The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic GreeceTales of archaic Greek city foundations continue to be told and retold long after the colonies themselves were settled, and this book explores how the ancient Greeks constructed their memory of founding new cities overseas. Greek stories about colonizing Sicily or the Black Sea in the seventh century B.C.E. are no more transparent, no less culturally constructed than nineteenth-century British tales of empire in India or Africa; they are every bit as much about power, language, and cultural appropriation. This book brings anthropological and literary theory to bear on the narratives that later Greeks tell about founding colonies and the processes through which the colonized are assimilated into the familiar story-lines, metaphors, and rituals of the colonizers. The distinctiveness and the universality of the Greek colonial representations are explored through explicit comparison with later European narratives of new world settlement. |
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Contents
| 3 | |
| 13 | |
Staging the City | 81 |
Interpreting the Metaphors | 157 |
Appendix | 165 |
Bibliography | 189 |
Index of Passages | 201 |
Subject Index | 205 |
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The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece Carol Dougherty Limited preview - 1993 |
Common terms and phrases
Aeschylus Aetna Aetnaeae Alexidamus ambiguous Apollo and Cyrene Arcesilaus archaic colonization Argos Artemis athletic Bacchylides Battus bride Carneia Carrhotus celebration chariot Chiron choral poetry city founder city's civic colo colonial discourse colonial expedition colonial founder colonial narrative colonial oracles colonial tale colonial tradition colonists consult context cult cultural Cyrene Cyrene's daughter Delphic Apollo Delphic oracle describes Diagoras Diod discussion epinician etymology exile foreign founding a colony Greek colonial Helius Herodotus Hieron honor imagery island king land language legends Libya marriage metaphor murder myth narrative pattern native nymph oikist Olympian overseas Palici Pausanias Pind Pindar poem poetic poetry pollution praise Proetus purification Pyth Pythian 9 Pythian games rape Rhodes riddle ritual role settlement sexual Sicel song story Strab suggests Syracuse Telesicrates tells tion Tiryns Tlepolemus Vernant victory violence Zeus γὰρ δὲ ἐν ἔνθα ἐς καὶ μὲν νιν πόλιν τε τὸ τὸν
Popular passages
Page ix - Rome GRBS Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies...
Page 3 - ... their land is spacious and void, and there are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts. They are not industrious, neither have art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it, but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc.
Page 157 - It is, at its simplest, a way of proceeding from the known to the unknown. It is a way of cognition in which the identifying qualities of one thing are transferred in an instantaneous, almost unconscious, flash of insight to some other thing that is, by remoteness or complexity, unknown to us.
Page 5 - In my view, we experience the "fictionalization" of history as an "explanation" for the same reason that we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that we inhabit along with the author. In both we recognize the forms by which consciousness both constitutes and colonizes the world it seeks to inhabit comfortably.
Page 29 - The countrey tho in general well enough clothd appeard in some places bare ; it resembled in my imagination the back of a lean Cow, covered in general with long hair, but nevertheless where her scraggy hip bones have stuck out farther than they ought accidental rubbs and knocks have entirely bard them of their share of covering.'1 It was not possible, unfortunately, to investigate every potential harbour.
Page 5 - The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others...
Page 3 - ... do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts. They are not industrious, neither have [they] art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it; but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc.
Page 11 - ... not only models of past events and processes, but also metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude between such events and processes and the story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings. Viewed in a purely formal way, a historical narrative is not only a reproduction of the events reported in it, but also a complex of symbols which gives us directions for finding an icon of the structure of those events in our literary...
Page 6 - And in each case, I have tried to get at this most intimate of notions not by imagining myself someone else, a rice peasant or a tribal sheikh, and then seeing what I thought, but by searching out and analyzing the symbolic forms — words, images, institutions, behaviors — in terms of which, in each place, people actually represented themselves to themselves and to one another.
Page 44 - The Lele pangolin cult is only one example, of which many more could be cited, of cults which invite their initiates to turn round and confront the categories on which their whole surrounding culture has been built up and to recognise them for the fictive, man-made, arbitrary creations that they are.