Böcker i Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches-serien

In this landmark collection of essays, renowned classicist Charles Segal offers detailed analyses of major texts from archaic and early classical Greek poetry; in particular, works of Alcman, Mimnermus, Sappho, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Corinna. Segal provides close readings of the texts, and then studies the literary form and language of early Greek lyric, the poets'' conception of their aims and their art, the use of mythical paradigms, and the relation of the poems to their social context. A recurrent theme is the recognition of the fragility and brevity of mortal happiness and the consciousness of how the immortality conferred by poetry resists the ever-threatening presence of death and oblivion, fixing in permanent form the passing moments of joy and beauty. This is an essential book for students and scholars of ancient Greek poetry.

This work introduces a previously unrecognised Homeric theme of the "belted hero" and argues for its lasting historical, literary and archaeological significance. The hero fused king, warrior and athlete, and the belts served as visual emblems of power and for women as superior in love.

The essays in this collection address questions of interest in Homeric studies: the questions of performance and poet-audience interaction, especially as depicted in idealized performances within the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey".

With a long, detailed historical record, a large corpus of archaeological data, and, more recently, a number of sophisticated analyses of current and previous environmental conditions, the Aegean region of the eastern Mediterranean offers a unique setting to explore the evolution of a landscape through time. As expanding world markets continue to encroach upon even the most remote and delicate ecological zones, anthropologists across all sub-disciplines are beginning to find common theoretical and methodological ground within their own discipline and with other ecologically oriented sciences. This volume examines the value of such collaborative research by bringing together archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, ethnoarchaeologists, and ecologists to discuss environmentally related issues that affect the European fringe, with an emphasis on the Aegean region. The contributors bring to light the subtleties involved in understanding the interactive relationship between humans and their environment over time. Students and scholars in a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, ecology, classics, and history, will find this book to be a valuable and original investigation of a dynamic and complex region.

When Worlds Elide responds to the various incarnations of 'the Greek' legacy that continues to mark our politics, our society, and our education. It offers both an elaboration of these incarnations and a critique of how they are understood and used politically, culturally, theoretically, and pedagogically.

This book provides new views of longstanding structural questions in the Oresteia, of its repeated language for time, and of its rich ritual constructions. Its wider appeal may well lie in being thoroughly multidisciplinary, in repeatedly finding inspiration in current anthropological work of time, ritual, and agency.

This volume explores the ways local communities perceive, experience, and interact with archaeological sites in Greece, as well as the archaeologists and government officials who construct and study such places. In so doing, it reveals another, much more troubled, side to sites that have been revered as both birthplace of Western civilization and basis of the modern Greek nation.

In 'The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis', Becker explores how Homeric poetry shapes its own reception: how Homer's reaction to a visual image creates his audience's response to a literary description. Becker also enters into a fiercely raging literary debate about the modernist, self-conscious elements of Homeric narrative.

Choral Identity and the Chorus of Elders in Greek Tragedy challenges the commonly held view that choruses are marginalized by the roles they play in classical Athenian tragedy. Focusing on those tragedies that feature a chorus representing old men who are elders of the community where the action is taking place, Dhuga argues that these elders, as elders, are not necessarily marginal and can even become in some ways central to the represented action.

This volume explores the ways local communities perceive, experience, and interact with archaeological sites in Greece, as well as with the archaeologists and government officials who construct and study such places. In so doing, it reveals another side to sites that have been revered as both birthplace of Western civilization and basis of the modern Greek nation. The conceptual terrain of those who live near such sites is complex and furrowed with ambivalence, confusion, and resentment. For many local residents, these sites are gated enclaves, unexplained and off limits, except when workers are needed. While cleavages between residents and archaeologists have received attention elsewhere, they have been little examined in Greece, where they are often masked by sweeping statements on the glory of antiquity that overlook the extent to which ordinary Greeks have become disconnected from these places in their midst. The complexity of this situation, freighted as it is with two centuries of archaeological practice, is explored in this volume from multiple viewpoints and with respect to sites from prehistoric to Ottoman and beyond. Several chapters trace the origins of the disconnection between archaeological sites and communities, relating it to the ways in which early travelers appropriated sites for their own purposes, the subsequent move of archaeology onto the slippery slope created by the travelers, and the concurrent depiction of Greek peasants as passive and uninformed. Other chapters chronicle the active ways in which communities have contested the development and representation of particular sites and even sometimes created alternative landscapes with other points of entry to the valued Greek past. Still others recount and assess recent archaeological efforts to reconnect residents to the sites in their midst. Archaeology in Situ will be of particular value to those interested in modern Greek studies, Greek archaeology, Classics, public archaeology, archaeological ethics, anthropology, cultur

When Worlds Elide responds to the various incarnations of "the Greek" legacy that continues to mark our politics, our society, and our education. It offers both an elaboration of these incarnations and a critique of how they are understood and used politically, culturally, theoretically, and pedagogically.

Light and Darkness in Ancient Greek Myth and Religion is a ground-breaking volume dedicated to a thorough examination of the well known empirical categories of light and darkness as it relates to modes of thought, beliefs and social behavior in Greek culture. With a systematic and multidisciplinary approach, the book elucidates the light/darkness dichotomy in color semantics, appearance and concealment of divinities and creatures of darkness, the eye sight and the insight vision, and the role of the mystic or cultic.

In this book, war, intercourse, and homecoming are put forward as central themes in the two Homeric epics. All three themes have their own semiotics and operate in different ways in the Illiad and the Odyssey thereby determing their myth and plot, their narrative syntax and, more generally their poetic and humanistic character.

Using semiotic and anthropologic theory, this book reconstructs the religious and social institutions surrounding the songs sung by young women in ancient Greece, demonstrating their function in an aesthetic education that permitted the young girls to achieve the stature of womanhood.

Described as "a powerful, brilliant, and original study" when first published, this second edition of Froma Zeitlin''s experiment in decoding the Aeschylus'' Seven Against Thebes in the light of contemporary theory now updates her explorations of the tragic struggle between Eteocles and Polyneices, the doomed sons of Oedipus, with a new preface, a new afterword, and the addition of the relevant Greek texts. The mutual self-destruction of the enemy brothers in this last act of the cursed family is preceded (and determined) by one of Aeschylus'' most daring innovations through the pairing of the shields of attackers and defenders in the central scene of the play as an extended dialogue explicitly concerned with visual and verbal symbols. In a preliminary consideration of the relations between language and kinship and between city and family, between self and society, as determining forces in fifth-century drama, the heart of the book is a detailed investigation of this tour de force of semiotic energy. Zeitlin''s decipherment of this provocative text yields a heightened appreciation of Aeschylus'' compositional artistry and the complexity of his worldview. At the same time, this study points the way to Zeitlin''s larger engagement with the special ideological role that the city of Thebes comes to play on the tragic stage as the negative counterpart to the self-representation of Athens.

This study represents a radical rethinking of traditional distinctions involving the term "religion" in the ancient Greek world and beyond, through late antiquity to the 17th century, and promotes the fluidity of such concepts as religion and magic.

In this volume, K.S. Brown and Yannis Hamilakis bring together scholars of history, archaeology, and anthropology to explore the located and contextual nature of historical narratives through the lens of twentieth-century Greece.

This volume explores the techniques by which classical Greek texts written primarily for public performance incorporate direct quotations (oratio recta) of 'other voices' - imagined or real.

This text explores the concept of the "iambic" as a genre. In a set of detailed studies, the contributors examine, across time, the idea of the iambic through a wide variety of cultural settings: Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antiquity.