Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface -- Contributors -- Introduction --   Anton Bierl, David Bouvier and Ombretta Cesca -- Part 1 Orality, Narration, and Performance in Poetry and Images -- Memories Become Story: On the Poetics of Persuasion in Homer’s Iliad --   Elizabeth Minchin -- Song 44 of Sappho as Shaped by Oral Traditions --   Gregory Nagy -- “Modified Rapture!” In and Out of Orality in Staging Comedy --   Niall W. Slater -- Between Symposium, Stage, and Papyrus: The Story of Kirke in Archaic Greek Art --   Jasper Gaunt -- Part 2 Performance, Mythic-Ritual Poetics, and Writing -- Writing the Unspeakable: How Did the Greeks Write about the Eleusinian Mysteries? --   Sandra Fleury -- Between Athens and Delphi: The Performance and Poetics of the Delphic Hymns --   Claas Lattmann -- Epitaph and Ritual --   Ruth Scodel -- The Text, the Reader, and the Voice: Roman Mores in Verse Epitaphs --   Dylan Bovet -- Part 3 Performance and Mythic-Ritual Poetics in Christian Texts -- Multimodality and Metonymy: Deuteronomy as a Test Case --   Raymond F. Person Jr. -- Jesus’ Baptism in the Scamander: Homeric Intertextuality and Christian Ritual in Eudocia’s Homeric Centos --   Anna Lefteratou -- Index Locorum -- Index of Subjects.

Myths can be defined as traditional stories that societies pass on from generation to generation, constantly reinventing and reshaping them through oral, written or visual representations. Rituals and cults, on the other hand, are the festive celebrations that punctuate social life, providing the occasion for the community to perform and reflect on mythic stories or mimetic plays about or by gods and heroes. How do then the recent advances in narratology, sociolinguistics, and anthropology lead us to reconsider the complex relationships between myth and ritual in ancient traditional societies, both literate and non-literate? The papers in this groundbreaking volume explore and compare these dynamic interactions across diverse cultures, including archaic and classical Greece, the ancient Near East, and imperial Rome.

English

Description based on print version record.