18 research outputs found
The noise-lovers: cultures of speech and sound in second-century Rome
This chapter provides an examination of an ideal of the âdeliberate speakerâ, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech. In the Roman Empire, words became a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups, and orators and authors in both Latin and Greek alleged, by contrast, that their enemies produced babbling noise rather than articulate speech. In this chapter, the ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.Accepted manuscrip
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The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy
Pindarâs epinikian odes were poems commissioned to celebrate athletic victories in the first half of the fifth century BCE. Drawing on the insights of interpretive anthropology and cultural history, Leslie Kurke investigates how the socially embedded genre of epinikion responded to a period of tremendous social and cultural change. Kurke examines the odes as public performances which enact the reintegration of the athletic victor into his heterogeneous communities. These communitiesâthe victorâs household, his aristocratic class, and his cityârepresent competing, sometimes conflicting interests, which the epinikian poet must satisfy to accomplish his project of reintegration. Kurke considers in particular the different modes of exchange in which Pindarâs poetry participated: the symbolic economy of the household, gift exchange between aristocratic houses, and the workings of monetary exchange within the city. Her analysis produces an archaeology of Pindarâs poetry, exposing multiple systems of imagery that play on different shared cultural models to appeal to the various segments of the poetâs audience. The Traffic in Praise aims to provide new insight into Pindarâs poetry as well as into the conceptual world of archaic and classical Greece
Recommended from our members
The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy
Pindarâs epinikian odes were poems commissioned to celebrate athletic victories in the first half of the fifth century BCE. Drawing on the insights of interpretive anthropology and cultural history, Leslie Kurke investigates how the socially embedded genre of epinikion responded to a period of tremendous social and cultural change. Kurke examines the odes as public performances which enact the reintegration of the athletic victor into his heterogeneous communities. These communitiesâthe victorâs household, his aristocratic class, and his cityârepresent competing, sometimes conflicting interests, which the epinikian poet must satisfy to accomplish his project of reintegration. Kurke considers in particular the different modes of exchange in which Pindarâs poetry participated: the symbolic economy of the household, gift exchange between aristocratic houses, and the workings of monetary exchange within the city. Her analysis produces an archaeology of Pindarâs poetry, exposing multiple systems of imagery that play on different shared cultural models to appeal to the various segments of the poetâs audience. The Traffic in Praise aims to provide new insight into Pindarâs poetry as well as into the conceptual world of archaic and classical Greece
The Poetâs Pentathlon: Genre in Pindarâs First <i>Isthmian</i>
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Pindar Fr. 75 SM and the Politics of Athenian Space
This dithyramb, in evoking the Altar of the Twelve Gods and adjacent shrines, was sung in and celebrates the old agora east of the Acropolis, associated with the Peisistratids, rather than the new agora of the developing democracy