8th century
A01=David W. Tandy
aegean
ancient greece
ancient history
ascra
Author_David W. Tandy
boeotia
Category=JHM
Category=KCZ
Category=NHC
Category=NHD
chiefdoms
class
classical history
classicism
community
epic poetry
epic tradition
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
greek communities
greek experience
greek poetry
greek world
hesiod
literary criticism
mediterranean
nonfiction
poetry
polis
social change
wealth
works and days
Product details
- ISBN 9780520226913
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 27 Nov 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The eighth century dawned on a Greek world that had remained substantially unchanged during the centuries of stagnation known as the Dark Age. This book is a study of the economic and cultural upheaval that shook mainland Greece and the Aegean area in the eighth century, and the role that poetry played in this upheaval. Using tools from political and economic anthropology, David Tandy argues that between about 800 and 700 B.C., a great transformation of dominant economic institutions took place involving wrenching adjustments in the way status and wealth were distributed within the Greek communities. Tandy explores the economic organization of preindustrial societies, both ancient and contemporary, to shed light on the Greek experience. He argues that the sudden shift in Greek economic formations led to new social behaviors and to new social structures such as the polis, itself a by-product of economic change. Unraveling the dialectic between the material record and epic poetry, Tandy shows that the epic tradition mirrored these new social behaviors and that it portrayed the stresses that economic change brought to the ancient Aegean world.
Tandy brings in comparative evidence from other small-scale communities beset by changes, spotlighting the specific plight of one community, Ascra in Boeotia, on whose behalf Hesiod sang his Works and Days. The result is a lively, moving account of a human dilemma that, many centuries later, is all too familiar.
David W. Tandy is Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Departments of Classics and Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. He has translated, with Walter C. Neale, Hesiod's Works and Days (California, 1996).
