The Splendors and Miseries of Ruling Alone

The Splendors and Miseries of Ruling Alone PDF Author: Nino Luraghi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783515105040
Category : Greece
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Monarchy, that is, a political order characterized by a single ruler, is an understudied aspect of Greek politics and culture. The contributors to this e-book provide a unified scholarly framework in which to interpret the sociological as well as the ideological side of monarchic regimes from archaic Greek tyranny to Hellenistic monarchy in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. Taking their cue from Hans-Joachim Gehrke's essay on the victorious king, published here in an updated English translation, the contributors bring to the surface common trends and features that make it possible to sketc.

The Splendors and Miseries of Ruling Alone

The Splendors and Miseries of Ruling Alone PDF Author: Nino Luraghi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783515105040
Category : Greece
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Monarchy, that is, a political order characterized by a single ruler, is an understudied aspect of Greek politics and culture. The contributors to this e-book provide a unified scholarly framework in which to interpret the sociological as well as the ideological side of monarchic regimes from archaic Greek tyranny to Hellenistic monarchy in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. Taking their cue from Hans-Joachim Gehrke's essay on the victorious king, published here in an updated English translation, the contributors bring to the surface common trends and features that make it possible to sketc.

Hellenistic Science at Court

Hellenistic Science at Court PDF Author: Marquis Berrey
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110540150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The development of science in the modern world is often held to depend on such institutions as universities, peer-reviewed journals, and democracy. How, then, did new science emerge in the pre-modern culture of the Hellenistic Egyptian monarchy? Berrey argues that the court society formed around the Ptolemaic pharaohs Ptolemy III and IV (reigned successively 246-205/4 BCE) provided an audience for cross-disciplinary, learned knowledge, as physicians, mathematicians, and mechanicians clothed themselves in the virtues of courtiers attendant on the kings. The multicultural Greco-Egyptian court society prized entertainment that drew on earlier literature, mixed genres and cultures, and highlighted motion and sound. New cross-disciplinary science in the Hellenistic period gained its social currency and subsequent scientific success through its entertainment value as court science. Ancient court science sheds light on the long history of scientific interdisciplinarity.

Evil Lords

Evil Lords PDF Author: Nikos Panou
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199394865
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Evil Lords uses the prism of bad rule or tyranny to enhance our understanding of political discourse from the ancient world to the Renaissance, elucidating premodern notions of sovereignty as well as the relation between ethics and politics, the individual and society, power, and propaganda. Eleven chapters present case studies exploring Hebrew, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine, early, high and late medieval, and Renaissance conceptions and representations of bad or tyrannical government. Since bad rule is always a perversion of the norm, its shifting conceptualizations shed light on historically specific assessments of what constitutes acceptable and legitimate political behavior. Meanwhile, political debate also reflects specific power structures, authorial intent, and audience expectations. Each of the essays, therefore, examines bad rule and its agents within the ideological frameworks and societal patterns of the respective periods, thereby painting a picture of historical and intellectual change. Despite these often profound variations, however, the volume also shows that it is meaningful to think of a Western tradition of tyranny in the premodern world that derived from shared roots in Classical and biblical thought and was further defined by ongoing cross-fertilization spanning two millennia. Thus, Evil Lords offers scholars and students of Western political theory, history, and literature a critical framework through which to revisit the longue durée of premodern political reflection.

Kings and Usurpers in the Seleukid Empire

Kings and Usurpers in the Seleukid Empire PDF Author: Boris Chrubasik
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191090611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Kings and Usurpers in the Seleukid Empire: The Men who would be King focuses on ideas of kingship and power in the Seleukid empire, the largest of the successor states of Alexander the Great. Exploring the question of how a man becomes a king, it specifically examines the role of usurpers in this particular kingdom - those who attempted to become king, and who were labelled as rebels by ancient authors after their demise - by placing these individuals in their appropriate historical contexts through careful analysis of the literary, numismatic, and epigraphic material. By writing about kings and rebels, literary accounts make a clear statement about who had the right to rule and who did not, and the Seleukid kings actively fostered their own images of this right throughout the third and second centuries BCE. However, what emerges from the documentary evidence is a revelatory picture of a political landscape in which kings and those who would be kings were in constant competition to persuade whole cities and armies that they were the only plausible monarch, and of a right to rule that, advanced and refuted on so many sides, simply did not exist. Through careful analysis, this volume advances a new political history of the Seleukid empire that is predicated on social power, redefining the role of the king as only one of several players within the social world and offering new approaches to the interpretation of the relationship between these individuals themselves and with the empire they sought to rule. In doing so, it both questions the current consensus on the Seleukid state, arguing instead that despite its many strong rulers the empire was structurally weak, and offers a new approach to writing political history of the ancient world.

The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East

The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East PDF Author: Zahra Newby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192695290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East explores the various ways in which the experience of civic festivals in the Graeco-Roman East was created and framed by material culture. By the second and third centuries AD, Greek festivals were thriving across the eastern Mediterranean. Much of our knowledge of these festivals, and their associated processions, rituals, banquets, and competitions, comes from material culture— inscriptions, coins, architecture, and art-works. Yet each of these pieces of material evidence was the result of a conscious act, of what to record, and where and how to record it, with varying patterns discernible across different areas, and in different media. This volume draws attention to the choices made in a variety of different forms of material culture relating to Greek festivals from the Hellenistic to Roman periods, and unpicks the ways in which they encode or forge particular social relationships and power structures, as well as creating senses of community or communication between different groups. These helped to fix ephemeral events into public memory, to present particular views of their significance for the wider community, and to frame the experience of their participants.

The Demades Papyrus (P.Berol. inv. 13045)

The Demades Papyrus (P.Berol. inv. 13045) PDF Author: Davide Amendola
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110600404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 765

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Book Description
Despite the significance of its contents, the so-called Demades papyrus (P.Berol. inv. 13045) has received scarce scholarly attention since the 1923 editio princeps by Karl Kunst. This unique late second-century BCE document of almost 430 lines was found in the Egyptian chora, but it is supposed to have been written in Alexandria, where it probably served as a textbook for the highest level of rhetorical education. Besides shedding new light on its find circumstances and physical aspects, the volume offers a full re-edition and commentary of the two adespota texts contained in it, namely a eulogy of the Lagid monarchy and a historical work consisting of a dialogue between Demades and his prosecutor in the trial of 319 BCE at the court of Pella. The aim of the accompanying introduction is to address the question of the origin, nature and purpose of such fragments and of the collection itself, as well as to show to what extent the papyrus contributes to a better understanding of some of the main historical events of the early Hellenistic period. This book is thus meant to fill a significant gap in Classical scholarship, all the more so as a close investigation of most of the topics dealt with therein has hitherto been lacking.

Hellenistic Athletes

Hellenistic Athletes PDF Author: Sebastian Scharff
Publisher:
ISBN: 100919996X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This is a study of Hellenistic athletics from the perspective of the victors. By analyzing agonistic epigrams as poetry on commission, it investigates how successful athletes and horse owners and their sponsors wanted their victories to be understood. Based on the identification of recurring motifs that exceed the conventions of the genre, a multiplicity of agonistic cultures is detected on three different levels - those of the polis, the region and the empire. Kings and queens used athletics in order to legitimate their rule, cities tried to compensate for military defeats by agonistic successes, and victorious aristocrats created virtual halls of fame to emphasize their common regional identity. Without a doubt, athletic victories represented far more than just leisure activities of Hellenistic noblemen. They clearly mattered in terms of politics and social status.

Prophets, Viziers and Philosophers

Prophets, Viziers and Philosophers PDF Author: Emily J. Cottrell
Publisher: Barkhuis
ISBN: 9493194280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
The collection of essays assembled in this volume addresses the models of divine and practical wisdom in some of the earlier Arabic prose texts passed down to us. All essays were initially presented and discussed at an international conference held at the Freie Universität Berlin in October 2014. More than isolated case studies, the contributions offer ground-breaking new research on essential works and figures of the early translation movement (from Greek, Syriac and Middle-Persian into Arabic). They also address, from the viewpoints of intertextuality and philology, the dissemination process of innovative syntheses elaborated by original medieval thinkers.

Localism in Hellenistic Greece

Localism in Hellenistic Greece PDF Author: Sheila L. Ager
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487548370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
The Hellenistic age witnessed a dynamic increase of cultural fusion and entanglement across the Mediterranean and Eurasian worlds. Amid seismic changes in the world writ large, the regions of central Greece and the Peloponnese have often been considered a cultural space left behind. Localism in Hellenistic Greece explores how various processes impacted the countless small-scale, local communities of the Greek mainland. Drawing on notions of locality, localism, local tradition, and boundedness in place, Sheila L. Ager and Hans Beck delve into some of the main hubs of Hellenistic Greece, from Thessaly to Cape Tainaron. Along with their contributors, they explore how polis and ethnos societies positioned themselves in a swiftly expanding horizon and the meaning-making force of the local. The book reveals how local discourses were energized by local sentiments and, much like an echo chamber, how discourses related back to the community and the place it occupied, prioritizing the local as the critical source of communal orientation. Engaging with debates about cultural connectivity and convergence, Localism in Hellenistic Greece offers new insights into lived experience in ancient Greece.

Cultural Perceptions of Violence in the Hellenistic World

Cultural Perceptions of Violence in the Hellenistic World PDF Author: Michael Champion
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 135180331X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Violence had long been central to the experience of Hellenistic Greek cities and to their civic discourses. This volume asks how these discourses were shaped and how they functioned within the particular cultural constructs of the Hellenistic world. It was a period in which warfare became more professionalised, and wars increasingly ubiquitous. The period also saw major changes in political structures that led to political and cultural experimentation and transformation in which the political and cultural heritage of the classical city-state encountered the new political principles and cosmopolitan cultures of Hellenism. Finally, and in a similar way, it saw expanded opportunities for cultural transfer in cities through (re)constructions of urban space. Violence thus entered the city through external military and political shocks, as well as within emerging social hierarchies and civic institutions. Such factors also inflected economic activity, religious practices and rituals, and the artistic, literary and philosophical life of the polis.