Bøker av Stephanie Lynn Budin

This book is a study of the woman-and-child motif - known as the kourotrophos - as it appeared in the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean. Budin argues that, contrary to many current beliefs, the image was not a universal symbol of maternity or a depiction of a mother goddess.

This work explores various aspects of ancient Greek personal and emotional lives, beginning with their understandings of their own bodies, individual and personal relationships, and ending with their feelings about religion and the afterlife. It covers ancient Greek culture from the early Archaic period in the 8th century BCE through the Late Classical period in the 4th century BCE. Readers will be fascinated to learn what the Greeks thought about the gods, physical deformity, citizenship, nymphs, goats, hospitality, and sexual relations that would be considered incest by modern standards.The content of the book provides an intimate sense of what the ancient Greeks were actually like, connecting ancient experiences to present-day culture. The chapters span a wide range of topics, including the human body, family and societal relationships, city life, the world as they knew it, and religious belief. The author draws extensively on primary sources to allow the reader to "e;hear"e; the Greeks speak for themselves and presents evidence from literature, art, and architecture in order to depict the ancient Greeks as living, breathing, thinking, and feeling people.

Stephanie Budin demonstrates that sacred prostitution, the sale of a person's body for sex in which some or all of the money earned was devoted to a deity or a temple, did not exist in the ancient world. Reconsidering the evidence from the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman texts, and the early Christian authors, Budin shows that the majority of sources that have traditionally been understood as pertaining to sacred prostitution actually have nothing to do with this institution. The few texts that are usually invoked on this subject are, moreover, terribly misunderstood. Contrary to many current hypotheses, the creation of the myth of sacred prostitution has nothing to do with notions of accusation or the construction of a decadent, Oriental 'Other'. Instead, the myth has come into being as a result of more than 2,000 years of misinterpretations, false assumptions, and faulty methodology.

Ancient Greeks chronicles the rise, decline, resurgence, and ultimate collapse of the Greek empire from its earliest stirrings in the Bronze Age, through the Dark Ages and Classical period, to the death of Cleopatra and the conquests by Macedon and Rome.