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The figure of Orpheus has long exercised a potent influence on
religious thought. Yet what we know directly about Orphism comes
from a scatter of isolated and often very short fragments quoted in
the works of Platonists of the Roman period, notably Proclus,
Damascius and Olympiodorus. The author's concern here is to
establish the context in which these passages were cited, and to
trace the development of the written tradition, from the texts
which contain a critique of the beliefs of the Homeric era to
those, whether newly composed or transformed, which show signs of
adaptation to later religious and philosophical movements, among
them Stoicism and Platonism. In sharp contrast to views held by
others, it is argued that it is possible to map out a process of
evolution, amongst other criteria by focusing on the role and place
of Chronos in the Orphic theogony. The author also asks whether
there really ever existed true Orphic sects with a cult with
specific rites, and would conclude that the present evidence cannot
be held to substantiate this. Orphee a pendant longtemps exerce une
puissante influence sur la pensee religieuse. Cependant, ce que
nous connaissons directement de l'OrphA-sme se reduit A une poignee
de fragments isoles et souvent tres courts qui se trouvent
eparpilles dans les oeuvres de Platoniciens ayant vecu sous
l'Empire romain, surtout Proclus, Damascius et Olympiodore. Dans
les articles qui composent ce recueil, l'auteur s'est attache A
reconstituer les contextes dans lesquels ces passages sont cites,
et A comprendre comment s'est developpee la tradition ecrite A
laquelle ils appartiennent, depuis les textes qui critiquent les
croyances vehiculees par Homere et par Hesiode et qui, ayant fait
l'objet d'une redaction ou d'une transformation recente, presentent
les signes d'une adaptation A des mouvements religieux ou
philosophiques tardifs, le StoA-cisme et le medio-Platonisme entre
autres. S'opposant en cela A b
In this concise but wide-ranging study, Luc Brisson describes how
the myths of Greece and Rome were transmitted from antiquity to the
Renaissance. He argues that philosophy was responsible for saving
myth from historical annihilation. Although philosophy was
initially critical of myth, mythology was progressively
reincorporated into philosophy through allegory. Brisson reveals
how philosophers employed allegory and how it enabled myth to take
on a number of different interpretive systems throughout the
centuries: moral, physical, psychological, political, and even
metaphysical.
"This wonderful book confirms Brisson's status as one of the major
authorities in the field of classical antiquity. Overall, and with
this excellent translation, the book is
invaluable."--"Choice"
"A compressed overview with moments of great insight. . . . Its
strengths lie in the details Brisson is able to work into this
brief treatment."--Peter Struck, "Journal of Religion"
We think of a myth as a fictional story, and Plato was the first to
use the term "muthos" in that sense. But Plato also used "muthos"
to describe the practice of making and telling myths, the oral
transmission of all that a community keeps in its collective
memory. In the first part of this text, Luc Brisson reconstructs
Plato's multifaceted and not uncritical description of "muthos" in
light of the latter's famous Atlantis story. The second part of the
book contrasts this sense of myth, as Plato does, with another form
of speech which he believed was far superior: the "logos" of
philosophy. Brisson's work is part lexical, part philosophical, and
part ethnological, and Gerard Naddaf's substantial introduction
shows the originality and importance both of Brisson's method and
of Plato's analysis in the context of contemporary debates over the
origin and evolution of the oral tradition.
Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the
intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws
and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In more than sixty
essays by an international team of scholars, this volume explores
the full breadth and reach of Greek thought--investigating what the
Greeks knew as well as what they thought about what they knew, and
what they believed, invented, and understood about the conditions
and possibilities of knowing. Calling attention to the
characteristic reflexivity of Greek thought, the analysis in this
book reminds us of what our own reflections owe to theirs.
In sections devoted to philosophy, politics, the pursuit of
knowledge, major thinkers, and schools of thought, this work shows
us the Greeks looking at themselves, establishing the terms for
understanding life, language, production, and action. The authors
evoke not history, but the stories the Greeks told themselves about
history; not their poetry, but their poetics; not their speeches,
but their rhetoric. Essays that survey political, scientific, and
philosophical ideas, such as those on Utopia and the Critique of
Politics, Observation and Research, and Ethics; others on specific
fields from Astronomy and History to Mathematics and Medicine; new
perspectives on major figures, from Anaxagoras to Zeno of Elea;
studies of core traditions from the Milesians to the various
versions of Platonism: together these offer a sense of the
unquenchable thirst for knowledge that marked Greek
civilization--and that Aristotle considered a natural and universal
trait of humankind. With thirty-two pages of color illustrations,
this work conveys the splendor and vitality of the Greek
intellectual adventure.
In his "Symposium," Plato crafted a set of speeches in praise of
love that has influenced writers and artists from antiquity to the
present. Early Christian writers read the dialogue's 'ascent
passage' as a vision of the soul's journey to heaven. Ficino's
commentary on the "Symposium" inspired poets and artists throughout
Renaissance Europe and introduced 'a Platonic love' into common
speech. Themes or images from the dialogue have appeared in
paintings or sketches by Rubens, David, Feuerbach, and La Farge, as
well as in musical compositions by Satie and Bernstein. The
dialogue's view of love as 'desire for eternal possession of the
good' is still of enormous philosophical interest in its own right.
Nevertheless, questions remain concerning the meaning of specific
features, the significance of the dialogue as a whole, and the
character of its influence. This volume brings together an
international team of scholars to address such questions.
This fascinating book collects and translates most of the extant
written Graeco-Roman material on human beings, divinities, animals,
and other creatures who were said to have been both female and
male. Luc Brisson provides a commentary that situates this rich
source material within its historical and intellectual contexts.
These selections--from mythological, philosophical, historical, and
anecdotal sources--describe cases of either simultaneous dual
sexuality, as in androgyny and in hermaphroditism, or successive
dual sexuality, as in the case of Tiresias (the blind Theban
prophet), which are found through the whole span of Graeco-Roman
antiquity. "Sexual Ambivalence "is an invaluable sourcebook that
gathers this suggestive, yet hard to find, material in one
convenient place.
This book presents some very obscure but wonderfully strange
material. There is the ghost story about a father who returns from
the dead to devour his dual-sexed son in the public square, leaving
behind only the head, which proceeds to deliver a prophecy from its
position on the ground. In addition to including such familiar
sources as the myths of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as told in
Ovid's "Metamorphoses "and Aristophanes' myth of the origins of the
sexes and sexuality in Plato's "Symposium, "Brisson also discusses
cosmogonic mythology in Hesiodic poetry, the Orphic "Rhapsodies,
"Gnosticism, the "Hermetic Corpus, "and the so-called "Chaldean
Oracles. "He presents the manifold variants of the myth of
Tiresias, as well as many other sources.
Brisson quotes this material at length and discusses its
significance in Graeco-Roman myth and philosophy. These ancient
stories open a window onto a world without the sexual oppositions
of male and female, a paradise of unity and self-containment, as
well as onto the peculiar world of go-betweens like the prophet
Tiresias. They deepen our awareness of the extent to which the
polarity of sexuality colors our entire perception of the world, as
it did in antiquity, and as it does for us now. This provocative
material is profoundly relevant to our thinking today.
A distinguished Platonic scholar discusses the impact of the Greek
discovery of the ""cosmos"" on man's perception of his place in the
universe, describes the problems this posed, and interprets Plato's
response to this discovery. Starting with the Presocratics, Vlastos
describes the intellectual revolution that began with the
cosmogonies of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes in the sixth
century B.C. and culminated a century later in the atomist system
of Leucippus and Democritus. What united these men was that for all
of them nature remained the inviolate, all-inclusive principle of
explanation, precluding any appeal to a supernatural cause or
ordering agency. In a detailed analysis of the astronomical and
physical theories of the Timaeus, Vlastos demonstrates Plato's role
in the reception and transmission of the discovery of the new
conception of the universe. Plato gives us the chance to see that
movement from a unique perspective: that of a fierce opponent of
the revolution who was determined to wrest from its brilliant
discovery, annex its cosmos, and redesign it on the pattern of his
own idealistic and theistic metaphysics. This book is a reprint of
the edition published in 1975 by the University of Washington
Press. It includes a new Introduction by Luc Brisson.
En Grece ancienne et a Rome jusqu'a la fin de la Republique, les
etres humains et les animaux qui passaient pour etre pourvus des
deux sexes etaient impitoyablement elimines, comme des monstres,
comme des signes funestes envoyes aux hommes par les dieux pour
annoncer la destruction de l'espece humaine. Expulsee de la realite
ou maintenue en marge, la bisexualite, entendue comme possession
des deux organes sexuels, joua pourtant un role important dans le
mythe, qu'il s'agisse de bisexualite simultanee, ou de bisexualite
successive.La bisexualite simultanee caracterise des etres qui sont
des archetypes, des etre primordiaux. Dans la mesure ou c'est d'eux
que derivent les dieux, les hommes et les animaux qui, pourvus d'un
seul sexe, masculin ou feminin, constituent notre monde, ces
archetypes doivent etre pourvus simultanement des deux sexes, car
ils se trouvent en-deca de cette sexion . En l'etre humain, le
souvenir de cet etat primordial suscite une nostalgie qui s'exprime
avec une profonde emotion dans le mythe qu'Aristophane raconte dans
le Banquet de Platon. Chaque couple, heterosexuel ou homosexuel,
aux moments les plus intenses de ses unions intermittentes, desire
realiser une impossible fusion permanente qui le ramenerait a cet
etat anterieur ou l'etre humain etait double.La bisexualite
successive revet une signification tres differente. Sont affectes
successivement des deux sexes, des mediateurs et essentiellement
des devins, tel Tiresias. Le fait qu'il ait ete d'abord un homme,
puis une femme avant de redevenir un homme lui permet d'etablir un
rapport entre le monde des hommes et celui des femmes. Tout se
passe donc comme si un etre qui transcende les oppositions (hommes
/ dieux; ne /mort) autour desquelles s'articule la realite devait
symboliser cette transcendance dans l'opposition la plus importante
pour l'etre humain: l'opposition entre l'homme et la femme.Luc
Brisson est directeur de recherches au CNRS. Il a publie de
nombreux travaux consacres a la philosophie et la religion
grecques. Aux Belles Lettres, on lui doit notamment, avec F. Walter
Meyerstein, Puissance et limite de la raison. Le Probleme des
valeurs (1995) et, avec Alain Segonds, la Vie de Pythagore de
Jamblique (nouvelle edition, 2008).
The word myth is commonly thought to mean a fictional story, but
few know that Plato was the first to use the term "muthos" in that
sense. He also used "muthos" to describe the practice of making and
telling stories, the oral transmission of all that a community
keeps in its collective memory. In the first part of "Plato the
Myth Maker," Luc Brisson reconstructs Plato's multifaceted
description of "muthos" in light of the latter's Atlantis story.
The second part of the book contrasts this sense of myth with
another form of speech that Plato believed was far superior: the
"logos" of philosophy.
Gerard Naddaf's substantial introduction shows the originality and
importance both of Brisson's method and of Plato's analysis and
places it in the context of contemporary debates over the origin
and evolution of the oral tradition.
" Brisson] contrasts "muthos" with the "logos" found at the heart
of the philosophical reading. He] does an excellent job of
analyzing Plato's use of the two speech forms, and the translator's
introduction does considerable service in setting the
tone."--"Library Journal"
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