The first Persian Empire (559-331 BCE) was the biggest land empire the world had seen, and seated at the heart of its vast dominions, in the south of modern-day Iran, was the person of the Great ...King. Immortalized in Greek literature as despotic tyrants, a new vision of Persian monarchy is emerging from Iranian, and other, sources (literary, visual, and archaeological), which show the Kings in a very different light. Inscriptions of Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, and their heirs present an image of Persian rulers as liberators, peace-makers, valiant warriors, righteous god-fearing judges, and law-makers.
Around them the Kings established lavish and sophisticated courts, the centres of political decision-making and cultural achievements in which the image of monarchy was endorsed and advanced by an almost theatrical display of grandeur and power.
This book explores the representation of Persian monarchy and the court of the Achaemenid Great Kings from the point of view of the ancient Iranians themselves and through the sometimes distorted prism of Classical authors.
Le tirage au sort ne fut jamais une spécificité des régimes démocratiques. À rebours d’une idée reçue, cette procédure, appelée sors ou sortitio en latin, occupait une place centrale dans la vie ...publique de la Rome républicaine et impériale, bien que le système politique de cette cité devenue un Empire ne fut jamais une démocratie. Si le recours au tirage au sort était fréquent dans la sphère privée ou dans les sanctuaires oraculaires, il était aussi au cœur du fonctionnement des institutions et servait à sélectionner des citoyens ou à répartir entre eux des fonctions. Ce livre retrace l’histoire, de l’époque médio-républicaine à l’époque augustéenne, de l’un des tirages au sort civiques les plus cruciaux pour la cité romaine : celuides provinces,qu’effectuaient consuls et préteurs en exercice, puis sortis de charge. Cette sortitio permettait de répartirle commandement des armées et les principales tâches juridiques, judiciaires et administratives à Rome et dans l’empire romain entre les magistrats curules, tout en limitant les effets délétères de la compétition aristocratique et la corruption. L’enquête, qui s’appuie sur un corpus mêlant sources littéraires, épigraphiques, numismatiques et archéologiques, cherche à restituer, d’une part,les règles qui encadraient cette procédure, c’est-à-dire l’ensemble des coutumes, lois, sénatus-consultes, qui réglaient l’attribution des provinces par le sort, et, d’autre part, la manière dont le rituel était effectué et perçu. Plus largement, c’est une réflexion sur la place et le rôle qui étaient réservés au hasard dans la vie et la culture politiques romaines, et sur les significations religieuses et sociopolitiques que lui prêtaient les Romains, qui est ici proposée.
In Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus, author Arum Park explores two notoriously difficult ancient Greek poets and seeks to articulate the complex relationship between them. ...Although Pindar and Aeschylus were contemporaries, previous scholarship has often treated them as representatives of contrasting worldviews. Park’s comparative study offers the alternative perspective of understanding them as complements instead. By examining these poets together through the concepts of reciprocity, truth, and gender, this book establishes a relationship between Pindar and Aeschylus that challenges previous conceptions of their dissimilarity. The book accomplishes three aims: first, it shows that Pindar and Aeschylus frame their poetry using similar principles of reciprocity; second, it demonstrates that each poet depicts truth in a way that is specific to those reciprocity principles; and finally, it illustrates how their depictions of gender are shaped by this intertwining of truth and reciprocity. By demonstrating their complementarity, the book situates Pindar and Aeschylus in the same poetic ecosystem, which has implications for how we understand ancient Greek poetry more broadly: using Pindar and Aeschylus as case studies, the book provides a window into their dynamic and interactive poetic world, a world in which ostensibly dissimilar poets and genres actually have much more in common than we might think.
In 146 BC the armies of Rome destroyed Carthage and emerged as the decisive victors of the Third Punic War. The Carthaginian population was sold and its territory became the Roman province of Africa. ...In the same year and on the other side of the Mediterranean Roman troops sacked Corinth, the final blow in the defeat of the Achaean conspiracy: thereafter Greece was effectively administered by Rome. Rome was now supreme in Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Macedonia, Sicily, and North Africa, and its power and influence were advancing in all directions.
However, not all was well. The unchecked seizure of huge tracts of land in Italy and its farming by vast numbers of newly imported slaves allowed an elite of usually absentee landlords to amass enormous and conspicuous fortunes. Insecurity and resentment fed the gulf between rich and poor in Rome and erupted in a series of violent upheavals in the politics and institutions of the Republic. These were exacerbated by slave revolts and invasions from the east. The instigation of Rome's first professional army to resolve the crises soon made its generals - Sulla, then Pompey, then Caesar - all too powerful. Meanwhile Greek ideas and culture had invaded Rome, contributing to the subversion of the Roman ideal of the free citizen, farmer of his own land, duty-bound to fight in its defence.
Catherine Steel tells history of this crucial and turbulent century, focussing on the issues of freedom, honour, power, greed and ambition, and the cherished but abused institutions of the Republic which were central to events then and which have preoccupied historians ever since.
Many histories of Ancient Greece center their stories on Athens, but what would that history look like if they didn’t? There is another way to tell this story, one that situates Greek history in ...terms of the relationships between smaller Greek cities and in contact with the wider Mediterranean. In this book, author Joshua P. Nudell offers a new history of the period from the Persian wars to wars that followed the death of Alexander the Great, from the perspective of Ionia. While recent scholarship has increasingly treated Greece through the lenses of regional, polis, and local interaction, there has not yet been a dedicated study of Classical Ionia. This book fills this clear gap in the literature while offering Ionia as a prism through which to better understand Classical Greece. This book offers a clear and accessible narrative of the period between the Persian Wars and the wars of the early Hellenistic period, two nominal liberations of the region. The volume complements existing histories of Classical Greece. Close inspection reveals that the Ionians were active partners in the imperial endeavor, even as imperial competition constrained local decision-making and exacerbated local and regional tensions. At the same time, the book offers interventions on critical issues related to Ionia such as the Athenian conquest of Samos, rhetoric about the freedom of the Greeks, the relationship between Ionian temple construction and economic activity, the status of the Panionion, Ionian poleis and their relationship with local communities beyond the circle of the dodecapolis, and the importance of historical memory to our understanding of ancient Greece. The result is a picture of an Aegean world that is more complex and less beholden narratives that give primacy to the imperial actors at the expense of local developments.
Victor Cojocaru, Instituţia proxeniei în spaţiul pontic / Die Proxenie im Schwarzmeerraum Pontica et Mediterranea V, Cluj-Napoca, Editura Mega, 338 p., ISBN 978-606-543-717-3.
PDF