This volume presents for the first time an in-depth analysis of the origins of Greek euergetism. Derived from the Greek for 'benefactor', 'euergetism' refers to the process whereby citizens and ...foreigners offered voluntary services and donations to the polis that were in turn recognised as benefactions in a formal act of reciprocation. Euergetism is key to our understanding of how city-states negotiated both the internal tensions between mass and elite, and their conflicts with external powers. This study adopts the standpoint of historical anthropology and seeks to identify patterns of behaviour and social practices deeply rooted in Greek society and in the long course of Greek history. It covers more than five hundred years and will appeal to ancient historians and scholars in other fields interested in gift exchange, benefactions, philanthropy, power relationships between mass and elite, and the interplay between public discourse and social praxis.
This book examines the impact of the Roman cultural revolution under Augustus on the Roman province of Greece. It argues that the transformation of Roman Greece into a classicizing 'museum' was a ...specific response of the provincial Greek elites to the cultural politics of the Roman imperial monarchy. Against a background of Roman debates about Greek culture and Roman decadence, Augustus promoted the ideal of a Roman debt to a 'classical' Greece rooted in Europe and morally opposed to a stereotyped Asia. In Greece the regime signalled its admiration for Athens, Sparta, Olympia and Plataea as symbols of these past Greek glories. Cued by the Augustan monarchy, provincial Greek notables expressed their Roman orientation by competitive cultural work (revival of ritual; restoration of buildings) aimed at further emphasising Greece's 'classical' legacy. Reprised by Hadrian, the Augustan construction of 'classical' Greece helped to promote the archaism typifying Greek culture under the principate.
What did citizenship really mean in classical Athens? It is conventionally understood as characterised by holding political office. Since only men could do so, only they were considered to be ...citizens, and the community (polis) has appeared primarily as the scene of men's political actions. However, Athenian law defined citizens not by political office, but by descent. Religion was central to the polis and in this domain, women played prominent public roles. Both men and women were called 'citizens'. On a new reading of the evidence, Josine Blok argues that for the Athenians, their polis was founded on an enduring bond with the gods. Laws anchored the polis' commitments to humans and gods in this bond, transmitted over time to male and female Athenians as equal heirs. All public offices, in various ways and as befitting gender and age, served both the human community and the divine powers protecting Athens.
To comprehend how Greece precipitated such an outsized economic crisis in Europe, we must understand how it developed into a nation in the first place. Enlightenment and Revolution traces the ...ideologies that shaped a Greek-speaking religious community into a modern nation-state--one in which antiliberal forces have exacted a high price.
Notes from the Balkans Green, Sarah F
2016, 2005., 20160926, 2005, 2005-01-01, 20050101, Volume:
20
eBook
Maps and borders notwithstanding, some places are best described as "gaps"--places with repeatedly contested boundaries that are wedged in between other places that have clear boundaries. This book ...explores an iconic example of this in the contemporary Western imagination: the Balkans. Drawing on richly detailed ethnographic research around the Greek-Albanian border, Sarah Green focuses her groundbreaking analysis on the ambiguities of never quite resolving where or what places are. One consequence for some Greek peoples in this border area is a seeming lack of distinction--but in a distinctly "Balkan" way. In gaps (which are never empty), marginality is, in contrast with conventional understandings, not a matter of difference and separation--it is a lack thereof.
Notes from the Balkans represents the first ethnographic approach to exploring "the Balkans" as an ideological concept. Green argues that, rather than representing a tension between "West" and "East," the Balkans makes such oppositions ambiguous. This kind of marginality means that such places and peoples can hardly engage with "multiculturalism." Moreover, the region's ambiguity threatens clear, modernist distinctions. The violence so closely associated with the region can therefore be seen as part of continual attempts to resolve the ambiguities by imposing fixed separations. And every time this fails, the region is once again defined as a place that will continually proliferate such dangerous ambiguity, and could spread it somewhere else.
Mediterranean landscape ecology, island cultures and long-term human history have all emerged as major research agendas over the past half-century, engaging large swathes of the social and natural ...sciences. This book brings these traditions together in considering Antikythera, a tiny island perched on the edge of the Aegean and Ionian seas, over the full course of its human history. Small islands are particularly interesting because their human, plant and animal populations often experience abrupt demographic changes, including periods of near-complete abandonment and recolonization, and Antikythera proves to be one of the best-documented examples of these shifts over time. Small islands also play eccentric but revealing roles in wider social, economic and political networks, serving as places for refugees, hunters, modern eco-tourists, political exiles, hermits and pirates. Antikythera is a rare case of an island that has been investigated in its entirety from several systematic fieldwork and disciplinary perspectives, not least of which is an intensive archaeological survey. The authors use the resulting evidence to offer a unique vantage on settlement and land use histories.
Prompted by the abundant historical allusions in Athenian political and diplomatic discourse, Bernd Steinbock analyzes the uses and meanings of the past in fourth-century Athens, using Thebes' role ...in Athenian memory as a case study. This examination is based upon the premise that Athenian social memory, that is, the shared and often idealized and distorted image of the past, should not be viewed as an unreliable counterpart of history but as an invaluable key to the Athenians' mentality. Against the tendency to view the orators' references to the past as empty rhetorical phrases or propagandistic cover-ups forRealpolitik,it argues that the past constituted important political capital in its own right. Drawing upon theories of social memory, it contextualizes the orators' historical allusions within the complex net of remembrances and beliefs held by the audience and thus tries to gauge their ideological and emotive power.Integrating literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence with recent scholarship on memory, identity, rhetoric, and international relations,Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse: Uses and Meanings of the Pastenhances our understanding of both the function of memory in Athenian public discourse and the history of Athenian-Theban relations. It should be of interest not only to students of Greek history and oratory but to everybody interested in memory studies, Athenian democracy, and political decision making.
In 431 BC, the long simmering rivalry between the city-states of Athens and Sparta erupted into open warfare, and for more than a generation the two were locked in a life-and-death struggle. Jennifer ...Roberts' rich narrative of this famous conflict is the first general history to tell the whole story, from the war's origins down to Sparta's defeat at Leuctra. A fast-paced narrative of one of antiquity's most famous clashes, The Plague of War is a must-read for history enthusiasts of all ages.
Housing is shaped by culturally-specific expectations about the kinds of architecture and furnishings that are appropriate; about how and where different activities should be carried out; and by and ...with whom. It is those expectations, and the wider social and cultural systems of which they are a part, that are explored in this volume. At the same time, the book as a whole argues two larger points: first, that while houses, households and families have in recent years become increasingly important as objects of inquiry in Greek and Roman contexts, their potential as sources of information about broader social-historical issues has yet to be fully realised; and second, that greater weight and independence should be given to material culture as a source for studying ancient history. The book will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students and scholars.
This book is the first attempt that has ever been made to give a comprehensive account of the religious life of ancient Athens. The city's many festivals are discussed in detail, with attention to ...recent anthropological theory; so too, for instance, are the cults of households and of smaller groups, the role of religious practice and argumentation in public life, the authority of priests, the activities of religious professionals such as seers and priestesses, magic, the place of theatrical representations of the gods within public attitudes to the divine. A long final section considers the sphere of activity of the various gods, and takes Athens as a uniquely detailed test case for the structuralist approach to polytheism. The work is a synchronic, thematically organized complement (though designed to be read independently) to the same author's "Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford 1996)".
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