Tracking Hermes, Pursuing Mercury

Tracking Hermes, Pursuing Mercury PDF

Author: John F. Miller

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-31

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0191083127

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Of all the divinities of classical antiquity, the Greek Hermes (Mercury in his Roman alter ego) is the most versatile, enigmatic, complex, and ambiguous. The runt of the Olympian litter, he is the god of lies and tricks, yet is also kindly towards mankind and a bringer of luck. His functions embrace both the marking of boundaries and their transgression, but also extend to commerce, lucre, and theft, as well as rhetoric and practical jokes. In another guise, he plays the role of mediator between all realms of human and divine activity, embracing heaven, earth, and the netherworld. Pursuing this elusive divinity requires a truly multidisciplinary approach, reflecting his prismatic nature, and the twenty contributions to this volume draw on a wide range of fields to achieve this, from Greek and Roman literature (epic, lyric, and drama), epigraphy, cult, and religion, to vase painting and sculpture. In offering an overview of the myriad aspects of Hermes/Mercury-including his origins, patronage of the gymnasium, and relation to other trickster figures-the volume attempts to track the god's footprints across the many domains in which he partakes. Moreover, in keeping with his deep connection to exchange, commerce, and dialogue, it aims to exemplify and further encourage discourse between Latinists and Hellenists, as well as between scholars of literary and material cultures.

Tracking Hermes, Pursuing Mercury

Tracking Hermes, Pursuing Mercury PDF

Author: John F. Miller

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-31

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0191083119

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Of all the divinities of classical antiquity, the Greek Hermes (Mercury in his Roman alter ego) is the most versatile, enigmatic, complex, and ambiguous. The runt of the Olympian litter, he is the god of lies and tricks, yet is also kindly towards mankind and a bringer of luck. His functions embrace both the marking of boundaries and their transgression, but also extend to commerce, lucre, and theft, as well as rhetoric and practical jokes. In another guise, he plays the role of mediator between all realms of human and divine activity, embracing heaven, earth, and the netherworld. Pursuing this elusive divinity requires a truly multidisciplinary approach, reflecting his prismatic nature, and the twenty contributions to this volume draw on a wide range of fields to achieve this, from Greek and Roman literature (epic, lyric, and drama), epigraphy, cult, and religion, to vase painting and sculpture. In offering an overview of the myriad aspects of Hermes/Mercury-including his origins, patronage of the gymnasium, and relation to other trickster figures-the volume attempts to track the god's footprints across the many domains in which he partakes. Moreover, in keeping with his deep connection to exchange, commerce, and dialogue, it aims to exemplify and further encourage discourse between Latinists and Hellenists, as well as between scholars of literary and material cultures.

What's in a Divine Name?

What's in a Divine Name? PDF

Author: Alaya Palamidis

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-03-18

Total Pages: 896

ISBN-13: 3111326519

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Divine Names are a key component in the communication between humans and gods in Antiquity. Their complexity derives not only from the impressive number of onomastic elements available to describe and target specific divine powers, but also from their capacity to be combined within distinctive configurations of gods. The volume collects 36 essays pertaining to many different contexts - Egypt, Anatolia, Levant, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome - which address the multiple functions and wide scope of divine onomastics. Scrutinized in a diachronic and comparative perspective, divine names shed light on how polytheisms and monotheisms work as complex systems of divine and human agents embedded in an historical framework. Names imply knowledge and play a decisive role in rituals; they move between cities and regions, and can be translated; they interact with images and reflect the intrinsic plurality of divine beings. This vivid exploration of divine names pays attention to the balance between tradition and innovation, flexibility and constraints, to the material and conceptual parameters of onomastic practices, to cross-cultural contexts and local idiosyncrasies, in a word to human strategies for shaping the gods through their names.

Humanities as a Resource and Inspiration for Humanizing Business

Humanities as a Resource and Inspiration for Humanizing Business PDF

Author: Michael Thate

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-09-09

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 3031335252

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This book highlights the relevance of the grand traditions of the humanities as an untapped resource for business-world problems. In a time where the humanities are viewed as in decline or in threat of collapse altogether, this book enacts and extends the best of the humanities toward prevailing challenges within the complex realities of our current cultural moment. The book presents how the humanities can contribute to humanizing business and management. It explores and discusses various ways to integrate the views and approaches of the humanities in business and management research, practice, and education responding to the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene. The relations between humanities and social sciences is also discussed, as models and theories of business and management are based on insights of social sciences. The book is an outcome of the “Humanities for Business” project of Princeton University Faith and Work Initiative, the European SPES Institute, Leuven, and the Business Ethics Center of Corvinus University of Budapest. It is of great value to researchers, students, policy makers and research institutions interested in using humanities for renewing and humanizing business and management.

Sublime Cosmos in Graeco-Roman Literature and its Reception

Sublime Cosmos in Graeco-Roman Literature and its Reception PDF

Author: David Christenson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-03-07

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1350344699

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The essays collected in this volume examine manifestations of our sublime cosmos in ancient literature and its reception. Individual themes include religious mystery; calendrical and cyclical thinking as ordering principles of human experience; divine birth and the manifold nature of divinity (both awesome and terrifying); contemplation of the sky and meteorological (ir)regularity; fears associated with overpowering natural and anthropogenic events; and the aspirations and limitations of human expression. In texts ranging from Homer to Keats, the volume's chapters apply diverse critical methods and approaches that engage with sublimity in various aesthetic, agential and metaphysical aspects. The ancient texts – epic, dramatic, historiographic and lyric – treated here are rooted in a remote world where, within a framework of (perceived) celestial order, literature, myth and science still communicated profoundly, a tradition that continued in literary receptions of these ancient works. This volume honours the intellectual legacy of Thomas D. Worthen, a scholar whose expertise and insights cut across multiple disciplines, and who influenced and inspired students and colleagues at the University of Arizona, USA, for over three decades. Beyond clarifying temporally and culturally distant contemplations of the human universe, these essays aim to inform the continuing sense of wonder and horror at the sublime heights and depths of our ever-changing cosmos.

The Play of Language in Ancient Greek Comedy

The Play of Language in Ancient Greek Comedy PDF

Author: Kostas E. Apostolakis

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-05-06

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 3111295281

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Ancient Greek comedy relied primarily on its text and words for the fulfilment of its humorous effects and aesthetic goals. In the wake of a rich tradition of previous scholarship, this volume explores a variety of linguistic materials and stylistic artifices exploited by the Greek comic poets, from vocabulary and figures of speech (metaphors, similes, rhyme) to types of joke, obscenity, and the mechanisms of parody. Most of the chapters focus on Aristophanes and Old Comedy, which offers the richest arsenal of such techniques, but the less ploughed fields of Middle and New Comedy are also explored. Emphasis is placed on practical criticism and textual readings, on the examination of particular artifices of speech and the analysis of individual passages. The main purpose is to highlight the use of language for the achievement of the aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual purposes of ancient comedy, in particular for the generation of humour and comic effect, the delineation of characters, the transmission of ideological messages, and the construction of poetic meaning. The volume will be useful to scholars of ancient drama, linguists, students of humour, and scholars of Classical literature in general.

Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination

Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination PDF

Author: Wouter J. Hanegraaff

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-06-30

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1009302876

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In Egypt during the first centuries CE, men and women would meet discreetly in their homes, in temple sanctuaries, or insolitary places to learn a powerful practice of spiritual liberation. They thought of themselves as followers of Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary master of ancient wisdom. While many of their writings are lost, those that survived have been interpreted primarily as philosophical treatises about theological topics. Wouter J. Hanegraaff challenges this dominant narrative by demonstrating that Hermetic literature was concerned with experiential practices intended for healing the soul from mental delusion. The Way of Hermes involved radical alterations of consciousness in which practitioners claimed to perceive the true nature of reality behind the hallucinatory veil of appearances. Hanegraaff explores how practitioners went through a training regime that involved luminous visions, exorcism, spiritual rebirth, cosmic consciousness, and union with the divine beauty of universal goodness and truth to attain the salvational knowledge known as gnôsis.

Early Christianity in Alexandria

Early Christianity in Alexandria PDF

Author: M. David Litwa

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-12-21

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1009449559

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Utilizing the Nag Hammadi codices and early Christian writings, this book explores the earliest development of Christianity in Alexandria.

Data Science, Human Science, and Ancient Gods

Data Science, Human Science, and Ancient Gods PDF

Author: Sandra Blakely

Publisher: Lockwood Press

Published: 2023-05-01

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 1948488523

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The studies in this volume share a focus on religion in the ancient Mediterranean world: How ritual, myth, spectatorship, and travel reflect the continual interaction of human beings with the richly fictive beings who defined the boundaries of groups, access to the past, and mobility across land and seascapes. They share as well the methodological exploration of the intersection between human sciencesthe integration of numerous disciplines around the study of all aspects of human life from the biological to the culturaland the study of the past. In so doing, they continue a long dialogue that engages with critical models derived from specializations within history, philology, archaeology, sociology, and anthropology, and addresses, increasingly, the potentialities and pitfalls of quantitative and digital analyses. Many of the threads in this long conversation inform these chapters: the comparative project, human social evolution, disciplinary reflexivity, religion as an embedded, functional, and structural system, and the role for agency, networks, and materiality.

Divine Institutions

Divine Institutions PDF

Author: Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-06-06

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0691247633

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How religious ritual united a growing and diversifying Roman Republic Many narrative histories of Rome's transformation from an Italian city-state to a Mediterranean superpower focus on political and military conflicts as the primary agents of social change. Divine Institutions places religion at the heart of this transformation, showing how religious ritual and observance held the Roman Republic together during the fourth and third centuries BCE, a period when the Roman state significantly expanded and diversified. Blending the latest advances in archaeology with innovative sociological and anthropological methods, Dan-el Padilla Peralta takes readers from the capitulation of Rome's neighbor and adversary Veii in 398 BCE to the end of the Second Punic War in 202 BCE, demonstrating how the Roman state was redefined through the twin pillars of temple construction and pilgrimage. He sheds light on how the proliferation of temples together with changes to Rome's calendar created new civic rhythms of festival celebration, and how pilgrimage to the city surged with the increase in the number and frequency of festivals attached to Rome's temple structures. Divine Institutions overcomes many of the evidentiary hurdles that for so long have impeded research into this pivotal period in Rome's history. This book reconstructs the scale and social costs of these religious practices and reveals how religious observance emerged as an indispensable strategy for bringing Romans of many different backgrounds to the center, both physically and symbolically.