Cults and Rites in Ancient Greece: Essays on Religion and Society

Description

This volume assembles fourteen highly influential articles written by Michael H. Jameson over a period of nearly fifty years, edited and updated by the author himself. They represent both the scope and the signature style of Jameson's engagement with the subject of ancient Greek religion. The collection complements the original publications in two ways: firstly, it makes the articles more accessible; and secondly, the volume offers readers a unique opportunity to observe that over almost five decades of scholarship Jameson developed a distinctive method, a signature style, a particular perspective, a way of looking that could perhaps be fittingly called a 'Jamesonian approach' to the study of Greek religion. This approach, recognizable in each article individually, becomes unmistakable through the concentration of papers collected here. The particulars of the Jamesonian approach are insightfully discussed in the five introductory essays written for this volume by leading world authorities on polis religion.

Michael H. Jameson received his BA in Greek from the University of Chicago at the age of seventeen. After serving in the US Navy, he returned to the University of Chicago where he earned his PhD in 1949, with a dissertation on 'The Offering at Meals: Its Place in Greek Sacrifice'. He spent 1949-50 at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens with a Fulbright Fellowship. After three years at the University of Minnesota, he accepted a Ford Fellowship at the Institute for Social Anthropology at Oxford University in 1953-4. In 1954 he became Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania, and later director of the Graduate Group in Ancient History until 1976. In that year he was appointed Professor of Classics at Stanford University; in 1977 he became Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, a position he held until his death in August 2004. Throughout his long career he received numerous awards and visiting fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1966-7). He wrote over sixty articles on the political, ecological and social aspects of the practice of religion in the ancient Greek polis. As an epigrapher he published many inscriptions in Inscriptiones Graecae. As an archaeologist he began the excavation of Halieis in 1962, and was a director and organizer of the Argolid Exploration Project, an archaeological, ecological and ethnographic survey during the period 1979-83, which resulted in numerous publications, especially A Greek Countryside: The Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day (1994), co-authored with Tjeerd Van Andel and C. N. Runnels. His teaching and example inspired a generation of scholars. Allaire B. Stallsmith, now Associate Professor of History at Towson University in Towson, MD, wrote her PhD dissertation under the direction of Michael H. Jameson. Her research interests include ancient Greek religion, especially the cult of Demeter, as well as the ethnoarchaeology of the Greek countryside. Her publications include 'One Colony, Two Mother Cities: Cretan Agriculture under Venetian and Ottoman Rule', in J. Davis and S. Davies (eds.) Between Venice and Istanbul: Colonial Landscapes in Early Modern Greece, Hesperia Supplement 40, 2007, and (as Allaire Brumfield) The Attic Festivals of Demeter and their Relation to the Agricultural Year, New York (Arno Press 1981). She is currently writing a longer study of Demeter Thesmophoros and the Thesmophoria.