Belted Heroes and Bound Women: The Myth of the Homeric Warrior King

(Paperback)

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This clearly written, beautifully illustrated book introduces a previously unrecognized Homeric theme, the "belted hero," and argues for its lasting historical, literary, and archaeological significance. The belted hero fuses king, warrior, charioteer, and athlete into a supreme image of political power. The special "heroic warrior's belts" (zosteres) worn by Agamemnon, Menelaos, and Nestor served as unimpeachable visual emblems of their exalted positions of rank. The feminine counterpart, or zone, presents the woman as superior in the competitive arena of love. Bennett shows that the belted hero represented an ideology attractive to wealthy landowners, their oikoi, and inter-family connections. He suggests that the communal spirit of the hoplite phalanx attempted to appropriate the belted hero ideal, even while undermining its ethos of personal honor. Bennett also makes several important iconographic interpretations that provide fundamentally new insights into early Greek oral epic compositional techniques, conceptions of time, and cosmological structure. Belted Heroes and Bound Women will be of interest to scholars and students of early Greek art, history, or literature.

Reviews

. . . a boldly original work, employing meticulous archaeology and philology as it explores warrior-belts and their representation in Homeric poetry . . . an exciting vision of the interplay between text and object in early Greece. -- Richard P. Martin, Stanford University
Not since Alice mistook Humpty Dumpty's cravat for a belt has there been a discussion of waistbands as imaginative as this. It goes on to construct a set of extraordinary theories about the meaning of their decoration and the symbolism of belt-wearing in early Greece. * Classical Review *
. . . tightly written and lucidly presented . . . -- Joanne Milani, The Tampa Tribune

Author Bio

Michael J. Bennett is Senior Curator of Classical Art at the Tampa Museum of Art and Associate Professor of Art History at Eckerd College.