Bücher der Reihe Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches

This book explores the ramifications of understanding the similarities and differences between the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles and realistic Japanese noh. First, it looks at the relationship of Aristotle's definition of tragedy to the tragedies he favored. Next, his definition is applied to realistic noh, in order to show how they do and do not conform to his definition. In the third and fourth chapters, the focus moves to those junctures in the dramas that Aristotle considered crucial to a complex plot - recognitions and sudden reversals -, and shows how they are presented in performance. Chapter 3 examines the climactic moments of realistic noh and demonstrates that it is at precisely these moments that a third actor becomes involved in the dialogue or that an actor in various ways steps out of character. Chapter 4 explores how plays by Euripides and Sophocles deal with critical turns in the plot, as Aristotle defined it. It is not by an actor stepping out of character, but by the playwright's involvement of the third actor in the dialogue. The argument of this book reveals a similar symbiosis between plot and performance in both dramatic forms. By looking at noh through the lens of Aristotle and two Greek tragedies that he favored, the book uncovers first an Aristotelian plot structure in realistic noh and the relationship between the crucial points in the plot and its performance; and on the Greek side, looking at the tragedies through the lens of noh suggests a hitherto unnoticed relationship between the structure of the tragedies and their performance, that is, the involvement of the third actor at the climactic moments of the plot. This observation helps to account for Aristotle's view that tragedy be limited to three actors.

This book shows how Plato's Statesman and Thucydides' presentation of the moral collapse in Athenian political discourse reveal many points of agreement between Plato and Thucydides.

This book investigates the chaotic end of the Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean through the lens of Homeric poetry, with an emphasis on the description of piratical activities described in the Odyssey's "Second Cretan Lie," and on the impact of revolutionary seafaring technology in this watershed period in Mediterranean history.

This study of the "Odyssey" argues that Athena's wrath is central to both the structure and the theme of the poem. It shows how an appreciation of the thematic role of Athena's anger elucidates the poem's narrative organisation and its conception of the hierarchical relations between gods and men.

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.

An examination of how the major themes of the "Iliad" -Achilleus' "wrath", heroic values such as honour and glory, and human mortality and suffering, to mention the most widely recognized - are connected to each other in a way that reveals the poem's structural coherence and unity.

Reconsiders the origins of the Ancient Greeks' ideas and practices concerning their own past. This study demonstrates that hero cult and ancestor cult persisted throughout the Iron Age. Practices such as visiting tombs to make offerings were common.

Diachronic Dialogues considers central aspects of Homer's poetry, such as truth, knowledge, gender, virtue and the heroic code, authorship, memory and song, diction and formula. This book makes the case for performative, rather than essential values in the Illiad and the Odyssey.

S.E. Bassett's classic work The Poetry of Homer investigates the rhetorical techniques that enable the Iliad and the Odyssey speak to both ancient and modern audiences. Somewhat neglected in the decades after its posthumous publication in 1938, it has become an immensely influential work and has left its mark on a generation of Classicists.

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.

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.

Greek Heroes in and out of Hades is a study on heroism and mortality from Homer to Plato. Through systematic readings of a wide range of ancient Greek texts, Stamatia Dova offers innovative hermeneutic approaches to heroic character and a comprehensive overview of the theme of descent to the underworld in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Bacchylides 5, Plato's Symposium, and Euripides' Alcestis.

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.

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.

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 study is an interpretation of the choices the tragedians made in regard to certain forms of standardized variations in word order and prosody. Those choices were made in response to the competing demands of metrical constrain and the poets' sense of what was stylistically appropriate for tragic trimeters.

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 collection of essays examines the linguistic and rhetorical features of Homer's work. Arguing that there can be no purely historical interpretation, Pucci focuses on two features of Homer's rhetoric - repetition of expression and its effects on meaning, and the issue of intertexuality.

The Philosopher's Song is a full-length treatment of Plato and the dynamic course of his philosophical thought, regarded from a distinctly poetic point of view. Kevin Crotty demonstrates how Plato's invention of philosophy needs to be situated within the context of a society where poets were cultural authorities, whose teachings emphasized such tragic themes as the instability of things and the indeterminacy of moral terms. The interest of Plato's philosophy lies to a great extent in the compelling interest of what he sought to repress-the poetic and political heritage of a world tragically conceived. Plato's attacks on the poets are notorious. Despite his apparently frank hostility, however, his relation to the poets was exceedingly complex, argues Crotty. Even the banishment of the poets in the Republic turns out to be, more deeply, a recruitment of mimetic poetry for Plato's metaphysics. Once endowed with a metaphysical significance, however, the poets posed a serious challenge to Platonic idealism, and spurred Plato to revise considerably his metaphysical scheme. Crotty ultimately concludes that the views of politics and ethics in Plato's later works return in many ways to the insights of the poets.

This text examines the theme of heroic exile and return in Greek poetic tradition, from the archaic epic of Homer to modern Greek folk poetry and song. The author argues that the hero's reputation, his glory, is managed by women - especially his wife and mother.

Anger is central to the Homeric epic, but few scholarly interventions have probed HomerOs language beyond the study of the IliadOs first word: menis. Yet Homer uses over a dozen words for anger. Fighting Words and Feuding Words engages the powerful tools of Homeric poetic analysis and the anthropological study of emotion in an analysis of two anger terms highlighted in the Iliad by the Achaean prophet Calchas. Walsh argues that kotos and kholos locate two focal points for the study of aggression in Homeric poetry, the first presenting HomerOs terms for feud and the second providing the native terms that designates the martial violence highlighted by the Homeric tradition. After focusing on these two terms as used in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Walsh concludes by addressing some post-Homeric and comparative implications of Homeric anger.

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.

A Penelopean Poetics looks at the relationship between gender ideology and the self-referential poetics of the Odyssey through the figure of Penelope. She is a cunning story-teller; her repeated reweavings of Laertes' shroud a figurative replication of the process of oral poetic composition itself. Penelope's web is thus a discourse and it can be construed specifically as feminine. Her gendered poetics celebrates process, multiplicity, and ambiguity and it resists phallocentric discourse by undermining stable and fixed meanings. Penelope's poetics become a discursive thread through which different feminine voices can realize their resistant capacities. Author Barbara Clayton's work contributes to discussions in the classics as well as literary criticism, sex and gender studies, and women's studies.

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.

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.

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.