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In this
groundbreaking study, Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling
new vision of ancient Greece. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece
takes us far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and
the Parthenon to reveal a fundamentally other culture — one
of slavery, of masks and death, of scapegoats, of ritual hunting,
and of ecstasies.
Vernant’s provocative discussions of various institutions
and practices (including war, marriage, and sacrifice) detail the
complex intersection of the religious, social, and political structures
of ancient Greece. The book concludes with Vernant’s authoritative
genealogy of the study of myth from Antiquity to structuralism and
beyond. “Myth,” he writes, “brings into operation
a form of logic which we may describe, unlike the logic of noncontradiction
of the philosophers, as a logic of the ambiguous and the equivocal.” Also by this author:
Myth and Thought Among the Greeks Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece
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