To know all we know about Sappho is to know little. Her poetry, dating from the seventh century B.C.E., comes to us in fragments, her biography as speculation. How is it then, Page duBois asks, that this poet has come to signify so much? "Sappho Is Burning" offers a new reading of this archaic lesbian poet that acknowledges the poet's distance and difference from us and stresses Sappho's inassimilability into our narratives about the Greeks, literary history, philosophy, the history of sexuality, the psychoanalytic subject. In "Sappho is Burning, " duBois reads Sappho as a disruptive...
To know all we know about Sappho is to know little. Her poetry, dating from the seventh century B.C.E., comes to us in fragments, her biography as spe...
Page duBois, a classicist known for her daring and originality, turns in this new book to one of the most troubling subjects in the study of antiquity: the indispensability of slaves in ancient Greece. DuBois argues that every object and text in the world of ancient Greece bears the marks of slavery and the need to reiterate the distinction between slave and free. And yet the ubiquity of slaves in ancient societies has been overlooked by scholars who idealize antiquity, misconstrued by those who view slavery through the lens of race, and obscured by the split between historical and...
Page duBois, a classicist known for her daring and originality, turns in this new book to one of the most troubling subjects in the study of antiquity...
We've become accustomed to the wisdom of the ancient Greeks being trotted out by conservatives in the name of timeless virtues. At the same time, critics have charged that multiculturalists and their ilk have hopelessly corrupted the study of antiquity itself, and that the teaching of Classics is dead.
Trojan Horses is Page duBois's answer to those who have appropriated material from antiquity in the service of a conservative political agendaamong them, Camille Paglia, Allan Bloom, and William Bennett. She challenges cultural conservatives' appeal to the authority of the classics by...
We've become accustomed to the wisdom of the ancient Greeks being trotted out by conservatives in the name of timeless virtues. At the same time, c...
Page duBois, a classicist known for her daring and originality, turns in this book to one of the most troubling subjects in the study of antiquity: the indispensability of slaves in ancient Greece. DuBois here explores both the material culture of slavery as well as its representation in literature. Specifically, she considers the place of slaves in Plato's "Meno", Aristotle's "Politics", Aesop's "Fables", Aristophanes' "Wasps", and Euripides' "Orestes". She contends throughout that portraying the difference between slave and free as natural was pivotal to Greek concepts of selfhood and...
Page duBois, a classicist known for her daring and originality, turns in this book to one of the most troubling subjects in the study of antiquity: th...
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is perhaps the most famous phrase of all in the American Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson's momentous words are closely related to the French concept of "liberte, egalite, fraternitye"; and both ideas incarnate a notion of freedom as inalienable human right that in the modern world we expect to take for granted. In the ancient world, by contrast, the concepts of freedom and equality had little purchase. Athenians, Spartans and Romans all possessed slaves or helots (unfree bondsmen), and society was unequal at every stratum. Why, then,...
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is perhaps the most famous phrase of all in the American Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson's ...
Applying modern experiences of bondage to slavery in antiquity, this book explores the writings on the subject of Aristotle, Plautus, Terence and Aristophanes. It relates ancient notions of liberation to the all-too-common immigrant experience of enslaveme
Applying modern experiences of bondage to slavery in antiquity, this book explores the writings on the subject of Aristotle, Plautus, Terence and Aris...
The iconoclast of Classics, Page duBois refuses to act as border patrol for a sometimes fiercely protected traditional discipline. Instead, she incorporates insights from postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and postmodern theories into her nuanced close readings of ancient Greek texts. Contemporary theory and ancient texts are mutually transformed in the process. Out of Athens sets ancient Greek culture next to the global ancient world of Vedic India, the Han dynasty in China, and the empires that survived Alexander the Great. DuBois also extends the range of classical studies through...
The iconoclast of Classics, Page duBois refuses to act as border patrol for a sometimes fiercely protected traditional discipline. Instead, she incorp...
Many people worship not just one but many gods. Yet a relentless prejudice against polytheism denies legitimacy to some of the world's oldest and richest religious traditions. In her examination of polytheistic cultures both ancient and contemporary--those of Greece and Rome, the Bible and the Quran, as well as modern India--Page duBois refutes the idea that the worship of multiple gods naturally evolves over time into the "higher" belief in a single deity. In A Million and One Gods, she shows that polytheism has endured intact for millennia even in the West, despite the many hidden...
Many people worship not just one but many gods. Yet a relentless prejudice against polytheism denies legitimacy to some of the world's oldest and r...
Offering nuanced readings of Sappho s poems, written in an archaic Aeolic dialect, DuBois skillfully draws out their sharp images and rhythmic melody. She further discusses the exciting discovery of a new verse fragment in 2004, and the ways in which Sappho influenced Catullus, Horace and Ovid, as well as later writers and painters."
Offering nuanced readings of Sappho s poems, written in an archaic Aeolic dialect, DuBois skillfully draws out their sharp images and rhythmic melody....
