Special Issue Greek Worlds Ancient And Modern

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.

Classics in the Modern World explores the features and implications of a 'democratic turn' in modern perceptions of the ancient world. Exploring the relationship between Greek and Roman ways of thinking and modern definitions of democratic practices and approaches, it enables a wider re-evaluation of the role of classics in the modern world.

In this book, prominent historians apply Mediterranean paradigms to Classical Mediterranean Antiquty (Greece and Rome), allowing for a new approach to the ancient world and enhancing antiquity's relevance to the understanding of other historical periods as well as our contemporary world. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Mediterranean Historical Review.

Ancient Greece was the model that guided the emergence of many facets of the modern sports movement, including most notably the Olympics. Yet the process whereby aspects of the ancient world were appropriated and manipulated by sport authorities of nation-states, athletic organizations and their leaders as well as by sports enthusiasts is only very partially understood. This volume takes modern Greece as a case-study and explores, in depth, issues related to the reception and use of classical antiquity in modern sport, spectacle and bodily culture. For citizens of the Greek nation-state, classical antiquity is not merely a vague "legacy" but the cornerstone of their national identity. In the field of sport and bodily culture, since the 1830s there had been persistent attempts to establish firm and direct links between ancient Greek athletics and modern sport through the incorporation of sport in school curricula, the emergence of national sport historiographies as well as the initiatives to revive (in the 19th century) or appropriate (in the 20th) the modern Olympics. Based on fieldwork and unpublished material sources, this book dissects the use and abuse of classical antiquity and sport in constructing national, gender and class identities, and illuminate aspects of the complex modern perceptions of classicism, sport and the body. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

This book simultaneously tells a story—or rather, stories—and a history. The stories are those of Greek Leftists as paradigmatic figures of abjection, given that between 1929 and 1974 tens of thousands of Greek dissidents were detained and tortured in prisons, places of exile, and concentration camps. They were sometimes held for decades, in subhuman conditions of toil and deprivation. The history is that of how the Greek Left was constituted by the Greek state as a zone of danger. Legislation put in place in the early twentieth century postulated this zone. Once the zone was created, there was always the possibility—which came to be a horrific reality after the Greek Civil War of 1946 to 1949—that the state would populate it with its own citizens. Indeed, the Greek state started to do so in 1929, by identifying ever-increasing numbers of citizens as “Leftists” and persecuting them with means extending from indefinite detention to execution. In a striking departure from conventional treatments, Neni Panourgiá places the Civil War in a larger historical context, within ruptures that have marked Greek society for centuries. She begins the story in 1929, when the Greek state set up numerous exile camps on isolated islands in the Greek archipelago. The legal justification for these camps drew upon laws reaching back to 1871—originally directed at controlling “brigands”—that allowed the death penalty for those accused and the banishment of their family members and anyone helping to conceal them. She ends with the 2004 trial of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Panourgiá uses ethnographic interviews, archival material, unpublished personal narratives, and memoirs of political prisoners and dissidents to piece together the various microhistories of a generation, stories that reveal how the modern Greek citizen was created as a fraught political subject. Her book does more than give voice to feelings and experiences suppressed for decades. It establishes a history for the notion of indefinite detention that appeared as a legal innovation with the Bush administration. Part of its roots, Panourgiá shows, lie in the laboratory that Greece provided for neo-colonialism after the Truman Doctrine and under the Marshall Plan.

The Parthenon. Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. Homer's epic poems. Gods and goddesses lounging around, indulging in pleasures on Mount Olympus. All of these images bring to mind the traditional icons of Greece, the cradle of Western Civilization. But what do we know of modern Greece? The answer to that question and more can be found in this comprehensive look at contemporary Greek culture. This one-stop reference source is packed with illustrative descriptions of daily life in Greece in the 21st century. Ideal for high school students and even undergraduates interested in studying abroad, this extensive volume examines topics such as religion, social customs, leisure life, festivals, language, literature, performing arts, media, and modern art and architecture, among many other topics. Woven into the text are beautiful and accurate vignettes of Greek life, helping to illustrate how it is people live. A crossroads between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Greece is fighting to hold on to the culture of yesterday, while still looking toward modernity. Culture and Customs of Greece is a must-have volume for all high school and public library shelves.

Women Writing Greece explores images of modern Greece by women who experienced the country as travellers, writers, and scholars, or who journeyed there through the imagination. The essays assembled here consider women's travel narratives, memoirs and novels, ranging from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, focusing on the role of gender in travel and cross-cultural mediation and challenging stereotypical views of 'the Greek journey', traditionally seen as an antiquarian or Byronic pursuit. This collection aims to cast new light on women's participation in the discourses of Hellenism and Orientalism, examining their ideological rendering of Greece as at once a luminous land and a site crossed by contradictory cultural memories. Arranged chronologically, the essays discuss encounters with Greece by, among others, Lady Elizabeth Craven, Lady Hester Stanhope, Lady Montagu, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley, Felicia Skene, Emily Pfeiffer, Eva Palmer, Jane Ellen Harrison, Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, Christa Wolf, Penelope Storace and Gillian Bouras, and analyse them through a variety of critical, historical, contextual and theoretical frames.

Classical drama on the modern stage as a cultural and political phenomenon is scholarly trailed since the 1950s and 60s and intensified in the last third of the twentieth century. The evidence is being extensively documented, pioneered by Walton (1987) and McDonald (1992) and subsequently developed by collaborative research projects which include published databases. It is clear from the work of these projects that performance of classical drama is a major feature in all types of theatre – avant-garde and experimental, student, international and fringe, epic and classical, commercial, popular and canonical. This means that it is closely intertwined with the politics of locale, environment and geography as well as of language, translation and culture. Each of the essays has a specialised contribution to make. However, the total impact of the whole section will be even greater than the sum of the parts because the authors not only intersect in their discussions of common concerns in modern performance of ancient drama but also provide case studies that will add to the knowledge base and critical acumen of everyone working in the field.