Luxury and power av James Fraser

449,-

Kjøp

An eye-opening publication that contrasts perceptions of luxury ¿ together with its positive and negative connotations ¿ in imperial Persia, democratic Athens and the Hellenistic world between 600 and 200 BCE. `Luxuriously illustrated¿ ¿ Asian Review of Books Luxurious objects are celebrated for their exoticism, rarity and style, but also disparaged as indulgent, extravagant and corrupt. The ancient origins of these attitudes emerged at the boundary between the imperial Persian and democratic Athenian Greek worlds. Luxury was at the centre of the royal Persian court and behaviours of ostentatious display rippled through the imperial provinces, whose elite classes emulated luxury objects in lesser materials. But luxury is contrastingly depicted through Athenian eyes ¿ within the philosophical context of early democratic codes and the historical context of the Greco-Persian Wars, which suddenly and spectacularly brought eastern luxuries into the imagination of the Athenian populace for t