Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks write by Esther Eidinow. This book was released on 2007-10-04. Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A study of the question tablets from the oracle at Dodona and binding-curse tablets from across the ancient Greek world, These tablets reveal the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, and help us to understand some of the ways in which they managed risk and uncertainty in their daily lives.
Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks
Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks write by Esther Eidinow. This book was released on 2007-10-05. Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. How did ancient Greek men and women deal with the uncertainty and risk of everyday life? What did they fear most, and how did they manage their anxieties? Esther Eidinow sets side-by-side two collections of material usually studied in isolation: binding curse tablets from across the ancient world, and the collection of published private questions from the oracle at Dodona in north-west Greece. Eidinow uses these texts to explore perceptions of risk and uncertainty in ancient society, challenging previous explanations. In these records we hear voices that are rarely, if ever, heard in literary texts and history books. The questions and curses in these tablets comprise fervent, sometimes ferocious appeals to the gods. The stories they tell offer tantalizing glimpses of everyday life, carrying the reader through the teeming ancient city - both its physical setting and its social dynamics. Among these tablets we find prostitutes and publicans, doctors and soldiers, netmakers and silver-workers, actors and seamstresses. Anxious litigants ask the gods to silence their opponents. Men inquire about the paternity of their children. Women beg the gods to help them keep their men. Business rivals try to corner the market. Slaves plead to escape their masters. This material takes us beyond the headlines of ancient history, offering new insights into institutions, activities, and relationships. Above all, individually and together, these texts help us to understand some of the ways in which ancient Greek men and women understood the world. In turn, the beliefs and activities of an ancient culture may shed light on modern attitudes to risk.
Luck, Fate, and Fortune
Luck, Fate, and Fortune - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Luck, Fate, and Fortune write by Esther Eidinow. This book was released on 2011. Luck, Fate, and Fortune available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The impulse to try to anticipate the future, and make sense of apparently random events, is irrepressible. Why and how the ancient Greeks tried to foretell the outcome of the present is the subject of Esther Eidinow's lively appraisal, which explores the legacy of ancient Greek notions of luck, fate and fortune in our own era, drawing on approaches to cognitive anthropology. Perhaps the most famous of all sites of prediction is the Oracle at Delphi. But the Delphic Oracle is only the best-known example from a landscape covered by oracular sanctuaries; while across the literary genres of antiquity there are myriad tales -- such as that of doomed Oedipus -- which wrestle with the cruel vicissitudes of fate and fortune. Exploring some of the key ideas of ancient Greek culture that resonate with modern conceptions of destiny, Eidinow examines the ancients' notion of luck as a means to explain daily experiences. Focusing on writers such as Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Demosthenes, the author shows how concepts of fate in antiquity changed over time, in response to social and political currents. She draws too on modern cultural texts like Terminator 2 and Lawrence of Arabia, demonstrating how the recurring questions "what if?" and "why me?" are fundamental to the human relationship with an uncertain future, whether it be in the ancient past or the present day.
Divination and Prophecy in the Ancient Greek World
Divination and Prophecy in the Ancient Greek World - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Divination and Prophecy in the Ancient Greek World write by Roger D. Woodard. This book was released on 2022-12-31. Divination and Prophecy in the Ancient Greek World available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Demonstrates the relevance of comparativism, ethnography, cognitive function, orality, and intertextuality to the elucidation of Greek prophetic practices.
Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion
Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion write by Ellie Mackin Roberts. This book was released on 2020-02-24. Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This volume presents a case for how and why people in archaic and classical Greece worshipped Underworld gods. These gods are often portrayed as malevolent and transgressive, giving an impression that ancient worshippers derived little or no benefit from developing ongoing relationships with them. In this book, the first book-length study that focuses on Underworld gods as an integral part of the religious landscape of the period, Mackin Roberts challenges this view and shows that Underworld gods are, in many cases, approached and ‘befriended’ in the same way as any other kind of god. Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion provides a fascinating insight into the worship of these deities, and will be of interest to anyone working on ancient Greek religion and cult.
