Images of Paris Alexander in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: A Commented Poetic Anthology.

Abstract

Being in the shadow of Helen and Hector, Paris, for a long time, was reduced to the kidnapper of the most beautiful woman among mortals, with a certain emphasis on his judgment of the three goddesses - Hera, Athena and Aphrodite -, whose choice resulted in the aforementioned kidnapping. However, the poetic texts that have come down to us do not exhaust their image in this crime, being sometimes multiple and contradictory even in the same poet: in a single work, we can have him as the one who disappears from a duel, but also as the responsible , together with Apollo, for the death of his people's greatest enemy; sometimes as a victim of divine designs, sometimes as an agent of misfortune. This project aims, therefore, to trace a panorama of the character in the Greek poetry of the archaic (VII-V b.C.) and classical (V-IV b.C.) period, passing through different poetic genres - epic, melic and tragedy - and poets, in order to to observe and understand the different figurations of the hero in the course of time and in the making of poetry. In this way, the dissertation will be an important groundwork for the study of a hero who, although of paramount mythical importance, was not so explored by scholars, for the development of future research with different approaches, in addition to bringing to the discussion texts little explored among us, such as the fragments of the Alexander tragedies - that of Sophocles and Euripides.