Author: Laura McClure
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131779415X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Witty nicknames, crude jokes, public nudity and lavish monuments, all of these things distinguished Greek courtesans from respectable citizen women in ancient Greece. Although prostitutes appear as early as archaic Greek lyric poetry, our fullest accounts come from the late second century CE. Drawing on Book 13 of the Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae--which contains almost all known references to hetaeras from all periods of Greek literature--Laura K. McClure has created a window onto the ways ancient Greeks perceived the courtesan and the role of the courtesan in Greek life.
Courtesans and Fishcakes
Author: James N. Davidson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226137430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
As any reader of the Symposium knows, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates conversed over lavish banquets, kept watch on who was eating too much fish, and imbibed liberally without ever getting drunk. In other words, James Davidson writes, he reflected the culture of ancient Greece in which he lived, a culture of passions and pleasures, of food, drink, and sex before—and in concert with—politics and principles. Athenians, the richest and most powerful of the Greeks, were as skilled at consuming as their playwrights were at devising tragedies. Weaving together Greek texts, critical theory, and witty anecdotes, this compelling and accessible study teaches the reader a great deal, not only about the banquets and temptations of ancient Athens, but also about how to read Greek comedy and history.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226137430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
As any reader of the Symposium knows, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates conversed over lavish banquets, kept watch on who was eating too much fish, and imbibed liberally without ever getting drunk. In other words, James Davidson writes, he reflected the culture of ancient Greece in which he lived, a culture of passions and pleasures, of food, drink, and sex before—and in concert with—politics and principles. Athenians, the richest and most powerful of the Greeks, were as skilled at consuming as their playwrights were at devising tragedies. Weaving together Greek texts, critical theory, and witty anecdotes, this compelling and accessible study teaches the reader a great deal, not only about the banquets and temptations of ancient Athens, but also about how to read Greek comedy and history.
The Greeks and Greek Love
Author: James N. Davidson
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 0375505164
Category : Greece
Languages : en
Pages : 833
Book Description
For nearly two thousand years, historians have treated the subject of homosexuality in ancient Greece with apology, embarrassment, or outright denial. Now classics scholar James Davidson offers a brilliant, unblushing exploration of the passion that permeated Greek civilization. Using homosexuality as a lens, Davidson sheds new light on every aspect of Greek culture, from politics and religion to art and war. With stunning erudition and irresistible wit–and without moral judgment–Davidson has written the first major examination of homosexuality in ancient Greece since the dawn of the modern gay rights movement. What exactly did same-sex love mean in a culture that had no word or concept comparable to our term “homosexuality”? How sexual were these attachments? When Greeks spoke of love between men and boys, how young were the boys, how old were the men? Drawing on examples from philosophy, poetry, drama, history, and vase painting, Davidson provides fascinating answers to questions that have vexed scholars for generations. To begin, he defines the essential Greek words for romantic love–eros, pothos, philia–and explores the shades of emotion and passion embodied in each. Then, exploding the myth of Greek “boy love,” Davidson shows that Greek same-sex pairs were in fact often of the same generation, with boys under eighteen zealously separated from older boys and men. Davidson argues that the essence of Greek homosexuality was “besottedness”–falling head over heels and “making a great big song and dance about it,” though sex was certainly not excluded. With refreshing candor, humor, and an astonishing command of Greek culture, Davidson examines how this passion played out in the myths of Ganymede and Cephalus, in the lives of archetypal Greek heroes such as Achilles, Heracles, and Alexander, in the politics of Athens and the army of lovers that defended Thebes. He considers the sexual peculiarities of Sparta and Crete, the legend and truth surrounding Sappho, and the relationship between Greek athletics and sexuality. Writing with the energy, vitality, and irony that the subject deserves, Davidson has elucidated the ruling passion of classical antiquity. Ultimately The Greeks and Greek Love is about how desire–homosexual and heterosexual–is embodied in human civilization. At once scholarly and entertaining, this is a book that sheds as much light on our own world as on the world of Homer, Plato, and Alexander.
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 0375505164
Category : Greece
Languages : en
Pages : 833
Book Description
For nearly two thousand years, historians have treated the subject of homosexuality in ancient Greece with apology, embarrassment, or outright denial. Now classics scholar James Davidson offers a brilliant, unblushing exploration of the passion that permeated Greek civilization. Using homosexuality as a lens, Davidson sheds new light on every aspect of Greek culture, from politics and religion to art and war. With stunning erudition and irresistible wit–and without moral judgment–Davidson has written the first major examination of homosexuality in ancient Greece since the dawn of the modern gay rights movement. What exactly did same-sex love mean in a culture that had no word or concept comparable to our term “homosexuality”? How sexual were these attachments? When Greeks spoke of love between men and boys, how young were the boys, how old were the men? Drawing on examples from philosophy, poetry, drama, history, and vase painting, Davidson provides fascinating answers to questions that have vexed scholars for generations. To begin, he defines the essential Greek words for romantic love–eros, pothos, philia–and explores the shades of emotion and passion embodied in each. Then, exploding the myth of Greek “boy love,” Davidson shows that Greek same-sex pairs were in fact often of the same generation, with boys under eighteen zealously separated from older boys and men. Davidson argues that the essence of Greek homosexuality was “besottedness”–falling head over heels and “making a great big song and dance about it,” though sex was certainly not excluded. With refreshing candor, humor, and an astonishing command of Greek culture, Davidson examines how this passion played out in the myths of Ganymede and Cephalus, in the lives of archetypal Greek heroes such as Achilles, Heracles, and Alexander, in the politics of Athens and the army of lovers that defended Thebes. He considers the sexual peculiarities of Sparta and Crete, the legend and truth surrounding Sappho, and the relationship between Greek athletics and sexuality. Writing with the energy, vitality, and irony that the subject deserves, Davidson has elucidated the ruling passion of classical antiquity. Ultimately The Greeks and Greek Love is about how desire–homosexual and heterosexual–is embodied in human civilization. At once scholarly and entertaining, this is a book that sheds as much light on our own world as on the world of Homer, Plato, and Alexander.
Prostitution in the Ancient Greek World
Author: Konstantinos Kapparis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110557959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 510
Book Description
Prostitution in the ancient Greek world was widespread, legal, and acceptable as a fact of life and an unavoidable necessity. The state regulated the industry and treated prostitution as any other trade. Almost every prominent man in the ancient world has been truly or falsely associated with some famous hetaira. These women, who sold their affections to the richest and most influential men of their time, have become legends in their own right. They pushed the boundaries of female empowerment in their quest for self-promotion and notoriety, and continue to fascinate us. Prostitution remains a complex phenomenon linked to issues of gender, culture, law, civic ideology, education, social control, and economic forces. This is why its study is of paramount importance for our understanding of the culture, outlook and institutions of the ancient world, and in turn it can shed new light and introduce new perspectives to the challenging debate of our times on prostitution and contemporary sexual morality. The main purpose of this book is to provide the primary historical study of the topic with emphasis upon the separation of facts from the mythology surrounding the countless references to prostitution in Greek literary sources.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110557959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 510
Book Description
Prostitution in the ancient Greek world was widespread, legal, and acceptable as a fact of life and an unavoidable necessity. The state regulated the industry and treated prostitution as any other trade. Almost every prominent man in the ancient world has been truly or falsely associated with some famous hetaira. These women, who sold their affections to the richest and most influential men of their time, have become legends in their own right. They pushed the boundaries of female empowerment in their quest for self-promotion and notoriety, and continue to fascinate us. Prostitution remains a complex phenomenon linked to issues of gender, culture, law, civic ideology, education, social control, and economic forces. This is why its study is of paramount importance for our understanding of the culture, outlook and institutions of the ancient world, and in turn it can shed new light and introduce new perspectives to the challenging debate of our times on prostitution and contemporary sexual morality. The main purpose of this book is to provide the primary historical study of the topic with emphasis upon the separation of facts from the mythology surrounding the countless references to prostitution in Greek literary sources.
Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome
Author: Sandra Boehringer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000396169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465
Book Description
This groundbreaking study, among the earliest syntheses on female homosexuality throughout Antiquity, explores the topic with careful reference to ancient concepts and views, drawing fully on the existing visual and written record including literary, philosophical, and scientific documents. Even today, ancient female homosexuals are still too often seen in terms of a mythical, ethereal Sapphic love, or stereotyped as "Amazons" or courtesans. Boehringer's scholarly book replaces these clichés with rigorous, precise analysis of iconography and texts by Sappho, Plato, Ovid, Juvenal, and many other lyric poets, satirists, and astrological writers, in search of the prevailing norms, constraints, and possibilities for erotic desire. The portrait emerges of an ancient society to which today's sexual categories do not apply—a society "before sexuality"—where female homosexuality looks very different, but is nonetheless very real. Now available in English for the first time, Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome includes a preface by David Halperin. This book will be of value to students and scholars of ancient sexuality and gender, and to anyone interested in histories and theories of sexuality.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000396169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465
Book Description
This groundbreaking study, among the earliest syntheses on female homosexuality throughout Antiquity, explores the topic with careful reference to ancient concepts and views, drawing fully on the existing visual and written record including literary, philosophical, and scientific documents. Even today, ancient female homosexuals are still too often seen in terms of a mythical, ethereal Sapphic love, or stereotyped as "Amazons" or courtesans. Boehringer's scholarly book replaces these clichés with rigorous, precise analysis of iconography and texts by Sappho, Plato, Ovid, Juvenal, and many other lyric poets, satirists, and astrological writers, in search of the prevailing norms, constraints, and possibilities for erotic desire. The portrait emerges of an ancient society to which today's sexual categories do not apply—a society "before sexuality"—where female homosexuality looks very different, but is nonetheless very real. Now available in English for the first time, Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome includes a preface by David Halperin. This book will be of value to students and scholars of ancient sexuality and gender, and to anyone interested in histories and theories of sexuality.
Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece
Author: Nancy Demand
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801847622
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Book Description
Why did Greek society foster social conditions, especially early marriage with its attendant early childbearing, that were known to be dangerous for both mother and child? What were the actual causes of death among women described as dying of childbirth in the Hippocratic Epidemics? Why did families choose to portray labor scenes on tombstones when the Greek commemorative tradition otherwise avoided reference to suffering and illness? In Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece, Nancy Demand offers the first comprehensive exploration of the social and cultural construction of childbirth in ancient Greece. Reading the ancient evidence in light of feminist theory, the Foucauldian notion of discursively constituted objects, medical anthropology, and anthropological studies of the modern Greek village, Demand discusses topics that include midwifery, abortion, attitudes of doctors toward women patients, and the treatment of women generally. For evidence, she relies primarily on the case histories in the Epidemics concerning women with complications in pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth. She also draws relevant details from cure records and dedications from healing sanctuaries, labor scenes depicted on tombstones, Aristophanic comedy, andPlatonic philosophy.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801847622
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Book Description
Why did Greek society foster social conditions, especially early marriage with its attendant early childbearing, that were known to be dangerous for both mother and child? What were the actual causes of death among women described as dying of childbirth in the Hippocratic Epidemics? Why did families choose to portray labor scenes on tombstones when the Greek commemorative tradition otherwise avoided reference to suffering and illness? In Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece, Nancy Demand offers the first comprehensive exploration of the social and cultural construction of childbirth in ancient Greece. Reading the ancient evidence in light of feminist theory, the Foucauldian notion of discursively constituted objects, medical anthropology, and anthropological studies of the modern Greek village, Demand discusses topics that include midwifery, abortion, attitudes of doctors toward women patients, and the treatment of women generally. For evidence, she relies primarily on the case histories in the Epidemics concerning women with complications in pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth. She also draws relevant details from cure records and dedications from healing sanctuaries, labor scenes depicted on tombstones, Aristophanic comedy, andPlatonic philosophy.
The Greeks and Greek Civilization
Author: Jacob Burckhardt
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312244477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498
Book Description
In 1872 Burckhardt, one of the preeminent historians of classical and Renaissance culture, presented this revolutionary work, which portrays ancient Greek culture as an aristocratic world and tyrannical state with minimal personal freedoms. This landmark culmination of 30 years of scholarship offers a rich cultural history of a fascinating society.
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312244477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498
Book Description
In 1872 Burckhardt, one of the preeminent historians of classical and Renaissance culture, presented this revolutionary work, which portrays ancient Greek culture as an aristocratic world and tyrannical state with minimal personal freedoms. This landmark culmination of 30 years of scholarship offers a rich cultural history of a fascinating society.
From Ikaria to the Stars
Author: Peter Green
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292702301
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
"I hadn't, till I really started digging, gauged the fierce intensity of the need for myth in the human psyche, of any age, or sensed the variety of motives dictating that need," writes Peter Green in the introduction to this wide-ranging collection of essays on classical mythology and the mythic experience. Using the need for myth as the starting point for exploring a number of topics in Greek mythology and history, Green advances new ideas about why the human urge to make myths persists across the millennia and why the borderland between mythology and history can sometimes be hard to map. Green looks at both specific problems in classical mythology and larger theoretical issues. His explorations underscore how mythic expression opens a door into non-rational and quasi-rational modes of thought in which it becomes possible to rewrite painful truths and unacceptable history--which is, Green argues, a dangerous enterprise. His study of the intersections between classical mythology and Greek history ultimately drives home a larger point, "the degree of mythification and deception (of oneself no less than of others) of which the human mind is capable."
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292702301
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
"I hadn't, till I really started digging, gauged the fierce intensity of the need for myth in the human psyche, of any age, or sensed the variety of motives dictating that need," writes Peter Green in the introduction to this wide-ranging collection of essays on classical mythology and the mythic experience. Using the need for myth as the starting point for exploring a number of topics in Greek mythology and history, Green advances new ideas about why the human urge to make myths persists across the millennia and why the borderland between mythology and history can sometimes be hard to map. Green looks at both specific problems in classical mythology and larger theoretical issues. His explorations underscore how mythic expression opens a door into non-rational and quasi-rational modes of thought in which it becomes possible to rewrite painful truths and unacceptable history--which is, Green argues, a dangerous enterprise. His study of the intersections between classical mythology and Greek history ultimately drives home a larger point, "the degree of mythification and deception (of oneself no less than of others) of which the human mind is capable."
Greek Homosexuality
Author: Kenneth James Dover
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781474257183
Category : Greece
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781474257183
Category : Greece
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
The Victorians and Ancient Greece
Author: Richard Jenkyns
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
Courtesans at Table
Author: Laura McClure
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131779415X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Witty nicknames, crude jokes, public nudity and lavish monuments, all of these things distinguished Greek courtesans from respectable citizen women in ancient Greece. Although prostitutes appear as early as archaic Greek lyric poetry, our fullest accounts come from the late second century CE. Drawing on Book 13 of the Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae--which contains almost all known references to hetaeras from all periods of Greek literature--Laura K. McClure has created a window onto the ways ancient Greeks perceived the courtesan and the role of the courtesan in Greek life.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131779415X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Witty nicknames, crude jokes, public nudity and lavish monuments, all of these things distinguished Greek courtesans from respectable citizen women in ancient Greece. Although prostitutes appear as early as archaic Greek lyric poetry, our fullest accounts come from the late second century CE. Drawing on Book 13 of the Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae--which contains almost all known references to hetaeras from all periods of Greek literature--Laura K. McClure has created a window onto the ways ancient Greeks perceived the courtesan and the role of the courtesan in Greek life.