Pindar and the Cult of Heroes

Pindar and the Cult of Heroes PDF Author: Bruno Currie
Publisher: Oxford Classical Monographs
ISBN: 9780199277247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
Pindar and the Cult of Heroes takes a radical new look at the veneration and cult of heroic men, living and dead, in ancient Greece. Bruno Currie finds the roots of the Hellenistic ruler cult, and hence Roman emperor cult, in the 5th century BC (and earlier). Pindar's victory odes represent a crucial stage in this process. Currie also offers a major re-evaluation of the epinician genre and extensive studies of five of Pindar's odes.

Pindar and the Cult of Heroes

Pindar and the Cult of Heroes PDF Author: Bruno Currie
Publisher: Oxford Classical Monographs
ISBN: 9780199277247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
Pindar and the Cult of Heroes takes a radical new look at the veneration and cult of heroic men, living and dead, in ancient Greece. Bruno Currie finds the roots of the Hellenistic ruler cult, and hence Roman emperor cult, in the 5th century BC (and earlier). Pindar's victory odes represent a crucial stage in this process. Currie also offers a major re-evaluation of the epinician genre and extensive studies of five of Pindar's odes.

Pindar, Song, and Space

Pindar, Song, and Space PDF Author: Richard Neer
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421429799
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
A groundbreaking study of the interaction of poetry, performance, and the built environment in ancient Greece. Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Classics by the Association of American Publishers In this volume, Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke develop a new, integrated approach to classical Greece: a "lyric archaeology" that combines literary and art-historical analysis with archaeological and epigraphic materials. At the heart of the book is the great poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his magnificent odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other competitions. Unlike the quintessentially personal genre of modern lyric, these poems were destined for public performance by choruses of dancing men. Neer and Kurke go further to show that they were also site-specific: as the dancers moved through the space of a city or a sanctuary, their song would refer to local monuments and landmarks. Part of Pindar's brief, they argue, was to weave words and bodies into elaborate tapestries of myth and geography and, in so doing, to re-imagine the very fabric of the city-state. Pindar's poems, in short, were tools for making sense of space. Recent scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology. But Neer and Kurke show that these distinctions are artificial. Poems, statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and buildings worked together as a "suite" of technologies for organizing landscapes, cityscapes, and territories. Studying these technologies in tandem reveals the procedures and criteria by which the Greeks understood relations of nearness and distance, "here" and "there"—and how these ways of inhabiting space were essentially political. Rooted in close readings of individual poems, buildings, and works of art, Pindar, Song, and Space ranges from Athens to Libya, Sicily to Rhodes, to provide a revelatory new understanding of the world the Greeks built—and a new model for studying the ancient world.

Greek Religion

Greek Religion PDF Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674362819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
A survey of the religious beliefs of ancient Greece covers sacrifices, libations, purification, gods, heroes, the priesthood, oracles, festivals, and the afterlife.

Orpheus and Greek Religion

Orpheus and Greek Religion PDF Author: William Keith Guthrie
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691024998
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
The tales told of Orpheus are legion. He is said to have been an Argonaut--and to have saved Jason's life. Rivers are reported to have stopped their flow to listen to the sounds of his lyre and his voice. Plato cites his poetry and Herodotus refers to "practices that are called Orphic." Did Orpheus, in fact, exist? His influence on Greek thought is undeniable, but his disciples left little of substance behind them. Indeed, their Orphic precepts have been lost to time. W.K.C. Guthrie attempts to uncover and define Orphism by following its circuitous path through ancient history. He tackles this daunting task with the determination of a detective and the analytical rigor of a classical scholar. He ferries his readers with him on a singular voyage of discovery.

Redefining Ancient Orphism

Redefining Ancient Orphism PDF Author: Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107038219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
In a paradigm shift, this book redefines Orphism as a polemical label for extra-ordinary religion, good or bad.

Pindar's Poetry, Patrons, and Festivals

Pindar's Poetry, Patrons, and Festivals PDF Author: Simon Hornblower
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199296723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
Ancient sport made a huge if indirect contribution to the literature of ancient Greece, since some sixty poems by Pindar and Bacchylides ('epinikian odes'), written to commemorate victories, survive from the Classical period. This book is a collection of essays about that literature, and about the social and physical context for which it was written. The editors assembled an internationally distinguished team of speakers for the original 2002 seminar series held in London, and thesepapers form the backbone of the book. But to ensure coherence and comprehensive coverage, they have commissioned three further papers, and have themselves written a long thematic Introduction. The result is a stellar team of authors, and a book which looks at an important literary phenomenon inlight of the latest archaeological and sociological insights, as well as evaluating the poetry both as poetry and as a performance genre with distinctive characteristics.

Myth, Locality, and Identity in Pindar's Sicilian Odes

Myth, Locality, and Identity in Pindar's Sicilian Odes PDF Author: Virginia M. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019091033X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Myth, Locality, and Identity argues that Pindar engages in a striking, innovative style of mythmaking that represents and shapes Sicilian identities in his epinician odes for Sicilian victors in the fifth century BCE. While Sicily has been thought to be lacking in local traditions for Pindar to celebrate, Lewis argues that the Sicilian odes offer examples of the formation of local traditions: the monster Typho whom Zeus defeated to become king of the gods, for example, now lives beneath Mt. Aitna; Persephone receives the island of Sicily as a gift from Zeus; and the Peloponnesian river Alpheos travels to Syracuse in pursuit of the local spring nymph Arethusa. By weaving regional and Panhellenic myth into the local landscape, as the book shows, Pindar infuses physical places with meaning and thereby contextualizes people, cities, and their rulers within a wider Greek framework. During this time period, Greek Sicily experienced a unique set of political circumstances: the inhabitants were continuously being displaced, cities were founded and resettled, and political leaders rose and fell from power in rapid succession. This book offers the first sustained analysis of myth in Pindar's odes for Sicilian victors across the island that accounts for their shared context. The nodes of myth and place that Pindar fuses in this poetry reinforce and develop a sense of place and community for citizens locally; at the same time, they raise the profile of physical sites and the cities attached to them for larger audiences across the Greek world. In addition to providing new readings of Pindaric odes and offering a model for the formation of Sicilian identities in the first half of the fifth century, the book contributes new insights into current debates on the relationship between myth and place in classical literature.

Pindar's Paeans

Pindar's Paeans PDF Author: Pindar
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780198143819
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
Text and translation of all Pindar's paeans, sacred hymns to Apollo, with a supplement containing fragments from poems of uncertain genre. The lengthy introduction provides a re-evaluation of the poems and examines their place in the song-dance culture of Classical and Hellenistic Greece.

Inner Purity and Pollution in Greek Religion

Inner Purity and Pollution in Greek Religion PDF Author: Andrej Petrovic
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198768044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Was Ancient Greek religion really 'mere ritualism'? Early Christians denounced the pagans for the disorderly plurality of their cults, and reduced Greek religion to ritual and idolatry. This work argues that there was an important place for belief in Greek rituals, examining notions of inner purity and pollution as a manifestation of such belief.

The 'Orphic' Gold Tablets and Greek Religion

The 'Orphic' Gold Tablets and Greek Religion PDF Author: Radcliffe G. Edmonds
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521518318
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Examines new methodologies used in the study of these tablets. Includes an updated edition and translation of the tablet texts.