The History Written on the Classical Greek Body

by Robin Osborne

• ISBN13: 9780521176705
• ISBN10: 0521176700
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-08-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book challenges historians to come to terms with the distortions that they systematically introduce into their work by their reliance on what has been written on paper without looking at what was and was not written on the body. This book is concerned with the ways in which texts relating to classical Greece, and in particular to classical Athens, classified people and with the extent to which those classifications could be seen by the eye. It compares the qualities distinguished in texts to those distinguished in sculpture and painted pottery, and emphasises the frequent invisibility of the categories upon which historians have laid most stress the citizen, the free person, the foreigner, even the god. The frequent impossibility of seeing who belonged to which category has major political, social and theological implications which are explored here, as well as potentially revolutionary implications for all future historical writing.

Author Biography

Robin Osborne is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow and Senior Tutor of King's College, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research ranges broadly across Greek history, Greek archaeology and the history of Greek art. Along with numerous edited and co-edited volumes, he has written Demos; the Discovery of Classical Attika (Cambridge, 1985), Classical Landscape with Figures: the Ancient Greek City and its Countryside (1987), Greece in the Making, 1200-479 BC (1996, 2nd edn 2009), Archaic and Classical Greek Art (1998) and Greek History (2004). A collection of his papers has been published as Athens and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge, 2010). This book was written as a contribution to a project on 'Changing Beliefs of the Human Body' funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
Preface	p. xiii
List of abbreviations	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Writing history on the classical body	p. 6
The history incorporated in words, and the history embodied in images	p. 6
The words have a Greek for them	p. 18
The appearance of the classical Greelk body	p. 27
Greek athletics and the Greek body	p. 27
The medical writers' body	p. 37
The sculpted body	p. 40
Drawing on the body	p. 44
Bodies of thought	p. 52
The distinguished body	p. 55
Distinguishing bodies in red-figure pottery	p. 57
Distinguished men and distinguished women on gravestones	p. 65
Social distinction?	p. 75
The citizen body	p. 85
The citizenship debate	p. 85
Aristode and the classical concept of the citizens	p. 88
Citizenship terminology in classical Greece	p. 92
The invisible citizen body	p. 105
Foreign bodies	p. 124
Dirty bodies	p. 158
Godsbodies	p. 185
Describing godsbodies	p. 185
The theology of godsbodies	p. 189
The history of godsbodies	p. 194
The Pheidian revolution and the alternatives	p. 203
Telling bodies	p. 216
References	p. 231
Index	p. 249
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