Paradise Earned: The Bacchic-Orphic Gold Lamellae of Crete

by Yannis Tzifopoulos

This is a study of the twelve small gold lamellae from Crete that were tokens for entrance into a golden the deceased who were buried or cremated with them believed that they had 'earned Paradise.' The lamellae are placed within the context of a small corpus of similar texts, and published with extensive commentary on their topography, lettering and engraving, dialect and orthography, meter, chronology, and usage. The texts reveal a hieros logos whose poetics and rituals are not much different from Homeric rhapsodizing and prophetic discourses. Cretan contexts, both literary and archaeological, are also brought to bear on these incised objects and on the burial custom involved. Finally, this work adduces parallels to the texts on the lamellae from the Byzantine period and modern Greece to illuminate the everlasting and persistent human quest for 'earning Paradise.'

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2007

About the author

Yannis Z. Tzifopoulos studied Classics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (BA 1983), The Ohio State University (MA 1985), New York University (1985-86) and The Ohio State University (PhD 1991). He taught at the University of Crete (1994-2007), and since 2007 he teaches Greek Literature and Epigraphy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
His research interests include Greek and Latin Epigraphy, historiography, iambos and Greek comedy, Sophocles, Pausanias and the second sophistic, Greek, Latin, and Modern Greek paroemiology and folklore