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Zusatztext `[Parker's] substantial and important book has set new standards of perceptiveness and subtlety! quite apart from its sheer learning! in this difficult but rich and revealing field of study.'Times Literary Supplement Informationen zum Autor Robert Parker, a Bronx native, witnessed the city's upheaval during his formative years. After serving in the USAF, he pursued Aerospace Engineering at Fullerton College, contributing to the NASA Space Shuttle program for three decades. His debut novel, Blood Oaths: Sumus Quasi Mortui (We Are As Dead Men), merges his diverse experiences into a captivating tale. Blending history, action, and a Christian worldview, Parker offers readers a visceral journey through time and legacy. Klappentext This was the first work in English to treat the themes of pollution and purification in depth and has become a classic. It brings together the different categories of evidence while doing justice to the diversity and complexity of the phenomenon. Zusammenfassung Anyone who has sampled even a few of the most commonly read Greek texts will have encountered pollution. The pollution of bloodshed is a frequent theme of tragedy: Orestes is driven mad; Oedipus brings plague upon all Thebes. In historical texts we find cities intervening in the internal affairs of others to `drive out the pollution', or making war on account of it. Political orators represent their opponents as polluting demons. Purity is a constant concern in ritual texts, and any Greek underwent many small purifications in his everyday life. Certain abnormal religious movements of the archaic age made `purification' the path to felicity in the afterlife. First published in hardback in 1983, Miasma is the first work in English to treat this theme in detail.
