Greek religion (Classics)

Many of the fascinating little gold leaves which have come to light by now are characterized by a peculiar mixture of verse and rhythmical prose. The lines in rhythmical prose have a distinctly performative ring and may be divided into two groups: one serving as a kind of secret password and commemorating an initiation ritual; the other issuing from an adaption of the poetical narration in order to be used as a libretto for a performance in the course of the initiation. In the second case, it seems justified to include them in an attempt at reconstructing not the words, to be sure, but at least the rough outline of the ‘story’ which was narrated in the original “Sacred discourse”.

This article calculates the public spending of classical Athens. The major public activities of this ancient democracy were festivals, politics and wars. There is hot debate about what was spent on these three activities. Ancient historians cannot agree whether the Athenian dēmos (‘people’) spent more on festivals or wars. This debate goes back to the first book on Athenian public finance. In 1817 August Böckh famously criticised the Athenians for wasting money on their festivals instead of building up their armed forces. Calculating their public spending would settle this debate. Böckh lacked the evidence to do such. Two centuries after him this is no longer the case. But this articles calculations do more than settle a longstanding debate. In classical Athens the dēmos had full control over public spending. In the assembly they authorised all the public activities of their state. Assemblygoers understood the financial consequences of their decisions. They knew how much a proposal that was put before them would cost. They had a good general knowledge of what the state spent on its major activities. Consequently they could judge whether a proposal cost the same as what was normally spent on such things. This made it possible for the Athenians to change their pattern of spending and so what they spent on one class of activities relative to other classes. Such votes allowed the dēmos to spend more on what they saw as a priority. Over time the sums that they spent on different public activities reflected the order of the priorities that they had set for their state. By calculating these sums this article demonstrates that it was not religion or politics but war that was the overriding priority of the Athenian people.

La représentation mythique des détroits de la Méditerranée ancienne, du Bosphore au Gibraltar, présente des traits communs qui soulignent les difficultés d’un lieu de passage qui n’est déjà plus terre, mais pas encore tout à fait mer: précarité et instabilité du passe, fréquence des gouffres et des courants dangereux pour les navires, présence des monstres marins, etcetera. A l’intérieur de ce cadre le détroit de Messine est caractérisé par une grande abondance de matériel mythique qui porte sur le risque de mort rattaché à ce passage depuis l’antiquité: on peut citer, à ce propos, Scylla e Charybde, les rochers flottants (ou Planctes) ; les légendes de la Fée Morgane et de Colapesce constituent également des exemples qui dépassent les limites de l’antiquité. Les dangers liés au détroit ne sont pas symbolisés seulement au niveau mythique, mais sont mis en évidence dans les récits des géographes et des historiens anciens (Thucydide, Strabon).
Dans ma contribution je concentre mon attention sur la figure de Charybde, qui représente par certains aspects un unicum dans la mythologie gréco-romaine. En partant de l’analyse des traits monstrueux qu’elle partage avec Scylla (genre féminin, voracité, sonorité frappante), je réfléchis ensuite sur des caractères qui lui sont propres : à savoir l’absence de forme, qui correspond au presque total manque d’images dans l’iconographie ancienne (au contraire de Scylla), et la métaphore du chaudron, par laquelle elle est souvent représentée dans les sources littéraires. Celui-ci est, en effet, un élément typique la représentation du monstre marin, qu’on retrouve dans d’autres récits de combat entre héros et monstres, et qu’on peut également comparer, d’un point de vue interculturel, avec les représentations du Léviathan et du poisson de Jonas dans la tradition juive. En ce qui concerne l’image du monstre, une explication à ce vide iconographique peut être suggérée en mettant en relation la représentation de Charybde, où les traits sonores l’emportent sur la figuration visuelle, aux différentes descriptions des monstres de la mer dans la littérature ancienne. L’informité est ainsi envisagée en tant que modalité privilégié de représentation des périls rattachés à la mort en mer, qui outrage le cadavre en le faisant disparaître ou en le restituant par morceaux, en le privant, autrement dit, de sa propre forme humaine.

Women's mobility is central to understanding cultural constructions of gender. Regarding ancient cultures, including ancient Greece, a re-evaluation of women's mobility within the household and beyond it is currently taking place. This invites an informed analysis of female mobility in Greek myth, under the premise that myth may open a venue to social ideology and the imaginary.

Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth offers the first comprehensive analysis of this topic. It presents close readings of ancient texts, engaging with feminist thought and the 'mobility turn'. A variety of Olympian goddesses and mortal heroines are explored, and the analysis of their myths follows specific chronological considerations. Female mobility is presented in quite diverse ways in myth, reflecting cultural flexibility in imagining mobile goddesses and heroines. At the same time, the out-of-doors spaces that mortal heroines inhabit seem to lack a public or civic quality, with the heroines being contained behind 'glass walls'. In this respect, myth seems to reproduce the cultural limitations of ancient Greek social ideology on mobility, inviting us to reflect not only on the limits of mythic imagination but also on the timelessness of Greek myth.

Cosa accomuna due oggetti culturali come il racconto della trasformazione dei pirati in delfini del III libro delle Metamorfosi di Ovidio e Origin, la serie di immagini in movimento dell'artista visuale contemporaneo Daniel Lee? E, soprattutto, cosa li rende così distanti?

The armed forces that Athens took into the Peloponnesian War had four distinct corps. The two that have been studied the most are the cavalry-corps and the navy. The same level of focus is now paid to the hoplite corps. In contrast to these three branches the archers continue to be largely unstudied. Indeed the last dedicated study of this corps was published in 1913. This neglect of the archers by military historians is unjustified. The creation of the archer corps in the late 480s was a significant military innovation. For the rest of the fifth century Athens constantly deployed archers in a wide range of important combat-roles. In the late 430s the state spent just as much on them as it did on the cavalry. Nevertheless this neglect explains why four problems about them remain unresolved. The first problem is why the Athenians took the unprecedented step of creating such a corps. Very few military historians recognise this as the problem that it is. The second problem is that many military archers were actually Athenian citizens. It is likely that poverty had ruled out their service as hoplites. But this leaves unexplained why they did not chose the navy, because naval service was cheaper still and earned, as we shall see, a lot more esteem. The third problem is the role that the ten tribes played in the archer corps’s organisation. Certainly horsemen and hoplites fought in tribal units. But there is ongoing debate about whether the rest of the armed forces was organised by tribes. The fourth problem is this branch’s disappearance after only 80 years. A. Plassart attempted to explain it more than a hundred years ago. Since his study epigraphy has hugely increased what we know about this branch. This new evidence shows that Plassart’s explanation is no longer valid. This article’s main goal is to resolve these four problems. In doing so it seeks to redress the archer corps’s neglect in military history.

This paper suggests that consideration of alternative models—of ancient Greek religion, the nature of the individual, and theories of mind—raise questions about the ancient conceptions of the individual experience and mind—and lead to a reconsideration of the nature of ’private reflection in private spaces’.

In Euthyphro Socrates succeeds in demonstrating Euthyphro’s lack of knowledge and understanding of the central to the dialogue concept of piety (εὐσέβεια) by showing his inability to satisfactorily define what is piety, but whether he succeeds in affirming or denying possibility of objective knowledge of God per se and in principle is a different question, a question which requires careful attention to the risk of anachronistic reading of the dialogue as well as caution regarding the claim that only definitions can serve as explanations.

The issue of Alexander the Great’s divinity has produced an enormous literature. Modern scholars are divided in their view of how Alexander understood his divinity. A. B. Bosworth argued that Alexander really believed that he had a divine nature and so demanded divine honours. For E. Badian Alexander thought he was merely worthy of receiving isotheoi timai (‘honours equal to those of the gods’) but understood that he was not actually divine. This seminar will closely analyse the modern debate on Alexander’s divinity and carefully trace each step by which he came to demand divine honours. It will show how on this important question Badian got closer to the truth than Bosworth.

Pochi hanno indagato con solerzia gli intimi legami fra mitologie greche e fenomeni estatici quali lo "sciamanesimo". Gli orfici conoscevano delle "mappe" per aggirarsi nell'aldilà: erano geografie della coscienza affini ai sentieri invisibili percorsi dagli sciamani nelle loro trance. In Grecia come nelle steppe siberiane, il viaggio diventava mito: Odisseo legato a un albero cosmico ascoltava il linguaggio segreto delle Sirene, mentre gli iniziati varcavano le soglie di Ade certi di poter acquisire una vita paradisiaca. Come gli sciamani ricreavano universi sonori, Orfeo modulava nello spazio un suono incantatorio. Chi può giungere a una tale perfezione? Colui che si è purificato nell'acqua che zampilla dalle gelide fonti di Mnemosyne, il "ricordo" che risveglia la memoria antica e cancella l'angoscia della vita terrena.

Sanctuaries and religion were instrumental in forming the worldview of the ancient Cypriots, and one would expect that social power relations, meanings, and identities were expressed through the holistic concept of sacred landscapes. This contribution primarily discusses the change in the use and perception of sacred landscapes, which were originally constructed in the era of the Cypriot basileis (kings) but continued to function in a new political environment under the control of the Ptolemaic strategos (general). Furthermore, it proposes a contextualized methodology for approaching the study of sacred landscapes in Iron Age Cyprus, revealing new possibilities and their effects on our understanding of Cypriot social, cultural, and political histories and at the same time indicating the limits and the dangers of such a task. Drawing on ideas from theoretical/methodological studies of landscape archaeology and their relevant applications in other Mediterranean histories, this article explores how spatial order (i.e., the hierarchical arrangement of sites), as observed in sacred landscapes, is expected to articulate social order and to be linked with shifting relations of power and cultural influence in an ancient Cypriot context. It also suggests that a closer consideration of sacred landscapes and their complexities from a long-term perspective not only makes the transition from the Cypriot city-kingdoms to the Hellenistic period more comprehensible but also illuminates the political and sociocultural histories of both periods when they are studied in their own terms.

Archaeological Institute of America
Jstor link: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.3764/aja.117.1.0033?searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dpapantoniou%252C%2BGiorgos%26amp%3Bprq%3Damerican%2Bjournal%2Bof%2Barchaeology%26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone%26amp%3Bhp%3D25%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bso%3Drel%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff&resultItemClick=true&Search=yes&searchText=papantoniou%252C&searchText=Giorgos&uid=3737848&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21105808080823

The late Antique mosaic of Orpheus decorated a small room, approximately 18 m2 in area, connected with two even smaller ones, in 4 m2 and the other 2 m2 in area, belonging most likely to a small funerary chapel (or tomb) discovered in the ancient necropolis by the Damascene Gate in Jerusalem; it was discovered in 1901 by H. Vincent.
The author proposes a new interpretation of the iconographic program of the Orpheus myth used by wealthy Christians in a sepulchral context (see Olszewski M.T. «Orphée endeuillé de la mosaïque funéraire de Jérusalem», in Rey Mimoso-Ruiz, B. ed., Actes du colloque «Orphée entre Soleil et ombre», à l’Institut Catholique de Toulouse du 16 au 17 novembre 2007, Inter Lignes, numéros spécial – mars 2008, pp. 205-214, 226). He also proposes a new interpretation of the role Orpheus played in Roman funerary art, concentrating on the importance of the play on words and the visual and textual punning that was popular in ancient art and especially in funerary art. He rejects the popular interpretation of Orpheus as Christ in the Roman catacombs and proposes to interpret the image as that of Orpheus, bard of the departed souls, without any ahistorical connection with Christ. The program of the mosaic from Jerusalem is thus explained as a play on the words Orpheus-orphanos and Chiron (Chi-Rho) and Pan [Παν(τοκράτωρ)].The frequently used Christian funerary formula of resting in peace, Christ or the Lord corresponds
perfectly with the mood created around the mythical bard.
Orpheus’ universal role as singer and musician moving even the most stony of hearts, extolling the beloved departed, is absolutely justified in the context of a 6th-century Christian tomb. Orpheus is a popular and neutral figure, meaning that in effect it does not constitute a threat to Christian theology and can be tolerated by the educated Christians of Jerusalem.

This paper examines the evidence for the obscure Attic goddess Δάειρα / Δαῖρα who received cult in some Attic demes in an Eleusinian context. It is argued that this deity originally had nothing to do with Persephone, Demeter, Aphrodite, Hecate, or Harmonia with whom she is identified in some sources; instead, due prominence is given to the earliest mythographical sources according to which Daeira was an Oceanid (Pherecydes fr. 45 Fowler; Paus. 1.38.7) and a “watery substance”, ἡ ὑγρὰ οὐσία (Aelius Dionysius δ 1 Erbse  = BNJ² 368 F 1). Based on these testimonia, the name Δάειρα / Δαῖρα is etymologized as “the Lady of the Waters”: *δά ϝειρα ‘having δα-’ from PIE *deh₂- ‘water’ (Iranian *dānu- ‘river’), fully parallel to the name of Poseidon (*potei̯ dās ‘the Lord of the Waters’ > Ποτ(ε)ιδᾶς).

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years.

Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura.

This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

https://en.unipress.dk/udgivelser/a/ascending-and-descending-the-acropolis/

This chapter discusses one of the ancient Greek rituals associated with maenads, during which the participants left their homes and the city to worship Dionysus at the mountains. While historians of religion and archaeologists are becoming increasingly aware that the movement of worshipers must have played an important role in their ritual experience, archaeological finds are not available for every ritual. The ritual at the mountain is one such ritual. The chapter therefore turns to the so-called “early” sources on maenadism from the fifth century BC, both literary and visual, and the analysis assumes that these sources form part of the Athenian imaginary, they belong to the realm of representations. The first part describes the structuring of space in the Bacchae, while the second moves back in time to the first third of the fifth century BC and to a small group of Attic vases. Just as the study of archaeological space has proven informative in tracing the worshipers’ experience in a sanctuary, the consistent representation of this mountain space as related to movement, dancing and an altered state of consciousness could also shed some light on the ritual experience of maenads in the Athenian imaginary.

This paper aims to study the influence of the Mediterranean region on the development of the notion of the tragic. Although tragedy is not exclusively Mediterranean, the influence of this region on the development of the notion of the tragic is beyond question. Tragedy arises and flourishes in Greece, continues in Rome with Seneca and reaches its peak with Calderón and especially with Shakespeare, who located many of his plays in Italy and in the Mediterranean area, from Illyria to Greece and Troy. The Italian 17th century gives birth to baroque opera with the works of Monteverdi and Cavalli, who were largely influenced by ancient Greek tragedy, while ‘canonical’ tragedy develops in France with Corneille and Racine, who found their models of perfection in the Augustan age (i.e., the Roman form of classicism). In 18th and 19th century, both Neoclassicism and Romanticism are deeply connected with the Mediterranean: theorists and philosophers of the tragic such as the Schlegel brothers, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner recognize a sharp division between ancient (i.e. Mediterranean) and modern (i.e. Germanic), but attempt to achieve the closest possible contact with Ancient Greece and make Greek literature central to their literary theories. At the same time, both the Neoclassical and Romantic mythological tragedies, such as Alfieri’s Antigone and Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, have Mediterranean settings, as well as some controversial works that attempt to follow Greek models (i.e. Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina). To conclude this overview of the connections between the Mediterranean region and the tragic, it should be noted that the Mediterranean maintains its leading position also in the 20th century tragic production with key figures such as Pirandello, Artaud, Sartre, Genet, Garçia Lorca and Camus.
Camus himself, who was strongly influenced by Greek civilization, claimed that at the center of his work there was «an invincible sun» and defined «Mediterraneity» as the original condition where man lives in harmony with the world and where light dominates. The light and the sun, among the most important features of the Mediterranean, already play a crucial role in Greek Tragedy, where sunlight is one of the main poetic images for denoting the boundary dividing life from death: for example, when Antigone sings her own funeral lament, she takes one last, lingering look at the ‘bright Sun’, before leaving the stage to die (Soph. Ant. 879-80). And before killing himself, Ajax says farewell to the Sun forever, asking him to take the news across the Aegean Sea in distant Salamis, on which he also shone (Soph. Aj. 845-51).
This paper intends to take into account the cultural and imaginative geography established for the Mediterranean region over the course of history, in order to examine how the various cultures around the Mediterranean opened emotional, physical, imaginative and political possibilities for writers and thinkers. It aims to show why the Mediterranean appears to have originated and inspired tragedy and to determine the core aspects of what may be called ‘Mediterranean tragic’.

In the 4th century BC, the first sanctuary for the goddess Isis was built in Athens by Egyptian immigrants. Cults for the Greco-Egyptian deities Isis, Sarapis, Harpocrates, and Anubis are attested in Athens and Attica until late antiquity and enjoyed great popularity among the Athenians. In previous research, these cults have mostly been studied in terms of their distribution and were more or less treated as "exotica". In my paper, however, I will show how the cults of the Greco-Egyptian gods were religiously appropriated and integrated into the local cultic landscape through the actions of individuals and groups. In doing so, I raise the question of the many possible meanings that the cults could have had in the local context of Athens at different times. As a new approach, I apply the theory of the Social Imaginary to describe how a ritual, a sanctuary, or an iconography of a god was imagined and shaped by the agency of individuals and groups. The seminar takes place Tuesday May 17, 2022, 17.00 (Athens time) with live presence at the Swedish Institute at Athens, Mitseon 9, or via Zoom link.

Why was an unknown man insisting he was Alexander the Great received with distinct deference by Roman officials and Bacchic celebration by hundreds of attendants around A.D. 221? Examining Dio Cassius's presentation in light of contemporary beliefs, one finds that the enthusiastic reception most probably was due to the conviction that Alexander had actually returned physically immortal and deified, either resurrected or never having died at all. The respectful awe of the officials was also most likely caused by either this belief or by their holding that this was the dead and disembodied hērōs of the famed conqueror.

The three-headed goddess Hekate is well known from texts and depictions from the middle of the first millenium BC onwards and also a common motive on so-called magical gems from the third or fourth century AD. The present paper presents a collection of the known attestations of magical gems with a depiction of Hekate and classifies these into different groups. The representations of the goddess clearly represent her typical appearance with three heads or faces, but can be separated into groups of triprosopos, trikephalos or a depiction with three heads and three bodies.

In diesem Beitrag wird die Rolle von religiösen Phänomenen des klassischen Griechenlands auf die im Geschichtswerk des Thukydides geschilderten Ereignisse, welche Vorgeschichte und Verlauf des Peloponnesischen Krieges beschreiben, untersucht. Zunächst wird hierzu auf den Forschungsstand und die historiographische Methode des Thukydides, sofern sie für die Themenstellung relevant erscheint, dargelegt. Im Anschluss daran wird anhand zahlreicher Fallbeispiele aus dem Primärwerk, welche skizziert und interpretiert, sowie phänomenologisch gemäß den jeweils politisch zum Tragen kommenden kultisch-religiösen Aspekten typologisiert werden, die komplexe Wechselwirkung zwischen der politischen und religiösen Sphäre beleuchtet. Es zeigt sich hierbei, dass Religion und Kult teils mit bemerkenswertem Pragmatismus als politische „Stilmittel“ eingesetzt werden, teils aber auch dann politisch wirkmächtige Faktoren darstellen, wenn man den traditionell-religiösen Vorstellungen und Praktiken Folge leistet. Ferner reicht die Bandbreite von Begebenheiten, bei welchen religiöse Phänomene politisch wirksam werden, von räumlich wie personell sehr begrenzten Fällen bis hin zu zwischenstaatlichen Auseinandersetzungen größter Tragweite. Zudem lassen sich in Hinblick auf den Umgang mit Religion und Kult bei den hauptsächlichen Konfliktparteien des Peloponnesischen Krieges merkliche Unterschiede konstatieren. Die antike griechische Religion tritt also auch im thukydideischen Geschichtswerk als geradezu omnipräsentes Politikum zutage.

One of Robert Parker’s conclusions in this volume may at first seem a despairingly negative one: “A convincing unifying account of Greek pollution remains elusive, and my inclination remains to think that one cannot be found, since pollution is an immensely flexible metaphor that could be applied in many different spheres”. We can readily agree that a ‘unified theory’ of Greek pollution is impossible; indeed, it would surely be reductive and therefore undesirable. As the contributions to this volume and other ongoing investigations—arriving at a quick pace—persist in demonstrating, there is more profit in continuing to explore the ‘flexible metaphors’ of purity and impurity. From institutional law to traditional norm, from rhetorical slander to substantive crime, from ethical conception to ritual practice, from inner— mental—to outer—corporeal—expressions, the different declensions of purity and impurity reach beyond definitional uncertainties, unveiling some of the richness, diversity, and complexity of ancient realities.

From Homer’s Iliad to the Athenian funeral oration and beyond the “‘beautiful death” was the name that the Greeks used to describe a combatant’s death. From the world of Achilles to democratic Athens, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the warrior’s death was a model that concentrated the representations and the values that served as [masculine] norms.  This should not be a surprise: the Iliad depicts a society at war and in the Achaean camp, at least, a society of men, without children and legitimate wives. Certainly the Athenian polis (“city-state”) reversed the traditional combatant–citizen relationship by claiming that one must be, first, a citizen before being a soldier.  Nevertheless this polis distinguished itself from others by the splendour that it gave the public funeral of its citizens that had died in war and especially by the repatriating of their mortal remains (Thuc. 2.34). In a society that believed in autochthony this repatriation was, undoubtedly, significant. Since the beautiful death crystallised the aretē (“courage”) of Achilles and Athenians alike, it was, from the outset, linked to speech. Indeed heroic death and the civic beautiful death were the subject-matter of elaborate speech. Such a celebratory discourse gave the warrior’s death an eternal existence in memory. This discourse gave his death its reality, but, conversely, also took for itself all that was valued in his accomplished exploit and claimed to be its truthful expression. In short the beautiful death was a paradigm.