French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Zucker (ed.), Littérature et érotisme dans les Passions d'amour de Parthénios de Nicée. Proceedings of the Nice Colloquium, May 31, 2006
Comparative and World Literature

Arnaud Zucker (ed.), Littérature et érotisme dans les Passions d'amour de Parthénios de Nicée. Proceedings of the Nice Colloquium, May 31, 2006, Millon, 2008, 218 p.

EAN : 9782841372188

25 €

Publisher's Description:

Parthenius is a prominent Greek intellectual who undoubtedly played a major role in the literary and cultural development of the great epic and elegiac poets of the late Republic and early Roman Empire.
Yet, apart from a few editions and annotated translations, there are very few dedicated studies on this enigmatic author, whose output was significant, but whose posterity was discreet and literary legacy limited. Although only fragments of his poetic work remain, a curious literary object nevertheless survives under his name; this collection seeks, through a range of perspectives, to understand its nature, identify its tradition, and define its scope.
This volume brings together articles that naturally focus on three essential aspects of Parthenius's work: first, the generic originality of this unclassifiable work, which seems to hover between a draft and a prose poem, and whose literary character may have been underestimated; second, the rich cultural network that the work helps reconstruct, through its borrowings and echoes as well as its influence on future Latin literature; and finally, eroticism, as a sometimes highly theatrical staging of love in this catalog of short tales, which deals with this devastating passion through figures that are both suggestive and exemplary.
These Greco-Latin analyses of an author straddling two worlds, who helped bring them closer together, shed light on a moment of the cultural hybridization from which classical and humanist literature emerged.

Parthenius of Nicaea occupies a significant transitional space between Hellenistic Greek culture and the literature of the late Roman Republic and early Empire. While much of his poetic output survives only in fragments, his prose collection of love stories remains a curious and influential object of study. Scholars of classical antiquity have long examined how Hellenistic writers adapted mythographic traditions into new narrative forms, exploring the complex cultural exchanges that shaped the literature of this period. Such studies contribute to our broader understanding of how ancient texts mediated between poetic invention and scholarly compilation.

This volume collects various perspectives on the generic classification, cultural networks, and thematic concerns of Parthenius's surviving work, examining its formal ambiguity and its theatrical treatment of erotic themes. Readers interested in the history of classical reception, Greco-Latin literary relations, and the transmission of ancient myth may find this collection relevant to their research into the origins of humanist literature.