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“... by two of the most distinguished scholars now active in the field of Greek mythology and religion. Jean-Pierre Vernant is a Professor in the Collège de France; his book is a collection of essays published over a long period. Walter Burkert is a Professor at Zurich, and the author of a remarkable history of Greek religion in the Archaic and Classical ...”

“... The dominant explanations in the 20th century were those of Walter Burkert, on the one hand, and Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, on the other. Burkert explained sacrifice in terms of collective psychology and human evolution, seeing the ritual as a relic of guilt at the killing of other beings and a technique for managing aggression. ...”

“... held to be crucial by a particular society. The body ‘represents’ these classifications. Thus Jean-Pierre Vernant argues that in the Western tradition the constitution of the ‘body’ as an entity or object of thought is a historically specific process: that the ‘objectification’ of the body was in significant ways accomplished in later Greek ...”

“... issue into one that is unambiguously straightforward. No less a historian of ancient culture than Jean-Pierre Vernant has written that ‘there is no myth of Oedipus in Greek tragedy. The Oedipus in the tragedy may have complexes, but he doesn’t have an Oedipus complex – that is obvious.’ Vernant’s essay ...”

“... ugly man of adultery was like charging an invalid with assault. All this led the French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant to conclude that the Greek body was best seen, not as a lump of meat, temporarily animated by the soul, but as a source of energy and light, a corps éclatant. When the body was at its best, powerful attributes played over its surface ...”

“... Some time ago the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant reminded us that Greek gods are not persons but forces; and in Anne Carson’s Oresteia, her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three plays about the legacy of Atreus, one each by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as in her translations of four other plays by Euripides,* I kept hearing an invitation to extend and refine the thought ...”

“... like this one, which pays out the multiple strands in the myth of Helen of Troy. Greek tragedy, Jean-Pierre Vernant wrote, presents its protagonists as objects of debate, not examples of good conduct or even heroes deserving of sympathy; the same can be said of characters in epic, like Helen. Laurie Maguire’s literary biography of Helen of Troy makes ...”

“... Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach at Cambridge. He acquired the idea of a historical anthropology from Jean-Pierre Vernant in Paris. Twenty years ago he took up ancient Chinese science. He has since become the world’s foremost contributor to studies comparing aspects of ancient Greek and Chinese civilisations. In a series of half a dozen books he has ...”

“... of exchange or at the very least the presence of war at the heart of childbirth.’2 Could it be, Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests to Loraux in conversation, that ‘giving birth is the most accomplished test of a woman’s virility?’ In which case, the act that is seen as supremely defining of a woman, as the acme of femininity, is also the moment when ...”

“... the sail disappear, like Dido. In an essay on Greek perception of space, the French scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests that Western culture has always divided space by gender, so that inferiority, inner fixedness, is female: it is summed up by Hestia, goddess of the hearth. Mobility is male, incarnated by Hermes, the lord of messages and ...”