Tales of archaic Greek city foundations continue to be told and retold long after the colonies themselves were settled, and this book explores how the ancient Greeks constructed their memory of founding new cities overseas. Greek stories about colonizing Sicily or the Black Sea in the seventh century B.C.E. are no more transparent, no less culturally constructed than nineteenth-century British tales of empire in India or Africa; they are every bit as much about
power, language, and cultural appropriation. This book brings anthropological and literary theory to bear on the narratives that later Greeks tell about founding colonies and the processes through which the colonized are assimilated into the familiar story-lines, metaphors, and rituals of the colonizers.
The distinctiveness and the universality of the Greek colonial representations are explored through explicit comparison with later European narratives of new world settlement.
- ISBN10 0195083997
- ISBN13 9780195083996
- Publish Date 6 January 1994 (first published December 1993)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 220
- Language English