Within twenty years of Alexander's death his empire had split into separate states, whose rulers had taken the title of king. The new kings were forceful and ambitious men who relied on their armies and mostly ruled in lands where monarchy was traditional. The new monarchies presented Greeks with ideological problems. Wherever they lived, they had to adjust to a dominant royal power and to find an acceptable place for monarchy within their political philosophy. It has been widely argued that the Antigonid monarchy in Macedonia differed in important respects from monarchy in the other kingdoms. Hellenistic monarchy was closely associated with religion and the gods. More varied in both its form and its implications is the religious practice commonly known as ruler-cult. The legacy of Hellenistic kingship lived on in the Roman Empire, its ideology and its institutions, secular and religious alike, now adapted to the requirements of a universal monarchy.

Monarchies and monarchic Ideas

Preface Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Greek Sorcerers 3. Alien Sorcerers 4. The Rivals of Jesus 5. Medea and Circe 6. Witches in Greek Literature 7. Witches in Latin Literature 8. Ghosts 9. Necromancy 10. Curses 11. Erotic Magic 12. Voodoo Dolls and Magical Images 13. Amulets 14. Magic and the Law 15. Supplementary Texts Bibliographies Indices

Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook

Introduction Hellenistic political philosophy has had a bad press. In lectures published in 1983 the distinguished and influential ancient historian Moses Finley gave it as his view that Plato and Aristotle ‘were the first genuine political theorists of antiquity, and the last’. For only they attempted ‘a complete and coherent account’ of the ideal society ‘grounded in systematic metaphysics, epistemology, psychology and ethics’. Some thirty years earlier, in what remains an eminently serviceable general account of Greek political thought, T. A. Sinclair wrote as follows: Looking back over the political thought of the third century BC one cannot help being struck with its barrenness. This is of course due in part to the decline in the polis and in part to the loss of contemporary writings on the subject. But it is also due to the refusal or inability to relate political thinking to the material conditions in which men lived. Epicurus and Chrysippus did their best to help men to face life cheerfully, but the men whom they helped were the few, who had sufficient education to understand their message and sufficient leisure for lessons in philosophy. Finley and Sinclair are only echoing a long entrenched judgement which finds a classic formulation in the third volume of Zeller's great history of Greek philosophy, first published in 1852. For Zeller the Hellenistic period found the Greeks coping with a deterioration in their external circumstances, and particularly with loss of political self-determination as the monarchies of Alexander's successors eclipsed the city-state, by withdrawing into the inner world of self-consciousness.

Social and political thought

This book offers a resolution of the paradox posed by the pleasure of tragedy by returning to its earliest articulations in archaic Greek poetry and its subsequent emergence as a philosophical problem in Plato's Republic. Socrates' claim that tragic poetry satisfies our 'hunger for tears' hearkens back to archaic conceptions of both poetry and mourning that suggest a common source of pleasure in the human appetite for heightened forms of emotional distress. By unearthing a psychosomatic model of aesthetic engagement implicit in archaic poetry and philosophically elaborated by Plato, this volume not only sheds new light on the Republic's notorious indictment of poetry, but also identifies rationally and ethically disinterested sources of value in our pursuit of aesthetic states. In doing so the book resolves an intractable paradox in aesthetic theory and human psychology: the appeal of painful emotions.

Tragic Pleasure from Homer to Plato

Appendices: The rise of the philosophical textbook

The Hippocratic Tradition

Galen on Coans versus Cnidians.

In 1909 Julius Tambornino published what has remained the standard collection of material relevant to the belief in demonic possession in pagan and Christian antiquity.1 The views advanced by Tambornino have been generally accepted. As H. J. Rose puts it: " That a human being might become possessed by a supernatural power was a fairly common ancient belief. The effect might be a prophetic frenzy, as in the case of the Pythia; such a person was EV0EoE. It might also be some terrifying disease, as epilepsy.... Later, under Oriental influence (cf., e.g., the numerous references to demoniacs in the New Testament), the belief grew stronger and commoner, and mentions of magical cures and the activity of exorcists, pagan and Christian, are extremely frequent." 2 " Possessed" (like besessen, possede) is used by extension to describe one who is mad, or even under unusual compulsion from an idea or passion, but in the strict sense it refers to a person who has been entered by an alien being who assumes control of him, as we know the phenomenon from late antiquity and the Middle Ages.3 It has been generally agreed that, although a belief in possession in the strict sense was not common among the enlightened in Greek antiquity, the belief itself was ancient, and persisted as a folk belief either from pre-Greek times or from its introduction in the seventh century B.C. or thereabouts.4

So-called possession in pre-Christian Greece.

Physiology in the Homeric poems.

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The Hippocratic Tradition

The Hippocratic Tradition

Galen on Coans versus Cnidians.

So-called possession in pre-Christian Greece.

Physiology in the Homeric poems.