Bøger af Michael Vickers

This book challenges the widely held view that Greek pottery vases were objects of great value in antiquity, commissioned by rich patrons from the greatest artists of the day. Instead, they are shown to have been simply low cost versions of tableware originally made in silver and gold. Vickers and Gill demonstrates how Greek pottery first came to be regarded as a high value commodity in the eighteenth century thanks to clever, if not fraudulent, sales techniques. They explore the ways in which work in gold and silver influenced painted pottery, and examine the primary sources, both literary and epigraphic, to find what materials the ancients did consider to be important.

The conventional view of Aristophanes bristles with problems. Important testimony for Alcibiades' paramount role in comedy is consistently disregarded, and the tradition that "e;masks were made to look like the komodoumenoi, so that before an actor spoke a word, the audience would recognize who was being attacked"e; is hardly ever invoked. If these testimonia are taken into account, a fascinating picture emerges, where the komodoumenoi are based on the Periclean household: older characters on Pericles himself, younger on Alcibiades. Aspasia, Pericles' mistress, and Hipparete, Alcibiades' wife, lie behind many female characters, and Alcibiades' ambiguous sexuality also allows him to be shown on the stage as a woman, notably as Lysistrata. There is a substantial overlap between the anecdotal tradition relating to the historical figures and the plotting of Aristophanes' plays. This extends to speech patterns, where Alcibiades' speech defect is lampooned. Aristophanes is consistently critical of Alcibiades' mercurial politics, and his works can also be seen to have served as an aide-memoire for Thucydides and Xenophon. If the argument presented here is correct, then much current scholarship on Aristophanes can be set aside.

Literary historians have long held the view that the plays of the Greek dramatist, Sophocles deal purely with archetypes of the heroic past and that any resemblance to contemporary events or individuals is purely coincidental. This book challenges this view.

Vickers reads the first six of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays in a way that reveals the principal characters to be based in large part on Pericles and his ward Alcibiades.

Literary historians have long held the view that the plays of the Greek dramatist Sophocles deal purely with archetypes of the heroic past and that any resemblance to contemporary events or individuals is purely coincidental. In this book, Michael...

This handbook tracks the eventful history of the Arundel and Pomfret Marbles before they came to rest in Oxford.