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Journal articles on the topic 'Greek tragedy; Athens; Eleusis'

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1

Spawforth, A. J., and Susan Walker. "The World of the Panhellenion I. Athens and Eleusis." Journal of Roman Studies 75 (November 1985): 78–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/300654.

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In A.D. 131/2 the emperor Hadrian created a new organization of Greek cities, the Panhellenion. This paper is the first of two in which we explore, from a provincial perspective, the implications of this novel initiative by Rome in Greek affairs.The foundation of the Panhellenion belongs to a series of interventions by Hadrian in the Greek world, the others mostly in the form of acts of benefaction towards individual communities. Although Hadrian's reign marked a watershed in Greek relations with Rome, these relations had already evolved significantly over the previous two generations. The two most obvious developments lay in the overlapping areas of cultural and political life. Not only did educated Greeks and Romans now share an intellectual milieu, but a renaissance of Greek literary and rhetorical activity had begun under the leadership of provincials enjoying (more often than not) close ties with Rome. At the same time, a Roman career had become more available to ambitious Greeks; a marked increase in the numbers of Greek senators may be dated to the last quarter of the first century.
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Spawforth, A. J., and Susan Walker. "The World of the Panhellenion II. Three Dorian Cities." Journal of Roman Studies 76 (November 1986): 88–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/300367.

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The first part of this study (hereafter Panhellenion I) considered the nature of Hadrian's Panhellenion by looking at its known membership and activities and its social context, and reviewed the impact of the league's foundation on Athens, its capital city, and Eleusis, Attica's most prestigious sanctuary.Here we concentrate on three Dorian member-cities: Sparta and Argos in the province of Achaia, and Cyrene in Crete-and-Cyrene. In doing so we sometimes need to go beyond the evidence relating specifically to the Panhellenion, since certain features of Greek city-life under the Antonines are best explained in the larger framework of Hadrian's initiatives in the Greek world: in particular a pre-occupation with civic origins, relations of kinship (syngeneia) and recognition through ‘diplomacy’ of the historic primacy of Achaia's most famous cities. In the archaeology of Cyrene and Argos it is possible to discern, as at Athens, a phase of urban development which owed its impetus to Hadrian and which, at Cyrene, embraced a marked archaism of style.
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Che Jayoung. "Eleusis and Athens: The Flexibility of Political Structure and Regional Links in the Ancient Greek Polis." Journal of Classical Studies 2008, no. 22 (June 2008): 69–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.20975/jcskor.2008.2008.22.69.

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4

Carter, D. M. "Was Attic Tragedy Democratic?" Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 21, no. 1-2 (2004): 1–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/20512996-90000058.

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This article begins with a detailed response to Simon Goldhill's paper in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, 107 (1987), on the civic ideology surrounding Attic tragedy. His view, that the Dionysia was a festival promoting the values of the democratic polis, requires substantial qualification. I then suggest my own interpretation of the evidence Goldhill cites for ceremonies at the Dionysia, referring also to several of the dramas. Tragedy at the Dionysia was presented in front of an audience from all over the Greek world. As a result, (1) political ideas in tragedy for the most part are relevant both to democracies and to other cities; (2) where Athens appears in tragedy, it tends to be presented more as a benevolent imperial power, and less often as a democracy.
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Rock-McCutcheon, Bonnie. "The Politics of Youth in Greek Tragedy: Gangs of Athens by Matthew Shipton." Classical World 112, no. 3 (2019): 236–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/clw.2019.0037.

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6

BEDFORD, DAVID, and THOM WORKMAN. "The tragic reading of the Thucydidean tragedy." Review of International Studies 27, no. 1 (January 2001): 051–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0260210500010512.

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The Greek intellectual Thucydides has been widely identified by scholars of international relations as prefiguring twentieth century Realist thought. This appropriation fails to locate particular aspects of Thucydides' writing within the overall narrative structure of The Peloponnesian War. The narrative structure is in the form of a tragedy. Thucydides was critical of the excessive and unrestrained nature of Athenian and Hellenic conduct during the war. By taking up specific themes including the dominance of reason by the passions, the eclipse of logos by ergon, and the decline of nomos, he expressed this critique in a tragic form. In the end, an unrestrained Athens reached for Sicily and suffered Nemesian retribution in the form of ignominious defeat. To claim Thucydides as a precursor to Realist thought, therefore, is peculiar, and has the character of enlisting a critique of excess and immoderation on behalf of an intellectual discourse altogether lacking in reasoned moderation.
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Antoniou, Michaela. "Performing Ancient Greek Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Greece: Dimitris Rontiris and Karolos Koun." New Theatre Quarterly 33, no. 1 (January 10, 2017): 31–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x16000610.

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In this article Michaela Antoniou gives an account of the two prevailing acting schools in ancient Greek tragedy in the twentieth century, as formed and developed by Dimitris Rontiris at the National Theatre and Karolos Koun at the Theatro Technis (Art Theatre). She discusses how these two great theatre masters directed, guided, and taught their actors to perform tragedy, arguing that Rontiris's approach stemmed from a text-based perspective that focused on reciting and pronunciation, while Koun's developed from a physical and emotional approach that prioritzed actors and their abilities. Her article summarizes each director's philosophy regarding the Greek tragedies, and discusses the position of the genre within modern Greek theatre, mapping the process employed by the actors, and analyzing their method in order to illustrate the different perspectives that the two great directors had with regards to approaching and performing a role. Michaela Antoniou completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently working as an external collaborator of the Department of Theatre Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has also worked on the stage as an actress and playwright, and is a published author.
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De Tradução, Trupe. "Tradução inclusiva e performativa: dossiê de um processo tradutório." Nuntius Antiquus 4 (December 31, 2009): 119–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/1983-3636.4..119-137.

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In this paper, we intend to report the process of a translation proposal, developed from translation theoretical studies applied to dramatic texts from the V century B.C theater in Athens. Among many texts that are currently available, we chose the tragedy Persians, by the greek author Aeschylus. In the process, which happened in a seminar of Greek language and literature, where we did the instrumental translation in class and, a posteriori, individually, the students gave to the translation an established format with scenic and aesthetic concerns. Each student reports in this article his/her experience and his/her focus of interest; finally, we offer a translation tested by actors and directors and presented orally in class with a relative success.
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Allan, William. "The Ethics of Retaliatory Violence in Athenian Tragedy." Mnemosyne 66, no. 4-5 (2013): 593–615. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852512x617605.

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Abstract This article focuses on the presentation of retaliatory violence in Athenian tragedy. It suggests that such tit-for-tat violence is characterized as problematic from the earliest Greek literature onwards, but also stresses the continuing importance of anger, honour, and revenge in classical Athenian attitudes to punishment and justice. With these continuities in mind, it analyses the new process by which punishment and justice were achieved in Athens, and argues that the Athenians’ emphasis on the authority of their laws is central to understanding tragedy’s portrayal of personalized vengeance and the chaos that ensues from it. Though (for reasons of space) it focuses on only a selection of plays in detail (A. Eu., S. El., E. El., Or.), the article adduces further examples to show that the same socio-historical developments are central to the portrayal of retaliatory violence throughout the genre, and ends by considering how tragedy, in depicting revenge as problematic, offers a more positive alternative to such violence which does justice to the emotional and social needs of its audience.
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De Tradução, Trupe. "Tradução inclusiva e performativa: dossiê de um processo tradutório." Nuntius Antiquus 4 (December 31, 2009): 119. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/1983-3636.4.0.119-137.

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<p>In this paper, we intend to report the process of a translation proposal, developed from translation theoretical studies applied to dramatic texts from the V century B.C theater in Athens. Among many texts that are currently available, we chose the tragedy <em>Persians, </em>by the greek author Aeschylus. In the process, which happened in a seminar of Greek language and literature, where we did the instrumental translation in class and, <em>a posteriori</em>, individually, the students gave to the translation an established format with scenic and aesthetic concerns. Each student reports in this article his/her experience and his/her focus of interest; finally, we offer a translation tested by actors and directors and presented orally in class with a relative success.</p>
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Atack, Carol. "An Origin for Political Culture’: Laws 3 as Political Thought and Intellectual History." Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 37, no. 3 (September 1, 2020): 468–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/20512996-12340295.

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Abstract Plato’s survey in Laws book 3 of the development of human society from its earliest stages to the complex institutions of democratic Athens and monarchical Persia operates both as a conjectural history of human life and as a critical engagement with Greek political thought. The examples Plato uses to illustrate the stages of his stadial account, such as the society of the Cyclops and the myths of Spartan prehistory, are those used by other political theorists and philosophers, in some cases also drawing on the presence of the same stories in classical Greek epic and tragedy. By incorporating his critique into a timeline Plato is able to suggest that some approaches are limited in scope to specific social conditions, whereas his Athenian Stranger presents his analysis from an external and superior viewpoint, looking down on human society from above.
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Parush, Adi. "The Courtroom as Theater and the Theater as Courtroom in Ancient Athens." Israel Law Review 35, no. 1 (2001): 118–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021223700012103.

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To prevent any misunderstanding, I first would like to clarify that I am not a historian dealing with classical studies; my main disciplines are philosophy and law. However, following a seminar I gave dealing with several philosophical-legal aspects of Greek tragedy, and an article I wrote about the relationship between the concept of guilt in Oedipus Tyrannus and the principle of strict liability in modern criminal law, I have found myself in recent years becoming increasingly interested in the unique culture which emerged in Athens during the classical period, particularly in the 5th century BCE. In the course of that century, Athens was involved in many wars – against the Persians in the early decades, against Sparta (the Peloponnesian War) in the latter decades, and other “minor” wars. And yet despite these wars, during the 5th century BCE Athens was in a state of cultural-social-political ferment that left its mark on the whole history of western culture. In the course of that century, there was in Athens a burgeoning of independent-critical thought in the philosophical domain, nature and medicine were systematically studied, tragedies by the Athenians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were written and performed, and the democratic regime took shape.
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WOHL, VICTORIA. "HOW TO RECOGNIZE A HERO IN EURIPIDES' ELECTRA." Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 58, no. 1 (June 1, 2015): 61–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2015.12002.x.

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Abstract Why were the heroes of Greek tragedy all elite? Why in the premier genre of democratic Athens should the action always be performed by noblemen and not by, say, a poor farmer? Euripides' Electra raises this question and dramatizes its stakes. It poses the possibility of a non-elite hero – in fact, a farmer – only to show how and why this radical premise fails to pan out. The famous recognition scene compels the audience to recognize Orestes as the play's hero based on literary allusions and theatrical conventions, and in the process to disavow the egalitarian reality the play itself has staged. Electra does not ultimately answer the question why the tragic protagonist has to be elite, but it does reveal the consequences, political and dramatic, of accepting that necessity. In so doing, it exposes both the utopian potential of tragedy and its limits, and challenges us in the audience to acknowledge our role in both.
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Suter, Ann. "LAMENT IN EURIPIDES' TROJAN WOMEN." Mnemosyne 56, no. 1 (2003): 1–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852503762457473.

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AbstractThis article summarizes the findings of an unpublished PhD dissertation, "The Form of Lament in Greek Tragedy" by E. Wright, which provide for the first time objective criteria for identification of lamentation in tragedy. It applies these criteria to the Trojan Women, and argues, on the basis of metrical and stylistic devices, that virtually every scene in the Trojan Women shows the characteristics of lament. The play is, from both the minute technical, and the overall structural, point of view, a lament. This provides explanations for some of the long-standing critical issues of the play, e.g., no unity, no plot, an ill-conceived prologue. The article then considers also how the Trojan Women fits into current discussions of lament as a gendered genre. It replies especially to work on the development of 5th-century Athenian attitudes towards female lament, in which a pattern of increased criticism and restriction, it is argued, is reflected in the changing treatment of lament in Athenian tragedy. The treatment of lament in the Trojan Women does not conform to this perceived development. This suggests that there were still a variety of attitudes current and influential in late 5th-century Athens towards female lamentation.
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Wickramasinghe, Chandima S. M. "Grief and Stress Communication and Management in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis." KnowEx Social Sciences 1, no. 1 (July 7, 2021): 01–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.17501/27059901.2020.1101.

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Communication, an essential human trait, is vital to develop a great connectedness among individuals as it helps to understand human mind and emotions. Grief and stress are communicated in different proportions in ancient Greek tragedies, which revolve around a plot that emanates grief. The characters in a Greek tragedy are affected by or are victims of a grieving situation central to the play. Aristotle maintained that tragic action must emanate pity and fear which are connected with grief and stress. Euripides, the revolutionary dramatist of Classical Athens, has empowered his characters to the effect of transmitting their sentiments freely. This feature is notable in his plays such as Alcestis, Electra, Ion, Orestes and Iphigenia in Aulis (IA). In IA, a well-established mythical account is presented as a simple family story. It is not just Iphigenia, who is affected by her impending tragedy. Almost all characters grieve in different proportions, while attempting to manage their grief and stress first by communicating it and then in ways peculiar to themselves. The strategies range from keeping a positive attitude, accepting the situations, to being assertive instead of being aggressive. This study examines the communication of grief and stress as a means of managing such sentiments with especial reference to Iphigenia in Aulis in order to understand how Euripidean tragedy could bring relief to its audience. In the process, the study observes how the dynamics of engagement of a character with others, their feelings, thoughts and intentions can contribute to manage grief and stress through effective communication of such sentiments. Keywords: grief and stress, communication, management, Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis
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Golden, Mark. "M. SHIPTON The Politics of Youth in Greek Tragedy: Gangs of Athens. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Pp. vi + 196. £90.80. 9781474295079." Journal of Hellenic Studies 139 (October 11, 2019): 247–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0075426919000193.

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Heath, Malcolm. "Greek Literature." Greece and Rome 60, no. 2 (September 16, 2013): 313–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383513000120.

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In Cosmology and the Polis Richard Seaford carries forward the trajectory of Reciprocity and Ritual (1994) and Money and the Early Greek Mind (2004), extending his analytical resources with (not exactly Bakhtinian) chronotopes – socially constructed cognitive models, in which space and time are congruently conceived (i.e. as ‘the same’ in certain respects: 22, 39). He distinguishes three chronotopes: reciprocal, as found in Homer; aetiological, related to ritual and the emergent polis (and containing an ‘antideterminate’ sub-chronotope, which expresses the space–time from which the aetiological transition is made); and monetized (4–5). ‘In the genesis of drama at the City Dionysia the reciprocal chronotope has been replaced by the aetiological’ (75). Monetization then contributes to tragedy's content by isolating powerful individuals from the collective: ‘tragedy frequently ends with the demise of the powerful individual(s)’ (113), and ‘tragic isolation derives in part from the self-sufficiency imposed on the individual by the new phenomenon of monetisation’ (169). Monetization ‘contributes also to its form’, since ‘the establishment of the second actor…may have arisen out of tension – between Dionysos and autocrat at Athens’ (111). The slide from indicative (‘contributes’) to hypothetical (‘may have’), with its long train of speculative attendants (‘it is tempting…hypothesise…seems likely…it is possible…may well have…’, 111) is, despite the desperately optimistic adverb, an index of the fragility of the construction. What is the exegetical pay-off? Seaford is capable, it must be said, of pure fantasy. He detects an allusion to incest in Aristotle's use of the phrase ‘currency from currency’ in Pol. 1258b1–8 (333). Aristotle objects to profit from purely financial transactions, not because it resembles incest (which would be silly), but because it has become disconnected from the real economy. In any case, ‘X from X’ has nothing to do with incest. The formula sums up an obvious feature of the natural course of reproduction (horses come from horses, and so on: Ph. 191b20–21, 193b8, 12; Gen. Corr. 333b7–8; Metaph. 1034b2, 1049b25–6; Pol. 1255b1–2; Pr. 878a27), and is applied to currency in a parenthetic explanation of the metaphorical use of tokos for interest. Aristotle is not the only victim of exegetical extravagance. The gold-changer to whom Aeschylus compares Ares (Ag. 438–9) exchanges gold dust for goods; Seaford knows this (200 n. 43, 247) but still assimilates the passage to currency exchange and monetized commercial transactions (200). Though his claims for the unique powers of monetization ought to make the importance of the distinction salient to him, mentions of silver are treated indiscriminately as references to money (201, on Aesch. Ag. 949, 959). Similarly, it is Seaford who associates insatiable prosperity with monetization (201), not Aeschylus’ text (Ag. 1331–42); and when Antigone speaks of death as kerdos (Soph. Ant. 461–4), it is Seaford who insists that Creon's single mention of coined silver (296) makes ‘the association of kerdos with monetary gain…inevitable’ (328). Why should our understanding of Antigone's patently non-monetized gain be determined by Creon's ‘obsession’? If it is an obsession, what marks it as such is its irrelevance: his grounds for complaint would be just as strong if a guard were suborned by non-monetary incentives. No other character has reason to share Creon's irrationality; nor has the audience; nor have we. This is a dazzlingly clever book; but its foundations are unstable, and its superstructure fragile.
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Domingues, Darcylene Pereira, and Jussemar Weiss Gonçalves. "HISTÓRIA, GÊNERO E ENSINO: DISCUSSÕES A PARTIR DA POÉTICA DE EURÍPIDES * HISTORY, GENDER AND TEACHING: DISCUSSIONS FROM EURÍPIDES POETICS." História e Cultura 8, no. 2 (December 7, 2019): 128. http://dx.doi.org/10.18223/hiscult.v8i2.2319.

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O presente estudo tem por objetivo a reflexão sobre as temáticas de História e Gênero, especificamente através de uma peça teatral característica do período de crescimento cultural da cidade de Atenas na Grécia. Nossa fonte é a tragédia Medeia escrita pelo poeta Eurípides que apresenta uma personagem feminina que se distancia do ideário comportamental desejado para uma mulher. Além disso, temos aspiração de expressar que a literatura clássica, uma tragédia, pode ser empregada na sala de aula de História para debater conceitos de gênero. A partir dessa obra, desejamos instigar os alunos a refletirem sobre a constituição social grega e os papeis sociais determinados pelo sexo biológico naquela sociedade.*This paper aims to reflect on the themes of history and gender, specifically through the analysis of tragedy, a characteristic theatrical genre of the cultural growth period of Athens in Greece. Our source is the theatrical representation Medea, written by the poet Euripides, who presents a female character who distances herself from the behavioral ideals desired for a woman at the time. We believe that the tragedy can be used in the classroom as it provides a reflective shift from which students can observe their realities. We want to instigate the students to reflect on the social constitution of genres in the world that we live through the Greek experience.
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Rader, Richard, and James Collins. "Introduction." Ramus 42, no. 1-2 (2013): 1–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0048671x00000035.

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In 1990 Jack Winkler and Froma Zeitlin dropped a bomb on the study of Greek drama with the publication of Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Taking their departure from the narrow formalist historicism of prior scholarship, with its interest in properly historical persons, events and trends, Winkler and Zeitlin shifted their attention toward ‘the entire social context of the [dramatic] festival’ (3). Greek drama would now be a window into the sociocultural pulse of fifth-century Athens. This new praxis came to be known as ‘cultural poetics’, and its practitioners viewed Greek drama as an embedded and constitutive element of a society in constant negotiation with itself. Drama now reflected or symptomatised historical, religious and political context. As Simon Goldhill put it in the introduction to his study of the Oresteia:Tragedy takes place…at the moment of maximal unresolved tension between…systems of ideas… It explores the different and competing ideals, different and competing obligations, different and competing sense of words in the developing polis, different and competing ideas of glory and success… It discovers tensions and ambiguities with the very civic ideology of democracy that is the context of tragedy's performance… Tragedy takes the developing notions, vocabulary, commitments of democracy and places them under rigorous, polemical, violent and public scrutiny.The impact and aftershock of Nothing to Do with Dionysos? can still be felt today. In one way or another, we might say, we are all the children (and grandchildren) of Winkler and Zeitlin. The question remains, however, what type of children we have been in the time since (kaloi men k'agathoi, kakoi de k'aischroi?) and how we will honour their legacy as we move forward with the study of Greek drama.
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Debnar, Paula. "Justice in Greek Tragedy - (R. F.) Kennedy Athena's Justice. Athena, Athens and the Concept of Justice in Greek Tragedy. (Lang Classical Studies 16.) Pp. xiv + 169, figs. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Cased, €44.90, US$74.95. ISBN: 978-1-4331-0454-1." Classical Review 60, no. 2 (September 28, 2010): 349–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009840x10000090.

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Jenckes, Norma. "Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy. By Margherita Laera. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013. Pp. xiv + 319 + 14 b/w illus. £45/$72.95 Pb." Theatre Research International 40, no. 1 (February 6, 2015): 117–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883314000741.

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Griffiths, E. M. "(M.) Shipton The Politics of Youth in Greek Tragedy. Gangs of Athens. Pp. vi + 196. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Cased, £85. ISBN: 978-1-4742-9507-9." Classical Review 69, no. 1 (April 2019): 329. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009840x18003165.

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Kopp, Hans. "GREEK TRAGEDY AND COMEDY IN DIALOGUE - (S.) Nelson Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse. Comedy, Tragedy and the Polis in 5th Century Athens. (Mnemosyne Supplements 390.) Pp. x + 384. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016. Cased, €135, US$175. ISBN: 978-90-04-31090-2." Classical Review 67, no. 2 (March 15, 2017): 342–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009840x1700021x.

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Griffith, Mark. "Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the "Oresteia"." Classical Antiquity 14, no. 1 (April 1, 1995): 62–129. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/25000143.

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Intertwined with the celebration of Athenian democratic institutions, we find in the "Oresteia" another chain of interactions, in which the elite families of Argos, Phokis, Athens, and even Mount Olympos employ the traditional aristocratic relationships of xenia and hetaireia to renegotiate their own status within-and at the pinnacle of-the civic order, and thereby guarantee the renewed prosperity of their respective communities. The capture of Troy is the result of a joint venture by the Atreidai and the Olympian "family" (primarily Zeus xenios and Athena). Although Agamemnon falls victim to his own mishandling of aristocratic privilege, his son is raised by doryxenoi in Phokis (Strophios and Pylades), a relationship which is mirrored by that with the Olympian "allies," Hermes and Apollo. Orestes' recovery of his father's position is thus shown to depend upon a network of "guest-friends" and "sworn-comrades," reinforced by the traditional language of oaths and reciprocal loyalty. In the Eumenides, the alliance between the Olympian and Argive royal families is re-invoked as the basis both for Athena's protection of Orestes, and finally for Zeus' concern for his daughter's Athenian dependents. In contrast to this successful "networking," and the resultant benefits that trickle down to the citizens of Argos and Athens, stand the seditious oaths and perverted "comradeship" of Aigisthos and Klytaimestra; likewise, the Erinyes are unable to draw on equivalent claims of pedigree or xenia to those enjoyed by Orestes and Apollo. Like all Greek tragedies, the "Oresteia" presents the action through constantly shifting viewpoints, those of aristocrats and commoners, leaders and led, while the propriety of this hierarchy itself is never questioned. And although the action moves from monarchical Argos to an incipiently democratic Athens, paradoxically we hear less and less about "ordinary," lower-class citizens as the trilogy progresses. Thus, at the same time that the trilogy reinforces the sense of collective survival and civic values (the perspectives, e.g., of the Argive Elders, Watchman, Herald, and Athenian Propompoi), it also suggests that these can be maintained only through the proper interventions of their traditional leaders. Aeschylus' plays were composed during a time when the Athenian democracy was still developing, and elite leadership and patronage were still taken for granted. Attic tragedy and the City Dionysia may be seen as a site of negotiation between rival (democratic and aristocratic) ideologies within the polis, wherein a kind of "solidarity without consensus" is achieved. Written and staged by the elite under license from the demos, the dramas play out (in the safety of the theater space) dangerous stories of royal risk-taking, crime, glory, and suffering, in such a way as to reassure the citizen audience simultaneously of their own collective invulnerability, and of the unique value of their (highly vulnerable, often flawed, but ultimately irreplaceable) leading families.
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McAuslan, I. "Athens under the Tyrants. By J. A. Smith; Greek Architecture. By. R. A. Tomlinson; Greek Tragedy: an Introduction. By Marion Baldock; Morals and Values in Ancient Greece. By John Ferguson; The Julio-Claudian Emperors. By Thomas Wiedemann. Bristol Classical Press, Bristol, 1989. Pp. viii + 93, with 12 figures; viii + 104, with 44 figures; vi + 112, with 11 figures; viii + 103, with 9 figures; xiii + 94, with 22 figures, 3 tables, and 1 map. Paper £4.95 each." Greece and Rome 37, no. 2 (October 1990): 229–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383500028990.

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Schwartz, Joel D. "The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens. By Philip Brook Manville. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 265p. $35.00. - The Greek Discovery of Politics. By Christian Meier. Translated by David McLintock. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. 305p. $32.50. - The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken. By J. Peter Euben. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 314p. $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper." American Political Science Review 85, no. 3 (September 1991): 1002–3. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1963870.

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Dover, K. J. "Some Types of Abnormal Word-Order in Attic Comedy." Classical Quarterly 35, no. 2 (December 1985): 324–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838800040209.

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On the analogy of the colloquial register in some modern languages, where narrative and argument may be punctuated by oaths and exclamations (sometimes obscene or blasphemous) in order to maintain a high affective level and compel the hearer's attention, it is reasonable to postulate that Attic conversation also was punctuated by oaths, that this ingredient in comic language was drawn from life, and that the comparative frequency of ║ (|) M M (M) Δ in comedy is sufficiently explained thereby. There are obvious affinities between some passages of comedy, relaxed conversation in Plato and Xenophon, and the forceful, man-to-man tone which Demosthenes sometimes adopts to such good effect (e.g. xxi 209). Compare, for instance, Ar. V. 133 f. ἔστιν δ' ⋯νομα ⋮ τῷ μ⋯ν γέροντι ⋮ Φιλοκλέων / να⋯ μ⋯ Δία, τῷ δ' υἱεῖ κτλ., where the oath is a response to imagined incredulity, and X. Smp. 4.27 αὐτ⋯ν δ⋯ σέ, ἔɸη, ⋯γὼ εἶδον να⋯ μ⋯ τ⋯ν Ἀπόλλω, ὅτε κτλ. (‘Oh, yes, I did!’).It is also important that the commonest oaths fit, in most of their forms, the end of an iambic trimeter: (να⋯) μ⋯ τ⋯ν Δία, ν⋯ (τ⋯ν) Δία,ν⋯ τούς θεούς, μ⋯ τοὺς θεούς. Add that in Aristophanic dialogue (by contrast with Menander) over half the iambic trimeters end with major pause, and half the remainder with minor pause, and we can see why Δ / established itself early as a distinctive comic pattern. Out of 105 examples of M M (M) Δ cited from comedy in Section II above, 59 have the oath at verse-end.In the case of πάνυ, which was almost exclusively Attic and — to judge from its great rarity in tragedy — felt by Athenian poets to be prosaic, we lack evidence on its functions in the colloquial register; it may or may not have served as affective punctuation. In prose, we have to reckon with the fact that π Mπ and Mπ π constituted a genuine stylistic choice (cf. n. 32) as far back as the evidence will take us, since the two earliest instances in prose are [X.] Ath. 2.3 πάνυ δι⋯ χρείαν and ibid. 3.5 πολλ⋯ ἔτι πάνυ. The oath, as treated by the comic poets on the basis of colloquial usage, is bound to have served as a model for πάνυ, exerting an influence which pulled πάνυ to the end of the verse, but there was also a powerful metrical constraint. As a dibrach ending in a vowel which could not be elided or enter into crasis, πάνυ was especially appropriate for verse-end. That in itself was enough both to establish Mπ π as the dominant pattern in comedy and to promote Mπ … π. Out of the total of 104 examples of Mπ (…) π in comedy, 93 have πάνυ at verse-end, which makes Mπ (…) π / one of the hallmarks of comic style. Mπ … π does not occur in prose in association with any other feature identified as colloquial, but it should be noted that Aiskhines and Demosthenes are much fonder of Mπ π than other prose authors. In some cases one can see that the order Mπ π avoids a succession of short syllables (e.g. D. xviii 130, liv 1) or hiatus (e.g. D. xxx 36) or both (e.g. D. xliii 10), but there are other cases in which it has the opposite effect (e.g. D. xxiv 140, xliii 53). The possibility of comic influence on oratorical language cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is also possible that someone will find positive determinants which will explain all the cases of Mπ π in prose.σɸόδρα, which, like πάνυ, is peculiarly Attic, is metrically more tractable than πάνυ, since it can be elided; even so, out of the 80 comic examples of Mσ (…) σ no less than 58 have σɸόδρα at verse-end, and of those 58 there are 22 at major pause, 8 at presumed major pause and 9 at minor pause. The comic treatment of σɸόδρα is thus comparable with the treatment of πάνυ, and Timokles (CGFP) 222(b).4 τηρεῖν…σɸόδρα is in fact the closest analogy we have to Ar. Pl. 234 f. ἄχθομαι…πάνυ.δέ and γάρ are a different matter, and in some significant respects different from each other. Postponement of δέ is especially prominent in Aeschylus (45 examples, including a few in which the text is suspect) and then abundant in fourth-century comedy. It is much less common in Euripides (18 examples), rare in Sophocles (6) and Aristophanes (6), and virtually limited in prose to the categories which I labelled (l)–(3). There is as yet no evidence to associate postponement of δέ with colloquial language; on the contrary, it seems to have begun as a feature of poetic language and to have been taken up and exploited by fourth-century comedy. If, in addition to being Aeschylean, it was colloquial in the fourth century, what happened to it afterwards? Except for such an isolated and inexplicable case as Diod. xx85.1 (v.l.!) — in a military narrative — it is not a feature of the Koine at literary, documentary or subliterate level.Postponement of γάρ was no doubt encouraged by postponement of δέ, but it is not itself notably poetic (20 examples in tragedy, of which only three come in my class (5)). One can see how it could possibly have developed in the spoken language of the fourth century, extending the function of γάρ as an explanatory particle (rather on the lines of γε) in a way which makes it comparable with the English ‘you see’ in (e.g.) ‘He didn't dare pick it up. He hurt his back last year, you see’. For an extension of this kind we may compare the current extension of the English genitive affix in (I heard both examples a year or two ago) ‘Then the girl whose place she was taking's mother turned up’ and ‘The man that Christopher liked's Introduction is much better’. Moreover, postponed γάρ appears in a segment of conversation constructed in indirect speech by Theophrastus in Char. 8.9 τ⋯ πρ⋯γμα βο⋯σθαι γάρ (p C N γάρ). Again we must ask: what happened to it afterwards? A couple of cases in Theophrastus' botanical works (CP iii 11.3 and HP iv 6.1) could be a reflex of the influence of comedy on literary language at Athens. The influence was plainly short-lived, since it did not affect the Koine.It is not hard to see why serious poetry in the fifth century and earlier should have experimented occasionally with the postponement of δέ and γάρ: treatment of M M q as a valid alternative to M q M is metrically very convenient. No poet, however, could afford to use common words in a bizarre, un-Greek way merely to save himself time and trouble in constructing a verse. Linguistic innovation is normally analogical, proceeding by extension from a starting-point already there, and the most obvious starting-point for postponement of δέ and γάρ is constituted by my class (3). This consideration provides comic postponement with a pedigree, but does not deny it individuality. The remarkable scale and frequency with which comedy exploited a phenomenon which tragedy used with restraint and prose hardly at all gives comic postponement the right to be regarded as a quite distinctive artificial feature of comedy.
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Hummler, Madeleine. "Classical and Hellenistic periods - Swedish Institute at Athens. Opuscula Atheniensia (Annual ofthe Swedish Institute at Athens) 30, 2005. 222 pages, numerous illustrations, tables. 2005. Stockholm: Swedish Institute at Athens & Sävedalen: Paul Åström; 91-7916-054-9 paperback. - Joan Breton Connelly. Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. xvi+416 pages, 120 illustrations, 27 colour plates. 2007. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press; 978-0-691-12746-0 hardback £26.95. - Susan I. Rotroff. Hellenistic Pottery: The Plain Wares (The Athenian Agora, Results of Excavations conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens Volume 33). xxxviii+442 pages, 65 illustrations in-text, 23 tables, 98 figures & 90 plates at end. 2006. Princeton (NJ): American School of Classical Studies at Athens; 978-0-87661-233-0 hardback $150 & £95. - Gloria S. Merker. The Greek Tile Works at Corinth: The Site and the Finds (Hesperia Supplement 35). xiv+186 pages, 119 illustrations. 2006. Princeton (NJ): American School of Classical Studies at Athens; 978-0-87661-535-5 paperback $55 & £35. - Philip P. Betancourt. The Chrysokamino Metallurgy Workshop and Its Territory (Hesperia Supplement 36). xxii+462 pages, 170 illustrations, 37 tables. 2006. Princeton (NJ): American School of Classical Studies at Athens; 978-0-87661-536-2 paperback $65 & £40. - Elizabeth Moignard, photographs by Robert L. Wilkins. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, Great Britain Fascicule 22: Aberdeen University, Marischal Museum Collection. x+40 pages, 20 figures, 53 plates. 2006. Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy; 978-0-19-726376-1 hardback £65. - Irene Bald Romano. Classical Sculpture: Catalogue of the Cypriot, Greek, and Roman Stone Sculpture in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. xii+332 pages, 400 illustrations, CD-ROM 2006. Philadelphia (PA): University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; 978-1-931707-84-8 hardback $59.95. - Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober & Robert W. Wallace with Paul Cartledge & Cynthia Farrar. Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece. xii+242 pages. 2007. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press; 978-0-520-24562-4 hardback £22.95. - Olga Palagia & Alkestis Choremi-Spetsieri (ed.) The Panathenaic Games (Proceedings of an International Conference held at the University of Athens, May 11-12, 2004). 172 pages, 120 illustrations, 16 colour plates, 4 tables. 2007. Oxford: Oxbow; 978-1-84217-221-6 hardback £45. - Graham Ley. The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy: Playing Space and Chorus. xx+226 pages, 19 illustrations. 2007. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press; 978-0-226-47757-2 hardback $40 & £25.50." Antiquity 81, no. 312 (June 1, 2007): 502–3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0003598x00120356.

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Gantley, Michael J., and James P. Carney. "Grave Matters: Mediating Corporeal Objects and Subjects through Mortuary Practices." M/C Journal 19, no. 1 (April 6, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1058.

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IntroductionThe common origin of the adjective “corporeal” and the noun “corpse” in the Latin root corpus points to the value of mortuary practices for investigating how the human body is objectified. In post-mortem rituals, the body—formerly the manipulator of objects—becomes itself the object that is manipulated. Thus, these funerary rituals provide a type of double reflexivity, where the object and subject of manipulation can be used to reciprocally illuminate one another. To this extent, any consideration of corporeality can only benefit from a discussion of how the body is objectified through mortuary practices. This paper offers just such a discussion with respect to a selection of two contrasting mortuary practices, in the context of the prehistoric past and the Classical Era respectively. At the most general level, we are motivated by the same intellectual impulse that has stimulated expositions on corporeality, materiality, and incarnation in areas like phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 77–234), Marxism (Adorno 112–119), gender studies (Grosz vii–xvi), history (Laqueur 193–244), and theology (Henry 33–53). That is to say, our goal is to show that the body, far from being a transparent frame through which we encounter the world, is in fact a locus where historical, social, cultural, and psychological forces intersect. On this view, “the body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes an infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78). However, for all that the cited paradigms offer culturally situated appreciations of corporeality; our particular intellectual framework will be provided by cognitive science. Two reasons impel us towards this methodological choice.In the first instance, the study of ritual has, after several decades of stagnation, been rewarded—even revolutionised—by the application of insights from the new sciences of the mind (Whitehouse 1–12; McCauley and Lawson 1–37). Thus, there are good reasons to think that ritual treatments of the body will refract historical and social forces through empirically attested tendencies in human cognition. In the present connection, this means that knowledge of these tendencies will reward any attempt to theorise the objectification of the body in mortuary rituals.In the second instance, because beliefs concerning the afterlife can never be definitively judged to be true or false, they give free expression to tendencies in cognition that are otherwise constrained by the need to reflect external realities accurately. To this extent, they grant direct access to the intuitive ideas and biases that shape how we think about the world. Already, this idea has been exploited to good effect in areas like the cognitive anthropology of religion, which explores how counterfactual beings like ghosts, spirits, and gods conform to (and deviate from) pre-reflective cognitive patterns (Atran 83–112; Barrett and Keil 219–224; Barrett and Reed 252–255; Boyer 876–886). Necessarily, this implies that targeting post-mortem treatments of the body will offer unmediated access to some of the conceptual schemes that inform thinking about human corporeality.At a more detailed level, the specific methodology we propose to use will be provided by conceptual blending theory—a framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, and others to describe how structures from different areas of experience are creatively blended to form a new conceptual frame. In this system, a generic space provides the ground for coordinating two or more input spaces into a blended space that synthesises them into a single output. Here this would entail using natural or technological processes to structure mortuary practices in a way that satisfies various psychological needs.Take, for instance, W.B. Yeats’s famous claim that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” (“Easter 1916” in Yeats 57-8). Here, the poet exploits a generic space—that of everyday objects and the effort involved in manipulating them—to coordinate an organic input from that taxonomy (the heart) with an inorganic input (a stone) to create the blended idea that too energetic a pursuit of an abstract ideal turns a person into an unfeeling object (the heart-as-stone). Although this particular example corresponds to a familiar rhetorical figure (the metaphor), the value of conceptual blending theory is that it cuts across distinctions of genre, media, language, and discourse level to provide a versatile framework for expressing how one area of human experience is related to another.As indicated, we will exploit this versatility to investigate two ways of objectifying the body through the examination of two contrasting mortuary practices—cremation and inhumation—against different cultural horizons. The first of these is the conceptualisation of the body as an object of a technical process, where the post-mortem cremation of the corpse is analogically correlated with the metallurgical refining of ore into base metal. Our area of focus here will be Bronze Age cremation practices. The second conceptual scheme we will investigate focuses on treatments of the body as a vegetable object; here, the relevant analogy likens the inhumation of the corpse to the planting of a seed in the soil from which future growth will come. This discussion will centre on the Classical Era. Burning: The Body as Manufactured ObjectThe Early and Middle Bronze Age in Western Europe (2500-1200 BCE) represented a period of change in funerary practices relative to the preceding Neolithic, exemplified by a move away from the use of Megalithic monuments, a proliferation of grave goods, and an increase in the use of cremation (Barrett 38-9; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Brück, Material Metaphors 308; Waddell, Bronze Age 141-149). Moreover, the Western European Bronze Age is characterised by a shift away from communal burial towards single interment (Barrett 32; Bradley 158-168). Equally, the Bronze Age in Western Europe provides us with evidence of an increased use of cist and pit cremation burials concentrated in low-lying areas (Woodman 254; Waddell, Prehistoric 16; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Bettencourt 103). This greater preference for lower-lying location appears to reflect a distinctive change in comparison to the distribution patterns of the Neolithic burials; these are often located on prominent, visible aspects of a landscape (Cooney and Grogan 53-61). These new Bronze Age burial practices appear to reflect a distancing in relation to the territories of the “old ancestors” typified by Megalithic monuments (Bettencourt 101-103). Crucially, the Bronze Age archaeological record provides us with evidence that indicates that cremation was becoming the dominant form of deposition of human remains throughout Central and Western Europe (Sørensen and Rebay 59-60).The activities associated with Bronze Age cremations such as the burning of the body and the fragmentation of the remains have often been considered as corporeal equivalents (or expressions) of the activities involved in metal (bronze) production (Brück, Death 84-86; Sørensen and Rebay 60–1; Rebay-Salisbury, Cremations 66-67). There are unequivocal similarities between the practices of cremation and contemporary bronze production technologies—particularly as both processes involve the transformation of material through the application of fire at temperatures between 700 ºC to 1000 ºC (Musgrove 272-276; Walker et al. 132; de Becdelievre et al. 222-223).We assert that the technologies that define the European Bronze Age—those involved in alloying copper and tin to produce bronze—offered a new conceptual frame that enabled the body to be objectified in new ways. The fundamental idea explored here is that the displacement of inhumation by cremation in the European Bronze Age was motivated by a cognitive shift, where new smelting technologies provided novel conceptual metaphors for thinking about age-old problems concerning human mortality and post-mortem survival. The increased use of cremation in the European Bronze Age contrasts with the archaeological record of the Near Eastern—where, despite the earlier emergence of metallurgy (3300–3000 BCE), we do not see a notable proliferation in the use of cremation in this region. Thus, mortuary practices (i.e. cremation) provide us with an insight into how Western European Bronze Age cultures mediated the body through changes in technological objects and processes.In the terminology of conceptual blending, the generic space in question centres on the technical manipulation of the material world. The first input space is associated with the anxiety attending mortality—specifically, the cessation of personal identity and the extinction of interpersonal relationships. The second input space represents the technical knowledge associated with bronze production; in particular, the extraction of ore from source material and its mixing with other metals to form an alloy. The blended space coordinates these inputs to objectify the human body as an object that is ritually transformed into a new but more durable substance via the cremation process. In this contention we use the archaeological record to draw a conceptual parallel between the emergence of bronze production technology—centring on transition of naturally occurring material to a new subsistence (bronze)—and the transitional nature of the cremation process.In this theoretical framework, treating the body as a mixture of substances that can be reduced to its constituents and transformed through technologies of cremation enabled Western European Bronze Age society to intervene in the natural process of putrefaction and transform the organic matter into something more permanent. This transformative aspect of the cremation is seen in the evidence we have for secondary burial practices involving the curation and circulation of cremated bones of deceased members of a group (Brück, Death 87-93). This evidence allows us to assert that cremated human remains and objects were considered products of the same transformation into a more permanent state via burning, fragmentation, dispersal, and curation. Sofaer (62-69) states that the living body is regarded as a person, but as soon as the transition to death is made, the body becomes an object; this is an “ontological shift in the perception of the body that assumes a sudden change in its qualities” (62).Moreover, some authors have proposed that the exchange of fragmented human remains was central to mortuary practices and was central in establishing and maintaining social relations (Brück, Death 76-88). It is suggested that in the Early Bronze Age the perceptions of the human body mirrored the perceptions of objects associated with the arrival of the new bronze technology (Brück, Death 88-92). This idea is more pronounced if we consider the emergence of bronze technology as the beginning of a period of capital intensification of natural resources. Through this connection, the Bronze Age can be regarded as the point at which a particular natural resource—in this case, copper—went through myriad intensive manufacturing stages, which are still present today (intensive extraction, production/manufacturing, and distribution). Unlike stone tool production, bronze production had the addition of fire as the explicit method of transformation (Brück, Death 88-92). Thus, such views maintain that the transition achieved by cremation—i.e. reducing the human remains to objects or tokens that could be exchanged and curated relatively soon after the death of the individual—is equivalent to the framework of commodification connected with bronze production.A sample of cremated remains from Castlehyde in County Cork, Ireland, provides us with an example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in a Western European context (McCarthy). This is chosen because it is a typical example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in the context of Western Europe; also, one of the authors (MG) has first-hand experience in the analysis of its associated remains. The Castlehyde cremation burial consisted of a rectangular, stone-lined cist (McCarthy). The cist contained cremated, calcined human remains, with the fragments generally ranging from a greyish white to white in colour; this indicates that the bones were subject to a temperature range of 700-900ºC. The organic content of bone was destroyed during the cremation process, leaving only the inorganic matrix (brittle bone which is, often, described as metallic in consistency—e.g. Gejvall 470-475). There is evidence that remains may have been circulated in a manner akin to valuable metal objects. First of all, the absence of long bones indicates that there may have been a practice of removing salient remains as curatable records of ancestral ties. Secondly, remains show traces of metal staining from objects that are no longer extant, which suggests that graves were subject to secondary burial practices involving the removal of metal objects and/or human bone. To this extent, we can discern that human remains were being processed, curated, and circulated in a similar manner to metal objects.Thus, there are remarkable similarities between the treatment of the human body in cremation and bronze metal production technologies in the European Bronze Age. On the one hand, the parallel between smelting and cremation allowed death to be understood as a process of transformation in which the individual was removed from processes of organic decay. On the other hand, the circulation of the transformed remains conferred a type of post-mortem survival on the deceased. In this way, cremation practices may have enabled Bronze Age society to symbolically overcome the existential anxiety concerning the loss of personhood and the breaking of human relationships through death. In relation to the former point, the resurgence of cremation in nineteenth century Europe provides us with an example of how the disposal of a human body can be contextualised in relation to socio-technological advancements. The (re)emergence of cremation in this period reflects the post-Enlightenment shift from an understanding of the world through religious beliefs to the use of rational, scientific approaches to examine the natural world, including the human body (and death). The controlled use of fire in the cremation process, as well as the architecture of crematories, reflected the industrial context of the period (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 16).With respect to the circulation of cremated remains, Smith suggests that Early Medieval Christian relics of individual bones or bone fragments reflect a reconceptualised continuation of pre-Christian practices (beginning in Christian areas of the Roman Empire). In this context, it is claimed, firstly, that the curation of bone relics and the use of mobile bone relics of important, saintly individuals provided an embodied connection between the sacred sphere and the earthly world; and secondly, that the use of individual bones or fragments of bone made the Christian message something portable, which could be used to reinforce individual or collective adherence to Christianity (Smith 143-167). Using the example of the Christian bone relics, we can thus propose that the curation and circulation of Bronze Age cremated material may have served a role similar to tools for focusing religiously oriented cognition. Burying: The Body as a Vegetable ObjectGiven that the designation “the Classical Era” nominates the entirety of the Graeco-Roman world (including the Near East and North Africa) from about 800 BCE to 600 CE, there were obviously no mortuary practices common to all cultures. Nevertheless, in both classical Greece and Rome, we have examples of periods when either cremation or inhumation was the principal funerary custom (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21).For instance, the ancient Homeric texts inform us that the ancient Greeks believed that “the spirit of the departed was sentient and still in the world of the living as long as the flesh was in existence […] and would rather have the body devoured by purifying fire than by dogs or worms” (Mylonas 484). However, the primary sources and archaeological record indicate that cremation practices declined in Athens circa 400 BCE (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 20). With respect to the Roman Empire, scholarly opinion argues that inhumation was the dominant funerary rite in the eastern part of the Empire (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 17-21; Morris 52). Complementing this, the archaeological and historical record indicates that inhumation became the primary rite throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Inhumation was considered to be an essential rite in the context of an emerging belief that a peaceful afterlife was reflected by a peaceful burial in which bodily integrity was maintained (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21; Morris 52; Toynbee 41). The question that this poses is how these beliefs were framed in the broader discourses of Classical culture.In this regard, our claim is that the growth in inhumation was driven (at least in part) by the spread of a conceptual scheme, implicit in Greek fertility myths that objectify the body as a seed. The conceptual logic here is that the post-mortem continuation of personal identity is (symbolically) achieved by objectifying the body as a vegetable object that will re-grow from its own physical remains. Although the dominant metaphor here is vegetable, there is no doubt that the motivating concern of this mythological fabulation is human mortality. As Jon Davies notes, “the myths of Hades, Persephone and Demeter, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Adonis and Aphrodite, of Selene and Endymion, of Herakles and Dionysus, are myths of death and rebirth, of journeys into and out of the underworld, of transactions and transformations between gods and humans” (128). Thus, such myths reveal important patterns in how the post-mortem fate of the body was conceptualised.In the terminology of mental mapping, the generic space relevant to inhumation contains knowledge pertaining to folk biology—specifically, pre-theoretical ideas concerning regeneration, survival, and mortality. The first input space attaches to human mortality; it departs from the anxiety associated with the seeming cessation of personal identity and dissolution of kin relationships subsequent to death. The second input space is the subset of knowledge concerning vegetable life, and how the immersion of seeds in the soil produces a new generation of plants with the passage of time. The blended space combines the two input spaces by way of the funerary script, which involves depositing the body in the soil with a view to securing its eventual rebirth by analogy with the sprouting of a planted seed.As indicated, the most important illustration of this conceptual pattern can be found in the fertility myths of ancient Greece. The Homeric Hymns, in particular, provide a number of narratives that trace out correspondences between vegetation cycles, human mortality, and inhumation, which inform ritual practice (Frazer 223–404; Carney 355–65; Sowa 121–44). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for instance, charts how Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the dead, and taken to his underground kingdom. While searching for her missing daughter, Demeter, goddess of fertility, neglects the earth, causing widespread devastation. Matters are resolved when Zeus intervenes to restore Persephone to Demeter. However, having ingested part of Hades’s kingdom (a pomegranate seed), Persephone is obliged to spend half the year below ground with her captor and the other half above ground with her mother.The objectification of Persephone as both a seed and a corpse in this narrative is clearly signalled by her seasonal inhumation in Hades’ chthonic realm, which is at once both the soil and the grave. And, just as the planting of seeds in autumn ensures rebirth in spring, Persephone’s seasonal passage from the Kingdom of the Dead nominates the individual human life as just one season in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. A further signifying element is added by the ingestion of the pomegranate seed. This is evocative of her being inseminated by Hades; thus, the coordination of vegetation cycles with life and death is correlated with secondary transition—that from childhood to adulthood (Kerényi 119–183).In the examples given, we can see how the Homeric Hymn objectifies both the mortal and sexual destiny of the body in terms of thresholds derived from the vegetable world. Moreover, this mapping is not merely an intellectual exercise. Its emotional and social appeal is visible in the fact that the Eleusinian mysteries—which offered the ritual homologue to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—persisted from the Mycenaean period to 396 CE, one of the longest recorded durations for any ritual (Ferguson 254–9; Cosmopoulos 1–24). In sum, then, classical myth provided a precedent for treating the body as a vegetable object—most often, a seed—that would, in turn, have driven the move towards inhumation as an important mortuary practice. The result is to create a ritual form that makes key aspects of human experience intelligible by connecting them with cyclical processes like the seasons of the year, the harvesting of crops, and the intergenerational oscillation between the roles of parent and child. Indeed, this pattern remains visible in the germination metaphors and burial practices of contemporary religions such as Christianity, which draw heavily on the symbolism associated with mystery cults like that at Eleusis (Nock 177–213).ConclusionWe acknowledge that our examples offer a limited reflection of the ethnographic and archaeological data, and that they need to be expanded to a much greater degree if they are to be more than merely suggestive. Nevertheless, suggestiveness has its value, too, and we submit that the speculations explored here may well offer a useful starting point for a larger survey. In particular, they showcase how a recurring existential anxiety concerning death—involving the fear of loss of personal identity and kinship relations—is addressed by different ways of objectifying the body. Given that the body is not reducible to the objects with which it is identified, these objectifications can never be entirely successful in negotiating the boundary between life and death. In the words of Jon Davies, “there is simply no let-up in the efforts by human beings to transcend this boundary, no matter how poignantly each failure seemed to reinforce it” (128). For this reason, we can expect that the record will be replete with conceptual and cognitive schemes that mediate the experience of death.At a more general level, it should also be clear that our understanding of human corporeality is rewarded by the study of mortuary practices. No less than having a body is coextensive with being human, so too is dying, with the consequence that investigating the intersection of both areas is likely to reveal insights into issues of universal cultural concern. For this reason, we advocate the study of mortuary practices as an evolving record of how various cultures understand human corporeality by way of external objects.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor W. Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Trans. Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Barrett, John C. “The Living, the Dead and the Ancestors: Neolithic and Bronze Age Mortuary Practices.” The Archaeology of Context in the Neolithic and Bronze Age: Recent Trends. Eds. John. C. Barrett and Ian. A. Kinnes. 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London: Psychology Press, 1999.De Becdelievre, Camille, Sandrine Thiol, and Frédéric Santos. “From Fire-Induced Alterations on Human Bones to the Original Circumstances of the Fire: An Integrated Approach of Human Remains Drawn from a Neolithic Collective Burial”. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 4 (2015) 210–225.Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.Ferguson, Everett. Backgrounds of Early Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003.Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Gejvall, Nils. "Cremations." Science and Archaeology: A Survey of Progress and Research. Eds. Don Brothwell and Eric Higgs. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969. 468-479.Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.Henry, Michel. I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Kerényi, Karl. “Kore.” The Science of Mythology. Trans. Richard F.C. Hull. London: Routledge, 1985. 119–183.Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1990.McCarthy, Margaret. “2003:0195 - Castlehyde, Co. Cork.” Excavations.ie. The Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, 4 July 2003. 12 Jan. 2016 <http://www.excavations.ie/report/2003/Cork/0009503/>.McCauley, Robert N., and E. Thomas Lawson. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans: Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002.Morris, Ian. Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.Musgrove, Jonathan. “Dust and Damn'd Oblivion: A Study of Cremation in Ancient Greece.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 85 (1990), 271-299.Mylonas, George. “Burial Customs.” A Companion to Homer. Eds. Alan Wace and Frank. H. Stubbings. London: Macmillan, 1962. 478-488.Nock, Arthur. D. “Hellenistic Mysteries and Christian Sacraments.” Mnemosyne 1 (1952): 177–213.Rebay-Salisbury, Katherina. "Cremations: Fragmented Bodies in the Bronze and Iron Ages." Body Parts and Bodies Whole: Changing Relations and Meanings. Eds. Katherina Rebay-Salisbury, Marie. L. S. Sørensen, and Jessica Hughes. Oxford: Oxbow, 2010. 64-71.———. “Inhumation and Cremation: How Burial Practices Are Linked to Beliefs.” Embodied Knowledge: Historical Perspectives on Technology and Belief. Eds Marie. L.S. Sørensen and Katherina Rebay-Salisbury. Oxford: Oxbow, 2012. 15-26.Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. Nottingham: SAGE, 2012.Smith, Julia M.H. “Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c.700–1200).” Proceedings of the British Academy 181 (2012): 143–167.Sofaer, Joanna R. The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.Sørensen, Marie L.S., and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury. “From Substantial Bodies to the Substance of Bodies: Analysis of the Transition from Inhumation to Cremation during the Middle Bronze Age in Europe.” Past Bodies: Body-Centered Research in Archaeology. Eds. Dušan Broić and John Robb. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008. 59–68.Sowa, Cora Angier. Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1984.Toynbee, Jocelyn M.C. Death and Burial in the Roman World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.Waddell, John. The Bronze Age Burials of Ireland. Galway: Galway UP, 1990.———. The Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland. Galway: Galway UP, 2005.Walker, Philip L., Kevin W.P. Miller, and Rebecca Richman. “Time, Temperature, and Oxygen Availability: An Experimental Study of the Effects of Environmental Conditions on the Colour and Organic Content of Cremated Bone.” The Analysis of Burned Human Remains. Eds. Christopher W. Schmidt and Steven A. Symes. London: Academic Press, 2008. 129–135.Whitehouse, Harvey. Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Woodman Peter. “Prehistoric Settlements and Environment.” The Quaternary History of Ireland. Eds. Kevin J. Edwards and William P. Warren. London: Academic Press, 1985. 251-278.Yeats, William Butler. “Easter 1916.” W.B. Yeats: The Major Works. Ed. Edward Larrissey. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. 85–87.
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