Susan Guettel Cole is Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo in the Department of Classics. She is known for her work on Ancient Greek Religion and gender. [1]
Susan Guettel Cole | |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Minnesota |
Thesis | (1975) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Classics;Ancient Greek Religion |
Institutions | University of Illinois at Chicago;University at Buffalo |
Notable works | Landscapes,Gender,and Ritual Space:The Ancient Greek Experience (2004) |
Cole received her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1975. [1] Her doctoral thesis was entitled The Samothracian Mysteries and the Samothracian Gods:Initiates,Theoroi,and Worshippers. [2]
After graduating,she became Assistant Professor of Classics and Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. [1] [3] In 1991 she was a Fellow of the Institute of Humanities at UIC. [4] She published Theoi Megaloi:The Cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace,based on her doctoral dissertation,in 1986. [5] [6] Her second book,Landscapes,Gender,and Ritual Space:The Ancient Greek Experience,came out in 2004. [7] She has also worked on pigs in Ancient Greek culture. [8] [9]
In 1992 she joined the Department of Classics at the University at Buffalo,where she was Chair of the department from 1994 to 1995 and again 1998–2004. [1] [10]
Cole was chair of the Society for Classical Studies Committee for Professional Ethics in 1986. [11] She was Directeur d’Etudes Associéat the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études in 1990. [12] In 1996-97 she was a Fellow of the National Humanities Center. [13] She has also received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies,the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation,and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, [10] and a grant from the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. [14]
Atalanta is a heroine in Greek mythology.
Mystery religions, mystery cults, sacred mysteries or simply mysteries, were religious schools of the Greco-Roman world for which participation was reserved to initiates (mystai). The main characterization of this religion is the secrecy associated with the particulars of the initiation and the ritual practice, which may not be revealed to outsiders. The most famous mysteries of Greco-Roman antiquity were the Eleusinian Mysteries, which predated the Greek Dark Ages. The mystery schools flourished in Late Antiquity; Emperor Julian, of the mid 4th century, is believed by some scholars to have been associated with various mystery cults—most notably the mithraists. Due to the secret nature of the school, and because the mystery religions of Late Antiquity were persecuted by the Christian Roman Empire from the 4th century, the details of these religious practices are derived from descriptions, imagery and cross-cultural studies. Much information on the Mysteries comes from Marcus Terentius Varro.
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus by the Greeks for a frenzy he is said to induce called baccheia. As Dionysus Eleutherius, his wine, music, and ecstatic dance free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. His thyrsus, a fennel-stem sceptre, sometimes wound with ivy and dripping with honey, is both a beneficent wand and a weapon used to destroy those who oppose his cult and the freedoms he represents. Those who partake of his mysteries are believed to become possessed and empowered by the god himself.
Semele, or Thyone in Greek mythology, was the youngest daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, and the mother of Dionysus by Zeus in one of his many origin myths.
In Greek mythology, Cadmus was the legendary Greek hero and founder of Boeotian Thebes. He was, alongside Perseus and Bellerophon, the greatest hero and slayer of monsters before the days of Heracles. Commonly stated to be a prince of Phoenicia, the son of king Agenor and queen Telephassa of Tyre, the brother of Phoenix, Cilix and Europa, Cadmus traced his origins back to Poseidon and Libya.
Samothrace is a Greek island in the northern Aegean Sea. It is a municipality within the Evros regional unit of Thrace. The island is 17 km (11 mi) long, 178 km2 (69 sq mi) in size and has a population of 2,596. Its main industries are fishing and tourism. Resources on the island include granite and basalt. Samothrace is one of the most rugged Greek islands, with Mt. Saos and its highest peak Fengari rising to 1,611 m (5,285 ft). The Winged Victory of Samothrace statue, which is now displayed at the Louvre in Paris, originates from the island.
In Greek mythology, the Cabeiri or Cabiri, also transliterated Kabeiri or Kabiri, were a group of enigmatic chthonic deities. They were worshipped in a mystery cult closely associated with that of Hephaestus, centered in the north Aegean islands of Lemnos and possibly Samothrace—at the Samothrace temple complex—and at Thebes. In their distant origins the Cabeiri and the Samothracian gods may include pre-Greek elements, or other non-Greek elements, such as Thracian, Tyrrhenian, Pelasgian, Phrygian or Hittite. The Lemnian cult was always local to Lemnos, but the Samothracian mystery cult spread rapidly throughout the Greek world during the Hellenistic period, eventually initiating Romans.
The word chthonic, or chthonian, is derived from the Ancient Greek word χθών, "khthon", meaning earth or soil. It translates more directly from χθόνιος or "in, under, or beneath the earth" which can be differentiated from Γῆ, or "ge", which speaks to the living surface of land on the earth. In Greek, chthonic is a descriptive word for things relating to the underworld and can be used in the context of chthonic gods, chthonic rituals, chthonic cults, and more. This is as compared to the more commonly referred-to Olympic gods and their associated rites and cults. Olympic gods are understood to reference that which exists above the earth, particularly in the sky. Gods that are related to agriculture are also considered to have chthonic associations as planting and growing take place in part under the earth.
The Samothrace Temple Complex, known as the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, is one of the principal Pan-Hellenic religious sanctuaries, located on the island of Samothrace within the larger Thrace. Built immediately to the west of the ramparts of the city of Samothrace, it was nonetheless independent, as attested to by the dispatch of city ambassadors during festivals.
In Ancient Greek Religion and mythology, Enodia is a distinctly Thessalian Ancient Greek goddess, identified in certain areas or by certain ancient writers with Artemis, Hecate or Persephone. She was paired with Zeus in cult and sometimes shared sanctuaries with him. Enodia was primarily worshipped in Ancient Thessaly and was well known in Hellenistic Macedonia.
Worshipers of Artemis were found all over the Ancient Greek world. One of the most famous worshiping sites for Artemis was in Attica at Brauron. Artemis is said to have presided over all the biological transitions of females from before puberty to the first childbirth. "Young girls began to prepare for the event of the first childbirth at an early age. Even before menarche young girls danced for Artemis, in some places playing the role of animals. At the Attic site, or Brauron, in the rite called arkteia, girls representing the polis of Athens imitated she-bears, arktoi." "The initiation ritual for girls was called the Brauronia, after the location of Artemis' shrine at Brauron, in Attica, where the ritual, performed by girls before they reached puberty, took place." Brauron is the site where Iphigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter, is said to have established a temple to Artemis by decree of Athena, as told in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris.
In Greek mythology, Priapus is a minor rustic fertility god, protector of livestock, fruit plants, gardens, and male genitalia. Priapus is marked by his oversized, permanent erection, which gave rise to the medical term priapism. He became a popular figure in Roman erotic art and Latin literature, and is the subject of the often humorously obscene collection of verse called the Priapeia.
The term gamelia (Γαμηλία) can refer to several ancient Athenian customs revolving around the act of marriage. Most often it relates to the practice in which a new husband would perform an offering in honor of his recent marriage for his phratry during the Apaturia.
Piraeus Artemis refers to two bronze statues of Artemis excavated in Piraeus, Athens in 1959, along with a large theatrical mask and three pieces of marble sculptures. Two other statues were found in the buried cache as well: a larger-than-lifesize bronze Late Archaic Apollo and a similarly sized bronze fourth century-style Athena. Both statues are now exhibited in the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus in Athens.
Bonna Daix Wescoat is an art historian and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History at Emory University. Her work focuses on ancient Greek art and architecture, particularly Archaic and Hellenistic architecture and sculpture.
Sarah Iles Johnston is an American academic working at Ohio State University, studying and publishing on ancient Greek myths and religion.
The neorion at Samothrace was a long, rectangular, monumental structure built to house a dedicatory ship to the gods at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the Greek island of Samothrace in the northern Aegean Sea. It consisted of two main chambers: one in which an entire ship was displayed on marble supports, and a place where visitors to the building could view said ship. It is posited that the structure was built between 300 and 250 BCE. Neorions are found at few other places in Greece, but oftentimes they displayed captured warships of the enemy as their centerpiece; however, there is some debate as to what sort of ship exactly was housed within the neorion at the sanctuary on Samothrace.
Susan Jane Deacy is a classical scholar who has been Professor of Classics at the University of Roehampton since January 2018. She researches the history and literature of the ancient Greek world, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality, ancient Greek mythology and religion, and disability studies. She is also an expert on the teaching of subjects which are potentially sensitive, including sexual violence, domestic violence, and infanticide; she was project leader on the initiative 'Teaching Sensitive Subjects in the Classics Classroom'. She is also series editor of Routledge's Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World, and has been editor of the Bulletin of the Council of University Classical Departments since 2011.
Rebecca Futo Kennedy is Associate Professor of Classics, Women's and Gender Studies, and Environmental Studies at Denison University, and the Director of the Denison Museum. Her research focuses on the political, social, and cultural history of Classical Athens, Athenian tragedy, ancient immigration, ancient theories of race and ethnicity, and the reception of those theories in modern race science.
Lucia Nixon is a Classical Archaeologist at the University of Oxford. She was Senior Tutor at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Since 1987, she has co-directed the Sphakia Survey with Jennifer Moody, which excavates and surveys the Sphakia region of south-west Crete, from ca. 3000 BCE - 1900 CE.