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Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
From Homer to Aristotle, understanding anger and harnessing its
power was at the core of Hellenic civilization. Homer created the
framework for philosophical inquiries into anger, one that
persisted until it was overturned by Stoicism and Christianity.
Plato saw anger as the guardian of justice and Aristotle conceived
of it as bound to friendship. Yet both showed that anger can become
a guardian of injustice and a defender of our psychological
abnormalities. Plato claimed that reason is a tertiary factor in
controlling anger and Aristotle argued that non-cognitive powers
can issue commands for anger's arousal - findings that shed light
as to why cognitive therapeutic approaches often prove to be
ineffective. Both proposed nurturing the "thumos," the receptacle
of anger and the seat of self-esteem. Aristotle's view of public
anger as an early warning sign of social dissolution continues to
be relevant to this day. In this carefully argued study, Kostas
Kalimtzis examines the theories of anger in the context of the
ancient world with an eye to their implications for the modern
predicament.
This edition of Thucylides epic chronicle, The History of the
Peloponnesian War, contains all eight books in the authoritative
English translation of Richard Crawley. Thucylides himself was an
Athenian general who personally witnessed the various skirmishes of
the war. Ordering all of the events chronologically - a first for
any work of history - he offers a straightforward account of the
conflict, straying little to personal opinions or permitting his
history to be influenced by the politics of the era. For this,
Thucylides' is lauded for his methodical telling of each battle,
which offers the reader insight into Greek and Spartan tactics and
cultures. Throughout the history, we are given transcripts of
various speeches. Although the inclusion of such lengthy quotations
of sources is unheard of in modern history books, the presence of
lengthy oratory in Thucylides' history is considered to be a
cultural trait: speech and rhetoric were prized in Greece as the
prime means of transferring knowledge.
This informative and enjoyable book surveys many aspects of the
personal and emotional lives and belief systems of the ancient
Greeks, focusing on such issues as familial life, religious piety,
and ethnic identity. This work explores various aspects of ancient
Greek personal and emotional lives, beginning with their
understandings of their own bodies, individual and personal
relationships, and ending with their feelings about religion and
the afterlife. It covers ancient Greek culture from the early
Archaic period in the 8th century BCE through the Late Classical
period in the 4th century BCE. Readers will be fascinated to learn
what the Greeks thought about the gods, physical deformity,
citizenship, nymphs, goats, hospitality, and sexual relations that
would be considered incest by modern standards. The content of the
book provides an intimate sense of what the ancient Greeks were
actually like, connecting ancient experiences to present-day
culture. The chapters span a wide range of topics, including the
human body, family and societal relationships, city life, the world
as they knew it, and religious belief. The author draws extensively
on primary sources to allow the reader to "hear" the Greeks speak
for themselves and presents evidence from literature, art, and
architecture in order to depict the ancient Greeks as living,
breathing, thinking, and feeling people. Provides an unprecedented
survey of ancient Greeks that describes the full scope of the
personal and emotional lives of the actual people who gave rise to
Greek laws, literature, and culture Reconstructs the everyday,
emotional experiences of individuals in the ancient world and
depicts the ways in which details of private life affected the
individual's world view Covers all regions inhabited by the Greeks
from the Archaic through the Classical periods, including the Greek
mainland and islands, western Turkey, the Black Sea, North Africa,
Sicily, and southern Italy
A systematic and historical treatment of the civil and criminal
procedure of Cicero's time. At the same time, the author examines
the legal difficulties and contradictions found in Cicero's
writings on procedure. With a subject index and index to passages
found in Cicero's works. Of value to the student of Roman Law,
ciminal and military procedure and law, and the history of European
courts.
Mercury's Wings: Exploring Modes of Communication in the Ancient
World is the first-ever volume of essays devoted to ancient
communications. Comparable previous work has been mainly confined
to articles on aspects of communication in the Roman empire. This
set of 18 essays with an introduction by the co-editors marks a
milestone, therefore, that demonstrates the importance and rich
further potential of the topic. The authors, who include art
historians, Assyriologists, Classicists and Egyptologists, take the
broad view of communications as a vehicle not just for the
transmission of information, but also for the conduct of religion,
commerce, and culture. Encompassed within this scope are varied
purposes of communication such as propaganda and celebration, as
well as profit and administration. Each essay deals with a
communications network, or with a means or type of communication,
or with the special features of religious communication or
communication in and among large empires. The spatial, temporal,
and cultural boundaries of the volume take in the Near East as well
as Greece and Rome, and cover a period of some 2,000 years
beginning in the second millennium BCE and ending with the spread
of Christianity during the last centuries of the Roman Empire in
the West. In all, about one quarter of the essays deal with the
Near East, one quarter with Greece, one quarter with Greece and
Rome together, and one quarter with the Roman empire and its
Persian and Indian rivals. Some essays concern topics in cultural
history, such as Greek music and Roman art; some concern economic
history in both Mesopotamia and Rome; and some concern traditional
historical topics such as diplomacy and war in the Mediterranean
world. Each essay draws on recent work in the theory of
communications.
This is a pioneering study that examines the sale of sex in
classical Athens from a commercial (rather than from a cultural or
moral) perspective. Following the author's earlier book on Athenian
banking, Athenian Prostitution analyzes erotic business at Athens
not anachronistically, but in the context of the Athenian economy.
For the Athenians, the social acceptability and moral standing of
human labor was largely determined by the conditions under which
work was performed. Pursued in a context characteristic of servile
endeavor, prostitution-like all forms of slave labor-was
contemptible. Pursued under conditions appropriate to non-servile
endeavor, prostitution-like all forms of free labor-was not
violative of Athenian work ethics. As a mercantile activity,
however, prostitution was not untouched by Athenian antagonism
toward commercial and manual pursuits; as the "business of sex,"
prostitution further evoked negativity from segments of Greek
opinion uncomfortable with any form of carnality. Yet ancient
sources also adumbrate another view, in which the sale of sex,
lawful and indeed pervasive at Athens, is presented alluringly. In
Athenian Prostitution, Edward E. Cohen explores the high
compensation earned by female sexual entrepreneurs who often
controlled prostitutional businesses that were perpetuated from
generation to generation on a matrilineal basis, and that
benefitted from legislative restrictions on pimping. The author
juxtaposes the widespread practice of "prostitution pursuant to
written contract" with legislation targeting male prostitutes
functioning as governmental leaders, and explores the seemingly
contradictory phenomena of extensive sexual exploitation of slave
prostitutes (male and female) coexisting with Athenian society's
pride in its legislative protection of slaves and minors against
sexual outrage.
Situated within contemporary posthumanism, this volume offers
theoretical and practical approaches to materiality in Greek
tragedy. Established and emerging scholars explore how works of the
three major Greek tragedians problematize objects and affect,
providing fresh readings of some of the masterpieces of Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides. The so-called new materialisms have
complemented the study of objects as signifiers or symbols with an
interest in their agency and vitality, their sensuous force and
psychosomatic impact-and conversely their resistance and
irreducible aloofness. At the same time, emotion has been recast as
material "affect," an intense flow of energies between bodies,
animate and inanimate. Powerfully contributing to the current
critical debate on materiality, the essays collected here
destabilize established interpretations, suggesting alternative
approaches and pointing toward a newly robust sense of the
physicality of Greek tragedy.
Canidia is one of the most well-attested witches in Latin
literature. She appears in no fewer than six of Horace's poems,
three of which she has a prominent role in. Throughout Horace's
Epodes and Satires she perpetrates acts of grave desecration,
kidnapping, murder, magical torture and poisoning. She invades the
gardens of Horace's literary patron Maecenas, rips apart a lamb
with her teeth, starves a Roman child to death, and threatens to
unnaturally prolong Horace's life to keep him in a state of
perpetual torment. She can be seen as an anti-muse: Horace
repeatedly sets her in opposition to his literary patron, casts her
as the personification of his iambic poetry, and gives her the
surprising honor of concluding not only his Epodes but also his
second book of Satires. This volume is the first comprehensive
treatment of Canidia. It offers translations of each of the three
poems which feature Canidia as a main character as well as the
relevant portions from the other three poems in which Canidia plays
a minor role. These translations are accompanied by extensive
analysis of Canidia's part in each piece that takes into account
not only the poems' literary contexts but their magico-religious
details.
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