Search Results

After the death of Alexander the Great of Macedon, a series of monuments depicting him hunting a lion along with one or more companions began to appear on the Greek mainland. In Asia during that time, lions were symbols of kingship. This chapter discusses the history, meaning, and purpose of lion hunts in relation to the Successors' power struggles in the last decades of the 4th century. It argues that the lion-hunt iconography was borrowed from the east to emphasise the participants' intimacy with the king and that it was used by the Successors in their propaganda war to confer legitimacy on their aspirations to rule Alexander's empire. The echo of Alexander's royal hunts, especially of the Vergina fresco with shades of Dionysus, lingers in the hunting iconography. The controversy surrounding Hephaestion's funeral pyre, described by Diodorus, is also discussed.

At the end of Thebaid 5, the Nemean infant Opheltes is tragically killed by a snake; his funeral rites and games are the focus of Thebaid 6. This article examines the thematic conflicts that arise as the Argives struggle to give Opheltes’ death an ideological meaning that various forces (religious, divine, intertextual, thematic) resist. The Argives’ attempt to control the ‘meaning’ of Opheltes’ death is undermined by: 1) the opposition of the Argive perspective to that of the Nemean king and queen Lycurgus and Eurydice, and that of the Lemnian slave Hypsipyle; 2) the problematic of thefuneral pyres constructed and the rites performed; and 3) Jupiter’s frustration with the Argives’ slow march to Thebes. In sum, the Argives’ actions are riddled with the problems bedeviling their overall war with Thebes.

This chapter examines this transformation of selves and others through the controversial ending of the Padm ā vat, which thematizes the conquest of Chittaur by 'Alāuddīn Khaljī and the death of the lovely queen Padminī or Padmāvatī on a funeral pyre. Jāyasī brings his story to a conclusion by invoking the stereotypic narratives of the Turkish conquest of Hindustan, yet he valorizes the Sufis as the brave Rajput defenders of the land. In the conflict of might versus right, the women are sacrificed on a funeral pyre, a symbol for mystical annihilation. The chapter compares Jāyasī's ending with prior narratives of the conquest of India: a story of the Scythian conquest of India popular among Jains in the sultanate period, a Persian verse romance by Amīr Khusrau, and an Apabhramś a text from one of the Rajput kingdoms that fell to the superior cavalry and military might of the Turkish army of Delhi. These texts interweave conquest and romance, spelling out a wider cultural politics in which possession, rejection, or sacrifice of women marked the negotiations of opposed ideologies and notions of male honor.

This chapter focuses on the funerary rite of cremation. Cremation was first introduced during a time came when no crypt would be safe from desecration by entrepreneurs whose escapades yielded treasure which served as capital invested in new social orders. The original funeral pyre thus burned—and preserved—the complete contents of a mummy’s tomb. Benjamin and Derrida also brought into focus, the arts of magnification which cover the central stations of the mourning process—idealization, spiritualization, and dematerialization—by always investing the otherwise inconspicuous elements they enlarge with a surfeit of meaning. In Stifter’s “Condor”, a “ghostly” contraption of “shrouds” emanates from the funeral pyre of the magnifier.