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Recent attacks on contemporary art have portrayed the erotic
content of works by Robert Mapplethorpe and others as if it were a
deviation from the Western artistic tradition. On the contrary,
there is a rich tradition of eroticism in the arts beginning with
the erotic verse of ancient Greek and Roman poets. Games of Venus,
the first comprehensive anthology in English of ancient Greek and
Roman erotic verse, revives this tradition for the modern reader.
Itpresents the whole spectrum of erotic poetry from Sappho to Ovid
in translations which evoke the full range of styles and tones
present in the original Greek and Latin. Brief biographical
sketches accompany the work of each poet as do notes referring to
the myths, geography, historical events, personages, and sexual and
social customs mentioned in the verse.
`Games of Venus is a timely piece of work' - The Independent on Sunday
...`It is handsomely produced and fills a most important gap' - Daily Telegraph
We often think of classical Greek society as a model of rationality
and order. Yet as Walter Burkert demonstrates in these influential
essays on the history of Greek religion, there were archaic, savage
forces surging beneath the outwardly calm face of classical Greece,
whose potentially violent and destructive energies, Burkert argues,
were harnessed to constructive ends through the interlinked uses of
myth and ritual. For example, in a much-cited essay on the Athenian
religious festival of the Arrephoria, Burkert uncovers deep
connections between this strange nocturnal ritual, in which two
virgin girls carried sacred offerings into a cave and later
returned with something given to them there, and tribal puberty
initiations by linking the festival with the myth of the daughters
of Kekrops. Other chapters explore the origins of tragedy in blood
sacrifice; the role of myth in the ritual of the new fire on
Lemnos; the ties between violence, the Athenian courts, and the
annual purification of the divine image; and how failed political
propaganda entered the realm of myth at the time of the Persian
Wars.
"A milestone, not only in the field of classics but in the wider
field of the history of religion. . . . It will find a place
alongside the works of Jane Ellen Harrison, Sir James George
Frazer, Claude Levi-Strauss, and van Gennep."--Wendy Flaherty,
Divinity School, University of Chicago
"This book is a professional classic, an absolute must for any
serious student of Greek religion."--Albert Henrichs, Harvard
University
This colloquium volume celebrates a new Hellenistic epigram
collection attributed to the third-century B.C.E. poet Posidippus,
one of the most significant literary finds in recent memory.
Included in this collection are an unusual variety of voices and
perspectives: papyrological, art historical, archaeological,
historical, literary, and aesthetic. These texts are considered as
individual poems and as collective artifact, an early poetry book.
The volume will be of interest to readers of Greek and Latin
epigram, students of the Hellenistic period, and all readers
interested in the aesthetics of poetry collection and the evolution
of the poetry book in antiquity.
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