Revisiting Delphi

Revisiting Delphi
Author: Julia Kindt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2016-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107151570

An innovative reading of how different authors tell stories about the Delphic Oracle, focusing on the religious views thereby conveyed.

Ancient Divination and Experience

Ancient Divination and Experience
Author: Lindsay Gayle Driediger-Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198844549

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This volume sets out to re-examine what ancient people - primarily those in ancient Greek and Roman communities, but also Mesopotamian and Chinese cultures - thought they were doing through divination, and what this can tell us about the religions and cultures in which divination was practised. The chapters, authored by a range of established experts and upcoming early-career scholars, engage with four shared questions: What kinds of gods do ancient forms of divination presuppose? What beliefs, anxieties, and hopes did divination seek to address? What were the limits of human 'control' of divination? What kinds of human-divine relationships did divination create/sustain? The volume as a whole seeks to move beyond functionalist approaches to divination in order to identify and elucidate previously understudied aspects of ancient divinatory experience and practice. Special attention is paid to the experiences of non-elites, the perception of divine presence, the ways in which divinatory techniques could surprise their users by yielding unexpected or unwanted results, the difficulties of interpretation with which divinatory experts were thought to contend, and the possibility that divination could not just ease, but also exacerbate, anxiety in practitioners and consultants.

The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World

The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World
Author: A G Leventis Senior Research Fellow Inaugural A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus Paul Cartledge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 865
Release: 2024-11-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0199383553

The ancient Greek world consisted of approximately 1,000 autonomous polities scattered across the Mediterranean basin, and each one developed its own, unique set of socio-political institutions and social practices. The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World offers twenty-one detailed studies of key sites from across the Greek world between c. 750 and c. 480 BCE--a crucial period when much of what is now seen as distinctive about Greek culture emerged. All the studies in this seven-volume series use the same structure and methodology so that readers can easily compare a wide range of Greek communities. The series thus offers a new and unique resource for the study of ancient Greece that will transform how we study and think about a crucial era in ancient Greek history. Volume IV contains detailed and up-to-date studies of Cyrene, Delphi, Macedonia, Massalia, and Metapontion.

The Layers of the Text

The Layers of the Text
Author: Richard Hunter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 1079
Release: 2021-10-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110747766

This volume collects the most recent essays of Richard Hunter, one of the world's leading experts in the field of Greek and Latin literature. The essays range across all periods of ancient literature from Homer to late antiquity, with a particular focus not just on the texts in their original contexts, but also on how they were interpreted and exploited for both literary and more broadly cultural purposes later in antiquity. Taken together, the essays sketch a picture of a continuous tradition of critical and historical engagement with the literature of the past from the period of Aristophanes and then Plato and Aristotle in classical Athens to the rich prose literature of the Second Sophistic. Richard Hunter's earlier essays are collected in On Coming After (Berlin 2008).

Plutarch’s Religious Landscapes

Plutarch’s Religious Landscapes
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2020-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004443541

The polygraph from Chaeronea includes in Moralia and Lives a wide range of interesting views on religious and philosophical matters: philosophical theology, cult, ethics, politics, natural sciences, hermeneutics, atheism, and the afterlife. The essays included in Plutarch’s Religious Landscapes offer a glance into these views.

The Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

The Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion
Author: Hans Beck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2023-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009301837

Which dimensions of the religious experience of the ancient Greeks become tangible only if we foreground its local horizons? This book explores the manifold ways in which Greek religious beliefs and practices are encoded in and communicate with various local environments. Its individual chapters explore 'the local' in its different forms and formulations. Besides the polis perspective, they include numerous other places and locations above and below the polis-level as well as those fully or largely independent of the city-state. Overall, the local emerges as a relational concept that changes together with our understanding of the general or universal forces as they shape ancient Greek religion. The unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion becomes tangible in the manifold ways in which localizing and generalizing forces interact with each other at different times and in different places across the ancient Greek world.

Households in Context

Households in Context
Author: Caitlín Eilís Barrett
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2024-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501772597

Households in Context shifts the focus from monumental temples, tombs, and elite material and visual culture to households and domestic life to provide a crucial new perspective on everyday dwelling practices and the interactions of families and individuals with larger social and cultural structures. A focus on households reveals the power of the everyday: the critical role of quotidian experiences, objects, and images in creating the worlds of the people who live with them. The contributors to this book share contemporary research on houses and households in both Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt to reshape the ways we think about ancient people's lived experiences of family, community, and society. Households in Context places the archaeology and history of Greco-Roman Egypt in dialogue with research on dwelling, daily practice, and materiality to reveal how ancient households functioned as laboratories for social, political, economic, and religious change. Contributors: Youssri Abdelwahed, Richard Alston, Anna Lucille Boozer, Paola Davoli, David Frankfurter, Jennifer Gates-Foster, Melanie Godsey, Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, Sabine R. Huebner, Gregory Marouard, Miriam Müller, Lisa Nevett, Bérangère Redon, Bethany Simpson, Ross I. Thomas, Dorothy J. Thompson

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.

Mercury's Wings

Mercury's Wings
Author: Richard J. A. Talbert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2017-04-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190663286

Mercury's Wings: Exploring Modes of Communication in the Ancient World is the first-ever volume of essays devoted to ancient communications. Comparable previous work has been mainly confined to articles on aspects of communication in the Roman empire. This set of 18 essays with an introduction by the co-editors marks a milestone, therefore, that demonstrates the importance and rich further potential of the topic. The authors, who include art historians, Assyriologists, Classicists and Egyptologists, take the broad view of communications as a vehicle not just for the transmission of information, but also for the conduct of religion, commerce, and culture. Encompassed within this scope are varied purposes of communication such as propaganda and celebration, as well as profit and administration. Each essay deals with a communications network, or with a means or type of communication, or with the special features of religious communication or communication in and among large empires. The spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries of the volume take in the Near East as well as Greece and Rome, and cover a period of some 2,000 years beginning in the second millennium BCE and ending with the spread of Christianity during the last centuries of the Roman Empire in the West. In all, about one quarter of the essays deal with the Near East, one quarter with Greece, one quarter with Greece and Rome together, and one quarter with the Roman empire and its Persian and Indian rivals. Some essays concern topics in cultural history, such as Greek music and Roman art; some concern economic history in both Mesopotamia and Rome; and some concern traditional historical topics such as diplomacy and war in the Mediterranean world. Each essay draws on recent work in the theory of communications.

Pausanias in the World of Greek Myth

Pausanias in the World of Greek Myth
Author: Greta Hawes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2021-09-16
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0192568698

Greek myth comes to us through many different channels. Our best source for the ways that local communities told and used these stories is a travel guide from the second century AD, the Periegesis of Pausanias. Pausanias gives us the clearest glimpse of ancient Greek myth as a living, local tradition. He shows us that the physical landscape was nothing without the stories of heroes and gods that made sense of it, and reveals what was at stake in claims to possess the past. He also demonstrates how myths guided curious travellers to particular places, the kinds of responses they provoked, and the ways they could be tested or disputed. The Periegesis attests to a form of cultural tourism we would still recognise: it is animated by the desire to see for oneself distant places previously only read about. It shows us how travellers might map the literary landscapes that they imagined on to the reality, and how locals might package their cities to meet the demands of travellers' expectations. In Pausanias in the World of Greek Myth, Greta Hawes uses Pausanias's text to illuminate the spatial dynamics of myth. She reveals the significance of local stories in an Empire connected by a shared literary repertoire, and the unifying power of a tradition made up paradoxically of narratives that took diverse, conflicting forms on the ground. We learn how storytelling and the physical infrastructures of the Greek mainland were intricately interwoven such that the decline or flourishing of the latter affected the archive of myth that Pausanias transmits.