Myth and Society in Ancient Greece

About this book

In this groundbreaking study Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece takes us far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon to reveal a fundamentally other culture one of slavery of masks and death of scapegoats of ritual hunting and of ecstasies. Vernants provocative discussions of various institutions and practices (including war marriage and sacrifice) detail the complex intersection of the religious social and political structures of ancient Greece. The book concludes with Vernants authoritative genealogy of the study of myth from Antiquity to structuralism and beyond. Myth he writes brings into operation a form of logic which we may describe unlike the logic of noncontradiction of the philosophers as a logic of the ambiguous and the equivocal.