Myth, Mythology, and Mythography

This article examines traditions through which members of a society achieve or express identity via myth, mythology, and mythography. It is no exaggeration to state that myths are the best-known parts of Greek antiquity today. In a brief survey, it is impossible to treat the whole subject of myth. The discussion here instead focuses on some observations on the origin, production, and function of myth; its relation to ritual; its transformation and marginalization in the course of the archaic and classical periods; its fossilization and function in the Roman/Hellenistic period; and its study in modern times.

Postcolonialism

This article discusses the ‘dialogue’ between postcolonial theory and Hellenistic studies. It highlights this by exploring the act of will and self-identification by which Greece is appropriated to a particular culture, made its history, and put to its service. One important point to which the discussion draws attention is the potentially universal significance that this gives Hellenic studies: just because the appropriation of ancient Greece is an act of will, it always remains available for counter-appropriation by other interests as well.

Near Eastern Perspectives on the Greeks

This article considers ways of approaching Hellenism from the perspective of non-Hellenes and invites the reader to rethink some of the fundamental tenets of Hellenism. It argues that ancient Near Eastern sources offer a contrasting picture of cross-cultural contact in comparison with the Greek. For example, several kinds of evidence from the era of the Persian wars point to Greek involvement in the workforce at Persepolis, Susa, and Pasargadae, and in the bureaucracy of the Achaemenids. The article does not suggest that the non-Greek sources are necessarily more accurate or less biased than the Greek; rather, it illustrates how Near Eastern sources, which have been relatively neglected in the study of the eastern Mediterranean, cast a complementary light on historical situations that are also described by or impinge upon Greeks.

Hellenism and Modernity

This article argues that Hellenism is a controversial concept with a lengthy history, and which ultimately defies all attempts to give it definition. In discussing Matthew Arnold, it suggests that people think of Hellenism as a relationship between a particular past and a perpetually changing present. The ancient Greek world is contested, fragile, and phantasmatic; it is constructed by a gaze that looks intensely back into the past. While the concept of Hellenism has been extraordinarily fertile, it is also restrictive, and its evasions and exclusions need to be acknowledged. A broader and more inclusive conception, as some have argued, would allow for a more critical and self-aware reception of the Greek past and would engage with the range of diverse traditions that have contributed to the formation of Hellenism since antiquity. The article focuses on German and British Hellenism, the two most formative traditions in modernity.

Introduction

This article introduces the themes for the first part of this book, ‘Hellenes and Hellenism’. In the classic Victorian statement of political and social criticism, Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold wrote that to get rid of one's ignorance and to see things as they are is the simple and attractive ideal which Hellenism holds out before human nature; and from the simplicity and charm of this ideal, Hellenism and human life is imbued with a kind of clarity and radiance. The rest of the article briefly describes related themes such as modernity, classical antiquity, Greek society, colonization, Alexander the Great, Hellenistic culture, Rome, Hebraism, Islam, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.

Oratory

In a direct democracy such as that of classical Athens, even the most important political decisions were made as a result of debates conducted in mass meetings attended by ordinary citizens. The ability to speak coherently, engagingly, and persuasively was an important key to political influence. This article examines a related problem by asking how much people really know about ancient rhetoric. It discusses the relationship between the public speeches delivered in classical Athens and the textual remains available today, many of which survived because they were considered, in some respects at least, model speeches. The question here is how much the practice of oratory differed from its theory, and to what extent today's texts display the concerns and abilities of a narrow elite.

Lyric Poetry

This article emphasizes the importance of context, and of what is lost, when people approach the study of lyric poetry: even the one complete poem by Sappho turns out to be a fragment, because people can no longer hear the tune to which it was sung, because they do not know for whom she was singing. It suggests that people need to rethink quite radically ancient processes of identification between poets, performers, and audiences; while, at the same time, the identification with the Greeks can be harnessed to understand their literature, and ourselves. For example, the dominance of the lyric poet-scholars in nineteenth-century Italian culture explains, in part, the current flourishing of Italian scholarship on ancient Greek lyric.

Travel and Travel Writing

Greek travellers tried to take their city with them: travel is typically conducted as a civic act, one justified and defined by one's tie to the city: trade, for example, or martial aggression, or colonization. This article discusses the range of travel experiences reflected in surviving literature. The study of ancient travel focuses on the process of travelling, on individual travellers' movements and their reactions to particular journeys and places. The evidence is therefore mainly literary, with valuable additions from epigraphic sources. The remains of sites that were particularly attractive to ancient travellers, depictions of their means of transport, shipwrecks, and traces of ancient roads can add further information. Greek travel literature had a strong influence on early modern geography and ethnography, and it still has an impact on how people understand the Greek world.

Slavery

This article addresses the issue of slavery. Where society operates to give cultural shape to biological facts in the case of sexuality, it denies cultural identity or cultural significance to slaves, who become ‘mere’ bodies. Most of the written evidence from Greek antiquity comes from the perspective of slave-owners. People cannot know what ancient Greek slaves might have had to say about their experiences of enslavement. There are various ways to address this matter: one is by using the analogy of slaves from other historical circumstances who did write about such experiences, in the form, for example, of the slave narratives of ante- and post-bellum America. Other strategies for imagining or representing ancient slaves' experience involve extrapolating from silence, supplying the other side of a one-sided dialogue between master and slave.

Friendship, Love, and Marriage

Friendship, love, and marriage are three different types of personal relationship. The first and main difference considered in this article is the fact that friendship and love are emotional bonds, while marriage is a social and legal institution, not necessarily connected with an emotional bond. The first part of this article discusses the nature of the emotional relationship created by friendship and love. The second part describes the basic legal and social rules of Greek marriage, and reflects on the relations between marriage and love.