Author Description

This interdisciplinary volume sheds light on the fascination with origins from different perspectives. The international team of contributors investigate how the power of origins is employed in historiography, in literature ancient and modern, in religious contexts, in philosophy, and in political debate. What is it that makes origins such a fascinating form of discourse? The contributions explore, from very different angles, how aetiology works as a creative process that collapses temporal categories (present/past) and forges the past in order to legitimise the present, ultimately establishing cultural identity. Other topics include the interaction of time and space in the discourse of origins and the different ways in which aetia can bolster or undermine political power, of an elite or of the people. Origins, it is shown, are a multi-faceted and fluid form of discourse: inherent in them is the possibility of constantly re-reading and re-shaping the past, and thus they are also a site of competition and correction. Attention is also paid to the functioning of origins in different media, both literary and iconographical. It becomes clear that the appeal to origins, a highly versatile mode of discourse that can express awide range of meanings, is a phenomenon that links modernity with Antiquity.