Book Description:
Julius Caesar was warned to tread carefully in the long grass at Troy lest he step on Hector's ghost: the mythical geography of Greece mirrored that of the real world. The ancient Greeks re created a physical view of a mythological past that poets, priests, and politicians used as a paradigm for contemporary behavior. The Greeks drew upon their physical environment not just to illustrate the past but also in many ways to invent it. Massive fossil bones were the remains of giants; strange rocks were petrified heroines; Bronze Age walls and tombs were the work of titans; and artifacts from the past became Achilles' spear, Helen's necklace, Hercules' cup. The Greeks could point to where Poseidon struck the Acropolis with his trident, to Athena's olive tree, to Odysseus' cave in Ithaca. It all enhanced their sense of Greekness and of history, and it attracted the Roman tourist too. This book explores how the Greeks created and re created their past in physical terms in both objects and images: those that are recoverable, those that are mentioned in texts, or those that may be imagined. It offers new insights into the making of myth and the exceptional imagination of a people building the first modern civilization out of the relics of the past. A separate section of the book assembles the many relevant extracts from classical writers with paraphrases of their content. Presented alphabetically under authors and with indexes to gods, heroes, places, and classes of object, these testimonia provide an absorbing read in their own right as well as useful source material for students. 183 b/w illustrations.
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