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In this engrossing retelling of Greek myth, Jean-Pierre Vernant
combines his profound knowledge of the subject with brilliant and
original story-telling. Beginning with the creation of Earth out of
Chaos, Vernant continues with the castration of Uranus, the war
between the Titans and the gods of Olympus, the wily ruses of
Prometheus and Zeus, and the creation of Pandora, the first woman.
His narrative takes us from the Trojan War to the voyage of
Odysseus, from the story of Dionysus to the terrible destiny of
Oedipus and to Perseus's confrontation with the Gorgons.
Jean-Pierre Vernant has devoted himself to the study of Greek
mythology. In recounting these tales, he unravels for us their
multiple meanings and brings to life cherished figures of legend
whose stories lie at the origin of our civilization.
"Full of matter for anyone interested in language, religion, and
politics in the ancient world."--R. T. Ridley, "Journal of
Religion"
With this book, three distinguished French historians tell the
story of the birth of writing and reason, explaining how the
logical and religious structures of Near Eastern and Mesopotamian
cultures served as precursors to those of the West.
Jean-Pierre Vernant's concise, brilliant essay on the origins of
Greek thought relates the cultural achievement of the ancient
Greeks to their physical and social environment and shows that what
they believed in was inseparable from the way they lived. The
emergence of rational thought, Vernant claims, is closely linked to
the advent of the open-air politics that characterized life in the
Greek polis. Vernant points out that when the focus of Mycenaean
society gave way to the agora, the change had profound social and
cultural implications. "Social experience could become the object
of pragmatic thought for the Greeks," he writes, "because in the
city-state it lent itself to public debate. The decline of myth
dates from the day the first sages brought human order under
discussion and sought to define it. . . . Thus evolved a strictly
political thought, separate from religion, with its own vocabulary,
concepts, principles, and theoretical aims."
A classic work that rereads questions of "muthos" and "logos" in
multifaceted contexts. When Jean-Pierre Vernant first published
Myth and Thought among the Greeks in 1965, it transformed the field
of ancient Greek scholarship, calling forth a new way to think
about Greek myth and thought. In eighteen essays-three of which,
along with a new preface, are translated into English for the first
time-Vernant freed the subject of ancient Greece from its
philological chains and reread the questions of "muthos" and
"logos" within multifaced and transdisciplinary contexts-of
religion, ritual, and art, philosophy, science, social and economic
institutions, and historical psychology. A major contribution to
both the humanities and the social sciences, Myth and Thought among
the Greeks aims to come to terms with a single, essential question:
How were individual persons in ancient Greece inseparable from a
social and cultural environment of which they were simultaneously
the creators and products? Seven themes organize this stellar
work-from "Myth Structures" and "Mythic Aspects of Memory and Time"
to "The Organization of Space," "Work and Technological Thought,"
and "Personal Identity and Religion." A master storyteller, an
innovative, precise, and original thinker, Vernant continues to
change the narratives we tell about the histories of civilizations
and the histories of human beings in their individual and
collective identities.
Rich with implications for the history of sexuality, gender issues,
and patterns of hellenic literary imagining, Marcel Detienne's
landmark book, first published in 1972, recast long-standing ideas
about the fertility myth of Adonis. The author challenges Sir James
Frazer's thesis that the vegetation god Adonis - whose premature
death was mourned by women and whose resurrection marked a joyous
occasion - represented the annual cycle of growth and decay in
agriculture. Using the analytic tools of structuralism, Detienne
shows instead that the festivals of Adonis depict a seductive but
impotent and fruitless deity - whose physical ineptitude led to his
death in a boar hunt, after which his body was found in a lettuce
patch. Contrasting the festivals of Adonis with the solemn ones
dedicated to Demeter, the goddess of grain, he reveals the former
as a parody and negation of the institution of marriage. Detienne
considers the short-lived gardens that Athenian women planted in
mockery for Adonis's festival, and explores the function of such
vegetal matter as spices, mint, myrrh, cereal, and wet plants in
religious practice and in a wide selection of myths. His inquiry
exposes, among many things, the way sin which women of various
martial statuses were regarded and attitudes toward sexual activity
ranging from "perverse" acts to marital relations.
Jean-Pierre Vernant has profoundly transformed our perceptions
of ancient Greece. Published in 1991, this collection of nineteen
essays probes deeply into themes of enduring interest--death, the
body, the soul, the individual, and relations between mortals and
immortals; the mask, the mirror, the image, and the imagination;
the self and the other, and, more broadly, the concept of otherness
itself, or "alterity."
In this enchanting retelling of Greek myth, Jean-Pierre Vernant combines his deep knowledge of the subject with an original storytelling style. Beginning with the creation of Earth out of Chaos, Vernant continues with the castration of Uranus, the war between the Titans and the Olympian gods, the wily ruses of Prometheus and Zeus, and the creation of Pandora, the first woman. His narrative takes readers from the Trojan War to the voyage of Odysseus, from the story of Dionysus to the terrible destiny of Oedipus, to Perseus's confrontation with the Gorgons. Jean-Pierre Vernant has devoted himself to the study of Greek mythology. In recounting these tales, he unravels for us their multiple meanings and brings to life the beloved figures of legend whose narratives lie at the origin of our civilization.
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