Divining Disaster. Signs of Catastrophe in Ancient Greek Culture

Michiel van Veldhuizen (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

436 Seiten

2025
Brill (Verlag)
978-90-04-73856-0 (ISBN)

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This book includes the ancient Greek world in the longue durée of disaster discourse, adopting semiotic and ecocritical perspectives to show how ancient Greek literature and culture employ signs as a hermeneutic form of disaster management.

In a world riddled with earthquakes and plagued by epidemics, how did the ancient Greeks cope with, and make sense of, disaster? As our present-day environment is perceived to be increasingly perilous, this book includes the ancient Greek world in the longue durée of disaster discourse. Drawing on anthropological disaster studies, ecocriticism, and cognitive studies, this study considers disaster as a semiotic phenomenon marked by uncertainty. Divining disaster, then, functions as a hermeneutic form of disaster management that alleviates uncertainty and assigns agency, not only in religious practices such as oracle consultation but also in historical and mythological narratives.

Michiel van Veldhuizen (PhD ‘19, Brown University) is Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research interests include ancient Greek literature, religion and ecocriticism. He has published on such topics as sacrifice, animals, oracles, and eclipse poetry.

List of Figures and Tables

Abbreviations

Introduction: “Do You Bring a Sign of Some War, Or …?” (463 BCE)

1 Terrors of the Sign

2 Pindar’s Terrifying Eclipse

3 Divining Disaster

4 “What Is Disaster?”

5 The Ecocritical Perspective

6 Agency, Vulnerability, and Resilience

7 Uncertainty

8 An Ancient Greek Mentality

9 A Comparative Perspective

10 Structure and Organization of the Book

Part 1 Divination and Semiotics: “Those Were the Signs” (494 BCE)

Introduction to Part 1

1 Ancient Divination

1 Chian Catastrophe

2 Delian Disaster

3 “The Theology of the Age”

4 Defining Divination

5 A Cognitive Turn

6 Zeichenbeobachtung

2 Classifying the Sign

1 Peirce’s Triadic Sign

2 A Divinatory Paradigm

3 Basic Sign Classifications

4 Natural vs. Technical Divination

5 Interpreting the Sign

6 “I Opened Their Eyes to the Signs”

3 Naming the Sign

1 Tzetzes’ Terminology

2 Sēma and Sēmainō

3 Teras: Signs and Monsters

4 Teras: Thunder, Snakes, and Rainbows

5 Teras: Monsters and Monstrous Babies

6 From Teras to Tekmar: A Cognitive Perspective

7 Tekmar: Plotting Paths

8 Tekmar: “Conjecture the Invisible”

9 Tekmērion: Toward a Secular Semiotics

4 Abductive Reasoning

1 “We Must Conquer the Truth by Guessing”

2 The Divinatory Sign in Action: Chios Revisited

3 The Divinatory Sign in Action: Delos Revisited

4 The Divinatory Sign in Action: Monster at the Mysteries

5 Codes, Conditionals, and Compendia

6 Signs and Causes: Soft and Hard Astrology

7 Divining Disaster with the Stars: From Hesiod to Berossus

8 Divining Disaster with the Stars: Chaldeans and Egyptians

9 Divining Disaster with the Stars: Ptolemy

Part 2 Disasters and Definitions: “Disasters in the Sun” (1601)

Introduction to Part 2

5 Three Modes of Disaster: Plutarch, Shakespeare, Derrida

1 A Neologism in Hamlet

2 Disaster-as-Sign: Shakespeare’s Reception of Plutarch

3 Disaster-as-Condition: Edmund the Bastard

4 Disaster-as-Event and Derrida’s Événement

5 Verticality, Apocalypse, and Le Ciel Désastré

6 Translating Ancient Disaster

1 Un Mot Chaldaique

2 Theseus’ Advice

3 Breaking the Stalk, Felling the Crops

4 Accidental and Violent Fallings

5 The Semantic Field of Disaster in Ancient Greek

6 Military Disaster Lexicon: Sicily and Chaeronea

7 Military Disaster Lexicon: Cannae

8 Categories of Disaster

7 Staging Disaster in Tragedy and History

1 Remembering Disaster

2 Thucydides’ Disaster List

3 Divining Disaster on Stage: Darius

4 Divining Disaster on Stage: Heracles

5 Disasters in the Sun

6 Polybius on Pity and Folly

Part 3 Agency and Punishment: “How Can I Have Lunch?” (1799)

Introduction to Part 3

8 The Sunken City of Helike

1 Spectacle of Absence

2 Divining the Helike Disaster: Scrofani

3 Helike’s Ancient Testimony

4 “The God Is Wont to Send Signs”

5 Interpreting the Helike Disaster: Religion vs Science

6 Divining the Helike Disaster: Aelian

7 Hermeneutic Disaster Management

9 Moral Agency and Punitive Disaster

1 Agency Reconsidered

2 From Angry Poseidon to Bessie’s Hurricane

3 Punishment, or “A Blessing in Disguise”

4 Acts of Nature, Acts of God

5 Helike Revisited: Anger and Survival

6 Helike Revisited: Signs and Meaning

10 Poseidon’s Disaster Agency

1 Signs, Symbols, Myth

2 “God of Brute Force”

3 Poseidon’s Mode of Action

4 Breaking Open the Earth

5 Leveling the Achaean Wall

6 Covering with Mountains: Phaeacia and Polybotes

7 Rooting the Phaeacian Ship

8 Immobilizing Alcathoos

9 Divining Disaster: Alcinous

10 Divining Disaster: Polyphemus

Part 4 Uncertainty and Suffering: “Hell, Upside Down” (1971)

Introduction to Part 4

11 Imagining Disaster aboard The Poseidon

1 From New York to Athens

2 “We’ve Turned Over”: Imagining Disaster

3 “Robinson Crusoe on a World-Wide Scale”

4 The Banality of Disaster

5 “There Were No Landmarks”

12 The Disaster Geography of the Argonauts

1 Finding the Way Out

2 Rocks and Currents

3 “In the Grip of Perfect Calm”

4 Divining Disaster: Restoring Sights and Sounds

5 Divining Disaster: Decoding the Sign

6 The Black Emptiness of Katoulas

7 The Sibyl Divines Disaster

8 Vesuvius, Giants, and Cosmic Disaster

13 Negative Cosmology: Titans, Typhoeus, and Tartarus

1 Soundscapes of Divine and Human Strife

2 Crashing Gaia and Cosmic Conflagration

3 Typhoeus and Athena

4 Typhoeus as Cosmic Teras

5 The Disastered State of Tartarus

14 Bound and Adrift: Prometheus, Io, and the Island of Delos

1 Hesiod’s mega pēma: Erratic Winds

2 Hesiod’s mega pēma: Coma and Exile

3 God in Exile

4 Prometheus Bound, Io Adrift

5 “Tangled in Disaster’s Endless Net”

6 The Floating Island

7 The Polysemy of Delos

8 The Mobility of Delos: akinēton teras

9 Home to Octopuses and Seals

10 Divining Disaster: An Island and an Oracle

Part 5 Vulnerability and Contagion: “A Protean Disease” (2020)

Introduction to Part 5

15 The Plague as Semiotic Monster

1 Dr. Fauci Goes to Marseille

2 The Bees of Aristaeus

3 The Disaster Triad

4 Disaster in Hesiod’s Wicked City

5 Sterility and Strife

6 Divining Disasters with Monsters: The Sphinx and the Kētos

7 Divining Disasters with Monsters: The Minotaur

8 A Typology of the Monstrous

16 Oracles and Plague in Historical Narrative

1 Divining Loimos and Oracular Divination

2 Herodotus: Loimos for the Chians

3 Herodotus: Loimos for the Cretans and Persians

4 David’s Dilemma: Plague, Famine, or War?

5 Josephus’ Plague-as-Plague

6 Divining Disaster: David and Epimenides

7 Curing the Plague: From Abaris to Hippocrates

8 Thucydides Divines Disaster

Conclusion: “A Strange Stillness” (1962)

1 Andrà Tutto Bene

2 Divining Disaster for the Modern Ecocritic

3 The longue durée of Disaster Discourse

Bibliography

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	26.09.2025
Reihe/Serie	Mnemosyne, Supplements, History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity ; 496
Verlagsort	Leiden
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	847 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Altertum / Antike
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
ISBN-10	90-04-73856-8 / 9004738568
ISBN-13	978-90-04-73856-0 / 9789004738560
Zustand	Neuware