The beautiful hetaera Thais was a real woman who inspired poets, artists and sculptors in Athens, Memphis, Alexandria, Babylon and Ecbatana. She traveled with Alexander the Great's army during his Persian campaign and was the only woman to enter the capitol of Persia - Persepolis. Love, beauty, philosophy, war, religion - all that and more in a historic masterpiece by Ivan Yefremov.
The beautiful hetaera Thais was a real woman who inspired poets, artists and sculptors in Athens, Memphis, Alexandria, Babylon and Ecbatana. She traveled with Alexander the Great's army during his Persian campaign and was the only woman to enter the capitol of Persia - Persepolis.Love, beauty, philosophy, war, religion - all that and more in a historic masterpiece by Ivan Yefremov.
Thais, the best-selling novel by Ivan Yefremov, a prominent Russian scientist and writer, was first published in Russia nearly forty years ago. It has sold millions of copies and to some extent has shaped the national cultural outlook on femininity and true humanity.Set in the era of Alexander the Great, the book tells a story of an Athenian hetaera Thais, whose fascinating image captures readers' hearts and minds from the very first chapter and makes you fall in love with the heroine, or more precisely the image created by Yefremov - the image of a Muse, a word that has gone out of use, as well as the concept itself. The novel embraces the authentic historical overview and, with more relevance to our time, offers a unifying distinction of the ancient philosophies and religions through the prism of the universal humane values of all times. The pivoting point of the novel is the female aspect of divinity, the disregard, and diminution of which led to the domination of machismo reflected in spiritual and social trends, culture and ultimately human progress. The time has come for the rest of the world to discover Thais in order to remind us all of what true feminine beauty is - a combination of beautiful body, mind, and spirit; the very ideal of a woman.
The collected essays in this volume focus on the presentation, representation and interpretation of ancient violence – from war to slavery, rape and murder – in the modern visual and performing arts, with special attention to videogames and dance as well as the more usual media of film, literature and theatre. Violence, fury and the dread that they provoke are factors that appear frequently in the ancient sources. The dark side of antiquity, so distant from the ideal of purity and harmony that the classical heritage until recently usually called forth, has repeatedly struck the imagination of artists, writers and scholars across ages and cultures. A global assembly of contributors, from Europe to Brazil and from the US to New Zealand, consider historical and mythical violence in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and the 2010 TV series of the same name, in Ridley Scott's Gladiator, in the work of Lars von Trier, and in Soviet ballet and the choreography of Martha Graham and Anita Berber. Representations of Roman warfare appear in videogames such as Ryse: Son of Rome and Total War, as well as recent comics, and examples from both these media are analysed in the volume. Finally, interviews with two artists offer insight into the ways in which practitioners understand and engage with the complex reception of these themes.
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Alexander the Great offers a considerable range of topics, of interest to students and academics alike, in the long tradition of this subject’s significant impact, across a sometimes surprising and comprehensive variety of areas. Arguably no other historical figure has cast such a long shadow for so long a time. Every civilisation touched by the Macedonian Conqueror, along with many more that he never imagined, has scrambled to “own” some part of his legacy. This volume canvasses a comprehensive array of these receptions, beginning from Alexander’s own era and journeying up to the present, in order to come to grips with the impact left by this influential but elusive figure.
When we are confronted with a work of art, what is its effect on us? In contrast to post-Enlightenment conceptions, which tend to restrict themselves to aesthetic or discursive responses, the ancient Greeks and Romans often conceived works of art as having a more dynamic effect on their viewers, inspiring them to direct imitation of what they saw represented. This notion of 'mimetic contagion' was a persistent and widespread mode of framing response to art across the ancient world, discernible in both popular and elevated cultural forms, yet deployed differently in various historical contexts; it is only under the specificity of a particular cultural moment's concerns that it becomes most useful as a lens for understanding how that culture is attempting to negotiate the problems of representation. After framing the phenomenon in terms general enough to be applicable across many periods, literary genres, and artistic media, this volume takes a particular literary work, Terence's Eunuch, as a starting point, both as a vivid example of this extensive pattern, and as a case study situating use of the motif within the peculiarities of a particular historical moment, in this case mid-second-century BC Rome and its anxieties about the power of art. One of the features of mimetic contagion frequently noted in this study is its capacity to render the operation of a particular work of art an emblem for the effect of representation more generally, and this is certainly the case in the Eunuch, whereby the painting at the centre of the play functions as a metatheatrical figure for the dynamics of mimesis throughout, illustrating how the concept may function as the key to a particular literary work. Although mimetic contagion is only one available Greco-Roman strategy for understanding the power of art, by offering an extended reading of a single work of literature through this lens, this volume demonstrates what ramifications closer attention to it might have for modern readers and literary criticism.
