First published in 1951, The People of Aristophanes provides a sociological account of Athens in the period of its greatest glory. Drawing upon Old Attic Comedy and the plays of Aristophanes, the author recreates, for the reader, the life of Athens at that time. He writes extensively about social structure, family, religion and political relationships within the state, and discusses the far-reaching changes which took place within Athenian society.
Much of the evidence—literary, historical, documentary, and pictorial—from ancient Athens is urban in authorship, subject matter, and intended audience. The result has been the assertion of an undifferentiated monolithic "Athenian" citizen regime as often as not identifiably urban in its lifestyle, preoccupations, and attitude. In Rural Athens Under the Democracy, however, Nicholas F. Jones undertakes the first comprehensive attempt to reconstruct on its own terms the world of rural Attica outside the walls during the "classical" fifth and fourth centuries B.C. What he finds is a distinctly nonurban (and nonurbane) order dominated by a traditional, predominantly agrarian society and culture. Jones relies heavily upon the relatively neglected epigraphic record from the rural countryside and villages, as well as posing new questions of the well-known urban writings of Athenian historians, essayists, and philosophers and occasionally following the lead of Hesiod's agrarian poem Works and Days. From these sources he gleans new findings regarding settlement patterns, argues for a heretofore unrecognized system of personal patronage, explores relations between villages and the town of Athens, reconstructs the "Agrarian" Dionysia in several of its more important dimensions, and contrasts the realities of rural Attic culture with their various representations in contemporary literary and philosophical writings by Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and others. Building on Jones's previous publications on the ancient Greek city-state, Rural Athens Under the Democracy presents the first holistic examination of classical extramural Attica. He challenges the received view that ancient Athens in its heyday was marked by a uniform cultural, ideological, and conspicuously citified order and, in place of the perception of things rural as mere deficits in urbanity, proposes that we look at Attica outside the walls in its own right and in positive terms.
Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World explores the implications of sex-for-pay across a broad span of time, from ancient Mesopotamia to the early Christian period. In ancient times, although they were socially marginal, prostitutes connected with almost every aspect of daily life. They sat in brothels and walked the streets; they paid taxes and set up dedications in religious sanctuaries; they appeared as characters—sometimes admirable, sometimes despicable—on the comic stage and in the law courts; they lived lavishly, consorting with famous poets and politicians; and they participated in otherwise all-male banquets and drinking parties, where they aroused jealousy among their anxious lovers. The chapters in this volume examine a wide variety of genres and sources, from legal and religious tracts to the genres of lyric poetry, love elegy, and comic drama to the graffiti scrawled on the walls of ancient Pompeii. These essays reflect the variety and vitality of the debates engendered by the last three decades of research by confronting the ambiguous terms for prostitution in ancient languages, the difficulty of distinguishing the prostitute from the woman who is merely promiscuous or adulterous, the question of whether sacred or temple prostitution actually existed in the ancient Near East and Greece, and the political and social implications of literary representations of prostitutes and courtesans.
This volume, comprising 24 essays, aims to contribute to a developing appreciation of the capacity of rhetoric to reinforce affiliation or disaffiliation to groups. To this end, the essays span a variety of ancient literary genres (i.e. oratory, historical and technical prose, drama and poetry) and themes (i.e. audience-speaker, laughter, emotions, language, gender, identity, and religion).
Collecting documents culled from the writings of ancient Greek and Roman authors, this book provides a glimpse of what life was like in ancient times and illustrates the relevance of these long-ago civilizations to modern life. Voices of Ancient Greece and Rome: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life sheds light on various aspects of Greek and Roman daily life by examining excerpts from the works of ancient authors who wrote about these topics. Written to help readers truly understand what life within an ancient civilization was like, each entry is preceded by background information and followed by thought-provoking questions. This book covers fascinating topics such as domestic life, employment, housing, food and clothing, sports and games, public safety, education, health care, politics, and religion. Each chapter contains several relevant documents excerpted from the writings of ancient authors accompanied by background information, reading and thought questions, bibliographical data, and suggestions for further reading. An introductory essay to the volume, a guide for evaluating original sources, and bio-notes on the ancient authors are also included. As with other volumes in the Greenwood Voices of an Era series, this book contains much more than just a series of documents: it provides the information and tools that will promote critical thinking and support the research process.
This study of the language of insult charts abuse in classical Athenian literature that centres on the mouth and its appetites, especially talking, eating, drinking, and sexual activities. Attic comedy, Platonic dialogue, and fourth-century oratory often deploy insulting depictions of the mouth and its excesses in order to deride professional speakers as sophists, demagogues, and women. Although the patterns of imagery explored are very prominent in ancient invective and later western literary traditions, this is the first book to discuss this phenomenon in classical literature. It responds to a growing interest in both abusive speech genres and the representation of the body, illuminating an iambic discourse that isolates the intemperate mouth as a visible emblem of behaviours ridiculed in the democratic arenas of classical Athens.
A groundbreaking, cross-cultural reference work exploring the diversity of expression found in rituals, festivals, and performances, uncovering acting techniques and practices from around the world. Acting: An International Encyclopedia explores the amazing diversity of dramatic expression found in rituals, festivals, and live and filmed performances. Its hundreds of alphabetically arranged, fully referenced entries offer insights into famous players, writers, and directors, as well as notable stage and film productions from around the world and throughout the history of theater, cinema, and television. The book also includes a surprising array of additional topics, including important venues (from Greek amphitheaters to Broadway and Hollywood), acting schools (the Actor's Studio) and companies (the Royal Shakespeare), performance genres (from religious pageants to puppetry), technical terms of the actor's art, and much more. It is a unique resource for exploring the techniques performers use to captivate their audiences, and how those techniques have evolved to meet the demands of performing through Greek masks and layers of Kabuki makeup, in vast halls or tiny theaters, or for the unforgiving eye of the camera.
These critically diverse and innovative essays are aimed at restoring the social context of ancient Greek drama. Theatrical productions, which included music and dancing, were civic events in honor of the god Dionysos and were attended by a politically stratified community, whose delegates handled all details from the seating arrangements to the qualifications of choral competitors. The growing complexity of these performances may have provoked the Athenian saying "nothing to do with Dionysos" implying that theater had lost its exclusive focus on its patron. This collection considers how individual plays and groups of dramas pertained to the concerns of the body politic and how these issues were presented in the convention of the stage and as centerpieces of civic ceremonies. The contributors, in addition to the editors, include Simon Goldhill, Jeffrey Henderson, David Konstan, Franois Lissarrague, Oddone Longo, Nicole Loraux, Josiah Ober, Ruth Padel, James Redfield, Niall W. Slater, Barry Strauss, and Jesper Svenbro.
Theatre was at the very heart of culture in Graeco-Roman civilizations and its influence permeated across social and class boundaries. The theatrical genres of tragedy, comedy, satyr play, mime and pantomime operate in Antiquity alongside the conception of theatre as both an entertainment for the masses and a vehicle for intellectual, political and artistic expression. Drawing together contributions from scholars in Classics and Theatre Studies, this volume uniquely examines the Greek and Roman cultural spheres in conjunction with one another rather than in isolation. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.
