The Politics of Sacrifice in Early Greek Myth and Poetry

Download or read book The Politics of Sacrifice in Early Greek Myth and Poetry written by Charles H. Stocking and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new interpretation of ancient Greek sacrifice from a cultural poetic perspective. Through close readings of the Theogony, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and the Odyssey in conjunction with evidence from material culture, it demonstrates how sacrifice narratives in early Greek hexameter poetry are intimately connected to a mythic-poetic discourse referred to as the 'politics of the belly'. This mythic-poetic discourse presents sacrifice as a site of symbolic conflict between the male stomach and female womb for both mortals and immortals. Ultimately, the book argues that the ritual of sacrifice operates as a cultural mechanism for the perpetuation of patriarchal ideology not just in early Greek hexameter, but throughout Greek cultural history.