Bücher der Reihe Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches

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.

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 volume brings torether poetics and psychology to study the tragic chorus in Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus". Employing a flexible combination of Lacanian and object-relations psychoanalytic theory, Travis investigates the tragic text's conception of the problems of human existence.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An examination of Sophocles' "Antigone" in the context of its setting in 5th-century Athens. The authors attempt to create an interpretive environment that is true to the issues and interests of 5th-century Athenians, as opposed to those of modern scholars and philosophers.

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 study, Marian Demos seeks to demonstrate the significance of three famous lyric quotations within their respective contexts in the dialogues of Plato. These passages include the Simonides poem in the "Protagoras" and the misquotation of Pindar in the "Gorgias".

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.

Lowell Edmunds combines two readings of the "Oedipus at Colonus" to arrive at a fresh way of looking at Greek tragedy. He sets forth a semiotic theory of theatrical space and then applies his theory to the visual and spacial dimensions of the "Oedipus at Colonus".

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.