Author: Maria Serena Mirto
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780806141879
Category : Death in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Examines ancient Greek conceptions of death and the afterlife In our contemporary Western society, death has become taboo. Despite its inevitability, we focus on maintaining youthfulness and well-being, while fearing death's intrusion in our daily activities. In contrast, observes Maria Serena Mirto, the ancient Greeks embraced death more openly and effectively, developing a variety of rituals to help them grieve the dead and, in the process, alleviate anxiety and suffering. In this fascinating book, Mirto examines conceptions of death and the afterlife in the ancient Greek world, revealing few similarities-and many differences-between ancient and modern ways of approaching death. Exploring the cultural and religious foundations underlying Greek burial rites and customs, Mirto traces the evolution of these practices during the archaic and classical periods. She explains the relationship between the living and the dead as reflected in grave markers, epitaphs, and burial offerings and discusses the social and political dimensions of burial and lamentation. She also describes shifting beliefs about life after death, showing how concepts of immortality, depicted so memorably in Homer's epics, began to change during the classical period. Death in the Greek World straddles the boundary between literary and religious imagination and synthesizes observations from archaeology, visual art, philosophy, politics, and law. The author places particular emphasis on Homer's epics, the first literary testimony of an understanding of death in ancient Greece. And because these stories are still so central to Western culture, her discussion casts new light on elements we thought we had already understood. Originally written and published in Italian, this English-language translation of Death in the Greek World includes the most recent scholarship on newly discovered texts and objects, and engages the latest theoretical perspectives on the gendered roles of men and women as agents of mourning. The volume also features a new section dealing with hero cults and a new appendix outlining fundamental developments in modern studies of death in the ancient Greek world. Volume 44 in the Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture Maria Serena Mirto is Associate Professor of Classical Philology, Department of Classics, University of Pisa, Italy. A. M. Osborne holds an MA in Modern and Medieval Languages from the University of Cambridge, and an MA with distinction in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. A resident of the United Kingdom, she currently translates both academic and literary texts.
Author: Robert Garland
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069117380X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
Most classical authors and modern historians depict the ancient Greek world as essentially stable and even static, once the so-called colonization movement came to an end. But Robert Garland argues that the Greeks were highly mobile, that their movement was essential to the survival, success, and sheer sustainability of their society, and that this wandering became a defining characteristic of their culture. Addressing a neglected but essential subject, Wandering Greeks focuses on the diaspora of tens of thousands of people between about 700 and 325 BCE, demonstrating the degree to which Greeks were liable to be forced to leave their homes due to political upheaval, oppression, poverty, warfare, or simply a desire to better themselves. Attempting to enter into the mind-set of these wanderers, the book provides an insightful and sympathetic account of what it meant for ancient Greeks to part from everyone and everything they held dear, to start a new life elsewhere—or even to become homeless, living on the open road or on the high seas with no end to their journey in sight. Each chapter identifies a specific kind of "wanderer," including the overseas settler, the deportee, the evacuee, the asylum-seeker, the fugitive, the economic migrant, and the itinerant, and the book also addresses repatriation and the idea of the "portable polis." The result is a vivid and unique portrait of ancient Greece as a culture of displaced persons.
Author: Graham Shipley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134065310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 601
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Book Description
The Greek World After Alexander 323–30 BC examines social changes in the old and new cities of the Greek world and in the new post-Alexandrian kingdoms. An appraisal of the momentous military and political changes after the era of Alexander, this book considers developments in literature, religion, philosophy, and science, and establishes how far they are presented as radical departures from the culture of Classical Greece or were continuous developments from it. Graham Shipley explores the culture of the Hellenistic world in the context of the social divisions between an educated elite and a general population at once more mobile and less involved in the political life of the Greek city.
Author: Robert Garland
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801487460
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
"Death for the Greeks was not an instantaneous event, rather a process or passage which required strenuous efforts on the part of the living to ensure that the dead achieved full and final transfer to the next world. The central questions which this book attempts to answer are: the extent to which death was a preoccupying concern among the Greeks; the feelings with which the individual may have anticipated his death; the nature of the bonds between the living and the dead; and the light shed by burial practices upon characteristic elements of Greek society. While the beliefs of ordinary Greeks about their ordinary dead form the book's central focus, there is also a chapter on 'special dead' - the unburied, murderers and their victims, children, and suicides."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Alex Long
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107086590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Provides an accessible account of the variety and subtlety of Greek and Roman philosophy of death, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius.
Author: George Alexander Gazis
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1789627354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
The concept of the afterlife has always been prominent in both Greek literature and modern scholarship alike. The fate of man after his/her allotted time has come to an end has a central position in poetry, philosophy and religion, often leading to questions and answers as to how one can best live one’s life, and how can one deal with the burden of mortality that is inherent in every human being. The Greeks devoted a considerable amount of their literary production in an attempt to answer these questions through a variety of different media, whereas similar concerns appear to have been at the core of the ancient world in general. This volume represents the first to examine the influences, intersections, and developments of understandings of death and the afterlife between poetic, religious, and philosophical traditions in ancient Greece in one resource. Greek thinking on death and the afterlife was neither uniform, simple, nor static, and by offering an examination of these matters in a properly interdisciplinary context this collection of papers aims to demonstrate the full richness, complexity, and flexibility of these ideas in the ancient Greek world, and illuminate how freely writers from various genres drew inspiration from each other’s thinking concerning eschatological matters. Contributors: Alberto Benarbé; Rick Benitez; Nicolo Benzi; Chiara Blanco; Radcliffe Edmonds; George Alexander Gazis; Anthony Hooper; Vaios Liapis; Alex Long; Ioannis Ziogas.
Author: Reyes Bertolín Cebrián
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806167580
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
In the world of sports, the most important component is the athlete. After all, without athletes there would be no sports. In ancient Greece, athletes were public figures, idolized and envied. This fascinating book draws on a broad range of ancient sources to explore the development of athletes in Greece from the archaic period to the Roman Empire. Whereas many previous books have focused on the origins of the Greek games themselves, or the events or locations where the games took place, this volume places a unique emphasis on the athletes themselves—and the fostering of their athleticism. Moving beyond stereotypes of larger-than-life heroes, Reyes Bertolín Cebrián examines the experiences of ordinary athletes, who practiced sports for educational, recreational, or professional purposes. According to Bertolín Cebrián, the majority of athletes in ancient times were young men and mostly single. Similar to today, most athletes practiced sport as part of their schooling. Yet during the fifth century B.C., a major shift in ancient Greek education took place, when the curriculum for training future leaders became more academic in orientation. As a result, argues Bertolín Cebrián, the practice of sport in the Hellenistic period lost its appeal to the intellectual elite, even as it remained popular with large sectors of the population. Thus, a gap emerged between the “higher” and “lower” cultures of sport. In looking at the implications of this development for athletes, whether high-performing or recreational, this erudite volume traverses such wide-ranging fields as history, literature, medicine, and sports psychology to recreate—in compelling detail—the life and lifestyle of the ancient Greek athlete.
Author: Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198150695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516
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Book Description
This book offers a series of in-depth studies of the beliefs, attitudes, and rituals surrounding death in ancient Greece, from the Minoan and Mycenean period to the end of the classical age. Drawing on a wide range of evidence--from literary texts, to inscriptions, to images in art--Sourvinou-Inwood sheds light on many key, still problematic, aspects of Greek life, myth, and literature. She also looks at the problem of "reading" this material within the context of our own culturally-determined beliefs.
Author: Robert E. Gaebel
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806133652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
Gaebel dokumenterer såvel militært som historisk, at rytteriet - indtil Alexander den Store's død i 323 f.K - spillede en større rolle end hidtil opfattet. Som dokumentation gennemgås 50 markante slag, hvorunder Alexander bl.a. ændrede anvendelsen af rytteriet fra logistiske til offensive funktionenr.
Author: P. J. Rhodes
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444358588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 502
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Book Description
Thoroughly updated and revised, the second edition of this successful and widely praised textbook offers an account of the ‘classical’ period of Greek history, from the aftermath of the Persian Wars in 478 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. Two important new chapters have been added, covering life and culture in the classical Greek world Features new pedagogical tools, including textboxes, and a comprehensive chronological table of the West, mainland Greece, and the Aegean Enlarged and additional maps and illustrative material Covers the history of an important period, including: the flourishing of democracy in Athens; the Peloponnesian war, and the conquests of Alexander the Great Focuses on the evidence for the period, and how the evidence is to be interpreted
