Claude Calame

Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece offers the first comprehensive inquiry into the deity of sexual love, a power that permeated daily Greek life. Avoiding Foucault's philosophical paradigm of dominance/submission, Claude Calame uses an anthropological and linguistic approach to re-create indigenous categories of erotic love. He maintains that Eros, the joyful companion of Aphrodite, was a divine figure around which poets constructed a physiology of desire that functioned in specific ways within a network of social relations. Calame begins by showing how poetry and iconography gave a rich variety of expression to the concept of Eros, then delivers a history of the deity's roles within social and political institutions, and concludes with a discussion of an Eros-centered metaphysics.

Calame's treatment of archaic and classical Greek institutions reveals Eros at work in initiation rites and celebrations, educational practices, the Dionysiac theater of tragedy and comedy, and in real and imagined spatial settings. For men, Eros functioned particularly in the symposium and the gymnasium, places where men and boys interacted and where future citizens were educated. The household was the setting where girls, brides, and adult wives learned their erotic roles--as such it provides the context for understanding female rites of passage and the problematics of sexuality in conjugal relations. Through analyses of both Greek language and practices, Calame offers a fresh, subtle reading of relations between individuals as well as a quick-paced and fascinating overview of Eros in Greek society at large.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Seitenzahl: 200
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. August 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781400849154
• Artikelnr.: 56998602

Autorenporträt

Claude Calame is Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is the author of several works translated into English, including Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece and The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece. This current book, The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece, was originally published in Italian translation.

Inhaltsangabe

List of Illustrations
Foreword
Preface
Note on Translations
List of Abbreviations
Tragic Prelude: The Yoke of Eros
3
Pt. 1
The Topics of Eros
11
Ch. I
The Eros of the Melic Poets
13
Ch. II
The Eros of Epic Poetry
39
Pt. 2
The Symbolic Practices of Eros
49
Ch. III
The Pragmatic Effects of Love Poetry
51
Ch. IV
The Pragmatics of Erotic Iconography
65
Pt. 3
Eros in Social Institutions
89
Ch. V
Eros in the Masculine: The polis
91
Ch. VI
Eros in the Feminine: The Oikos
110
Ch. VII
Dionysiac Challenges to Love
130
Pt. 4
The Spaces of Eros
151
Ch. VIII
The Meadows and Gardens of Legend
153
Ch. IX
The Meadows and Gardens of the Poets
165
Pt. 5
The Metaphysics of Eros
175
Ch. X
Eros as Demiurge and Philosopher
177
Ch. XI
Mystic Eros
192
Elegiac Coda: Eros the Educator
198
Bibliography
201
Name Index
207
Subject Index
211