Pausanias Periegetes II

Pausanias Periegetes II
Author: W Kendrick Pritchett
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2023-08-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 900467358X

The author's second volume on Pausanias focuses on a collection of over fifty examples where Pausanias is alleged by modern scholars to have made errors in his topographical descriptions of sites and monuments, debating the pros and cons. He vindicates the Periegetes in most cases, finding his most serious error is duplicated in Strabo and Pliny. Tables are offered of figures where distances are given in stades, leading to the observation that various scholars independently hypothesize that alphabetical numerals, easily corruptable, were used at some stage in the transmission of the text. Following his earlier study of wooden cult statues, called xoana, the author collects examples of other statues of wood where the word is not used, noting that wooden statues of athletes are attested as early as 544 BC. Tables of bronze statues are also presented, leading to the conclusion that, although favored by the Romans as booty in war, many bronzes by famous artists still remained in Greece in the second century of our era. A third chapter is devoted to Pausanias' description of ruins, including towns and temples. The Periegete reported more ruins in Arkadia than in any other province. A final chapter collects Pausanias' record of sixty-one festivals and panegyreis. This book will be of interest to topographers, art-historians, and students of Greek religion.

Pausanias Periegetes

Pausanias Periegetes
Author: William Kendrick Pritchett
Publisher: Brill
Total Pages: 370
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN:

The author's second volume on Pausanias focuses on a collection of over fifty examples where Pausanias is alleged by modern scholars to have made errors in his topographical descriptions of sites and monuments, debating the pros and cons. He vindicates the Periegetes in most cases, finding his most serious error is duplicated in Strabo and Pliny. Tables are offered of figures where distances are given in stades, leading to the observation that various scholars independently hypothesize that alphabetical numerals, easily corruptable, were used at some stage in the transmission of the text. Following his earlier study of wooden cult statues, called xoana, the author collects examples of other statues of wood where the word is not used, noting that wooden statues of athletes are attested as early as 544 BC. Tables of bronze statues are also presented, leading to the conclusion that, although favored by the Romans as booty in war, many bronzes by famous artists still remained in Greece in the second century of our era. A third chapter is devoted to Pausanias' description of ruins, including towns and temples. The Periegete reported more ruins in Arkadia than in any other province. A final chapter collects Pausanias' record of sixty-one festivals and panegyreis. This book will be of interest to topographers, art-historians, and students of Greek religion.

The Legend of Seleucus

The Legend of Seleucus
Author: Daniel Ogden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2017-04-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107164788

The first full reconstruction of and investigation into the vibrant and fascinating legend of King Seleucus, successor to Alexander the Great.

Official Power and Local Elites in the Roman Provinces

Official Power and Local Elites in the Roman Provinces
Author: Rada Varga
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2016-11-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317086139

Presenting a new and revealing overview of the ruling classes of the Roman Empire, this volume explores aspects of the relations between the official state structures of Rome and local provincial elites. The central objective of the volume is to present as complex a picture as possible of the provincial leaderships and their many and varied responses to the official state structures. The perspectives from which issues are approached by the contributors are as multiple as the realities of the Roman world: from historical and epigraphic studies to research of philological and linguistic interpretations, and from architectural analyses to direct interpretations of the material culture. While some local potentates took pride in their relationship with Rome and their use of Latin, exhibiting their allegiances publicly as well as privately, others preferred to keep this display solely for public manifestation. These complex and complementary pieces of research provide an in-depth image of the power mechanisms within the Roman state. The chronological span of the volume is from Rome’s Republican conquest of Greece to the changing world of the fourth and fifth centuries AD, when a new ecclesiastical elite began to emerge.

Greek and Roman Necromancy

Greek and Roman Necromancy
Author: Daniel Ogden
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691207062

In classical antiquity, there was much interest in necromancy--the consultation of the dead for divination. People could seek knowledge from the dead by sleeping on tombs, visiting oracles, and attempting to reanimate corpses and skulls. Ranging over many of the lands in which Greek and Roman civilizations flourished, including Egypt, from the Greek archaic period through the late Roman empire, this book is the first comprehensive survey of the subject ever published in any language. Daniel Ogden surveys the places, performers, and techniques of necromancy as well as the reasons for turning to it. He investigates the cave-based sites of oracles of the dead at Heracleia Pontica and Tainaron, as well as the oracles at the Acheron and Avernus, which probably consisted of lakeside precincts. He argues that the Acheron oracle has been long misidentified, and considers in detail the traditions attached to each site. Readers meet the personnel--real or imagined--of ancient necromancy: ghosts, zombies, the earliest vampires, evocators, sorcerers, shamans, Persian magi, Chaldaeans, Egyptians, Roman emperors, and witches from Circe to Medea. Ogden explains the technologies used to evocate or reanimate the dead and to compel them to disgorge their secrets. He concludes by examining ancient beliefs about ghosts and their wisdom--beliefs that underpinned and justified the practice of necromancy. The first of its kind and filled with information, this volume will be of central importance to those interested in the rapidly expanding, inherently fascinating, and intellectually exciting subjects of ghosts and magic in antiquity.

Plutarch and his Contemporaries

Plutarch and his Contemporaries
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2024-02-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004687300

The volume puts into the spotlight overlaps and points of intersection between Plutarch and other writers of the imperial period. It contains twenty-eight contributions which adopt a comparative approach and put into sharper relief ongoing debates and shared concerns, revealing a complex topography of rearrangements and transfigurations of inherited topics, motifs, and ideas. Reading Plutarch alongside his contemporaries brings out distinctive features of his thought and uncovers peculiarities in his use of literary and rhetorical strategies, imagery, and philosophical concepts, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the empire’s culture in general, and Plutarch in particular.

Sparta

Sparta
Author: Stephen Hodkinson
Publisher: Classical Press of Wales
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2002-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1914535200

The study of the Spartans is now pursued more widely and intensively than ever. Indeed, no longer is Sparta the 'second city' of ancient Greece. This volume, the fourth in the established series on which Powell and Hodkinson have collaborated, breaks fresh ground, not least in the range of its contributors. The authors of the fourteen new papers represent nine different countries and demonstrate many of the fertile modern approaches to the history, the archaeology - and the still-influential image - of the city on the Eurotas.

The Comparative Perspective

The Comparative Perspective
Author: Andrea Ercolani
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2016-03-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110428652

The book is the third and concluding part of the investigation on Submerged literature in ancient Greece and beyond. The book expands the inquiry to a comparative perspective, in order to test the validity and usefulness of the hermeneutical approach in other fields and cultures. The comparative case studies deal with gnostic text, Qumran texts, the Hebrew Bible, Early Christianity, Cuneiform Texts, Arabic-Islamic literature, ancient Rome, Medieval China, and contemporary southern Italy. The volume tackles themes and questions relating to author and authorship, cultural translation and transmission, the interaction between orality and literacy, myth and folktale. A particular emphasis is given to anthropological themes and methods. In this vein, the book further explores dynamics of emergence and submersion in ancient Greece, including cultural trends promoted respectively by Sparta and Athens. The volume provides the reader with a wide range of tools and methodological suggestions to reconstruct literary phenomena and cultural processes in a given historical epoch and context, as well as offering new insights for both classical and comparative studies.

Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature

Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature
Author: N. Bryant Kirkland
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2022
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197583512

"Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature is the first monograph devoted to the reception of Herodotus among Imperial Greek writers. Using a broad reception model and focused largely on texts outside of historiography proper, this book analyzes the entanglements of criticism and imitation in select works by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Dio of Prusa, Lucian, and Pausanias. It offers a new angle on Herodotus's intellectual afterlife, channeled through evocations both explicit and implicit in literary criticism, the moral essay, public oration, satire and periegetic literature. Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature shifts focus from reputation only - what ancient authors explicitly had to say about Herodotus - toward the kinetic interrelation between Herodotus's reputation and his active reworking across genre and mode. It demonstrates how Herodotus was strategically construed and often implicitly summoned - as fabulist, classicist, moralizer, and evasive intellectual - and how such Herodotean presences played to the wider purposes of Imperial writers. Herodotus became a touchstone for writers concerned with a nimbus of questions that the Histories first helped to articulate. Imperial Greeks found Herodotus useful in puzzling through questions of authorial persona, mimesis, the relationship between aesthetic and ethical criticism, the self, and the contingent definitions of Hellenism under Rome. Ultimately, Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature widens an incomplete reception history and reads bi-focally, examining how attention to the presence of Herodotus in various texts unveils new layers of meaning in those works, while also showing how ancient receptions offer insight into the Histories"--

The Tyrants of Corinth

The Tyrants of Corinth
Author: Daniel Ogden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2024-07-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040088147

The Tyrants of Corinth is the first monograph in English devoted to the archaic tyranny of Corinth and the engaging legends of Cypselus and Periander, which embrace such themes as hidden babies, animal helpers, arbitrary violence, necrophilia and vengeful ghosts. This detailed study of the ancient sources for the Corinthian tyrants analyses the tales associated with them comprehensively from the perspective of folklore and traditional narrative, including the miraculous birth and deliverance of Cypselus, Periander’s consultation of the ghost of his wife, Melissa, at the Acheron Oracle of the Dead and the saving of the bard Arion from the sea by a dolphin. Any lingering notions that the tales retain historical content are dispelled; Ogden’s radical approach considers all the major episodes associated with both men to be entirely fictive. This allows for reinterpretation of individual details in the tales and for the recovery of lost storylines and symbolism lurking beneath the narrative that our ancient sources preserve for us. All the major sources are supplied in new translations in a convenient appendix, and brief consideration is also given to the tales’ modern reception. The Tyrants of Corinth is suitable for scholars working on Greek tyranny, Greek history and mythology more broadly, and folklore, while also speaking accessibly to undergraduates encountering the history of Archaic Greece for the first time.