Although ancient hope has attracted much scholarly attention in the past, this is the first book-length discussion of the topic. The introduction offers a systematic discussion of the semantics of Greek elpis and Latin spes and addresses the difficult question of whether hope -ancient and modern- is an emotion. On the other hand, the 16 contributions deal with specific aspects of hope in Greek and Latin literature, history and art, including Pindar's poetry, Greek tragedy, Thucydides, Virgil's epic and Tacitus' Historiae. The volume also explores from a historical perspective the hopes of slaves in antiquity, the importance of hope for the enhancement of stereotypes about the barbarians, and the depiction of hope in visual culture, providing thereby a useful tool not only for classicist but also for philosophers, cultural historians and political scientists.
The seventh volume in the Institute of Classical Archaeology's series on the rural countryside (chora) of Metaponto is a study of the Greek sanctuary at Pantanello. The site is the first Greek rural sanctuary in southern Italy that has been fully excavated and exhaustively documented. Its evidence—a massive array of distinctive structural remains and 30,000-plus artifacts and ecofacts—offers unparalleled insights into the development of extra-urban cults in Magna Graecia from the seventh to the fourth centuries BC and the initiation rites that took place within the cults. Of particular interest are the analyses of the well-preserved botanical and faunal material, which present the fullest record yet of Greek rural sacrificial offerings, crops, and the natural environment of southern Italy and the Greek world. Excavations from 1974 to 2008 revealed three major phases of the sanctuary, ranging from the Archaic to Early Hellenistic periods. The structures include a natural spring as the earliest locus of the cult, an artificial stream (collecting basin) for the spring's outflow, Archaic and fourth-century BC structures for ritual dining and other cult activities, tantalizing evidence of a Late Archaic Doric temple atop the hill, and a farmhouse and tile factory that postdate the sanctuary's destruction. The extensive catalogs of material and special studies provide an invaluable opportunity to study the development of Greek material culture between the seventh and third centuries BC, with particular emphasis on votive pottery and figurative terracotta plaques.
The studies presented in the book express the spirit of A. Segal research work and reflect his interest and curiosity in a wide spectrum of Classical archaeology, such as town planning and architecture in the Graeco-Roman world, Roman theatres, Roman temples, Herodian art and architecture, Nabataean art and architecture, architectural decoration, and more.
This is the first ever documented study of the 1,035 identifiable Greek city states (poleis) of the Archaic and Classical periods (c.650-325 BC). Previous studies of the Greek polis have focused on Athens and Sparta, and the result has been a view of Greek society dominated by Sophokles', Plato's, and Demosthenes' view of what the polis was. This study includes descriptions of Athens and Sparta, but its main purpose is to explore the history andorganization of the thousand other city states.The main part of the book is a regionally organized inventory of all identifiable poleis covering the Greek world from Spain to the Caucasus and from the Crimea to Libya. This inventory is the work of 47 specialists, and is divided into 46 chapters, each covering a region. Each chapter contains an account of the region, a list of second-order settlements, and an alphabetically ordered description of the poleis. This description covers such topics as polis status,territory, settlement pattern, urban centre, city walls and monumental architecture, population, military strength, constitution, alliance membership, colonization, coinage, and Panhellenic victors.The first part of the book is a description of the method and principles applied in the construction of the inventory and an analysis of some of the results to be obtained by a comparative study of the 1,035 poleis included in it. The ancient Greek concept of polis is distinguished from the modern term `city state', which historians use to cover many other historic civilizations, from ancient Sumeria to the West African cultures absorbed by the nineteenth-century colonializingpowers. The focus of this project is what the Greeks themselves considered a polis to be.