- Shopping Bag ( 0 items )
Other sellers (Hardcover)
-
All (11) from $82.61
-
New (10) from $82.61
-
Used (1) from $154.21
More About This Textbook
Overview
By the end of the archaic period, Greek sanctuaries were bursting with dedications, including many that bore epigrams. This study views dedications comprehensively as sites of ritual efficacy, and in particular it recovers epigrams' reflections of and contributions to that efficacy and restores them to an important place in the panorama of Greek religious practice. In order to reconstruct the archaic experience of reading and viewing, the book draws on studies of traditional poetic language as resonant with immanent meaning, early Greek poetry as socially and religiously effective performance, and viewing art as an active response of aesthetic appreciation. It argues that reading epigrams while viewing dedications generated effects of religious ritual and poetic performance, and that visual and verbal representation of the dedicator's act of offering associated that rite with similar effects, thereby framing the experiences of readers and viewers as reperformances of the earlier occasion.
Product Details
Meet the Author
Joseph W. Day is Professor of Classics at Wabash College, Indiana and frequent Senior Associate Member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He is the author of The Glory of Athens: The Popular Tradition in Aelius Aristides (1980); but subsequently he has focused on earlier inscribed Greek epigram, contributing to many journals and edited collections on that subject.
Table of Contents
List of illustrations ix
Preface xiii
List of abbreviations xix
1 (Re) presentation and (re)performance 1
Questions about reception 1
Straightforward representation 5
A thesis: (re)presentation generates (re)performance 14
The argument of the book 17
Scholarly context 21
Telesinos again 24
2 Contexts of encounters and the question of reading 26
Did Greeks view dedications and read their inscriptions? 26
Reading Mantiklos' epigram (CEG326) 33
Efforts to attract and guide reading 48
Literary evidence for epigraphic literacy 59
Circumstances of viewing and reading 64
Table 1 How readings are attracted 76
Table 2 How readings are guided 80
3 Presenting the dedication 85
Naming the dedication agalma 85
The theme of agalma 88
Agalma as performance frame 106
Agalma: theme, frame, reperformance 120
Appendix: How not to define agalma in inscriptions 124
4 Presenting the god 130
Epigraphic divine names: representation and effects 130
Activation of ritual: praising, conjuring, and constructing gods 141
(Re)presentation of ritual: the Athenian Akropolis and the Panathenaia 159
Conclusion: reperforming the Panathenaia 176
5 Presenting the dedicator 181
Piety or display? 181
The dedicator's family 187
The dedicator's achievement, especially athletic 198
Piety and display 228
6 Presenting the act of dedicating 232
Charis: then, now, forever 232
The theme of charis 234
The frame of charis 246
The charis of the encounter 254
The reperformance of charis 272
Bibliography 281
Index of inscriptions and passages discussed 312
Greek index 315
Subject index 316