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
What contribution can digital textual collections make to research in Ancient History? As Arnaldo Momigliano (1980: 14) wrote: the domain of work for a historian is determined by the existence of documents and information about the past, which must be combined and interpreted to understand what… Read more
My interest, as discussed in my first post, is in how audiences responded to descriptions of communities in the early Greek epics. On such response, albeit a late one, comes from the Roman-period geographer Strabo. In a discussion of the western Peloponnesos, Strabo observes that a number of communities… Read more
The visual medium has always been a powerful way to communicate; this is probably one of the reasons why visual arts are often used to convey a political message. It is usually agreed «that architecture is the most political of all visual arts […]; public buildings represent the polis’ most… Read more
