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In ordinary life an Athenian woman was allowed no accomplishments beyond leading a quiet, exemplary existence as wife and mother. In Greek tragedy, however, women die violently and, through violence, master their fate. Through her reading of these texts, Loraux elicits an array of insights into Greek attitudes toward death, sexuality, and gender.
Nicole Loraux has devoted much of her writing to charting the paths of the Greek "imaginary," revealing a collective masculine psyche fraught with ambivalence as it tries to grasp the differences between nature and culture, body and soul, woman and man. The Experiences of Tiresias, its title referring to the shepherd struck blind after glimpsing Athena's naked body, captures this ambivalence in exploring how the Greek male defines himself in relationship to the feminine. In these essays, Loraux disturbs the idea of virile men and feminine women, a distinction found in official discourse and aimed at protecting the ideals of male identity from any taint of the feminine. Turning to epic and to...
"Nicole Loraux brilliantly elucidates how Athenian politics were 'gendered' in the Classical period. She investigates the Athenian state's interdiction of ritualized mourning by women . . . (and) . . . illuminates . . . the institutional suppression of women as a political and social force in the most flourishing period of Athenian history".--Laura M. Slatkin, University of Chicago.
"According to one myth, the first Athenian citizen was born from the earth after the sperm of a rejected lover, the god Hephaistos, dripped off the virgin goddess Athena's leg and onto fertile soil. Henceforth Athenian citizens could claim to be truly indigenous to their city and to have divine origins that bypassed maternity. In these essays, the renowned French Hellenist Nicole Loraux examines the implication of this and other Greek origin myths as she explores how Athenians in the fifth century forged and maintained a collective identity."--Publisher's description.
Loraux presents a radical challenge to what has become the dominant view of tragedy in recent years: that tragedy is primarily a civic phenomenon.
An exploration of the roles of conflict and forgetting in ancient Athens. Athens, 403 B.C.E. The bloody oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty is over, and the democrats have returned to the city victorious. Renouncing vengeance, in an act of willful amnesia, citizens call for---if not invent---amnesty. They agree to forget the unforgettable, the "past misfortunes," of civil strife or stasis. More precisely, what they agree to deny is that stasis---simultaneously partisanship, faction, and sedition---is at the heart of their politics. Continuing a criticism of Athenian ideology begun in her pathbreaking study The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux argues that this crucial moment of Athenian p...
One of the world's most renowned classicists here offers a fascinating look at myths of origins and their role in ancient Greek civic ideology. Through a series of critical interpretations of Athenian myths, Nicole Loraux explores the meaning of democracy in its first form, which excluded from its benefits women, slaves, and foreigners. Arguing that these stories have much to tell us about the present and the human condition, her book makes important claims about the role of the past in our understanding of the present. Loraux begins by discussing the Greek fascination with being born from the earth. Myths of autochthony, she asserts, shed important light on attitudes toward both foreigners and women in democratic states. She considers the role demarcated for women by the Pandora myth, according to which women are artificially created out of earth and therefore belong to a race apart. Her analysis also extends to contemporary issues, concluding with the place of the foreigner in democratic societies, ancient and modern. Originally published in France in 1996, Born of the Earth has been superbly translated into English by Selina Stewart.
The most important study of the funeral oration for dead combatants in democratic Athens since Nicole Loraux's classic work.
Discusses the legal, social, and religious position of women in the Greco-Roman world, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, and modern era.