Details the role of sports in the classical world from early Greece through the late Roman and early Byzantine empires.

This is the first major study to focus solely on the victor sayings and should prove invaluable to scholars and students of Revelation and apocalyptic literature. It demonstrates that the motif of victory is Revelation's macrodynamic theme. Chiasmus is proposed as the book's macrostructure, based in part on the chiastic nature of the promises to the victors, with the later fulfillment of these promises in the book. The proposed forms for the seven letters--forms such as edicts, oracles, and epistles--are examined, and it is concluded that they are a mixtum compositum best called "prophetic letters." The sociological significance of victory is explored within the Greco-Roman world. The text of the promises and their co-texts (as reflected intertextually in traditions of biblical literature) receive thorough examination. The eschatological fulfillment of the victor sayings is surveyed in Revelation's later chapters, especially in chapters 21-22, where the new Jerusalem is depicted. The study concludes with an investigation of the ways that the promises were appropriated for the time and the text world of Revelation.

In contrast with previous methodologies which seek ''key ideas'' or functional ''programs, '' this book argues that the unique complexity of Pindar's choral lyric can be better understood by analysis of each text's logical configuration as a network of interacting polarities and analogies. Against the backdrop of pre-Socratic philosophy and later rhetorical radition, the book systematically examines the primary polar relations which are prominent in Pindar's work, illustrating their development and transformation through the course of individual odes. The author concludes that Pindar expands traditional ethical dichotomies into dynamic tensions which play on the semantic fluidity of Greek poetic language in its formative period. This work attempts to apply ''structuralist'' hermeneutics in an appropriate way to the elucidation of an often difficult and obscure archaic poet. Accordingly, it should be of interest not only to the Pindaric specialist, but also to students of literary theory and the history of ideas in antiquity.

This volume brings together essays by archaeologists, historians, and literary scholars in a comprehensive examination of the Greek archaic age. A time of dramatic and revolutionary change when many of the institutions and thought patterns that would shape Greek culture evolved, this period has become the object of renewed scholarly interest in recent years. Yet it has resisted reconstruction, largely because its documentation is less complete than that of the classical period. In order to read the text of archaic Greece, the contributors here apply new methods--including anthropology, literary theory, and cultural history--to central issues, among them the interpretation of ritual, the origins of hero cult and its relation to politics, the evolving ideologies of colonization and athletic victory, the representation of statesmen and sages, and the serendipitous development of democracy. With their interdisciplinary approaches, the various essays demonstrate the interdependence of politics, religion, and economics in this period; the importance of public performance for negotiating social interaction; and the creative use of the past to structure a changing present. Cultural Poetics in Ancient Greece offers a vigorous and coherent response to the scholarly challenges of the archaic period.