Presentation
For at least a millennium, the Greek world has been bloodying altars to pay homage to its gods. In the words of Jean-Louis Durand, Greece is a "sacrificial culture". It is a particular form of culture in which human beings make contact with supra-human powers around an animal that has been put to death. The opportunities for this connection are as numerous as they are varied, and all available documentary genres bear witness to it, whether in texts from the manuscript tradition, epigraphic texts, iconography in all its forms or data uncovered by archaeology.
After devoting the lecture given in 2024-2025 to poetic evocations of sacrifice from Homer to Euripides, this year's lecture will focus on sacrificial practices in cities, in the concrete aspects of their implementation and the socio-political implications of their fulfillment. This shift will not, however, overlook the representation of the gods that these rituals allow us to grasp. Sacrifice will be understood both in its horizontal dimension as a social device and in its vertical dimension as a specific language between men and gods.
The lecture course will be extended by a series of seminars entitled, for the second year running, Sacrifices in Comparison. Once again, we'll be looking at other sacrificial cultures to question the analysis of Greek material.