- Title Pages
- Preface
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction the Greek Gods in the Twentieth Century
- 1 What is A Greek God?
- 2 Canonizing the Pantheon: The Dodekatheon in Greek Religion and its Origins
- 3 Gods in Greek Inscriptions: Some Methodological Questions
- 4 Metamorphoses of Gods into Animals and Humans
- 5 Sacrificing to the Gods: Ancient Evidence and Modern Interpretations
- 6 Getting in Contact: Concepts of Human—Divine Encounter in Classical Greek Art
- 7 New Statues for Old Gods
- 8 Zeus at Olympia
- 9 Zeus in Aeschylus: The Factor of Monetization
- 10 Hephaistos Sweats or How to Construct an Ambivalent God
- 11 Transforming Artemis: From the Goddess of the Outdoors to City Goddess
- 12 Herakles Between Gods and Heroes
- 13 Identities of Gods and Heroes: Athenian Garden Sanctuaries and Gendered Rites of Passage
- 14 Early Greek Theology: God as Nature and Natural Gods
- 15 Gods in early Greek Historiography
- 16 Gods in Apulia
- 17 Lucian's Gods: Lucian's Understanding of the Divine
- 18 The Gods in the Greek Novel
- 19 Reading Pausanias: Cults of the Gods and Representation of the Divine
- 20 Kronos and the Titans as Powerful Ancestors: A Case Study of the Greek Gods in Later Magical Spells
- 21 <i>Homo Fictor Deorum Est</i>: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells
- 22 The Gods in Later Orphism
- 23 Christian Apologists and Greek Gods
- 24 The Materiality of God's Image: The Olympian Zeus and Ancient Christology
- 25 The Greek Gods in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century German and British Scholarship
- Epilogue
- Index
Zeus in Aeschylus: The Factor of Monetization
Zeus in Aeschylus: The Factor of Monetization
- Chapter:
- (p.178) 9 Zeus in Aeschylus: The Factor of Monetization
- Source:
- The Gods of Ancient Greece
- Author(s):
Jan N. Bremmer
Andrew Erskine
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
This chapter offers a new interpretation of the opening of the famous Hymn to Zeus in Aeschylus’ tragedy the Agamemnon (160-6) with its reference to weighing in the divine scales. Zeus is imagined as beyond equivalence with all the commodities that can be put on the (cosmic) balance. The Greek polis was the first thoroughly monetised society in history, and Aeschylus’ conception of Zeus has been influenced (here and in other passages) by the all-pervasive omnipotence of abstract (monetary) value. Aeschulus sees the world as pervaded by the unity of opposites, an idea also associated with Heraclitus and Pythagoreanism.
Keywords: Aeschylus, Zeus, Monetization, Weighing, Tragedy, Heraclitus, Pythagoreanism
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- Title Pages
- Preface
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction the Greek Gods in the Twentieth Century
- 1 What is A Greek God?
- 2 Canonizing the Pantheon: The Dodekatheon in Greek Religion and its Origins
- 3 Gods in Greek Inscriptions: Some Methodological Questions
- 4 Metamorphoses of Gods into Animals and Humans
- 5 Sacrificing to the Gods: Ancient Evidence and Modern Interpretations
- 6 Getting in Contact: Concepts of Human—Divine Encounter in Classical Greek Art
- 7 New Statues for Old Gods
- 8 Zeus at Olympia
- 9 Zeus in Aeschylus: The Factor of Monetization
- 10 Hephaistos Sweats or How to Construct an Ambivalent God
- 11 Transforming Artemis: From the Goddess of the Outdoors to City Goddess
- 12 Herakles Between Gods and Heroes
- 13 Identities of Gods and Heroes: Athenian Garden Sanctuaries and Gendered Rites of Passage
- 14 Early Greek Theology: God as Nature and Natural Gods
- 15 Gods in early Greek Historiography
- 16 Gods in Apulia
- 17 Lucian's Gods: Lucian's Understanding of the Divine
- 18 The Gods in the Greek Novel
- 19 Reading Pausanias: Cults of the Gods and Representation of the Divine
- 20 Kronos and the Titans as Powerful Ancestors: A Case Study of the Greek Gods in Later Magical Spells
- 21 <i>Homo Fictor Deorum Est</i>: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells
- 22 The Gods in Later Orphism
- 23 Christian Apologists and Greek Gods
- 24 The Materiality of God's Image: The Olympian Zeus and Ancient Christology
- 25 The Greek Gods in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century German and British Scholarship
- Epilogue
- Index
