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

Seaford, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107470722 ISBN 13: 9781107470729

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2015

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

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1107470722
• ISBN 13: 9781107470729
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 382