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University of California Press

The Seer and the City

Religion, Politics, and Colonial Ideology in Ancient Greece
by Margaret Foster (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $95.00 / £80.00
Publication Date: Jan 2018
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780520295001
Trim Size: 6 x 9
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About the Book

Seers featured prominently in ancient Greek culture, but they rarely appear in archaic and classical colonial discourse. Margaret Foster exposes the ideological motivations behind this discrepancy and reveals how colonial discourse privileged the city’s founder and his dependence on Delphi, the colonial oracle par excellence, at the expense of the independent seer. Investigating a  sequence of literary texts, Foster explores the tactics the Greeks devised both to leverage and suppress the extraordinary cultural capital of seers. The first cultural history of the seer, The Seer and the City illuminates the contests between religious and political powers in archaic and classical Greece.

About the Author

Margaret Foster is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Conventions and Abbreviations

Introduction
1. Beyond Entrails and Omens: Herodotus’s Teisamenos and the Talismanic Seer at War
2. Sailing to Sicily: Theoklymenos and Odysseus in the Odyssey
3. Suppressing the Seer in Colonial Discourse: Delphic Consultations and the Seer in the City
4. Th e Disappearance of Melampous in Bacchylides’ Ode 11
5. Hagesias as Sunoikister: Mantic Authority and Colonial Ideology in Pindar’s Olympian 6
6. Amphiaraos, Alkmaion, and Delphi’s Oracular Monopoly
Conclusion

Bibliography
Index
Index Locorum

Reviews

"Foster’s central observation about the striking absence of a certain style of religious expert where we might well expect them is new and important for historians of ancient religion and colonialism alike. So too, her writing is clear and the overall argument is well-constructed."
— Reading Religion
"Foster systematically and clearly identifies and explains a significant anomaly in the Archaic and Classical Greek location of authority among the competing media of divine communication. . . . She has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of power, the push and push-back, between dominant and non-dominant cultic programs in ancient Greece—a description that resonates with ongoing discourse in postcolonial studies."
— Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"It is not easy to write successful ‘cultural poetics’ work because one is bound to enter a variety of different fields, but this is done deftly here. The results are excellent and raise important questions for many different areas of scholarship."—Nigel Nicholson, Walter Mintz Professor of Classics, Reed College

"This book makes an important intervention into our understanding of the incredibly rich and relatively untapped collection of material that can be called the discourse of the seer by focusing on and elaborating the ways that the Greeks imagined the seer rather than on the instrumental and functional details of how prophecy worked in archaic and classical Greece."—Carol Dougherty, Professor of Classical Studies, Wellesley College