Men of bronze Kagan, Donald; Viggiano, Gregory F
2013., 20130609, 2013, 2013-06-09
eBook
Men of Bronzetakes up one of the most important and fiercely debated subjects in ancient history and classics: how did archaic Greek hoplites fight, and what role, if any, did hoplite warfare play in ...shaping the Greek polis? In the nineteenth century, George Grote argued that the phalanx battle formation of the hoplite farmer citizen-soldier was the driving force behind a revolution in Greek social, political, and cultural institutions. Throughout the twentieth century scholars developed and refined this grand hoplite narrative with the help of archaeology. But over the past thirty years scholars have criticized nearly every major tenet of this orthodoxy. Indeed, the revisionists have persuaded many specialists that the evidence demands a new interpretation of the hoplite narrative and a rewriting of early Greek history.Men of Bronzegathers leading scholars to advance the current debate and bring it to a broader audience of ancient historians, classicists, archaeologists, and general readers.
After explaining the historical context and significance of the hoplite question, the book assesses and pushes forward the debate over the traditional hoplite narrative and demonstrates why it is at a crucial turning point. Instead of reaching a consensus, the contributors have sharpened their differences, providing new evidence, explanations, and theories about the origin, nature, strategy, and tactics of the hoplite phalanx and its effect on Greek culture and the rise of the polis.
The contributors include Paul Cartledge, Lin Foxhall, John Hale, Victor Davis Hanson, Donald Kagan, Peter Krentz, Kurt Raaflaub, Adam Schwartz, Anthony Snodgrass, Hans van Wees, and Gregory Viggiano.
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.
Ancient Greek literature, Athenian civic ideology, and modern classical scholarship have all worked together to reinforce the idea that there were three neatly defined status groups in classical ...Athens--citizens, slaves, and resident foreigners. But this book--the first comprehensive account of status in ancient democratic Athens--clearly lays out the evidence for a much broader and more complex spectrum of statuses, one that has important implications for understanding Greek social and cultural history. By revealing a social and legal reality otherwise masked by Athenian ideology, Deborah Kamen illuminates the complexity of Athenian social structure, uncovers tensions between democratic ideology and practice, and contributes to larger questions about the relationship between citizenship and democracy.
Each chapter is devoted to one of ten distinct status groups in classical Athens (451/0-323 BCE): chattel slaves, privileged chattel slaves, conditionally freed slaves, resident foreigners (metics), privileged metics, bastards, disenfranchised citizens, naturalized citizens, female citizens, and male citizens. Examining a wide range of literary, epigraphic, and legal evidence, as well as factors not generally considered together, such as property ownership, corporal inviolability, and religious rights, the book demonstrates the important legal and social distinctions that were drawn between various groups of individuals in Athens. At the same time, it reveals that the boundaries between these groups were less fixed and more permeable than Athenians themselves acknowledged. The book concludes by trying to explain why ancient Greek literature maintains the fiction of three status groups despite a far more complex reality.
In light of the evident global rise of populist tendencies in recent years, it seems reasonable to ask whether there were political currents in classical Athens and then in the Hellenist poleis that ...could qualify as populist today, and how they manifested themselves. The volume asks this question in constant dialogue with the present and modern political science research.
This book argues that Plato’s Republic must be understood as developing out of a 5th Century sophistic debate. In Part One the author presents a new analysis of the sophists and their extant texts ...addressing the important topics of justice and its value. This part shows that already in the 5th Century there was a robust debate about whether the just or unjust life was better for the self-interested individual, and that multiple sophistic authors made inventive and philosophically sophisticated arguments on both sides of this debate. The Moral Cynics argues that the intelligent individual was better off being unjust, whereas the Friends of Justice defended the idea that the just life was better for human beings. Part Two argues that Plato was very much aware of this debate and that in a number of dialogues—but most importantly in Republic—he engaged with this debate. The immoralist challenge that Glaucon and Adeimantus pose to Socrates early in Republic draws from the arguments of the 5th Century Moral Cynics and moreover identifies problems with the arguments of the 5th Century Friends of Justice. By having Socrates make an argument that overcomes the theoretical weaknesses of the earlier Friends of Justice, Plato is able to pose a new defence of justice that is more effective at responding to the Moral Cynics. The book’s analysis of Republic suggests new readings for certain important passages, such as the division of goods.
