The Imagery Of The Athenian Symposium

This book explores what it meant to be a Greek community and how Athenians thought about past and present.

This book presents the first well-preserved set of sympotic pottery which served a Late Archaic house in the Athenian Agora. The deposit contains household and fine-ware pottery, nearly all the figured pieces of which are forms associated with communal drinking. Since it comes from a single house, the pottery also reflects purchasing patterns and thematic preferences of the homeowner. The multifaceted approach adopted in this book shows that meaning and use are inherently related, and that through archaeology one can restore a context of use for a class of objects frequently studied in isolation. Winner of the 2013 James R. Wiseman Book Award given by the Archaeological Institute of America.

The images analyzed in this project suggest that the modern understanding of the reclining symposium as an Orientalizing import was not shared by the ancient Athenians, who instead endowed the institution with a proud Hellenic pedigree. This realization calls into question the modern conception of the late Archaic symposium as a countercultural institution practiced exclusively by aristocrats who distinguished themselves from common citizens by engaging in a practice that was understood to be more Asian than Hellenic. On the contrary, I argue, the images' emphasis on the symposium as an ancient institution practiced by a community of equals has parallels in the rhetoric surrounding Athenian democracy, which sought legitimacy in a myth of autochthony that defined all citizen men as each other's equals. Far from being hostile to the common Athenian citizen, the symposium is represented on the vases as his birthright.

This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, and sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece.

The fourteen essays in this volume share new and evolving knowledge, theories, and observations about the city of Athens or the region of Attica. The contents include essays on topography, architecture, religion and cult, sculpture, ceramic studies, iconography, epigraphy, trade, and drama. This volume is dedicated to John McK. Camp II, to acknowledge the extraordinary impact he has had on the field of Greek archaeology through his work in the Athenian Agora, as a scholar of ancient Greece, and as Mellon Professor at the American School of Classical Studies. The contributors' work represents current research by the latest generation of scholars with ties to Athens. All of the contributors were students of Professor Camp in Greece, and their essays are dedicated to him in gratitude for his profound influence on their lives and careers.

Frisbee Sheffield argues that the Symposium has been unduly marginalized by philosophers. Although the topic - eros - and the setting at a symposium have seemed anomalous, she demonstrates that both are intimately related to Plato's preoccupation with the nature of the good life, with virtue, and how it is acquired and transmitted. For Plato, analysing our desires is a way of reflecting on the kind of people we will turn out to be and on our chances of leading a worthwhile and happy life. In its focus on the question why he considered desires to be amenable to this type of reflection, this book explores Plato's ethics of desire.

How did the Greek view of Persia and Persians change so radically in the archaic and classical Greek sources that they turned from noble warriors into peacock-loving cross-dressers with murderous mothers? This book looks at the development of a range of responses to the Achaemenids and their Empire. Through a study of ancient texts and material evidence from the archaic and classical periods, Janett Morgan investigates the historical, political and social factors that inspired and manipulated different identities for Persia and the Persians within Greece.Key Features:an interdisciplinary approach to investigating cultural contact and cultural exchange to explore the Greek response to Persiaoffers unique insights into the role of Greek social elites and political communities in creating different representations of the Achaemenid Persians and their EmpireKeywords

The New Testament gospels feature numerous social exchanges between Jesus and people with various physical and sensory disabilities. Despite this, traditional biblical scholarship has not seen these people as agents in their own right but existing only to highlight the actions of Jesus as a miracle worker. In this study, Louise A. Gosbell uses disability as a lens through which to explore a number of these passages anew. Using the cultural model of disability as the theoretical basis, she explores the way that the gospel writers, as with other writers of the ancient world, used the language of disability as a means of understanding, organising, and interpreting the experiences of humanity. Her investigation highlights the ways in which the gospel writers reinforce and reflect, as well as subvert, culturally-driven constructions of disability in the ancient world.

The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual addresses the various modes of interaction between ancient Greek lyric poetry and the visual arts as well as more general notions of visuality. It covers diverse poetic genres in a range of contexts radiating outwards from the original performance(s) to encompass their broader cultural settings, the later reception of the poems, and finally also their understanding in modern scholarship. By focusing on the relationship between the visual and the verbal as well as the sensory and the mental, this volume raises a wide range of questions concerning human perception and cultural practices. As this collection of essays shows, Greek lyric poetry played a decisive role in the shaping of both.

In the Greek Classical period, the symposium--the social gathering at which male citizens gathered to drink wine and engage in conversation--was held in a room called the andron. From couches set up around the perimeter, symposiasts looked inward to the room's center, which often was decorated with a pebble mosaic floor. These mosaics provided visual treats for the guests, presenting them with images of mythological scenes, exotic flora, dangerous beasts, hunting parties, or the spectre of Dionysos: the god of wine, riding in his chariot or on the back of a panther. In The World Underfoot, Hallie M. Franks takes as her subject these mosaics and the context of their viewing. Relying on discourses in the sociology and anthropology of space, she presents an innovative new interpretation of the mosaic imagery as an active contributor to the symposium as a metaphorical experience. Franks argues that the images on mosaic floors, combined with the ritualized circling of the wine cup and the physiological reaction to wine during the symposium, would have called to mind other images, spaces, or experiences, and in doing so, prompted drinkers to reimagine the symposium as another kind of event--a nautical voyage, a journey to a foreign land, the circling heavens or a choral dance, or the luxury of an abundant past. Such spatial metaphors helped to forge the intimate bonds of friendship that are the ideal result of the symposium and that make up the political and social fabric of the Greek polis.