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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.
Price: $34.95
Pages: 232
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
28 May 2024
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520401426
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
"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."
Margaret Foster is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University.
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
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