The Poetics of Eros in Ancient GreeceThe Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece offers the first comprehensive inquiry into the deity of sexual love, a power that permeated daily Greek life. Avoiding Foucault's philosophical paradigm of dominance/submission, Claude Calame uses an anthropological and linguistic approach to re-create indigenous categories of erotic love. He maintains that Eros, the joyful companion of Aphrodite, was a divine figure around which poets constructed a physiology of desire that functioned in specific ways within a network of social relations. Calame begins by showing how poetry and iconography gave a rich variety of expression to the concept of Eros, then delivers a history of the deity's roles within social and political institutions, and concludes with a discussion of an Eros-centered metaphysics. |
Contents
The Yoke of Eros | 3 |
THE TOPICS OF EROS | 11 |
THE SYMBOLIC PRACTICES OF EROS | 49 |
EROS IN SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS | 89 |
THE SPACES OF EROS | 151 |
THE METAPHYSICS OF EROS | 175 |
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