Greek knowledge of and interest in foreign peoples is commonly believed to have developed in conjunction with a wider sense of "Greekness" that emerged during the Hellenic encounter with Achaemenid Persia during the late sixth to early fifth centuries BC. The dramatic nature of this "clash of cultures" is widely thought to have laid the foundations for prose descriptions of foreign lands and peoples by causing previously vague imaginings to crystallize into a diametric opposition between "Hellene" and "barbarian."

The Invention of Greek Ethnography challenges the legitimacy of...

Greek knowledge of and interest in foreign peoples is commonly believed to have developed in conjunction with a wider sense of "Greekness" that emerged during the Hellenic encounter with Achaemenid Persia during the late sixth to early fifth centuries BC. The dramatic nature of this "clash of cultures" is widely thought to have laid the foundations for prose descriptions of foreign lands and peoples by causing previously vague imaginings to crystallize into a diametric opposition between "Hellene" and "barbarian."

The Invention of Greek Ethnography challenges the legitimacy of...

This groundbreaking book attempts a fully contextualized reading of the poetry written by Pindar for Hieron of Syracuse in the 470s BC. It argues that the victory odes and other occasional songs composed by Pindar for the Sicilian tyrant were part of an extensive cultural program that included athletic competition, coinage, architecture, sanctuary dedication, city foundation, and much more. In the tumultuous years following the Persian invasion of Greece in 480, elite Greek leaders and their cities struggled to capitalize on the Greek victory and to define themselves as free peoples who...

The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West examines the relationship between epinician and the heroizing narratives about athletes, or "hero-athlete narratives," that circulated orally in Sicily and Italy in the late archaic and early classical period. Drawing on the colorful stories told about athletes in later sources, the fragments of Simonides, and the surviving odes of Pindar and Bacchylides, it argues that epinician was formed in opposition to orally transmitted narratives and that these two forms-epinician and the hero-athlete narrative-promoted opposed political visions, with...

Ancient Greek migrants in Sicily produced societies and economies that both paralleled and differed from their homeland. Explanations for these similarities and differences have been hotly debated. On the one hand, some scholars have viewed the ancient Greeks as one in a long line of migrants who were shaped by Sicily and its inhabitants. On the other hand, other scholars have argued that the Greeks acted as the main source of innovation and achievement in the culture of ancient Sicily, a culture that was still removed from that of mainland Greece. Neither of these positions is completely...

Ancient Greek migrants in Sicily produced societies and economies that paralleled and differed from their homeland. Since the nineteenth century explanations for this have been heavily debated. This book is the first to gather the historical and archaeological evidence and to deploy it to test the various historical models proposed.