Kategoria BISAC: History >> Ancient - Greece

A dream in which a man has sex with his mother may promise him political or commercial success--according to dream interpreters of late antiquity, who, unlike modern Western analysts, would not necessarily have drawn conclusions from the dream about the dreamer's sexual psychology. Evidence of such shifts in perspective is leading scholars to reconsider in a variety of creative ways the history of sexuality. In these fifteen original essays, eminent cultural historians and classicists not only discuss sex, but demonstrate how norms, practices, and even the very definitions of what counts...

The invention of coinage in ancient Greece provided an arena in which rival political groups struggled to imprint their views on the world. Here Leslie Kurke analyzes the ideological functions of Greek coinage as one of a number of symbolic practices that arise for the first time in the archaic period. By linking the imagery of metals and coinage to stories about oracles, prostitutes, Eastern tyrants, counterfeiting, retail trade, and games, she traces the rising egalitarian ideology of the polis, as well as the ongoing resistance of an elitist tradition to that development. The argument...

In this ground-breaking analysis of the world's first private banks, Edward Cohen convincingly demonstrates the existence and functioning of a market economy in ancient Athens while revising our understanding of the society itself. Challenging the "primitivistic" view, in which bankers are merely pawnbrokers and money-changers, Cohen reveals that fourth-century Athenian bankers pursued sophisticated transactions. These dealings--although technologically far removed from modern procedures--were in financial essence identical with the lending and deposit-taking that separate true "banks"...

The Bronze Age came to a close early in the twelfth century b.c. with one of the worst calamities in history: over a period of several decades, destruction descended upon key cities throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, bringing to an end the Levantine, Hittite, Trojan, and Mycenaean kingdoms and plunging some lands into a dark age that would last more than four hundred years. In his attempt to account for this destruction, Robert Drews rejects the traditional explanations and proposes a military one instead.

When did the Indo-Europeans enter the lands that they occupied during historical times? And, more specifically, when did the Greeks come to Greece? Robert Drews brings together the evidence--historical, linguistic, and archaeological--to tackle these important questions.

The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece offers the first comprehensive inquiry into the deity of sexual love, a power that permeated daily Greek life. Avoiding Foucault's philosophical paradigm of dominance/submission, Claude Calame uses an anthropological and linguistic approach to re-create indigenous categories of erotic love. He maintains that Eros, the joyful companion of Aphrodite, was a divine figure around which poets constructed a physiology of desire that functioned in specific ways within a network of social relations. Calame begins by showing how poetry and...

How and why did the Western tradition of political theorizing arise in Athens during the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C.? By interweaving intellectual history with political philosophy and literary analysis, Josiah Ober argues that the tradition originated in a high-stakes debate about democracy. Since elite Greek intellectuals tended to assume that ordinary men were incapable of ruling themselves, the longevity and resilience of Athenian popular rule presented a problem: how to explain the apparent success of a regime "irrationally" based on the inherent wisdom and practical efficacy...

For Danielle Allen, punishment is more a window onto democratic Athens' fundamental values than simply a set of official practices. From imprisonment to stoning to refusal of burial, instances of punishment in ancient Athens fueled conversations among ordinary citizens and political and literary figures about the nature of justice. Re-creating in vivid detail the cultural context of this conversation, Allen shows that punishment gave the community an opportunity to establish a shining myth of harmony and cleanliness: that the city could be purified of anger and social struggle, and perfect...

Challenging the modern assumption that ancient Athens is best understood as a polis, Edward Cohen boldly recasts our understanding of Athenian political and social life. Cohen demonstrates that ancient sources referred to Athens not only as a polis, but also as a "nation" (ethnos), and that Athens did encompass the characteristics now used to identify a "nation." He argues that in Athens economic, religious, sexual, and social dimensions were no less significant than political and juridical considerations, and accordingly rejects prevailing scholarship's equation of...

Jan Bremmer presents a provocative picture of the historical development of beliefs regarding the soul in ancient Greece. He argues that before Homer the Greeks distinguished between two types of soul, both identified with the individual: the free soul, which possessed no psychological attributes and was active only outside the body, as in dreams, swoons, and the afterlife; and the body soul, which endowed a person with life and consciousness. Gradually this concept of two kinds of souls was replaced by the idea of a single soul. In exploring Greek ideas of human souls as well as those of...

This full-scale sequential reading of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War will be invaluable to the specialist and also to those in search of an introduction and companion to the Histories. Moving beyond other studies by its focus on the reader's role in giving meaning to the text, it reveals Thucydides' use of objectivity not so much as a standard for the proper presentation of his subject matter as a method for communicating with his readers and involving them in the complexity and suffering of the Peloponnesian War. W. Robert Connor shows that as Thucydides' themes and...

How do communities survive catastrophe? Using classical Athens as its case study, this book argues that if a democratic community is to survive over time, its people must choose to go on together. That choice often entails hardship and hard bargains. In good times, going on together presents few difficulties. But in the face of loss, disruption, and civil war, it requires tragic sacrifices and agonizing compromises.

Athenian Legacies demonstrates with flair and verve how the people of one influential political community rebuilt their democratic government, rewove...

In this provocative and wide-ranging examination of the causes of the Peloponnesian war, first published in 1972, Geoffrey de Ste Croix argued against most previous historiography (which tended to blame Athens), that the Spartans and their allies must bear the immediate and ultimate responsibility for the war. The book includes a strong argument for the fundamental credibility of Thucydides' narrative, background on Corcyraean and Potidaean affairs, a lengthy re-examination of the Athenian decree excluding Megarians from the civic centre of Athens and the ports of the empire, and three...

By comparing traditional narratives concerning archaic colonists and tyrants, Ogden shows that monarchic rulers in archaic Greece were often paradoxically conceptualized as deformed scapegoats or as evil malformed babies of sinister birth. This way of thinking helped to explain their extraordinary power, for they embodied in their twisted limbs a terrible pollution that enabled them to overthrow their communities. The author considers a diverse range of related themes, including the myth of Oedipus, the fables of Aesop, the meanings attached to monkeys, pigs and mice, demonic cooks, the...

Peter Jones calls on the ancient Greeks and Romans to cast light on modern problems in this first collection of his columns, which have appeared for over ten years in the "Spectator" and the "Sunday Telegraph." Typical issues on which a light is thrown are women priests, growing old gracefully, how to end strikes, psychotherapy, finding a wife, going on holiday, succeeding in life, ending crime, the purpose of children, why bare feet are bad for sex, the sex-drive of the powerful, the use of alcohol, foretelling the future, and the power of the dead.

This is a literary study of Aeschylus' Persians alongside Herodotus' Histories, which offers a comprehensive understanding what actually happened at the battle of Salamis and afterwards. Thomas Harrison examines the political and ideological motivating factors underpinning Persai in the context of the times.

Aeschylus' Persians is not only the first surviving Greek drama. It is also the only tragedy to take for its subject historical rather than mythical events: the repulse of the army of Xerxes at Salamis in 480 B.C. It has frequently been mined for information on the tactics...

This book examines the ethical dilemmas and arguments about abortion, very similar to our own, which exercised Greek and Roman doctors, philosophers, historians, theologians, dramatists, novelists and poets. In this important new study, Professor Kapparis extrapolates the views of ancient physicians on abortion from a detailed investigation of the medical facts, medical and philosophical theories concerning the human status of the unborn in antiquity, the Hippocratic Oath, and other important documents on Greek medical ethics. He explores the reasons why women in antiquity sought...

How successful were the Athenians and other Greeks in bringing about the rule of law? What did the Greeks recognise as 'law' both in the 'polis' and internationally? How did the courts attempt to implement this ideal, and how successful were they?

This collection of essays sets out to answer these questions, focussing on the following themes: law, religion and the sources of legitimacy; substance and procedure; legal arguments in court; documents and witnesses; and law in an international context. There is much here to interest not only specialists in Greek law, but also those...