While it is sometimes thought that free Athenian women were hemmed in by surveillance within the oikos, this article argues that the obstacle that impeded them when they attempted to control property was that they were excluded from the impersonal and formal systems of surveillance of male citizens. Athenian public life, lived in the view of others, dramatically extended the agency of those within it. While women could compensate for their legal incapacities by cultivating the personal trust of men, this (...) required them to treat some of the people closest to them instrumentally, thus transforming their affectionate relationships. (shrink)

This paper explores the role the Panhellenic centers played in facilitating the circulation of wisdom in ancient Greece. It argues that there are substantial thematic overlaps among practitioners of wisdom , who are typically understood as belonging to different categories . By focusing on the presence of σοφοί at the Panhellenic centers in general, and Delphi in particular, we can acquire a more accurate picture of the particular expertise they possessed, and of the range of meanings the Greeks attributed to (...) the word σοφία. This approach seeks to challenge the conventional categories of modern scholarship and to offer a broader and more inclusive interpretive framework in its stead. One such thematic overlap is the way in which many σοφοί are described as exerting an almost uncanny, yet highly conventional ability to attract listeners and enchant them with their verbal performances. There is plenty of material to support the view that σοφοό, through tapping into the repository of σοφία that Delphi constituted and by aligning themselves with its authority, were seen as themselves being a conduit for a similar type of charismatic speech. (shrink)

This article treats representations of the wolf in the Greek archaic and early classical literary and visual sources. Using a close reading of the Iliadic Doloneia as a point of departure, it argues that wolves in myth, fable, and other modes of discourse, as well as in the early artistic tradition, regularly serve as a means of signaling the loss of distinctions that occurs when friend turns into foe and an erstwhile philos or “second self” betrays one of his kind. (...) Prominent in the discussion are two further issues: the generic confusion or oscillation that characterizes so many textual and artistic versions of the tale, as well as the loss of distinction between two roles that normative representations more regularly contrast, those of warrior and hunter, martial victim and animal prey. Within the Doloneia, warfare proves indistinguishable from the hunt. (shrink)

Granting that the `soul' was only an attractive and mysterious thought, from which philosophers rightly, but reluctantly, separated themselves - that which they have since learnt to put in its place is perhaps even more attractive and even more mysterious. The human body, in which the whole of the most distant and most recent past of all organic life once more becomes living and corporal, seems to flow through this past and right over it like a huge and inaudible torrent: (...) the body is a more wonderful thought than the old `soul'. (Nietzsche, 1973: 132-3) Man is but breath and a shadow. (Sophocles). (shrink)

The uneasy relation between violence and sanctity, between oppression and culture, underlies the dramatic action of Euripides' "Ion." Ion's monody ends with his threatening to shoot the birds who would soil the temple, or in other words, to protect purity through violence and death. The earlier part of his song also shows how the forces of exclusion and domination create sacredness. Ritual silence , restricted access to the aduton, ritual chastity, even the irreversible transformation of natural gardens into laurel brooms (...) and jugs of water all suggest how violence and domination create culture out of nature. The rape of Creusa epitomizes the relation between culture and violence. Her meeting with Ion reveals the psychological cost of social oppression and portrays the imperfect interdependence between moral feelings and legal institutions. Various dramatic devices portray the divisions in Creusa's mind that the injustice has created, devices including self-address, riddling speech, self-restraint, and silence. Her reluctance to pose her bold question to the oracle, and her displacement of the story onto the person of a raped "friend," show her resentful awareness that social institutions collaborate in the oppression. Ion's disillusionment echoes her resentment more theoretically. Together their comments show how moral rules and legal institutions, though fundamentally based on personal feelings such as shame and indignation, enact these feelings only imperfectly; the resulting dissonance in turn leads to further indignation and moral reflection. Finally, the allusions to fifth-century politics in Ion's speech on Athenian politics and elsewhere suggest that democracy itself depends on political domination and imperialism. (shrink)

Scholars have traditionally interpreted Hipponax fragment 128 as an epic parody designed to belittle the grand pretensions and gluttonous habits of his enemy. I suggest, however, that this traditional reading ultimately falls short because of two unexamined assumptions: that the meter and diction of the fragment are exclusively meant to recall epic narrative and not any other early hexametrical genre, and that the descriptive epithets in lines 2 and 3 are the ad hoc comic creations of the poet and simply (...) refer to the table manners of a glutton or a parasite. I argue instead that this fragment in several ways reflects the language, the meter and the performative goal of hexametrical chants or incantations designed to expel harmful famine demons or to escort human scapegoats from the city. I also suggest that the vivid and somewhat comic descriptions of the enemy in fragment 128 probably do not aim at his personal eating disorders, but rather they are drawn from two interrelated and generic features of archaic Greek thought: a tradition of describing famine-demons as insatiable eaters, and a popular theme in Greek invective which demonizes political enemies as rapacious pests who threaten to gobble up the commonwealth of the city and who therefore must be expelled from the community, precisely like a famine-demon. (shrink)