Brings together a wide range of papers written with a single vision. Greek tragedy, the New Testament, representations of the inner self, Greek and Indian philosophy, Wagner: these seemingly disparate phenomena are analysed with special attention to the shaping influence of ritual and of money.

How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage, which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system, fundamental to Presocratic philosophy, and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods, as found in tragedy.

All Greek is translated."--BOOK JACKET.

This book further develops Professor Seaford's innovative work on the study of ritual and money in the developing Greek polis. It employs the concept of the chronotope, which refers to the phenomenon whereby the spatial and temporal frameworks explicit or implicit in a text have the same structure, and uncovers various such chronotopes in Homer, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Presocratic philosophy and in particular the tragedies of Aeschylus. Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering use of the chronotope was in literary analysis. This study by contrast derives the variety of chronotopes manifest in Greek texts from the variety of socially integrative practices in the developing polis - notably reciprocity, collective ritual and monetised exchange. In particular, the Oresteia of Aeschylus embodies the reassuring absorption of the new and threatening monetised chronotope into the traditional chronotope that arises from collective ritual with its aetiological myth. This argument includes the first ever demonstration of the profound affinities between Aeschylus and the (Presocratic) philosophy of his time.

Explains for the first time the genesis and early form of both Indian and Greek philosophy, and their striking similarities.

This volume brings together studies on Greek animal sacrifice by foremost experts in Greek language, literature and material culture. Readers will benefit from the synthesis of new evidence and approaches with a re-evaluation of twentieth-century theories on sacrifice. The chapters range across the whole of antiquity and go beyond the Greek world to consider possible influences in Hittite Anatolia and Egypt, while an introduction to the burgeoning science of osteo-archaeology is provided. The twentieth-century emphasis on sacrifice as part of the Classical Greek polis system is challenged through consideration of various ancient perspectives on sacrifice as distinct from specific political or even Greek contexts. Many previously unexplored topics are covered, particularly the type of animals sacrificed and the spectrum of sacrificial ritual, from libations to lasting memorials of the ritual in art.

The volume offers new insights into the intricate theme of silence in Greek literature, especially drama. Even though the topic has received respectable attention in recent years, it still lends itself to further inquiry, which embraces silence's very essence and boundaries; its applications and effects in particular texts or genres; and some of its technical features and qualities. The particular topics discussed extend to all these three areas of inquiry, by looking into: silence's possible role in the performance of epic and lyric; its impact on the workings of praise-poetry; its distinct deployments in our five complete ancient novels; Aristophanic, comic and otherwise, silences; the vocabulary of the unspeakable in tragedy; the connections of tragic silence to power, authority, resistance, and motivation; female tragic silences and their transcendence, against the background of male oppression or domination; famous tragic silences as expressions of the ritualized isolation of the individual from both human and divine society. The emerging insights are valuable for the broader interpretation of the relevant texts, as well as for the fuller understanding of central values and practices of the society that created them.