Download or read book The Eyesore of Aigina written by Katerina Meidani and published by Classical Press of Wales. This book was released on 2016-12-31 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our ideas about ancient Athens are constructed very largely from the writings of Athenian authors. Relatively rare are our sources for how others -- whether Greeks, Asiatics or Romans -- saw Athens from the outside. Yet we can see that not only did many across the Mediterranean world resist the political power of Athens in countless wars over several centuries, but that there existed an intriguing variety of anti-Athenian ideologies. The 12 new studies in this volume, by a distinguished international cast, trace negative thinking about Athens from the late archaic period to Roman times. They challenge the easy modern supposition that Athens was generally seen as the cultural emblem of Greece, and cast light on the thinking of ancient peoples who - nowadays - tend to exist in Athens' shadow.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Democracy in Antiquity written by Paul Cartledge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume surveys democracy broadly as a cultural phenomenon operating in different ways across a very wide range of ancient societies throughout Antiquity. It examines the experiences of those living in democratic communities and considers how ancient practices of democracy differ from our own. The origins of democracy can be traced in a general way to the earliest civilizations, beginning with the early urban societies of the Middle East, and can be seen in cities and communities across the Mediterranean world and Asia. In classical Athens, male citizens enjoyed full participation in the political life of the city and a flourishing democratic culture, as explored in detail in this volume. In other times and places democratic features were absent from the formal structures of regimes, but could still be found in the participatory structures of local social institutions. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and beyond the polis. These ten different approaches to democracy in Antiquity add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Download or read book The Achaean Federation in Ancient Greece written by Emmanouil M. L. Economou and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses ancient Greek federalism by focusing on one of the most organised and advanced Greek federal states, the Achaean Federation Sympoliteia. Unlike earlier studies that mainly focused on its political history, this book adopts an interdisciplinary approach, analysing aspects of the economic organization and institutions, and the political economy of the Achaean Federation, and combining these findings with political history. It also discusses the strategic choices made by significant historical figures such as generals Aratos and Philopoemen. The analysis of the Achaean Federation verifies the intertemporal federal axiom, which states that the success and viability of federal experiment is achieved when the benefits of participation for the member-states exceed the costs of conferring national sovereignty on supranational federal authorities. The book further argues that the Achaeans developed a system of sophisticated direct democratic procedures in decision-making on federal matters, as well as significant and highly sophisticated (for the era) economic institutions and federal practices, in order to achieve bonds of trust and legitimacy regarding their innovative federal structure. These practices included, among others, the creation of free market type economic institutions, a monetary union, federal budget, provision of public goods and a common defense and security policy for all the Achaean city-state members. Lastly, the book relates these findings to ideas on how the Achaean Federation would have dealt with a series of current global issues, such as European Union integration and problems such as Euroscepticism, Brexit and immigration.

Download or read book Athens and Boiotia written by Roy van Wijk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-25 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Were Athenians and Boiotians natural enemies in the Archaic and Classical period? The scholarly consensus is yes. Roy van Wijk, however, re-evaluates this commonly held assumption and shows that, far from perpetually hostile, their relationship was distinctive and complex. Moving between diplomatic normative behaviour, commemorative practice and the lived experience in the borderlands, he offers a close analysis of literary sources, combined with recent archaeological and epigraphic material, to reveal an aspect to neighbourly relations that has hitherto escaped attention. He argues that case studies such as the Mazi plain and Oropos show that territorial disputes were not a mainstay in diplomatic interactions and that commemorative practices in Panhellenic and local sanctuaries do not reflect an innate desire to castigate the neighbour. The book breaks new ground by reconstructing a more positive and polyvalent appreciation of neighbourly relations based on the local lived experience. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Download or read book Athens and Sparta written by Anton Powell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 827 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Athens and Sparta is an essential handbook to the study of fifth century Greek history and society. It encourages the reader to engage critically with the evidence, presenting a wide selection of ancient source material along with clear analysis and narrative. This fully revised and updated second edition contains a new appendix on the controversy over the truthfulness of Thucydides, and fresh material on the representation of Athenian women in vase painting.

Download or read book Excursions in Epichoric History written by Thomas J. Figueira and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1993 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a test case for the study of epichoric Greek history (that not centered on Athens and Sparta), Thomas Figueira deploys a range of disciplinary methodologies to explore the political history of the ancient island city-state of Aigina, down to the Roman conquest of Greece. Excursions in Epichoric History combines previously published articles, revised and updated, and new essays to provide a set of alternative perspectives on the course of Greek foreign policy and institutional history.

Download or read book The Demades Papyrus P Berol inv 13045 written by Davide Amendola and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-10-03 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the significance of its contents, the so-called Demades papyrus (P.Berol. inv. 13045) has received scarce scholarly attention since the 1923 editio princeps by Karl Kunst. This unique late second-century BCE document of almost 430 lines was found in the Egyptian chora, but it is supposed to have been written in Alexandria, where it probably served as a textbook for the highest level of rhetorical education. Besides shedding new light on its find circumstances and physical aspects, the volume offers a full re-edition and commentary of the two adespota texts contained in it, namely a eulogy of the Lagid monarchy and a historical work consisting of a dialogue between Demades and his prosecutor in the trial of 319 BCE at the court of Pella. The aim of the accompanying introduction is to address the question of the origin, nature and purpose of such fragments and of the collection itself, as well as to show to what extent the papyrus contributes to a better understanding of some of the main historical events of the early Hellenistic period. This book is thus meant to fill a significant gap in Classical scholarship, all the more so as a close investigation of most of the topics dealt with therein has hitherto been lacking.

Download or read book States of Memory written by David C. Yates and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Persian War was one of the most significant events in ancient history. It halted Persia's westward expansion, inspired the Golden Age of Greece, and propelled Athens to the heights of power. From the end of the war almost to the end of antiquity, the Greeks and later the Romans recalled the battles and heroes of this war with unabated zeal. The resulting monuments and narratives have long been used to reconstruct the history of the war itself, but they have only recently begun to be used to explore how the conflict was remembered over time. States of Memory focuses on the initial recollection of the war in the classical period down to the Lamian War (480-322 BCE). Drawing together recent work on memory theory and a wide range of ancient evidence, Yates argues that the Greek memory of the war was deeply divided from the outset. Despite the panhellenic scope of the conflict, the Greeks very rarely recalled the war as Greeks. Instead they presented themselves as members of their respective city-states. What emerged was a tangled web of idiosyncratic stories about the Persian War that competed with each other fiercely throughout the classical period. It was not until Philip of Macedonia and Alexander the Great dealt a devastating blow to the very notion of the independent city-state at the battle of Chaeronea that anything like a unified memory of the Persian War came to dominate the tradition.

Download or read book The Power of Individual and Community in Ancient Athens and Beyond written by Zosia Archibald and published by Classical Press of Wales. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pioneering ideas of John Kenyon Davies, one of the most significant Ancient Historians of the past half century, are celebrated in this collection of essays. A distinguished cast of contributors, who include Alain Bresson, Nick Fisher, Edward Harris, John Prag, Robin Osborne, and Sally Humphreys, focus tightly on the nexus of socio-political and economic problems that have preoccupied Davies since the publication of his defining work Athenian Propertied Families in 1971. The scope of Davies' interest has ranged widely in conceptual, and chronological, as well as geographical terms, and the essays here reflect many of his long-term concerns with the writing of Greek history, its methods and materials.

Download or read book Athenian Ostracism and Its Original Purpose written by Marek Węcowski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ostracism is by far the most emblematic institution of ancient Athenian democracy. This volume offers a reassessment of recently found ostraka (or potsherds, on which the names of the 'candidates' for exile were inscribed by citizens) from several Greek cities outside Athens, a thorough reconstruction of the history and of the procedure of ostracism in Athens, and a comprehensive account of the political circumstances of the introduction of the law on ostracism by Cleisthenes in 508/507 BCE. Marek Węcowski's original study focuses not only on the final stage, the day of the vote, but on the entire operation and procedure of ostracisation. Tracing the logic of the political play in Athens between the opening and final stages of ostracism, Węcowski argues that Athenian ostracism was a mechanism devised to impose compromise on the main players in Athenian political life, thereby avoiding the punishment of political elites by exile of leading politicians resulting from unpredictable votes by the citizenry. To support this hypothesis, Węcowski turns to the theory of the 'evolution of cooperation' as formulated by the American mathematician and political scientist Robert Axelrod based on the iterated prisoner's dilemma in game theory, applied as a probabilistic analogy to the dynamics of Athenian political life under democracy.

Download or read book The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines written by Guy Westwood and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-04-22 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In democratic Athens, mass citizen audiences - whether in the lawcourts, or in the political Assembly and Council, or when gathered for formal civic occasions - frequently heard politicians and litigants discussing the city's past, and manipulating it for persuasive ends. The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines explores how these dynamics worked in practice, taking two prominent mid-fourth-century politicians (and bitter adversaries) as focal points. While most recent scholarly treatments of how the Athenians recalled their past concentrate on collective processes, this work looks instead at the rhetorical strategies devised by individual orators, examining what it meant for Demosthenes or Aeschines to present particular 'historical' examples, arguments, and illustrations in particular contexts. It argues that discussing the Athenian past - and therefore discussing a core aspect of Athenian identity itself - offered Demosthenes and Aeschines, among others, an effective and versatile means both of building and highlighting their own credibility, authority, and commitment to the democracy and its values, and of competing with their rivals, whose own versions and handling of the past they could challenge and undermine as a symbolic attack on those rivals' wider competence. Recourse to versions of the past also offered orators a way of reflecting on a troubled contemporary geopolitical landscape in which Athens first confronted the enterprising Philip II of Macedon and then coped with Macedonian hegemony. The work covers the full range of Demosthenes' and Aeschines' surviving public speeches, and the extended opening chapter includes synoptic surveys of key individual topics which feed into the main discussion.

Download or read book Athens and the Cyclades written by Brian Rutishauser and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the history and economy of the Cyclades during the late sixth to late fourth centuries BC. While certain aspects of geography in the Cyclades remained constant, the islands were able to adapt to changing conditions and hegemony, imposed from outside the region, in order to increase their levels of economic prosperity.

Download or read book Hegemonic Finances written by Thomas J. Figueira and published by Classical Press of Wales. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research into the mechanisms and the morality of Athenian hegemony is now perhaps livelier than ever. Of particular importance are the methods by which Athens drew money from the Aegean world with which to fund a vast fleet, to facilitate her own demokratia and to create ambitious public buildings still visible today. This collection of new studies, inspired and guided by an internationally-acknowledged authority on ancient finance, Thomas Figueira, by focusing on how Athens raised finance, sheds light on more familiar questions: How oppressive, or otherwise, was Athens to fellow-Greeks and how did her demands vary over time? Contributors here suggest that Athens may have exercised hegemonic ambitions for longer than usually thought, applying greater experience, and more sensitivity to individual communities.

Download or read book Aegean Interactions written by Christy Constantakopoulou and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third century BC was a particularly troubled period of ancient Greek history, when the Aegean sea became the main stage for power struggles between various royal circles and dynasties, including the Antigonids and the Ptolemies. This volume addresses the history of interaction in the Aegean world during this time by focusing on the island of Delos, which housed one of its most important regional sanctuaries. It draws on contemporary network theory and approaches to regionalism, as well as thorough investigation of the Delian epigraphic and material evidence, to explore how and to what degree the islands of the southern Aegean formed active networks of political, religious, and cultural interaction. Four case studies examine different types of networks on and around Delos, covering the federal organisation of islands into the so-called 'Islanders' League', the participation of Delian and other agents in the processes of monumentalisation of the Delian landscape, the network of honours of the Delian community, and the social dynamics of dedication through the record of dedicants in the Delian inventories. They reveal not only that these kinds of regional interaction in the southern Aegean were pervasive, but also that they had a significant impact on the creation of a regional identity; one that persisted despite the political changes of the age.

Download or read book Localism and the Ancient Greek City State written by Hans Beck and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much like our own time, the ancient Greek world was constantly expanding and becoming more connected to global networks. The landscape was shaped by an ecology of city-states, local formations that were stitched into the wider Mediterranean world. While the local is often seen as less significant than the global stage of politics, religion, and culture, localism, argues historian Hans Beck has had a pervasive influence on communal experience in a world of fast-paced change. Far from existing as outliers, citizens in these communities were deeply concerned with maintaining local identity, commercial freedom, distinct religious cults, and much more. Beyond these cultural identifiers, there lay a deeper concept of the local that guided polis societies in their contact with a rapidly expanding world. Drawing on a staggering range of materials—including texts by both known and obscure writers, numismatics, pottery analysis, and archeological records—Beck develops fine-grained case studies that illustrate the significance of the local experience. Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State builds bridges across disciplines and ideas within the humanities and shows how looking back at the history of Greek localism is important not only in the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, but also in today’s conversations about globalism, networks, and migration.

Download or read book Polis written by John Ma and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive new history of the origins, evolution, and scope of the ancient Greek city-state The Greek polis, or city-state, was a resilient and adaptable political institution founded on the principles of citizenship, freedom, and equality. Emerging around 650 BCE and enduring to 350 CE, it offered a means for collaboration among fellow city-states and social bargaining between a community and its elites—but at what cost? Polis proposes a panoramic account of the ancient Greek city-state, its diverse forms, and enduring characteristics over the span of a millennium. In this landmark book, John Ma provides a new history of the polis, charting its spread and development into a common denominator for hundreds of communities from the Black Sea to North Africa and from the Near East to Italy. He explores its remarkable achievements as a political form offering community, autonomy, prosperity, public goods, and spaces of social justice for its members. He also reminds us that behind the successes of civic ideology and institutions lie entanglements with domination, empire, and enslavement. Ma’s sweeping and multifaceted narrative draws widely on a rich store of historical evidence while weighing in on lively scholarly debates and offering new readings of Aristotle as the great theoretician of the polis. A monumental work of scholarship, Polis transforms our understanding of antiquity while challenging us to grapple with the moral legacy of an idea whose very success centered on the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others.

Download or read book The triumviral period civil war political crisis and socioeconomic transformations written by Pina Polo, Francisco and published by Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nothing from the subsequent Augustan age can be fully explained without understanding the previous Triumviral period (43-31 BC). In this book, twenty experts from nine different countries and nineteen universities examine the Triumviral age not merely as a phase of transition to the Principate but as a proper period with its own dynamics and issues, which were a consequence of the previous years. The volume aims to address a series of underlying structural problems that emerged in that time, such as the legal nature of power attributed to the Triumvirs; changes and continuity in Republican institutions, both in Rome and the provinces of the Empire; the development of the very concept of civil war; the strategies of political communication and propaganda in order to win over public opinion; economic consequences for Rome and Italy, whether caused by the damage from constant wars or, alternatively, resulting from the proscriptions and confiscations carried out by the Triumvirs; and the transformation of Roman-Italian society. All these studies provide a complete, fresh and innovative picture of a key period that signaled the end of the Roman Republic.