Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy

Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy PDF Author: Susan Lape
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139484125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
In Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy, Susan Lape demonstrates how a race ideology grounded citizen identity. Although this ideology did not manifest itself in a fully developed race myth, its study offers insight into the causes and conditions that can give rise to race and racisms in both modern and pre-modern cultures. In the Athenian context, racial citizenship emerged because it both defined and justified those who were entitled to share in the political, symbolic, and socioeconomic goods of Athenian citizenship. By investigating Athenian law, drama, and citizenship practices, this study shows how citizen identity worked in practice to consolidate national unity and to account for past Athenian achievements. It also considers how Athenian identity narratives fuelled Herodotus' and Thucydides' understanding of history and causation.

Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy

Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy PDF Author: Susan Lape
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139484125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy, Susan Lape demonstrates how a race ideology grounded citizen identity. Although this ideology did not manifest itself in a fully developed race myth, its study offers insight into the causes and conditions that can give rise to race and racisms in both modern and pre-modern cultures. In the Athenian context, racial citizenship emerged because it both defined and justified those who were entitled to share in the political, symbolic, and socioeconomic goods of Athenian citizenship. By investigating Athenian law, drama, and citizenship practices, this study shows how citizen identity worked in practice to consolidate national unity and to account for past Athenian achievements. It also considers how Athenian identity narratives fuelled Herodotus' and Thucydides' understanding of history and causation.

Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology

Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology PDF Author: Alan Lindley Boegehold
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology, Alan Boegehold and Adele Scafuro bring together a distinguished group of scholars who explore the nature and meaning of Athenian citizenship. Departing from the narrow perspective of constitutional historians and also embracing sociological concerns, the editors' range of topics attests to a broad vision of the concepts of citizenship and civic ideology in a society in which the boundary between public and private, sacred and secular, is not always clear. Among the contributors, Philip Brook Manville and W. Robert Connor offer fresh critiques of the study of citizenship, while Frank J. Frost examines pre-Cleisthenic notions of citizenship. Alan Boegehold looks at social and economic motivations for the passage of Perikles's citizenship law of 451/0 B.C. Focusing on the fifth and fourth centuries, Ian Morris discusses changes in the visual manifestation of civic ideology in funeral monuments, while Josiah Ober offers an interpretation of Thucydides's history as a discourse that actively resists hegemonic public discourse. Robert W. Wallace examines what might be perceived as contradictions within civic ideology, namely, alleged infringements of intellectual freedom. In the final essays, with their focus on the fourth and third centuries, Adele Scafuro discusses the process of citizen identification in Athenian society; Cynthia Patterson examines the position of women in the maintenance of civic ideology; and David Konstan considers the relationship between sexual attitudes and civic status.

Citizenship in Classical Athens

Citizenship in Classical Athens PDF Author: Josine Blok
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521191459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This book argues that citizenship in Athens was primarily a religious identity, shared by male and female citizens alike.

Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did it matter?

Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did it matter? PDF Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110685809
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This study raises that difficult and complicated question on a broad front, taking into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources, including Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Philo, and Paul. It approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories, labels, and frameworks. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins and lineage or by shared traditions and culture?

Race

Race PDF Author: Denise Eileen McCoskey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755697855
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories 'Greek' and 'Barbarian', and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as 'black and 'white' in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.

The Classical Athenian Democracy

The Classical Athenian Democracy PDF Author: David L. Stockton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

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.

Peasant-Citizen and Slave

Peasant-Citizen and Slave PDF Author: Ellen Meiksins Wood
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784781975
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The controversial thesis at the center of this study is that, despite the importance of slavery in Athenian society, the most distinctive characteristic of Athenian democracy was the unprecedented prominence it gave to free labor. Wood argues that the emergence of the peasant as citizen, juridically and politically independent, accounts for much that is remarkable in Athenian political institutions and culture. From a survey of historical writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus of which distorted later debates, Wood goes on to take issue with influential arguments, such as those of G.E.M. de Ste Croix, about the importance of slavery in agricultural production. The social, political and cultural influence of the peasant-citizen is explored in a way which questions some of the most cherished conventions of Marxist and non-Marxist historiography.

Serving Athena

Serving Athena PDF Author: Julia L. Shear
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108618022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
In ancient Athens, the Panathenaia was the most important festival and was celebrated in honour of Athena from the middle of the sixth century BC until the end of the fourth century AD. This in-depth study examines how this all-Athenian celebration was an occasion for constructing identities and how it affected those identities. Since not everyone took part in the same way, this differential participation articulated individuals' relationships both to the goddess and to the city so that the festival played an important role in negotiating what it meant to be Athenian (and non-Athenian). Julia Shear applies theories of identity formation which were developed in the social sciences to the ancient Greek material and brings together historical, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence to provide a better understanding both of this important occasion and of Athenian identities over the festival's long history.

A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean

A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean PDF Author: Jeremy McInerney
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444337343
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean presents a comprehensive collection of essays contributed by Classical Studies scholars that explore questions relating to ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean world. Covers topics of ethnicity in civilizations ranging from ancient Egypt and Israel, to Greece and Rome, and into Late Antiquity Features cutting-edge research on ethnicity relating to Philistine, Etruscan, and Phoenician identities Reveals the explicit relationships between ancient and modern ethnicities Introduces an interpretation of ethnicity as an active component of social identity Represents a fundamental questioning of formally accepted and fixed categories in the field