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. 

Modern treatments of Rome have projected in highly emotive terms the perceived problems, or the aspirations, of the present: 'race-mixture' has been blamed for the collapse of the Roman empire; more recently, Rome and Roman society have been depicted as 'multicultural'. Moving beyond these and beyond more traditional, juridical approaches to Roman identity, Emma Dench focuses on ancient modes of thinking about selves and relationships with other peoples, including descent-myths, history, and ethnographies. She explores the relative importance of sometimes closely interconnected categories of blood descent, language, culture and clothes, and territoriality. Rome's creation of a distinctive imperial shape is understood in the context of the broader ancient Mediterranean world within which the Romans self-consciously situated themselves, and whose modes of thought they appropriated and transformed.