Böcker av Derek Collins

Original and comprehensive, Magic in the Ancient Greek World takes the reader inside both the social imagination and the ritual reality that made magic possible in ancient Greece. * Explores the widespread use of spells, drugs, curse tablets, and figurines, and the practitioners of magic in the ancient world * Uncovers how magic worked.

This study provides for the first time an in-depth examination of a central mode of Greek poetic competition-capping, which occurs when speakers or singers respond to one another in small numbers of verses, single verses, or between verse units themselves.

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.