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This is the first study of Sergei Eisenstein's relationship to classical antiquity. Eisenstein regarded the cinema as a Gesamtkunstwerk and considered the ancient Greeks among its ancestors. He detected what he called “cinematism” in Homer, the Laocoon sculpture group, the Acropolis, and elsewhere. The book interprets Eisenstein's chief concept, montage, as a visual analogy to clever juxtapositions in Roman poetry and examines his conflicts with Stalin and the Communist Party over Bezhin Meadow and Ivan the Terrible alongside the classical rhetorical strategy of formidable speaking in the face of absolute power and the Russian practice of Aesopian language. Eisenstein also influenced the design of the New Acropolis Museum via an essay about the Acropolis' architectural promenade and his epic Alexander Nevsky. The cinematism of the Parthenon Frieze, American cinema architecture modeled on the Parthenon, and Eisenstein's image of the cinema as a temple reinforce his importance within the classical tradition.
Against the background of the interest in ancient Mediterranean connectivity and globalization, the present volume examines local places and local communities. Exploring the interplay between the local and the global, the focus shifts from long-distance connections and 'global' trends to the local dimensions of Mediterranean interactions, highlighting how local contexts engaged with their long-distance counterparts. Given the transformative nature of this period and region, our focus is firmly on the western Mediterranean during the first half of the first millennium BCE. Discussions of the local places and local communities of the Iron Age West Mediterranean are wrapped around the twin notions of agency and locality. We argue that everyday local agency produces locality in an ongoing dialectic, ranging from collaboration to struggle, with globalizing influences and colonial forces. The eighteen West Mediterranean case studies are organized around the themes of 'Indigeneity and locality', 'agency and empowerment' and 'practice and production'.
'Hipponax the poet' is an elusive figure. Stories about him abounded already in antiquity, at least in part extrapolated from the stories about himself that abounded in his poems. But what distinguishes him from other Greek lyric poets is the manner in which his corpus suggests a strategy of mischievousness around self-presentation: a deliberate confounding of expectations, the projecting of a pointedly strange and untrustworthy authorial persona. This is the first book-length literary study of Hipponax for almost half a century. It is written by an international team of scholars, who tackle various topics such as his relationship with social mores, performance practices, earlier and later poetry, and the visual arts. Contributors apply a range of perspectives for a richer understanding of Hipponax's poetics and provide close readings of several key texts. The volume is suitable for scholars and students of literature and all the Greek is translated.
Few buildings have been as important to Western culture as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. One of the Seven Wonders of antiquity, it was destroyed during the Middle Ages, leading countless architects, antiquarians, painters and printmakers in Early Modern Europe to speculate upon its appearance. This book – the first on its subject – examines their works, from erudite publications to simple pen sketches, from elegant watercolours to complete buildings inspired by the monument. Spanning the period between the Italian Renaissance and the discovery and archaeological excavation of the Mausoleum's foundations in the 1850s, it covers the most important cultural contexts of Western Europe, without neglecting artworks from Peru, China and Japan. The monument's connexion with themes of widowhood and female political power are analysed, as are the manifold interactions between architecture, text and image in the afterlife of the Mausoleum. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Roman world was a rural world. Most of the Roman population lived in the countryside and had their immediate rural surroundings as their social and economic frame of reference. For much of the Roman period, rural property provided the basis for political power and urban development, and it was in rural areas that the agricultural crops that sustained an expanding empire were grown and many of the most important Roman industries were situated. Rural areas witnessed the presence of some of the most durable symbols of Roman imperial hegemony, such as aqueducts and paved roads. It was mainly here that native and Roman traditions collided and were negotiated. This volume, containing 30 chapters by leading scholars, leverages recent methodological advancements and new interpretative frameworks to provide a holistic view, with an empire-wide reach, of the importance of Roman rural areas in the success of ancient Rome.
This book proposes that Sophoclean tragedy is a distinctive form of religious discourse concerned with exploring the relationship between humans and gods. Building on recent scholarship that has begun to reintegrate literature within the study of Greek religion after decades of neglect, Alexandre Johnston positions Sophocles' seven extant plays within a vibrant tradition of early Greek theology, literature and philosophy that cuts across modern disciplinary boundaries. Blending an overarching thematic approach with detailed analysis of key case studies, he argues that tragedies such as Antigone and Electra were at once poetic works and religious artefacts that engaged profoundly with contemporary intellectual culture. Through their narrative structure and performance, these tragedies allow spectators privileged insights into the workings of an obscure, unstable world dominated by inscrutable gods, offering distinctive, sometimes radical visions of the divine and its impact on the existence of mortals.
Appropriation, 'making something one's own', is a modern way of thinking about social practices. This volume highlights the potential of this critical concept for the investigation of everyday religious practice – and more generally, everyday social practice – in Antiquity. Appropriation foregrounds the agency of the social actors against the strictures imposed by the dominant culture's social order, whose ideas and practices they make their own, altering them in multiple, often subtle ways. How does appropriation transform pre-existing, traditional practices? What are the dominant structures against which the actors operate? Which tactics do they use? These are only some of the questions this volume seeks to address. The critical term 'appropriation' has yet to be fully discovered by classicists; the case studies in this volume, ranging from classical Greece to Late Antique Egypt, endeavour to demonstrate its pertinence to the study of religion in Antiquity.
Aristotle's account of justice has inspired thinkers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Martha Nussbaum. Concepts such as distributive justice, equity, the common good, and the distinction between just and unjust political organizations find articulations in his writings. But although Aristotle's account of justice remains philosophically relevant, its intellectual, social, and political origins in the Mediterranean world of the fourth century BCE have often been overlooked. This book places Aristotle's account of justice in dialogue with his fourth-century intellectual colleagues such as Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates, and allows it to be understood within the framework of fourth-century institutions as they were experienced by citizens of ancient Greek political communities. It thus provides the modern reader with the framework which Aristotle presupposed for his original work in antiquity, including the intellectual debates which formed its context.
For the Greeks and Romans, the world was full of gods, but this fundamental aspect of their experience poses major challenges to modern understanding. The concept of belief has been central to meeting those challenges but has itself been hotly debated, and has at times even been rejected as a supposedly Christianising anachronism. Others, meanwhile, have argued that a culture-neutral model of belief is both possible and essential, while the advent of the cognitive science of religion has offered new possibilities for understanding ancient religious worlds. The essays in this volume trace the historical development of the modern concept of belief, examine ancient debates about the nature of human knowledge of the divine, and draw on perspectives from anthropology, cognitive science and early modern history as well as classical studies to explore the nature and role of belief in Greek and Roman religion in ancient literature, society, experience and practice.
The western tradition of coinage began in Asia Minor around 650 BCE and from there the idea spread quite rapidly to other parts of the Mediterranean. This book describes and evaluates developments in coinage down to the period of the Persian Wars, ending in 479. Early coinage was not monolithic. The new medium of exchange proved attractive to a variety of rulers and societies – kings, dynasts, tribes, city–states with varying forms of governance. The physical characteristics of the coins produced were another source of difference. Initially there was no fixed idea of what a coin should look like, and there were several experiments before a consensus emerged around a small, circular metal object with a design, or type, on both sides. This book provides students with an authoritative introduction, with all technical terms and methodologies explained, as well as illustrations of over 200 important coins with detailed captions.
In Late Bronze Age Greece, Mycenaean authorities commissioned impressive funerary monuments, fortifications, and palatial complexes, reflecting their advanced engineering and architectural skills. Yet the degree of connectivity among Mycenaean administrative centers remains contested. In this book, Nicholas Blackwell explores craft relationships by analyzing artisan mobility and technological transfer across certain sites. These labor networks offer an underexplored perspective for interpreting the period's geopolitical dynamics. Focusing on iconic monuments like the Lion Gate relief, the refurbished Grave Circle A, and the Treasury of Atreus, Blackwell reconsiders the topographical and political evolution of Mycenae and the Argolid in the 14th-13th centuries BCE. Notable stone-working links between the Argolid and northern Boeotia also imply broader state-level relationships. His analysis contributes fresh ideas to ongoing research into the organization of the Mycenaean world.
Classical Athenian democracy is rightly famous but democracy flourished in other parts of the Greek world as well. In this clear and fascinating book, Matthew Simonton traces the emergence, growth, consolidation and decline of democratic city-states over the millennium down to the fifth century CE. He argues for the widespread and highly participatory nature of democratic constitutions across the Greek world, particularly in the fourth, third, and second centuries BCE. Readers will also learn to appreciate the characteristic ideological, institutional, and material-cultural features of democratic poleis. The evidence marshalled includes literary texts, inscriptions, coins, archaeological remains, and monumental art. The book does not shy away from the fact that ancient Greek democracies both empowered lower-class men but also rested on a series of exclusions (of women, enslaved people, and foreigners). Nevertheless, dēmokratia emerges as a major facet of ancient Greek culture and society.
Literary and archaeological evidence suggests that the Roman world was profoundly unequal. What did this mean in material terms for people at the bottom of the social hierarchy? Astrid Van Oyen here investigates the lived experiences of non-elite people in the Roman world through qualitative analysis of archaeological data. Supported by theoretical insights from the material turn, development economics, and feminist studies, her study of precarity cuts across the experiences of workers, the enslaved, women, and conquered populations. Van Oyen considers how precarity shaped these people's relation to production, consumption, time, place, and community. Drawing on empirically rich archaeological data from Roman Italy, Britain, Gaul, and the Iberian Peninsula, Van Oyen challenges long-held assumptions and generates new insights into the lives of the non-elite population. Her novel approaches will inspire future studies, enabling archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists to retrieve the unheard voices of the past.
Diodoros of Sicily (c.90–c.30 BC) spent thirty years producing an encyclopedic compendium of world history from its mythical beginnings to his own day. His is the only surviving, connected account of Greek affairs from 480/79 to 302/1. The books translated in this volume offer the best account of the career of Philip II of Macedon, his conquest of Greece and his assassination, as well as the earliest extant history of the career of Alexander the Great. Book 16 is also the main source for the Persian re-conquest of Egypt by Artaxerxes III (Okhos), the seizure of Delphi by the Phokians in the Third Sacred War, and Athens' defeat by a coalition of her allies in the Social War. The translation is supported by extensive notes, and the Introduction examines Diodoros' moral and educational purpose in writing, the plan of his work, his sources, and his qualities as a historian.
Although the unattested language of Proto-Indo-European has been studied for over 200 years, the greater part of this literature has focused on its phonology and morphology, with comparatively little known of its syntax. This book aims to redress the balance by reconstructing the syntax of relative clauses. It examines evidence from a wide range of archaic Indo-European languages, analysing them through the lens of generative linguistic theory. It also explains the methodological challenges of syntactic reconstruction and how they may be tackled. Ram-Prasad also alights on a wide range of points of comparative interest, including pronominal morphology, discourse movement and Wackernagel's Law. This book will appeal to classicists interested in understanding the Latin and Greek languages in their Indo-European context, as well as to trained comparative philologists and historical linguists with particular interests in syntax and reconstruction.
Bronze was a prized medium for sculpture in the classical world, as reflected by the remnants of the thousands of bronze statues of gods, dignitaries, and intellectuals that once filled its cities and sanctuaries. Today, only a few hundred statues are preserved, counting heads without bodies and bodies missing heads and limbs. Fortunately, the few survivors – pieces of bronze statues, scraps dumped by ancient bronze foundries, ancient texts, and occasional new finds – offer invaluable insights into the ancient bronze statuary industry. In this magisterial work, Carol Mattusch brings her deep knowledge of ancient technology to the study of bronze sculpture from multiple perspectives. Analyzing ancient literary testimonia together with the material evidence, she charts the production process from start to finished statues and to modern workshop analogies. Exploring standards for size, appearance, and placement of classical public statuary, her volume also considers issues related to Roman private collections of bronzes, including taste, production, means of acquisition, display, and loss or occasional survival of ancient bronzes.
Race as a concept has had a fraught role in the history of Classics, woven into its formation as an academic discipline. While the texts and artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean world provide complex understandings of what race might mean and how it might operate, they have also provided fodder for modern racial ideologies. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and groundbreaking overview of 'race' and 'racism' in ancient Mediterranean cultures as well as in the formation of Classics as a discipline. Through twenty-four chapters written by a team of international scholars, it clarifies the terms and concepts that are central to contemporary theories of race and explores the extent to which they can be applied to the study of the ancient Mediterranean world, in and beyond Greece and Rome. It also showcases various concrete examples of how Classics has been shaped by the intertwined histories of race and colonialism.
The ancient neighborhood of the Subura in Rome was held together by the shape of its terrain and the urban thoroughfares that connected the city's center and periphery. In this study, Margaret Andrews traces the Subura's urban development from the Iron Age through the Early Middle Ages. Using both written and material evidence, she argues that the valley was imbued with a social ideology that focused on the virtuous woman. This ideology was reconstituted and refocused over the centuries by Rome's most powerful leaders – senators, emperors, and bishops – and the Subura's residents themselves. The neighborhood's physical fabric was transformed in each period, as monumental and mundane structures were recombined in ways that blended past and present. Andrews demonstrates how the Subura serves as a compelling case study of urban evolution. She shows how socially constructed concepts are inscribed into urban environments and how the social processes through which these concepts were embedded evolved over time.