Maciej W Paprocki
I study ancient Greek literary depictions of gods and goddesses, examining how they operate within these texts: their powers, limitations, fears and motivations. My ambition is to search for common rules governing divine behaviour, a system which I like to call a 'functional theology' of the myth.
I am a gamer and an aspiring games scholar and I had an opportunity to design content for developers of games set in antiquity. From April 2013 to February 2015, I helped to design Apotheon™ (http://www.apotheongame.com/), a 2D platform action-rpg done in a stunning black-figure vase art style, based on Greek mythology. I ensured that Apotheon stayed as true to the Greek succession myth as possible, consulting twists and turns in the narrative and helping with character design.
From November 2015 to October 2018, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Distant Worlds Graduate School, at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. During my time in Munich, I examined depictions of political tensions between families of Zeus and Hyperion in the ancient Greek literature.
My doctoral project (2011-2015), conducted at the Universities of Wroclaw and Liverpool, focused on roads and travellers in the desert of Roman Egypt. My broader research examined the particulars of desert exploration of North Africa in Classical Antiquity: routes and limits of Mediterranean penetration into the Sahara. The project's result is a book, Roads in the Deserts of Roman Egypt, published in 2019 by Oxbox Books.
I hold a BA degree (2009-2012) in Classics/Mediterranean Culture and a MA degree (2009-2011) in English Studies. My work in Classics eclectically mixes post-Structuralist, neo-analyst, narratological and cognitive approaches, drawing inspiration from research by Jenny Strauss Clay, Sarah Iles Johnston and Jennifer Larson. In my search for functional theologies of the Greek epic, I particularly focus on assigning and transferring divine powers, rebellions against Zeus and the puzzling nature of divine immortality: how it functioned and how it could be obtained, passed down to offspring or lost.
My MA thesis was devoted to the body politic analogy, as seen through the lens of Cognitive Metaphor Theory and New Historicism. I have studied and continue to study how societies are creatively reimagined as human bodies and vice versa, with these perennial analogies shaping contemporary political and social discourses.
I am a gamer and an aspiring games scholar and I had an opportunity to design content for developers of games set in antiquity. From April 2013 to February 2015, I helped to design Apotheon™ (http://www.apotheongame.com/), a 2D platform action-rpg done in a stunning black-figure vase art style, based on Greek mythology. I ensured that Apotheon stayed as true to the Greek succession myth as possible, consulting twists and turns in the narrative and helping with character design.
From November 2015 to October 2018, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Distant Worlds Graduate School, at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. During my time in Munich, I examined depictions of political tensions between families of Zeus and Hyperion in the ancient Greek literature.
My doctoral project (2011-2015), conducted at the Universities of Wroclaw and Liverpool, focused on roads and travellers in the desert of Roman Egypt. My broader research examined the particulars of desert exploration of North Africa in Classical Antiquity: routes and limits of Mediterranean penetration into the Sahara. The project's result is a book, Roads in the Deserts of Roman Egypt, published in 2019 by Oxbox Books.
I hold a BA degree (2009-2012) in Classics/Mediterranean Culture and a MA degree (2009-2011) in English Studies. My work in Classics eclectically mixes post-Structuralist, neo-analyst, narratological and cognitive approaches, drawing inspiration from research by Jenny Strauss Clay, Sarah Iles Johnston and Jennifer Larson. In my search for functional theologies of the Greek epic, I particularly focus on assigning and transferring divine powers, rebellions against Zeus and the puzzling nature of divine immortality: how it functioned and how it could be obtained, passed down to offspring or lost.
My MA thesis was devoted to the body politic analogy, as seen through the lens of Cognitive Metaphor Theory and New Historicism. I have studied and continue to study how societies are creatively reimagined as human bodies and vice versa, with these perennial analogies shaping contemporary political and social discourses.
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Books by Maciej W Paprocki
In his timely monograph, Paprocki compiles and reconsiders the knowledge amassed so far on desert roads in Roman Egypt; he discusses geographical and social factors influencing the road use in the period, demonstrating that Roman overseers of these lands adapted remarkably well to local desert conditions, improving roads just as their predecessors would have done it. Transforming the Sahara—either through establishment of new, artificial activity nodes (resource exploitation, trade, military control) or through augmentation of previous subsistence nodes (water/agriculture)—resulted in marking new desert trails or reopening of the old ones, with activity nodes acting as attractant points funnelling desert traffic into discernible corridors. Not all desert areas of Egypt were equally suited for anthropogenic development, but almost all have been optimised under the Romans in one way or another, with road installations built for added comfort and safety of travellers. This study of how Romans successfully adapted to desert travel will be of interest to all those who study ancient trade networks, deserts and their ongoing expansion due to the global warming.
Papers by Maciej W Paprocki
Just like their Mediterranean neighbours, ancient Romans often used lead, which they treated as a by-product of silver-smelting cupelation process through which silver was extracted from argentiferous galena ores. However, the widespread use of lead could often be a health hazard. The article discusses sources of lead in the environment of ancient Romans (water pipes, kitchen utensils, lead artefacts on ships and foodstuffs containing lead compounds) and evaluates their potential toxicity. Particular amount of attention was devoted to must syrups (sapa / defrutum), often containing large quantities of lead (II) acetate. A part of article juxtaposes ancient knowledge about lead toxicity with modern reports about poisonings to establish how much was known about its noxious influence in the Ancient Era.
Book chapters by Maciej W Paprocki
Conference Proceedings by Maciej W Paprocki
Główna myśl artykułu podąża za ideą Archambaulta mówiącą, iż koncept ciała politycznego pozostaje motywem nieobojętnym politycznie i wskazuje na inklinacje polityczne używającego go. Autor artykułu przedstawia, w jaki sposób paradygmat ciała politycznego zmaga się w XVII i XXI wieku z doświadczeniem choroby ustroju oraz jak angloamerykański dyskurs polityczny próbował ujednolicić element społeczny utożsamiany z chorobą, tj. człowieka wyciszonego lub wykluczonego. Głównym postulatem autora jest twierdzenie, że owe dyskursy, oparte na homogenizacji społecznej, nie odpowiadają już potrzebom pluralistycznego społeczeństwa i są zastępowane przez konstrukcje bardziej akceptujące inność elementu wywrotowego.""
In my presentation, I would like to analyse a particularly pervasive subset of micrometaphors that form the body politic analogy, namely, the IMMIGRANTS ARE INVADING PATHOGENS metaphors. The pre-modern humoral paradigm accentuated INTERNAL fluid imbalances as the cause of diseases; in turn, newer theories stressed the EXTERNALITY of invading pathogens (Harris 1998:142). Medical discoveries were exploited by politicians, who equated foreigners with germs seeping into the body politic to subdue it. Frequently; “the elaboration of an external threat has been […] complicit with the erasure of domestic conflict” (Harris 1998:13): internal anxieties were transferred onto immigrants, who—marked with EXTERNALITY—could be expelled as scapegoats. I intend to demonstrate how these pernicious mappings are reinforced and questioned today, as immigrants begin to engage in chiastic metaphor reversals (Inda 2000).
Employing selected cognitive terms, this paper argues that musical pieces, as exhibiting observable formal regularities, may exemplify certain concepts. It examines how the concept of winter has been rendered in six selected works separated in time, yet united by the common motif. In conclusion, the paper argues that the perceived differences in winter representation modes demonstrate that the broad conceptual model of winter in music comprises of a multitude of related micrometaphors, such as STACCATO IS FALLING SNOW or BELLS ARE CHRISTMAS. Such micrometaphors are creatively re-used in the Coca-Cola Christmas commercial."
The paper analyses J. Keats’ and W. B. Yeats’ poetic responses to the threat of loss and decay. Keats in his Ode to a Grecian Urn proposes to stop the temporal cycles of death and rebirth by freezing the ephemeral beauty in stasis. Conversely, Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium conveys his idea of transcending time altogether and crossing into Neo-Platonist timelessness. The writers not only employ the Greek ideas of decay, but also transcend them: for both the Greek notion of time is only a canvass on which to paint their own visions of the life imperishable.
Conference Presentations by Maciej W Paprocki
In my view, greater and lesser gods, nymphs and mortals of Ancient Greece could be categorised by their possession (or lack thereof) of three qualities that sustain gods’ eternal lives: inexhaustible vitality, agelessness and invulnerability. Inexhaustible vitality denotes lack of death as an inborn trait: left undisturbed, a being would continue living for ever. Agelessness denotes no decay associated with old age (Clay 1981: 112), whereas nigh invulnerability means that one can be wounded, but cannot be killed by wounding. All three powers coexist in an archetypal Greek deity and are absent in a mortal: nonetheless, the cosmic hierarchy included in-between beings that had one or two, but not three divine qualities—for instance, deities undying and ever–young, yet vulnerable to death from wounds. This fuzzy ontological class encompasses monsters (Clay 1993: 105–116), minor divinities of nature and—debatably—elusive ‘immortals of human speech and bearing’ (θεοὶ αὐδήεντες) (Clay 1974: 133; Nagler 1996: 143): in my presentation, I explore common attributes of these characters, defining their significance in the ontological spectrum and mythological narratives.
Shadowy, sly shapeshifters learned in magical arts, (great-)grandchildren of Okeanos comprise some of the craftiest and grandest trickster gods of Greece: into their group one may include descendants by birth (Kalypso, Maia, Hermes, Athena, Prometheus, Kirke, Medea, Metis, Thetis) and descendants by adoption (Hera through Tethys and Hephaistos through Thetis and Eurynome). In the Theogony, Hesiod obliquely expresses his theological convictions through carefully planned divine marriages and resultant offspring. I argue that the poet instinctively understood functional similarities between trickster-type deities and thus traced their descent from Okeanos and Tethys, primordial gods of transformation and change: transcending Hesiod, the Okeanos trickster genealogy lingers in later Greek works, with authors conceptually juxtaposing these deities in their works.
Homer’s Iliad explicitly called Okeanos and Tethys the genesis/parents of all the gods (14.200-204, 246, 302; 21.196-197): in the poem, the divine pair lived in an indefinable, primordial circling river, into which other gods plunged to feast, rest in hiding or replenish their powers (Seemee 2015: 5-8, Hom. Il. 1.422-423, 493-495, 18.395-405, 23.205-207). The Okeanos-focused mythology reverberated in pre- and post-Socratic thought, with water, instead of earth, seen as the root of existence (Pl. Tht. 152d-e, Cra. 400d-401e; Orph. H. 83); later allegorical readings reinterpreted Okeanos as the principle of change and movement, whereas his sister-mate Tethys signified cosmic stability (Corn. Compendium §8 p. 10-17).
Problematically, a more influential cosmogonic paradigm expressed in Hesiod’s Theogony (8th/7th c. genealogical epic) made Gaia (the Earth) the mother of the gods and recast Okeanos and Tethys as her children, with Homeric scholiasts struggling to symbolically reconcile Hesiod’ genealogy with the Iliad (schol. D Il. 14.201 van Thiel). In my view, the body of the Greek myth indirectly supports Homer’s claim about Okeanos and Tethys’ genealogical supremacy by fostering strong conceptual links between two Titans and their (grand)children. Not only do (grand)children of Okeanos constitute almost two-thirds of named deities in the Theogony, but they also share striking similarities with their ancestors: shadowy, sly shapeshifters learned in magical arts, they comprise some of the craftiest and grandest trickster gods of Greece.
Thetis, daughter of Nereus and Doris, was courted by both Zeus and Poseidon until they learned she was destined to bear a son more powerful than his father: to avert succession danger, Zeus married her off to his mortal grandson, Peleus, to whom Thetis bore Achilles. In her seminal work (The power of Thetis), Laura Slatkin demonstrates that the Iliad represents Thetis as a formerly powerful, yet ultimately marginalised deity. The mistress of bounds and binding, Thetis could avert destruction (λοιγὸν ἀμῦναι) or bring it on; once, she played an active role in the divine affairs, having rescued Hephaestus and Dionysus and freed Zeus’ from bonds put on him by rebellious Olympians. Curiously, in the timeframe of the Iliad, Thetis appears passive: she does indirectly influence the war, but only by calling in owed favours from Zeus and Hephaestus. Slatkin has noted that Thetis blames Zeus for her arranged marriage, yet she never directly opposes him, as if some unseen factor forestalled her wrath.
I argue that Thetis’ reproductive potential—and, by extension, her political power—was silenced when the goddess was raped by Peleus, with Zeus’ tacit consent. On vases depicting Thetis’ rape by Peleus (f. e. Douris, CdM Paris 539; Pioneer Group, Louvre G65), we see Peleus encircle Thetis’ waist—and simultaneously, her womb, where the succession danger originated—with his hands. No transformation of Thetis can break Peleus’ grip, as if this simple gesture took advantage of her greatest vulnerability. Exhausted Thetis finally collapses into a single form; subsequently, Peleus symbolically closes Thetis’ womb by siring a mortal child inside. I interpret this act as the binding of her reproductive potential: as long as Achilles is alive, the will of Zeus is being fulfilled and Thetis cannot directly oppose or bind Zeus. Subduing Thetis by proxy, Zeus simultaneously fulfils the prophecy and averts its doom: Thetis bears a child of his grandson, his designated 'second', but it is not his divine seed that impregnates her. Thetis, mistress of bounds, cannot unbind herself any more than Aphrodite, mistress of desire, can stop desiring Anchises: in both cases, Zeus turns their own power against them.
In his timely monograph, Paprocki compiles and reconsiders the knowledge amassed so far on desert roads in Roman Egypt; he discusses geographical and social factors influencing the road use in the period, demonstrating that Roman overseers of these lands adapted remarkably well to local desert conditions, improving roads just as their predecessors would have done it. Transforming the Sahara—either through establishment of new, artificial activity nodes (resource exploitation, trade, military control) or through augmentation of previous subsistence nodes (water/agriculture)—resulted in marking new desert trails or reopening of the old ones, with activity nodes acting as attractant points funnelling desert traffic into discernible corridors. Not all desert areas of Egypt were equally suited for anthropogenic development, but almost all have been optimised under the Romans in one way or another, with road installations built for added comfort and safety of travellers. This study of how Romans successfully adapted to desert travel will be of interest to all those who study ancient trade networks, deserts and their ongoing expansion due to the global warming.
Just like their Mediterranean neighbours, ancient Romans often used lead, which they treated as a by-product of silver-smelting cupelation process through which silver was extracted from argentiferous galena ores. However, the widespread use of lead could often be a health hazard. The article discusses sources of lead in the environment of ancient Romans (water pipes, kitchen utensils, lead artefacts on ships and foodstuffs containing lead compounds) and evaluates their potential toxicity. Particular amount of attention was devoted to must syrups (sapa / defrutum), often containing large quantities of lead (II) acetate. A part of article juxtaposes ancient knowledge about lead toxicity with modern reports about poisonings to establish how much was known about its noxious influence in the Ancient Era.
Główna myśl artykułu podąża za ideą Archambaulta mówiącą, iż koncept ciała politycznego pozostaje motywem nieobojętnym politycznie i wskazuje na inklinacje polityczne używającego go. Autor artykułu przedstawia, w jaki sposób paradygmat ciała politycznego zmaga się w XVII i XXI wieku z doświadczeniem choroby ustroju oraz jak angloamerykański dyskurs polityczny próbował ujednolicić element społeczny utożsamiany z chorobą, tj. człowieka wyciszonego lub wykluczonego. Głównym postulatem autora jest twierdzenie, że owe dyskursy, oparte na homogenizacji społecznej, nie odpowiadają już potrzebom pluralistycznego społeczeństwa i są zastępowane przez konstrukcje bardziej akceptujące inność elementu wywrotowego.""
In my presentation, I would like to analyse a particularly pervasive subset of micrometaphors that form the body politic analogy, namely, the IMMIGRANTS ARE INVADING PATHOGENS metaphors. The pre-modern humoral paradigm accentuated INTERNAL fluid imbalances as the cause of diseases; in turn, newer theories stressed the EXTERNALITY of invading pathogens (Harris 1998:142). Medical discoveries were exploited by politicians, who equated foreigners with germs seeping into the body politic to subdue it. Frequently; “the elaboration of an external threat has been […] complicit with the erasure of domestic conflict” (Harris 1998:13): internal anxieties were transferred onto immigrants, who—marked with EXTERNALITY—could be expelled as scapegoats. I intend to demonstrate how these pernicious mappings are reinforced and questioned today, as immigrants begin to engage in chiastic metaphor reversals (Inda 2000).
Employing selected cognitive terms, this paper argues that musical pieces, as exhibiting observable formal regularities, may exemplify certain concepts. It examines how the concept of winter has been rendered in six selected works separated in time, yet united by the common motif. In conclusion, the paper argues that the perceived differences in winter representation modes demonstrate that the broad conceptual model of winter in music comprises of a multitude of related micrometaphors, such as STACCATO IS FALLING SNOW or BELLS ARE CHRISTMAS. Such micrometaphors are creatively re-used in the Coca-Cola Christmas commercial."
The paper analyses J. Keats’ and W. B. Yeats’ poetic responses to the threat of loss and decay. Keats in his Ode to a Grecian Urn proposes to stop the temporal cycles of death and rebirth by freezing the ephemeral beauty in stasis. Conversely, Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium conveys his idea of transcending time altogether and crossing into Neo-Platonist timelessness. The writers not only employ the Greek ideas of decay, but also transcend them: for both the Greek notion of time is only a canvass on which to paint their own visions of the life imperishable.
In my view, greater and lesser gods, nymphs and mortals of Ancient Greece could be categorised by their possession (or lack thereof) of three qualities that sustain gods’ eternal lives: inexhaustible vitality, agelessness and invulnerability. Inexhaustible vitality denotes lack of death as an inborn trait: left undisturbed, a being would continue living for ever. Agelessness denotes no decay associated with old age (Clay 1981: 112), whereas nigh invulnerability means that one can be wounded, but cannot be killed by wounding. All three powers coexist in an archetypal Greek deity and are absent in a mortal: nonetheless, the cosmic hierarchy included in-between beings that had one or two, but not three divine qualities—for instance, deities undying and ever–young, yet vulnerable to death from wounds. This fuzzy ontological class encompasses monsters (Clay 1993: 105–116), minor divinities of nature and—debatably—elusive ‘immortals of human speech and bearing’ (θεοὶ αὐδήεντες) (Clay 1974: 133; Nagler 1996: 143): in my presentation, I explore common attributes of these characters, defining their significance in the ontological spectrum and mythological narratives.
Shadowy, sly shapeshifters learned in magical arts, (great-)grandchildren of Okeanos comprise some of the craftiest and grandest trickster gods of Greece: into their group one may include descendants by birth (Kalypso, Maia, Hermes, Athena, Prometheus, Kirke, Medea, Metis, Thetis) and descendants by adoption (Hera through Tethys and Hephaistos through Thetis and Eurynome). In the Theogony, Hesiod obliquely expresses his theological convictions through carefully planned divine marriages and resultant offspring. I argue that the poet instinctively understood functional similarities between trickster-type deities and thus traced their descent from Okeanos and Tethys, primordial gods of transformation and change: transcending Hesiod, the Okeanos trickster genealogy lingers in later Greek works, with authors conceptually juxtaposing these deities in their works.
Homer’s Iliad explicitly called Okeanos and Tethys the genesis/parents of all the gods (14.200-204, 246, 302; 21.196-197): in the poem, the divine pair lived in an indefinable, primordial circling river, into which other gods plunged to feast, rest in hiding or replenish their powers (Seemee 2015: 5-8, Hom. Il. 1.422-423, 493-495, 18.395-405, 23.205-207). The Okeanos-focused mythology reverberated in pre- and post-Socratic thought, with water, instead of earth, seen as the root of existence (Pl. Tht. 152d-e, Cra. 400d-401e; Orph. H. 83); later allegorical readings reinterpreted Okeanos as the principle of change and movement, whereas his sister-mate Tethys signified cosmic stability (Corn. Compendium §8 p. 10-17).
Problematically, a more influential cosmogonic paradigm expressed in Hesiod’s Theogony (8th/7th c. genealogical epic) made Gaia (the Earth) the mother of the gods and recast Okeanos and Tethys as her children, with Homeric scholiasts struggling to symbolically reconcile Hesiod’ genealogy with the Iliad (schol. D Il. 14.201 van Thiel). In my view, the body of the Greek myth indirectly supports Homer’s claim about Okeanos and Tethys’ genealogical supremacy by fostering strong conceptual links between two Titans and their (grand)children. Not only do (grand)children of Okeanos constitute almost two-thirds of named deities in the Theogony, but they also share striking similarities with their ancestors: shadowy, sly shapeshifters learned in magical arts, they comprise some of the craftiest and grandest trickster gods of Greece.
Thetis, daughter of Nereus and Doris, was courted by both Zeus and Poseidon until they learned she was destined to bear a son more powerful than his father: to avert succession danger, Zeus married her off to his mortal grandson, Peleus, to whom Thetis bore Achilles. In her seminal work (The power of Thetis), Laura Slatkin demonstrates that the Iliad represents Thetis as a formerly powerful, yet ultimately marginalised deity. The mistress of bounds and binding, Thetis could avert destruction (λοιγὸν ἀμῦναι) or bring it on; once, she played an active role in the divine affairs, having rescued Hephaestus and Dionysus and freed Zeus’ from bonds put on him by rebellious Olympians. Curiously, in the timeframe of the Iliad, Thetis appears passive: she does indirectly influence the war, but only by calling in owed favours from Zeus and Hephaestus. Slatkin has noted that Thetis blames Zeus for her arranged marriage, yet she never directly opposes him, as if some unseen factor forestalled her wrath.
I argue that Thetis’ reproductive potential—and, by extension, her political power—was silenced when the goddess was raped by Peleus, with Zeus’ tacit consent. On vases depicting Thetis’ rape by Peleus (f. e. Douris, CdM Paris 539; Pioneer Group, Louvre G65), we see Peleus encircle Thetis’ waist—and simultaneously, her womb, where the succession danger originated—with his hands. No transformation of Thetis can break Peleus’ grip, as if this simple gesture took advantage of her greatest vulnerability. Exhausted Thetis finally collapses into a single form; subsequently, Peleus symbolically closes Thetis’ womb by siring a mortal child inside. I interpret this act as the binding of her reproductive potential: as long as Achilles is alive, the will of Zeus is being fulfilled and Thetis cannot directly oppose or bind Zeus. Subduing Thetis by proxy, Zeus simultaneously fulfils the prophecy and averts its doom: Thetis bears a child of his grandson, his designated 'second', but it is not his divine seed that impregnates her. Thetis, mistress of bounds, cannot unbind herself any more than Aphrodite, mistress of desire, can stop desiring Anchises: in both cases, Zeus turns their own power against them.
Maciej Paprocki, współtwórca gry Apotheon™, przybliży uczestnikom spotkania specyfikę procesu twórczego oraz opowie o swoich doświadczeniach związanych z pracą nad grą. Główną część wystąpienia stanowić będą rozważania na temat fabuły gry. Apotheon jest kreatywnym rozwinięciem i kontynuacją mitu sukcesyjnego z Teogonii Hezjoda oraz mitu o wiekach ludzkości z Pracy i Dni tegoż autora. Prelegent objaśni, co zadecydowało o tym, że twórcy zainspirowali się właśnie tymi mitami przy tworzeniu fabuły gry oraz w jaki sposób zostało im dopisane zakończenie zgodne z duchem mitu greckiego. Dodatkowo zostanie ukazane uczestnikom, z jakimi problemami musieli zmierzyć się twórcy, godząc logikę mitu z wymaganiami narracyjnymi gier wideo.
W jaki sposób można było uczynić kogoś (nie)śmiertelnym? Jedną z możliwości było spożycie pokarmu o cudownych właściwościach. Starożytni Grecy głęboko wierzyli, że stajemy się tym, co spożywamy i pijemy: jeśli ludzie jedzą pokarm bogów i piją ich napoje, mogą oni stać się do nich podobni - nieśmiertelni i niestarzejący się. Zauważmy jednak, że mit grecki niezwykle rzadko wspomina o tym, co nastąpiłoby, gdyby bóstwa były zmuszone stołować się u śmiertelników: dostępne nam źródła ograniczają się jedynie do tajemniczych aluzji.
W niniejszym wystąpieniu analizuję zachowane w micie wzmianki o pokarmach, po spożyciu których bóstwa tracą siły witalne, stając się bardziej podobnymi do śmiertelników. Prezentacja rozpoczyna się od krótkiego omówienia greckich poglądów na temat ontologicznych różnic pomiędzy bóstwem i człowiekiem, opierając się głównie na ustaleniach paryskiej szkoły strukturalistycznej. Kolejno przedstawione i przeanalizowane zostają przykłady pokarmów i napojów, których spożycie może zaszkodzić bóstwom: zboża, wino, granaty, mleko matki i tym podobne. Szczególna uwaga poświęcona zostaje ephemeroi karpoi, owocom śmiertelności, do których spożycia został podstępem namówiony Tyfon (Apollod. 1.6.3). Analiza źródeł pozwala ustalić znaczenie tego rodzaju pokarmów oraz zrozumieć, dlaczego mit tak rzadko o nich wspomina. Być może pośrednią przyczyną popularności tego rodzaju podań była głęboko zakorzeniona w greckiej myśli niechęć do władzy absolutnej: Grecy z lubością podkreślali, że nawet i bóstwa—mimo swej potęgi—nie są wolne od słabości i mogą kiedyś zostać pozbawione swej mocy.
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Do niedawna wyżej wymienione teksty stanowiły jedyne źródło informacji na temat starożytnej Azanii, co przekładało się na mocno europocentryczną (czytaj: sceptyczną) perspektywę badaczy. Wykopaliska przeprowadzone na tym terenie w ostatnich dekadach ubiegłego wieku przez Felixa A. Chami pozwoliły nam na uzupełnienie danych pochodzących ze śródziemnomorskich tekstów. Wybrzeża dzisiejszej Tanzanii zostały zasiedlone przez osadników najprawdopodobniej pochodzących z terenów Wielkich Jezior Afrykańskich, gdzie już ok. 500 r. p.n.e. kultura Urewe opanowała sztukę wytopu żelaza z miejscowych rud. W okresie między 200 r. p.n.e. a 50 r. n.e. Azańczycy zdominowali wybrzeże Tanzanii i przejęli korytarz handlowy prowadzący doliną Białego Nilu w stronę Meroe. Umiejętność obróbki żelaza przyśpieszyła rozwój szkutnictwa, a wybrzeże pomiędzy Zanzibarem, Komorami i Madagaskarem zyskało na znaczeniu dla handlu dalekomorskiego.
Po otwarciu się na Ocean Indyjski Rzymianie zwrócili uwagę na potencjał handlowy Azanii, jednakże drogę do niej blokowały państewka Półwyspu Arabskiego, żywo zainteresowane utrzymaniem monopolu handlowego na tym obszarze. Rzymskie naciski doprowadziły do istotnych przetasowań w Azanii, których konsekwencje odczuto być może i w Afryce Południowej. Czy handel morski z Rzymem doprowadził do przerwania szlaku lądowego przez Meroe? Czy Rzymianie pośrednio wsparli rozwój tanzańskiej kultury Tana? Dlaczego Azańczycy kupowali od Rzymian żelazne przedmioty, skoro sami mogli wytworzyć podobne? Skąd pochodzą ołowiane artefakty znajdowane w Azanii? To tylko niektóre z pytań, na które spróbuję odpowiedzieć w moim wystąpieniu.
In the first chapter of the thesis, I develop a research methodology suitable for analysing how THE HUMAN BODY IS A CITY metaphor is mapped in Osmosis Jones and The Purple Island. I discuss basic tenets and limitations of Cognitive Poetics—a relatively novel school of literary criticism, of particular use when researching metaphors in works of culture. However, this school has been often accused of sacrificing literariness for the sake of exactness. Thus, it becomes necessary to supplement Cognitive Poetics with another school of thought, more focused on traditionally understood literariness. For my analysis, I decided to adopt the New Historicist approach.
The second chapter presents The Purple Island, a poem which reconceptualises a depersonalised human body as an insular society governed by a dynastic aristocracy. The following issues are discussed: the structure of mappings between HUMAN BODY and CITY domains, interactions between building-block micrometaphors and their consequences and finally the body politic mappings in the poem. As for the social discourse, particular attention has been devoted to topics such as power circulation in The Purple Island society, anthropomorphic personifications and their disenfranchising of lesser body parts, the minimal agency of lowest social strata and co-optation practices they are subject to.
The third chapter analyses Osmosis Jones, a movie which presents the body of a slovenly zookeeper Frank as a sprawling, decaying metropolis, inhabited by cells and germs. The main problem to consider is the dialectic interplay of axiological opposites in the space of Frank. I investigate tensions between such extremes as centre and periphery, poverty and affluence or health and disease, tensions which determine how mappings between HUMAN BODY and CITY are realised. Additionally, I discuss topics such as the urban space as embedded in the organic space, reasons for personifying cells and the peculiar position of the germ community in the body politic of Frank.
The last chapter contrasts and compares findings of the previous chapters in order to present the universals of mappings between the urban and the organic and how these mappings change when reflecting certain socio-political systems. I demonstrate that works employing THE HUMAN BODY IS A CITY metaphor more often than not reflect political inclinations of their authors; what is more, they reflect social tensions of contemporary regimes and ways of defusing them.
In 2014, Alientrap Games delighted classics-lovers, gamers, and classics-loving-gamers with Apotheon, designed by Lee Vermeulen and Jesse McGibney. The game, as you may well know, is a beautiful, action-packed 2D platform for Steam and PS4, delivered in an imitation black-figure vase style. It takes a hero, Nikandreos, on a mission through worlds of classical statues and mythological bosses to save humanity by defeating the gods.
DEADLINE for abstract submissions is 31 May 2017.
In 1991, Laura Slatkin published The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad, in which she argued that Homer knowingly situated the storyworld of the Iliad against the backdrop of an older world of mythos by which the events in the Iliad are explained and given traction. Slatkin’s focus was on Achilles’ mother, Thetis: an ostensibly marginal and powerless goddess, Thetis nevertheless drives the plot of the Iliad, being allusively credited with the power to uphold or challenge the rule of Zeus. Now, almost thirty years after Slatkin’s publication, this timely volume re-examines depictions and receptions of this ambiguous goddess, in works ranging from archaic Greek poetry to twenty-first century cinema. Twenty authors build upon Slatkin’s readings to explore Thetis and multiple roles she played in Western literature, art, material culture, religion, and myth. Ever the shapeshifter, Thetis has been and continues to be reconceptualised: supporter or opponent of Zeus’ regime, model bride or unwilling victim of Peleus’ rape, good mother or child-murderess, figure of comedy or monstrous witch. Hers is an enduring power of transformation, resonating within art and literature.