Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-0-691-00736-6 (ISBN)
The invention of coinage in ancient Greece provided an arena in which rival political groups struggled to imprint their views on the world. Here Leslie Kurke analyzes the ideological functions of Greek coinage as one of a number of symbolic practices that arise for the first time in the archaic period. By linking the imagery of metals and coinage to stories about oracles, prostitutes, Eastern tyrants, counterfeiting, retail trade, and games, she traces the rising egalitarian ideology of the polis, as well as the ongoing resistance of an elitist tradition to that development. The argument thus aims to contribute to a Greek "history of ideologies," to chart the ways ideological contestation works through concrete discourses and practices long before the emergence of explicit political theory. To an elitist sensibility, the use of almost pure silver stamped with the state's emblem was a suspicious alternative to the para-political order of gift exchange. It ultimately represented the undesirable encroachment of the public sphere of the egalitarian polis.
Kurke re-creates a "language of metals" by analyzing the stories and practices associated with coinage in texts ranging from Herodotus and archaic poetry to Aristotle and Attic inscriptions. She shows that a wide variety of imagery and terms fall into two opposing symbolic domains: the city, representing egalitarian order, and the elite symposium, a kind of anti-city. Exploring the tensions between these domains, Kurke excavates a neglected portion of the Greek cultural "imaginary" in all its specificity and strangeness.
Leslie Kurke is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy and the co-editor, with Carol Dougherty, of Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics.
Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xvii Introduction Toward an Imaginary History of Coinage 3 I. What Is Coinage for? Numismatic and Historical Debates 6 II. Literary Methodology 23 III. The Structure of the Argument 32 PART ONE: DISCOURSES Chapter One The Language of Metals 41 I. Forging the Language of Metals 45 II. Metals and Others in Herodotus 60 Chapter Two Tyrants and Transgression: Darius and Amasis 65 I. Darius and the Daric 68 II. Darius Kapelos 80 III. Amasis the Vulgar Tyrant 89 Chapter Three Counterfeiting and Gift Exchange: The Fate of Polykrates 101 I. Counterfeiting and Violated Exchange 101 II. Cosmic Reciprocity ill III. Gift Exchange as Civic Violence 121 Chapter Four Kroisos and the Oracular Economy 130 I. Kroisos in Epinikion 131 II. Gift Exchange, the Grotesque Body, and the Civic Norm 142 III. Competing Economies, Competing Epiphanies 152 IV. Lydians and Ludopatheis: The Gap between History and Ethnography 165 PART TWO: PRACTICES Chapter Five The Hetaira and the Porne 175 I. Inventing the Hetaira 178 II. The Porne and the Public Sphere 187 III. Ideological Faultlines 199 Chapter Six Herodotus's Traffic in Women 220 I. Herodotean Pressure: Destabilizing the Terms 220 II. Herodotean Alternatives: Reimagining the Public Sphere 227 Chapter Seven Games People Play 247 I. Games and Other Symbolic Systems 248 II. Pessoi: The Mediation of the Game Board 254 III. Aristocratic Games: Embodiment, Chance, and Ordeal 275 IV. Herodotean Games 295 Chapter Eight Minting Citizens 299 I. The Two Sides of the Coin: Materiality as Ideology 301 II. Coins Are Good to Think with 316 III. Changing the Currency 328 Conclusion Ideology, Objects, and Subjects 332 Bibliography 337 Index Locorum 365 General Index 373
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 29.8.1999 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | 9 halftones |
| Verlagsort | New Jersey |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 235 mm |
| Gewicht | 595 g |
| Themenwelt | Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile |
| Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Freizeit / Hobby ► Sammeln / Sammlerkataloge | |
| Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Systeme | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-691-00736-5 / 0691007365 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-691-00736-6 / 9780691007366 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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