Ancient Necropolitics

This is the first collection of essays approaching aspects of Greek antiquity and its reception through ‘necropolitics’. It discovers traces of necropolitics in the unburied and maltreated corpses of the Homeric epics; it follows the manifestations of necropower in Greek tragedy, historiography, and biography; and it delves into torture, capital punishment, and non-normative burials in the ancient Greek world. It contributes to the debate - much of which is only available in modern Greek - on recent archaeological evidence, notably the iron-bound individuals discovered in the Athenian suburb of Phaleron, and includes a captivating exploration of necropolitics in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Greek-tragedy-inspired cinema.

Efimia D. Karakantza is Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the University of Patras, Greece. Her research focuses on metafeminist and political readings of ancient Greek literature, mainly tragedy. Her latest monographs include Who Am I? (Mis)Identity and the Polis in Oedipus Tyrannus (Harvard UP, 2020) and Antigone (Routledge, 2023).Alexandros Velaoras is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Patras, Greece. His research focuses on Attic tragedy, especially Euripides, and its reception. The title of his dissertation is The Arrival of the Suppliant in Euripides’ ‘Political Plays’.Marion Meyer, Ph.D. (1984), Univ.Prof. (1997, retired in 2020), taught Classical Archaeology in Germany and Vienna. Her studies focus on images and ancient Athens, e.g. Athena, Göttin von Athen. Kult und Mythos auf der Akropolis bis in klassische Zeit (2017).Contributors are: Dimitrios Bosnakis, Zina Giannopoulou, Efimia D. Karakantza, Cezary Kucewicz, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, Angeliki Syrkou, Alexandros Velaoras, Jesse Weiner.