Download or read book Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens written by Jon Hesk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the ways in which classical Athenian texts represent and evaluate the morality of deception. It is particularly concerned with the way in which the telling of lies was a problem for the world's first democracy and compares this problem with the modern Western situation. There are major sections on Greek tragedy, comedy, oratory, historiography and philosophy.
Download or read book Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens written by Jon Hesk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-23 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 2000, is a full-length study of the representation of deceit and lies in classical Athens. Dr Hesk traces the ways in which Athenian drama, democratic oratory and elite prose-writing construct and theorize a relationship between dishonesty and civic identity. He focuses on the ideology of military trickery, notions of the 'noble lie' and the developing associations of rhetorical language with deceptive communication. Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens combines close analysis of Athenian texts with lively critiques of modern theorists and classical scholars. Athenian democratic culture was crucially informed by a nuanced, anxious and dynamic discourse on the problems and opportunities which deception presented for its citizenry. Mobilizing comparisons with twentieth-century democracies, the author argues that Athenian literature made deception a fundamental concern for democratic citizenship. This ancient discourse on lying highlights the dangers of modern resignation and postmodern complacency concerning the politics and morality of deception.
Download or read book The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy written by Demetra Kasimis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that immigration politics is a central - but overlooked - object of inquiry in the democratic thought of classical Athens. Thinkers criticized democracy's strategic investments in nativism, the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the precarious membership that a blood-based order effects for those eligible and ineligible to claim it.
Download or read book Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens written by Edwin Carawan and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive book on judicial review in Athens from the 5th through the 4th centuries BCE. The power of the court to overturn a law or decree—called judicial review—is a critical feature of modern democracies. Contemporary American judges, for example, determine what is consistent with the Constitution, though this practice is often criticized for giving unelected officials the power to strike down laws enacted by the people's representatives. This principle was actually developed more than two thousand years ago in the ancient democracy at Athens. In Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens, Edwin Carawan reassesses the accumulated evidence to construct a new model of how Athenians made law in the time of Plato and Aristotle, while examining how the courts controlled that process. Athenian juries, Carawan explains, were manned by many hundreds of ordinary citizens rather than a judicial elite. Nonetheless, in the 1890s, American apologists found vindication for judicial review in the ancient precedent. They believed that Athenian judges decided the fate of laws and decrees legalistically, focusing on fundamental text, because the speeches that survive from antiquity often involve close scrutiny of statutes attributed to lawgivers such as Solon, much as a modern appellate judge might resort to the wording of the Framers. Carawan argues that inscriptions, speeches, and fragments of lost histories make clear that text-based constitutionalism was not so compelling as the ethos of the community. Carawan explores how the judicial review process changed over time. From the restoration of democracy down to its last decades, the Athenians made significant reforms in their method of legislation, first to expedite a cumbersome process, then to revive the more rigorous safeguards. Jury selection adapted accordingly: the procedure was recast to better represent the polis, and packing the court was thwarted by a complicated lottery. But even as the system evolved, the debate remained much the same: laws and decrees were measured by a standard crafted in the image of the people. Offering a comprehensive account of the ancient origins of an important political institution through philological methods, rhetorical analysis of ancient arguments, and comparisons between models of judicial review in ancient Greece and the modern United States, Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens is an innovative study of ancient Greek law and democracy.
Download or read book Reproducing Athens written by Susan Lape and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.
Download or read book Ancient Greek History and Contemporary Social Science written by Mirko Canevaro and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-06 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length academic study to deal exclusively with female stardom in British cinema.
Download or read book Popular Culture in the Ancient World written by Lucy Grig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book adopts a new approach to the classical world by focusing on ancient popular culture.
Download or read book Numbers and Numeracy in the Greek Polis written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a wide-ranging study of numbers as a social and cultural phenomenon in ancient Greece, revealing both the instrumentality of numbers to polis life and the complex cultural meanings inherent in their use.
Download or read book Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens written by Arlene W. Saxonhouse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-19 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illuminates the distinctive character of our modern understanding of the basis and value of free speech by contrasting it with the very different form of free speech that was practised by the ancient Athenians in their democratic regime. Free speech in the ancient democracy was not a protected right but an expression of the freedom from hierarchy, awe, reverence and shame. It was thus an essential ingredient of the egalitarianism of that regime. That freedom was challenged by the consequences of the rejection of shame (aidos) which had served as a cohesive force within the polity. Through readings of Socrates's trial, Greek tragedy and comedy, Thucydides's History, and Plato's Protagoras this volume explores the paradoxical connections between free speech, democracy, shame, and Socratic philosophy and Thucydidean history as practices of uncovering.
Download or read book Embattled written by Emily Katz Anhalt and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive exploration of the way Greek myths empower us to defeat tyranny. As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian tragedies exposed the tyrannical potential of individuals and groups large and small. These stories identified abuses of power as self-defeating. They initiated and fostered a movement away from despotism and toward broader forms of political participation. Following her highly praised book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, the classicist Emily Katz Anhalt retells tales from key ancient Greek texts and proceeds to interpret the important message they hold for us today. As she reveals, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and Sophocles's Antigone encourage us—as they encouraged the ancient Greeks—to take responsibility for our own choices and their consequences. These stories emphasize the responsibilities that come with power (any power, whether derived from birth, wealth, personal talents, or numerical advantage), reminding us that the powerful and the powerless alike have obligations to each other. They assist us in restraining destructive passions and balancing tribal allegiances with civic responsibilities. They empower us to resist the tyrannical impulses not only of others but also in ourselves. In an era of political polarization, Embattled demonstrates that if we seek to eradicate tyranny in all its toxic forms, ancient Greek epics and tragedies can point the way.
Download or read book Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy written by Simon Goldhill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-06-13 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1999 book discusses the ways performance is central to the practice and ideology of Athenian democracy.
Download or read book Private and Public Lies written by Andrew J. Turner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graeco-Roman literary works, historiography, and even the reporting of rumours were couched as if they came in response to an insatiable desire by ordinary citizens to know everything about the lives of their leaders, and to hold them to account, at some level, for their abuse of constitutional powers for personal ends. Ancient writers were equally fascinated with how these same individuals used deceit as a powerful tool to disguise private and public reality. The chapters in this collection examine the themes of despotism and deceit from both historical and literary perspectives, over a range of historical periods including classical Athens, the Hellenistic kingdoms, late republican and early imperial Rome, late antiquity, and Byzantium.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens written by Jenifer Neils and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive introduction to ancient Athens, its topography, monuments, inhabitants, cultural institutions, religious rituals, and politics. Drawing from the newest scholarship on the city, this volume examines how the city was planned, how it functioned, and how it was transformed from a democratic polis into a Roman urbs.
Download or read book Popular Tyranny written by Kathryn A. Morgan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature of authority and rulership was a central concern in ancient Greece, where the figure of the king or tyrant and the sovereignty associated with him remained a powerful focus of political and philosophical debate even as Classical Athens developed the world's first democracy. This collection of essays examines the extraordinary role that the concept of tyranny played in the cultural and political imagination of Archaic and Classical Greece through the interdisciplinary perspectives provided by internationally known archaeologists, literary critics, and historians. The book ranges historically from the Bronze and early Iron Age to the political theorists and commentators of the middle of the fourth century B.C. and generically across tragedy, comedy, historiography, and philosophy. While offering individual and sometimes differing perspectives, the essays tackle several common themes: the construction of authority and of constitutional models, the importance of religion and ritual, the crucial role of wealth, and the autonomy of the individual. Moreover, the essays with an Athenian focus shed new light on the vexed question of whether it was possible for Athenians to think of themselves as tyrannical in any way. As a whole, the collection presents a nuanced survey of how competing ideologies and desires, operating through the complex associations of the image of tyranny, struggled for predominance in ancient cities and their citizens.
Download or read book Poet and Orator written by Andreas Markantonatos and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multiauthored volume, as well as bringing into clearer focus the notion of drama and oratory as important media of public inquiry and critique, aims to generate significant attention to the unified intentions of the dramatist and the orator to establish favourable conditions of internal stability in democratic Athens. We hope that readers both enjoy and find valuable their engagement with these ideas and beliefs regarding the indissoluble bond between oratorical expertise and dramatic artistry. This exciting collection of studies by worldwide acclaimed classicists and acute younger Hellenists is envisaged as part of the general effort, almost unanimously acknowledged as valid and productive, to explore the impact of formalized speech in particular and craftsmanship rhetoric in general upon Attic drama as a moral and educational force in the Athenian city-state. Both poet and orator seek to deepen the central tensions of their work and to enlarge the main themes of their texts to even broader terms by investing in the art of rhetoric, whilst at the same time, through a skillful handling of events, evaluating the past and establishing standards or ideology.
Download or read book Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective written by Richard Bourke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first collaborative volume to explore popular sovereignty, a pivotal concept in the history of political thought.
