"Representing some of the most fruitful recent approaches to the phenomenon of Dionysus and well illustrated, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of classical literature and ancient history, the history of ancient religion, art history, classical philology, and archaeology." -- Back cover
"Representing some of the most fruitful recent approaches to the phenomenon of Dionysus and well illustrated, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of classical literature and ancient history, the history of ancient religion, art history, classical philology, and archaeology." -- Back cover
Tracing the interrelationship among play, poetic imitation, and power to the Hellenic world, Mihai I. Spariosu provides a revisionist model of cultural change in Greek antiquity. Challenging the traditional and static distinction made between archaic and later Greek culture, Spariosu's perspective is grounded in a dialectical understanding of values whose dominance depends on cultural emphasis and which shifts through time. Building upon the scholarship of an earlier volume, Dionysus Reborn, Spariosu her continues to draw on Dionysus--the "God of many names," of both poetic play and sacred power--as a mythical embodiment of the two sides of the classical Greek mentality. Combining philosophical reflection with close textual analysis, the author examines the divided nature of the Hellenic mentality in such primary canonic texts as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, Works and Days, the most well-known of the Presocratic fragments, Euripides' Bacchae, Aristophanes' The Frogs, Plato's Republic and Laws, and Aristotle's Poetics and Politics. Spariosu's model illuminates the many of the most enduring questions in contemporary humanistic study and addresses modern questions about the nature of the interrelation of poetry, ethics, and politics.
William Storm reinterprets the concept of the tragic as both a fundamental human condition and an aesthetic process in dramatic art. He proposes an original theoretical relation between a generative and consistent tragic ground and complex characterization patterns. For Storm, it is the dismemberment of character, not the death, that is the signature mark of tragic drama. Basing his theory in the sparagmos, the dismembering rite associated with Dionysus, Storm identifies a rending tendency that transcends the ancient Greek setting and can be recognized transhistorically. The dramatic character in any era who suffers the tragic fate must do so in the manner of the ancient god of theater: the depicted self is torn apart, figuratively if not literally, psychologically if not physically. Storm argues that a newly objectified concept of the tragic can prove more useful critically and diagnostically than the traditional and more subjective tragic "vision." Further, he develops a theory of the tragic field, a model for the connective and cumulative activity that brings about the distinctive Dionysian effect upon character. His theory is supported with case studies from Agamemnon and Iphigenia in Aulis, King Lear, and The Seagull. Storm's examination of the dramatic form of tragedy and the existential questions it raises is sensitive to both their universal relevance and their historical particularity.
Out of Athens sets ancient Greek culture next to the global ancient world of Vedic India, the Han dynasty in China, and the empires that survived Alexander the Great.--Publisher description.
The metaphysical center of Plato's work has traditionally been taken to be his Doctrine of Forms; the epistemological center, the Doctrine of Recollection. The Symposium has been viewed as one of the clearest explanations of the first and Meno as one of the clearest explanations of the other. The Masks of Dionysos challenges these traditional interpretations.