This paper discusses the theme of casting 'unchaste' women into the sea as a punishment in Greek myth and literature. Particular focus will be given to the stories of Danae, Auge, Aerope and Phronime, who are all depicted suffering this punishment at the hands of their fathers. While Seaford (1990) has emphasized the theme of imprisonment which occurs in some of the stories involving the 'floating chest', I turn my attention instead to the theme of the sea. The coincidence in these stories of the threat of drowning for apparent promiscuity or sexual impurity with the escape of those girls who are innocent can be explained by the phenomenon of the 'trial by water' as evidenced in Babylonian and other early law codes (cf. Glotz 1904). Further evidence for this theory can be found in ancient novels where the trial of the heroine for sexual purity is often a key theme. The significance of chastity in the myths and in Athenian society is central to understanding the story patterns. The interrelationship of mythic and social ideals is drawn out in the paper. This paper examines the punishment of 'unchaste' women in Greek myth and literature, in particular their representation in Euripides' fragmentary Auge, Cretan Women and Danae. My focus is on punishments involving the sea, where it is possible to discern two interrelated strands in the tales. 1 The first strand involves an angry parent condemning an errant daughter to be cast into the sea with the intention of drowning her. The so-called 'floating chest', a box in which a mother and illegitimate child are enclosed before being cast into the sea, is a prominent theme in this strand. The second strand involves an unchaste girl being given to a merchant to sell overseas. Occasionally the first strand overlaps with the second, when the merchant is asked to drown a girl but elects instead to give her in marriage overseas. Before turning to an examination of the two different strands outlined here in myth and fragmentary tragedy, I will consider the significance of chastity in Athenian society and its connection with the sea theme. 1. Chastity and the sea In this paper two different groups of women come under consideration. The first group comprises girls who lose their virginity before marriage, while the second is made up of wives who are unfaithful to their husbands. Both sets of women are criticised for their lack of obedience to their male relatives. The unmarried girls are considered disobedient and disloyal to their fathers, while married women are often felt to have displeased both their husbands and their

The 'trial by water' in Greek myth and literature

Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on His Letters

...................................................................................... 3 Introduction ................................................................................... 4 1. Kazantzakis as a reader of Modern Greek literature ................................. 29 2. The integration of the folk and literary tradition in The Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas .............................................................................. 77 3. Intertextuality as recurrence: Christ Recrucified .................................... 115 4. Quotations and narrative allusions in O Kapetan Michalis ......................... 137 5. Tradition and innovation: The Last Temptation ....................................... 181 Conclusions .................................................................................. 225 Bibliography ................................................................................. 234

The Modern Greek literary tradition in the major novels of Nikos Kazantzakis

This paper examines Morgan’s theorization of images of organizations from a phenomenological perspective using the works of Nikos Kazantzakis. The paper argues that Morgan’s representation ...

/pdf/nikos-kazantzakis-s-phenomenology-and-its-relevance-to-the-15j346g52x.pdf

Nikos Kazantzakis’s phenomenology and its relevance to the study of organizations

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The Stylistic Identity of the Metapoet: A corpus-based comparative analysis using translations of modern Greek poetry

Once seen as a patriotic evocation of the Greek nationalist struggle
 of the nineteenth century, Freedom and Death can now be seen to
 revolve around a number of interrelated conflicts: sexual (in the
 overlapping, triangular relationships of Mihalis-Nuri-Emine and of
 Michalis-Polyxingis-Emine); internal (Mihalis's struggles with his
 "demons"); and ideological/psychological (the "gravitational" pull of
 Crete and the ancestors versus the centrifugal, enlightening
 trajectory of Kosmas). Kazantzakis revisits and implicitly criticizes
 earlier intellectual positions of his own (aestheticism, nationalism).
 At the same time, the novel pursues a parallel quest (unresolved) to
 that articulated in the two novels on the Christ story (conflict/union
 with the divine). But since Freedom and Death is a work of fiction,
 not of philosophy, it deserves to be read for the play of nonhuman
 forces acted out by its human protagonists, and hence may be
 compared with later South American fiction, especially that of
 Marquez.

Of Crete and Other Demons: A Reading of Kazantzakis's Freedom and Death

\"It was its two component parts that made me choose the title of this piece of work; MYTHOS1 (myth), because I have used quite plainly a certain mythology; ISTORIA (history/story), because I have tried to express, with some coherence, a situation as independent of myself as the characters in a novel\" (Seferis 1972: 314). With this note to the sequence of 24 poems published in 1935 under the title MithistÃ3rima or Novel, Seferis drew attention to the references to ancient Greek mythology which abound in the poems and also to the strategy which some of the texts, at least, pursue of juxtaposing this mythology with the world of real experience (history or story). This strategy owes an acknowledged debt to that of T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, but rather more to Eliot's now famous review of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, which had been published in the same year (1922). There Eliot credits Joyce with the achievement of a new \"method,\" which he contrasts with the \"narrative method\" of the obsolescent genre of the novel. This method uses a myth (here the paradigmatic story of the Odyssey) as \"a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history\" (Eliot 1970: 270). The relevance of Eliot's conception of myth, distilled from Joyce's novel, to a reading of Seferis' sequence of poems goes beyond the disputed question of how far this \"mythical method\" is actually used in individual sections of MithistÃ3rima.2 The link between the

From Mythos to Logos: The Poetics of George Seferis

http://muse.jhu.edu/content/crossref/journals/journal_of_modern_greek_studies/v016/16.1beaton.pdf

W(h)ither the Neohellenic

Greeks, despite the physical proximity of so many of them to the sea and their economic dependence on it, have surprisingly little to say about the sea in their literature. There are of course significant exceptions to this, as was ably demonstrated by many contributors to the literature panels at the 1987 Modern Greek Studies Association symposium on \"Greece, Greeks and the Sea\" (MGSA 1987). If one is prepared to go back far enough in time there is always the Odyssey, which among other things is the world's first sea story. But if one considers Greek literature since the 12th century as a whole, the most interesting discovery is not that KarkavÃ-tsas, VlÃ¡mi, KÃ3ndoglu, KavvadÃ-as and a handful of others have written stories and poems about the sea, or that many more writers, such as HortÃ¡tsis, KornÃ¡ros, PapadiamÃ¡ndis, Seferis and Elytis, have made more or less interesting references to the subject; but rather that these are the exceptions which prove the rule: there is no established tradition of writing about the sea in Greek. There is no Greek Defoe (despite the aspirations of KÃ3ndoglu), no Greek Melville, no Greek Treasure Isfond, no Greek Conrad; not even a Greek Masefield. If we include oral folk poetry and tales within the scope of literature, as I believe in principle we must, there are in Greek no sea shanties, no tales of Sindbad the sailor, or so few that again it is their rarity that attracts our attention. This very general observation serves as a reminder that one cannot with impunity account for literary phenomena by recourse to a mechanical model of environmental determinism. The forms taken

The Sea as Metaphorical Space in Modern Greek Literature

The future for Modern Greek Studies, with particular reference to the UK, lies in the potential for Neohellenists to position themselves and their subject in relation to the wider intellectual context, both inside and outside the "acad- emy." In this, their US-based colleagues have often proved more adaptable, while usually lacking, on the other hand, the departmental base and developed graduate programs that are the norm in the UK. Contemporary fields of enquiry to which the specialist knowledge and skills of the Neohellenist ought to make a significant contribution include: classical tradition; study of nations and nationalism; modern Balkan history; comparative/world literature; translation studies; historical linguistics and socio-linguistics; film and gender studies. In contexts such as these, Modern Greek Studies can expect to come out of the "ghetto" and achieve both visibility and academic integration, without diluting the discipline-based rigor that has a long tradition in British universities.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_modern_greek_studies/v024/24.2beaton.pdf

Modern Greek Studies in the United Kingdom: Suggestions for the Future

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