In Memory of Hakapoua, Wes Mere, and Koha Hēdea Dōra Acknowledgments This book stems from a sense of lasting awe before the marvels of the natural world. It stems from walks in the woods, along the resounding sea, and through lushly planted gardens. It stems also from the wondrous painted landscapes in Roman houses and villas on the Bay of Naples, from Lucretius’ impassioned, often… Read more
Prologue: An Afternoon Walk One fine afternoon in Athens, Cicero, together with his friends Marcus Piso and Titus Pomponius, his brother Quintus, and his first cousin Lucius Cicero, set off on foot through the imposing Dipylon Gate and beyond the city’s circuit wall. Their destination was the nearby Academy where they intended to take a relaxing stroll to unwind from a morning spent listening to the philosophical discourse of… Read more
Introduction: Seeds of Perfection In the course of the so-called Heroic Age, the Greeks mustered a fleet of a thousand ships and sailed to Troy in order to retrieve the radiant Helen, wife of the Spartan king, as well as to avenge the Trojan prince’s breach of the sacrosanct relationship between guest and host. [1] Thus it was, as Homer recounts, that… Read more
Chapter 1. Homer’s Eutopolis For ten long years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus endures one hardship after another as his ships are driven over the ominous, wine-dark sea, but his sufferings are not in vain. In the course of his wanderings, Odysseus sees many cities and intimately comes to know many ways of life. The intelligence he gathers will be of the utmost importance to him… Read more
Chapter 2. Greece and the Garden It is at dawn, the time of new beginnings, that the Phaiakian ship, with Odysseus onboard, draws near to the island of Ithaka. There the spectacular harbor of Phorkys, enclosed by two lofty promontories sheltering it from perilous winds and waves, affords all vessels a ready approach. At the head of the harbor, Homer tells us, is a long-leaved olive tree… Read more
Chapter 3. Rome and the Reinvention of Paradise In 1848, earthworks on Rome’s Esquiline Hill fortuitously brought to light part of an elegant private house in what was once a fashionable neighborhood in the ancient city’s expansive greenbelt. The walls of a cryptoporticus, a long vaulted room in the villa’s substructure, yielded a most remarkable work of art, an unprecedented example of landscape painting (Figure 9). Dated… Read more
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
