Herodotus in Context

Herodotus in Context

Author: Rosalind Thomas

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780521012416

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An examination of Herodotus' Histories in the context of the intellectual developments of his time.


States of Memory

States of Memory

Author: David C. Yates

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-05-29

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0190673567

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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.


The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World, Volume II

The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World, Volume II

Author: ROBIN. OSBORNE

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-07-21

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0197644422

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This book introduces the history and archaeology of ancient Athens in the period from 800-500 BCE. Following the standard arrangement of the Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World series, author Robin Osborne deals successively with the sources; environmental setting; material culture (settlement pattern, burial customs, ceramic production); political, legal, and diplomatic history; economy and demography; social and religious customs; and cultural history (including history of sculpture) of archaic Athens. He provides not only a full and up-to-date guide to all these various aspects of Athenian history and archaeology, but also an integrated history which shows how all the different aspects intersect. Osborne guides the reader through an exciting story of the way in which the territory of Attica was re-occupied after the collapse of Bronze Age civilization, how Athens emerged as the dominant settlement, how the claims of family, place, and wealth were played out against one another, and how the Athenians came to place themselves both in relation to the wider Greek world and in relation to the gods. The account is illustrated with abundant maps and halftone images that bring the world of Athens to life. The political and cultural achievements of classical Athens (democracy, tragedy, the Parthenon and its sculpture) rested upon the foundations created in the archaic period, but Osborne shows that archaic Athens did not merely provide foundations for what came later but offered a fascinating history and culture of its own.


Intentional History

Intentional History

Author: Lin Foxhall

Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783515096836

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The contributions assembled in this volume study the social function and functioning of notions and ideas about the past held by groups and individuals, with a special focus on ancient Greece but including comparative contributions on early China and on the function of the classical past in modern European culture. Special attention is devoted to the past as a foundation for collective identities and to the ways in which the goals and needs of specific groups impacted its representation and transmission. Contributions range in time from the archaic age to the Roman Empire, covering aspects such as the representation of the past in visual arts, the function of myth and its representation in literary and visual genres, the relationship of historiography to social memory, and the way that the past features in Greek religion. Monuments, literary texts, and inscriptions are investigated in order to reconstruct the rich texture of Greek social memory and its development over time.


The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World

The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World

Author: Paul Cartledge

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-04-23

Total Pages: 657

ISBN-13: 0199383618

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The ancient Greek world consisted of approximately 1,000 autonomous polities scattered across the Mediterranean basin and was remarkable for both its diversity and its uniformity. As Greeks dispersed throughout the Mediterranean, the different environmental and human ecosystems they encountered created important differences among widely scattered settlements: each Greek community developed its own unique set of socio-political institutions and social practices. Nonetheless, despite their dispersal and diversity, Greek communities were bound together by a network of commercial, cultural, diplomatic, and military ties and shared important commonalities, most notably language and religion. The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World, a collaborative effort by more than forty eminent scholars, offers twenty-one detailed and comprehensive studies of key sites from across the Greek world in the period between c. 750 and c. 480 BCE. During that period, Greeks confronted a series of demographic, political, social, and economic challenges and generated an array of responses that transformed the ways in which they lived, worked, and interacted. Much of what is now seen as distinctive about Greek culture--such as democracy, stone temples, and nude athletics--first developed during the Archaic period. The series is organized alphabetically by polis. Volume I contains detailed and up-to-date studies of Argos, Chalcis and Eretria, Chios-Lesbos-Samos, and Corcyra. Together with the other volumes in the series, the Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World offers a new and unique resource for the study of ancient Greece that will transform how we understand a crucial era in antiquity.


The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece

The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece

Author: Carol Atack

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780367205300

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This book examines how ancient authors explored ideas of kingship as a political role fundamental to the construction of civic unity, the use of kingship stories to explain the past and present unity of the polis and the distinctive function or status attributed to kings in such accounts. It explores the notion of kingship offered by historians such as Herodotus, as well as dramatists writing for the Athenian stage, paying particular attention to dramatic depictions of the unique capabilities of Theseus in uniting the city in the figure of the 'democratic king'. It also discusses kingship in Greek philosophy: the Socratics' identification of an 'art of kingship', and Xenophon and Isocrates' model of 'virtue monarchy'. In turn, these allow a rereading of explorations of kingship and excellence in Plato's later political thought, seen as a critique of these models, and also in Aristotle's account of total kingship or pambasileia, treated here as a counterfactual device developed to explore the epistemic benefits of democracy. This book offers a fascinating insight into the institution of monarchy in classical Greek thought and society, both for those working on Greek philosophy and politics, and also for students of the history of political thought.


Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse

Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse

Author: Bernd Steinbock

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 0472118323

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Examining the role of Athenian social memory in understanding the political climate in fourth-century Athens


Polis

Polis

Author: John Ma

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-06-04

Total Pages: 736

ISBN-13: 0691155380

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"The polis, the dominant political form around which ancient Greeks structured their lives and activities, is perhaps their most fundamental creation and enduring legacy. It was a highly successful form of social organization in which Greek culture thrived, including architecture, literature, and philosophy. In this book, ancient historian John Ma offers a new history of the polis from its origins in the Early Iron Age through its eclipse in Late Antiquity. He aims to answer a few big questions about it-Why did it emerge? What needs did it fulfill? How did it work? In addition, it is often assumed that the polis, along with the concomitant values of democracy and freedom, came to an end with the Classical period. Taking a contrary view, Ma explores how it endured under imperial control (the Persian Achaimenids, the Hellenistic kings, the Roman Empire), as well as why and how it eventually ended. In addressing these questions, Ma examines not only the most well-known ancient city-states like Sparta and Athens but also many lesser-known ones. He shows how complex the relations of power, access, and membership between the city, the territory, and the members of the polis were. Ma also examines the polis's significance as a social form and looks to the people who constitute the polis, from free adult men-stakeholders in institutional power, slaveowners, or heads of households-and elites to women, foreigners, and enslaved peoples, however disempowered. He draws on recent work on gender and slavery to evaluate the place of domination and violence in the polis. In doing so, Ma shows how the composition of the citizen body is both a political and social issue. The powerful combination of central political ideas and conflict around the issues of autonomy and social power led, Ma argues, to a "great convergence" of polis forms, producing a relatively uniform, stable organism, centred on communitarian, democratic forms and bargains between the community and its elites. This convergence led to the diffusion and harmonization of polis forms, both within and beyond the Aegean, and which allowed them to endure for almost a thousand years with an even longer legacy"--


A Cultural History of Democracy in Antiquity

A Cultural History of Democracy in Antiquity

Author: Paul Cartledge

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1350284335

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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.