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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC
BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship
Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected
open access locations. At the heart of this volume are three trials
held in Athens in the fourth century BCE. The defendants were all
women and in each case the charges involved a combination of ritual
activities. Two were condemned to death. Because of the brevity of
the ancient sources, and their lack of agreement, the precise
charges are unclear, and the reasons for taking these women to
court remain mysterious. Envy, Poison, and Death takes the
complexity and confusion of the evidence not as a riddle to be
solved, but as revealing multiple social dynamics. It explores the
changing factors - material, ideological, and psychological - that
may have provoked these events. It focuses in particular on the
dual role of envy (phthonos) and gossip as processes by which
communities identified people and activities that were dangerous,
and examines how and why those local, even individual, dynamics may
have come to shape official civic decisions during a time of
perceived hardship. At first sight so puzzling, these trials reveal
a vivid picture of the socio-political environment of Athens during
the early-mid fourth century BCE, including responses to changes in
women's status and behaviour, and attitudes to ritual activities
within the city. The volume reveals some of the characters, events,
and even emotions that would help to shape an emergent concept of
magic: it suggests that the boundary of acceptable behaviour was
shifting, not only within the legal arena but also through the
active involvement of society beyond the courts.
This volume offers new insights into ancient figurations of
temporality by focusing on the relationship between gender and time
across a range of genres. Each chapter in this collection places
gender at the center of its exploration of time, and the volume
includes time in treatises, genealogical lists, calendars,
prophetic literature, ritual practice and historical and poetic
narratives from the Greco-Roman world. Many of the chapters begin
with female characters, but all of them emphasize how and why time
is an integral component of ancient categories of female and male.
Relying on theorists who offer ways to explore the connections
between time and gender encoded in narrative tropes, plots,
pronouns, images or metaphors, the contributors tease out how time
and gender were intertwined in the symbolic register of Greek and
Roman thought. Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity provides
a rich and provocative theoretical analysis of time-and its
relationship to gender-in ancient texts. It will be of interest to
anyone working on time in the ancient world, or students of gender
in antiquity.
Esther Eidinow sets the published question tablets from the oracle
at Dodona side by side with the binding-curse tablets from across
the ancient Greek world, and explores what they can tell us about
perceptions of and expressions of risk among ordinary Greek men and
women, as well as the insights they afford into civic institutions
and activities, and social dynamics. Eidinow follows the
anthropologist Mary Douglas in defining risk' as socially
constructed, in contradistinction to most other ancient historians,
who treat risk-management as a way of handling objective external
dangers. The book includes a full catalogue of all published texts
from Dodona, as well as the 159 curse tablets discussed, together
with translations of all texts.
Contributions in this volume demonstrate how, across the ancient
Mediterranean and over hundreds of years, women's rituals
intersected with the political, economic, cultural, or religious
spheres of their communities in a way that has only recently
started to gain sustained academic attention. The volume aims to
tease out a number of different approaches and contexts, and to
expand existing studies of women in the ancient world as well as
scholarship on religious and social history. The contributors face
a famously difficult task: ancient authors rarely recorded aspects
of women's lives, including their songs, prophecies, and prayers.
Many of the objects women made and used in ritual were perishable
and have not survived; certain kinds of ritual objects (lowly
undecorated pots, for example) tend not even to be recorded in
archaeological reports. However, the broad range of contributions
in this volume demonstrates the multiplicity of materials that can
be used as evidence - including inscriptions, textiles, ceramics,
figurative art, and written sources - and the range of
methodologies that can be used, from analysis of texts, images, and
material evidence to cognitive and comparative approaches.
The impulse to try to anticipate the future, and make sense of
apparently random events, is irrepressible. Why and how the ancient
Greeks tried to foretell the outcome of the present is the subject
of Esther Eidinow's lively appraisal, which explores the legacy of
ancient Greek notions of luck, fate and fortune in our own era,
drawing on approaches to cognitive anthropology. Perhaps the most
famous of all sites of prediction is the Oracle at Delphi. But the
Delphic Oracle is only the best-known example from a landscape
covered by oracular sanctuaries; while across the literary genres
of antiquity there are myriad tales - such as that of doomed
Oedipus - which wrestle with the cruel vicissitudes of fate and
fortune. Exploring some of the key ideas of ancient Greek culture
that resonate with modern conceptions of destiny, Eidinow examines
the ancients' notion of luck as a means to explain daily
experiences. Focusing on writers such as Homer, Herodotus,
Thucydides and Demosthenes, the author shows how concepts of fate
in antiquity changed over time, in response to social and political
currents. She draws too on modern cultural texts like "Terminator
2" and "Lawrence of Arabia", demonstrating how the recurring
questions 'what if?' and 'why me?' are fundamental to the human
relationship with an uncertain future, whether it be in the ancient
past or the present day.
This volume offers new insights into ancient figurations of
temporality by focusing on the relationship between gender and time
across a range of genres. Each chapter in this collection places
gender at the center of its exploration of time, and the volume
includes time in treatises, genealogical lists, calendars,
prophetic literature, ritual practice and historical and poetic
narratives from the Greco-Roman world. Many of the chapters begin
with female characters, but all of them emphasize how and why time
is an integral component of ancient categories of female and male.
Relying on theorists who offer ways to explore the connections
between time and gender encoded in narrative tropes, plots,
pronouns, images or metaphors, the contributors tease out how time
and gender were intertwined in the symbolic register of Greek and
Roman thought. Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity provides
a rich and provocative theoretical analysis of time-and its
relationship to gender-in ancient texts. It will be of interest to
anyone working on time in the ancient world, or students of gender
in antiquity.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC
BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship
Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected
open access locations. This volume sets out to re-examine what
ancient people - primarily those in ancient Greek and Roman
communities, but also Mesopotamian and Chinese cultures - thought
they were doing through divination, and what this can tell us about
the religions and cultures in which divination was practised. The
chapters, authored by a range of established experts and upcoming
early-career scholars, engage with four shared questions: What
kinds of gods do ancient forms of divination presuppose? What
beliefs, anxieties, and hopes did divination seek to address? What
were the limits of human 'control' of divination? What kinds of
human-divine relationships did divination create/sustain? The
volume as a whole seeks to move beyond functionalist approaches to
divination in order to identify and elucidate previously
understudied aspects of ancient divinatory experience and practice.
Special attention is paid to the experiences of non-elites, the
perception of divine presence, the ways in which divinatory
techniques could surprise their users by yielding unexpected or
unwanted results, the difficulties of interpretation with which
divinatory experts were thought to contend, and the possibility
that divination could not just ease, but also exacerbate, anxiety
in practitioners and consultants.
Contributions in this volume demonstrate how, across the ancient
Mediterranean and over hundreds of years, women's rituals
intersected with the political, economic, cultural, or religious
spheres of their communities in a way that has only recently
started to gain sustained academic attention. The volume aims to
tease out a number of different approaches and contexts, and to
expand existing studies of women in the ancient world as well as
scholarship on religious and social history. The contributors face
a famously difficult task: ancient authors rarely recorded aspects
of women's lives, including their songs, prophecies, and prayers.
Many of the objects women made and used in ritual were perishable
and have not survived; certain kinds of ritual objects (lowly
undecorated pots, for example) tend not even to be recorded in
archaeological reports. However, the broad range of contributions
in this volume demonstrates the multiplicity of materials that can
be used as evidence - including inscriptions, textiles, ceramics,
figurative art, and written sources - and the range of
methodologies that can be used, from analysis of texts, images, and
material evidence to cognitive and comparative approaches.
The cognitive science of religion does not have its own
methodology, and yet from the very beginnings of the discipline,
methodology has defined it not only in relation to the general
study of religion in the humanities but also to the sciences
interested in the mind. Scholars of the cognitive science of
religion are using a range of methodologies, borrowing mostly from
the cognitive sciences and experimental psychology, but also from
biology, archaeology, history, philosophy, linguistics, the social
and statistical sciences, neurosciences, and anthropology. In fact,
this multi-disciplinarity defines the cognitive science of
religion. Such multi-disciplinarity requires hard work and truly
interdisciplinary teams, but also continual reflections on and
debates about the methodologies being used. In fact, no study of
the cognitive science of religion worth its name can rely on only
one methodology. Triangulation is standard, but often even more
approaches are used. This book consists of selected papers from the
Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion and the Journal of
Cognitive Historiography. Each chapter demonstrates a particular
method or group of methods and how those methods advance our
knowledge of the religious mind from the ancient past up to today.
This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of scholarship in
ancient Greek religion, from the Archaic to the Hellenistic
periods. It presents not only key information, but also explores
the ways in which such information is gathered and the different
approaches that have shaped the area. In doing so, the volume
provides a crucial research and orientation tool for students of
the ancient world, and also makes a vital contribution to the key
debates surrounding the conceptualization of ancient Greek
religion. The handbook's initial chapters lay out the key
dimensions of ancient Greek religion, approaches to evidence, and
the representations of myths. The following chapters discuss the
continuities and differences between religious practices in
different cultures, including Egypt, the Near East, the Black Sea,
and Bactria and India. The range of contributions emphasizes the
diversity of relationships between mortals and the supernatural -
in all their manifestations, across, between, and beyond ancient
Greek cultures - and draws attention to religious activities as
dynamic, highlighting how they changed over time, place, and
context.
How did ancient Greek men and women deal with the uncertainty and
risk of everyday life? What did they fear most, and how did they
manage their anxieties? Esther Eidinow sets side-by-side two
collections of material usually studied in isolation: binding curse
tablets from across the ancient world, and the collection of
published private questions from the oracle at Dodona in north-west
Greece. Eidinow uses these texts to explore perceptions of risk and
uncertainty in ancient society, challenging previous explanations.
In these records we hear voices that are rarely, if ever, heard in
literary texts and history books. The questions and curses in these
tablets comprise fervent, sometimes ferocious appeals to the gods.
The stories they tell offer tantalizing glimpses of everyday life,
carrying the reader through the teeming ancient city - both its
physical setting and its social dynamics. Among these tablets we
find prostitutes and publicans, doctors and soldiers, netmakers and
silver-workers, actors and seamstresses. Anxious litigants ask the
gods to silence their opponents. Men inquire about the paternity of
their children. Women beg the gods to help them keep their men.
Business rivals try to corner the market. Slaves plead to escape
their masters. This material takes us beyond the headlines of
ancient history, offering new insights into institutions,
activities, and relationships. Above all, individually and
together, these texts help us to understand some of the ways in
which ancient Greek men and women understood the world. In turn,
the beliefs and activities of an ancient culture may shed light on
modern attitudes to risk.
For some time interest has been growing in a dialogue between
modern scientific research into human cognition and research in the
humanities. This ground-breaking volume focuses this dialogue on
the religious experience of men and women in the ancient Greek and
Roman worlds. Each chapter examines a particular historical problem
arising from an ancient religious activity and the contributions
range across a wide variety of both ancient contexts and sources,
exploring and integrating literary, epigraphic, visual and
archaeological evidence. In order to avoid a simple polarity
between physical aspects (ritual) and mental aspects (belief) of
religion, the contributors draw on theories of cognition as
embodied, emergent, enactive and extended, accepting the
complexity, multimodality and multicausality of human life. Through
this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters open up new questions
around and develop new insights into the physical, emotional, and
cognitive aspects of ancient religions.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC
BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship
Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected
open access locations. At the heart of this volume are three trials
held in Athens in the fourth century BCE. The defendants were all
women and in each case the charges involved a combination of ritual
activities. Two were condemned to death. Because of the brevity of
the ancient sources, and their lack of agreement, the precise
charges are unclear, and the reasons for taking these women to
court remain mysterious. Envy, Poison, and Death takes the
complexity and confusion of the evidence not as a a riddle to be
solved, but as revealing multiple social dynamics. It explores the
changing factors-material, ideological, and psychological-that may
have provoked these events. It focuses in particular on the dual
role of envy (phthonos) and gossip as processes by which
communities identified people and activities that were dangerous,
and examines how and why those local, even individual, dynamics may
have come to shape official civic decisions during a time of
perceived hardship. At first sight so puzzling, these trials reveal
a vivid picture of the socio-political environment of Athens during
the early-mid fourth century BCE, including responses to changes in
women's status and behaviour, and attitudes to ritual activities
within the city. The volume reveals some of the characters, events,
and even emotions that would help to shape an emergent concept of
magic: it suggests that the boundary of acceptable behaviour was
shifting, not only within the legal arena but also through the
active involvement of society beyond the courts.
Studied for many years by scholars with Christianising assumptions,
Greek religion has often been said to be quite unlike Christianity:
a matter of particular actions (orthopraxy), rather than particular
beliefs (orthodoxies). This volume dares to think that, both in and
through religious practices and in and through religious thought
and literature, the ancient Greeks engaged in a sustained
conversation about the nature of the gods and how to represent and
worship them. It excavates the attitudes towards the gods implicit
in cult practice and analyses the beliefs about the gods embedded
in such diverse texts and contexts as comedy, tragedy, rhetoric,
philosophy, ancient Greek blood sacrifice, myth and other forms of
storytelling. The result is a richer picture of the supernatural in
ancient Greece, and a whole series of fresh questions about how
views of and relations to the gods changed over time.
Studied for many years by scholars with Christianising assumptions,
Greek religion has often been said to be quite unlike Christianity:
a matter of particular actions (orthopraxy), rather than particular
beliefs (orthodoxies). This volume dares to think that, both in and
through religious practices and in and through religious thought
and literature, the ancient Greeks engaged in a sustained
conversation about the nature of the gods and how to represent and
worship them. It excavates the attitudes towards the gods implicit
in cult practice and analyses the beliefs about the gods embedded
in such diverse texts and contexts as comedy, tragedy, rhetoric,
philosophy, ancient Greek blood sacrifice, myth and other forms of
storytelling. The result is a richer picture of the supernatural in
ancient Greece, and a whole series of fresh questions about how
views of and relations to the gods changed over time.
The cognitive science of religion does not have its own
methodology, and yet from the very beginnings of the discipline,
methodology has defined it not only in relation to the general
study of religion in the humanities but also to the sciences
interested in the mind. Scholars of the cognitive science of
religion are using a range of methodologies, borrowing mostly from
the cognitive sciences and experimental psychology, but also from
biology, archaeology, history, philosophy, linguistics, the social
and statistical sciences, neurosciences, and anthropology. In fact,
this multi-disciplinarity defines the cognitive science of
religion. Such multi-disciplinarity requires hard work and truly
interdisciplinary teams, but also continual reflections on and
debates about the methodologies being used. In fact, no study of
the cognitive science of religion worth its name can rely on only
one methodology. Triangulation is standard, but often even more
approaches are used. This book consists of selected papers from the
Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion and the Journal of
Cognitive Historiography. Each chapter demonstrates a particular
method or group of methods and how those methods advance our
knowledge of the religious mind from the ancient past up to today.
This handbook offers both students and teachers of ancient Greek
religion a comprehensive overview of the current state of
scholarship in the subject, from the Archaic to the Hellenistic
periods. It not only presents key information, but also explores
the ways in which such information is gathered and the different
approaches that have shaped the area. In doing so, the volume
provides a crucial research and orientation tool for students of
the ancient world, and also makes a vital contribution to the key
debates surrounding the conceptualization of ancient Greek
religion. The handbook's initial chapters lay out the key
dimensions of ancient Greek religion, approaches to evidence, and
the representations of myths. The following chapters discuss the
continuities and differences between religious practices in
different cultures, including Egypt, the Near East, the Black Sea,
and Bactria and India. The range of contributions emphasizes the
diversity of relationships between mortals and the supernatural -
in all their manifestations, across, between, and beyond ancient
Greek cultures - and draws attention to religious activities as
dynamic, highlighting how they changed over time, place, and
context.
What did the ancient Greeks eat and drink? What role did migration
play? Why was emperor Nero popular with the ordinary people but
less so with the upper classes? Why (according to ancient authors)
was Oedipus ('with swollen foot') so called? For over 2,000 years
the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome have captivated our
collective imagination and provided inspiration for so many aspects
of our lives, from culture, literature, drama, cinema, and
television to society, education, and politics. Many of the roots
of the way life is lived in the West today can be traced to the
ancient civilizations, not only in politics, law, technology,
philosophy, and science, but also in social and family life,
language, and art. Beautiful illustrations, clear and authoritative
entries, and a useful chronology and bibliography make this
Companion the perfect guide for readers interested in learning more
about the Graeco-Roman world. As well as providing sound
information on all aspects of classical civilization such as
history, politics, ethics, morals, law, society, religion,
mythology, science and technology, language, literature, art, and
scholarship, the entries in the Companion reflect the changing
interdisciplinary aspects of classical studies, covering broad
thematic subjects, such as race, nationalism, gender, ethics, and
ecology, confirming the impact classical civilizations have had on
the modern world.
'offers not only that breakfast for the mind we keep hearing about,
but lunch, tea, dinner, supper and non-stop snacks...offers a
cornucopia of accurate and succinct knowledge that would be hard to
equal' (Peter Green, Washington Times about the third edition). For
over sixty years, The Oxford Classical Dictionary has been the
unrivalled one-volume reference in the field of classics. Now
completely revised and updated to include the very latest research
findings, developments, and publications, this highly acclaimed
reference work will be the most up-to-date and comprehensive
dictionary available on all aspects of the classical era. In over
6,700 entries written by the very best of classical scholars from
around the world, the Dictionary provides coverage of Greek and
Roman history, literature, myth, religion, linguistics, philosophy,
law, science, art, archaeology, near eastern studies, and late
antiquity. New entries supplement the existing material, including
entries on topics such as Adrasteia, Latin anthologies, Jewish art,
ancient religious beliefs, emotions, film, gender, kinship, and
many more. Other specific developments include an added focus on
two new areas: 'anthropology ' and 'reception'. All entries are
written in an accessible style and all Latin and Greek words have
been translated to ensure ease of use. Under the editorship of
Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow, a huge
range of contributors have revised and updated the text, which has
made an already outstanding work even better. The Dictionary
covers: 1) politics, government, economy - from political figures
to political systems, terms and practices, histories of major
states and empires, economic theory, agriculture, artisans and
industry, trade and markets 2) religion and mythology - deities and
mythological creatures, beliefs and rituals, sanctuaries and sacred
buildings, astrology 3) law and philosophy - from biographies of
lawgivers and lawyers to legal terms and procedures, from major and
minor philosophers to philosophical schools, terms, and concepts 4)
science and geography - scientists and specific theory and
practice, doctors and medicine, climate and landscape, natural
disasters, regions and islands, cities and settlements,
communications 5) languages, literature, art, and architecture -
languages and dialects, writers and literary terms and genres,
orators and rhetorical theory and practice, drama and performance,
art, painters and sculptors, architects, buildings and materials 6)
archaeology and historical writing - amphorae and pottery,
shipwrecks and cemeteries, historians, and Greek and Roman
historiography 7) military history - generals, arms and armour,
famous battles, attitudes to warfare 8) social history, sex, and
gender - women and the family, kinship, peasants and slaves,
attitudes to sexuality
The cultural impulse to try to anticipate the future, and make
sense of apparently random events, is irrepressible. Perhaps the
most famous of all sites of prediction is the Oracle of Delphi. How
the world of antiquity, and particularly the ancient Greeks, tried
to foretell the outcome of the present, serves as Esther Eidinow's
starting-point for an appraisal of that legacy of forecasting in
our own era. Delphi is still invoked when business people discuss
future strategy and risk; these is even a strategic planning
technique called the "Delphi Method." But the Delphic Oracle is
only the best known example of a physical landscape covered by
oracular sanctuaries; while across classical literary genres, there
are myriad tales - such as that of doomed Oedipus - which wrestle
with the cruel vicissitudes of fate and fortune. Exploring notions
of destiny related by writers like Homer, Herodotus, and Sophocles,
Esther Eidinow discusses ancient augurial theories and methods,
including sacrifice, cleromancy (dicing), and astromancy (telling
of the stars). She then turns to ideas about moral luck and later
Roman use of prophecy for maintenance of the pax deorum. Drawing on
modern texts as diverse as the Terminator films and Solitaire's
tarot reading in Live and Let Die, the author shows how the the
recurring questions "what if?" and "why me?" are a fundamental part
of what it means to be human, whether in the ancient past or the
present day.
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