FYS 1108 From Chaos to Compromise (McKay): Athens Game

The first unabridged translation into American English, and the first to take into account the wealth of Thucydidean scholarship of the last half of the twentieth century, Steven Lattimore's translation sets a new standard for accuracy and reliability. Notes provide information necessary for a fuller understanding of problematic passages, explore their implications as well as the problems they may pose, and shed light on Thucydides as a distinctive literary artist as well as a source for historians and political theorists.

From the editor of the widely praised The Landmark Thucydides and The Landmark Herodotus, here is a new edition of Xenophon’s Hellenika, the primary source for the events of the final seven years and aftermath of the Peloponnesian War. Hellenika covers the years between 411 and 362 B.C.E., a particularly dramatic period during which the alliances among Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Persia were in constant flux. Together with the volumes of Herodotus and Thucydides, it completes an ancient narrative of the military and political history of classical Greece. Xenophon was an Athenian who participated in the expedition of Cyrus the Younger against Cyrus’ brother, the Perisan King Artaxerces II. Later Xenophon joined the Spartan army and hence was exiled from Athens. In addition to the Hellenika, a number of his essays have survived, including one on his memories of his teacher, Socrates. Beautifully illustrated, heavily annotated, and filled with detailed, clear maps, this edition gives us a new, authoritative, and completely accessible translation by John Marincola, an comprehensive introduction by David Thomas, sixteen appendices written by leading classics scholars, and an extensive timeline/chronology to clarify this otherwise confusing period. Unlike any other edition of the Hellenika, it also includes the relevant texts of Diodorus Siculus and the Oxyrhynchus Historian, with explanatory footnotes and a table that correlates passages of the three works, which is perhaps crucial to an assessment of Xenophon’s reliability and quality as a historian. Like the two Landmark editions that precede it, The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika is the most readable and comprehensive edition available of an essential history.

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"Reeve's book is an excellent companion to Plato's Apology and a valuable discussion of many of the main issues that arise in the early dialogues. Reeve is an extremely careful reader of texts, and his familiarity with the legal and cultural background of Socrates' trial allows him to correct many common misunderstandings of that event. In addition, he integrates his reading of the apology with a sophisticated discussion of Socrates' philosophy. The writing is clear and succinct, and the research is informed by a thorough acquaintance with the secondary literature. Reeve's book will be accessible to any serious undergraduate, but it is also a work that will have to be taken into account by every scholar doing advanced research on Socrates." --Richard Kraut, Northwestern University

Originally published in in 1893, this book contains the text of the Socratic dialogue Protagoras, which discusses a variety of Sophistic and Socratic tenets, including the teachability of virtue. The dialogue also provides an interesting view on the connection between pederasty and education in ancient Athens. Notable Plato scholars James and Adele Adams present an introduction addressing the purpose and themes of the dialogue; a biography of Protagoras and extant fragments of his works are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Platonic, Socratic or Sophistic philosophies.

Probably written by a student of Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution is both a history and an analysis of Athens' political machinery between the seventh and fourth centuries BC, which stands as a model of democracy at a time when city-states lived under differing kinds of government. The writer recounts the major reforms of Solon, the rule of the tyrant Pisistratus and his sons, the emergence of the democracy in which power was shared by all free male citizens, and the leadership of Pericles and the demagogues who followed him. He goes on to examine the city's administration in his own time - the council, the officials and the judicial system. For its information on Athens' development and how the democracy worked, The Athenian Constitution is an invaluable source of knowledge about the Athenian city-state.

The Politics is one of the most influential texts in the history of political thought, and it raises issues which still confront anyone who wants to think seriously about the ways in which human societies are organized and governed. The work of one of the world's greatest philosophers, it draws on Aristotle's own great knowledge of the political and constitutional affairs of the Greek cities. By examining the way societies are run - from households to city states - Aristotle establishes how successful constitutions can best be initiated and upheld. For this edition Sir Ernest Barker's fine translation, which has been widely used for nearly half a century, has been extensively revised to meet the needs of the modern reader. The accessible introduction and clear notes by R F Stalley examine the historical and philosophical background of the work and discuss its significance for modern political thought.

Three treatises survive from classical Greece under the loose title Politeiai (Constitutions) which are unique in character and indispensable to any student of the period. The longest and most important is Aristotle's Constitution of Athens which is both a history of Athenian constitutional development and a survey of the constitutional machinery of Aristotle's own day. The second, by Xenophon, is an account of the Spartan social and educational system, and the third, also attributed to Xenophon, The Constitution of the Athenians, though probably by an earlier author, is the first example in history of political pamphleteering. Dr. Moore has newly translated all three of these documents and an additional fragment The Boeotian Constitution written in the fourth century B. C. and the only surviving account of a genuinely oligarchic regime of the period. To these much needed, scholarly translations Dr. Moore has added brilliant introductions and commentaries which evaluate the documents, illumine their significance, and provide the background information which the writers assumed their readers to possess. In bringing together, translating, and annotating these constitutional documents from ancient Greece, Dr. Moore has produced an authoritative work of the highest scholarship which will place all students of constitutional history and of the Ancient World in his debt.

Trojan Women is very much a play for our times. Strongly against war, it shows its aftermath through the eyes of a group of women, members of the Trojan royal household. They have experienced displacement, degradation and deprivation as their city has been sacked by the Greeks. The play expresses their protest, their articulation of grief, their reflection upon the world they now find themselves in, one in which the more they suffer the more their love for each other and for the family they have lost is strengthened. Trojan Women is concentrated in its emotive power and its uniquely lyric quality and it is not without the irony either that the positions of victors and vanquished are not always as fixed or as irreversible as they seem. Greek text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.

Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, the exuberant, satirical form of festival drama which flourished during the heyday of classical Athenian culture in the fifth century BC. His plays are characterized by extraordinary combinations of fantasy and satire, sophistication and vulgarity, formality and freedom. Birds is an escapist fantasy in which two dissatisfied Athenians, in defiance of men and gods, bring about a city of birds, the eponymous Cloudcuckooland. In Lysistrata the heroine of the play organizes a sex-strike and the wives of Athens occupy the Akropolis in an attempt to restore peace to the city. The main source of comedy in the Assembly-Women is a similar usurpation of male power as the women attempt to reform Athenian society along utopian-communist lines. Finally, Wealth is Aristophanes' last surviving comedy, in which Ploutos, the god of wealth is cured of his blindness and the remarkable social consequences of his new discrimination are exemplified. This is the first complete verse translation of Aristophanes' comedies to appear for more than twenty-five years and makes freshly available one of the most remarkable comic playwrights in the entire Western tradition, complete with an illuminating introduction including play by play analysis and detailed notes.

Trials from Classical Athenspresents a selection of key forensic speeches with new translations and lucid explanatory notes, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments and a discussion of the legal issues raised. Carey offers a diverse repertory of legal case studies which deal with different aspects of Athenian law. The volume provides a unique and accessible introduction to the Athenian legal system and how the system reveals the values and social life of Classical Athens. This comprehensive book will be a fundamental resource for students of Ancient Greek history and anyone interested in the law, social history and oratory of the Ancient Greek world.

Originally published in 1864 as La Cité Antique, this remarkable work describes society as it existed in Greece during the age of Pericles and in Rome at the time of Cicero. Working with only a fraction of the materials available to today's classical scholar, Fustel de Coulanges fashioned a complete picture of life in the ancient city, resulting in a book impressive today as much for the depth of its portrait as for the thesis it presents. In The Ancient City, Fustel argues that primitive religion constituted the foundation of all civic life. Developing his comparisons between belifes and laws, Fustel covers such topis as rites and festivals; marriage and the family; divorce, death, and burial; and political and legal structures. "Religion," the suthor states, "constituted the Greek and Roman family, established marriage and paternal authority, fixed the order of relationship, and consecrated the right of propery, and the right of inheritance. This same religion, after having enlarged and extended the family, formed a stull larger association, the city, and reigned in that as it had reigned in the family. From it came all the institutions, as well as the private law, of the ancients." As Arnaldo Momigliano and S. C. Humphreys note in their foreword, The Ancient City rightly takes its place alongside a number of pioneering works of the late nineteenth century that offered radically new inerpretations of ancient society and culture. Indeed, modern anthropology, as well as classics, owes a debt to Fustel de Coulanges, whose early insights in The Ancient City remain valid and provocative today.

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History, political philosophy, and constitutional law were born in Athens in the space of a single generation--the generation that lived through the Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.e.). This remarkable age produced such luminaries as Socrates, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and the sophists, and set the stage for the education and early careers of Plato and Xenophon, among others. The School of History provides the fullest and most detailed intellectual and political history available of Athens during the late fifth century b.c.e., as it examines the background, the context, and the decisive events shaping this society in the throes of war. This expansive, readable narrative ultimately leads to a new understanding of Athenian democratic culture, showing why and how it yielded such extraordinary intellectual productivity. As both a source and a subject, Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War is the central text around which the narrative and thematic issues of the book revolve. Munn re-evaluates the formation of the Greek historiographical tradition itself as he identifies the conditions that prompted Thucydides to write--specifically the historian's desire to guide the Athenian democracy as it struggled to comprehend its future. The School of History fully encompasses recent scholarship in history, literature, and archaeology. Munn's impressive mastery of the huge number of sources and publications informs his substantial contributions to our understanding of this democracy transformed by war. Immersing us fully in the intellectual foment of Athenian society, The School of History traces the history of Athens at the peak of its influence, both as a political and military power in its own time and as a source of intellectual inspiration for the centuries to come. A Main Selection of the History Book Club

This book asks an important question often ignored by ancient historians and political scientists alike: Why did Athenian democracy work as well and for as long as it did? Josiah Ober seeks the answer by analyzing the sociology of Athenian politics and the nature of communication between elite and nonelite citizens. After a preliminary survey of the development of the Athenian "constitution," he focuses on the role of political and legal rhetoric. As jurymen and Assemblymen, the citizen masses of Athens retained important powers, and elite Athenian politicians and litigants needed to address these large bodies of ordinary citizens in terms understandable and acceptable to the audience. This book probes the social strategies behind the rhetorical tactics employed by elite speakers. A close reading of the speeches exposes both egalitarian and elitist elements in Athenian popular ideology. Ober demonstrates that the vocabulary of public speech constituted a democratic discourse that allowed the Athenians to resolve contradictions between the ideal of political equality and the reality of social inequality. His radical reevaluation of leadership and political power in classical Athens restores key elements of the social and ideological context of the first western democracy.

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 of decisions made by non-elite citizens? The problem became acute after two oligarchic coups d' tat in the late fifth century B.C. The generosity and statesmanship that democrats showed after regaining political power contrasted starkly with the oligarchs' violence and corruption. Since it was no longer self-evident that "better men" meant "better government," critics of democracy sought new arguments to explain the relationship among politics, ethics, and morality. Ober offers fresh readings of the political works of Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, among others, by placing them in the context of a competitive community of dissident writers. These thinkers struggled against both democratic ideology and intellectual rivals to articulate the best and most influential criticism of popular rule. The competitive Athenian environment stimulated a century of brilliant literary and conceptual innovation. Through Ober's re-creation of an ancient intellectual milieu, early Western political thought emerges not just as a "footnote to Plato," but as a dissident commentary on the first Western democracy.

This book is the result of a long and fruitful conversation among practitioners of two very different fields: ancient history and political theory. The topic of the conversation is classical Greek democracy and its contemporary relevance. The nineteen contributors remain diverse in their political commitments and in their analytic approaches, but all have engaged deeply with Greek texts, with normative and historical concerns, and with each others' arguments. The issues and tensions examined here are basic to both history and political theory: revolution versus stability, freedom and equality, law and popular sovereignty, cultural ideals and social practice. While the authors are sharply critical of many aspects of Athenian society, culture, and government, they are united by a conviction that classical Athenian democracy has once again become a centrally important subject for political debate. The contributors are Benjamin R. Barber, Alan Boegehold, Paul Cartledge, Susan Guettel Cole, W. Robert Connor, Carol Dougherty, J. Peter Euben, Mogens H. Hansen, Victor D. Hanson, Carnes Lord, Philip Brook Manville, Ian Morris, Martin Ostwald, Kurt Raaflaub, Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Barry S. Strauss, Robert W. Wallace, Sheldon S. Wolin, and Ellen Meiksins Wood.

The Classical Athenians were the first to articulate and implement the notion that ordinary citizens of no particular affluence or education could make responsible political decisions. For this reason, reactions to Athenian democracy have long provided a prime Rorschach test for political thought. Whether praising Athens's government as the legitimizing ancestor of modern democracies or condemning it as mob rule, commentators throughout history have revealed much about their own notions of politics and society. In this book, Jennifer Roberts charts responses to Athenian democracy from Athens itself through the twentieth century, exploring a debate that touches upon historiography, ethics, political science, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, gender studies, and educational theory.

This critical study, designed for the modern reader, explains what the institutions of the classical Athenian democracy were, how they worked, and on what assumptions they were founded. Incorporating important recent work by historians, epigraphists, and archaeologists, Stockton traces thebroad development of the Athenian constitution from the reforms of Solon in the early sixth century to those of Ephialtes in the late 460s B.C., carefully examining the fully-developed democratic system of the post-Ephialtic period. Stockton translates all Greek terms and explains difficult essaysmaking the volume highly accessible to students of ancient and modern history, and to the general reader.