Girls Playing Persephone (in Marriage and Death)

Arguably, the most famous myth told about Persephone is her abduction and marriage to Hades. The story clearly articulates the strong connection between marriage and death, and this episode became significant in both literature and religious practice in the wider classical Greek world. Reference to the story of Persephone’s abduction came to be used as a shorthand for evoking this connection, particularly in myth. This paper discusses two particular ways that Persephone’s narrative was used in marriage and death. I examine the pre-marriage offerings to Persephone at Lokroi, in southern Italy, and the tradition of Athenian girls who died unmarried being buried as brides. These cultic instances frame a discussion of Brides of Hades, particularly in tragedy. Overall, I conclude that these girls do not attempt to replace Persephone, but rather to imitate her: the ‘play the role’ of Persephone at various stages of her own abduction and marriage story

"All children are dwarfs": medical discourse and iconography of children's bodies

Ancient medical discourse conveys a mainly negative view of children's bodies. From Hippocrates to Galen, newborn children are defined as imperfect and ugly beings, associating an excessive softness and weakness with various anomalies. Aristotle links their physical disproportions with those of dwarfs and animals. These disproportions induce physiological troubles and mental incapacities. Hot-tempered and moist, children are dominated by their emotions and sensations. Often authors group them with other beings regarded as inferior, such as women, the old, the sick, the insane, the drunk. How are mythical and human children rendered in iconography? Do their characteristics correspond to the medical discourse? The image of children's bodies changes with the passing of time; the miniature adult of archaic Greece gradually turns into the plump toddler of the Hellenistic period. How can we interpret these transformations? Does the evolution of iconography reflect the transformation of society or does it mirror the progress of medical knowledge

Keeping tradition alive: just war and historical imagination

The just war tradition is one of the key constituencies of international political theory, and its vocabulary plays a prominent role in how political and military leaders frame contemporary conflicts. Yet, it stands in danger of turning in on itself and becoming irrelevant. This article argues that scholars who wish to preserve the vitality of this tradition must think in a more open-textured fashion about its historiography. One way to achieve this is to problematize the boundaries of the tradition. This article pursues this objective by treating one figure that stands in a liminal relation to the just war tradition. Despite having a lot to say about the ethics of war, Xenophon is seldom acknowledged as a bona fide just war thinker. The analysis presented here suggests, however, that his writings have much to tell us, not only about how he and his contemporaries thought about the ethics of war, but about how just war thinking is understood (and delimited) today and how it might be revived as a pluralistic critical enterprise

Rewriting the just war tradition: just war in classical Greek political thought and practice

The just war tradition is the predominant western framework for thinking about the ethics of contemporary war. Political and military leaders frequently invoke its venerable lineage to lend ballast to their arguments for or against particular wars. How we understand the history of just war matters, then, for it subtends how that discourse is deployed today. Conventional accounts of the just war trace its origins to the writings of Saint Augustine in the 4th century CE. This discounts the possibility that just war ideas were in circulation prior to this, in the classical world. This article contests this omission. It contends that ideas homologous to a range of core jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum principles were evident in classical Greek political thought and practice. This finding challenges scholars to re-consider not only the common view that the just war is, at root, a Christian tradition, but also the relation between victory and just war, the nature of the ties binding just war and Islamic jihad, and an innovative approach to the comparative ethics of war

Social Class

Discussion of class structure in fifth-century Athens, historical constitution of theater audiences, and the changes in the comic representation of class antagonism from Aristophanes to Menander