Kategoria BISAC: History >> Ancient - Greece

This collection of 12 original essays provides an overview of how Greeks and Romans perceived the phenomenon of rape. Using the numerous references to rape in Greek legal speeches, comedy, tragedy, visual art and myth, the authors assess the degree of seriousness with which rape was taken and who was seen as its main victims. They also consider whether the numerous Greek and Roman myths that involve rape reflect real-life behaviour and attitudes. Modern readers, used to a discourse which focuses on the question of woman's (or man's) consent to sexual activity, and which treats an unwilling...

Slavery was a fundamental institution in the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, but little agreement. The modern debate has sometimes been bitter - unsurprisingly, given its background in the abolitionist atmosphere of the 19th century. As we enter the 21st century the battleground has started to shift: can the historian hope to reconstruct the life of ancient slaves, or just fragments of their image in Greek and Roman literature? More than most topics, the ancient slave has therefore attracted constant modern redefinition. But how...

Slavery is a word heavy with emotional and political overtones - to be owned by another person and treated as a commodity is the ultimate injustice. But this was the fate of a substantial percentage of the population of the ancient world. Slavery was essential to their societies; thus slavery is necessarily a core topic in the study of classical civilisation. Most previous studies of ancient slavery have grown out of historical and literary research. In the flood of books and papers on the subject, the archaeological evidence has often been ignored. This book fills the gap by confronting,...

How should we study the democracy of classical Athens? How, if at all, is it relevant to our own world with its different forms of democracy? Attitudes to Athenian democracy have always been affectd by the circumstances of those studying it; but, after a period in which scholars professed objectivity and impartiality as their ideal, the possibility of attaining that ideal has been questioned, and ideological commitment and relevance to contemporary circumstances have returned into fashion. This book traces developments in the study of Athenian democracy, examines the different approaches...

Thucydides' work was one of the most exciting creations in the cultural history of Greece in the fifth century BC and it still poses fresh and challenging questions about the writing of history. There is a marked tension in Thucydides' History between his aim to write about contemporary events and his desire that his work should outlast the period in which he composed it. Thucydides and the Shaping of History addresses two important issues: how contemporary was the History when it was written in the fifth century, and how 'contemporary' is it now? This book combines a close analysis of...

The smooth functioning of an ordered society depends on the possession of a means of regularising its activities over time. That means is a calendar, and its regularity is a function of how well it models the more or less regular movements of the celestial bodies - of the moon, the sun or the stars. Greek and Roman Calendars examines the ancient calendar as just such a time-piece, whose elements are readily described in astronomical and mathematical terms. The story of these calendars is one of a continuous struggle to maintain a correspondence with the regularity of the seasons and the...

One of the greatest aesthetic attractions in the ancient world was pantomime dancing, a ballet-style entertainment in which a silent, solo dancer incarnated a series of mythological characters to the accompaniment of music and sung narrative. Looking at a multitude of texts and particularly Lucian's "On the Dance," a dialogue written at the height of pantomime's popularity, this innovative cultural study of the genre offers a radical reassessment of its importance in the symbolic economy of imperial and later antiquity. Rather than being trivial or lowbrow, pantomime was thoroughly...

This book offers a survey of the teachings of, and relations between, four leading figures in third-century Platonism: Longinus, Plotinus, Porphyry and lamblichus. It documents and explains the coalescence of Aristotelian and Platonic elements in the Platonic tradition before the 3rd century, considers the effect of the new political environment on these thinkers, and argues that the antagonistic interests of the two older men (Longinus and Plotinus) were combined in the work of the two younger figures (Porphyry and lamblichus) without sacrifice of coherence, rationality or fidelity to...

Revenge was an all important part of the ancient Athenian mentality, intruding on all forms of life - even where we might not expect to find it today. Revenge was of prime importance as a means of survival for the people of early Greece and remained in force during the rise of the 'poleis'. The revenge of epic heroes such as Odysseus and Menalaus influences later thinking about revenge and suggests that avengers prosper. Nevertheless, this does not mean that all forms of revenge were seen as equally acceptable in Athens. Differences in response are expected depending on the crime and the...