Seers featured prominently in ancient Greek culture, but they rarely appear in archaic and classical colonial discourse. Margaret Foster exposes the ideological motivations behind this discrepancy and reveals how colonial discourse privileged the city’s founder and his dependence on Delphi, the colonial oracle par excellence, at the expense of the independent seer. Investigating a sequence of literary texts, Foster explores the tactics the Greeks devised both to leverage and suppress the extraordinary cultural capital of seers. The first cultural history of the seer, The Seer and the City illuminates the contests between religious and political powers in archaic and classical Greece.
By:
Margaret Foster
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 23mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780520295001
ISBN 10: 0520295005
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 26 January 2018
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
ELT Advanced
,
A / AS level
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgments Conventions and Abbreviations Introduction 1. Beyond Entrails and Omens: Herodotus’s Teisamenos and the Talismanic Seer at War 2. Sailing to Sicily: Theoklymenos and Odysseus in the Odyssey 3. Suppressing the Seer in Colonial Discourse: Delphic Consultations and the Seer in the City 4. Th e Disappearance of Melampous in Bacchylides’ Ode 11 5. Hagesias as Sunoikister: Mantic Authority and Colonial Ideology in Pindar’s Olympian 6 6. Amphiaraos, Alkmaion, and Delphi’s Oracular Monopoly Conclusion Bibliography Index Index Locorum
Margaret Foster is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University.
Reviews for The Seer and the City: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Ideology in Ancient Greece
Foster's central observation about the striking absence of a certain style of religious expert where we might well expect them is new and important for historians of ancient religion and colonialism alike. So too, her writing is clear and the overall argument is well-constructed. * Reading Religion *
