Results by title

The role of athletics in ancient Greece extended well beyond the realms of kinesiology, competition, and entertainment. In teaching and philosophy, athletic practices overlapped with rhetorical ones and formed a shared mode of knowledge production. Bodily Arts examines this intriguing intersection, offering an important context for understanding the attitudes of ancient Greeks toward themselves and their environment.

In classical society, rhetoric was an activity, one that was in essence "performed." Detailing how athletics came to be rhetoric's "twin art" in the bodily aspects of learning and performance, Bodily Arts draws on diverse orators and philosophers such as Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Plato, as well as medical treatises and a wealth of artifacts from the time, including statues and vases.

Debra Hawhee's insightful study spotlights the notion of a classical gymnasium as the location for a habitual "mingling" of athletic and rhetorical performances, and the use of ancient athletic instruction to create rhetorical training based on rhythm, repetition, and response. Presenting her data against the backdrop of a broad cultural perspective rather than a narrow disciplinary one, Hawhee presents a pioneering interpretation of Greek civilization from the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE by observing its citizens in action.

Deianeira sends her husband Herakles a poisoned robe. Eriphyle trades the life of her husband Amphiaraos for a golden necklace. Atreus’s wife Aerope gives away the token of his sovereignty, a lamb with a golden fleece, to his brother Thyestes, who has seduced her. Gifts and exchanges always involve a certain risk in any culture, but in the ancient Greek imagination, women and gifts appear to be a particularly deadly combination.

This book explores the role of gender in exchange as represented in ancient Greek culture, including Homeric epic and tragedy, non-literary texts, and iconographic and historical evidence of various kinds. Using extensive insights from anthropological work on marriage, kinship, and exchange, as well as ethnographic parallels from other traditional societies, Deborah Lyons probes the gendered division of labor among both gods and mortals, the role of marriage (and its failure) in transforming women from objects to agents of exchange, the equivocal nature of women as exchange-partners, and the importance of the sister-brother bond in understanding the economic and social place of women in ancient Greece. Her findings not only enlarge our understanding of social attitudes and practices in Greek antiquity but also demonstrate the applicability of ethnographic techniques and anthropological theory to the study of ancient societies.

At the heart of this book is a deceptively simple question: What does “health” mean? The answer, historian Calloway B. Scott shows, is culturally contingent, and in ancient Greece the concept went well beyond the proper functioning of an individual’s body. Rather, “health” (Greek hygieia) furnished a key discursive and ritual tool for civic cohesion, religious praxis, and even cultural identity. The all-important polis, central to ancient Greek social and political life, fundamentally depended on this conception of good health as a communal and religious phenomenon, and its ritualization informed relationships not just between individuals but also between communities of humans and between the human and divine realms.

Scott employs an impressive array of sources, from technical medical treatises to poetry to material remains and sanctuary sites, to explore the “body politic” of the ancient Greek world—and to query exactly what keeping that body healthy meant. Health, political identity, social relationships, and religious praxis were all deeply entwined; thus rites, rituals, and healing spaces were public, bringing people together in cohesive, coherent, and, ideally, healthy communities.

How ancient Greek democracies wrestled with the tension between egalitarianism and hierarchical structures necessary for organized government.

Democracy and egalitarianism are ever in tension. The ideal of direct democracy—equal participation in all aspects of governance—coexists with the reality that hierarchical structures are necessary to organize and stabilize the workings of the state. This tension consumed America’s founders. And two thousand years earlier, it had consumed the people of Athens.

King Demos shows how ancient Greek democracies wrestled with this problem, crafting what the Federalist Papers would later dream of: “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” As Athens grew and direct democracy became unwieldy, the Greeks developed a system of delegation, with the “people” (demos) conceived as a king with authority over a sprawling system of state officials whose day-to-day operation was handled by experts. Hierarchical structures became commonplace in the city, yet sovereign powers remained with the citizenry. Andrew Alwine argues that delegation was a stepping stone between direct and representative democracy and provided a crucial compromise, enabling the Greeks to benefit from the abilities of elite citizens while also keeping them under control.

In ancient Greece, interstate relations, such as in the formation of alliances, calls for assistance, exchanges of citizenship, and territorial conquest, were often grounded in mythical kinship. In these cases, the common ancestor was most often a legendary figure from whom both communities claimed descent.

In this detailed study, Lee E. Patterson elevates the current state of research on kinship myth to a consideration of the role it plays in the construction of political and cultural identity. He draws examples both from the literary and epigraphical records and shows the fundamental difference between the two. He also expands his study into the question of Greek credulity—how much of these founding myths did they actually believe, and how much was just a useful fiction for diplomatic relations? Of central importance is the authority the Greeks gave to myth, whether to elaborate narratives or to a simple acknowledgment of an ancestor. Most Greeks could readily accept ties of interstate kinship even when local origin narratives could not be reconciled smoothly or when myths used to explain the link between communities were only "discovered" upon the actual occasion of diplomacy, because such claims had been given authority in the collective memory of the Greeks.

The nature of authority and rulership was a central concern in ancient Greece, where the figure of the king or tyrant and the sovereignty associated with him remained a powerful focus of political and philosophical debate even as Classical Athens developed the world's first democracy. This collection of essays examines the extraordinary role that the concept of tyranny played in the cultural and political imagination of Archaic and Classical Greece through the interdisciplinary perspectives provided by internationally known archaeologists, literary critics, and historians.

The book ranges historically from the Bronze and early Iron Age to the political theorists and commentators of the middle of the fourth century B.C. and generically across tragedy, comedy, historiography, and philosophy. While offering individual and sometimes differing perspectives, the essays tackle several common themes: the construction of authority and of constitutional models, the importance of religion and ritual, the crucial role of wealth, and the autonomy of the individual. Moreover, the essays with an Athenian focus shed new light on the vexed question of whether it was possible for Athenians to think of themselves as tyrannical in any way. As a whole, the collection presents a nuanced survey of how competing ideologies and desires, operating through the complex associations of the image of tyranny, struggled for predominance in ancient cities and their citizens.

Nicholas D. Cross’s The Roots of Cooperation reinterprets how the Greeks conceived, enacted, and displayed their alliances, offering a socially grounded understanding of interstate relations in antiquity. Following the international relations model of constructivism, Cross emphasizes the social features of Greek alliances including words used to articulate agreements, ceremonial acts they performed during the formation process, and the symbols they employed to illustrate how the alliances contributed to the creation of shared goals, ideas, and identities. The study covers the proposals for alliances, the articulation of alliance treaties, the ratification of alliances by means of religious ceremonies, the public display of the agreements in visual media, and the implications of terminated alliances. While alliances had political and military objectives, the Greeks represented them as collective and consensual achievements. Relying as much on epigraphic and numismatic evidence as on the literary record, this study recontextualizes interstate activity by analyzing how contemporaries imagined and depicted their formal interstate agreements. The Roots of Cooperation offers fresh insights that go beyond just alliances and can deepen our understanding of interstate relations, broadly speaking, in the ancient world.

Ancient Greek images of disability permeate the Western consciousness: Homer, Teiresias, and Oedipus immediately come to mind. But The Staff of Oedipus looks at disability in the ancient world through the lens of disability studies, and reveals that our interpretations of disability in the ancient world are often skewed. These false assumptions in turn lend weight to modern-day discriminatory attitudes toward disability.

Martha L. Rose considers a range of disabilities and the narratives surrounding them. She examines not only ancient literature, but also papyrus, skeletal material, inscriptions, sculpture, and painting, and draws upon modern work, including autobiographies of people with disabilities, medical research, and theoretical work in disability studies. Her study uncovers the realities of daily life for people with disabilities in ancient Greece and challenges the translation of the term adunatos (unable) as "disabled," with all its modern associations.