The Bacchic Gold Tablets and Poetic Tradition

Examines a collection of gold tablets, products of Greek mystery religions offering post-mortem salvation, and reads them in the performance context and thought of early Greek poetry. Applies a range of new analytical tools to these materials, including approaches from epigraphy and religious studies.

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The Bacchic gold tablets are a remarkable collection of objects from the Ancient Greek world: inscribed with short verse texts and buried in graves of mystery initiates, they express extraordinary hopes for post-mortem salvation. Past approaches to these objects have sought to reconstruct their underlying belief system. This book is the first to examine them primarily within the context of early Greek poetry and performance culture. The patterns of thought and expression in the tablets find instructive poetic antecedents and analogies, including in non-canonical and inscribed genres that are not included in conventional descriptions of the poetic tradition. Applying a range of analytical approaches from the fields of epigraphy, anthropology, and religious studies, this book ultimately uses the tablets to cast more familiar literature in a new light.