-PDF Download- Gaming Greekness EBOOK

Gaming Greekness

Author: Allan Georgia

Publisher: Gorgias Press

Published: 2021-01-18

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9781463241247

"How the Jewish and Christian communities that emerged in the early Roman Empire navigated a 'Hellenistic' world is a longstanding and unsettled question. Recent scholarship on the intellectual cultures that developed among Greek speaking subjects of Rome in the so-called Second Sophistic as well as models for culture and competition informed by mathematical and economic game theories provide new ideas to address this question. This study offers a model for a kind of culture-making that accounts for how the cultural ecosystems of the Roman Empire enabled these religious communities to win legitimacy and build discourses of self-expression by competing on the same cultural fields as other Roman subjects. By considering a range of texts and figures-including Justin Martyr, Tatian, the 'second' Paul of the Acts of the Apostles, Lucian of Samosata, 4 Maccabees, and Favorinus of Arelate-this study contends that competing for legitimacy enabled those fledgling religious communities to express coherent cultural identities and secure social credibility within the complex milieu of Roman Imperial society"--

Reading Games in the Greek Novel

Author: Eleni Papargyriou

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-02

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1351193457

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"How is play constituent in the formation of the Greek modernist novel? Reflecting competition with European and North American models as well as internal antagonism with more established literary genres in Greece, the novel after the 1930s employed playfulness as a means to demonstrate or even perform its novelty. Innovations unexpectedly came from the Greek periphery rather than Athens, and the Greek novel swiftly exchanged a passively understood realism for communicative patterns that actively involve the reader and educate him into bringing scraps of plot into a meaningful synthesis. Featuring key Greek authors such as Yannis Skarimbas, Stratis Tsirkas and Nikos Kachtitsis, this is a comprehensive and innovative study of Greek modernist prose fiction and the first of its kind to appear in English. Eleni Papargyriou is Lecturer in Modern Greek Literature at Kings College London."

Greeks on Greekness

Author: David Konstan

Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society

Published: 2020-08-30

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1913701352

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Karl Marx observed that just when people seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves... they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service. While the Greek east under Roman rule was not revolutionary, perhaps, in the sense that Marx had in mind, it was engaged in creating something that had not previously existed, in part just through the millennia-long involvement with its own tradition, which was continually being remodelled and readapted. It was an age that was intensely self-conscious about its relation to history, a consciousness that manifested itself not only in Attic purism and a reverence for antique literary models but also in ethnic identities, educational and religious institutions, and political interactions with and even among the Romans. In this volume, seven scholars explore some of the forms that this preoccupation with the Greek past assumed under Roman rule. Taken together, the chapters offer a kaleidoscopic view of how Greeks under the Roman Empire related to their past, indicating the multiple ways in which the classical tradition was problematised, adapted, transformed, and at times rejected. They thus provide a vivid image of a lived relation to tradition, one that was inventive rather than conservative and self-conscious rather than passive. The Greeks under Rome played with their heritage, as they played at being and not being the Greeks they continually studied and remembered.

Intimate Lives of the Ancient Greeks

Author: Stephanie L. Budin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This informative and enjoyable book surveys many aspects of the personal and emotional lives and belief systems of the ancient Greeks, focusing on such issues as familial life, religious piety, and ethnic identity. This work explores various aspects of ancient Greek personal and emotional lives, beginning with their understandings of their own bodies, individual and personal relationships, and ending with their feelings about religion and the afterlife. It covers ancient Greek culture from the early Archaic period in the 8th century BCE through the Late Classical period in the 4th century BCE. Readers will be fascinated to learn what the Greeks thought about the gods, physical deformity, citizenship, nymphs, goats, hospitality, and sexual relations that would be considered incest by modern standards. The content of the book provides an intimate sense of what the ancient Greeks were actually like, connecting ancient experiences to present-day culture. The chapters span a wide range of topics, including the human body, family and societal relationships, city life, the world as they knew it, and religious belief. The author draws extensively on primary sources to allow the reader to "hear" the Greeks speak for themselves and presents evidence from literature, art, and architecture in order to depict the ancient Greeks as living, breathing, thinking, and feeling people.

Lucian’s Laughing Gods

Author: Inger NI Kuin

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2023-04-10

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0472220977

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

No comic author from the ancient world features the gods as often as Lucian of Samosata, yet the meaning of his works remain contested. He is either seen as undermining the gods and criticizing religion through his humor, or as not engaging with religion at all, featuring the gods as literary characters. His humor was traditionally viewed as a symptom of decreased religiosity, but that model of religious decline in the second century CE has been invalidated by ancient historians. Understanding these works now requires understanding what it means to imagine as laughing and laughable gods who are worshipped in everyday cult. In Lucian's Laughing Gods, author Inger N. I. Kuin argues that in ancient Greek thought, comedic depictions of divinities were not necessarily desacralizing. In religion, laughter was accommodated to such an extent as to actually be constituent of some ritual practices, and the gods were imagined either to reciprocate or push back against human laughter—they were never deflated by it. Lucian uses the gods as comic characters, but in doing so, he does not automatically negate their power. Instead, with his depiction of the gods and of how they relate to humans—frivolous, insecure, callous—Lucian challenges the dominant theologies of his day as he refuses to interpret the gods as ethical models. This book contextualizes Lucian’s comedic performances in the intellectual life of the second century CE Roman East broadly, including philosophy, early Christian thought, and popular culture (dance, fables, standard jokes, etc.). His texts are analyzed as providing a window onto non-elite attitudes and experiences, and methodologies from religious studies and the sociology of religion are used to conceptualize Lucian’s engagement with the religiosity of his contemporaries.

The End of Greek Athletics in Late Antiquity

Author: Sofie Remijsen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-05-28

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1316299066

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book presents the first comprehensive study of how and why athletic contests, a characteristic aspect of Greek culture for over a millennium, disappeared in late antiquity. In contrast to previous discussions, which focus on the ancient Olympics, the end of the most famous games is analyzed here in the context of the collapse of the entire international agonistic circuit, which encompassed several hundred contests. The first part of the book describes this collapse by means of a detailed analysis of the fourth- and fifth-century history of the athletic games in each region of the Mediterranean: Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Italy, Gaul and northern Africa. The second half continues by explaining these developments, challenging traditional theories (especially the ban by the Christian emperor Theodosius I) and discussing in detail both the late antique socio-economic context and the late antique perceptions of athletics.

Being Greek Under Rome

Author: Simon Goldhill

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-06-07

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0521663172

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book explores the cultural conflicts of the second-century CE Roman Empire, through the perspective of Greek writings. The specially commissioned essays investigate the intellectual and social tensions in the era which gave rise to Christianity.

Roman Festivals in the Greek East

Author: Fritz Graf

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-11-05

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1107092116

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book explores how festivals of Rome were celebrated in the Greek East and their transformations in the Christian world.

A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity

Author: Paul Christesen

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-01-07

Total Pages: 692

ISBN-13: 1444339524

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity presents a series of essays that apply a socio-historical perspective to myriad aspects of ancient sport and spectacle. Covers the Bronze Age to the Byzantine Empire Includes contributions from a range of international scholars with various Classical antiquity specialties Goes beyond the usual concentrations on Olympia and Rome to examine sport in cities and territories throughout the Mediterranean basin Features a variety of illustrations, maps, end-of-chapter references, internal cross-referencing, and a detailed index to increase accessibility and assist researchers

Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World

Author: Donald G. Kyle

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-12-31

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1118613562

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The second edition of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World updates Donald G. Kyle’s award-winning introduction to this topic, covering the Ancient Near East up to the late Roman Empire. • Challenges traditional scholarship on sport and spectacle in the Ancient World and debunks claims that there were no sports before the ancient Greeks • Explores the cultural exchange of Greek sport and Roman spectacle and how each culture responded to the other’s entertainment • Features a new chapter on sport and spectacle during the Late Roman Empire, including Christian opposition to pagan games and the Roman response • Covers topics including violence, professionalism in sport, class, gender and eroticism, and the relationship of spectacle to political structures