Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient World
An innovative, up-to-date treatment of ancient Greek mobility and migration from 1000 BCE to 30 BCE A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient World explores the mobility and migration of Greeks who left their homelands in the ten centuries between the Early Iron Age and the Hellenistic period. While most academic literature centers on the Greeks of the Aegean basin area, this unique volume provides a systematic examination of the history of the other half of the ancient Greek world. Contributions from leading scholars and historians discuss where migrants settled, their new communities, and their connections and interactions with both Aegean Greeks and non-Greeks. Divided into three parts, th...
The Politics of Identity in Greek Sicily and Southern Italy
This analysis of the relationship between collective identities and politics in ancient Greece focuses on four key types of identity -- polis identity, ethnicity (e.g., Dorian or Achaean), regional, and Greek -- and places these multiple and flexible self-perceptions at the center of a new account of politics in the Greek West.
Collective Violence and Memory in the Ancient Mediterranean
This book reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “vanquished” to offer a new paradigm for studying representations of past violence across diverse media, from funerary texts to literary works, chronicles, monumental reliefs, and other material artefacts such as ruins. It thus paves the way for a new comparative approach to the study of collective violence in the ancient world.
The Audiences of Herodotus
By recognizing the pervasive influence that Herodotus’s career as an oral performer had on his composition of the Histories, The Audiences of Herodotus: Oral Performance and the Battle Narratives argues that the Histories’ versions of the three most important battles in the Persian Wars—the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea—persistently and disproportionately advance the interests, biases, and political agendas of distinct audiences in the mid-fifth century, well before Herodotus assembled his famous work of history as it survives to us. The Salamis and Plataea narratives reflect a mid-century audience of Athenians and their allies; the Thermopylae narrative reflects an Amphictyonic audience gathered at the Pythian Festival. Ian Oliver concludes that, as a participant in a culture of wisdom performance (epideixis), Herodotus originally composed short, ideologically motivated performance pieces that he intended to promote tendentious reinterpretations of these momentous events, then relied on these narratives when he composed his final text: the unitary Histories.
Athenian Ostracism and its Original Purpose
Ostracism is by far the most emblematic institution of ancient Athenian democracy. This volume offers a reassessment of recently found ostraka (or potsherds, on which the names of the 'candidates' for exile were inscribed by citizens) from several Greek cities outside Athens, a thorough reconstruction of the history and of the procedure of ostracism in Athens, and a comprehensive account of the political circumstances of the introduction of the law on ostracism by Cleisthenes in 508/507 BCE. Marek Węcowski's original study focuses not only on the final stage, the day of the vote, but on the entire operation and procedure of ostracisation. Tracing the logic of the political play in Athens be...
The Lottocratic Mentality
In recent years there has been great interest in new forms of citizen participation, such as citizens' assemblies or deliberative polls that involve ordinary citizens in political decision-making. Many see these innovations as the best solution to the current crisis of democracy. The most radical among them propose replacing elections with the random selection of ordinary citizens, transforming electoral democracy into a lottocracy. These developments are driven by a lottocratic mentality that is deeply transforming our understanding of democracy, political equality, representation, and more. In The Lottocratic Mentality, Lafont and Urbinati focus on this way of thinking, which is flourishin...
One God, One People
From ancient times to the present day, utopian social ideas have made the unity of humankind a central concern. In the face of the threats to civic peace and harmony caused by misrule, factions, inequality, and moral weakness, philosophical and religious traditions in antiquity gave considered attention to the attainment of oneness both as an ideal and as an embodied practice. In this volume, scholars of ancient history, early Judaism, and biblical studies come together to show that ideas of unity and practices of oneness were grounded in larger conceptions of worldview, cosmic order, and power, with theological ideas such as the oneness of God laying an important foundation. In particular, ...
Drawing Lots
This book offers the first comprehensive study of drawing lots as a central, ubiquitous institution of ancient Greek society. Led by an egalitarian mindset, Greeks drew lots as a matter of course to distribute inheritance, booty, sacrificial meat, and lands, to mix groups, select individuals, and set turns. Lot-oracles were used for divination; otherwise, the gods guarded the justice of the procedure but rarely determined the outcome. When drawing lots was gradually applied to polis governance, classical Athens made sortition the basis of the first democracy in human history. A Greek innovation, drawing lots for governance inspires new democratic politics today.
Divination and Prophecy in the Ancient Greek World
This volume examines the phenomena of ancient Greek prophecy and divination. With contributions from a distinguished, international cast of scholars, it offers fresh perspectives and interpretations of key aspects of these practices. Considering issues such as comparativism, ethnography, cognitive function, orality, and intertextuality, the volume demonstrates their relevance to the elucidation of Greek prophetic practices. The volume also shows how multi- and inter-disciplinary approaches can be applied to a range of topics, from an examination of the very inception of Greek divination, explored within the frame of more archaic cult ideas, through emic elaboration of divinatory practice in Archaic and Classical periods, to consideration of intentional manipulation of prophecy, as depicted in Hellenistic and Imperial Roman sources. Collectively, the essays deepen our understanding of ancient Greek prophecy by offering insights into divinition astéhknē, the centrality or marginality of Delphi and the Pythic priestess, prophetic ambiguity, and cognition, including cognitive dissonance.
Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece
Citizenship is a major feature of contemporary politics, but rather than being a modern phenomenon it is in fact a legacy of ancient Greece. Focusing on the archaic period and its cities, this volume challenges the narrow Aristotelian model of citizenship and provides instead a wide range of insights and methodological approaches to the topic.
