Savage Energies: Lessons of Myth and Ritual in Ancient Greece - Couverture souple

Burkert, Walter

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 022610043X ISBN 13 : 9780226100432

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2013

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

We often think of classical Greek society as a model of rationality and order. Yet as Walter Burkert demonstrates in these influential essays on the history of Greek religion, there were archaic, savage forces surging beneath the outwardly calm face of classical Greece, whose potentially violent and destructive energies, Burkert argues, were harnessed to constructive ends through the interlinked uses of myth and ritual.

For example, in a much-cited essay on the Athenian religious festival of the Arrephoria, Burkert uncovers deep connections between this strange nocturnal ritual, in which two virgin girls carried sacred offerings into a cave and later returned with something given to them there, and tribal puberty initiations by linking the festival with the myth of the daughters of Kekrops. Other chapters explore the origins of tragedy in blood sacrifice; the role of myth in the ritual of the new fire on Lemnos; the ties between violence, the Athenian courts, and the annual purification of the divine image; and how failed political propaganda entered the realm of myth at the time of the Persian Wars.

Biographie de l'auteur

Walter Burkert is an emeritus professor of classics at the University of Zürich. He is the author of a number of books, most recently The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age and Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Peter Bing is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of the Classics at Emory University. 

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 022610043X
• ISBN 13: 9780226100432
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 110