For more than one thousand years, people from every corner of the Greco-Roman world sought the hope for a blessed afterlife through initiation into the Mysteries of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis. In ...antiquity itself and in our memory of antiquity, the Eleusinian Mysteries stand out as the oldest and most venerable mystery cult. Despite the tremendous popularity of the Eleusinian Mysteries, their origins are unknown. Because they are lost in an era without written records, they can only be reconstructed with the help of archaeology. This book provides a much-needed synthesis of the archaeology of Eleusis during the Bronze Age and reconstructs the formation and early development of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The discussion of the origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries is complemented with discussions of the theology of Demeter and an update on the state of research in the archaeology of Eleusis from the Bronze Age to the end of antiquity.
Athenian democracy may have opened up politics to every citizen, but it had no impact on participation in sport. The city's sportsmen continued to be drawn from the elite, and so it comes as a ...surprise that sport was very popular with non-elite citizens of the classical period, who rewarded victorious sportsmen lavishly and created an unrivalled program of local sporting festivals on which they spent staggering sums of money. They also shielded sportsmen from the public criticism which was otherwise normally directed towards the elite and its conspicuous activities. This book is a bold and novel exploration of this apparent contradiction, which examines three of the fundamental aspects of Athens in the classical period - democratic politics, public commitment to sport and constant warfare - and is essential reading for all of those who are interested in Greek sport, Athenian democracy and its waging of war.
Focusing on one of the most dramatic and controversial periods in modern Greek history and in the history of the Cold War, James Edward Miller provides the first study to employ a wide range of ...international archives--American, Greek, English, and French--together with foreign language publications to shed light on the role the United States played in Greece between the termination of its civil war in 1949 and Turkey's 1974 invasion of Cyprus.Miller demonstrates how U.S. officials sought, over a period of twenty-five years, to cultivate Greece as a strategic Cold War ally in order to check the spread of Soviet influence. The United States supported Greece's government through large-scale military aid, major investment of capital, and intermittent efforts to reform the political system. Miller examines the ways in which American and Greek officials cooperated in--and struggled over--the political future and the modernization of the country. Throughout, he evaluates the actions of the key figures involved, from George Papandreou and his son Andreas, to King Constantine, and from John Foster Dulles and Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.Miller's engaging study offers a nuanced and well-balanced assessment of events that still influence Mediterranean politics today.
Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the "Long 1960s," this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It ...explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these "children of the dictatorship" managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their "progressive" purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students' social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels' regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades.
The Antikythera Mechanism, now 82 small fragments of corroded bronze, was an ancient Greek machine simulating the cosmos as the Greeks understood it. Reflecting the most recent researches, A Portable ...Cosmos presents it as a gateway to Greek astronomy and technology and their place in Greco-Roman society and thought.
From the mid-sixth to the mid-fourth century BCE a nexus of connections to Thrace defined the careers of several of Athens' most prominent figures, including Pisistratus, Miltiades, Alcibiades and ...Iphicrates. This book explores the importance of Thrace to these individuals and its resulting significance in the political, cultural and social history of Athens. Thrace was vitally important for Athens thanks to its natural resources and access to strategic waterways, which were essential to a maritime empire, and connections to the area conferred wealth and military influence on certain Athenians and offered them a refuge if they faced political persecution at home. However, Thrace's importance to prominent individuals transcended politics: its culture was also an important draw. Thrace was a world free of Athenian political, social and cultural constraints – one that bore a striking resemblance to the world of Homeric epic.
In the first two centuries AD, the eastern Roman provinces experienced a proliferation of elite public generosity unmatched in their previous or later history. In this study, Arjan Zuiderhoek ...attempts to answer the question why this should have been so. Focusing on Roman Asia Minor, he argues that the surge in elite public giving was not caused by the weak economic and financial position of the provincial cities, as has often been maintained, but by social and political developments and tensions within the Greek cities created by their integration into the Roman imperial system. As disparities of wealth and power within imperial polis society continued to widen, the exchange of gifts for honours between elite and non-elite citizens proved an excellent political mechanism for deflecting social tensions away from open conflicts towards communal celebrations of shared citizenship and the legitimation of power in the cities.
This book explores the territorial expansion of the Thessalian League ca. 196-27 BCE, the development of the state religion of the League, and the tension between regional political identity and ...local cult tradition.
In 1912, Italy occupied Rhodes, an Ottoman town inhabited by Greek Orthodox, Muslims, Jews, and Catholics. Rhodes became a territory of Italy's empire in 1923 following the Treaty of Lausanne, only ...one year after Mussolini seized power in Rome. The Ottoman demise corresponded to the expansion of fascist imperialism in the Mediterranean. Both the Ottoman Young Turks and Italian colonial governors invoked the role of a "new generation" of youth in imperial rule.Generations of Empire investigates the relationship between state and society in light of successive transformations of imperial rule, rethinking Italian colonialism as post-Ottoman history. Andreas Guidi explores how communal life in the town of Rhodes was affected by the transition between these regimes, from an autocratic to a constitutional empire in late Ottoman years to Italian military occupation to fascist annexation. Based on archival sources in five languages from seven different countries, the book investigates generational dynamics in the domains of political activism, the family, education, work and leisure, and mobility. Generations of Empire offers a vivid picture of how a local society navigated large-scale social and political transformations in the modern Mediterranean.
Early in the archaic period of Greek history, Messenia was annexed and partially settled by its powerful neighbour, Sparta. Achieving independence in the fourth century BC, the inhabitants of ...Messenia set about trying to forge an identity for themselves separate from their previous identity as Spartan subjects, refunctionalising or simply erasing their Spartan heritage. Professor Luraghi provides a thorough examination of the history of Messenian identity and consequently addresses a range of questions and issues whose interest and importance have only been widely recognised by ancient historians during the last decade. By a detailed scrutiny of the ancient written sources and the archaeological evidence, the book reconstructs how the Messenians perceived and constructed their own ethnicity at different points in time, by applying to Messenian ethnicity insights developed by anthropologists and early medieval historians.
