Aeschines: Against Timarchos

Aeschines: Against Timarchos
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2001-06-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191040339

This is the first commentary in any language on Aeschines' Against Timarchos, the prosecution speech in the politically crucial trial of 346/5BC. The case in essence was that Timarchos was legally ineligible to engage in active politics because he had engaged in improper homosexual relationships in the past and had wasted his inheritance on debauchery. The speech is our most important source for Athenian legal sanctions and moral attitudes concerning same-sex relations, and has been the focus of intense recent debates on the nature of Greek sexualities and on the relationship between sex, politics, and cultural life. It illuminates Athenian politics at the time when Athens faced the challenge to her independence from Philip of Macedon. It is a rhetorical masterpiece of misrepresentation, which persuaded the jury to convict Timarchos despite the fact that Aeschines had virtually no evidence of his misdeeds. This book provides a new translation, a full introduction, and a commentary, all accessible to those without knowledge of Greek. The introduction explores the main issues of the case, including Aeschines' career, Athenian laws and attitudes relating to homosexual relations, and the reasons for Aeschines' success: it is suggested that the verdict reflects the same moral and cultural unease in Athens which was shortly to produce the attempts at political, social, and cultural renewal associated with the age of Lycurgus. The fully documented commentary pays attention to the rhetorical strategy of the speech, explores important aspects of the language used, especially in relation to the moral denunciation of Timarchos' sexual and other malpractices, and explains all references to historical events and people.

Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts

Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts
Author: Allison Glazebrook
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2022-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1477324402

Oratory is a valuable source for reconstructing the practices, legalities, and attitudes surrounding sexual labor in classical Athens. It provides evidence of male and female sex laborers, sex slaves, brothels, sex traffickers, the cost of sex, contracts for sexual labor, and manumission practices for sex slaves. Yet the witty, wealthy, free, and independent hetaira well-known from other genres, does not feature. Its detailed narratives and character portrayals provide a unique discourse on sexual labor and reveal the complex relationship between such labor and Athenian society. Through a holistic examination of five key speeches, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts considers how portrayals of sex laborers intersected with gender, the body, sexuality, the family, urban spaces, and the polis in the context of the Athenian courts. Drawing on gender theory and exploring questions of space, place, and mobility, Allison Glazebrook shows how sex laborers represented a diverse set of anxieties concerning social legitimacy and how the public discourse about them is in fact a discourse on Athenian society, values, and institutions.

Litigation and Cooperation

Litigation and Cooperation
Author: Lene Rubinstein
Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2000
Genre: Athens (Greece)
ISBN: 9783515077576

Syn�goroi are widely known in Athenian law to have served as supporting speakers and aids to the main prosecutors within a courtroom. Lene Rubinstein argues that these people were an important part of court practice and social and political litigation, though largely ignored in many previous studies of Athenian politics. Her study draws extensively on the speeches of syn�goroi , revealing their multi-functionality as witnesses, as co-speakers alongside the main prosecutor and as part of a collaborative legal team.

Great Power Diplomacy in the Hellenistic World

Great Power Diplomacy in the Hellenistic World
Author: John D Grainger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2016-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317124863

Diplomacy is a neglected aspect of Hellenistic history, despite the fact that war and peace were the major preoccupations of the rulers of the kingdoms of the time. It becomes clear that it is possible to discern a set of accepted practices which were generally followed by the kings from the time of Alexander to the approach of Rome. The republican states were less bound by such practices, and this applies above all to Rome and Carthage. By concentrating on diplomatic institutions and processes, therefore, it is possible to gain a new insight into the relations between the kingdoms. This study investigates the making and duration of peace treaties, the purpose of so-called 'marriage alliances', the absence of summit meetings, and looks in detail at the relations between states from a diplomatic point of view, rather than only in terms of the wars they fought. The system which had emerged as a result of the personal relationships between Alexander's successors, continued in operation for at least two centuries. The intervention of Rome brought in a new great power which had no similar tradition, and the Hellenistic system crumbled therefore under Roman pressure.

Kings and Usurpers in the Seleukid Empire

Kings and Usurpers in the Seleukid Empire
Author: Boris Chrubasik
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198786921

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.

Prostitution in the Ancient Greek World

Prostitution in the Ancient Greek World
Author: Konstantinos Kapparis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2017-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110557959

Prostitution in the ancient Greek world was widespread, legal, and acceptable as a fact of life and an unavoidable necessity. The state regulated the industry and treated prostitution as any other trade. Almost every prominent man in the ancient world has been truly or falsely associated with some famous hetaira. These women, who sold their affections to the richest and most influential men of their time, have become legends in their own right. They pushed the boundaries of female empowerment in their quest for self-promotion and notoriety, and continue to fascinate us. Prostitution remains a complex phenomenon linked to issues of gender, culture, law, civic ideology, education, social control, and economic forces. This is why its study is of paramount importance for our understanding of the culture, outlook and institutions of the ancient world, and in turn it can shed new light and introduce new perspectives to the challenging debate of our times on prostitution and contemporary sexual morality. The main purpose of this book is to provide the primary historical study of the topic with emphasis upon the separation of facts from the mythology surrounding the countless references to prostitution in Greek literary sources.

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens
Author: Jenifer Neils
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2021-02-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1108754147

Named for a goddess, epicenter of the first democracy, birthplace of tragic and comic theatre, locus of the major philosophical schools, artistically in the vanguard for centuries, ancient Athens looms large in contemporary study of the ancient world. This Companion is a comprehensive introduction the city, its topography and monuments, inhabitants and cultural institutions, religious rituals and politics. Chapters link the religious, cultural, and political institutions of Athens to the physical locales in which they took place. Discussion of the urban plan, with its streets, gates, walls, and public and private buildings, provides readers with a thorough understanding of how the city operated and what people saw, heard, smelled, and tasted as they flowed through it. Drawing on the latest scholarship, as well as excavation discoveries at the Agora, sanctuaries, and cemeteries, the Companion explores how the city was planned, how it functioned, and how it was transformed from a democratic polis into a Roman city.

The Fall of the Seleukid Empire, 187–75 BC

The Fall of the Seleukid Empire, 187–75 BC
Author: John D. Grainger
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2015-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 147387419X

Third in the trilogy of the ancient Greek dynasty. “In Grainger’s account, the fall of the Seleukid is as enlightening as the rise.”—Minerva Magazine The concluding part of John D Grainger’s history of the Seleukids traces the tumultuous last century of their empire. In this period, it was riven by dynastic disputes, secessions and rebellions, the religiously inspired insurrection of the Jewish Maccabees, civil war and external invasion from Egypt in the West and the Parthians in the East. By the 80s BC, the empire was disintegrating, internally fractured and squeezed by the converging expansionist powers of Rome and Parthia. This is a fittingly, dramatic and colorful conclusion to John Grainger’s masterful account of this once-mighty empire. “To get the best from The Fall of the Seleukid it would be worthwhile making sure you’ve absorbed the first two volumes. Nonetheless you can enjoy and learn from this book alone. Like the fall of any other empire or the folly of human behavior—the story is compelling.”—UNRV “Grainger does a good job of producing a convincing narrative using the limited sources.”—HistoryOfWar

Insults in Classical Athens

Insults in Classical Athens
Author: Deborah Kamen
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299328007

Scholarly investigations of the rich field of verbal and extraverbal Athenian insults have typically been undertaken piecemeal. Deborah Kamen provides an overview of this vast terrain and synthesizes the rules, content, functions, and consequences of insulting fellow Athenians. The result is the first volume to map out the full spectrum of insults, from obscene banter at festivals, to invective in the courtroom, to slander and even hubristic assaults on another's honor. While the classical city celebrated the democratic equality of "autochthonous" citizens, it counted a large population of noncitizens as inhabitants, so that ancient Athenians developed a preoccupation with negotiating, affirming, and restricting citizenship. Kamen raises key questions about what it meant to be a citizen in democratic Athens and demonstrates how insults were deployed to police the boundaries of acceptable behavior. In doing so, she illuminates surprising differences between antiquity and today and sheds light on the ways a democratic society valuing "free speech" can nonetheless curb language considered damaging to the community as a whole.

Greek and Roman Slaveries

Greek and Roman Slaveries
Author: Eftychia Bathrellou
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2022-05-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1118969294

Greek and Roman Slaveries Slavery was foundational to Greek and Roman societies, affecting nearly all of their economic, social, political, and cultural practices. Greek and Roman Slaveries offers a rich collection of literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and archaeological sources, including many unfamiliar ones. This sourcebook ranges chronologically from the archaic period to late antiquity, covering the whole of the Mediterranean, the Near East, and temperate Europe. Readers will find an interactive and user-friendly engagement with past scholarship and new research agendas that focuses particularly on the agency of ancient slaves, the processes in which slavery was inscribed, the changing history of slavery in antiquity, and the comparative study of ancient slaveries. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses on ancient slavery, as well as courses on slavery more generally, this sourcebook’s questions, cross-references, and bibliographies encourage an analytical and interactive approach to the various economic, social, and political processes and contexts in which slavery was employed while acknowledging the agency of enslaved persons.