What was childhood like in ancient Greece? What activities and games did Greek children embrace? How were they schooled and what religious and ceremonial rites of passage were key to their development? These fascinating questions and many more are answered in this groundbreaking book--the first English-language study to feature and discuss imagery and artifacts relating to childhood in ancient Greece.Coming of Age in Ancient Greece shows that the Greeks were the first culture to represent children and their activities naturalistically in their art. Here we learn about depictions of children in myth as well as life, from infancy to adolescence. This beautifully illustrated book features such archaeological artifacts as toys and gaming pieces alongside images of them in use by children on ancient vases, coins, terracotta figurines, bronze and stone sculpture, and marble grave monuments. Essays by eminent scholars in the fields of Greek social history, literature, archaeology, anthropology, and art history discuss a wide range of topics, including the burgeoning role of childhood studies in interdisciplinary studies; the status of children in Greek culture; the evolution of attitudes toward children from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period as documented by literature and art; the relationships of fathers and sons and mothers and daughters; and the roles of cult practice and death in a child's existence.This delightful book illuminates what is most universal and specific about childhood in ancient Greece and examines childhood's effects on Greek life and culture, the foundation on which Western civilization has been based.

This volume contains 20 papers that explore ancient notions and experiences of childhood around the Mediterranean, from prehistory to late antiquity.

This volume reflects on liminality as it relates to initiatory themes in Greek literature and on literary works, especially tragedy, that represent heroes and heroines undergoing rites of passage. Featured works include Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Euripides' Ion and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Sophocles' Antigone and Women of Trachis.

"Wonderful…a thoughtful discussion of what made [the Greeks] so important, in their own time and in ours." —Natalie Haynes, Independent The ancient Greeks invented democracy, theater, rational science, and philosophy. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. Yet this accomplished people never formed a single unified social or political identity. In Introducing the Ancient Greeks, acclaimed classics scholar Edith Hall offers a bold synthesis of the full 2,000 years of Hellenic history to show how the ancient Greeks were the right people, at the right time, to take up the baton of human progress. Hall portrays a uniquely rebellious, inquisitive, individualistic people whose ideas and creations continue to enthrall thinkers centuries after the Greek world was conquered by Rome. These are the Greeks as you’ve never seen them before.

The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once again by his death in 323 BCE. Over time, trade and intellectual achievement resumed, but Cleopatra's death in 30 BCE brought this Hellenistic moment to a close--or so the story goes. Angelos Chaniotis reveals a Hellenistic world that continued to Hadrian's death in 138 CE.

The Greek Way of Life is a survey of the major life experiences which constituted the social reality of classical Greece, broken down into the general topics of conception and pregnancy, birth, childhood, coming of age, early adulthood, and elders and the elderly. What emerges is a conception of the human being as a social animal par excellence whose nature was largely realised in the attainment of paradigmatic social roles: military service for men and childbearing for women. Among the subtopics are Greek medical ideas, the roles of women and children, marriage, care of the elderly, and the role of religious ideas. An engaging narrative and a useful sourcebook, this will appeal to both general readers and scholars.