Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece

This book traces the trajectories of a key idea of ancient Greek culture through three thousand years of literature and reception.

Renaud Gagn\u00E9 (Author)

9781316613542, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 23 June 2016

568 pages

22.9 x 15.3 x 3 cm, 0.82 kg

\""A learned, wide-ranging, and original book. Everyone should read it who is interested in Greek ethics, or symposiastic poetry, or Greek political debates about pollution, or tragedy, or Herodotus, or Greek theology in the imperial period.\""

Ruth Scodel, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between w]