Ancient Greek History

In this article, two questions are posed: Just how reliable is the evidence concerning Pythagoras's mathematical studies, and can we reconstruct his contribution to mathematics? All known fragments of evidence by fourth-century B.C. authors on Pythagoras's mathematical investigations are examined, and it is shown that all the discoveries they mentioned belong to the sixth century B.C. The opinion that the Pythagoreans ascribed their own discoveries to Pythagoras is refuted, and it is shown that we are able to establish logically his contribution to mathematics.Der Aufsatz behandelt die Frage, ob es sichere Zeugnisse über Pythagoras' mathematische Beschäftigungen gibt und ob wir auf dieser Grundlage seinen Beitrag zur Mathematik rekonstruieren können. Im Aufsatz werden Zeugnisse der Autoren aus dem 4 Jh. v.u.Z. über Pythagoras' mathematische Forschungen gesammelt, und es wird gezeigt, daß alle seine Entdeckungen wirklich dem Ende des 6 Jh. v.u.Z. angehören. Im Aufsatz wird die ältere Meinung abgelehnt, daß die Pythagoreer ihre Entdeckungen dem Pythagoras zugeschrieben haben, und es wird gezeigt, daß wir in der Lage sind, seinen Beitrag zur Mathematik abzugrenzen.

Descubra la vida y cultura en la brillante Grecia Clásica. Su sistema político fragmentado y los derechos de los ciudadanos, la educación, las artes y el ocio, la vivienda y el urbanismo, sus ceremonias y mitología, los viajes, la alimentación y el mundo militar. Un recorrido riguroso y didáctico por la sabiduría, costumbres y tradiciones de la cuna de la civilización occidental.
Grecia es la tierra de dioses y héroes, de reyes y príncipes y la cuna de una de las civilizaciones que más brillaron en la Antigüedad. Pero ¿qué sabemos de su día a día? ¿A qué se dedicaban? ¿Dónde vivían? ¿Cómo se divertían? ¿Cómo influían los dioses en los ciudadanos? En Breve historia de la vida cotidiana de la Gracia clásica, el lector podrá conocer otros aspectos igual de importantes que las guerras y batallas pero que a menudo pasan desapercibidos o no se tienen en cuenta debido a que todo el protagonismo se centra en los acontecimientos políticos y en las confrontaciones bélicas

This is a prefinal version of a critical bibliography published with Oxford University Press as:
Hin, S. (2015) ‘Ancient Demography’, in: Clayman, D. L. (ed.) Oxford Bibliographies in Classics. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 30. Online publication. DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0208. See for the final version: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195389661/obo-9780195389661-0208.xml

Through a careful analysis of the historical records of travels to the Mani peninsula
from the 16th century onward, I argue that the commonly-ascribed identity of
the Maniots, as descended directly from the Spartans of Classical Antiquity, is a modern
construction that was: a) externally imposed; and b) created largely in the 18th century.
In this article, I provide a timeline of Spartan identification in Mani, discuss the
historical, military, and political circumstances that led to the formation of this identification,
and conclude with a brief examination of the modern re-appropriation of ancient
Spartan identity in recent years within the far-right fascist political group, Golden
Dawn, whose leading members identified strongly both with Mani and ancient Sparta.
Ultimately, in this work I provide context for the progression and evolution of Spartan
identity in this small corner of the Greek world.

Diffused by the historiographical renewal of the sixties and the seventies, the concept of initiation rites has a long history. In the field of Greek studies, while the heuristic potential of this concept borrowed from anthropology is probably due to the intuition of Jane Harrison, yet it is the French historian Henri Jeanmaire who systematised its use in 1939. This pioneering position held by Jeanmaire made him an authority, whose works were subject to little historiographical criticism. Nevertheless, his construction of a very personal comparative experimental protocol, partly based on questionable theoretical assumptions, raises a number of theoretical issues. Evolutionism had a large impact on Jeanmaire’s approach to Greek chronology, as it is clear from his emphasis on the “traces” left by an inaccessible past, as well as from his focus on the classical city of Sparta and his evolutionary approach to historical transformations. This article aims to show that Jeanmaire’s evolutionist approach has had some problematic consequences for his understanding of Greek anthropology and history, and that the limits imposed on Jeanmaire’s work by his peculiar reception of evolutionism have not always been taken into account by his scientific successors.

This paper objectively presents a provable construction of generating a length of magnitude  , as the geometrical solution for the ancient problem of doubling the volume of a cube. Cube duplication is believed to be impossible under the stated restrictions of Euclidean geometry, because the Delian constant  is classified as an irrational number, that was stated to be geometrically irreducible (Pierre Laurent Wantzel, 1837) [1]. Contrary to the impossibility consideration, the solution for this ancient problem is theorem  , in which an elegant approach is presented, as a  refute to the cube duplication impossibility statement. Geogebra software as one of the interactive geometry software is used to illustrate the accuracy of the obtained results, at higher accuracies which cannot be perceived using the idealized platonic straightedge and compass construction.

Chapter III (55)

How Roman Arms Came to Conquer the Successors of Alexander (55)

How Much More Successful Was the Roman Legion than the Macedonian Phalanx? (57)

The Best Soldiers versus the Best Formation (59)

Why the Greeks Were Shocked after Rome’s Domination of Macedon (60)

Final Thoughts on the Impact of Alexander on Polybius’ Work (63)

This article reinterprets Thucydides's analysis of the post-Periclean turn in Athenian politics by reading it within the context of contemporary "tragic" and "scientific" explanatory traditions. It finds in this analysis an ambitious attempt to reinvent the traditional, tragic pattern of hubris-driven reversal by reinterpreting its underlying causal logic according to a scientific perspective in which the overdetermining effects of deities are replaced by the variable power dynamics of democratic deliberation. The resultant analysis identifies a change in the relative standing of leaders as the determining cause of democratic reversal, not the absolute decline in leadership, thus tracing the Athenian turn towards hubris, great error, and civil discord to the egalitarian ordering of the post-Periclean assembly. In so doing, it shows how Thucydides's analysis posed a powerful challenge to previous attempts, both tragic and scientific, to prognosticate the fate of imperial democracy, as well as offering an exemplary moment of Thucydides's synthetic approach towards tragic and scientific explanatory perspectives.

Ce livre entreprend tout d’abord d’éclairer le lien étroit qui unit l’invention de la démocratie et l’esclavage en Grèce ancienne. En étudiant la façon dont est défini à Athènes l’homme-marchandise qu’est l’esclave, les formes d’organisation de son travail, ou encore le statut de sa parole dans l’espace judiciaire, il propose tout d’abord une analyse inédite du droit athénien de l’esclavage. Mais le livre entend surtout placer l’esclavage au cœur de nos réflexions sur l’expérience grecque, en éclairant la façon dont la cité des hommes libres est elle-même modelée par l’institution esclavagiste. L’imaginaire politique athénien, auquel nous associons l’expérience de l’autonomie politique, est en effet le produit de l’expérience esclavagiste. À travers l’esclavage, la cité pense et donne une forme à ses frontières, et c’est un certain rapport au corps, à l’écriture, ou à la notion même de représentation qui se trouve alors éclairé.
Mais le livre entend aussi interroger les relations souterraines qui nouent l’histoire de l’esclavage antique à notre présent. Si nous prétendons aujourd’hui, à tort et à raison, être les héritiers de l’Antiquité gréco-romaine, en quoi l’esclavage, qui fut la condition même de son développement, a-t-il contribué à écrire une part de notre histoire au point de persister jusque dans notre plus extrême modernité ? Explorant, sous la forme d’essais libres, le droit du travail, la cybernétique, ou les formes modernes de la représentation politique, mais aussi convoquant Hermann Melville ou Aimé Césaire, Paulin Ismard en arrive à la conclusion que la configuration athénienne est d’une certaine façon encore la nôtre.

The finds presented here, which mainly come from the excavations conducted between 1985 and 1995, yield substantial information about eating habits, everyday life and the utensils manufactured for daily use. Since the finds originate from both a municipal excavation (Kalabaktepe) and a sanctuary excavation (Zeytintepe), they allow a comparison between the secular and religious spheres. Among the material it was possible to identify some new types of kitchenware. These include fish-shaped grills, cylindrical stoves and portable ovens of clay, but also varying types of stand made of stone and clay for cooking pots and grills. Cooking pots were the most common kitchenware for the preparation of warm meals. In addition bowls, mortaria, stone pestles, and coarsely made jugs were used, as were stoves, pithoi, hand-mills of stone, various stands and vessel lids and small tripod tables made of clay. Macroscopic and chemical analysis has established the reference Group of clays for the local kitchenware and utensils from Miletus. On this basis it will be possible to answer questions concerning trade networks more precisely in future.

During plebeian tribunat of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus 133 BC, main ideological and political adviser
was Caius Blossius. He came from Cumae, campanian town and community. Caius Blossius was adherent
of radical version of stoicism, which included democratic and social ideas. After death of his friend and leader
Tiberius Gracchus, Caius Blossius left Italy for Asia Minor where he joined to movement of Aristonicus and Heliopolis.
He committed a suicide after defeat of Aristonicus movement.

It is well known that the Western Culture as we know it today pays a big debt to the encounter of two among the biggest civilizations of the antiquity: the Greeks and the Romans. Since the cultural roots of our present European world are to be found in the Greek and Roman cultures, it could be useful to determine to what extent these cultures were related between each other and how they interacted to create the so-called Classical Culture that has proven to be so fundamental for our common cultural development. The relationship between the Greeks and the Romans began officially with the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 BCE, after which the roman consul Titus Quinctius Flamininus proclaimed the freedom of the Greek cities from the Macedonian dominance, and lasted for other two centuries before the definitive conquest of the Greek mainland by the Romans with the creation of the Province of Achaia in 27 BCE under the rule of the emperor Augustus. During these centuries was established a continuous contact and interchange of people and ideas that made possible the creation of a fruitful and durable cultural dialogue, the main topic of this paper. We will analyze the meaning of the words Hellenization and Romanization and focus the effects of the reciprocal influences, particularly their literary aspects.

This article provides an in-depth analysis of Gorgias's Funeral Oration. The chapter shows that Gorgias’s Epitaphios was most likely composed and disseminated at some point in the last quarter of the fifth century; that the text was intended to be received primarily by a literary audience (it was certainly not presented orally in the public funeral ceremony); and that Gorgias’s Epitaphios conveyed a tenor critical of the Athenian power politics in the later fifth century. Also, Gorgias’s Epitaphios seems to have played a role when Thucydides wrote the Periclean funeral oration in the Histories; and Isocrates in the Panegyricus took over the central message from Gorgias and developed it further.

Most slaves in the Greek world were imported non-Greeks and their offspring. Yet little is known of the entry into slavery of individuals from the non-Greek periphery. Far more promising for studying entry into slavery is a less numerically significant process, piracy, where the capture and sale of individuals - mainly Greeks - is extensively documented. Piracy was both a form of labour in itself, and a means of acquiring labour. The aim of this article is to explore the pragmatic aspects of capture and sale, as well as the extent to which the practice of ransoming prisoners kept captives away from entering the slave supply, by studying the pirate crew's work, the technology at its disposal, and the fate of its victims.

Recent scholarship has been divided over the question of whether a categorization of the disabled existed in antiquity. Close readings of Lysias, Plutarch, and other ancient Greek authors strongly suggest that some Greeks did construct a social category of disability. The ἀδύνατοι were banned from military, political, and religious roles in Athens and elsewhere. The Spartans, on the other hand, chastised those who did not fi ght, even those with disabling impairments, while lauding those who " overcame " their disabilities. Disability thus provides a new framework within which to gauge inter-Greek ethnic identity.

The famous dedication by Xenokrateia to the river god Kephisos and other divinities not far from the city of Athens in c. 400 BC (NM 2756; IG I3 987; IG II2 4547) is a rare example of a sizeable, public ego-document by a citizen woman. Close reading of the iconography of the votive relief, of the dedicatory epigram and the inscribed offering list, and comparison with other private foundations allow reconstructing Xenokrateia’s sense of her identity and the religious, intellectual and economic competences she must have had to bring this dedication about. As a literate, self-confident and pious Athenian citizen, mother, widow and heiress, she spent on estimation several hundred drachmas on her dedication, pace the law quoted at Is. 10.10. The plot of land involved was either her own property or a place already sacred to Kephisos and the Nymphs, to which she added her own dedication. For the latter possibility, a double relief dedicated by Kephisodotos to the hero Echelos and other deities (NM 1783) provides additional evidence. Xenokrateia’s dedication is exceptional for the detailed, qualitative analysis it allows, but it is not exceptional in quantitative terms: numerous dedications by women show them using similar competences. This approach to the evidence, initiated in recent scholarship, may open new windows on women’s agency in classical Athens.
Mots-clés : Xenokrateia – private foundation – citizenship – identity – competence – literacy – numeracy – votive relief – dedication – women’s agency – Is. 10.10 – classical Athens

This is the preliminary edition of a collection of translated ancient Greek sources on: family and household, sexuality, social groups, travel and foreigners, education, religion, military, leisure and sports, and science. The book is meant to be used in a university course on the History, society, or culture of Ancient Greece. One of its primary intentions is to train undergraduate students in testing the reliability of ancient sources and in extracting historical information from them.

Il volume propone un quadro sintetico ma aggiornato delle forme del potere nel mondo greco tra iv e i secolo a.C., fra la tirannide e la nuova concezione di regalità introdotta da Alessandro Magno. La chiave di lettura è la reazione polemica o, spesso, intrisa d’ironia, satira e parodia, che queste suscitarono nella pubblicistica – coeva e non – e tra i sudditi. A tal proposito vengono individuati e discussi alcuni casi di studio particolarmente significativi: re munifici e tiranni spietati, regine virtuose e sovrane viziose riprendono vita in queste pagine, mostrando, tra scurrilità e raffinatezza, sbeffeggio e mito, la persistente attualità del loro volto.

The following is a brief discussion of Emperor Hadrian's hellenized cultural influence on Rome. Surely Rome had had extensive contact with Greece previously, as reflected in their art, literature, and other forms of cultural expression. Under Hadrian, however, Greek culture experienced a renaissance in Rome and Hadrianic hellenism influenced Roman art, culture, and attitudes for centuries afterward.

The article analyses one of the hexametric poems copied on a second century AD papyrus, possibly from Hermupolis, P.Lit.Goodspeed 2: a Hellenistic hymn to Aphrodite celebrated as a patroness of the sea and of wedded love. This portrayal of the goddess perfectly fits with Ptolemaic royal propaganda in III BC. The address to a "Ptolemai[c] Arsinoe" (II 5) reveals that here the goddess is worshipped as a divine image of a queen Arsinoe, most probably Arsinoe II Philadelphos, who had strong links with key-figures of the Ptolemaic navy. The hymn is compared with contemporary Alexandrian poetry, like the epigrams of the Milan papyrus P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309. Some hypotheses are also presented about the context for the composition and the performance of the hymn (a Cypriot cult of Arsinoe Philadelphos?).

P. A. Evdokimov
The Cypriot Politeia of Aristotle and Royal Power in Cyprus
There are just a few remained fragments of Aristotle's lost Cypriot politeia in the excerpts of later periods. It is worth noting, that all these extracts are anyway devoted to the problem of royal power (one explains the difference between the terms basileus and anax and another one gives some information concerning some particular personalities from the royal dynasty of Pafos); we should also take into account the one fragment from Politics, where he mentions a complot against Evagoras I the Salaminian.
Some interesting traits connect “political” works of Stagiritus with Cyprus: his friendship with Eudemus the Cypriot, the devotion of Protrepticus to Cypriot ruler Themison, Clearchus from Soloi as Aristotle's student in the Lyceum and Theophrastus, who also turned his attention to the phenomenon of royal power in Cyprus – not to mention Isocrates' Orationes and other facts of the late 5th – 4th centuries B. C. , which made the island closer to a number of Athenian intellectuals and politics of than time.
Both works of Aristotle devoted to megalonesoi (Crete and Cyprus) were named in a quite similar manner, i.e. Ton Cyprion politeia and Ton Creton politeia – that means that without going deep in the details and peculiarities connected with each individual polity, the author deals with common features of all the polities in these islands (seen from aside Cypriot polities looked much similar to each other, as like as Cretan ones did).
It is possible to suppose that it was namely the unique institute of royal power which attracted Aristotle's attention in Cyprus, so some general thoughts made in his Politics could be deduces by taking into account Cypriot political reality – and it is probably the passage where the Stagirite defines several types of royal power (Arist. Polit. ΙΙΙ. 12-14, 1285 b). When the philosopher deals with the royal power of the heroic times, it fits well to Cypriot realia known both from archaeological evidences and written tradition: military function of Cypriot kings as war-leaders, their close connection with cult (as king-priests in Pafos of elsewhere), scepters as signs of power, and especially important role as patrons of crafts (first of all mining bronze-production and metallworking).



Published in: ΠΕΝΤΗΚΟΝΤΑΕΤΙΑ. Исследования по античной истории и культуре. Сборник, посвященный юбилею Игоря Евгеньевича Сурикова / Под ред. О. Л. Габелко, А. В. Махлаюка и А. А. Синицына. – СПб.: Издательство РХГА, 2018. – 464 с. : ил., [16] с. ил.
ISBN 978-5-88812-887-9

Since Nietzsche published his study The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, there has been a common misconception that the ancient Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus are two parts of a polarity, a dichotomy, an antithetical pair. This essay argues that in the context of the tragedies of classical Athens, the two gods are but different aspects of the same dramatic principle – that of κάθαρσις, catharsis. The ways in which each god is employed as an agent of catharsis can tell us much about the social, political, cultural and religious tensions present in classical Athenian society, especially considering the importance of theatrical performances during the fourth and fifth centuries BCE.

Türkçeye Fransızcadan geçen ve sömürgecilikle eşdeğer bir kelime olarak kullanılan kolonicilik genel anlamıyla bir ulusun ya da topluluğun yabancı bir toprağı işgal etmesi, işgal edilen bölgeye göçmenlerin yerleştirilmesi ve ilhak edilen bölgenin toprağının işlenmesinin sağlanması anlamına gelmektedir. Bu bağlamda her ne kadar Batı tarihçilik geleneği koloniciliği Coğrafi Keşiflerle başlatsa da anlamı itibariyle bu tanım, Eski Yunan ve hatta bazı eksikleri olmasına rağmen Fenikeliler dönemine kadar geriye götürülebilmektedir.
İlk olarak Yunanlılar, daha sonrasında onların mirasını devralan Romalılar tarafından mor boyanın ülkesinden gelen halk olarak nitelenen Levant halkı, bu betimlemeye atfen Fenikeliler olarak tanımlanmıştır. Tarihi kayıtlar çerçevesinde ilk kolonist devlet olarak nitelenen Fenikeliler esasen bir devletin oluşturduğu üniter birliktelikten çok uzaktı, bölge birçok kent devletinden müteşekkil olup bu devletler arasındaki ilişkiler farklı nitelikler gösterebilmekteydi. Dahası her kent devleti kendi dış ilişkilerini istediği istikamette ilerletebilmekteydi. Ancak bu kent devletleri her ne kadar tarihi olarak farklı yönler izlediyse de kültürel ve dil bağlamında birbiriyle ortak bir mirası paylaşmaktaydı, bu sebeptendir ki bugünkü Lübnan sınırları içerisinde yer alan Fenike Kent Devletleri tarih boyunca tek bir devletmiş gibi değerlendirilmiştir. Her ne kadar Fenikelilerden elimize yazılı kaynak kalmamış olsa da birtakım arkeolojik kalıntılar ve miras bıraktıkları dikili taşlar kültürel ve siyasi yapıları bakımından az da olsa bir fikir edinmeyi olanaklı kılmaktadır.
Bir sahil şeridi çevresine yerleşen Fenikeliler şüphesiz ki coğrafyanın kendilerine sağladığı avantajları oldukça iyi bir şekilde kullanmışlardır. Nitekim bölgeye ilk yerleştikleri dönemlerden itibaren balıkçılıkla uğraşan Sami kökenli bu halk, zamanla sahil şeridinin dışına çıkıp çok uzak bölgeler de dahil Akdeniz’in birçok bölümünde koloniler kurmayı başarabilmiştir. Gerek zaruri ihtiyaçlardan gerekse de daha fazlasını elde etme arzusu Fenikeli kolonicilere cesaret vermiştir. Coğrafya olarak çok hassas bir bölgeye yerleşmiş olan Fenike halkı, tarih boyunca Asur, Babil, Mısır, Hitit gibi devletlerin baskısı altına girmiş gözükse de özerkliğini bir şekilde korumayı başarmıştır. Şüphesiz ki bu başarının en önemli sırrı Fenikelilerin ticaretteki üstünlüğünden kaynaklanmıştır.