The symposion was a key cultural phenomenon in ancient Greece. This book investigates its place in ancient Greek society and thought by exploring the rhetorical dynamics of its representations in literature and art. Across genres, individual Greeks constructed visions of the party and its performances that offered persuasive understandings of the event and its participants. Sympotic representations thus communicated ideas which, set within broader cultural conversations, could possess a discursive edge. Hence, at the symposion, sympotic styles and identities (...) might be promoted, critiqued and challenged. In the public imagination, the ethics of Greeks and foreigners might be interrogated and political attitudes intimated. Symposia might be suborned into historical narratives about struggles for power. And for philosophers, writing a Symposium was itself a rhetorical act. Investigating the symposion's discursive potential enhances understanding of how the Greeks experienced and conceptualized the symposion and demonstrates its contribution to the Greek thought world. (shrink)

Animals can be used in many ways in science and scientific research. Given that society values sentient animals and that basic research is not goal oriented, the question is raised.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Politics of Eating: Feasting in Early Greek SocietyJohn RundinIn Euripides’ Cyclops, Silenus and his satyr companions have been shipwrecked in the realm of Polyphemus and have become his slaves. 1 Odysseus lands there, meets Silenus, and, conversing with him, asks who inhabits the land:Odysseus: Who occupies the area? A race of beasts? Silenus: Cyclopes. They live in caves, not roofed houses. Odysseus: Who is their leader? Or (...) do they have a democracy? Silenus: They’re herdsmen. No one has any power over anyone else. Odysseus: Do they sow Demeter’s grain? Or what do they live on? Silenus: Milk and cheeses and meals [borai] of mutton. Odysseus: Do they have Dionysus’ drink, the liquid of the vine? Silenus: Not at all. For that reason, they live in a land without choruses. Odysseus: Are they hospitable, and do they treat strangers with respect? Silenus: They claim that strangers have the most delicious flesh. [End Page 179] Odysseus: What do you mean? They like meals [borai] of men they have killed? Silenus: Everyone who comes here has been eaten up.(117–28)Silenus has rapidly made clear the beastly level of Cyclopean gastronomy. The savagery of the Cyclopes’ diet is underlined by his diction: the LSJ tells us that the word translated twice here as “meals,” borai, is more appropriately used to describe food for animals than for people. Silenus also lets us know that the Cyclopes are herdsmen and, like atavistic throwbacks to a time before cereal culture, raise no grain. 2 They are so backward that they do not have even wine. One dire consequence of this is spelled out by Silenus: they have no choruses. Polyphemus himself later illustrates another: they totally lack sympotic sophistication (483–589). So great is their culinary degeneracy, that, in defiance of the accepted norms of hospitality, they eat strangers who visit their realm. Not only, however, do the Cyclopes lack the elements of a cultured cuisine, they also lack basic political institutions. They have no ruler, nor do they have a democracy: as Silenus says, “no one has any power over anyone else.” The lack of political institutions and of culinary development may at first seem like two independent elements of a culturally deprived life. This is not the case, however. We shall see that in early Greek culture there is a strong connection between eating and politics. Indeed, it will soon be apparent that the Cyclopes’ culinary and political deficiencies are closely related.It is my hope to demonstrate this relationship. Emphasis will be placed on representations of eating in the Iliad and the Odyssey. It will then be shown how the patterns uncovered in Homeric texts lived on in later documents and institutions. It is impossible to know how accurately the life portrayed in the Homeric poems represents the historical conditions of any real society. 3 It may be true that the analysis of institutions [End Page 180] described in them is relevant only to an ideal world or to an aristocratic ideology. Such complex issues, however, may be avoided by merely analyzing certain aspects of eating as presented by Homer without thought of how well those aspects match the practice of any actual people. In the endeavor, of course, caution must be exercised not to expect too much of the data. Even if Homer’s narrative does represent some actual society, it is the nature of narrative to be selective, and it would therefore be inappropriate to try to extract from the poems either a comprehensive picture of foodways or any quantitative data about them. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to be struck by how consistent representations of eating in Homer are, and, moreover, not to acknowledge that patterns revealed in the Homeric representations had a long afterlife not only in later texts but even in social institutions.Feasting and the Homeric Political EconomyOn the shield of Achilles, a microcosm of the Iliadic world, is wrought a scene which reveals some political aspects of eating.And he put on it [the shield] the precinct of a king. There workmen were reaping with sharp sickles in their hands. Some of the bunches of grain were falling... (shrink)

The Marxist theory of history and of the sources of cultural change is here applied to the Pre-Socratics. As a consequence, most of the book is devoted to pre-history and to the history of Greece from the Homeric Age on. The final portions discussing the Pre-Socratics show the economic sources of the different schools and the ways in which they anticipated confusedly the truths of Dialectical Materialism. The book contributes little either to Marxist theory or to philosophy, and is interesting (...) only as an application of Marxist theory to the history of philosophy.--R. G. S. (shrink)

Pharmaceutical firms seek to fulfill their responsibilities to stakeholders by developing drugs that treat diseases. We evaluate the social and financial costs of developing new drugs relative to the realized benefits and find the industry falls short of its potential. This is primarily due to legislation-mandated reliance on animal test results in early stages of the drug development process, leading to a mere 10 percent success rate for new drugs entering human clinical trials. We cite hundreds of biomedical studies from (...) journals including Nature, Science, and the Journal of the American Medical Association to show animal modeling is ineffective, misleading to scientists, unable to prevent the development of dangerous drugs, and prone to prevent the development of useful drugs. Legislation still requires animal testing prior to human testing even though the pharmaceutical sector has better options that were unavailable when animal modeling was first mandated. We propose that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Congress should work together to abolish regulations and policies that require animal use. Doing so will benefit pharmaceutical industry stakeholders, including patients whose health depends on drugs and the many people who rely on the financial well-being of pharmaceutical firms. (shrink)

Can a democratic Global Society become the alternative to Empire and bring order into present international anarchy? One hundred percent sovereignty in nation states gives “security” to each but creates “anarchy” in relations between states. To bring order into international relations some sovereignty has to be surrendered. Empire, which does bring an order of sorts, is imposed from outside, is undemocratic and aggrandising. Global Society can be conceptualised as its alternative. Sharply contrasting Global Society to Empire tends (...) to pose the former as a panacea, but it is important to know its potential faults. Global Society can be envisioned at the constitutive stage and as continuing to exert influence within the institutions it creates. At the difficult constitutive stage, it will be fragile and of unwieldy size and ought only be called into play at critical junctures. The institutions it creates will be a democratic federal regime of regional blocks of states. To resolve issues, Global Society presumes effective consocial dialogue and participation rather than violent contention. Classical and Hellenistic Greece provide examples where vision and honour battled with the ambitions and greed of Empire and remarkably sometimes won. All the Greek city-states were under some sort of regional federal alliance at different times and drew strength from shared religious sanctuaries and their attached Games. The various interchanges between democratic Federalism and Empire in ancient Greece offers a microcosm of today's interregnum between modern and postmodern international relations. For as democratic political theorists at the start of the twenty first century, we do not seem to be able to do without the legitimizing idea of the People, but we do not know what to do with it. —Margaret Canovan, “The People, the Masses, and the Mobilization of Power: The Paradox of Hannah Arendt's ‘Populism’” Lysistrata: Don't you share a cup at common altars, for common gods, like brothers, at the Olympic games, Thermophylai and Delphi? —Aristophanes, Lysistrata. (shrink)

Starting mostly with the second half of the 20th century, the churches and the religious communities are facing the challenges raised by the process of secularization, which is considered by some sociologists of religion as irreversible. The most affected ones were / are the traditional churches and the most obvious area where this phenomenon has become very visible is the Western Europe. This study aims to analyze the situation of the traditional churches in Romania, with a special focus on the (...) Greek-Catholic Church, from the same perspective: the impact of post-modernity over a church which is very much orientated towards the West, which is becoming more and more urban and is still passing through a complicated process of structuring and transition. The study underlines the fact that one of the answers to the problems raised by the process of secularization is based on the way in which the ecclesiastical community is built and on how deep is the consciousness of the confessional identity rooted in the mind and the soul of the believers. (shrink)

How is poverty discursively constituted, both as a category of thinking and as a label applied to particular social categories in times of austerity? How is it linked to social exclusion? Based on extensive fieldwork with representatives from 79 typical non-governmental organizations and informal initiatives of civil society in two Greek cities (Athens and Patras, in the periphery), this chapter explores the link between crisis, poverty and social exclusion. In their attempt to underline the marginalizing effects of austerity (...) in Greece, civil society actors question previous assumptions about what constitutes poverty and exclusion in Greek society and offer important insights into the seemingly disparate practices and experiences among those classified as “poor” or “new excluded”. (shrink)

Statius' Silvae 5.3 is a poem written in honor of the poet's dead father. In the course of the poem, Statius recounts his father's life and achievements. Prominent among these accomplishments are the years the elder Statius spent as a teacher of Greek poetry—a grammarian—in Naples. Statius tells us which Greek poets his father taught and to whom. The content and audience of Statius' father's instruction form the basis of this paper. A number of the Greek poets (...) taught by Statius' father are not obvious candidates for inclusion in a course of instruction in Greek poetry. Lycophron, Corinna or Epicharmus, for instance, are not commonly found in other accounts of Greek education in Roman Italy during the early empire. The elder Statius' pedagogical activity has thus been viewed as a Neapolitan peculiarity. Yet, I argue, the same authors taught by Statius' father were the focus of grammarians who were working in Rome itself. The curriculum of Statius' father is thus representative of Greek intellectual activity in early imperial Rome. The pedagogical activity of Statius senior is relevant to Roman intellectual history in a second way. His students consisted of aristocrats from around the Bay of Naples and southern Italy. Some of these students were likely Roman. So too the students of the Greek grammarians working in Rome likely encountered young Romans. How did the study of some mainstream and some recondite Greek poets fit into the élite discourse of the early empire? I argue that knowledge of the poets taught by the elder Statius was geared towards marking off the élite from the non-élite. Students of grammarians such as Statius' father were given the tools to engage in aristocratic discourse, which constituted a claim for prestige and honor in early imperial Rome. (shrink)

Profiles Grecian influences on tenth-century Arab society.

This article analyzes the application of creative visualization in the ethics of Ancient Greek Cynicism. The author concentrates on visualizations of 2 fundamental ethical principles (vicious chase of pleasures and virtuous radical temperance) and their relevance to modern society. The author comes to a conclusion that Cynics visualized the first principle through the image of a never-ending wheel of slavery and a concrete illness – dropsy, whereas the second one was visualized through the image of remedy for the (...) above mentioned disease and slavery as well as images of the result of taking that remedy, that is, permanent health, freedom and happiness. The both visualizations bear an evident creative character. The other important conclusion is that those visualizations are not relevant to contemporary society. Yet, being prototypes of relevant modern visualizations of hasty chase of pleasures and mild temperance, they retain significance to that society. (shrink)

The first book to offer an integrated reading of ancient Greek attitudes to laughter. Taking material from various genres and contexts, the book analyses both the theory and the practice of laughter as a revealing expression of Greek values and mentalities. Greek society developed distinctive institutions for the celebration of laughter as a capacity which could bridge the gap between humans and gods; but it also feared laughter for its power to expose individuals and groups to (...) shame and even violence. Caught between ideas of pleasure and pain, friendship and enmity, laughter became a theme of recurrent interest in various contexts. Employing a sophisticated model of cultural history, Stephen Halliwell traces elaborations of the theme in a series of important texts: ranging far beyond modern accounts of 'humour', he shows how perceptions of laughter helped to shape Greek conceptions of the body, the mind and the meaning of life. (shrink)

This article discusses the textual sources used for understanding the built environment and interactions between Greek eastern colonies and other societies in the Bactro-Gandharan region.

The Greeks have long been regarded as innovators across a wide range of fields in literature, culture, philosophy, politics and science. However, little attention has been paid to how they thought and felt about novelty and innovation itself, and to relating this to the forces of traditionalism and conservatism which were also present across all the various societies within ancient Greece. What inspired the Greeks to embark on their unique and enduring innovations? How did they think and feel about the (...) new? This book represents the first serious attempt to address these issues, and deals with the phenomenon across all periods and areas of classical Greek history and thought. Each chapter concentrates on a different area of culture or thought, while the book as a whole argues that much of the impulse towards innovation came from the life of the polis which provided its setting. (shrink)

This article aims to explore, through the civil society’s opinion, the polarisation between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and the group of the ‘new excluded’, or ‘new poor’, that has emerged as a result of the European economic crisis and the social transformations that followed in the Greek society. Based on the Theory of Justice introduced by John Rawls (1971), and using the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, this study focuses on the discourse analysis of the perception of 97 (...) representatives of local and national NGOs, both formal and informal. The main results focus on different self and others’ presentations, especially during the economic crisis, and on the creation of an unbalanced, fragmented and exclusion-cantered society. However, the definition of rich and poor appears ambiguous through the analysis of various linguistic strategies of Greek NGOs revealing a hidden face of the society. (shrink)

Der Beziehung zwischen Religion, sozialen Strukturen und politischen Institutionen kam in menschlichen Gesellschaften seit jeher eine fundamentale Rolle zu. Die hier versammelten Aufsätze erkunden mögliche Wege, wie die philosophischen Konzeptualisierungen von Gott, Göttern und dem Göttlichen in der antiken Welt mit traditionellen religiösen Praktiken und Institutionen interagieren, ebenso wie mit nicht-philosophischen Ansichten des Göttlichen. Dabei wird ein Bogen von der „Rationalisierung“ des Göttlichen durch die frühen griechischen Philosophen bis hin zur Konzeption der Toleranz gespannt, die sich bei Augustinus finden lässt. (...) Untersucht werden Schriften von Platon, der als Erster in der Geschichte die Worte ‚Theologie‘ und ‚Atheismus‘ prägte, und Aristoteles mit seinem intellektuell geprägten Blick auf Gott. Der Band ist besonders wertvoll für Interessenten der Geistesgeschichte, politischen Theorie, Religionsgeschichte und der klassischen Antike. Mit Beiträgen von Sylvana V. Chrysakopoulou | Francesca Eustacchi | Silvia Gastaldi | Giovanni Giorgini | Christoph Horn | Elena Irrera | Jakub Jinek | Manuel Knoll | Maria Liatsi | Francisco L. Lisi | Alberto Maffi | Maurizio Migliori | Josef Moural | Nurdane Şimşek | Bernat Torres | Denis Walter. (shrink)

In this book, Eric Havelock presents a challenging account of the development of the idea of justice in early Greece, and particularly of the way justice changed as Greek oral tradition gradually gave way to the written word in a literate society. He begins by examining the educational functions of poets in preliterate Greece, showing how they conserved and transmitted the traditions of society, a thesis adumbrated in his earlier book Preface to Plato. Homer, he demonstrates, has (...) much to say about justice, but since that idea is nowhere in the epics directly stated or expressed, it must be deduced from the speech and actions of the characters. Havelock's careful reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey is original and revealing; it sheds light both on Homeric notions of justice and on the Archaic Greek society depicted in the poems. As Havelock continues his inquiry from Hesiod to Aeschylus, his findings become more complex. The oral Greek world shades into a literate one. Words lose some kinds of meanings, gain others, and steadily become more suited to the conceptualization that Plato strove for and achieved. This evolution of language itself, Havelock shows, was one of the principal accomplishments of the Greek world. Lucidly written and forcefully argued, this book is a major contribution to our knowledge of ancient Greece--its politics, philosophy, and literature, from Homer to Plato. (shrink)

Greek had held an important place in Roman society and culture since the Late Republican period, and educated Romans were expected to be bilingual and well versed in both Greek and Latin literature. The Roman school ‘curriculum’ was based on Hellenistic educational culture, and in theDe grammaticis et rhetoribusSuetonius says that the earliest teachers in Rome, Livius and Ennius, were ‘poets and half Greeks’ (poetae et semigraeci), who taught both Latin and Greek ‘publicly and privately’ (domi (...) forisque docuisse) and ‘merely clarified the meaning of Greek authors or gave exemplary readings from their own Latin compositions’ (nihil amplius quam Graecos interpretabantur aut si quid ipsi Latine composuissent praelegebant,Gram. et rhet.1–2). Cicero, the Latin neoteric poets and Horace are obvious examples of bilingual educated Roman aristocrats, but also throughout the Imperial period a properly educated Roman would be learned inutraque lingua. The place of Greek in Quintilian'sInstitutio Oratoriareveals the importance and prevalence of Greek in Roman education and literature in the late first centurya.d.Quintilian argues that children should learn both Greek and Latin but that it is best to begin with Greek. Famously, in the second centurya.d.the Roman author Apuleius gave speeches in Greek to audiences in Carthage, and in hisApologiamocked his accusers for their ignorance of Greek. (shrink)

This paper seeks to explore whether and how the Greek left-wing criticism against Israeli politics challenges the state of Israel’s right to exist and spreads antisemitic mythopoesis by utilising ‘soft hate speech’. In particular, my aim is to shed light on an ideological paradox – the utilisation of discriminatory discourse by the Greek left – a multidimensional political power consisted of a wide range of ideologies that all defend human rights and are characterised by progressive perspectives; a point (...) that reveals that antisemitism is well rooted in the Greek society, revives in times of crisis and penetrates the whole political spectrum. By applying the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and its argumentation strategies as an appropriate theory and methodology to analyse in detail such utterances, my attempt is to show how antisemitism has been constituted as a common sense beyond the limits of the far-right populist discourses. (shrink)

How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods. Seaford (...) argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal. (shrink)