Download or read book Genealogies of Ancestral Fault written by Renaud Gagné and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 1564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Homer to Proclus, the idea that delayed divine punishment can strike at descendants for the crimes of their forebears has continued to play a central role in Greek culture. This is what I refer to as ancestral fault in the following study. The idea of ancestral fault was a cornerstone of such fundamental Greek social institutions as the oath and the curse, for instance, and for centuries it remained a key element in the cultural memory and the ritual life of the polis. It played an important role in early epic, lyric, iambic, and elegiac poetry, in tragedy and historiography, medical literature, Classical and Hellenistic philosophy, writings of the Second Sophistic, and Neoplatonic teaching. In large part as a consequence of this abundance of material, ancestral fault has exercised a deep fascination in the work of modern classical scholarship. There has, however, been no exhaustive study on the topic since 1904.