Claude Calame

The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece offers the first comprehensive inquiry into the deity of sexual love, a power that permeated daily Greek life. Avoiding Foucault's philosophical paradigm of dominance/submission, Claude Calame uses an anthropological and linguistic approach to re-create indigenous categories of erotic love. He maintains that Eros, the joyful companion of Aphrodite, was a divine figure around which poets constructed a physiology of desire that functioned in specific ways within a network of social relations. Calame begins by showing how poetry and iconography gave a rich variety of expression to the concept of Eros, then delivers a history of the deity's roles within social and political institutions, and concludes with a discussion of an Eros-centered metaphysics. Calame's treatment of archaic and classical Greek institutions reveals Eros at work in initiation rites and celebrations, educational practices, the Dionysiac theater of tragedy and comedy, and in real and imagined spatial settings. For men, Eros functioned particularly in the symposium and the gymnasium, places where men and boys interacted and where future citizens were educated. The household was the setting where girls, brides, and adult wives learned their erotic roles--as such it provides the context for understanding female rites of passage and the problematics of sexuality in conjugal relations. Through analyses of both Greek language and practices, Calame offers a fresh, subtle reading of relations between individuals as well as a quick-paced and fascinating overview of Eros in Greek society at large.

The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece

The modern concept of “nature” appeared during the 17th Century: nature as a mechanical object to be submitted to reason man. A long tradition refers to the concept of nature in the Greek phusis. It is referring to a dynamic process that engages in criticizing the modern paradigm of nature as opposed to culture. As it is, the principle of the domination and exploitation by humans of what we consider as nature is at the heart of the ideological, economic and financial models imposed by neoliberal capitalism. Based on the objective of growth, this model shapes and destroys human communities as well as the environment on which they rely and sustain. The climatic urgency as well as the limited capacity of the resources of the earth, require a transition towards an ecosocialism for another world. The anthropological confrontation with the Greek phusis invites to a break with capitalism based on a large scale and speedy use of technologies and with the only objective of financial gain. The result has been destructive productivism. Instead, we have to take into account the complexity of and interactions between human societies and their technical practices in their environment. The survival of one or the other is at stake. In sum, nature is culture. Contents ​​​​​​​Preface to the English Edition. 3 Introduction. 9 Between Nature and Culture. 15 I. Humans and Their Milieu in Ancient Greece. 19 II. From the Enlightenment Philosophers to Modern Anthropologists 37 III. Beyond Anthropological Determinisms: Permeabilities 47 IV. The Human Being and its Environment: Interactive Relationships 57 V. For an Ecosocialist Understanding of Humans and their Milieu. 65

Humans and Their Environment, Beyond the Nature/Culture Opposition

La vita sessuale e sentimentale dei greci non aveva uno svolgimento a senso unico. La considerazione di cui godeva l'istituto matrimoniale non escludeva affatto altre forme di soddisfacimento sessuale e affettivo, con una forte dimensione sociale, se non veicoli di poesia. I maggiori studiosi europei dell'età antica offrono un quadro completo, intrigante e spesso sorprendente, dei modi in cui l'esperienza amorosa era vissuta in Grecia.

L'amore in Grecia

Le mythe, le rite, constituent deux objets privilégiés de l'anthropologie culturelle et sociale, deux concepts dont l'origine est censée remonter aux Anciens. Si, de fait, il n'en est rien, en revanche les Grecs se sont montrés de véritables maîtres dans la création et la manipulation, d'une part, des récits héroïques que nous, modernes, identifions comme des mythes, d'autre part des pratiques cultuelles que nous dénommons rites. Mais, en régime polythéiste, ce qui importe ce sont les rapports pratiques entre ces productions d'un même processus symbolique ; il est animé par de grands poètes et des cités puissantes, et ses manifestations, dans leurs dimensions historique et politique, constituent un domaine d'enquête foisonnant. Dès la fin du VIe siècle avant notre ère, à l'aube de l'âge supposé être celui de la démocratie et de la raison, ne voit-on pas les Athéniens s'approprier la figure du jeune Thésée pour en faire, sous les apparences du néo-initié, le modèle du futur citoyen ? Assorti d'autres "travaux", le célèbre épisode du combat du jeune héros contre le Minotaure est dès lors recentré sur Athènes. Présentées comme des gestes premiers, civilisateurs, les actions du jeune héros permettent non seulement de reformuler le sens des rituels offerts aux divinités tutélaires de la cité, mais elles légitiment aussi une politique d'expansion économique et maritime, soutenue par un désir de domination culturelle. Se dessine ainsi un nouvel espace fait de réalité historique et façonné par l'imaginaire, marqué par des actions héroïques fondatrices et habité par des gestes rituels qui entretiennent les relations avec les dieux. A partir de textes et d'images, la saga de Thésée nous offre un terrain privilégié d'enquête à la fois sémio-narrative et anthropologique pour explorer un florissant travail de production symbolique, à visée pratique.

Légende et culte en Grèce antique

Thésée et l'imaginaire athénien

Argues that the meaning of Greek myths can only be studied according to their artistic forms of expression. Using myths such as those of Persephone, Bellerophon, Helen and Teiresias, Claude Calame surveys Greek mythology as a category inseparable from the literature in which so much of it is found.

Poetics, Pragmatics and Fiction

Greek Mythology

Exploring a variety of literary texts representing different poetic genres, Claude Calame, an internationally known classicist, draws the lineaments of a real history of the means used by ancient Greek poets to create in their works a fictional authorship. In this collection of essays, he shows that they made of their poems, through various discursive strategies, texts to be performed, with the collective, ritual, and pragmatic values implicit in the ideas of craft and performance. How is it possible to distinguish between the external context and reception of a discursive work and the elaborate poetic effects produced in the text itself by means of language? Clearly, the partly fictional figure of the author constructed by the text is not the same as the biographical author. In ancient Greece, moreover, the person of the composer of a poem was often distinct from the person of its performer.Important examples in Masks of Authority include some of the Homeric Hymns, didactic poetry by Hesiod, a bucolic poem of Theocritus, performed poetry by Sappho and mimetic poems by Callimachus, Attic tragedy and comedy in masked performances (Sophocles and Aristophanes), an iconographic inscription, an authoritative scientific discourse by Hippocrates, and an initiatory commentary to an Orphic theogony. The result is a selective history of Greek poetics from the perspective of its authorial devices and social functions, its place between oral and written traditions.

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Poetics

Masks of Authority

Surely the ancient Greeks would have been baffled to see what we consider their "mythology." Here, Claude Calame mounts a powerful critique of modern-day misconceptions on this front and the lax methodology that has allowed them to prevail. He argues that the Greeks viewed their abundance of narratives not as a single mythology but as an "archaeology." They speculated symbolically on key historical events so that a community of believing citizens could access them efficiently, through ritual means. Central to the book is Calame's rigorous and fruitful analysis of various accounts of the foundation of that most "mythical" of the Greek colonies--Cyrene, in eastern Libya. Calame opens with a magisterial historical survey demonstrating today's misapplication of the terms "myth" and "mythology." Next, he examines the Greeks' symbolic discourse to show that these modern concepts arose much later than commonly believed. Having established this interpretive framework, Calame undertakes a comparative analysis of six accounts of Cyrene's foundation: three by Pindar and one each by Herodotus (in two different versions), Callimachus, and Apollonius of Rhodes. We see how the underlying narrative was shaped in each into a poetically sophisticated, distinctive form by the respective medium, a particular poetical genre, and the specific socio-historical circumstances. Calame concludes by arguing in favor of the Greeks' symbolic approach to the past and by examining the relation of mythos to poetry and music.

The Symbolic Creation of a Colony

Myth and History in Ancient Greece

Adepte infatigable de la marche alpine, Claude Calame manifeste la même endurance et la même mobilité dans son parcours intellectuel. Escarpés et rocailleux pour certains, à flanc de coteau et verdoyants pour d'autres, lei sentiers multiples qu'il emprunte témoignent d'une pensée résolument interdisciplinaire - au carrefour de la philologie, de la sémiotique, de l'analyse du discours et de l'anthropologie culturelle -, conjuguant érudition dans l'étude du passé et engagement dans le présent, capable de passer de la Grèce antique à la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée et à Bali, avant de faire retour sur les réalités politiques de l'Helvétie contemporaine. Ce volume invite à suivre Claude Calame sur ces sentiers transversaux, à travers quinze études réunies en guise d'hommage pour celui qui fut titulaire durant près de vingt ans de la chaire de langue et littérature grecques de l'Université de Lausanne.

entre poétiques grecques et politiques contemporaines

Sentiers transversaux

In this subtle, learned, and daring book, Claude Calame subverts common assumptions about the relationships between poet and audience, challenging his readers to rethink the very principles of mythmaking in the poetry and art of the ancient Greeks.

The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece

In this groundbreaking work, Claude Calame argues that the songs sung by choruses of young girls in ancient Greek poetry are more than literary texts; rather, they functioned as initiatory rituals in Greek cult practices. Using semiotic and anthropologic theory, Calame reconstructs the religious and social institutions surrounding the songs, demonstrating their function in an aesthetic education that permitted the young girls to achieve the stature of womanhood and to be integrated into the adult civic community. This first English edition includes an updated bibliography.

Claude Calame

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