James Davidson (historian)

Last updated

Davidson, James N (1994), Consuming Passions: Appetite, Addiction and Spending in Classical Athens, OCLC   260219359
  • Davidson, James N (1997), Courtesans [and] Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, Harper Collins, ISBN   978-0-00-255591-3
  • Davidson, James N (2000), One Mykonos: Being Ancients, Being Islands, Being Giants, Being Gay , Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, ISBN   978-0-312-26214-3
  • Davidson, James N (2008), The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece, Phoenix paperback, Phoenix, ISBN   978-0-7538-2226-5
  • Articles

    • Davidson, James, "At the British Museum", London Review of Books , vol. 45, no.3 (2 February 2023), pp. 26–27.

    Related Research Articles

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Obol (coin)</span> Unit of ancient Greek coinage

    The obol was a form of ancient Greek currency and weight.

    Lovers' Legends: The Greek Myths (ISBN 0-9714686-0-5) is a 2002 book by Andrew Calimach about homosexuality and paederasty in Greek myth.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Phryne</span> 4th-century BC Greek courtesan

    Phryne was an ancient Greek hetaira (courtesan). From Thespiae in Boeotia, she was active in Athens, where she became one of the wealthiest women in Greece. She is best known for her trial for impiety, where she was defended by the orator Hypereides. According to legend, she was acquitted after baring her breasts to the jury, though the historical accuracy of this episode is doubtful. She also modeled for the artists Apelles and Praxiteles, and the Aphrodite of Knidos was based on her. Largely ignored during the renaissance, artistic interest in Phryne began to grow from the end of the eighteenth century; her trial was famously depicted by Jean-Léon Gérôme in the 1861 painting Phryne Before the Areopagus.

    Homosexuality in the militaries of ancient Greece was a significant aspect across the ancient Greek city-states, ranging from being a core part of military life to being an accepted practice of some individual soldiers. It was regarded as contributing to morale. Although the primary example is the Sacred Band of Thebes, a unit said to have been formed of same-sex couples, the Spartan tradition of military heroism has also been explained in light of strong emotional bonds resulting from homosexual relationships. Various ancient Greek sources record incidents of courage in battle and interpret them as motivated by homoerotic bonds.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Homosexuality in ancient Greece</span> Homosexuality in ancient Greek society

    In classical antiquity, writers such as Herodotus, Plato, Xenophon, Athenaeus and many others explored aspects of homosexuality in Greek society. The most widespread and socially significant form of same-sex sexual relations in ancient Greece amongst elite circles was between adult men and pubescent or adolescent boys, known as pederasty. Certain city-states allowed it while others were ambiguous or prohibited it. Though sexual relationships between adult men did exist, it is possible at least one member of each of these relationships flouted social conventions by assuming a passive sexual role according to Kenneth Dover, though this has been questioned by recent scholars. It is unclear how such relations between same-sex partners were regarded in the general society, especially for women, but examples do exist as far back as the time of Sappho.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">John Beazley</span> British art historian and archaeologist (1885–1970)

    Sir John Davidson Beazley, was a British classical archaeologist and art historian, known for his classification of Attic vases by artistic style. He was professor of classical archaeology and art at the University of Oxford from 1925 to 1956.

    <i>Greek Homosexuality</i> (book) 1978 book by Kenneth Dover

    Greek Homosexuality is a book about homosexuality in ancient Greece by the classical scholar Kenneth Dover, in which the author uses archaic and classical archaeological and literary sources to discuss ancient Greek sexual behavior and attitudes. He addresses the iconography of vase paintings, the speeches in the law courts, and the comedies of Aristophanes, as well as the content of other literary and philosophical source texts.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Pederasty in ancient Greece</span> Social institution of ancient Greece

    Pederasty in ancient Greece was a socially acknowledged romantic relationship between an older male and a younger male usually in his teens. It was characteristic of the Archaic and Classical periods. The influence of pederasty on Greek culture of these periods was so prevalent that it has been called "the principal cultural model for free relationships between citizens."

    Greek love is a term originally used by classicists to describe the primarily homoerotic customs, practices, and attitudes of the ancient Greeks. It was frequently used as a euphemism for both homosexuality and pederasty. The phrase is a product of the enormous impact of the reception of classical Greek culture on historical attitudes toward sexuality, and its influence on art and various intellectual movements.

    'Greece' as the historical memory of a treasured past was romanticised and idealised as a time and a culture when love between males was not only tolerated but actually encouraged, and expressed as the high ideal of same-sex camaraderie. ... If tolerance and approval of male homosexuality had happened once—and in a culture so much admired and imitated by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—might it not be possible to replicate in modernity the antique homeland of the non-heteronormative?

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Achilles and Patroclus</span> Relationship in Classical Greece

    The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is a key element of the stories associated with the Trojan War. In the Iliad, Homer describes a deep and meaningful relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, where Achilles is tender toward Patroclus, but callous and arrogant toward others. Its exact nature—whether homosexual, a non-sexual deep friendship, or something else entirely—has been a subject of dispute in both the Classical period and modern times. Homer never explicitly casts the two as lovers, but they were depicted as lovers in the archaic and classical periods of Greek literature, particularly in the works of Aeschylus, Aeschines and Plato.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Cartledge</span> British ancient Greece historian (born 1947)

    Paul Anthony Cartledge is a British ancient historian and academic. From 2008 to 2014 he was the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He had previously held a personal chair in Greek History at Cambridge.

    Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a Chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. Until 2022, she was a professor at the Department of Classics at King's College London. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University, Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea, and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Pederasty</span> Male adult–adolescent sexual behavior

    Pederasty or paederasty is a sexual relationship between an adult man and a boy. It was a socially acknowledged practice in Ancient Greece and Rome and elsewhere in the world, such as Pre-Meiji Japan.

    Armand D'Angour is a British classical scholar and classical musician, Professor of Classics at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford. His research embraces a wide range of areas across ancient Greek culture, and has resulted in publications that contribute to scholarship on ancient Greek music and metre, innovation in ancient Greece, Latin and Greek lyric poetry, the biography of Socrates and the status of Aspasia of Miletus. He writes poetry in ancient Greek and Latin, and was commissioned to compose odes in ancient Greek verse for the 2004 and 2012 Olympic Games.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Scott (English author)</span> British classicist and broadcaster (born 1981)

    Michael Scott is a British classical scholar, ancient historian, and presenter. He is professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick.

    Rosalind Thomas FBA is a Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Balliol College, Oxford University and professor of Ancient Greek history. She focuses on ancient literacy, oral tradition and performance culture as well as Greek law and society, Greek historiography, Greek relations with the Persians, and the Greek polis. She was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Ingleheart</span> British classical scholar

    Jennifer Ingleheart is a British classical scholar, who is known for her work on Ovid, Classical reception, and the influence of Rome on the modern understanding of homosexuality. She is Professor of Latin at the University of Durham.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Zahra Newby</span> Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick

    Zahra Newby is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. She is known in particular for her work on Greek mythology in Roman art and the visual culture of Greek festivals in the Roman east. Newby is currently the Head of the Classics and Ancient History Department at the University of Warwick.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Harloe</span>

    Katherine Harloe is Professor of Classics and Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Previously she was Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. She is an expert on the history of classical scholarship, the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the eighteenth-century German classicist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. She is the first black professor of Classics in the UK, and the first woman director of the ICS.

    References

    James Davidson
    Nationality British
    Academic background
    Education Oxford University, Columbia University