Archaic Greek poems referred to a specific historical context and to a specific audience. To understand the meaning of these poems, it is necessary to reconstruct their contexts. Because of the lack of evidence about archaic Greece, different societies have to be compared: in the case of Sappho and Alcaeus,… Read more
Descriptions of communities in the early Greek epics—like descriptions of places, people and things in general—tend to be cursory. Three features, however, recur with some frequency, each of which belongs to the public sphere: a central meetingplace (agorē), freestanding temples, and a city wall that encircles the entire settlement. Communities… Read more
Based on hitherto unpublished archival material, this paper offers a brief biographical account of Charles Louis William Merlin, who served on Her Britannic Majesty’s consular service in Greece for almost 50 years (1839-1887). His extensive correspondence (1864-1892) with the British Museum, offers the opportunity to reconstruct Merlin’s role in the… Read more
“Ritual” has long attracted classicists. While building on anthropological theories, however, the field of classics has not yet fully explored or integrated recent developments into its hermeneutics. While anthropologists have written and thought a great deal about “ritual” and the adequacy of the term for describing repetitive actions in religious… Read more
My project deals with the interplay between image and literary-linguistic features of Archaic and Classical Attic dedicatory epigrams on stone in the communication with their two-fold audience, the god and the passers-by or, more broadly and importantly, the patron’s fellow citizens. Since epigrams were part of the ordinary life and… Read more
