Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece

Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece
Author: Renaud Gagné
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110743534X

Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. This book retraces the trajectories of Greek ancestral fault and the varieties of its expression through the many genres and centuries where it is found.

Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece

Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece
Author: Renaud Gagné
Publisher:
Total Pages: 568
Release: 2014-05-14
Genre: Greek literature
ISBN: 9781107417298

Traces the trajectories of a key idea of ancient Greek culture through three thousand years of literature and reception.

Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece

Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece
Author: Renaud Gagné
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107039800

This book traces the trajectories of a key idea of ancient Greek culture through three thousand years of literature and reception.

Genealogies of Ancestral Fault

Genealogies of Ancestral Fault
Author: Renaud Gagné
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1564
Release: 2007
Genre:
ISBN:

From Homer to Proclus, the idea that delayed divine punishment can strike at descendants for the crimes of their forebears has continued to play a central role in Greek culture. This is what I refer to as ancestral fault in the following study. The idea of ancestral fault was a cornerstone of such fundamental Greek social institutions as the oath and the curse, for instance, and for centuries it remained a key element in the cultural memory and the ritual life of the polis. It played an important role in early epic, lyric, iambic, and elegiac poetry, in tragedy and historiography, medical literature, Classical and Hellenistic philosophy, writings of the Second Sophistic, and Neoplatonic teaching. In large part as a consequence of this abundance of material, ancestral fault has exercised a deep fascination in the work of modern classical scholarship. There has, however, been no exhaustive study on the topic since 1904.

Cosmography and the Idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece

Cosmography and the Idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece
Author: Renaud Gagné
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108833233

Follows the extraordinary record of ancient Greek thought on Hyperborea as a case study of cosmography and anthropological philology.

Cosmography and the Idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece

Cosmography and the Idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece
Author: Renaud Gagné
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108976956

Cosmography is defined here as the rhetoric of cosmology: the art of composing worlds. The mirage of Hyperborea, which played a substantial role in Greek religion and culture throughout Antiquity, offers a remarkable window into the practice of composing and reading worlds. This book follows Hyperborea across genres and centuries, both as an exploration of the extraordinary record of Greek thought on that further North and as a case study of ancient cosmography and the anthropological philology that tracks ancient cosmography. Trajectories through the many forms of Greek thought on Hyperborea shed light on key aspects of the cosmography of cult and the cosmography of literature. The philology of worlds pursued in this book ranges from Archaic hymns to Hellenistic and Imperial reconfigurations of Hyperborea. A thousand years of cosmography is thus surveyed through the rewritings of one idea. This is a book on the art of reading worlds slowly.

The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and India

The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and India
Author: Richard Seaford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2019-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108499554

Explains for the first time the genesis and early form of both Indian and Greek philosophy, and their striking similarities.

The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion

The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion
Author: Esther Eidinow
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 737
Release: 2015-10-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0191058076

This handbook offers both students and teachers of ancient Greek religion a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship in the subject, from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods. It not only presents key information, but also explores the ways in which such information is gathered and the different approaches that have shaped the area. In doing so, the volume provides a crucial research and orientation tool for students of the ancient world, and also makes a vital contribution to the key debates surrounding the conceptualization of ancient Greek religion. The handbook's initial chapters lay out the key dimensions of ancient Greek religion, approaches to evidence, and the representations of myths. The following chapters discuss the continuities and differences between religious practices in different cultures, including Egypt, the Near East, the Black Sea, and Bactria and India. The range of contributions emphasizes the diversity of relationships between mortals and the supernatural - in all their manifestations, across, between, and beyond ancient Greek cultures - and draws attention to religious activities as dynamic, highlighting how they changed over time, place, and context.

Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion

Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion
Author: Esther Eidinow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2016-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316715213

Studied for many years by scholars with Christianising assumptions, Greek religion has often been said to be quite unlike Christianity: a matter of particular actions (orthopraxy), rather than particular beliefs (orthodoxies). This volume dares to think that, both in and through religious practices and in and through religious thought and literature, the ancient Greeks engaged in a sustained conversation about the nature of the gods and how to represent and worship them. It excavates the attitudes towards the gods implicit in cult practice and analyses the beliefs about the gods embedded in such diverse texts and contexts as comedy, tragedy, rhetoric, philosophy, ancient Greek blood sacrifice, myth and other forms of storytelling. The result is a richer picture of the supernatural in ancient Greece, and a whole series of fresh questions about how views of and relations to the gods changed over time.

The Poetics of Failure in Ancient Greece

The Poetics of Failure in Ancient Greece
Author: Stamatia Dova
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2020-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317021061

The Poetics of Failure in Ancient Greece offers an innovative approach to archaic and classical Greek literature by focusing on an original and rather unexplored topic. Through close readings of epic, lyric, and tragic poetry, the book engages into a thorough discourse on error, loss, and inadequacy as a personal and collective experience. Stamatia Dova revisits key passages from the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Pindar's epinician odes, Euripides' Herakles, and other texts to identify a poetics of failure that encompasses gods, heroes, athletes, and citizens alike. From Odysseus' shortcomings as a captain in the Odyssey to the defeat of anonymous wrestlers at the 460 B.C.E. Olympics in Pindar, this study examines failure from a mythological, literary, and historical perspective. Mindful of ancient Greek society's emphasis on honor and shame, Dova's in-depth analysis also sheds light on cultural responses to failure as well as on its preservation in societal memory, as in the case of Phrynichos' The Fall of Miletos in 493 B.C.E. Athens. Engaging for both scholars and students, this book is key reading for those interested in how ancient Greek literary paradigms tried to answer the question of how and why we fail.