Download or read book A New Reading of the Damonon Stele written by Paul Christesen and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-20 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new reading of one of the most important inscriptions from ancient Sparta, the Damonon stele. That inscription records victories that two Spartans, Damonon and his son Enymakratidas, won in the late fifth century BCE in equestrian and athletic competitions at religious festivals in and around Sparta. Scholars have repeatedly turned their attention to the Damonon stele because it offers invaluable insight into multiple facets of Spartan society. The inscription is commonly understood as cataloging dozens of victories won in the four-horse chariot race as well as other victories won in the horse-race and in footraces of various lengths. Careful study of the wording and structure of the inscription and relevant comparanda suggests that the most of Damonon's victories were actually won in the kalpe, a contest for mares in which the rider dismounted and ran alongside his horse in the final part of the race. Three fragmentary terracotta votive plaques found in the excavations at the shrine of Agamemnon and Alexandra at Amyklai show that the competitions in the kalpe were held near Sparta in Damonon's time. The re-interpretation of the Damonon stele proposed here has important ramifications, along multiple axes, for our understanding of both ancient Greek horse-racing and ancient Lakedaimon. Among other things, we are given a rare glimpse of the Lakedaimonian state at work. We see a Lakedaimon that is evolving rapidly in response to emergent military imperatives and Lakedaimonians who are ready, willing, and able to make swift, well-designed changes to the structure of religious festivals, and to manipulate gender expectations, in order to alter the structure of status competition and patterns of conspicuous consumption. Those changes, and the thought processes behind them, reveal a considerable level of complexity in Lakedaimonian thinking about their own social and political institutions and customs. That would not be surprising if manifested in Athens, but it contrasts sharply with the persistent picture of Lakedaimonians as unsophisticated and of Lakedaimon as a staid, conservative place with a static sociopolitical system. Indeed, the capacity of the Lakedaimonian state to make rapid, incremental changes that were in harmony with the overall structure of its sociopolitical system may well have been a key element in Lakedaimon's unusual stability.

Download or read book A NEW READING OF THE DAMONON STELE written by and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Journal of Hellenic Studies written by and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 878 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sparta and the Commemoration of War written by Matthew A. Sears and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tough Spartan soldier is one of the most enduring images from antiquity. Yet Spartans too fell in battle – so how did ancient Sparta memorialise its wars and war dead? From the poet Tyrtaeus inspiring soldiers with rousing verse in the seventh century BCE to inscriptions celebrating the 300's last stand at Thermopylae, and from Spartan imperialists posing as liberators during the Peloponnesian War to the modern reception of the Spartan as a brave warrior defending the “West”, Sparta has had an outsized role in how warfare is framed and remembered. This image has also been distorted by the Spartans themselves and their later interpreters. While debates continue to rage about the appropriateness of monuments to supposed war heroes in our civic squares, this authoritative and engaging book suggests that how the Spartans commemorated their military past, and how this shaped their military future, has perhaps never been more pertinent.

Download or read book The Running Centaur written by Sinclair W. Bell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys the practice of horse racing from antiquity to the modern period, and in this way offers a selective global history. Unlike previous histories of horse racing, which generally make claims about the exclusiveness of modern sport and therefore diminish the importance of premodern physical contests, the contributors to this book approach racing as a deep history of diachronically comparable practices, discourses, and perceptions centered around the competitive staging of equine speed. In order to compare horse racing cultures from completely different epochs and regions, the authors respond to a series of core issues which serve as structural comparative parameters. These key issues include the spatial and architectural framework of races; their organization; victory prizes; symbolic representations of victories and victors; and the social range and identities of the participants. The evidence of these competitions is interpreted in its distinct historical contexts and with regard to specific cultural conditions that shaped the respective relationship between owners, riders, and horses on the global racetracks of pre-modernity and modernity. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

Download or read book The Hero Cults of Sparta written by Nicolette A. Pavlides and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the hero-cults of Sparta on the basis of the archaeological and literary sources. Nicolette Pavlides explores the local idiosyncrasies of a pan-Hellenic phenomenon, which itself can help us understand the place and function of heroes in Greek religion. Although it has long been noted that hero-cult was especially popular in Sparta, there is little known about the cults, both in terms of material evidence and the historical context for their popularity. The evidence from the cult of Helen and Menelaos at the Menelaion, the worship of Agamemnon and Alexandra/Kassandra, the Dioskouroi, and others who remain anonymous to us, is viewed as a local phenomenon reflective of the developing communal and social consciousness of the polis. What is more, through an analysis of the typology of cults, it is concluded that in Sparta, the boundaries of the divine/heroic/mortal were fluid, which allowed a great variation in the expression of cults. The votive patterns, topography, and architectural evidence permit an analysis of the kinds of offerings to hero-cults and an evaluation of the architecture that housed such cults. Due to the material and spatial distribution of the votive deposits, it is argued that Sparta had a large number of hero shrines scattered throughout the polis, which attests to an enthusiastic and long-lasting local votive practice at a popular level.

Download or read book The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World written by Paul Cartledge and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Greek world consisted of approximately 1,000 autonomous polities scattered across the Mediterranean basin and was remarkable for both its diversity and its uniformity. As Greeks dispersed throughout the Mediterranean, the different environmental and human ecosystems they encountered created important differences among widely scattered settlements: each Greek community developed its own unique set of socio-political institutions and social practices. Nonetheless, despite their dispersal and diversity, Greek communities were bound together by a network of commercial, cultural, diplomatic, and military ties and shared important commonalities, most notably language and religion. The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World, a collaborative effort by more than forty eminent scholars, offers twenty-one detailed and comprehensive studies of key sites from across the Greek world in the period between c. 750 and c. 480 BCE. During that period, Greeks confronted a series of demographic, political, social, and economic challenges and generated an array of responses that transformed the ways in which they lived, worked, and interacted. Much of what is now seen as distinctive about Greek culture--such as democracy, stone temples, and nude athletics--first developed during the Archaic period. The series is organized alphabetically by polis. Volume I contains detailed and up-to-date studies of Argos, Chalcis and Eretria, Chios-Lesbos-Samos, and Corcyra. Together with the other volumes in the series, the Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World offers a new and unique resource for the study of ancient Greece that will transform how we understand a crucial era in antiquity.

Download or read book Sparta written by and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in the LACTOR Sourcebooks in Ancient History series offers a generous selection of primary texts on Sparta, with accompanying maps, illustrations, glossary, chronology and explanatory notes. It provides for the needs of students at schools and universities who are studying ancient history in English translation and has been written and reviewed by experienced teachers. The texts selected include extracts from the important literary sources but also numerous inscriptions, many of these being otherwise difficult for students to access.

Download or read book The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco Roman East written by Zahra Newby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East explores the various ways in which the experience of civic festivals in the Graeco-Roman East was created and framed by material culture. By the second and third centuries AD, Greek festivals were thriving across the eastern Mediterranean. Much of our knowledge of these festivals, and their associated processions, rituals, banquets, and competitions, comes from material culture-- inscriptions, coins, architecture, and art-works. Yet each of these pieces of material evidence was the result of a conscious act, of what to record, and where and how to record it, with varying patterns discernible across different areas, and in different media. This volume draws attention to the choices made in a variety of different forms of material culture relating to Greek festivals from the Hellenistic to Roman periods, and unpicks the ways in which they encode or forge particular social relationships and power structures, as well as creating senses of community or communication between different groups. These helped to fix ephemeral events into public memory, to present particular views of their significance for the wider community, and to frame the experience of their participants.

Download or read book In Praise of Greek Athletes written by Peter J. Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-09 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative analysis of epinikian song and inscribed epigram, especially their integration with the proclamation of athletic victory.

Download or read book How to Do Things with History written by Danielle Allen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Do Things with History is a collection of essays that explores current and future approaches to the study of ancient Greek cultural history. Rather than focus directly on methodology, the essays in this volume demonstrate how some of the most productive and significant methodologies for studying ancient Greece can be employed to illuminate a range of different kinds of subject matter. These essays, which bring together the work of some of the most talented scholars in the field, are based upon papers delivered at a conference held at Cambridge University in September of 2014 in honor of Paul Cartledge's retirement from the post of A. G. Leventis Professor of Ancient Greek Culture. For the better part of four decades, Paul Cartledge has spearheaded intellectual developments in the field of Greek culture in both scholarly and public contexts. His work has combined insightful historical accounts of particular places, periods, and thinkers with a willingness to explore comparative approaches and a keen focus on methodology. Cartledge has throughout his career emphasized the analysis of practice - the study not, for instance, of the history of thought but of thinking in action and through action. The assembled essays trace the broad horizons charted by Cartledge's work: from studies of political thinking to accounts of legal and cultural practices to politically astute approaches to historiography. The contributors to this volume all take the parameters and contours of Cartledge's work, which has profoundly influenced an entire generation of scholars, as starting points for their own historical and historiographical explorations. Those parameters and contours provide a common thread that runs through and connects all of the essays while also offering sufficient freedom for individual contributors to demonstrate an array of rich and varied approaches to the study of the past.

Download or read book Ancient Greek Athletics written by Charles H. Stocking and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Présentation de l'éditeur : "This work presents a collection of texts in translation on ancient athletics in Greek and Roman history, including a wide range of topics from the Olympics to ancient conceptions of health and wellness."

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World written by Alison Futrell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sport and spectacle in the ancient world has become a vital area of broad new exploration over the last few decades. This Handbook brings together the latest research on Greek and Roman manifestations of these pastimes to explore current approaches and open exciting new avenues of inquiry. It discusses historical perspectives, contest forms, contest-related texts, civic and social aspects, and use and meaning of the individual body. Greek and Roman topics are interwoven to simulate contest-like tensions and complementarities, juxtaposing, for example, violence in Greek athletics and Roman gladiatorial events, Greek and Roman chariot events, architectural frameworks for contests and games in the two cultures, and contrasting views of religion, bodily regimens, and judicial classification related to both cultures. It examines the social contexts of games, namely the evolution of sport and spectacle across cultural and political boundaries, and how games are adapted to multiple contexts and multiple purposes, reinforcing social hierarchies, performing shared values, and playing out deep cultural tensions. The volume also considers other directing forces in the ancient Mediterranean, such as Bronze Age Egypt and the Near East, Etruria, and early Christianity. It addresses important themes common to both antiquity and modern society, such as issues of class, gender, and health, as well as the popular culture of the modern Olympics and gladiators in cinema. With innovative perspectives from authoratative scholars on a wide range of topics, this Handbook will appeal to both students and researchers interested in ancient history, literature, sports, and games.

Download or read book Localism in Hellenistic Greece written by Sheila L. Ager and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hellenistic age witnessed a dynamic increase of cultural fusion and entanglement across the Mediterranean and Eurasian worlds. Amid seismic changes in the world writ large, the regions of central Greece and the Peloponnese have often been considered a cultural space left behind. Localism in Hellenistic Greece explores how various processes impacted the countless small-scale, local communities of the Greek mainland. Drawing on notions of locality, localism, local tradition, and boundedness in place, Sheila L. Ager and Hans Beck delve into some of the main hubs of Hellenistic Greece, from Thessaly to Cape Tainaron. Along with their contributors, they explore how polis and ethnos societies positioned themselves in a swiftly expanding horizon and the meaning-making force of the local. The book reveals how local discourses were energized by local sentiments and, much like an echo chamber, how discourses related back to the community and the place it occupied, prioritizing the local as the critical source of communal orientation. Engaging with debates about cultural connectivity and convergence, Localism in Hellenistic Greece offers new insights into lived experience in ancient Greece.

Download or read book The Historical Review of Sparta written by Giorgio Piras and published by Sapienza Università Editrice. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume, jointly promoted by the Department of Classics of Sapienza University and the Institute of Sparta, intends to explore the multifaceted system of connections and interactions among ancient poleis by focusing on Sparta, which acts as an exemplary case study to understand the complex relations among Greek cities in the classical Hellenic world. The latter is indeed composed by an extended range of settlements based on specific jurisdictions, sets of laws and ethical principles, that are nevertheless connected by a common shared culture. The publication includes the Proceedings of the International Conference “International relations in Antiquity: the case of Sparta” held in Sparta in 2021 and further papers dealing with the ancient Laconian polis. The book aims to critically analyse the Spartan international network, through an open and constructive methodology, deprived of pre-arranged interpretative models. Moreover, it means to bring together scholars from different backgrounds and a variety of scientific disciplines (such as philology, epigraphy, history, archaeology, international relations) to foster a fruitful cross-sectorial dialogue, aimed at enabling a comprehensive understanding of ancient Hellas.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity written by Paul Christesen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity covers the period 800 BCE to 600 CE. From the founding of the Olympics and Rome's celebratory games, sport permeated the cultural life of Greco-Roman antiquity almost as it does our own. Gymnasiums, public baths, monumental arenas, and circuses for chariot racing were constructed, and athletic contests proliferated. Sports-themed household objects were very popular, whilst the exploits of individual athletes, gladiators, and charioteers were immortalized in poetry, monuments, and the mosaic floors of the wealthy. This rich sporting culture attests to the importance of leisure among the middle and upper classes of the Greco-Roman world, but by 600 CE rising costs, barbarian invasions, and Christianity had swept it all away. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion and segregation; minds, bodies and identities; representation. Paul Christesen is Professor at Dartmouth College, USA. Charles Stocking is Associate Professor at Western University, Canada. Volume 1 in the Cultural History of Sport set General Editors: Wray Vamplew, Mark Dyreson, and John McClelland

Download or read book The Historical Review of Sparta 2023 written by Giorgio Piras and published by Sapienza Università Editrice. This book was released on 2023-10-18 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This issue of “The Historical Review of Sparta”, jointly promoted by the Department of Classics of Sapienza University of Rome and the Institute of Sparta, focuses on the battle of Sellasia, which occurred in the summer 222 BC and saw the clash between the Spartans led by Cleomenes III and the Achaean-Macedonian alliance guided by Antigonus III Doson. The several papers here collected address the historical incident from different and complementary perspectives, in the attempt to contextualize it in a wider framework. Hence, the articles carry out a thorough analysis of Hellenistic Sparta, by investigating the constitutional reforms implemented during the 3rd cent. BC, exploring the political (and sometimes conflictual) relations between the Laconian polis and other emerging powers in Greece and the Mediterranean basin, and discussing the changes occurred in the governmental, economic, military, educational and religious field. Furthermore, the contributions offer an in-depth study of the military strategies and tactics implemented in the battlefield, as well as an analysis on the final impact of the catastrophic defeat of Sparta on its internal societal structure and cultural system, and a reflection on the modern reception of the historical event.