Author: Jon Hesk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521028714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This book is a study of the ways in which classical Athenian texts represent and evaluate the morality of deception. It is particularly concerned with the way in which the telling of lies was a problem for the world's first democracy and compares this problem with the modern Western situation. There are major sections on Greek tragedy, comedy, oratory, historiography and philosophy.
Author: Demetra Kasimis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107052432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Argues that immigration politics is a central - but overlooked - object of inquiry in the democratic thought of classical Athens. Thinkers criticized democracy's strategic investments in nativism, the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the precarious membership that a blood-based order effects for those eligible and ineligible to claim it.
Author: Jon Hesk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139429582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
This book, first published in 2000, is a full-length study of the representation of deceit and lies in classical Athens. Dr Hesk traces the ways in which Athenian drama, democratic oratory and elite prose-writing construct and theorize a relationship between dishonesty and civic identity. He focuses on the ideology of military trickery, notions of the 'noble lie' and the developing associations of rhetorical language with deceptive communication. Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens combines close analysis of Athenian texts with lively critiques of modern theorists and classical scholars. Athenian democratic culture was crucially informed by a nuanced, anxious and dynamic discourse on the problems and opportunities which deception presented for its citizenry. Mobilizing comparisons with twentieth-century democracies, the author argues that Athenian literature made deception a fundamental concern for democratic citizenship. This ancient discourse on lying highlights the dangers of modern resignation and postmodern complacency concerning the politics and morality of deception.
Author: Edwin Carawan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421439506
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
The definitive book on judicial review in Athens from the 5th through the 4th centuries BCE. The power of the court to overturn a law or decree—called judicial review—is a critical feature of modern democracies. Contemporary American judges, for example, determine what is consistent with the Constitution, though this practice is often criticized for giving unelected officials the power to strike down laws enacted by the people's representatives. This principle was actually developed more than two thousand years ago in the ancient democracy at Athens. In Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens, Edwin Carawan reassesses the accumulated evidence to construct a new model of how Athenians made law in the time of Plato and Aristotle, while examining how the courts controlled that process. Athenian juries, Carawan explains, were manned by many hundreds of ordinary citizens rather than a judicial elite. Nonetheless, in the 1890s, American apologists found vindication for judicial review in the ancient precedent. They believed that Athenian judges decided the fate of laws and decrees legalistically, focusing on fundamental text, because the speeches that survive from antiquity often involve close scrutiny of statutes attributed to lawgivers such as Solon, much as a modern appellate judge might resort to the wording of the Framers. Carawan argues that inscriptions, speeches, and fragments of lost histories make clear that text-based constitutionalism was not so compelling as the ethos of the community. Carawan explores how the judicial review process changed over time. From the restoration of democracy down to its last decades, the Athenians made significant reforms in their method of legislation, first to expedite a cumbersome process, then to revive the more rigorous safeguards. Jury selection adapted accordingly: the procedure was recast to better represent the polis, and packing the court was thwarted by a complicated lottery. But even as the system evolved, the debate remained much the same: laws and decrees were measured by a standard crafted in the image of the people. Offering a comprehensive account of the ancient origins of an important political institution through philological methods, rhetorical analysis of ancient arguments, and comparisons between models of judicial review in ancient Greece and the modern United States, Control of the Laws in the Ancient Democracy at Athens is an innovative study of ancient Greek law and democracy.
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.
Author: Mirko Canevaro
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474421784
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 604
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Book Description
The first full-length academic study to deal exclusively with female stardom in British cinema.
Author: Lucy Grig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107074894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
This book adopts a new approach to the classical world by focusing on ancient popular culture.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900446722X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
This is a wide-ranging study of numbers as a social and cultural phenomenon in ancient Greece, revealing both the instrumentality of numbers to polis life and the complex cultural meanings inherent in their use.
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: Andrew J. Turner
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004187758
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
Graeco-Roman literary works, historiography, and even the reporting of rumours were couched as if they came in response to an insatiable desire by ordinary citizens to know everything about the lives of their leaders, and to hold them to account, at some level, for their abuse of constitutional powers for personal ends. Ancient writers were equally fascinated with how these same individuals used deceit as a powerful tool to disguise private and public reality. The chapters in this collection examine the themes of despotism and deceit from both historical and literary perspectives, over a range of historical periods including classical Athens, the Hellenistic kingdoms, late republican and early imperial Rome, late antiquity, and Byzantium.
