PERSONIFICATION IN THE GREEK WORLD

Personification, the anthropomorphic representation of any non-human thing, is a ubiquitous feature of ancient Greek literature and art. Natural phenomena (earth, sky, rivers), places (cities, countries), divisions of time (seasons, months, a lifetime), states of the body (health, sleep, death), emotions (love, envy, fear), and political concepts (victory, democracy, war) all appear in human, usually female, form. Some have only fleeting incarnations, others become widely-recognised figures, and others again seem to have become so firmly established as deities in the imagination of the community that they receive the kind of elements of cult one would associate with the Olympian gods. Though often thought of as a feature of the Hellenistic period, personifications can be found in literature, art and cult from the Archaic period onwards; with the development of the art of allegory in the Hellenistic period, personifications may be seen to acquire more ‘intellectual’ overtones, and certainly the use of allegory as an interpretative tool enabled personifications to survive the advent of Christianity, to remain familiar figures in the art and literature of Late Antiquity and beyond.

The conference was held at the Institute of Classical Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1, 11-13th September 2000 (in association with the Centre for Hellenic Studies), bringing together both established and younger scholars from all over Europe, North America and New Zealand. A selection from the papers delivered will be published in the Centre for Hellenic Studies series, published by Ashgate, edited by Emma Stafford (Leeds) and Judith Herrin (Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London). The twenty-one papers to be included cover personification in Greek literature, art and religion from its pre-Homeric origins to the Byzantine period.  Classical Athens, as usual, features prominently, but other areas of both mainland Greece and the Greek East are well represented.  Issues which come under discussion include: problems of identification and definition; the question of gender; the status of personifications in relation to the gods; the significance of personification as a literary device; the uses and meanings of personification in different visual media; personification as a means of articulating place, time and worldly power.  The papers reflect the enormous range of contexts in which personification occurs, which in turn indicates the ubiquity of the phenomenon as a pattern of thought in the ancient Greek world. Click here for a complete list of contributors and titles.

This page is maintained by Emma Stafford. Last updated 28/8/2003.