Chapter 5. Satyr, Lover, Teacher, Pimp: Socrates and His Many Masks What was the most amazing thing about Socrates? If we trust Alcibiades, it was that no one living or dead could compare to him. Any number of remarkable individuals shared with Socrates a trait or two, yet none could match that singular “strangeness” (atopia) of his (Plato Symposium 221c–d). What, then, made Socrates so different? Evidently… Read more
Chapter 6. Conclusions Rhetoric, aesthetics, ethics, politics—one might think that only one of those four directly concerns how things should be versus how they are. Still, as in Aristotle, so too in Bakhtin, ethics casts its net wide. Thus for the Russian thinker, poetics and aesthetics count as moral sciences concerned not just with the laws of form, but with an artist’s responsibility to art and life. Read more
Bibliography Adams, J. N. 1982. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. London. Alexiou, M. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge. Althusser, L. 1972. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York. ———. 1977. Reading Capital. 2nd ed. Trans. Ben Brewster, ed. 2. London. ———. 1979. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. Read more
Preface From an idea to organize a symposium to welcoming participants and ultimately holding a book in our hands … in our case, none of the steps in this process would have been possible without the Center for Hellenic Studies. When we were both junior fellows at the Center in the academic year 2001–2002, we soon found out that we shared a strong interest in Greek religion. Read more
Abbreviations AAA = Archaiologika analekta ex Athenon AarchSyr = Annales archéologiques de Syrie AASA = Annali di archeologia e storia antica AD = Antike Denkmäler AK = Antike Kunst AKG = Archiv für Kulturgeschichte AM = Annales du Midi. Revue de la… Read more
Introduction. What Is a Greek Priest?* Albert Henrichs What is a Greek priest? It might seem redundant, if not preposterous, to raise such a question in a volume of essays devoted to this very topic. For more than two hundred years, students of antiquity and historians of Greek religion have been in the habit of designating some or even all Greek… Read more
1. Priests as Ritual Experts in the Greek World Angelos Chaniotis 1. Who Needs Ritual Experts? In the study of Greek rituals more interest has been paid to the content, context, meaning, and function of rituals than to the persons who performed them—and I should add: for good reasons. [1] As F. Gschnitzer has shown, [2]… Read more
2. Priestly Personnel of the Ephesian Artemision: Anatolian, Persian, Greek, and Roman Aspects* Jan Bremmer The Indo-Europeans had neither a separate priestly class nor a specific term for priests or priestesses. This tradition may be one of the reasons why the Greeks had no clearly defined priestly class either. Every city could develop its own organization and vocabulary, [1]… Read more
3. Professionals, Volunteers, and Amateurs: Serving the Gods kata ta patria Susan Guettel Cole Alexandra Consults the Oracle In the second century AD, a priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros at Miletus consulted the oracle of Apollo at Didyma. A third-person account of her query survives: With good fortune. Alexandra, priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros, puts a question to the oracle, because, since the time when… Read more
4. Greek Priests of Sarapis? Beate Dignas Studying Hellenistic priests is piecework. Given that the main body of evidence comes from inscriptions, the questions, where is the best place to start? and how can this study be structured successfully? seem almost unanswerable. The task is extremely ambitious, but general statements on the character and significance of priesthoods are such a desideratum that even idiosyncratic examples must… Read more
