Word and Image in Ancient Greece

by Rutter, N. Keith; Sparkes, Brian

• ISBN13: 9780748614059
• ISBN10: 0748614052
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-10-31
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Summary

This volume of new work by leading scholars explores the ways in which visual and oral communication in Greek culture interact and throws new light on their many and related functions. The subjects include the creation of the Greek myths during the early centuries of the first millennium B.C. when the technique of writing had been lost; the significance of words and images on painted pottery; the relationship between drama on stage and the illustration of the same stories on pottery; and the ways in which stories portrayed in monumental sculpture on temples were understood by the people who came to look at them. Classical Greece produced the beginnings of the tradition of philosophical reflection on the nature and value of images, notably in the work of Plato and Aristotle: the concept of mimesis, concerned with questions both of representation and expression, is directly addressed by several of the authors, and forms an underlying theme of the volume as a whole. The authors are drawn from the historical, archaeological, literary, philosophical, and art historical fields of classical study.

Table of Contents

Preface	v
Contributors and Editors	vi
Illustrations	ix
Abbreviations	xii
Introduction	1	(10)
Part I Images in Early Greece
Songs for heroes: the lack of images in early Greece	11	(11)
Irene Lemos
The uses of writing on early Greek painted pottery	22	(13)
Anthony Snodgrass
Tools of the trade	35	(18)
Elizabeth Moignard
Part II Narrative and Image
Meaning and narrative techniques in statue-bases of the Pheidian circle	53	(26)
Olga Palagia
Small world: pygmies and co	79	(20)
Brian Sparkes
Plato and painting	99	(20)
Stephen Halliwell
Part III Image(ry) and the Stage
Vases and tragic drama: Euripides' Medea and Sophocles' lost Tereus	119	(21)
Jenny March
Eidola in epic, tragedy and vase-painting	140	(21)
Ruth Bardel
Placing theatre in the history of vision	161	(22)
Simon Golhill
Part IV Reading (and) the Image
Social structure, cultural rationalisation and aesthetic judgement in classical Greece	183	(23)
Jeremy Tanner
Losing the picture: change and continuity in Athenian grave monuments in the fourth and third centuries BC	206	(22)
Karen Stears
Archaic and classical Greek temple sculpture and the viewer	228	(19)
Robin Osborne
Programme of the First Leventis Greek Conference	247	(2)
Index locorum	249	(2)
Index	251