Böcker i Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches-serien

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".

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.

The Classical Moment is a reexamination of the concept of a supreme moment in the literatures of Greece, Mesopotamia, India, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Taking the case of Greece as its starting point, it examines what such "moments" have in common, how they are created, and what effect they have on subsequent literary creation.

These essays examine innovations in both the theory and practice of classical philosophy. The chapters address interdisciplinary methods in a variety of ways.

This volume investigates the idea of comic seriousness in Old Comedy. Attempting to set Old Comedy in its proper context, Riu explores the myth and ritual of Dionysus in the city state and relates the patterns found in those myths to the works of Aristophanes.

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.

This study of the construction of intellectual authority examines the impact of Thucydides's "History". It argues that Thucydides's work succeeded for two main reasons: he refined the language of administration, and drew upon the abstract philosophical rhetoric that arose in the 5th century.

This text forms an enquiry into the poetics of authenticity and authority in Sophocles' "Electra". The author reveals "Electra" as a self-referential play about play-writing.

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.

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.

A study of the nurse in Greek literature from Homer to Euripides. Depicted as a central figure of authority, the author focuses on the verbal manifestations of the nurse's authority - advice, approval, diasapproval, directions and orders.

This text looks at Euripides' "Hippolytus" and offers an examination of the ancient preference for the implicit style, and suugests a possible reading of Euripides' first treatment of the myth which would account for The Athenian audience's reservations about his "Hippoytus Veiled".

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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".

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.