This book provides a fascinating glimpse into the daily life of ancient Athens during the reign of Pericles. It discusses various aspects of Athenian society, including politics, culture, and economics. The book compares ancient and modern democracies and highlights the similarities and differences. It's a valuable resource for historians, political scientists, and anyone interested in ancient Greece. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
For over a century, scholars have recognized an "orientalizing period" in the history of early Greek art, in which Greek artisans fashioned works of art under the stimulus of Near Eastern imports or resident foreign artisans. Previous studies have emphasized the role of Greek and Phoenician traders in bringing about these contacts with the civilizations of the ancient Near East and Egypt, debating their duration or intensity in the Greek world. In this study, Ann Gunter interrogates the categories of "Greek" and "Oriental" as problematic and shifts emphasis to modes of contact and cultural transfers within a broader regional setting. Her provocative study places Greek encounters with the Near East and Egypt in the context of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which by the 8th and 7th centuries BCE extended from southern Turkey to western Iran. Using an expanded array of archaeological and textual sources, she argues that crucial aspects of the identity and meaning of foreign works of art were constructed through circumstances of transfer, ownership, and display.
"Kagan, faithful to his lifelong fascination with Pericles . . . gives us an accessible and invaluable account of his life and deeds".--Allan Bloom, author of "The Closing of the American Mind".
The challenge of Periclean Athens to the students of civilizations is unmistakable: the city and its empire reached a level of culture and well-being scarcely paralleled in the history of man elsewhere. And like the characters in a Greek tragedy, the city and its leaders and citizens were busy in their time of glory making provision for their own tragic decline. "I have tried to suggest in general terms," says the author, "the meaning of Periclean Athens, addressing my interpretation to laymen. . . With the increasing mass of specialized research on ancient Athens, it is imperative to catch a general notion of the significance of the whole. . . The result is a picture of a complex society, as any great civilization is bound to be, with its magnificent achievements and its faults." This first volume in The Centers of Civilization Series does indeed give a clear picture of Athenian civilization, its literature, philosophy, and political and judicial writing; its painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and drama; and even the arts of war. Above all, the book suggests to modern readers the supreme importance of decision in all of man's affairs, and the frightful consequences of wrong decision, once it is made.