This book offers the first attempt at understanding interpersonal violence in ancient Athens. While the archaic desire for revenge persisted into the classical period, it was channeled by the civil ...discourse of the democracy. Forensic speeches, curse tablets, and comedy display a remarkable openness regarding the definition of violence. But in daily life, Athenians had to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. They did so by enacting a discourse on violence in the performance of these genres, during which complex negotiations about the legitimacy of violence took place. Since discourse and reality were intertwined and the discourse was ritualized, actual violence might also have been partly ritualized. By still respecting the on-going desire to harm one’s enemy, this partial ritualization of violence helped restrain violence and thus contributed to Athens’ relative stability.
Civic Ritesexplores the religious origins of Western democracy by examining the government of fifth-century BCE Athens in the larger context of ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Deftly ...combining history, politics, and religion to weave together stories of democracy's first leaders and critics, Nancy Evans gives readers a contemporary's perspective on Athenian society. She vividly depicts the physical environment and the ancestral rituals that nourished the people of the earliest democratic state, demonstrating how religious concerns were embedded in Athenian governmental processes. The book's lucid portrayals of the best-known Athenian festivals-honoring Athena, Demeter, and Dionysus-offer a balanced view of Athenian ritual and illustrate the range of such customs in fifth-century Athens.
In Horos, Thea Potter explores the complex relationship between classical philosophy and the ‘horos’, a stone that Athenians erected to mark the boundaries of their marketplace, their gravestones, ...their roads and their private property. Potter weaves this history into a meditation on the ancient philosophical concept of horos, the foundational project of determination and definition, arguing that it is central to the development of classical philosophy and the marketplace. Horos challenges many significant interpretations of ancient thought. With nuance and insight, Potter combines the works of Aristotle, Plato, Homer and archaic Greek inscriptions with the twentieth-century continental philosophy of Heidegger, Derrida and Walter Benjamin. The result is a powerful study of the theme of boundaries in classical Athenian society as evidenced by boundary stones, law and exchange, ontology, insurgency and occupation. The innovative book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of ancient Greek social history, philosophy, and literature, as well as to the general reader who is curious to know more about classical life and philosophy.
In The Political Economy of Classical Athens - a Naval Perspective, Barry O'Halloran offers an account of the economic history of classical Athens in which its strategy of naval conquest provided the ...foundations for a period of unprecedented economic efflorescence.
The amount of 3D modelling applications in archaeology has increased enourmously over the last decade. 3D recording techniques allow researchers to quickly and accurately document archaeological ...evidence, and 3D reconstructions have created new possibilities to communicate the results to a larger public. In this latter case, however, numerous scholars have expressed their concern regarding the ethics of such digital representations, since they give prominence to a crystallized image of the past and do not account for the complexity of the archaeological record. The study presented here aims to make a practical contribution to a new understanding and use of 3D reconstructions, namely as ‘laboratories’ to test hypotheses and visualize, evaluate and discuss alternative interpretations. In order to do so, an analysis of visual reconstructions of the early and late modern period is presented first, followed by a discussion of current applications of 3D digital reconstructions, with a special focus on cityscapes. Lastly, a practical implementation of a research-driven, intellectually transparent and GIS-based 3D reconstruction is proposed for the urban site of Koroneia, in Boeotia, Central Greece. Specifically, the methodology developed in this work uses tools that are employed in geo-design and modern urban planning in an innovative way, integrating GIS with a rule-based modelling approach. With a strong focus on the automation and iteration of the reconstruction process, our 3D visualization provides an intuitive insight into hidden relationships and associations among data, and allows the creation and evaluation of alternative reconstruction hypotheses.
Scattered off the west coast of mainland Greece are the seven Ionian Islands, celebrated for their spectacular landscapes, olive groves and classical associations. Together with the mountainous ...mainland region of Epirus, the combined populations of Corfu, Paxos, Lefkas, Ithaca, Kefalonia, Zakynthos and Kythira constitute less than a twentieth of the population of Greece, yet they have made a huge contribution to the culture of the country, before and since becoming part of the Greek state. T.
Bust Lynn, Matthew
2010, 2010-12-21, 20110101
eBook
In 2001, Greece saw its application for membership into the Eurozone accepted, and the country sat down to the greatest free lunch in economic history. However, the coming years of global economic ...prosperity would lead to unrestrained spending, cheap borrowing, and a failure to implement financial reform, leaving the country massively exposed to a financial crisis-which duly struck. In Bust: Greece, the Euro, and the Sovereign Debt Crisis, Bloomberg columnist Matthew Lynn explores Greece's spectacular rise and fall from grace and the global repercussions of its financial disaster. Page by page, he provides a thrilling account of the Greek financial crisis, drawing out its origins, how it escalated, and its implications for a fragile global economy. Along the way, Lynn looks at how the Greek contagion has spread like wildfire throughout Europe and explores how government ineptitude as well as financial speculators compounded the problem. Blending financial history, politics, and current affairs, Lynn skillfully tells the story of how one nation rode the wave of economic prosperity and brought a continent, a currency, and, potentially, the global financial system to its knees. Lively, engaging, and thought provoking, Bust reminds us just how interconnected the world really is.
In a series of studies, Ian Moyer explores the ancient history and modern historiography of relations between Egypt and Greece from the fifth century BCE to the early Roman empire. Beginning with ...Herodotus, he analyzes key encounters between Greeks and Egyptian priests, the bearers of Egypt's ancient traditions. Four moments unfold as rich micro-histories of cross-cultural interaction: Herodotus' interviews with priests at Thebes; Manetho's composition of an Egyptian history in Greek; the struggles of Egyptian priests on Delos; and a Greek physician's quest for magic in Egypt. In writing these histories, the author moves beyond Orientalizing representations of the Other and colonial metanarratives of the civilizing process to reveal interactions between Greeks and Egyptians as transactional processes in which the traditions, discourses and pragmatic interests of both sides shaped the outcome. The result is a dialogical history of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the great civilizations of Greece and Egypt.
Through intensive surveys of three fortifications in late Roman Greece, Frey reveals the untapped potential of spolia in demonstrating the critical role played by non-elites in bringing about the ...architectural and social changes that mark the end of classical antiquity.
This volume collects twelve historical papers, some published here for the first time, in which Stephen Lambert explores the implications of the inscribed Athenian laws and decrees for the history of ...Athens in the age of Demosthenes.
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