The Locrian Maidens

The Locrian Maidens

Author: James Redfield

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 0691223815

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Athens dominates textbook accounts of ancient Greece. But was it, for the Greeks themselves, a model city-state or a creative, even a corrupt, departure from the model? Or was there a model? This book reveals Epizephyrian Locri--a Greek colony on the Adriatic coast of Italy--as a third way in Greek culture, neither Athens nor Sparta. Drawing on a wide range of literary and archaeological evidence, James Redfield offers a fascinating account of this poorly understood Greek city-state, and in particular the distinctive role of women and marriage therein. Redfield devotes much of the book to placing Locri within a more general account of Greek culture, particularly with the institution of marriage in relation to private property, sexual identity, and the fate of the soul. He begins by considering the annual practice of sending two maidens from old-world Locris, the putative place of origin of the Italian Locrians, to serve in the temple of Athena at Ilion, finding here some key themes of Locrian culture. He goes on to provide a richly detailed overview of the Italian city; in a set of iconographic essays he suggests that marriage was seen in Locri as a life transformation akin to the eternal bliss hoped for after death. Nothing less than a general reevaluation of classical Greek society in both its political and theological dimensions, The Locrian Maidens is must reading for students and scholars of classics, while remaining accessible and of particular interest to those in women's studies and to anyone seeking a broader understanding of ancient Greece.


The Alexandra of Lycophron

The Alexandra of Lycophron

Author: Charles McNelis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-04-21

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0191088587

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This monograph is a literary study of Lycophron's Alexandra, whose obscurity, a quality notorious already in antiquity, has long hampered holistic approaches. Through a series of distinct but closely integrated literary studies of major aspects of the poem, including its style, its engagement with the traditions of epic and tragedy, and it's treatment of heroism and of the gods, the book explores the way the Alexandra reconfigures Greek mythology. In particular, as it is presented in Homeric epic and Athenian tragedy, in order to cast the Romans and their restoration of Trojan glory as the ultimate telos of history. In this sense, the poem emerges as an important intermediary between Homeric epic and Latin poetry, particularly Vergil's Aeneid. By rewriting specific features of the epic and tragic traditions, the Alexandra denies to Greek heroes the glory that was the traditional compensation for their suffering, while at the same time attributing to Cassandra's Trojan family honours framed in the traditional language of Greek heroism. In this sense, the figure of Cassandra, a prophetess traditionally gifted with the power of foresight but denied credibility, self-reflexively serves as a vehicle for exploring the potentials and limitations of poetry.


Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World

Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World

Author: Simon Hornblower

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0198723687

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The 'Alexandra' attributed to Lykophron is a notoriously difficult poem but one that sheds crucial light on Greek religion, foundation myths, and myths of colonial identity. This book asserts its importance as a strongly political and historical document, and argues that the probable decade of its composition was a turning-point in Roman history.


Lykophron: Alexandra

Lykophron: Alexandra

Author: Lykophron

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-11-03

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0198863349

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'In requital for one man's sin, all Greece/ shall mourn the empty tombs of ten thousand of its children'. These lines from a powerful but neglected Greek poem, Lykophron's Alexandra, were admiringly imitated by Virgil. Priam's beautiful daughter, prophetic Kassandra, foresees her rape in Athena's temple by the hateful Greek Ajax at Troy's fall, and warns of disastrous returns (nostoi) for all the Greek 'heroes'. But Troy will rise again as Rome, founded by Trojan refugees. The Alexandra (also known as Kassandra) narrates Mediterranean foundation myths as failed Greek nostoi, and culminates in 'prophecies-after-the-event' of Roman rule over land and sea. This pseudonymous poem, a generic mix but closest to tragedy, is an ingeniously constructed masterpiece. It is ascribed to a third-century BCE tragedian, but was probably written c.190, when Rome had defeated Carthaginian Hannibal and was poised to humble the Seleukid king Antiochos III. The Alexandra anticipates, by over two millennia, modern Trojan War novels which adopt bitterly disillusioned female perspectives.


The Delphic Oracle

The Delphic Oracle

Author: Joseph Fontenrose

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-07-28

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 0520331311

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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.


Fear of slaves, fear of enslavement in the ancient Mediterranean

Fear of slaves, fear of enslavement in the ancient Mediterranean

Author: Anastasia Serghidou

Publisher: Presses Univ. Franche-Comté

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 9782848671697

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Les intervenants analysent le couple du maître et de l'esclave au regard des schémas d'autorité et d'obéissance, de liberté et de servitude, de suprématie et de soumission, et les incidences de ces problématiques sur les mouvements du corps social dans l'Antiquité.


The Law Is a White Dog - How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons

The Law Is a White Dog - How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons

Author: Colin Dayan

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-03-03

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0691157871

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A fascinating account of how the law determines or dismantles identity and personhood Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state—all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases, The Law Is a White Dog tackles key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unmake persons? And how do the supposedly rational claims of the law define marginal entities, both natural and supernatural, including ghosts, dogs, slaves, terrorist suspects, and felons? Reading the language, allusions, and symbols of legal discourse, and bridging distinctions between the human and nonhuman, Colin Dayan looks at how the law disfigures individuals and animals, and how slavery, punishment, and torture create unforeseen effects in our daily lives. Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, Dayan considers legal practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal discourse, and she explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, she also demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional questions, The Law Is a White Dog illuminates stark truths about civil society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.


A Companion to Hellenistic Literature

A Companion to Hellenistic Literature

Author: James J. Clauss

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-01-28

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 1118782909

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Offering unparalleled scope, A Companion to Hellenistic Literature in 30 newly commissioned essays explores the social and intellectual contexts of literature production in the Hellenistic period, and examines the relationship between Hellenistic and earlier literature. Provides a wide ranging critical examination of Hellenistic literature, including the works of well-respected poets alongside lesser-known historical, philosophical, and scientific prose of the period Explores how the indigenous literatures of Hellenized lands influenced Greek literature and how Greek literature influenced Jewish, Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Roman literary works


Oikistes

Oikistes

Author: Vanessa B. Gorman

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-09-18

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 900435090X

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This Festschrift includes a range of essays, mirroring the diverse abilities of the honoree, A. J. Graham, in ancient Greek and Roman constitutional history, military history, and colonization. The articles feature discussions of individual problems in politics, epigraphy, historiography, numismatics, and archaeology, including topics such as the Battle of Actium, the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, the Spartan constitution, democracy in Camarina, Persian coinage, mercenary soldiers, the origins of both Greek and Roman historical writing, cult practice at Berezan, the Athenian Long Walls, the Peloponnesian War, and various aspects of Greek colonization and Roman provincial policy.