Biblical Hebrew is known for its creative avoidance of mentioning intimate body parts. Did such euphemisms continue in Greek-speaking Judaism? This article proposes that the “Greek hat” in 2 ...Maccabees 4:12 is not (or at least not only) a literal hat or a vague metaphor for Hellenism, as has been suggested through the centuries. Instead, it is a sly euphemism for a foreskin, and refers to the practice of epispasm, or the restructuring of a penis to reverse the look of circumcision. Such a reading fits well with the text’s anxiety around the gymnasium and its concern for Torah observance.
As prompted by letters of the 1960s from Mary Renault to Bryher, addressing their shared métier of historical fiction, this essay recognizes affinities, as yet largely unacknowledged, between the ...mid-century fiction of Mary Renault, often informed by her engagement with Ancient Greece, and the earlier Hellenism of modernist writer H.D., as well as the vein of modernist Hellenism H.D.’s work exemplifies. Like Renault, H.D. and other modernist writers often enlist Hellenism as historical fiction that conjures past worlds—to comment on, and provide alternative vocabulary for issues of, the present. Comparison of Renault’s and H.D.’s shared gravitation toward myths associated with the figure of Theseus—which they both engage in a spirit of revision—further illuminates the way that, like Renault’s turn to Ancient Greece, much early modernist work was animated by efforts to rethink gender and sexuality. Yet comparing Renault’s and H.D.’s retellings of myths connected with Theseus also uncovers the major areas of difference between them, revealing the patriarchal allegiances and misogynistic costs of Renault’s modes of reworking, at a marked distance from H.D.’s forms of feminist re-vision.
In A Room of One's Own , when Virginia Woolf urges women writers to expose the "dark spots" in men's psychology, she signals her own intentions for The Waves . In The Waves , Woolf targets men's ...masculinity, elite educations, brutalized boyhoods (at public schools), and their too-easy belonging to literary traditions as causes of male writers' truncated creativity. Louis, Bernard, and Neville exhibit the writerly disabilities Woolf associates with virility in Room . They are also linked to T.S. Eliot, Desmond MacCarthy, and Lytton Strachey, and to modernist experimentalism, realism, and homosexual Hellenism, respectively. In The Waves , Woolf differentiates her aesthetics not only from the "materialists"—H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett—but her Georgian "allies" as well—Eliot, MacCarthy, and Strachey prominent among them.
Recent works on the categorisation of ancient Judaism have begun to call into question the division between Judaism and Hellenism, often reified as two distinct cultural spheres, even as scholars ...seek to explain texts and artefacts which show elements traditionally ascribed either to Judaism or Hellenism. These theoretical formulations have made some impact in the discussion of ancient Jewish texts but have so far failed to be fully appreciated in archaeological and architectural scholarship. This article will present the Magdala bathhouse (Galilee) as an example which forces us to re-evaluate the construction of Judaism and Hellenism. It proposes that we should view Judaism as an integral part of Hellenism, and any cultural output of ancient Judaism should be interpreted as a full participant in any definition of Hellenism.
Hellenism, beyond borders since Alexander the Great, is considered here from three perspectives. 1) Taking into account the indelible Alexander’s mark on hellenism when he broke the autochtonous ...frame of Greece in order to diffuse its culture through Orient, as well as the ambiguities generated by this influence and which still supply the analyses of number of intellectuals. 2) Confront the greek vision with the indigenous one: reflect on the hellenistic culture of that period confronting it with the culture of the indigenous countries and nations, Egyptians, Syrians, Indians, especially, in order to determine how these cultures have been adapted and modified, reciprocally, and examine the nature of the link between Alexander’s conquests and their cultural aftermaths. 3) Reflect on our relationship with a fantastic hellenism, affected by the ambiguous mark of Alexander, which has become our invisible and multiform homeland with wich we are still conversing.
Studies in the cultic honours for Hellenistic leaders and benefactors mainly focus on the ideological and diplomatic features of the phenomenon. Conversely, the papers collected in this volume aim to ...shift the focus to its material and practical aspects: media, ritual action and space, agency, administration and funding. Specialists in Hellenistic history, epigraphy, papyrology, numismatics, and archaeology provide fresh reassessments of a variety of documentary dossiers concerning both institutional and non-institutional agents (cities, kingdoms; individuals, associations), Greek and non-Greek, across the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean world. Moreover, this interdisciplinary investigation of the materiality of rituals addressed to human benefactors as to, or together with, traditional gods allows us to go beyond a commonly accepted yet methodologically arbitrary separation between cultic honours for deities and for human beings. The latter are often still considered as an isolated and paradoxical feature of ancient Greek polytheism, and as a deviation from ‘traditional’ religion, i.e., the cults for gods and heroes as they were already practised in the archaic and classical polis. Rather, the case studies dealt with in this book contribute to shedding new light on the way ancient people could exploit the ritual and administrative toolkit of their religious system in order to satisfy new needs. In other words, one may state that cultic honours for political leaders do not provide an exception to the way Greek polytheism functioned, but are fully embedded within it, and substantially contributed to its development in the Hellenistic age.
O artigo tem por objetivo discutir o papel do mito de Gaia na formação da ciência geográfica. Para tal objetivo, foram analisadas as obras Ilídada e Odisséia de Homero, os Hinos Homéricos, Teogonia – ...a origem dos deuses de Hesíodo e as obras Órficas, que permitiram entender o papel do mito de Gaia na construção da primeira interpretação geográfica no que tange à origem e a dinâmica de transformação da Terra, permitindo o desenvolvimento da ciência na antiguidade. O foco inicial recaiu na busca da compreensão da fisiologia e da fisiografia de Gaia pelos pré-socráticos, momento que surgiu o conceito de Kosmos, que pôs fim ao mito de Gaia. Foi a partir desta arquitetura que se desenvolveu a ciência geográfica no helenismo, cujo auge foram os trabalhos de Teofrasto e Estrabão, que influenciaram a própria constituição ciência geográfica na modernidade.
L'article vise à discuter du rôle du mythe Gaia dans la formation de la science géographique. À cette fin, sont analysées les œuvres Illidade et Odyssée, d'Homère, les Hymnes homériques, Théogonie - l’origine des dieux d'Hésiode et les œuvres orphiques, qui nous ont permis de comprendre le rôle du mythe Gaia dans la construction de la première interprétation géographique origine et la dynamique de la transformation de la terre, permettant le développement de la science dans les temps anciens. L'objectif initial était de rechercher une compréhension pré-socratique de la physiologie et de la physiographie de Gaia, moment auquel le concept de Cosmos a émergé, mettant fin au mythe de Gaia. C'est à partir de cette architecture que la science géographique s'est développée dans l'hellénisme, dont l'apogée a été l'œuvre de Théophraste et de Strabon, qui ont influencé la constitution même de la science géographique dans la modernité.
This article aims to discuss the participation of the myth of Gaia in the formation of geographical science in antiquity. For this purpose, Homer´s The Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns, The origin of the world and the gods according Hesiod's Theogony and the Orphic manuscripts have been used in order to understand the role of the Gaia myth in the construction of the first geographical interpretation related to Earth's origin and transformation, allowing the development of science in antiquity. The initial focus was directed to search the pre-Socratic understanding of the physiology and physiography of Gaia while the concept of Kosmos arose, decreeing the end of Gaia. It was from the architecture that Geographical science has developed in Hellenism taking for granted its peak moment in the work of Theophrastus and Strabo that notable influenced the constitution of geographical science in modernity.
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