Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece

This book traces the trajectories of a key idea of ancient Greek culture through three thousand years of literature and reception.

Renaud Gagné (Author)

9781316613542, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 June 2016

568 pages
22.9 x 15.3 x 3 cm, 0.82 kg

"A learned, wide-ranging, and original book. Everyone should read it who is interested in Greek ethics, or symposiastic poetry, or Greek political debates about pollution, or tragedy, or Herodotus, or Greek theology in the imperial period."
Ruth Scodel, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. This book retraces the trajectories of Greek ancestral fault and the varieties of its expression through the many genres and centuries where it is found.

Introduction
1. The theology of progonikon hamart?ma
2. Haereditarium piaculum and inherited guilt
3. The earliest record: ex?leia in Homer and Hesiod
4. Sympotic theologies: Alcaeus, Solon, and Theognis
5. Tracking divine punishment in Herodotus
6. Tragic reconfigurations: Labdacids
7. Tragic reconfigurations: Atridae
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Christian life & practice [HRCV], Biblical studies & exegesis [HRCG], Church history [HRCC2], History of religion [HRAX], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]