Figuring Death in Classical Athens
Visual and Literary Explorations
Series: Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology Series;
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 19 March 2025
- ISBN 9780198947905
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages320 pages
- Size 250x200x20 mm
- Weight 862 g
- Language English 731
Categories
Short description:
Figuring Death in Classical Athens puts art and literature in conversation to explore how ancient Athenians grappled with the uncertainties of death. How did objects and texts generate thinking about what death is and might be like?
MoreLong description:
Figuring Death in Classical Athens puts art and literature in conversation to explore how ancient Athenians grappled with the uncertainties of death. How did objects and texts generate thinking about what death is and might be like? Were Athenians aware of the imaginative frameworks that underpinned their thinking? Did they worry not just about death, but whether they could figure it out?
Death in the ancient world has long been a subject of interest. Studies abound that examine its social and ideological dimensions, funerary practices, and changing attitudes and beliefs. This book takes a fresh approach, cutting across sub-disciplines (art, text, philosophy, and so on) to build a picture of how ancient art and literature got their audiences thinking-thinking not just about death but about its knowability. Whether in the theatre, at the symposium, or on the Acropolis, representations of death challenged Athenians by presenting problems of exteriority (how can the living know what dying might be like?) and particularity (can one person's experience hold for another? is death truly a 'leveller'?).
The material covered is wide ranging. Unlike other studies, which often focus on either art or text and on one category of objects or one literary genre, the book pulls together exemplary texts and objects (including Plato, drinking cups, Sophocles, temple sculpture, and Thucydides) and makes each accessible to readers from multiple sub-disciplines and, indeed, from beyond Classics.
It will be critical reading for those interested in ancient attitudes to death, as well as those interested in cultural imagination and intellectual history. As a multi-media study, it will appeal to those working on ancient image and text (and their intersection), and, more broadly, to those in other disciplines working on visuality, mediality, materiality, and culturally situated ideas.
The book's most distinctive accomplishment lies not in the individual case studies, however, but in their cumulative effect. Mobilizing a range of sources rarely brought together, Clifford addresses across the span of one study some of the most important materials that survive from Classical Athens: vase painting, sculpture, philosophy, tragedy, and history. As she moves among them, she displays a remarkable facility and depth of knowledge with each subject area.
Table of Contents:
Figuring Death in Classical Athens: Visual and Literary Explorations
Death Comes as the End: Encountering Death in Plato's Phaedo
They Do It with Mirrors?: Imagining Death with Painted Pots
Deaths Old and New
The Extraordinary Death of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus
Niobes
Victory, Victory, Victory?: Encountering Death in the West Frieze of the Temple of Athena Nike
Death and the Plague in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War
Figuring (Out) Death
