The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece

The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece
Author: Carol Atack
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429557124

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This book examines how ancient authors explored ideas of kingship as a political role fundamental to the construction of civic unity, the use of kingship stories to explain the past and present unity of the polis and the distinctive function or status attributed to kings in such accounts. It explores the notion of kingship offered by historians such as Herodotus, as well as dramatists writing for the Athenian stage, paying particular attention to dramatic depictions of the unique capabilities of Theseus in uniting the city in the figure of the ‘democratic king’. It also discusses kingship in Greek philosophy: the Socratics’ identification of an ‘art of kingship’, and Xenophon and Isocrates’ model of ‘virtue monarchy’. In turn, these allow a rereading of explorations of kingship and excellence in Plato’s later political thought, seen as a critique of these models, and also in Aristotle’s account of total kingship or pambasileia, treated here as a counterfactual device developed to explore the epistemic benefits of democracy. This book offers a fascinating insight into the institution of monarchy in classical Greek thought and society, both for those working on Greek philosophy and politics, and also for students of the history of political thought.

All Things Ancient Greece [2 volumes]

All Things Ancient Greece [2 volumes]
Author: James W. Ermatinger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2022-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1440874549

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As an invaluable resource for students and general audiences investigating Ancient Greek culture and history, this encyclopedia provides a thorough examination of the Mediterranean world and its influence on modern society. All Things Ancient Greece examines the history and cultural life of Ancient Greece until the death of Philip II of Macedon in 336 BCE. The encyclopedia shows how the various city-states developed from the Bronze Age to the end of the Classical Age, influencing the Greek world and beyond. The cultural achievements of the Greeks detailed in this two-volume set include literature, politics, medicine, religion, and the arts. This work has entries on the various city-states, regions, battles, culture, and ideas that helped shape the ancient Greek world and its societies. Each entry delves into detailed topics with suggested readings. Many entries include sidebars containing primary documents from ancient sources that explore ancillary ideas, biographies, and specific examples from literature and philosophy. Readers, both students of ancient history and a general audience, are encouraged to interact with the material either chronologically, thematically, or geographically.

The Heroic Rulers of Archaic and Classical Greece

The Heroic Rulers of Archaic and Classical Greece
Author: Lynette Mitchell
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1472513460

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With an in-depth exploration of rule by a single man and how this was seen as heroic activity, the title challenges orthodox views of ruling in the ancient world and breaks down traditional ideas about the relationship between so-called hereditary rule and tyranny. It looks at how a common heroic ideology among rulers was based upon excellence, or arete, and also surveys dynastic ruling, where rule was in some sense shared within the family or clan. Heroic Rulers examines reasons why both personal and clan-based rule was particularly unstable and its core tension with the competitive nature of Greek society, so that the question of who had the most arete was an issue of debate both from within the ruling family and from other heroic aspirants. Probing into ancient perspectives on the legitimacy and legality of rule, the title also explores the relationship between ruling and law. Law, personified as 'king' (nomos basileus), came to be seen as the ultimate source of sovereignty especially as expressed through the constitutional machinery of the city, and became an important balance and constraint for personal rule. Finally, Heroic Rulers demonstrates that monarchy, which is generally thought to have disappeared before the end of the archaic period, remained a valid political option from the Early Iron Age through to the Hellenistic period.

Fashioning the Future in Roman Greece

Fashioning the Future in Roman Greece
Author: Estelle Strazdins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2023-02-09
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0192866109

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Fashioning the Future in Roman Greece: Memory, Monuments, Texts uses literature, inscriptions, art, and architecture to explore the relationship of elite Greeks of the Roman imperial period to time. This wide-ranging work challenges conventional thinking about the temporal positioning of imperial Greece and the so-called 'Second Sophistic', which holds that it was obsessed above all with the Classical past. Instead, the volume establishes that imperial Greek temporality was far more complex than scholarship has previously allowed by detailing how contemporary cultural output used the past to position itself within tradition but was crafted to speak to the future. At the same time, the book emphasizes the value of interdisciplinary analysis in any explication of elite culture in Roman Greece, since abundant extant evidence reveals its purveyors were often responsible for the production of both literature and material culture. Strazdins shows how these two modes of cultural production in the hands of elites, such as Herodes Atticus, Arrian, Aelius Aristides, Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, Polemon, Pausanias, and Philostratus, exhibit a shared rhetoric oriented towards posterity and informed by a heightened awareness of the fragility of cultural and personal memory over large spans of time. The book thus provides a sophisticated analysis of the tensions, anxieties, and opportunities that attend the fashioning of commemorative strategies against the background of the 'Second Sophistic' and the Roman empire, and details the consequences of embroilment with futurity on our understanding of the cultural and political concerns of elite imperial Greeks.

The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy

The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy
Author: Sara Brill
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 960
Release: 2024-03-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1003809413

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The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy is an essential reference source for cutting-edge scholarship on women, gender, and philosophy in Greek antiquity. The volume features original research that crosses disciplines, offering readers an accessible guide to new methods, new sources, and new questions in the study of ancient Greek philosophy and its multiple afterlives. Comprising 40 chapters from a diverse international group of experts, the Handbook considers questions about women and gender in sources from Greek antiquity spanning the period from 7th c. BCE to 2nd c. BCE, and in receptions of Greek antiquity from the Roman Imperial period, through the European Renaissance to the current day. Chapters are organized into five major sections: I. Early Greek antiquity – including Sappho, Presocratic philosophy, Sophists, and Greek tragedy – 700s–400s BCE II. Classical Greek antiquity – including Aeschines, Plato, and Xenophon – 400s–300s BCE III. Late Classical Greek to Hellenistic antiquity – including Cyrenaics, Cynics, the Hippocratic corpus, and Aristotle – 300s–200s BCE IV. Late Greek antiquity to Roman Imperial period – including Pythagorean women, Stoics, Pyrrhonian Skeptics, and late Platonists – 200s BCE to 700s CE V. Later receptions – including Shakespeare, the European Renaissance, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Harrison, Sarah Kofman, and Toni Morrison The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy is a vital resource for students and scholars in philosophy, Classics, and gender studies who want to gain a deeper understanding of philosophy’s rich past and explore sources and questions beyond the traditional canon. The volume is a valuable resource, as well, for students and scholars from history, humanities, literature, political science, religious studies, rhetorical studies, theatre, and LGBTQ and sexuality studies.

Ancient Greece and China Compared

Ancient Greece and China Compared
Author: G. E. R. Lloyd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2018-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108340326

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Ancient Greece and China Compared is a pioneering, methodologically sophisticated set of studies, bringing together scholars who all share the conviction that the sustained critical comparison and contrast between ancient societies can bring to light significant aspects of each that would be missed by focusing on just one of them. The topics tackled include key issues in philosophy and religion, in art and literature, in mathematics and the life sciences (including gender studies), in agriculture, city planning and institutions. The volume also analyses how to go about the task of comparing, including finding viable comparanda and avoiding the trap of interpreting one culture in terms appropriate only to another. The book is set to provide a model for future collaborative and interdisciplinary work exploring what is common between ancient civilisations, what is distinctive of particular ones, and what may help to account for the latter.

Of Rule and Office

Of Rule and Office
Author: Melissa Lane
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2023-06-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691192154

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A new reading of Plato’s political thought Plato famously defends the rule of knowledge. Knowledge, for him, is of the good. But what is rule? In this study, Melissa Lane reveals how political office and rule were woven together in Greek vocabulary and practices that both connected and distinguished between rule in general and office as a constitutionally limited kind of rule in particular. In doing so, Lane shows Plato to have been deeply concerned with the roles and relationships between rulers and ruled. Adopting a longstanding Greek expectation that a ruler should serve the good of the ruled, Plato’s major political dialogues—the Republic, the Statesman, and Laws—explore how different kinds of rule might best serve that good. With this book, Lane offers the first account of the clearly marked vocabulary of offices at the heart of all three of these dialogues, explaining how such offices fit within the broader organization and theorizing of rule. Lane argues that taking Plato’s interest in rule and office seriously reveals tyranny as ultimately a kind of anarchy, lacking the order as well as the purpose of rule. When we think of tyranny in this way, we see how Plato invokes rule and office as underpinning freedom and friendship as political values, and how Greek slavery shaped Plato’s account of freedom. Reading Plato both in the Greek context and in dialogue with contemporary thinkers, Lane argues that rule and office belong at the center of Platonic, Greek, and contemporary political thought.

Research Handbook on the History of Political Thought

Research Handbook on the History of Political Thought
Author: Cary J. Nederman
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2024-06-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1800373805

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This insightful Handbook reviews the key frameworks guiding political scientists and historians of political thought. Comprehensive in scope, it covers historical methodology, traditions, epochs, and classic authors and texts, spanning from ancient Greece until the nineteenth century.

The Greeks and the Rational

The Greeks and the Rational
Author: Josiah Ober
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2022-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520380177

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Tracing practical reason from its origins to its modern and contemporary permutations The Greek discovery of practical reason, as the skilled performance of strategic thinking in public and private affairs, was an intellectual breakthrough that remains both a feature of and a bug in our modern world. Countering arguments that rational choice-making is a contingent product of modernity, The Greeks and the Rational traces the long history of theorizing rationality back to ancient Greece. In this book, Josiah Ober explores how ancient Greek sophists, historians, and philosophers developed sophisticated and systematic ideas about practical reason. At the same time, they recognized its limits—that not every decision can be reduced to mechanistic calculations of optimal outcomes. Ober finds contemporary echoes of this tradition in the application of game theory to political science, economics, and business management. The Greeks and the Rational offers a striking revisionist history with widespread implications for the study of ancient Greek civilization, the history of thought, and human rationality itself.

Scholarship and Controversy

Scholarship and Controversy
Author: Stephen Halliwell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2023-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350333476

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The essays collected in this volume were written to mark the centenary of the birth of Sir Kenneth Dover, one of the twentieth century's most influential classical scholars. Between them, they explore the two major sides of his career: his groundbreaking scholarship on Greek language, literature and history, and the more public-facing roles he assumed in universities and at the British Academy which brought him into the national spotlight, not without some notoriety, in his later years. The contributors consider the various facets of Dover's life and work from a range of perspectives which reflect the burgeoning field of the history of scholarship. Some contributors were students and colleagues of Dover's at different stages of his career, while others are themselves leading experts in areas of Classics to which he devoted his energies. Chapters on his academic publications and on the controversies he faced in the public realm are not bland celebrations of his legacy but offer critical assessments of his motivations and achievements, cumulatively demonstrating that there is much to be learned not just about Dover himself but also about the fields he helped to shape.