Law, Rhetoric and Comedy in Classical Athens

Law, Rhetoric and Comedy in Classical Athens PDF Author: D.L. Cairns
Publisher: Classical Press of Wales
ISBN: 191453512X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
An international cast of distinguished scholars here offers seventeen new contributions on the detail and development of Athenian law; the life, work, and political background of the Attic orators; and the intersection of Attic Comedy with Athenian law, politics, and society. In their detailed and careful use of evidence and deep awareness of social and historical contexts, the essays aspire to standards set by their distinguished honorand, Professor D.M. MacDowell.

Law, Rhetoric and Comedy in Classical Athens

Law, Rhetoric and Comedy in Classical Athens PDF Author: D.L. Cairns
Publisher: Classical Press of Wales
ISBN: 191453512X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
An international cast of distinguished scholars here offers seventeen new contributions on the detail and development of Athenian law; the life, work, and political background of the Attic orators; and the intersection of Attic Comedy with Athenian law, politics, and society. In their detailed and careful use of evidence and deep awareness of social and historical contexts, the essays aspire to standards set by their distinguished honorand, Professor D.M. MacDowell.

Law, Rhetoric and Comedy in Classical Athens

Law, Rhetoric and Comedy in Classical Athens PDF Author: Douglas Maurice MacDowell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780954384555
Category : Athens (Greece)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Papers presented at a conference, Athenian Law and Life, held in Glasgow, 30 June-2 July 2001.

Studies on Greek Law, Oratory and Comedy

Studies on Greek Law, Oratory and Comedy PDF Author: Authored by Douglas M. MacDowell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317048873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
Douglas M. MacDowell (1931–2010) was a scholar of international renown and the articles included here cover a significant area of classical scholarship, discussing Athenian law, law-making and legal procedure, Old Comedy, comedy and law, politics and lexicography. All of these articles, published between 1959 and 2010, bear the characteristic marks of his scholarship: precision, balanced judgement, brevity and deep learning; they are rational and sober accounts of complicated and controversial issues. Many of these essays are virtually inaccessible as they were originally published in celebratory volumes or article collections which are now out of print or difficult to find outside major libraries. This collection of MacDowell’s articles will make these works available to a broad scholarly audience, and make it easier to bring this scholarship to the classroom as part of courses in Classics, ancient history, legal history and theatre studies. The volume includes a biography of MacDowell by Christopher Carey, based on the testimony of his closest colleagues and personal friends, which was presented to the British Academy.

Aristophanes the Democrat

Aristophanes the Democrat PDF Author: Keith Sidwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521519985
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
This book argues that writers of Old Comedy belonged to recognisable political circles and used their comedy to disparage their political enemies.

Democracy and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens

Democracy and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens PDF Author: Edward M. Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113945689X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 21

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Book Description
This volume brings together essays on Athenian law by Edward M. Harris, who challenges much of the recent scholarship on this topic. Presenting a balanced analysis of the legal system in ancient Athens, Harris stresses the importance of substantive issues and their contribution to our understanding of different types of legal procedures. He combines careful philological analysis with close attention to the political and social contexts of individual statutes. Collectively, the essays in this volume demonstrate the relationship between law and politics, the nature of the economy, the position of women, and the role of the legal system in Athenian society. They also show that the Athenians were more sophisticated in their approach to legal issues than has been assumed in the modern scholarship on this topic.

Reproducing Athens

Reproducing Athens PDF Author: Susan Lape
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825911
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.

Democratic Law in Classical Athens

Democratic Law in Classical Athens PDF Author: Michael Gagarin
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477320377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The democratic legal system created by the Athenians was completely controlled by ordinary citizens, with no judges, lawyers, or jurists involved. It placed great importance on the litigants’ rhetorical performances. Did this make it nothing more than a rhetorical contest judged by largely uneducated citizens that had nothing to do with law, a criticism that some, including Plato, have made? Michael Gagarin argues to the contrary, contending that the Athenians both controlled litigants’ performances and incorporated many other unusual features into their legal system, including rules for interrogating slaves and swearing an oath. The Athenians, Gagarin shows, adhered to the law as they understood it, which was a set of principles more flexible than our current understanding allows. The Athenians also insisted that their legal system serve the ends of justice and benefit the city and its people. In this way, the law ultimately satisfied most Athenians and probably produced just results as often as modern legal systems do. Comprehensive and wide-ranging, Democratic Law in Classical Athens offers a new perspective for viewing a legal system that was democratic in a way only the Athenians could achieve.

The Clouds

The Clouds PDF Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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Book Description
The Clouds is a Greek comedy play written by the playwright Aristophanes. A lampooning of intellectual fashions in classical Athens, it can be considered the world's first extant "comedy of ideas" and is considered by literary critics to be among the finest examples of the genre. The play also, however, remains notorious for its caricature of Socrates and is mentioned in Plato's Apology as a contributor to the philosopher's trial and execution.

Comic Invective in Ancient Greek and Roman Oratory

Comic Invective in Ancient Greek and Roman Oratory PDF Author: Sophia Papaioannou
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110735660
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This volume acknowledges the centrality of comic invective in a range of oratorical institutions (especially forensic and symbouleutic), and aspires to enhance the knowledge and understanding of how this technique is used in such con-texts of both Greek and Roman oratory. Despite the important scholarly work that has been done in discussing the patterns of using invective in Greek and Roman texts and contexts, there are still notable gaps in our knowledge of the issue. The introduction to, and the twelve chapters of, this volume address some understudied multi-genre and interdisciplinary topics: first, the ways in which comic invective in oratory draws on, or has implications for, comedy and other genres, or how these literary genres are influenced by oratorical theory and practice, and by contemporary socio-political circumstances, in articulating comic invective and targeting prominent individuals; second, how comic invective sustains relationships and promotes persuasion through unity and division; third, how it connects with sexuality, the human body and male/female physiology; fourth, what impact generic dichotomies, as, for example, public-private and defence-prosecution, may have upon using comic invective; and fifth, what the limitations in its use are, depending on the codes of honour and decency in ancient Greece and Rome.

The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines

The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines PDF Author: Guy Westwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599127
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
In democratic Athens, mass citizen audiences - whether in the lawcourts, or in the political Assembly and Council, or when gathered for formal civic occasions - frequently heard politicians and litigants discussing the city's past, and manipulating it for persuasive ends. The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines explores how these dynamics worked in practice, taking two prominent mid-fourth-century politicians (and bitter adversaries) as focal points. While most recent scholarly treatments of how the Athenians recalled their past concentrate on collective processes, this work looks instead at the rhetorical strategies devised by individual orators, examining what it meant for Demosthenes or Aeschines to present particular 'historical' examples, arguments, and illustrations in particular contexts. It argues that discussing the Athenian past - and therefore discussing a core aspect of Athenian identity itself - offered Demosthenes and Aeschines, among others, an effective and versatile means both of building and highlighting their own credibility, authority, and commitment to the democracy and its values, and of competing with their rivals, whose own versions and handling of the past they could challenge and undermine as a symbolic attack on those rivals' wider competence. Recourse to versions of the past also offered orators a way of reflecting on a troubled contemporary geopolitical landscape in which Athens first confronted the enterprising Philip II of Macedon and then coped with Macedonian hegemony. The work covers the full range of Demosthenes' and Aeschines' surviving public speeches, and the extended opening chapter includes synoptic surveys of key individual topics which feed into the main discussion.