David Rosenbloom - Böcker

Aeschylus' Persians is the earliest extant Greek tragedy and sole surviving historical tragedy. Produced in 472 BC, the play tells the story of the defeat of the Persian king Xerxes in his attempt to expand his empire by conquering Greece and his return in rags to Persia to face the condemnation of his elders. The first product of the Western imagination to represent the causes and limits of imperialist conquest, the Persians is particularly relevant today. The play is rich in verbal and visual imagery and unflinching in its depiction of the horrors of a defeated invasion and the glory of a successful defence. But the Persians is not merely a paean to Western freedom, democracy, courage and technological supremacy; it is a meditation on the tendency inherent in wealth, power and success to take on a momentum of their own and to push societies to the brink of ruin.

Greek Drama IV: Texts, Context, Performance contains fourteen papers that comprise a snapshot of current work on Greek drama. How do notions of performance and performance context influence interpretation of individual plays? How do we reconstruct fragmentary plays and understand the experience of watching plays in succession? To what extent does genre shape dramatic performance and its reception? Is tragedy an art form that interrogates the basic structures of experience that audiences take for granted outside the theatre? How is dramatic performance related to democracy as a political culture and as a set of institutions and practices? These are questions the contributions collected in Greek Drama IV seek to answer. The volume's Introduction considers ideas of text, performance and performance context central to contemporary scholarship and locates the volume's contributions within that scholarship.Euripides forms the heart of the volume. Eight of its fourteen papers deal with his plays: the climax of Trojan Women , genre and meaning in the choral odes of Alcestis , the idea of Sicily in Cyclops , the politics of enmity in Orestes , the reconstruction of the Archelaus and the Iphigenia at Aulis and Bacchae as companion plays performed in 406 BC. Two papers focus on Hecuba from different angles: one examines the play's manipulations of audience emotion, while the other analyses tensions between decree, durable law and moral-religious authority in the play.Two papers concentrate on individual plays of Sophocles. One reads the debate between Electra and Clytemnestra in Electra as utterances that perform and seek to determine the contestants' identities; the other discusses the blurring of the boundaries that structure experience in Trachiniae . Aeschylus is the subject of a paper that reads Persians and the three plays performed with it in 472 BC as a tetralogy linked by prophecies of Greek Persian-war victories. Comedy and tragedy feature in a study of anandreia (lack of manliness) as feminisation in staged attempts to avoid military service. Papers devoted to the nesting of dramatic performances within Athens' democratic political culture and to the story of how one regime for financing plays ( choregia ) was replaced by another ( agonothesia ) in late fourth-century Athens round out the collection.

Money, Warfare and Power in the Ancient World offers twelve papers analysing the processes, consequences and problems involved in the monetization of warfare and its connection to political power in antiquity. The contributions explore not only how powerful men and states used money and coinage to achieve their aims, but how these aims and methods had often already been shaped by the medium of coined money – typically with unintended consequences. These complex relationships between money, warfare and political power – both personal and collective – are explored across different cultures and socio-political systems around the ancient Mediterranean, ranging from Pharaonic Egypt to late antique Europe.This volume is also a tribute to the life and impact of Professor Matthew Trundle, an inspiring teacher and scholar, who was devoted to promoting the discipline of Classics in New Zealand and beyond. At the time of his death, he was writing a book on the wider importance of money in the Greek world. A central piece of this research is incorporated into this volume, completed by one of his former students, Christopher de Lisle. Additionally, Trundle had situated himself at the centre of a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of money and power in antiquity. The contributions of scholars of ancient monetization in this volume bring together many of the threads of those conversions, further advancing a field which Matthew Trundle had worked so tirelessly to promote.