The Gardens of Adonis. Spices in Greek mythology. Transl. from the French by Janet Lloyd. With an introduction by J.-P. Vernant.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - A very good and clean copy. - Rich with implications for the history of sexuality, gender issues, and patterns of Hellenic literary imagining, Marcel Detienne's landmark book, first published in 1972, recast long-standing ideas about the fertility myth of Adonis. The author challenges Sir James Frazer's thesis that the vegetation god Adonis�whose premature death was mourned by women and whose resurrection marked a joyous occasion�represented the annual cycle of growth and decay in agriculture. Using the analytic tools of structuralism, Detienne shows instead that the festivals of Adonis depict a seductive but impotent and fruitless deity�whose physical ineptitude led to his death in a boar hunt, after which his body was found in a lettuce patch. Contrasting the festivals of Adonis with the solemn ones dedicated to Demeter, the goddess of grain, he reveals the former as a parody and negation of the institution of marriage. Detienne considers the short-lived gardens that Athenian women planted in mockery for Adonis's festival, and explores the function of such vegetal matter as spices, mint, myrrh, cereal, and wet plants in religious practice and in a wide selection of myths. His inquiry exposes, among many things, the ways in which women of various marital statuses were regarded and attitudes toward sexual activity ranging from "perverse" acts to marital relations. - Contents: The perfumes of Arabia -- The Spice Ox -- From Myrrh to Lettuce -- The Misfortunes of Mint -- The Seed of Adonis -- The lettuce of Pythagoras. - Wikipedia: Marcel Detienne (October 11, 1935 in Li�, Belgium � March 21, 2019 in Nemours, France) was a Belgian historian and specialist in the study of ancient Greece. He was a Professor at The Johns Hopkins University, where he held the Basil L. Gildersleeve chair in Classics. Along with Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Detienne has sought to apply an anthropological approach, informed by the structuralism of Claude L�-Strauss, to classical and archaic Greece. ISBN 0691001049