Myth and Society in Ancient Greece
Jean-Pierre Vernant
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 0942299175
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this groundbreaking study, Jean Pierre-Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece takes us far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon to reveal a fundamentally other culture: one of slavery, of masks and death, of scapegoats, of ritual hunting and ecstasies.
Vernant's provocative discussion of various institutions and practices including war, marriage, and sacrifice details the complex intersection of the religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. The book concludes with Vernant's authoritative genealogy of the study of myth from antiquity to structuralism and beyond.
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are altered, modes o f action take on a more. positivist character, and thought becomes increasingly secular. Nevertheless, we also find fundamental dif ferences. The ephemeral institution of the dty-state seems to have been a remarkably unique and original phenomenon, whereas the states established in China between the fifth and third centuries appear similar to a type of political coristitution quite common in the history of mankind. Furthermore, it has to be recognized that, in China, social
that..new c.ontrad becoming dominant. These contradictions could arise only in_con� . ditions specific to the city-state. But, at the same time,their devel opment challenged the very structures within .which they had evolved. For Marx, the generalization of slavery and the spread of domestic exchange and maritime commerce, along with the establishment of commercial production and the concentration of landownership in fewer hands, broke down the forms of land tenure and the sociopolitical
misfortune itself, the crime, the origin of crime, its consequences, and its retribution.21 To say that all these aspects of syncretism can be explained in terms of a logic of participation would perhaps be too general a remark to be useful. However, we should like to point out that, in the religious thought of the Greeks, the category of action seems to be defined differently. from in our own. Certain actions that ru� counter to the religious order of the world con tain an unpropitious power
death of a close relative. The word does, it is true, refer to the chthonic sacrifice for the dead and the heroes, but with the meaning indicated by Stengel of tabu facere. It is a matter of liquid libations or blood directly offered to the gods o f the under world, " poured out into the sacred world." Finally agos itself cannot .be fully understood unless its meaning of defilement is connected with the wider concept of the sacred that is forbidden, a domain that is dangerous for man. In the
perception of the economic realities of his age? On the contrary; I believe, with Marx, t��t Aristotle ",:,as a faithful recorder of the social world of his period. In Aristot, le's remained outside themarket economy� This' was particularly true since there was no paid labor force.18 20 T H E C LA S S STRUGGLE What was class struggle like in fourth-century Gr�ece? Claude Mosse has recently studied the different aspects and ramifications of this question for fourth-century Athens. 19 She has
