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Author: Naomi T. Campa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009221434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
Freedom to do 'whatever one wishes' structured Athenian democratic ideology with consequences that empowered citizens and oppressed others.
Author: Naomi T. Campa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009221434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
Freedom to do 'whatever one wishes' structured Athenian democratic ideology with consequences that empowered citizens and oppressed others.
Author: Naomi Esther Campa-Thompson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
This project investigates the ideology of freedom and power underlying democratic citizenship in classical Athens using philological analysis and modern theoretical approaches, including performance and power studies. In opposition to other political systems such as oligarchy and tyranny, democracy is linked in ancient texts to freedom. Beginning with an exploration of what freedom meant to the Athenians and what logical conclusions this definition entailed, I find that freedom is often described as the ability of its citizens to do "whatever they wish." Building on modern political theory's distinction between negative and positive freedom (freedom from constraints versus freedom to act in order to take control of one's life), I argue that the phrase to do "whatever one wishes" is an expression of positive freedom, rather than negative freedom. I support this view with evidence from legal language, the historians (Herodotus and Thucydides), and the philosophers (Plato and Aristotle). These sources indicate that positive freedom and autonomy in both the private and public realms were conceptually and institutionally important for the Athenian citizen. This type of freedom accords, in turn, with a sense of power. I argue that power is best tracked by tracing the use of the adjective kurios and its opposite, akuros. Using the kurios of the household as a model, I outline basic features of power, including its performative and contested nature. I then focus philological analysis on kurios as deployed in forensic speeches to describe the defendant, jury, and the laws. The move from political theory into the pragmatic setting of the law court is conducive to identifying and analyzing prevalent notions about power and autonomy. In addition, I aim to show that democratic ideology negotiates a balance between its free citizens and its laws by conceptualizing the two parties as symbiotically drawing power from each other. Finally, I close with a case study of Against Neaira ([D.] 59), exemplifying how questions of freedom, power, and their attributes may be deployed for textual analysis. In contrast to other readings of the speech, I show that power struggles are central to the prosecution's argument.
Author: Christian Meier
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199588031
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
The book takes us on a tour through the rich spectrum of Greek life and culture, from their epic and lyric poetry, political thought and philosophy, to their social life, military traditions, sport, and religious festivals, and finally to the early stages of Greek democracy. Running as a connecting thread throughout is a people's attempt to create a society based upon the concept of freedom rather than naked power.
Author: Naomi T. Campa
Publisher:
ISBN: 1009221418
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Athenian democracy was distinguished from other ancient constitutions by its emphasis on freedom. This was understood, Naomi T. Campa argues, as being able to do 'whatever one wished,' a widely attested phrase. Citizen agency and power constituted the core of democratic ideology and institutions. Rather than create anarchy, as ancient critics claimed, positive freedom underpinned a system that ideally protected both the individual and the collective. Even freedom, however, can be dangerous. The notion of citizen autonomy both empowered and oppressed individuals within a democratic hierarchy. These topics strike at the heart of democracies ancient and modern, from the discursive principles that structure political procedures to the citizen's navigation between the limitations of law and expression of individual will to the status of noncitizens within a state. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Author: Sviatoslav Dmitriev
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195375181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541
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Book Description
This book elucidates the many uses of the slogan of freedom by ancient Greeks, beginning with the Peloponnesian war and continuing throughout the Hellenistic period, and shows in detail how the Romans appropriated and adjusted Greek political vocabulary and practices to establish the pax Romana over the Mediterranean world.
Author: Ineke Sluiter
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047405684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 462
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Book Description
This book contains a collection of essays on the notion of “Free Speech” in classical antiquity. The essays examine such concepts as “freedom of speech,” “self-expression,” and “censorship,” in ancient Greek and Roman culture from historical, philosophical, and literary perspectives. Among the many questions addressed are: what was the precise lexicographical valence of the ancient terms we routinely translate as "Freedom of Speech," e.g., Parrhesia in Greece, Licentia in Rome? What relationship do such terms have with concepts such as isêgoria, dêmokratia and eleutheria; or libertas, res publica and imperium? What does ancient theorizing about free speech tell us about contemporary relationships between power and speech? What are the philosophical foundations and ideological underpinnings of free speech in specific historical contexts?
Author: Arlene W. Saxonhouse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139447424
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
This book illuminates the distinctive character of our modern understanding of the basis and value of free speech by contrasting it with the very different form of free speech that was practised by the ancient Athenians in their democratic regime. Free speech in the ancient democracy was not a protected right but an expression of the freedom from hierarchy, awe, reverence and shame. It was thus an essential ingredient of the egalitarianism of that regime. That freedom was challenged by the consequences of the rejection of shame (aidos) which had served as a cohesive force within the polity. Through readings of Socrates's trial, Greek tragedy and comedy, Thucydides's History, and Plato's Protagoras this volume explores the paradoxical connections between free speech, democracy, shame, and Socratic philosophy and Thucydidean history as practices of uncovering.
Author: Arlene W. Saxonhouse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521721585
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Free speech in the ancient democracy was not a protected right but an expression of the freedom from hierarchy, awe, reverence and shame. That freedom was challenged by the consequences of the rejection of shame (aidos) which had served as a cohesive force within the polity. Through readings of Socrates's trial, Greek tragedy and comedy, Thucydides's History, and Plato's Protagoras, this volume explores the paradoxical connections between free speech, democracy, shame, and Socratic philosophy and Thucydidean history.
Author: Rachel Hall Sternberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521845526
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Ancient Athenians resemble modern Americans in their moral discomfort with empire. Athenians had power and used it ruthlessly, but the infliction of suffering did not mesh well with their civic-self-image. Embracing the concepts of democracy and freedom, they proudly pitted themselves against tyranny and oppression, but in practice they were capable of being tyrannical. Pity and Power in Ancient Athens argues that the exercise of power in democratic Athens, especially during its brief fifth-century empire, raised troubling questions about the alleviation and infliction of suffering, and pity emerged as a topic in Atheninan culture at this time.
Author: Josiah Ober
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691217971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Where did "democracy" come from, and what was its original form and meaning? Here Josiah Ober shows that this "power of the people" crystallized in a revolutionary uprising by the ordinary citizens of Athens in 508-507 B.C. He then examines the consequences of the development of direct democracy for upper-and lower-class citizens, for dissident Athenian intellectuals, and for those who were denied citizenship under the new regime (women, slaves, resident foreigners), as well as for the general development of Greek history. When the citizens suddenly took power into their own hands, they changed the cultural and social landscape of Greece, thereby helping to inaugurate the Classical Era. Democracy led to fundamental adjustments in the basic structures of Athenian society, altered the forms and direction of political thinking, and sparked a series of dramatic reorientations in international relations. It quickly made Athens into the most powerful Greek city-state, but it also fatally undermined the traditional Greek rules of warfare. It stimulated the development of the Western tradition of political theorizing and encouraged a new conception of justice that has striking parallels to contemporary theories of rights. But Athenians never embraced the notions of inherency and inalienability that have placed the concept of rights at the center of modern political thought. Thus the play of power that constituted life in democratic Athens is revealed as at once strangely familiar and desperately foreign, and the values sustaining the Athenian political community as simultaneously admirable and terrifying.
