This work presents a multifarious assortment of expert essays that deal with a variety of social, political and cultural practices, which the ancient Greeks had not simply inherited from the past but rather made a conscious choice to carry on. The elusiveness of the object of inquiry, the ‘ways of life’ of the Greeks as the term epitêdeumata may be rendered, translates into the tremendous diversity, both chronological and thematic, of the topics that the volume covers, and ensures that scholars specialised in different disciplines such as historiography, mythology, literary studies, gender studies and philosophy will find some contributions useful and relevant to their own areas of expertise.
The introduction highlights the paradoxical multiplicity of meanings associated with epitêdeumata straddling time-honoured practices and relatively new customs, individualistic modes of behaviour and socially imposed patterns of action.
B. d'Agostino investigates the first example of epitêdeumata, the dedication of statues in Greek sanctuaries. He argues that the statue of a bronze horse dedicated in the temple of Brauronian Artemis on the Athenian acropolis around 415 b.c. drew on the theme of the Trojan horse, still very much alive in the collective imagination of the Athenians. The dedication would have invoked upon the Athenians, on the eve of the Sicilian expedition, Artemis' protection just as in mythical times the goddess had overseen the Greeks' departure to Troy.
E. Bowie continues the investigation into the significance and relevance of the Trojan cycle. He attempts to reconstruct the work and reception of the sixth-century b.c. poet and musician Sacadas of Argos, to whom is attributed a poem entitled The Sack of Troy that contained a list of the Greek heroes hidden inside the wooden horse.
F. Lissarague tackles the practice of setting up a trophy on the battlefield stressing how both the literary sources on early trophies and the iconographic representation of tropaia in Attic vase painting point to the ephemeral character of the object, which in turn mirrors the Greek notion of victory as a short-lived instant in time.
N. Luraghi criticises the common assumption that favourable and unfavourable views of tyranny in Greek culture stemmed from later and conflicting strands of the historiographical tradition. By likening the tyrant to the trans-cultural and oxymoronic category of the trickster, Luraghi holds instead that internal contradiction defined ab ovo the representation of tyrants, at once cunning masterminds and violators of the established order, making them admirable and yet formidable characters.
Mining Plutarch's Lives as sources for the habits of life of six prominent Athenian statesmen, P. Schmitt Pantel focuses on the question of how types of behaviour displayed by such politicians contributed to the construction of their political identity in fifth-century b.c. Athenian discourse, drawing an important connection between epitêdeumata and public life.
With J. Davidson's chapter, the discussion turns to the 200-metre sprint termed stadion, the culminating event at the Olympic games, and its relationship to the foundational myth of the Olympics, the chariot race with which king Oenomaus challenged and killed his daughter's suitors until young Pelops defeated him. Linking running with sexual reproduction, Davidson maintains that the stadion embodied the ideal of a fair race where young men will inevitably win, and offered an antagonistic model to Oenomaus' unjust mythical challenge, which presented a hurdle to the proper succession of generations.
T. takes issue with Jacoby's theory that historical writings focusing on a specific Greek polis or locale, the so-called ‘local histories', were primarily organised according to the yearly ordering of city chronicles. By analysing the fragments of ‘local historians' and on the assumption that these works were designed to construct a city's identity, T. shows how other patterns seem to have played a role in determining the organisation of a locale's past history, such as the city's foundation, cults and festivals.
Moving forward to the Hellenistic age, P. Kosmin examines the cuneiform text inscribed on the cylinder that recorded king Antiochus I's reconstruction of the Ezida temple in the city of Borsippa near Babylon. Against the common opinion that the Seleucid sovereigns steered clear of attempts to force change upon Babylonian traditions, Kosmin points out that the text contains several references to their monarchic ideology, for instance the cult of Apollo as the dynasty's progenitor, nestled within an apparently conservative Babylonian model.
M. delves into the fragments of Theopompus' monumental history centred on the figure of Philip II, a history whose organising principles are the epitêdeumata of Philip and the Greeks. According to M., Theopompus' purpose in writing the Philippica was to present various ways of life as (mostly negative) moral exempla for the didactic contemplation of his fourth-century b.c. readers.
S. Hornblower looks at the Herodotean account of the wooing of Agariste of Sicyon (6.126–31), an episode in which two notable archaic practices converge, agonistic and marital competitions. For, upon his victory at Olympia, Agariste's father, the tyrant of Sicyon Cleisthenes, announced a wedding contest for his daughter's hand. By comparing the catalogue of Agariste's suitors in Herodotus (6.127) to the Olympic victor-lists of the archaic age, Hornblower infers that the suitors' locations of origin as indicated by Herodotus make a good deal of sense, and that the story may after all be based on an actual event.
Penned by O. Murray, the epilogue of the book contains a survey of the different views about friendship held in ancient Greece and emphasises the position of Aristotle, the first among the philosophers to insist on the concept of friendship as an intellectual pleasure. It is significant that Murray concludes the book since the majority of the volume's articles were originally presented at a conference in his honour on the occasion of his retirement in 2004 and have been reworked into the present volume with the addition of new contributions. A list of the vast bibliography authored by Murray and a thorough index complete the book.
The limitations of this work correlate to the vast and often contradictory range of meanings of the term epitêdeumata. Practices classifiable under this umbrella would be so countless and heterogeneous as to hamper any exhaustive or conclusive study. Even so, the volume certainly does justice to the manifoldness of Greek epitêdeumata through the variety of subjects explored and presents a stimulating series of papers written by distinguished academics. Well-versed scholars in classics will appreciate the opportunity this volume affords to reflect upon the ways in which the Greeks endeavoured to pattern the construction of the present in light of the past.
