In this groundbreaking work, Claude Calame argues that the songs sung by choruses of young girls in ancient Greek poetry are more than literary texts; rather, they functioned as initiatory rituals in Greek cult practices. Using semiotic and anthropologic theory, Calame reconstructs the religious and social institutions surrounding the songs, demonstrating their function in an aesthetic education that permitted the young girls to achieve the stature of womanhood and to be integrated into the adult civic community. This first English edition includes an updated bibliography.
The polygraph from Chaeronea includes in Moralia and Lives a wide range of interesting views on religious and philosophical matters: philosophical theology, cult, ethics, politics, natural sciences, hermeneutics, atheism, and the afterlife. The essays included in Plutarch’s Religious Landscapes offer a glance into these views.
This book does not intend to demonstrate that Greeks and other ancient Mediterranean peoples, men and women, married and unmarried, sought and participated in sex for its own sake. That is, it is taken as obvious, a given, that they were able to separate sex for pleasure from sex for reproduction. There never were human beings who concerned themselves only with “fertility”. Neither, does this study seek to demonstrate that some ancient Greeks were willing to provide sexual services to partners in return for the receipt of nonsexual benefits. Again, this is self-evident. Nor does this study intend to show that the ancient Mediterranean world was familiar with individuals and enterprises that regularly earned incomes by selling sexual services. Clearly, the ancient world knew prostitution as an occupation and as a form of enterprise. In an article published by Ugarit-Forschungen in 2008, Silver (2006a) challenged the view that temple/sacred prostitution did not exist in the ancient Near East. Contrary to such scholars as Julia Assante (1998, 2003), Martha T. Roth (2006) and Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge (2010), ample evidence indicates that it did. For the convenience of readers this article is included as a Supplement to the present volume. The original article has been reformatted to correct some typographical errors and to make it blend seamlessly into the present volume but otherwise it is unchanged. More recent materials from the ancient Near East are considered mostly in footnotes, however. The present study seeks to leap beyond this finding by showing that temple prostitution also flourished in the ancient Mediterranean. That it did is of course an “old” view, but the old supporting arguments often lack rigor and even clarity and the supporting evidence is fragmentary, contradictory and often facially absurd (e.g. Herodotus 1.199.1–5). Work of this kind has been discredited by scholars such as Fay Glinister (2000) and Stephanie Lynn Budin (2008).
Scanlon's overview of Greek athletics explores when and how athletics was linked with religion, upbringing, gender, sexuality, and social values in an evolution from Homer until the Roman period.
Literary critics have consistently marginalized the role of Apollo in Sophocles' Oedipus the King: some declare him to be inscrutable, others ignore him, and still others deny his existence altogether. In defiance of this long-standing critical consensus, Drew Griffith offers a new interpretation of the play by arguing that Apollo brings about Oedipus' downfall as just punishment for his hubris.
Pindar-the 'Theban eagle', as Thomas Gray famously called him-has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), arguably Pindar's greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar's odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar's odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar's astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet's persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar's views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.
A collection of papers with new insights on ancient religion, read at a colloquium in honour of Professor H.S. Versnel ("Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion"). The contributions, presented by nine leading scholars in the field, cover many areas of the religious experience of the Greeks and Romans: myth and ritual (W. Burkert), the gods (F. Zeitlin), cult, festivals, sacrifice. Several papers consider methodological problems and the progress of scholarship; they highlight the contribution of H.S. Versnel to the field. The papers are based on a wide range of sources: pagan and Christian, literary and epigraphical and iconographical. The collection will fascinate all scholars interested in ancient religion, whether they study malign magic, the Imperial cult or general theory.
This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In classics, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Classics, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of classics. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.
Through a balanced discussion of poetry as performance, relevant kinds and genres of poetry, the definition and scope of "woman's song" as a mode, partheneia (maidens' songs) and the girls' chorus, lyric in the drama, echoes and imitations of archaic woman's song in Hellenistic poetry, and inferences about the differences between male and female authors, Klinck demonstrates that woman's song is ultimately best understood as the product of a male-dominated culture but that feminine stereotypes, while refined by skilful male poets, are interrogated and shifted by female poets.
The Blackwell Companion to Greek Tragedy provides readers with a fundamental grounding in Greek tragedy, and also introduces them to the various methodologies and the lively critical dialogue that characterize the study of Greek tragedy today. Comprises 31 original essays by an international cast of contributors, including up-and-coming as well as distinguished senior scholars Pays attention to socio-political, textual, and performance aspects of Greek tragedy All ancient Greek is transliterated and translated, and technical terms are explained as they appear Includes suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, and a generous and informative combined bibliography
