Belted Heroes and Bound Women: The Myth of the Homeric Warrior-king

Framsida
Rowman & Littlefield, 1997 - 228 sidor
This clearly written, beautifully illustrated book introduces a previously unrecognized Homeric theme, the 'belted hero, ' and argues for its lasting historical, literary, and archaeological significance. The belted hero fuses king, warrior, charioteer, and athlete into a supreme image of political power. The special 'heroic warrior's belts' (zosteres) worn by Agamemnon, Menelaos, and Nestor served as unimpeachable visual emblems of their exalted positions of rank. The feminine counterpart, or zone, presents the woman as superior in the competitive arena of love. Bennett shows that the belted hero represented an ideology attractive to wealthy landowners, their oikoi, and inter-family connections. He suggests that the communal spirit of the hoplite phalanx attempted to appropriate the belted hero ideal, even while undermining its ethos of personal honor. Bennett also makes several important iconographic interpretations that provide fundamentally new insights into early Greek oral epic compositional techniques, conceptions of time, and cosmological structure. Belted Heroes and Bound Women will be of interest to scholars and students of early Greek art, history, or literature.

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Innehåll

The Harvard Belt
3
The Harvard Belt the Harvard Bow Fibula and the Shape of Epic Time
31
PhrygianIonian Belts and Belt Dedications at Olympia
43
References to Belts in the Iliad and the Odyssey
61
Zoster King as Hero
67
Zoma Athlete as Warrior
103
Mitre From Hero to Hoplite
115
Zone Bounding the Feminine
125
Belted Herakles and Bound Aphrodite
161
Conclusion
177
Postscript
185
Table
189
Bibliography
191
Index
219
About the Author
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Om författaren (1997)

Michael J. Bennett is Senior Curator of Classical Art at the Tampa Museum of Art and Associate Professor of Art History at Eckerd College.

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