Figuring Death in Classical Athens - Visual and Literary Explorations

Figuring Death in Classical Athens puts art and literature in conversation to explore how ancient Athenians grappled with the uncertainties of death. How did objects and texts generate thinking about what death is and might be like?

List of contents

• Conversation 1: Figuring Death in Classical Athens: Visual and Literary Explorations


• 1: Death Comes as the End: Encountering Death in Plato's Phaedo


• 2: They Do It with Mirrors?: Imagining Death with Painted Pots


• Conversation 2: Deaths Old and New


• 3: The Extraordinary Death of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus


• Conversation 3: Niobes


• 4: Victory, Victory, Victory?: Encountering Death in the West Frieze of the Temple of Athena Nike


• 5: Death and the Plague in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War


• Conversation 4: Figuring (Out) Death

About the author

Emily Clifford is Assistant Professor in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Warwick. From 2020 to 2024 she was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. She works on art and literature from the Graeco-Roman world with interest in the generative role played by cultural artefacts in processes of thought and imagination. Her publications in The Journal of Roman Studies (2023) and with Routledge, The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens (2024, as co-editor), focus respectively on imperial Rome and Classical Athens.

Summary

Figuring Death in Classical Athens puts art and literature in conversation to explore how ancient Athenians grappled with the uncertainties of death. How did objects and texts generate thinking about what death is and might be like?

Product details

• Authors: Emily Clifford, Emily (Assistant Professor in Classical Clifford
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 06.03.2025, delayed
• EAN: 9780198947905
• ISBN: 978-0-19-894790-5
• No. of pages: 320
• Series: Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology Series
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: general, reference works; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Death & Dying, PHILOSOPHY / Epistemology, Ancient Greece, HISTORY / Ancient / Greece, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Material Culture, Ancient History, Ancient history: to c 500 CE, Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge, Sociology: death and dying, Sociology: Death & Dying, Philosophy: epistemology and theory of knowledge