Results by title

406 books match the query 'Greece' and 16 start with e

Sort by

ELEGIAC CITYSCAPE

Propertius and the Meaning of Roman Monuments

Tara S. Welch

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

Throughout its history, the city of Rome has inspired writers to describe its majesty, to situate themselves within its sweeping landscape, and to comment upon its contribution to their own identity. The Roman elegiac poet Propertius was one such author. This final published collection, issued in 16 BCE, has been traditionally read as an abandonment by Propertius of his earlier flippant love poems for a more mature engagement with Roman public life or else a comical send-up of imperial policies as embodied in Rome’s public buildings. The relationship between poet and city is complicated at every turn with the presence in the background of the emperor Augustus, whose sustained artistic patronage of Roman monuments brought about the most pervasive transformation that the cityscape had yet seen.

The Elegiac Cityscape explores Propertius’ Rome and the various ways his poetry about the city illuminates the dynamic relationship between one individual and his environment. Combining the approaches of archaeology and literary criticism, Tara S. Welch examines how Propertius’ poems on Roman places scrutinize the monumentalization of various ideological positions in Rome, as they poke and prod Rome’s monuments to see what further meanings they might admit. The result is a poetic book rife with different perspectives on the eternal city, perspectives that often call into question any sleepy or complacent adherence to Rome’s traditional values.

[more]

Early Greek Lyric Poetry

Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by David Mulroy

University of Michigan Press, 1999

The Greek lyric poets composed some of the liveliest, juiciest, most personal lines that the ancient world ever knew. The very personal nature of these poems has made them perennial favorites with a wide variety of readers; it has also meant that they are often difficult to understand.
In Early Greek Lyric Poetry David Mulroy offers an accurate and lively translation of all the important lyric fragments and new papyri, as well as selections from the more fully preserved works of Theognis, Bacchylides, and Pindar. Unlike any other version of these poems, Early Greek Lyric Poetry also provides a translation of the literary context in which each poem survives. This format enables readers to see for themselves why particular lines or phrases happen to be preserved, and it also provides information on how earlier writers understood the poems.
The poems and fragments are accompanied by a comprehensive introduction to the genre and to the individual poets, explanatory notes, and a useful bibliography. Early Greek Lyric Poetry is indispensable for courses on Greek culture and literature in translation or on literary "great books."
David Mulroy is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He is also the author of Horace's Odes and Epodes: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary.

[more]

Echoes of the Great Catastrophe

Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora

Panayotis League

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora explores the legacy of the Great Catastrophe—the death and expulsion from Turkey of 1.5 million Greek Christians following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922—through the music and dance practices of Greek refugees and their descendants over the last one hundred years. The book draws extensively on original ethnographic research conducted in Greece (on the island of Lesvos in particular) and in the Greater Boston area, as well as on the author’s lifetime immersion in the North American Greek diaspora. Through analysis of handwritten music manuscripts, homemade audio recordings, and contemporary live performances, the book traces the routes of repertoire and style over generations and back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, investigating the ways that the particular musical traditions of the Anatolian Greek community have contributed to their understanding of their place in the global Greek diaspora and the wider post-Ottoman world. Alternating between fine-grained musicological analysis and engaging narrative prose, it fills a lacuna in scholarship on the transnational Greek experience.

[more]

Echoing Hylas

A Study in Hellenistic and Roman Metapoetics

Mark Heerink

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

During a stopover of the Argo in Mysia, the boy Hylas sets out to fetch water for his companion Hercules. Wandering into the woods, he arrives at a secluded spring, inhabited by nymphs who fall in love with him and pull him into the water. Mad with worry, Hercules stays in Mysia to look for the boy, but he will never find him again . . .

In Echoing Hylas, Mark Heerink argues that the story of Hylas—a famous episode of the Argonauts' voyage—was used by poets throughout classical antiquity to reflect symbolically on the position of their poetry in the literary tradition. Certain elements of the story, including the characters of Hylas and Hercules themselves, functioned as metaphors of the art of poetry. In the Hellenistic age, for example, the poet Theocritus employed Hylas as an emblem of his innovative

bucolic verse, contrasting the boy with Hercules, who symbolized an older, heroic-epic tradition. The Roman poet Propertius further developed and transformed Theocritus's metapoetical allegory by turning Heracles into an elegiac lover in pursuit of an unattainable object of affection. In this way, the myth of Hylas became the subject of a dialogue among poets across time, from the Hellenistic age to the Flavian era. Each poet, Heerink demonstrates, used elements of the myth to claim his own place in a developing literary tradition.

With this innovative diachronic approach, Heerink opens a new dimension of ancient metapoetics and offers many insights into the works of Apollonius of Rhodes, Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, Valerius Flaccus, and Statius.

[more]

Egypt and the Classical World

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Antiquity

Jeffrey Spier

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022

Presenting dynamic research, this publication explores two millennia of cultural interactions between Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

From Mycenaean weaponry found among the cargo of a Bronze Age shipwreck off the Turkish coast to the Egyptian-inspired domestic interiors of a luxury villa built in Greece during the Roman Empire, Egypt and the Classical World documents two millennia of cultural and artistic interconnectedness in the ancient Mediterranean. This volume gathers pioneering research from the Getty scholars' symposium that helped shape the major international loan exhibition Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018).

Generously illustrated essays consider a range of artistic and other material evidence, including archaeological finds, artworks, papyri, and inscriptions, to shed light on cultural interactions between Egypt, Greece, and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Late Period and Ptolemaic dynasty to the Roman Empire. The military's role as a conduit of knowledge and ideas in the Bronze Age Aegean, and an in-depth study of hieroglyphic Egyptian inscriptions found on Roman obelisks offer but two examples of scholarly lacunae addressed by this publication. Specialists across the fields of art history, archaeology, Classics, Egyptology, and philology will benefit from the volume's investigations into syncretic processes that enlivened and informed nearly twenty-five hundred years of dynamic cultural exchange.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/egypt-classical-world/ and includes zoomable, high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.

[more]

Eleftherios Venizelos

Greece

Andrew Dalby

Haus Publishing, 2010

The Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos (1864â€“1936) was one of the stars of the Paris Peace Conference, impressing many of the Western delegates, already possessed of a romantic view of 'the grandeur that was Greece', with his charm and oratorical style. He won support for his country's territorial ambitions in Asia Minor, the 'Great Idea' of a revived Hellenic empire controlling the Aegean and stretching to the Black Sea. Venizelos had won this support by bringing Greece into the war on the Allied side, but in doing so he had split his country, and in order to secure his government's position he had to deliver territorial gains at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. It was the Greek occupation of Asia Minor, however, that spurred the Turks to support Mustafa Kemal and resulted not in the creation of a Greater Greece but the modern Republic of Turkey. The conflict between Greece and Turkey began the tension between the two states that has continued for the past 90 years and is most clearly seen in the dispute over the divided island of Cyprus. The Paris Peace Conferences were where the modern Near East, with all its problems of competing nationalisms and ethnic divisions, was created, and Venizelos's Greece was the key player in this process.

[more]

Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens

By Andrew Alwine

University of Texas Press, 2015

Much has been written about the world’s first democracy, but no book so far has been dedicated solely to the study of enmity in ancient Athens. Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens is a long-overdue analysis of the competitive power dynamics of Athenian honor and the potential problems these feuds created for democracies.

The citizens of Athens believed that harming one’s enemy was an acceptable practice and even the duty of every honorable citizen. They sought public wins over their rivals, making enmity a critical element in struggles for honor and standing, while simultaneously recognizing the threat that personal enmity posed to the community. Andrew Alwine works to understand how Athenians addressed this threat by looking at the extant work of Attic orators. Their speeches served as the intersection between private vengeance and public sanction of illegal behavior, allowing citizens to engage in feuds within established parameters. This mediation helped support Athenian democracy and provided the social underpinning to allow it to function in conjunction with Greek notions of personal honor.

Alwine provides a framework for understanding key issues in the history of democracy, such as the relationship between private and public realms, the development of equality and the rule of law, and the establishment of individual political rights. Serving also as a nuanced introduction to the works of the Attic orators, Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens is an indispensable addition to scholarship on Athens.

[more]

Entangled Paths Toward Modernity

Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism in the Balkans

Augusta Dimou

Central European University Press, 2009

The book is a study in comparative intellectual history and discusses how socialist ideology emerged as an option of political modernity in the Balkans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.Focusing on how technologies of ideological transfer and adaptation work, the book examines the introduction and contextualization of international socialist paradigms in the Southeast European periphery. At its core is the presentation of three case studies (Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece), intertwined at times through similar, but also divergent paths. Each case aspires to tell a different and yet complementary story with respect to the issue of modernity and socialism. The book analyses the introduction of socialism against the background and in conjunction to other prominent options of political modernity such as nationalism, liberalism and agrarianism.

[more]

Entangled Worlds

Ancient Iran and the Classical Mediterranean

M. Rahim Shayegan

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0

An exploration of the far-reaching exchanges between ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome, offering a bold new perspective on their interconnected cultural legacy.

For more than a millennium, ancient Persia and the classical Mediterranean were deeply intertwined—not merely through conflict but also through diplomacy, trade, and cultural exchange. From the rise of the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BCE to the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the twilight of Sasanian Persia in 651 CE, political, religious, and artistic exchanges shaped—and were shaped by—the dynamic interactions between ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome. These encounters fostered a complex web of cultural connectivity, challenging the notion of antiquity as a series of isolated civilizations and revealing its deep, enduring entanglements.

Bringing the disciplines of classics, Iranian studies, and global history into dialogue, this volume examines how successive Iranian empires—Achaemenid, Seleucid, Arsacid (Parthian), and Sasanian—engaged with their western (and occasionally eastern) neighbors. Essays on diplomacy, religion, art, and intellectual life offer fresh perspectives on ancient historiography, cross-cultural mythmaking, material and visual culture, and the political and religious dynamics of empire. Featuring more than 100 illustrations, Entangled Worlds is a compelling resource for scholars, students, and general readers interested in the shared legacies of the ancient world.

[more]

Epicurus in Lycia

The Second-Century World of Diogenes of Oenoanda

Pamela Gordon

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Brings to life the controversial philosophers Diogenes and Epicurus

[more]

Epiphanius of Cyprus

Imagining an Orthodox World

Young Richard Kim

University of Michigan Press, 2015

Epiphanius of Cyprus offers the first complete biography in English of Epiphanius, lead bishop of Cyprus in the late fourth century CE and author of the Panarion, a massive encyclopedia of heresies. Imagining himself a defender of orthodoxy, he became an active heresy-hunter, involving himself in the most significant theological and ecclesiastical debates of his day.

Young Richard Kim studies the bishop as a historical person and a self-constructed persona, as mediated within the pages of the Panarion. Kim’s “micro-readings” of the Panarion present a close look at autobiographical anecdotes, situated in historical contexts, that profoundly shaped both Epiphanius’ character and how he wanted his readers to perceive him. “Macro-readings” examine portions of the Panarion that reflected how Epiphanius imagined his world, characterized by an orthodoxy that had existed since Creation and was preserved through the generations. In the final chapter, Kim considers Epiphanius’ life after the publication of the Panarion and how he spent years “living” the pages of his heresiology.

Kim brings a more balanced perspective to a controversial figure, recognizing shortcomings but also understanding them in light of Epiphanius’ own world. The bishop appears not as a buffoon, but as someone who knew how to use the power of the rhetoric of orthodoxy to augment his own authority. Quintessentially late antique, he embodied the contentious transition from the classical past to the medieval and Byzantine worlds.

This book will be of broad interest to students and scholars of ancient history, classics, and religious studies.

[more]

Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography

Arnaldo Momigliano

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Arnaldo Momigliano was one of the foremost classical historiographers of the twentieth century. This collection of twenty-one carefully selected essays is remarkable both in the depth of its scholarship and the breadth of its subjects. Moving with ease across the centuries, Momigliano supplements powerful readings of writers in the Greek, Jewish, and Roman traditions, such as Tacitus and Polybius, with writings that focus on later historians, such as Vico and Croce. Charmingly written and concise, these pieces range from review essays reprinted from the New York Review of Books to treatises on the nature of historical scholarship. Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography is a brilliant reminder of Momigliano’s profound knowledge of classical civilization and his gift for deftly handling prose.

With a new Foreword by Anthony Grafton, this volume is essential reading for any student of classics or historiography.

[more]

Ethnic Relations in the Ancient Mediterranean

Social Life Under Empire

Philip A. Harland

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A fresh perspective revealing how ethnographic thinking shaped the sociocultural landscape of the ancient Mediterranean.

With this book, Philip A. Harland presents a large-scale rereading of social and cultural life in the eastern part of the ancient Mediterranean in particular, examining social interactions among peoples, from culturally dominant groups to minority populations. Harland assesses literary and archaeological evidence to yield fresh insights into the dynamics of ethnic relations in the region and to explore how the population navigated questions of identification, differentiation, categorization, stratification, criminalization, and population production.

Harland considers encounters between peoples as well as their representations of one another, reframing the social landscape of the ancient world by focusing on the influence and ubiquity of the ethnographic imagination between the fifth century BCE and the third century CE. Drawing insights from anthropology, sociology, and postcolonial studies, Harland offers close readings of papyri, inscriptions, monuments, sculptures, and other materials that reflect interactions between different populations at all levels of society. He gives careful attention to the perspectives of enslaved, immigrant, and subject peoples, including Egyptians, Babylonians, Syrians, and Judeans under Persian, Hellenistic, or Roman rule.

Offering an innovative reading of social and cultural life from the ground up, this book reveals the extent to which ethnographic thinking structured the sociocultural landscape of the ancient world.

[more]

Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians

Justina Gregory

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Political by its very nature, Greek tragedy reflects on how life should be lived in the polis, and especially the polis that was democratic Athens. Instructional as well, drama frequently concerns itself with the audience's moral education. Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians draws on these political and didactic functions of tragedy for a close analysis of five plays: Alcestis, Hippolytus, Hecuba, Heracles, and Trojan Women. Clearly written and persuasively argued, this volume addresses itself to all who are interested in Greek tragedy. Nonspecialists and scholars alike will deepen their understanding of this complex writer and the tumultuous period in which he lived.

". . . a lucid presentation of the positive side of Euripidean tragedy, and a thoughtful reminder of the political implications of Greek tragedy." --American Journal of Philology

". . . the principal defect of [this] otherwise excellent study is that it is too short." --Erich Segal, Classical Review

". . . a most stimulating book throughout . . . ." --Greece and Rome

Justina Gregory is Professor of Classics, Smith College, where she is head of the department. She has been the recipient of Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson fellowships.

[more]

Exchange and the Maiden

Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy

By Kirk Ormand

University of Texas Press, 1999

Marriage is a central concern in five of the seven extant plays of the Greek tragedian Sophocles. In this pathfinding study, Kirk Ormand delves into the ways in which these plays represent and problematize marriage, thus offering insights into how Athenians thought about the institution of marriage.

Ormand takes a two-fold approach. He first explores the legal and economic underpinnings of Athenian marriage, an institution designed to guarantee the legitimate continuation of patrilineal households. He then shows how Sophocles' plays Trachiniae, Electra, Antigone, Ajax, and Oedipus Tyrannus both reinforce and critique this ideology by representing marriage as a homosocial exchange between men, in which women are objects who may attempt—but always fail—to become self-acting subjects.

These fresh readings provide the first systematic study of marriage in Sophocles. They draw important connections between drama and marriage as rituals concerned with controlling potentially disruptive female subjectivities.

[more]