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 wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. This book retraces the trajectories of Greek ancestral fault and the varieties of its expression through the many genres and centuries where it is found.

This chapter examines how the historiography of Greek religion renewed itself between 1920 and 1950. This period invested a great deal of effort in the answers that could be sought from the celebrated old sources. As the former certainties were battered from all sides, the revered voices from the past often resonated with the intensity of a battle call for renewal. Greek religion, one of the most contested domains in the reception of ancient culture, was to be solicited again and again to help imagine a new future. The chapter then considers the great changes that saw the Belle Époque study of ancient religion thoroughly transformed after the Great War, and the stakes of some of the fundamental disagreements that set influential scholars of the Interwar years against each other. Ultimately, the battle for the Greek Irrational was a search for the new foundations of modernity.

Abstract:Alkaios refers to Pittakos as one who has ‘acquired an Atreid wife’ in fragment 70 Voigt. This paper looks at the connotations of that statement in the text of the Lesbian poet, and its significance for the history of the Greek idea of ancestral fault.

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