Kategoria BISAC: History >> Ancient - Greece

This book provides a fresh perspective on Athenian democracy by exploring bad citizenship, both as a reality and an idea, in classical Athens, from the late sixth century down to 322. If called upon, Athenian citizens were expected to support their city through military service and financial outlay. These obligations were fundamental to Athenian understandings of citizenship and it was essential to the city s well-being that citizens fulfill them. The ancient sources, however, are full of allegations that individuals have avoided these duties or performed them deficiently. Claims of draft...

Homer's epics reflect an eighth-century BCE world of warrior tribes that were fractured by constant strife; aside from its fantastic scale, nothing is exceptional about Troy's conquest by the Greeks. Using a fascinating and innovative approach, Professor Gottschall analyses Homeric conflict from the perspective of modern evolutionary biology, attributing its intensity to a shortage of available young women. The warrior practice of taking enemy women as slaves and concubines meant that women were concentrated in the households of powerful men. In turn, this shortage drove men to compete...

Professor Lee provides a social and cultural history of the Cyreans, the mercenaries of Xenophon's Anabasis. While they have often been portrayed as a single abstract political community, this book reveals that life in the army was mostly shaped by a set of smaller social communities: the formal unit organisation of the lochos (???company???), and the informal comradeship of the suskenia (???mess group???). It includes full treatment of the environmental conditions of the march, ethnic and socio-economic relations amongst the soldiers, equipment and transport, marching and camp behaviour,...

In this book Dr Low explores the assumptions and principles which determined the conduct and representation of interstate politics in Greece during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. She employs a wide range of ancient evidence, both epigraphic and literary, as well as some contemporary theoretical approaches from the field of International Relations. Taking a thematic rather than a chronological approach, she addresses topics such as the nature of interstate society in the Greek world; the sources, scope and enforcement of 'international law'; the nature of interstate ethics and morality;...

This text was the first systematic study of what it meant to be 'Greek' in late antiquity and Byzantium, an identity that could alternatively become national, religious, philosophical, or cultural. Through close readings of the sources, Professor Kaldellis surveys the space that Hellenism occupied in each period; the broader debates in which it was caught up; and the historical causes of its successive transformations. The first section (100 400) shows how Romanisation and Christianisation led to the abandonment of Hellenism as a national label and its restriction to a negative religious...

This 2007 study explores how modern scholars came to write Greek history from a Eurocentric perspective and challenges orthodox readings of Greek history as part of the history of the West. Since the Greeks lacked a national state or a unified society, economy or culture, the polis has helped to create a homogenising national narrative. This book re-examines old polarities such as those between the Greek poleis and Eastern monarchies, or between the ancient consumer and the modern producer city, in order to show the fallacies of standard approaches. It argues for the relevance of Aristotle's...

This is a major, single-volume introduction to the whole of Ancient Greek History. It covers the period from the Golden Age of Knossos and Mycenae to the incorporation of Greece into the Roman empire in the second century BC and the transfer of Greek culture to Byzantium in the fourth century AD.

Spanning the period from Alexander the Great's accession to the throne in 336 BC to the defeat by Octavian of Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC, this volume provides a vivid account of the innovative civilization of the Hellenistic world.

Spanning the period from Alexander the Great's accession to the throne in 336 BC to the defeat by Octavian of Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC, this volume provides a vivid account of the innovative civilization of the Hellenistic world.

Exploiting the abundant primary sources available, this book examines the diverse ways in which war shaped the Hellenistic world.

• An overview of war and society in the Hellenistic world.
  
• Highlights the interdependence of warfare and social phenomena.
  
• Covers a wide range of topics, including social conditions as causes of war, the role of professional warriors, the discourse of war in Hellenistic cities, the budget of war, the collective memory of war, and the aesthetics of war.
  
• Draws on the abundance of primary...

Exploiting the abundant primary sources available, this book examines the diverse ways in which war shaped the Hellenistic world.

• An overview of war and society in the Hellenistic world.
  
• Highlights the interdependence of warfare and social phenomena.
  
• Covers a wide range of topics, including social conditions as causes of war, the role of professional warriors, the discourse of war in Hellenistic cities, the budget of war, the collective memory of war, and the aesthetics of war.
  
• Draws on the abundance of primary...

This book is a guide to the extraordinarily diverse literature of the Hellenistic period.

• A guide to the literature of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC
• Provides overviews of the social, political, intellectual and literary historical contexts in which Hellenistic literature was produced
• Introduces the major writers and genres of the period
• Provides information about style, meter and languages to aid readers with no prior knowledge of the language in understanding technical aspects of...

A History of the Hellenistic World provides an engaging look at the Macedonian monarchies in the period following the reign of Alexander the Great, and examines their impact on the Greek world.

• Offers a clearly organized narrative with particular emphasis on state and governmental structures
• Makes extensive use of inscriptions in translation to illustrate the continuing vitality of the Greek city states prior to the Roman conquest
• Emphasizes the specific Macedonian origins of all active participants in the creation of the Hellenistic world
• Highlights...

Making use of letters--both formal and personal--that have been preserved through the ages, Stanley Stowers analyzes the cultural setting within which Christianity arose.

The Library of Early Christianity is a series of eight outstanding books exploring the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts in which the New Testament developed.

The era of late antiquity - from the middle of the third century to the end of the eighth - was marked by the rise of two world religions, unprecedented political upheavals that remade the map of the known world, and the creation of art of enduring glory. In these eleven in-depth essays, drawn from the award-winning reference work Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, an international cast of experts provides essential information and fresh perspectives on this period's culture and history.

The name Helots evokes one of the most famous peculiarities of ancient Sparta, the system of dependent labour that guaranteed the livelihood of the free citizens. The Helots fulfilled all the functions that slaves carried out elsewhere in the Greek world, allowing their masters the leisure to be full-time warriors. Yet, despite their crucial role, Helots remain essentially invisible in our ancient sources and peripheral and enigmatic in modern scholarship. This book is devoted to a much-needed reassessment of Helotry and of its place in the history and sociology of unfree labour. The essays...

Hailed by Horace and Quintilian as the greatest of Greek lyric poets, Pindar has always enjoyed a privileged position in the so-called classical tradition of the West. Given the intense difficulty of the poetry, however, Pindaric interpretation has forever grappled with the perplexing dilemma that one of the most influential poets of antiquity should prove to be so dark. In discussing both poets and scholars from a broad historical span, with special emphasis on the German legacy of genius, Soliciting Darkness investigates how Pindar's obscurity has been perceived and confronted, extorted and...

Investigating ritual in Greece from cross-disciplinary and transhistorical perspectives, "Greek Ritual Poetics" offers novel readings of the pivotal role of ritual in Greek traditions by exploring a broad spectrum of texts, art, and social practices. This collection of essays written by an international group of leading scholars in a number of disciplines presents a variety of methodological approaches to secular and religious rituals, and to the narrative and conceptual strategies of their reenactment and manipulation in literary, pictorial, and social discourses. Addressing understudied...

"Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece" looks at the anthropology of the Greeks and other cultures across space and time, and in the process discovers aspects of the art of comparability. Historians and ethnologists can pool a wealth of knowledge about different cultures across space and time. Their joint task is to analyze human societies and to understand cultural products. Comparative analysis involves working together in an experimental and constructive enterprise. Marcel Detienne, alerted by dissonances, tries to see how cultural systems react not just to a touchstone category, but...