Epinikion, Kudos, and Criticism

This chapter considers the genre of professional epinikion (choral poems composed on commission to celebrate athletic victories), inquiring into the socio-cultural motivations for the development of this strange hybrid genre c.550 bce and relating it to a broader set of practices commemorating athletic victory in ancient Greece (including victor statues). Epinikion in performance and victor statues alike served as sites for negotiation between pre-eminent individual victors and their broader communities—both the Panhellenic elite and their civic communities. Both poetry and material monuments aimed to distil and preserve the special talismanic power (kudos) the victor acquired by victory at the ‘crown games’, anchoring it and sharing it out with the victor’s family and city. At the same time, literary evidence suggests that this elitist valorization of epinikian praise, victory statues, crowns, and kudos was not uncontested in archaic and classical Greece: poets espousing civic values explicitly challenged the worth of athletic achievement as a common good.

The Meaning of the Snake in the Ancient Greek World

Despite playing no meaningful practical role in the lives of the ancient Greeks, snakes are ubiquitous in their material culture and literary accounts, in particular in narratives which emphasise their role of guardian animals. This paper will mainly utilise vase paintings as a source of information, with literary references for further elucidation, to explain why the snake had such a prominent role and thus clarify its meaning within the cultural context of Archaic and Classical Greece, with a particular focus on Athens. Previous scholarship has tended to focus on dualistic opposites, such as life/death, nature/culture, and creation/destruction. This paper argues instead that ancient Greeks perceived the existence of a special primordial force living within, emanating from, or symbolised by the snake; a force which is not more—and not less—than pure life, with all its paradoxes and complexities. Thus, the snake reveals itself as an excellent medium for accessing Greek ideas about the divine, anthropomorphism, and ancestry, the relationship between humans, nature and the supernatural, and the negotiation of the inevitable dichotomy of old and new.

Small Wonders Figurines, Puppets, and the Aesthetics of Scale in Archaic and Classical Greece

This chapter addresses the aesthetics of smallness with regard to material from Archaic and Classical Greece (roughly, from the late eighth to the late fourth centuries BCE). It sketches a range of historical possibilities to relate ancient Greek concepts of scale and likeness to the research protocols of art history and archaeology. It explores the ancient concepts and corpora, with two propositions: 1. that smallness in Archaic and Classical Greece could be wonderful, in that it could make a work of craft what the Greeks called a thauma idesthai, “a wonder to behold for itself and oneself”; 2. to show that the comparativist method to accommodate ancient categories in a modern disciplinary infrastructure requires an eclectic and egalitarian approach to evidence that combines archaeological taxonomy with the reading habits of philology and art history, corpus scholarship with close looking.

Manteis and Medicine

The many scholars who have supposed that there were persons known as iatromanteis (healing-seers) who offered medical assistance in archaic and classical Greece have been in error—there was no such occupation. But manteis (seers) did sometimes offer medical advice in classical Greece, in addition to their other roles, especially—so it seems—during epidemics and to chronic patients, and notwithstanding the rise of Hippocratic medicine. The evidence to this effect is more extensive than is commonly realized.