Reproducing Athens

Reproducing Athens PDF Author: Susan Lape
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825911
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.

Reproducing Athens

Reproducing Athens PDF Author: Susan Lape
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825911
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.

Democracy

Democracy PDF Author: Paul Cartledge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190494328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Ancient Greece first coined the concept of "democracy", yet almost every major ancient Greek thinker-from Plato and Aristotle onwards- was ambivalent towards or even hostile to democracy in any form. The explanation for this is quite simple: the elite perceived majority power as tantamount to a dictatorship of the proletariat. In ancient Greece there can be traced not only the rudiments of modern democratic society but the entire Western tradition of anti-democratic thought. In Democracy, Paul Cartledge provides a detailed history of this ancient political system. In addition, by drawing out the salient differences between ancient and modern forms of democracy he enables a richer understanding of both. Cartledge contends that there is no one "ancient Greek democracy" as pure and simple as is often believed. Democracy surveys the emergence and development of Greek politics, the invention of political theory, and-intimately connected to the latter- the birth of democracy, first at Athens in c. 500 BCE and then at its greatest flourishing in the Greek world 150 years later. Cartledge then traces the decline of genuinely democratic Greek institutions at the hands of the Macedonians and-subsequently and decisively-the Romans. Throughout, he sheds light on the variety of democratic practices in the classical world as well as on their similarities to and dissimilarities from modern democratic forms, from the American and French revolutions to contemporary political thought. Authoritative and accessible, Cartledge's book will be regarded as the best account of ancient democracy and its long afterlife for many years to come.

Handbook of Greek Sculpture

Handbook of Greek Sculpture PDF Author: Olga Palagia
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614519749
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 1478

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Book Description
The Handbook of Greek Sculpture aims to provide a detailed examination of current research and directions in the field. Bringing together an international cast of contributors from Greece, Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, the volume incorporates new areas of research, such as the sculptures of Messene and Macedonia, sculpture in Roman Greece, and the contribution of Greek sculptors in Rome, as well as important aspects of Greek sculpture like techniques and patronage. The written sources (literary and epigraphical) are explored in dedicated chapters, as are function and iconography and the reception of Greek sculpture in modern Europe. Inspired by recent exhibitions on Lysippos and Praxiteles, the book also revisits the style and the personal contributions of the great masters.

Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition

Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition PDF Author: Clifford Ando
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204883
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
The Romans depicted the civil law as a body of rules crafted through communal deliberation for the purpose of self-government. Yet, as Clifford Ando demonstrates in Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition, the civil law was also an instrument of empire: many of its most characteristic features developed in response to the challenges posed when the legal system of Rome was deployed to embrace, incorporate, and govern people and cultures far afield. Ando studies the processes through which lawyers at Rome grappled with the legal pluralism resulting from imperial conquests. He focuses primarily on the tools—most prominently analogy and fiction—used to extend the system and enable it to regulate the lives of persons far from the minds of the original legislators, and he traces the central place that philosophy of language came to occupy in Roman legal thought. In the second part of the book Ando examines the relationship between civil, public, and international law. Despite the prominence accorded public and international law in legal theory, it was civil law that provided conceptual resources to those other fields in the Roman tradition. Ultimately it was the civil law's implication in systems of domination outside its own narrow sphere that opened the door to its own subversion. When political turmoil at Rome upended the institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively ended Roman democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings transformed. As a result, forms of domination once exercised by Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome, henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.

A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities

A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities PDF Author: Thomas K. Hubbard
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118610687
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities presents a comprehensive collection of original essays relating to aspects of gender and sexuality in the classical world. Views the various practices and discursive contexts of sexuality systematically and holistically Discusses Greece and Rome in each chapter, with sensitivity to the continuities and differences between the two classical civilizations Addresses the classical influence on the understanding of later ages and religion Covers artistic and literary genres, various social environments of sexual conduct, and the technical disciplines of medicine, magic, physiognomy, and dream interpretation Features contributions from more than 40 top international scholars

The Athenian Funeral Oration

The Athenian Funeral Oration PDF Author: David M. Pritchard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009413066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
In classical Athens, a funeral speech was delivered for dead combatants almost every year, the most famous being that by Pericles in 430 BC. In 1981, Nicole Loraux transformed our understanding of this genre. Her The Invention of Athens showed how it reminded the Athenians who they were as a people. Loraux demonstrated how each speech helped them to maintain the same self-identity for two centuries. But The Invention of Athens was far from complete. This volume brings together top-ranked experts to finish Loraux's book. It answers the important questions about the numerous surviving funeral speeches that she ignored. It also undertakes a comparison of the funeral oration with other genres that is missing in her famous book. What emerges is a speech that had a much greater political impact than Loraux thought. This volume puts the study of war in Athenian culture on a completely new footing.

Menander: Samia

Menander: Samia PDF Author: Matthew Wright
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350124788
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Matthew Wright brings Menander's Samia to life by explaining how it achieves its comic effects and how it fits within the broader context of fourth-century Greek drama and society. He offers a scene-by-scene reading of the play, combining close attention to detail with broader consideration of major themes, in an approach designed to bring out the humour and nuance of each individual moment on stage, while also illuminating Menander's comic art. The play dramatizes a tangled story of mistakes, mishaps and misapprehensions leading up to the marriage of Moschion and Plangon. For most of the action the characters are at odds with one another owing to accidental delusions or deliberate deceptions, and it seems as if the marriage will be cancelled or indefinitely postponed; but ultimately everyone's problems are solved and the play ends happily. Samia is one of the best-preserved examples of fourth-century Greek comedy: celebrated within antiquity but subsequently lost for many years, it miraculously came back to light, in almost complete form, as a result of Egyptian papyrus finds during the 20th century.

Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels

Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels PDF Author: Daniel Jolowicz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192647741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. This work challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks were not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. Three of these novels in particular-Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius' Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus' Daphnis and Chloe-are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After establishing the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry. The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire, and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period.

Menander in Antiquity

Menander in Antiquity PDF Author: Sebastiana Nervegna
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110732825X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
The comic playwright Menander was one of the most popular writers throughout antiquity. This book reconstructs his life and the legacy of his work until the end of antiquity employing a broad range of sources such as portraits, illustrations of his plays, papyri preserving their texts and inscriptions recording their public performances. These are placed within the context of the three social and cultural institutions which appropriated his comedy, thereby ensuring its survival: public theatres, dinner parties and schools. Dr Nervegna carefully reconstructs how each context approached Menander's drama and how it contributed to its popularity over the centuries. The resultant, highly illustrated, book will be essential for all scholars and students not just of Menander's comedy but, more broadly, of the history and iconography of the ancient theatre, ancient social history and reception studies.

Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition

Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition PDF Author: Kyriakos N. Demetriou
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004280499
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
George Grote’s (1794-1871) extensive publications on ancient Greek history and philosophy remain landmarks in the history of classical scholarship. Since the late 20thcentury, lively interest in the works of Grote has seen his profile revived and his ongoing significance highlighted: he has taken up his rightful place among the most celebrated nineteenth-century classical intellectuals. Grote’s critical engagement with Greek historiography and philosophy revolutionized classical studies in his day – a revolution set against both long-established interpretations and prevailing trends in German Altertumswissenschaft. Twenty-first-century scholarship shows that Grote’s works remain lively, sparkling and relevant, as they offers valuable insights that cut across the intellectual borders of the Victorian age. His diligent scholarship, fascination with evidence and sound judgement, intertwined with intriguing and insightful narrative prose, continue to captivate the attention of modern readers. In Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition Kyriakos N. Demetriou leads a team of prominent scholars to contextualize, unravel and explore Grote’s works as well as provide a critical assessment of his posthumous legacy.