Wandering Poets in Ancient Greek Culture

Keyword(s):  
2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 190-208
Author(s):  
Cordell M. Waldron

Does the central role of the Iliad and the Odyssey in ancient Greek culture indicate that they functioned as scripture? Taking the role of the Tanakh in Jewish culture as the standard of comparison, this essay argues that, while the Tanakh and the epics functioned similarly as foundational texts in their respective cultures, the ways in which Homer was used in Hellenic culture differ markedly from the ways in which the Tanakh was used in ancient Jewish culture. The Homeric epics were primarily thought of as orally delivered or performed events throughout most of their history, only coming to be thought of as primarily written texts in the Hellenistic era and later, whereas almost from its origins the Tanakh commands and exemplifies a textcentered community in which that which is written is most important.


2018 ◽  
pp. 64-73
Author(s):  
Oleksandra Tyrnova

The article explores phraseological units with the somatic component “heart”, which serve to denote emotions, psychological states and feelings in the Ancient Greek language of the classical age. The authors analyze the meaning of the verbs, used in the structure of the somatic phraseological units and compound metaphors with the somatic word “heart”. It is determined that more than hundred somatic phraseological units with the component καρδία / κραδίη / κῆρ “heart” are used in Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and 62 units of them serve to denote emotions, psychological states and feelings. It is revealed that somatic phraseological units with the component “heart”, which denote negative emotions and feelings, are predominant in the language of Greek tragedies. In particular, these emotions and feelings are sadness, sorrow, fear, anger, annoyance, irritation, malice, mental pain, despair and depression. The sphere of positive emotions, such as joy, exaltation, satisfaction, calmness and pacification, represented by the language material show the correlation of 15 % to 85 % with the phraseological units of negative meaning. It is found out that the meaning of verbs, used as a part of the phraseological unit, refer to physical action, which is committed over the heart, particularly harm, violence and abuse, physical pain, fast or slow heart rate, cold or hot feelings. In the phraseological units, which denote depression and despair, verbs indicate causing physical injuries of heart, for example, θλίβω “squeeze”,“compress”, δάκνω “bite”, μαστιγόω “slash”, ἐκτήκω “melt”. The verbs, used in the phraseological units with the meaning of fear, indicate changes of heart’s temperature and its pace, for instance ζωπυρέω “flare up”, ὀρχέομαι “dance”. Mental anxiety is verbalized via the cognitive metaphor “heart – water”, therefore waves arise in an alarmed heart or heart rages from an inevitable cycle. The results of the research confirm the thesis that the ancient Greek culture is a “culture of the heart”.


Author(s):  
Fei WU

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract in English only.Xianglong Zhang’s position on same-sex marriage is tolerance with reservations. He contends that Confucianism does not affirm or deny homosexuality as ancient Greek culture or Christianity did, because it regards homosexuality and same-sex marriage as two completely separate issues. By distinguishing marriage from homosexuality, the Confucian view proposed by Zhang neither violates the freedom of homosexuals nor affects the order of marriage and family. It can provide a more sensible perspective for people to understand the relationship between homosexuality and marriage in today’s world.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 192 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.


2018 ◽  
pp. 107-138
Author(s):  
Samuel N. Dorf

Eva Palmer Sikelianos, along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos, founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the ancient Greek rites that had taken place on that spot more than twenty-five hundred years before. This chapter explores Palmer Sikelianos’s choreography, rituals, music, and dramaturgy for her reconstructed Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in light of her research on ancient Greek culture, conducted in both Paris and modern Greece. Based on silent film records of Palmer Sikelianos’s 1930 festival, her autobiography, her collaborations with Natalie Clifford Barney on Greek-themed theatricals in the early 1900s, and comparisons to the movement vocabulary and other contemporary stagings of ancient Greek festivals and sport, the chapter demonstrates how Palmer Sikelianos navigated between the needs and methods of the archaeologist and those of the performer. She blended the oldest sources on ancient Greek ritual music and dance that she could find with what she saw as an authentic “spirit” of Greek culture that she observed in modern Greek society. Her performances drew from archival/archaeological courses (ancient treatises, dance iconography) and lived practices (folk song, modern dance, Byzantine chant traditions). Like the Ballets Russes’s re-enactment of ancient Greece in Daphnis et Cholé and L’Après-midi d’un Fauné and pagan Rus’s in Le Sacre du printemps [The Rite of Spring], Palmer Sikelianos’s project to re-enact “authentic” Greek theater and choreography illustrates that theories of theatrical historical reconstruction in the early twentieth century were heavily influence by contemporary theatrical, political, and social events.


2007 ◽  
Vol 128 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-132
Author(s):  
Vanda. Zajko
Keyword(s):  

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