The poetics of eros in Ancient Greece
By: Claude Calame ; translated by Janet Lloyd.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eka; eng
Number of pages: 213
Subjects: Erotic poetry, Greek -- History and criticism.; Literature and society -- Greece.; Poetics -- History -- To 1500.; Sex in literature.
Description: The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece offers the first comprehensive inquiry into the deity of sexual love, a power that permeated daily Greek life. Claude Calame uses an anthropological and linguistic approach to re-create indigenous categories of erotic love. He maintains that Eros, the joyful companion of Aphrodite, was a divine figure around which poets constructed a physiology of desire that functioned in specific ways within a network of social relations.

Calame begins by showing how poetry and iconography gave a rich variety of expression to the concept of Eros, then delivers a history of the deity's roles within social and political institutions, and concludes with a discussion of an Eros-centered metaphysics.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [201]-205) and indexes.