Description: This book further develops Professor Seaford's innovative work on the study of ritual and money in the developing Greek polis. It employs the concept of the chronotope, which refers to the phenomenon whereby the spatial and temporal frameworks explicit or implicit in a text have the same structure and uncovers various such chronotopes in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and in particular the tragedies of Aeschylus. Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering use of the chronotope was in literary analysis. This study by contrast derives the variety of chronotopes manifest in Greek texts from the variety of socially integrative practices in the developing polis - notably reciprocity, collective ritual, and monetised exchange. In particular, the tragedies of Aeschylus embodies the reassuring absorption of the new and threatening monetised chronotope into the traditional chronotope that arises from collective ritual with its aetiological myth.
Brief description: Richard Seaford is Professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Exeter. His publications range from Homer to the New Testament and include commentaries on Euripides' Cyclops (1984) and Euripides' Bacchae (1996), Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy and the Developing City-State (1994) and Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (2004). In 2009 he was President of the Classical Association.
Review Quotes: 'This is an important work that redefines our conception of central categories of early Greek thought: space, time, ritual, and money. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in the areas of classical Greek literature, Greek history, philosophy, and theatre.' Vayos Liapis, The Classical Journal