How did ancient Greek men and women deal with the uncertainty and risk of everyday life? What did they fear most, and how did they manage their anxieties? Esther Eidinow sets side-by-side two collections of material usually studied in isolation: binding curse tablets from across the ancient world, and the collection of published private questions from the oracle at Dodona in north-west Greece. Eidinow uses these texts to explore perceptions of risk and uncertainty in ancient society, challenging previous explanations.
In these records we hear voices that are rarely, if ever, heard in...

The cultural impulse to try to anticipate the future, and make sense of apparently random events, is irrepressible. Perhaps the most famous of all sites of prediction is the Oracle of Delphi. How the world of antiquity, and particularly the ancient Greeks, tried to foretell the outcome of the present, serves as Esther Eidinow's starting-point for an appraisal of that legacy of forecasting in our own era. Delphi is still invoked when business people discuss future strategy and risk; these is even a strategic planning technique called the "Delphi Method." But the Delphic Oracle is only the best...

Contributions in this volume demonstrate how, across the ancient Mediterranean and over hundreds of years, women s rituals intersected with the political, economic, cultural, or religious spheres of their communities in a way that has only recently started to gain sustained academic attention. The volume aims to tease out a number of different approaches and contexts, and to expand existing studies of women in the ancient world as well as scholarship on religious and social history.

The contributors face a famously difficult task: ancient authors rarely recorded aspects of women s...

This handbook offers both students and teachers of ancient Greek religion a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship in the subject, from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods. It not only presents key information, but also explores the ways in which such information is gathered and the different approaches that have shaped the area. In doing so, the volume provides a crucial research and orientation tool for students of the ancient world, and also makes a vital contribution to the key debates surrounding the conceptualization of ancient Greek religion.
The handbook's...

At the heart of this volume are three trials held in Athens in the fourth century BCE. The defendants were all women and in each case the charges involved a combination of ritual activities. Two were condemned to death. Because of the brevity of the ancient sources, and their lack of agreement, the precise charges are unclear, and the reasons for these women's trials remain mysterious.

Envy, Poison, and Death takes the complexity and confusion of the evidence not as a riddle to be solved, but as a revelation of social dynamics. It explores the changing factors--material,...

This book does away once and for all with the assumption that only religions of the book think systematically about god(s).