Cosmology and the Polis: The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus - Hardcover

Seaford, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107009278 ISBN 13: 9781107009271

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Synopsis

This book further develops Professor Seaford's innovative work on the study of ritual and money in the developing Greek polis. It employs the concept of the chronotope, which refers to the phenomenon whereby the spatial and temporal frameworks explicit or implicit in a text have the same structure and uncovers various such chronotopes in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and in particular the tragedies of Aeschylus. Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering use of the chronotope was in literary analysis. This study by contrast derives the variety of chronotopes manifest in Greek texts from the variety of socially integrative practices in the developing polis - notably reciprocity, collective ritual, and monetised exchange. In particular, the tragedies of Aeschylus embodies the reassuring absorption of the new and threatening monetised chronotope into the traditional chronotope that arises from collective ritual with its aetiological myth.

About this title

Book Description

The Greek polis was the first society to be monetised and the first to produce drama. This pioneering book seeks to uncover the relationship between these two momentous inventions by examining the clash between the old world of ritual and the new world of money in the tragedies of Aeschylus.

About the Author

Richard Seaford is Professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Exeter. His publications range from Homer to the New Testament and include commentaries on Euripides' Cyclops (1984) and Euripides' Bacchae (1996), Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy and the Developing City-State (1994) and Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (2004). In 2009 he was President of the Classical Association.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1107009278
• ISBN 13: 9781107009271
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 380