Investigating ritual in Greece from cross-disciplinary and transhistorical perspectives, Greek Ritual Poetics offers novel readings of the pivotal role of ritual in Greek traditions by exploring a broad spectrum of texts, art, and social practices. This collection of essays written by an international group of leading scholars in a number of disciplines presents a variety of methodological approaches to secular and religious rituals, and to the narrative and conceptual strategies of their reenactment and manipulation in literary, pictorial, and social discourses. Addressing understudied aspects of Greek ritual and societies, this book will prove significant for classicists, anthropologists, Byzantinists, art historians, neohellenists, and comparatists interested in the interaction between ritual, aesthetics, and cultural communicative systems.

Contents:

P. DUCREY, "Préface"
K. COLEMAN, "Melior's plane tree: an introduction to the ancient garden"
C. E. LOEBEN, "Der Garten im und am Grab - Götter in Gärten und Gärten für Götter: reale und dargestellte Gärten im Alten Ägypten"
S. DALLEY, "From Mesopotamian temples as sacred groves to the date-palm motif in Greek art and architecture"
E. PRIOUX, "Parler de jardin pour parler de créations littéraires"
R. TAYLOR, "Movement, vision, and quotation in the gardens of Herod the Great"
A. MARZANO, "Roman gardens, military conquests, and elite self-representation"
B. BERGMANN, "The concept of boundary in the Roman garden"
G. CANEVA, "Il giardino come espressione del divino nelle rappresentazioni dell'antica Roma"
R. L. FOX, "Early Christians and the gardens: image and reality"

This session will illustrate project-based activities in which students become the makers of objects and texts that are shared not only among each other, but with their schools and communities. The projects and their Roman models (monuments, coins) will provide a lens through which students will engage with “big” issues of civic identity and image.

 This article identifies and analyzes bureaucratic features in the language employed by Pliny and Trajan in Epistles 10 as an example of communication between two officials of senior but unequal status who were engaged in managing provincial affairs in the Roman empire. 

The Poetics of Consent breaks new ground in Homeric studies by interpreting the Iliad’s depictions of political action in terms of the poetic forces that shaped the Iliad itself. Arguing that consensus is a central theme of the epic, David Elmer analyzes in detail scenes in which the poem’s three political communities—Achaeans, Trojans, and Olympian gods—engage in the process of collective decision making.

These scenes reflect an awareness of the negotiation involved in reconciling rival versions of the Iliad over centuries. They also point beyond the Iliad’s world of gods and heroes to the here-and-now of the poem’s performance and reception, in which the consensus over the shape and meaning of the Iliadic tradition is continuously evolving.

Elmer synthesizes ideas and methods from literary and political theory, classical philology, anthropology, and folklore studies to construct an alternative to conventional understandings of the Iliad’s politics. The Poetics of Consent reveals the ways in which consensus and collective decision making determined the authoritative account of the Trojan War that we know as the Iliad.