Jean-Pierre Vernant has profoundly transformed our perceptions of ancient Greece. Published in 1991, this collection of nineteen essays probes deeply into themes of enduring interest--death, the body, the soul, the individual, and relations between mortals and immortals; the mask, the mirror, the image, and the imagination; the self and the other, and, more broadly, the concept of otherness itself, or "alterity."

1. Introduction 2. Fear, interest and honor 3. The spirit and its expression 4. The ancient world 5. Medieval Europe 6. From Sun King to Revolution 7. Imperialism and World War I 8. World War II 9. Hitler to Bush and beyond 10. General findings and conclusions.

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Mortals and immortals : collected essays

A Cultural Theory of International Relations

The first book to offer an integrated reading of ancient Greek attitudes to laughter. Taking material from various genres and contexts, the book analyses both the theory and the practice of laughter as a revealing expression of Greek values and mentalities. Greek society developed distinctive institutions for the celebration of laughter as a capacity which could bridge the gap between humans and gods; but it also feared laughter for its power to expose individuals and groups to shame and even violence. Caught between ideas of pleasure and pain, friendship and enmity, laughter became a theme of recurrent interest in various contexts. Employing a sophisticated model of cultural history, Stephen Halliwell traces elaborations of the theme in a series of important texts: ranging far beyond modern accounts of 'humour', he shows how perceptions of laughter helped to shape Greek conceptions of the body, the mind and the meaning of life.

Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity

1. Does memory have a history? 2. The rule of metaphor 3. The cultivation of memory 4. Privileged knowledge 5. An experimental science of memory 6. Memory kinds 7. Truth in memory 8. A place for memory 9. Memory in its place.

Marking the Mind: A History of Memory

Freedom as non-domination has acquired a leading status in political science. As a consequence of its success, neo-roman republicanism also has achieved great prominence as the political tradition that delivered it. Yet despite the fact that liberty in the Roman mode was forged not only in direct confrontation with monarchy but against democracy as well, the relationship of republicanism to democracy is the great absentee in the contemporary debate on non-domination. This article brings that relationship back into view in both historical and conceptual terms. It illustrates the misrepresentations of democracy in the Roman tradition and shows how these undergirded the theory of liberty as non-domination as a counter to political equality as a claim to taking part in imperium. In so doing it brings to the fore the “liberty side” of democratic citizenship as the equal rights of all citizens to exercise their political rights, in direct or indirect form.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055412000317

Mortals and immortals : collected essays

Citations

A Cultural Theory of International Relations

Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity

Marking the Mind: A History of Memory

Competing for Liberty: The Republican Critique of Democracy

Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism

Related Papers (5)

Myth and Society in Ancient Greece

Aspects of death in early Greek art and poetry

Shame and Necessity

Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical

Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources