Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold
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€87.99
A01=Leslie Kurke
Adjective
Aeschylus
Allusion
Anecdote
Archaic Greece
Aristotle
Astyages
Author_Leslie Kurke
Barbarian
Calculation
Category=AGA
Category=JPF
Category=NHC
Category=NHD
Category=WCF
Classical Greece
Courtesan
Criticism
Croesus
Currency
Dokimasia
Electrum
Epigram
Epigraphy
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eroticism
Essentialism
Ethnography
Etymology
Euphemism
Euripides
Genre
Greek literature
Grotesque body
Hellenistic period
Herodotus
Hesiod
Hetaira
Hetaireia
Hipponax
Hoplite
Household
Hubris
Iconography
Ideology
Imagery
Irony
Lydians
Narrative
Nomisma
Oligarchy
Parody
Peisistratos
Pierre Bourdieu
Pindar
Poetry
Prose
Prostitution
Proverb
Rhetoric
Rhodopis (hetaera)
S. (Dorst novel)
Scythians
Seven Against Thebes
Sophocles
Subjectivity
Suggestion
The Other Hand
The Persians
The Philosopher
Themistocles
Thucydides
Trickster
Tyrant
Usage
Wealth
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691007366
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 29 Aug 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
