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Author: Olaf Almqvist
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350221864
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Cosmological narratives like the creation story in the book of Genesis or the modern Big Bang are popularly understood to be descriptions of how the universe was created. However, cosmologies also say a great deal more. Indeed, the majority of cosmologies, ancient and modern, explore not simply how the world was made but how humans relate to their surrounding environment and the often thin line which separates humans from gods and animals. Combining approaches from classical studies, anthropology, and philosophy, this book studies three competing cosmologies of the early Greek world: Hesiod's Theogony; the Orphic Derveni theogony; and Protagoras' creation myth in Plato's eponymous dialogue. Although all three cosmologies are part of a single mythic tradition and feature a number of similar events and characters, Olaf Almqvist argues they offer very different answers to an ongoing debate on what it is to be human. Engaging closely with the ontological turn in anthropology and in particular with the work of Philippe Descola, this book outlines three key sets of ontological assumptions – analogism, pantheism, and naturalism – found in early Greek literature and explores how these competing ontological assumptions result in contrasting attitudes to rituals such as prayer and sacrifice.
Author: Olaf Almqvist
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350221864
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book Here
Book Description
Cosmological narratives like the creation story in the book of Genesis or the modern Big Bang are popularly understood to be descriptions of how the universe was created. However, cosmologies also say a great deal more. Indeed, the majority of cosmologies, ancient and modern, explore not simply how the world was made but how humans relate to their surrounding environment and the often thin line which separates humans from gods and animals. Combining approaches from classical studies, anthropology, and philosophy, this book studies three competing cosmologies of the early Greek world: Hesiod's Theogony; the Orphic Derveni theogony; and Protagoras' creation myth in Plato's eponymous dialogue. Although all three cosmologies are part of a single mythic tradition and feature a number of similar events and characters, Olaf Almqvist argues they offer very different answers to an ongoing debate on what it is to be human. Engaging closely with the ontological turn in anthropology and in particular with the work of Philippe Descola, this book outlines three key sets of ontological assumptions – analogism, pantheism, and naturalism – found in early Greek literature and explores how these competing ontological assumptions result in contrasting attitudes to rituals such as prayer and sacrifice.
Author: Olaf Almqvist
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350221901
Category : Cosmology, Ancient
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- 1. Introduction: Myth, Philosophy, and Ontological Pluralism -- 2. Cosmos and Chaos in Hesiod's Theogony -- 3. Beyond the Golden Age: Sacrifice, Sharing, and Affinity in Hesiod's Mekone -- 4. Orpheus and the Reinvention of the Cosmos -- 5. Dionysus Dismembered -- 6. Conclusion: Protagoras and Greek Naturalism -- Appendix: Some Key Orphic Texts -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Author: Vojt?ch Hladk?
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192873245
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
The Derveni papyrus is a multi-layered and intricate philosophical and religious treatise written in Greek, probably just before 400 BCE. Since its discovery in 1962, the papyrus has attracted the attention of scholars in several areas of Classical studies, mostly ancient philosophy and religion, but also literary studies. The anonymous author of the text quotes a previously unknown Orphic poem and comments on it using philosophical motifs and concepts borrowed from various Presocratic thinkers but especially Heraclitus and the Anaxagoreans. The book presents a new interpretation of various aspects of this complex text: situating the treatise within the tradition of allegorical interpretation; providing an interpretation of the opening columns, which describe a peculiar ritual and contain some Heraclitean material, including, as the study argues, some previously unknown fragments; reconstructing the contents of the Orphic poem upon which the Derveni author comments; examining various allegorical devices employed by the Derveni author in his explanation of the Orphic poem, following his commentary in detail; and finally, discussing the likely intellectual background in which the Derveni treatise originated. In general, the study argues that rather than being the work of a philosophising Orphic initiate, the Derveni treatise is a philosophical text whose aim was to explain a nonstandard religious poem. The commentary explains the Orphic poem from a perspective influenced by discussions among the followers of philosophy of Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, and employs reflections on the use and function of language found in the writings of some contemporary thinkers. Based on an analysis of sources upon which the Derveni papyrus is based, it is concluded that its author was probably active in Athens in late fifth century BCE and may have been a person close to Socrates' teacher Archelaus.
Author: Rosanna Lu
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004708030
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
Tehom, the Hebrew Bible’s primeval deep, is a powerful concept often overlooked outside of creation and conflict contexts. Primeval waters mark the boundary between life and death in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East, representing the duality of both deliverance and judgment. This book examines all contexts of Tehom to explain its conceptual forms and use as a proper noun. Comparative methodology combined with affect and spatial theories provide new ways to understand how religious communities repurposed Tehom. These interpretations of Tehom empower resilience in times of suffering and oppression.
Author: Sofia Frade
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472510437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Heracles and Athenian Propaganda examines how Greece's most important hero was appropriated and portrayed by Athens in religion, politics, architecture and literature, with a detailed study of Euripides' Heracles in relation to this interplay between the hero and the city's ideology. Though Athens needed a hero of Hellenic stature, Heracles was a deeply problematic figure: a violent hero of ancient epic, with an aristocratic nature and a murderous temper, who did not naturally fit into the new ideals of democratic society at Athens. Examining how Euripides' play fits within the space of the polis and its political ideology, Sofia Frade asks specific questions of tragedy and politics: how does Euripides' tragic drama of grief, insanity and murder reconcile this hero to a palatable, patriotic ideal? How does the tragic hero relate to his own representations and his cult within the polis? In a city so marked by iconographic propaganda, how did the imagery influence the audience? By looking at the play's larger contexts – literary, civic, political, religious and ideological – new readings are offered to the most problematic elements of the play, including the question of its unity, the nature of the hero's madness and the role of the gods.
Author: Matthew Wright
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350441198
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
Presenting a new approach to Euripides' plays, this book explores the playwright's ancient tragedies in relation to quotation culture. Treating extant works and lost works side-by-side, Matthew Wright presents a selective survey of ways in which Euripidean tragedy was quoted within antiquity, both in social contexts (on the comic stage, at symposia, in law courts, in education) and in different literary genres (drama, biography, oratory, philosophy, literary scholarship, history and anthologies). There is also a discussion of the connection between quotability and classic status, where Wright asks what quotations can tell us about ancient reading habits. The implication is that Euripides actively participated in quotation culture by deliberately making certain portions of his plays stand out as especially quotable. Within classical antiquity, Euripides was the most widely quoted author apart from Homer. His plays are full of 'quotable quotes', which were repeated so often that they acquired a life of their own. Hundreds of famous verses from Euripidean drama circulated widely within the ancient world, even after the plays in which they originally featured became forgotten or vanished completely. Indeed, the majority of Euripides' tragedies now survive only in the form of scattered quotations, otherwise known to us as 'fragments'. It is this corpus of fragmentary quotations, along with his extant plays, that makes Euripides such an interesting case study in the world of quotation culture. This book is the first of its kind to understand Euripides' work through this lens, as well as opening up quotation culture as a major theme of interest within classical scholarship.
Author: JoAnn Scurlock
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1575068656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Hermann Gunkel was a scholar in the generation of the origins of Assyriology, the spectacular discovery by George Smith of fragments of the “Chaldean Genesis,” and the Babel-Bibel debate. Gunkel’s thesis, inspired by materials supplied to him by the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, was to take the Chaoskampf motif of Revelation as an event that would not only occur at the end of the world but had already happened at the beginning, before Creation. In other words, in this theory, one imagines God in Genesis 1 as first having battled Rahab, Leviathan, and Yam (the forces of Chaos) in a grand battle, and only then beginning to create. The problem with Gunkel’s theory is that it did not simply identify common elements in the mythologies of the ancient Near East but imposed upon them a structure dictating the relationships between the elements, a structure that was based on inadequate knowledge and a forced interpretation of his sources. On the other hand, one is not entitled to insist that there was no cultural conversation among peoples who spent the better part of several millennia trading with, fighting, and conquering one another. Creation and Chaos attempts to address some of these issues. The contributions are organized into five sections that address various aspects of the issues raised by Gunekl’s theories.
Author: Robert Shorrock
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472519663
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Traditional and still prevalent accounts of late antique literature draw a clear distinction between 'pagan' and 'Christian' forms of poetry: whereas Christian poetry is taken seriously in terms its contribution to culture and society at large, so-called pagan or secular poetry is largely ignored, as though it has no meaningful part to play within the late antique world. The Myth of Paganism sets out to deconstruct this view of two contrasting poetic traditions and proposes in its place a new integrated model for the understanding of late antique poetry. As the book argues, the poet of Christ and the poet of the Muses were drawn together into an active, often provocative, dialogue about the relationship between Christianity and the Classical tradition and, ultimately, about the meaning of late antiquity itself. An analysis of the poetry of Nonnus of Panopolis, author of both a 'pagan' epic about Dionysus and a Christian translation of St John's Gospel, helps to illustrate this complex dialectic between pagan and Christian voices.
Author: Dwayne A. Meisner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190663529
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Meisner offers a new interpretation of four Orphic theogonies: Derveni, Eudemian, Hieronyman, and Rhapsodic. The fragments of these poems, thought to be written by Orpheus, contained narratives of the creation of the cosmos and the births of the gods, but differed from the mainstream account of Hesiod's Theogony.
Author: Werner Jaeger
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1592443214
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
The new and revolutionizing ideas which the early Greek thinkers developed about the nature of the universe had a direct impact upon their conception of what they called, in a new sense, 'God' or 'the Divine.' The history of the philosophical theology of the Greeks is thus the history of their rational approach to the nature of reality itself in its successive phases. The late Professor Jaeger's classic book traces this development from the first intimations in Hesiod of the theology that was to come, through the heroic age of Greek cosmological thought, down to the time of the Sophists of the fifth century B.C.
