Download or read book Serving Athena written by Julia L. Shear and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ancient Athens, the Panathenaia was the most important festival and was celebrated in honour of Athena from the middle of the sixth century BC until the end of the fourth century AD. This in-depth study examines how this all-Athenian celebration was an occasion for constructing identities and how it affected those identities. Since not everyone took part in the same way, this differential participation articulated individuals' relationships both to the goddess and to the city so that the festival played an important role in negotiating what it meant to be Athenian (and non-Athenian). Julia Shear applies theories of identity formation which were developed in the social sciences to the ancient Greek material and brings together historical, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence to provide a better understanding both of this important occasion and of Athenian identities over the festival's long history.
Download or read book Goddess and Polis written by Jenifer Neils and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the Olympics, because of their modern revival, enjoy the greatest fame today, in ancient Greece other religious festivals were equally elaborate and impressive spectacles. The lavishly illustrated Goddess and Polis is the first work devoted to the Panathenaia, the most significant of these festivals to be held in ancient Athens. Founded in 566 B.C., this complex ritual performed for the goddess Athena vied with other Greek festivals in grandeur and importance and was particularly distinguished by the works of art commissioned in its service. Among these were the painted vases known as Panathenaic amphoras, each of which contained forty liters of olive oil, awarded to athletic and equestrian victors. The contests depicted on these vases are the best extant illustrations of Greek sport. Although women were excluded from the competitions, they had an important role to play in the weaving of the peplos, an elaborate textile that took nine months to produce. The culmination of the festival was a long procession bearing this new robe to the cult statue of the goddess; the procession in turn was the subject of another great work of art, the Parthenon frieze. Combining art, spectacle, and civic consciousness, the Panathenaia contributed to the development of the high classical style of Periklean Athens. This book deals with every aspect of the festival and produces a vivid portrait of the worship of the patron goddess of the city. Essays by eminent classical scholars examine in depth the musical and poetic competitions, the athletic and equestrian contests, the peplos, and the evolving image of Athena as documented in sculpture from the Acropolis. Jenifer Neils, the curator of the exhibition Goddess and Polis, held at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, has contributed an introduction to the Panathenaia, an essay on the prize amphoras, and detailed entries for the seventy objects exhibited.
Download or read book The Parthenon Enigma written by Joan Breton Connelly and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis—the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state—from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon’s legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century) among the Elgin marbles. The frieze’s vast enigmatic procession—a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens—has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book’s intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city’s mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible. The Parthenon’s full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze’s dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent.
Download or read book Plato s Rhapsody and Homer s Music written by Gregory Nagy and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the overall testimony of Plato as an expert about the cultural legacy of these Homeric performances. Plato's fine ear for language--in this case the technical language of high-class artisans like rhapsodes--picks up on a variety of authentic expressions that echo the talk of rhapsodes as they once practiced their art.
Download or read book Worshipping Athena written by Jenifer Neils and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1996-12-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten papers from 1992 symposia at Dartmouth College and Princeton University are augmented by an original chapter and a translation of a Greek article, to explore the myth and cult of Athena, contests and prizes associated with her worship, and art and politics generated around her. Among the topics are women in the Panathenaic and other festivals, the iconography of shield devices and column-mounted statues on amphoras, and the Panatheniaia in the age of Perikles. Paper edition (unseen), $22.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Body Dress and Identity in Ancient Greece written by Mireille M. Lee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-12 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first general monograph on ancient Greek dress in English to be published in more than a century. By applying modern dress theory to the ancient evidence, this book reconstructs the social meanings attached to the dressed body in ancient Greece. Whereas many scholars have focused on individual aspects of ancient Greek dress, from the perspectives of literary, visual, and archaeological sources, this volume synthesizes the diverse evidence and offers fresh insights into this essential aspect of ancient society. Intended to be accessible to nonspecialists as well as classicists, and students as well as academic professionals, this book will find a wide audience.
Download or read book The Panathenaic Games written by Olga Palagia and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume were presented at an international conference organised in Athens (May 11-14, 2004) and focus on the study of the Panathenaic Games, a Panhellenic athletic event that lasted for nearly a millennium. An international assembly of archaeologists, art historians, ancient historians, epigraphists and classical scholars contributed to the discussion of the origins and the historical development of the Panathenaic Games in general and of individual contests in particular. The role of royal and other patrons in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, as well as the form and meaning of victory dedications and other monuments generated by the games were also examined, making this a truly interdisciplinary study into this fascinating event. Two papers are in Greek. "This handsomely-illustrated conference volume is the first to concentrate exclusively on the games." Jackson, Journal of Hellenic Studies "A handsome, well-illustrated, large-format volume of the proceeding, mostly in English, of a conference held in Athens in 2004 in connection with the modern Olympics." - Tsetskhladze, Ancient West & East
Download or read book The Changing Status of the Artist written by Senior Lecturer in Art History Emma Barker and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the second of six books in the series Art and its histories, which form the main texts of an Open University second-level course of the same name"--Preface.
Download or read book The Cosmos in Ancient Greek Religious Experience written by Efrosyni Boutsikas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructs ancient rituals in their day/night/season combining them with relevant mythology and astronomical observations to understand the ritual's cosmological links.
Download or read book Greek Religion written by Walter Burkert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the religious beliefs of ancient Greece covers sacrifices, libations, purification, gods, heroes, the priesthood, oracles, festivals, and the afterlife.
Download or read book The Iconography of Sculptured Statue Bases in the Archaic and Classical Periods written by Angeliki Kosmopoulou and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Angeliki Kosmopoulou demonstrates that relief bases present distinct, consistent iconographic and technical characteristics that differentiate them from related monuments."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Greek and Roman Textiles and Dress written by Mary Harlow and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty chapters present the range of current research into the study of textiles and dress in classical antiquity, stressing the need for cross and inter-disciplinarity study in order to gain the fullest picture of surviving material. Issues addressed include: the importance of studying textiles to understand economy and landscape in the past; different types of embellishments of dress from weaving techniques to the (late introduction) of embroidery; the close links between the language of ancient mathematics and weaving; the relationships of iconography to the realities of clothed bodies including a paper on the ground breaking research on the polychromy of ancient statuary; dye recipes and methods of analysis; case studies of garments in Spanish, Viennese and Greek collections which discuss methods of analysis and conservation; analyses of textile tools from across the Mediterranean; discussions of trade and ethnicity to the workshop relations in Roman fulleries. Multiple aspects of the production of textiles and the social meaning of dress are included here to offer the reader an up-to-date account of the state of current research. The volume opens up the range of questions that can now be answered when looking at fragments of textiles and examining written and iconographic images of dressed individuals in a range of media. The volume is part of a pair together with Prehistoric, Ancient Near Eastern and Aegean Textiles and Dress: an interdisciplinary anthology edited by Mary Harlow, Cécile Michel and Marie-Louise Nosch
Download or read book Cosmology and Politics in Plato s Later Works written by Dominic J. O'Meara and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book relates Plato's cosmology to his political philosophy by means of new interpretations of his Timaeus, Statesman, and Laws.
Download or read book Greek Architecture and Its Sculpture written by Ian Jenkins and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Athens and Arcadia on one side of the Aegean Sea and from Ionia, Lycia, and Karia on the other, this book brings together some of the great monuments of classical antiquity--among them two of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the later temple of Artemis at Ephesos and the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos. With 250 photographs and specially commissioned line drawings, the book comprises a monumental narrative of the art and architecture that gave form, direction, and meaning to much of Western culture.
Download or read book Women s Ritual Competence in the Greco Roman Mediterranean written by Matthew Dillon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Kinship in Ancient Athens written by S. C. Humphreys and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 1627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of kinship is at the heart of understanding not only the structure and development of a society, but also the day-to-day interactions of its citizens. Kinship in Ancient Athens aims to illuminate both of these issues by providing a comprehensive account of the structures and perceptions of kinship in Athenian society, covering the archaic and classical periods from Drakon and Solon up to Menander. Drawing on decades of research into a wide range of epigraphic, literary, and archaeological sources, and on S. C. Humphreys' expertise in the intersections between ancient history and anthropology, it not only puts a wealth of data at readers' fingertips, but subjects it to rigorous analysis. By utilizing an anthropological approach to reconstruct patterns of behaviour it is able to offer us an ethnographic 'thick description' of ancient Athenians' interaction with their kin that offers insights into a range of social contexts, from family life, rituals, and economic interactions, to legal matters, politics, warfare, and more. The work is arranged into two volumes, both utilizing the same anthropological approach to ancient sources. Volume I explores interactions and conflicts shaped by legal and economic constraints (adoption, guardianship, marriage, inheritance, property), as well as more optional relationships in the field of ritual (naming, rites de passage, funerals and commemoration, dedications, cultic associations) and political relationships, both formal (Assembly, Council) and informal (hetaireiai). Among several important and novel topics discussed are the sociological analysis of names and nicknames, the features of kin structure that advantaged or disadvantaged women in legal disputes, and the economic relations of dependence and independence between fathers and sons. Volume II deals with corporate groups recruited by patrifiliation and explores the role of kinship in these subdivisions of the citizen body: tribes and trittyes (both pre-Kleisthenic and Kleisthenic), phratries, genê, and demes. The section on the demes stresses variety rather than common features, and provides comprehensive information on location and prosopography in a tribally organized catalogue.
Download or read book The Art of Libation in Classical Athens written by Milette Gaifman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handsome volume presents an innovative look at the imagery of libations, the most commonly depicted ritual in ancient Greece, and how it engaged viewers in religious performance. In a libation, liquid--water, wine, milk, oil, or honey--was poured from a vessel such as a jug or a bowl onto the ground, an altar, or another surface. Libations were made on occasions like banquets, sacrifices, oath-taking, departures to war, and visitations to tombs, and their iconography provides essential insight into religious and social life in 5th-century BC Athens. Scenes depicting the ritual often involved beholders directly--a statue's gaze might establish the onlooker as a fellow participant, or painted vases could draw parallels between human practices and acts of gods or heroes. Beautifully illustrated with a broad range of examples, including the Caryatids at the Acropolis, the Parthenon Frieze, Attic red-figure pottery, and funerary sculpture, this important book demonstrates the power of Greek art to transcend the boundaries between visual representation and everyday experience.
