Ancient Necropolitics

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-71840-1
Verlag: World Bank Publications

Buch, Englisch, Band 492, 256 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 554 g

Reihe: Mnemosyne, Supplements

This is the first collection of essays approaching aspects of Greek antiquity and its reception through ‘necropolitics’. It discovers traces of necropolitics in the unburied and maltreated corpses of the Homeric epics; it follows the manifestations of necropower in Greek tragedy, historiography, and biography; and it delves into torture, capital punishment, and non-normative burials in the ancient Greek world. It contributes to the debate - much of which is only available in modern Greek - on recent archaeological evidence, notably the iron-bound individuals discovered in the Athenian suburb of Phaleron, and includes a captivating exploration of necropolitics in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Greek-tragedy-inspired cinema.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Karakantza, Efimia D.

Velaoras, Alexandros

Meyer, Marion

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

Part1 Theoretical Considerations

1 Introduction: From Necropolitics to Ancient Necropolitics

Alexandros Velaoras

Part2 Necropolitics in Configurations of the Imaginary

2 Necropolitics in the Iliad: Between Myth and Reality

Cezary Kucewicz

3 Odysseus’ Corpses: Necropolitics and Homer’s Odyssey

Jesse Weiner

4 Sophocles’ Ajax: The Necropolitical Treatment of the Hero’s Life and Death

Efimia D. Karakantza

5 Enacting Necropolitics in Sophocles’ Antigone

Zina Giannopoulou

6 The Non-burial at Thebes: Attic Tragedy and the Athenian Necropolitical Micro-apparatus

Alexandros Velaoras

Part3 Dead and (Un)Buried: The Material Evidence

7 Deviations from Necro-normality in Ancient Greek Poleis: The Governance of the Corpse (Modalities and Symbolisms)

Dimitrios Bosnakis

8 Necropolitical Violence and Roman Power in Imperial Greek Biography and Historiography

Katerina Oikonomopoulou

9 Forms of Necropolitical Violence in Antiquity

Angeliki Syrkou

Part4 Necropolitics in Classical Reception

10 A Necropolitics of Posthuman Bodies? Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Benjamin Eldon Stevens

Index of Passages

General Index

Über Autor(innen)

Efimia D. Karakantza is Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the University of Patras, Greece. Her research focuses on metafeminist and political readings of ancient Greek literature, mainly tragedy. Her latest monographs include Who Am I? (Mis)Identity and the Polis in Oedipus Tyrannus (Harvard UP, 2020) and Antigone (Routledge, 2023).

Alexandros Velaoras is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Patras, Greece. His research focuses on Attic tragedy, especially Euripides, and its reception. The title of his dissertation is The Arrival of the Suppliant in Euripides’ ‘Political Plays’.

Marion Meyer, Ph.D. (1984), Univ.Prof. (1997, retired in 2020), taught Classical Archaeology in Germany and Vienna. Her studies focus on images and ancient Athens, e.g. Athena, Göttin von Athen. Kult und Mythos auf der Akropolis bis in klassische Zeit (2017).

Contributors are: Dimitrios Bosnakis, Zina Giannopoulou, Efimia D. Karakantza, Cezary Kucewicz, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, Angeliki Syrkou, Alexandros Velaoras, Jesse Weiner.