sting of a poisonous stingray and

650-581: Is a lost ancient Greek epic poem about Telegonus , son of Odysseus by Circe . His name ("born far away") is indicative of his birth on Aeaea , far from Odysseus' home of Ithaca . It was part of the Epic Cycle of poems that recounted the myths of the Trojan War as well as the events that led up to and followed it. The story of the Telegony comes chronologically after that of the Odyssey and

700-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

750-422: Is buried and Circe makes the others immortal. Telegonus marries Penelope, and Telemachus marries Circe. According to a later Hellenistic tradition, Circe brought Odysseus back to life after his death, and he arranged for Telemachus to marry his half-sister Cassiphone , Odysseus and Circe's daughter. But after a quarrell with Circe, Telemachus slew his mother-in-law, and in rage Cassiphone killed him, avenging thus

800-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

850-589: Is referred to once by Pausanias in the 2nd century AD; alternatively, the Thesprotis may have been a name for the first book of the Telegony , which is set in Thesprotia . Such naming of isolated episodes within a larger epic was common practice for the ancient readers of the Homeric epics. A third possibility is that there was a wholly separate epic called the Thesprotis ; and yet a fourth possibility

900-406: Is that the Telegony and Thesprotis were two separate poems that were at some stage compiled into a single Telegony . The date of composition of the Telegony is uncertain. Cyrene , the native city of purported author Eugammon, was founded in 631 BC; but the narrative details may have existed prior to Eugammon's version, perhaps even in the oral tradition . There is a distinct possibility that

950-496: Is the final episode in the Epic Cycle. The poem was sometimes attributed in antiquity to Cinaethon of Sparta (8th century BC), but in one source it is said to have been stolen from Musaeus by Eugamon or Eugammon of Cyrene (6th century BC) (see Cyclic poets ). The poem comprised two books of verse in dactylic hexameter . In Antiquity , the Telegony may have also been known as the Thesprotis (Greek: Θεσπρωτίς), which

1000-679: The Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about

1050-606: The Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek

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1100-501: The Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

1150-452: The Telegony opens with the burial of Penelope 's suitors. Odysseus makes sacrifices to the Nymphs . He makes a voyage to Elis , where he visits an otherwise unknown figure Polyxenos, who gives him a bowl depicting the story of Trophonius . Odysseus returns to Ithaca and then travels to Thesprotia , presumably to make the sacrifices commanded by Tiresias in Odyssey 11. There, he weds

1200-550: The epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between

1250-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

1300-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

1350-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

1400-545: The Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for

1450-638: The Thesprotian queen Callidice , who bears him a son, Polypoetes . Odysseus fights for the Thesprotians in a war against the neighbouring Brygoi ; the gods participate in the war, Ares routing Odysseus and the Thesprotians, countered by Athena , ever Odysseus' patron; Apollo intervenes between the battling gods. Later, after the death of Callidice, Odysseus makes their son Polypoetes king of Thesprotia and returned to Ithaca. Meanwhile, it transpires that Circe , with whom Odysseus had an affair for

1500-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

1550-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

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1600-490: The author of the Odyssey knew at least some version of the Telegony story (the Thesprotian episode and Telegonus' unusual spear in the Telegony may have been based on Tiresias ' prophecy in Odyssey book 11; but it is also possible that the Odyssey poet used the Telegonus story as a basis for Teiresias' prophecy). Certainly, Eugammon's poem is most likely to have been composed in the 6th century BC. Only two lines of

1650-609: The character did in Sophocles' play. In The Lost Sophocles , D. F. Sutton suggests that Odysseus Acanthoplex was possibly first produced by about 414 BCE, which Sutton suggests is the same timeframe as Sophocles' Electra . Webster believes it was produced at a date close to that of Women of Trachis , which he dates to sometime before 431, due to perceived similarities with the structure of that play. Telegony The Telegony ( Ancient Greek : Τηλεγόνεια , romanized :  Tēlegóneia ; Latin : Telegonia )

1700-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

1750-530: The dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under

1800-567: The divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at

1850-432: The murder of her mother. The 1st-century AD Roman fabulist Hyginus differs from Proclus in adding a few details. First, it is both Odysseus and Telemachus who engage Telegonus in combat. Hyginus then adds that Odysseus had received an oracle to beware his son. Finally, Hyginus attributes to Telegonus a son named Italus , the eponymous founder of Italy; and to Telemachus he attributes a son named Latinus , whose name

1900-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

1950-444: The oracle had come to pass. Webster, who believes that Niptra and Odysseus Acanthoplex are the same play, believes that the play began with Odysseus' return home to Ithaca and his recognition by Eurycleia , who in The Odyssey washed Odysseus' feet. In his Poetics , Aristotle used the plot of Odysseus Acanthoplex , under the title Odysseus Wounded , as one of three examples of an effective type of plot for tragedy in which

2000-497: The oracle referred to Telemachus, he would have taken precautions against Telemachus killing him, but was unprepared when another son who he did not know of arrived and a fight ensued. The wounded Odysseus was brought on stage lamenting his wounds and denouncing the oracle for failing to predict that he would die at the hands of this stranger. Then Telegonus arrived on stage, and a recognition scene occurred in which Telegonus discovered that he killed his father and Odysseus realized that

2050-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

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2100-502: The poem's original text survive. For its storyline, we are dependent primarily on a summary of the Telegonus myth in the Chrestomathy of one "Proclus". The Telegony comprises two distinct episodes: Odysseus ' voyage to Thesprotia , and the story of Telegonus . Probably each of the two books of the Telegony related one of these episodes. The poem opens after the events depicted in the Odyssey. According to Proclus' summary,

2150-491: The sea god Poseidon . Several extant fragments make reference to the oracle of Zeus at Dodona . Other than one reference in Trachiniae , these are the only extant references to Dodona in Sophocles' works. Classicist T.F. Hoey believes that the thematic development of Odysseus Acanthoplex was similar to that of Trachiniae . According to archaeologist Thomas B. L. Webster , the plot of Odysseus Acanthoplex had

2200-439: The sea" (i.e., the poison of the ray). (In another respect, however, Odysseus' death contradicts the prophecy of Tiresias, who predicted ( Od . 11.135) that a "gentle death" would come to Odysseus "in sleek old age.") As Odysseus lies dying, he and Telegonus recognize one another, and Telegonus laments his mistake. Telegonus brings his father's corpse, Penelope , and Odysseus' other son Telemachus , back to Aeaea , where Odysseus

2250-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

2300-467: The time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with

2350-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

2400-452: Was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in

2450-582: Was given to the Latin language . Numerous Latin poets make Telegonus the founder of Praeneste or Tusculum , important Latin towns. In Dante 's Divine Comedy , in the eighth bolgia of the Inferno , Dante and his guide meet Ulisse among the false counsellors, and receive a variant accounting of Ulisse's death "from the sea", in a five-month journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules , that has ended in

2500-448: Was made by the god Hephaestus. A storm forces Telegonus onto Ithaca without his realizing where he is. As is customary for Homeric heroes in unfriendly land, he commits piracy, and unwittingly begins stealing Odysseus' cattle. Odysseus comes to defend his property. During the ensuing fight, Telegonus kills Odysseus with his unusual spear, thereby partially fulfilling Tiresias' prophecy in Odyssey 11 that death would come to Odysseus "out of

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