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
Citation with persistent identifier: Visvardi, Eirene. “Collective Emotion in Thucydides.” CHS Research Bulletin 1, no. 1 (2012). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:VisvardiE.Collective_Emotion_in_Thucydides.2012 https://vimeo.com/57934923 §1 In classical Athens, negotiations in diverse public contexts – forensic, deliberative, poetic – explicitly evoke and examine the role of the emotions.[1] At the same time,… Read more
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, parallels are made between Lesbos and Sparta or Athens. However, because Spartan and Athenian society were structurally different, it is… Read more
In the previous post I argued that some Archaic and Classical dedicatory epigrams deliberately selected non standard and non formulaic features to communicate with their audience. Those features concerned the material and immaterial elements of the dedicatory epigrams, that can be described by the three semantic systems of art and… Read more
