"The book's major parts, one on polarity and the other on analogy, introduce the reader to the patterns of thinking that are fundamental not only to Greek philosophy but also to classical civilization as a whole. As a leading classicist in his own right, Lloyd is an impeccable guide. His sophistication in adducing anthropological parallels to Greek models of polarity and analogy broadens his perspective, making him a forerunner in the study of what we are now used to calling semiotics. (...) A striking example of Lloyd's approach is his re-examination of the dichotomy of Olympian and chthonian gods in ancient Greek world view, which surpasses the reductionist and pseudo-historical models of sky-gods and earth-goddesses that are still commonly invoked to account for polarities in Greek pantheon. "In the second part, dealing with analogy, three crucial metaphorical models for the universe turn out to be basis for a dazzlingly wide variety of scientific and philosophical perspectives. Each model is tested in the whole spectrum of Greek artistic, philosophical and scientific thought. This work is a treasure-house of insights for experts and non experts alike." --Gregory Nagy, Harvard University. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engaging book, Martha Nussbaum examines texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm--including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca--and (...) recovers a valuable source for our moral and political thought of today.The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engaging book, Martha Nussbaum examines texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm--including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca--and recovers a valuable source for our moral and political thought of today. (shrink)

One of the most famous scenes in classical literature is theDichterweiheat the beginning of theTheogony: when Hesiod was tending his sheep below Mount Helicon, the Muses approached him, provided him with a staff and a divine voice, and told him to sing of the blessed, everlasting gods.

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients (...) than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

German classicist's monumental study of the origins of European thought in Greek literature and philosophy.

In this work, published here as a single volume, the authors present a disturbing and decidedly non-classical reading of Greek tragedy that insists on its radical discontinuity with our own outlook and with our social, aesthetic, and psychological categories.

Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece that takesus far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon, and reveals a culture ofslavery, of blood sacrifice, of perpetual and ritualized warfare, of ceremonial hunting andecstasies.In his provocative discussions of various institutions and practices including war,marriage, and the city state, Vernant unveils a complex and previously unexplored intersection ofthe religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. He concludes with a genealogy ofthe study of myth (...) from antiquity to the present, and offers a critique of structuralism.Jean-PierreVernant is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Study of Ancient Religions at the College de France inParis. (shrink)

Madness and emotion could be said to share, to a certain extent, their definition as kinds of human response to influences from their environment. The connection between madness and emotion is stressed in modern psychological observations establishing strong links between the causation of madness and human emotionality. Despite the fact that similar insights were absent from Greek medical theorists, or indeed from other contemporary writers, this would come as no surprise to either Sophokles or Euripides. Both tragedians handled their material (...) in such a way as to demonstrate how the strong pressures of familial or social influences can lead to mental disturbance. While it is most probably Sophokles who, for the first time, turns to the influence of internal forces in the process of madness, the lack of subject matter in his surviving plays allows us little scope for further comparison. On the other hand, Euripides seems to have dedicated more of his portrayals to madness. These portrayals offer an almost unique opportunity to examine the introduction, not only in drama but perhaps in the whole of Greek literature, of the emotions as contributing factors in madness. (shrink)

A study of methods in Ancient Near Eastern and Greek and Roman medicine, based on representative text corpora. Central is the question of what is "rational," or not, in the various systems.

I propose to demonstrate the clinical plausibility of the ‘psychotherapy scene’ of the Bacchae, which is subjected here to a purely psychiatric analysis: all my interpretations and conjectures are based on clinical data and psychiatric theory only. Euripides' objective and rational treatment of the irrational, the accuracy of his descriptions of abnormal behaviour, which are compatible, down to the last detail, with descriptions found in modern psychiatric texts, and his capacity to present not simply a partial list of symptoms, but (...) a coherent clinical picture are taken for granted and will not be discussed further in the present context. The focus of my enquiry is exclusively the psychiatric plausibility of Euripides' description of the psychotherapeutic process.It goes without saying that, since ‘instant cures’ are impossible, Euripides condensed a normally fairly long procedure into a single scene, selectively high-lighting only what would be the crucial moments of a real psychotherapy. His summary of the psychotherapy is as satisfactory as that of a modern psychiatrist. In fact, Euripides' masterly selectivity actually facilitates the understanding of the psychodynamics of Agave's recovery. This enables me to comment on the Euripidean text in exactly the same way as I commented on the verbatim transcript of the psychotherapy of one of my Plains Indian patients. (shrink)

Although military concepts in Homeric poetry have been studied since Alexandrian times, there has not been until now an extended study of the concept of alke, "defensive strength", as it unfolds intertextually within the Iliad and the Odyssey and archaic Greek poetry generally. Derek Collins uses evidence from Homeric poetry to reveal that alke, unlike other concepts of strength in archaic Greek, plays a central role in defining a warrior at the peak of his prowess, which can be related in (...) turn to its application to kings and to its use by Zeus and Athena as divine emblems of warfare. Just as importantly, Collins shows how alke functions poetically as a plot device for the Odyssey as the poem retrospectively views the Iliad. Finally, by integrating evidence from linguistics, anthropology, and comparative literature, Collins argues that the meaning of alke cannot be divorced from the oral-traditional media from which it emerges, and that its conceptual structure depends as much on archaic Greece as it does on the poetic demands of the Iliad and the Odyssey. (shrink)

Euripide, poète tragique du Ve siècle av. J.-C., a apporté des réponses à certaines questions fondamentales à travers la création poétique qui devient alors une philosophie de la vie.

To be satisfactory, a scholarly interpretation of a Greek tragedy must enable the present-day reader to see the play, so far as is possible, through the eyes of the fifth-century audience. If it does not, if it merely substitutes the predilections of a particular scholar for those of the reader, it is useless, and indeed worse than useless; for the reader unassisted by the interpretation of others may well examine the play critically for himself, while the reader with an interpretation (...) at his elbow is likely to make every effort to fit the ideas of the tragedian into the schema provided for him. Certainly, more and more interpretations are of the kind which assist the reader; but a significant number even of the most recent throw more darkness than light on their subject by refusing to acknowledge the whole context of value and belief in terms of which the tragedians wrote, and the audience watched, these dramas. The result of such misinterpretation is frequently, as in the case of the two I shall discuss here, to present for our admiration a more high-minded and uplifting drama than the one which Euripides wrote; but our concern is presumably not to achieve this end, but to understand Euripides and his audience. (shrink)