J.L. Shear, Serving Athena: the festival of the Panathenaia and the construction of Athenian identities. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021 (original) (raw)
Related papers
BMCR 2021.06, 2021
In this book, Shear harvests from her Ph.D. thesis on the Panathenaia, submitted in 2001, and shifts her focus to the current discourse on identities. The city's major festival was a perfect occasion for constructing individual and collective identities. Shear's approach is programmatically holistic; she uses literary, epigraphical, and archaeological sources as well as theories of the social sciences. Eight chapters are followed by eight appendices (on the Parthenon frieze, the pyrrhiche, and epigraphical sources of post-classical times), numerous tables (with evidence discussed in chapters 3-7), the bibliography, and three indices (written sources, collections, general). Forty figures of excellent quality are inserted into the chapters. The decision for footnotes (instead of endnotes) is highly appreciated.
The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens
2021
Athens was an ancient city like no other. Named for a goddess, epicenter of the first democracy, birthplace of tragic and comic theater, locus of the major philosophical schools, artistically in the vanguard for centuries, it looms larger than any other ancient polis in contemporary thought from historical scholarship to tourist attractions. The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens is a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the ancient city, its topography and monuments, inhabitants and cultural institutions, religious rituals and politics. Chapters in the volume link the religious, cultural, and political institutions of Athens to the physical locales in which they took place, so that readers gain a sense of the life and realia of the ancient city. Discussion of the urban plan with its streets, gates, walls and public and private buildings will give readers a thorough understanding of how the city operated, how various people flowed through it, what they saw, heard, smelled and perhaps tasted. Drawing from the newest scholarship on various aspects of the city as well as on-going excavations of its Agora, sanctuaries, and cemeteries, this volume examines how the city was planned, how it functioned, and how it was transformed from a democratic polis into a Roman urbs.
Athenian Identity in Late Antiquity
The purpose of my contribution is to delineate the distinctive features of the Athenian elites’ identity in the Late Antiquity and to investigate the possible connections between this elite and the monumental townscape. The literary and epigraphic documents show the existence of an oligarchy of families, that is at the guide of Athens in the 3rd and in the 4th AD. The distinctive features of this elite are the cult of the classical past and of the classical culture, the paganism, the ownership of political and religious offices in Athens and the euergetism towards the city. The importance of these values in the elite’s identity makes to me very plausible that its members were also responsible for the maintenance of the traditional representative monuments of the polis on the Athenian Agora. In fact, when the literary sources suggest a crisis of this aristocracy in the first half of the 5th century, these monuments are abandoned and replaced by new buildings. The citycentre seems to be now in the hands of another ruling class, that shows no interest in the preservation of the ancient monuments and has apparently different values. The Christian power has now reached Athens.
With a 'visual turn' taking place in the humanities, whereby material culture has attained a status equal to textual, it is increasingly important that works of art and artifacts be properly interpreted in their historic and archaeological contexts. The new approaches on the part of archaeologists who focus on contexts (political, social, religious) provide fresh ground for interpretation as more and more humanities disciplines engage with visual culture. The aim of the collection of individual studies assembled here is to demonstrate how Classical Athenian art remains a vital field not just for art historians and archaeologists, but for ancient historians, political and social scientists, anthropologists, and those in religious studies as well. Now as new material comes to light and fresh ideas on old topics are being formulated, it is timely to re-investigate the art generated in the age of Perikles and its aftermath, the Peloponnesian War. This new research is presented here in the hope that upcoming generations of students and scholars will gain a deeper understanding of this seminal period of Greek art and architecture. The five decades (449 to 403 B.C.) covered by this volume begin with the putative "Peace of Kallias", probably an invention of the 4 th century B.C., and end with the demise of Kritias, a pro-Spartan intellectual who ended his political career as one of the notorious Thirty Tyrants. This book comprises the papers presented at the international conference "From Kallias to Kritias. Classical Culture: Athens in the Second Half of the 5 th Century B.C.", hosted in Athens by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens on June 6-8, 2019. The conference followed chronologically in the footsteps of "From Hippias to Kallias: Greek Art in Athens and Beyond 527-449 B.C.", 1 hosted by the Acropolis Museum in May 2017. That conference explored the debates concerning the last manifestations of the Archaic and the emergence of the Early Classical style. This volume, like its predecessor, raises important new issues, triggered by ongoing research on old and new excavation material, by probes into museum storerooms, and by the reshuffling of traditional premises. Bibliographical abbreviations follow the guidelines of American Journal of Archaeology. Abbreviations of ancient authors can be found in the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The editors and authors are greatly indebted to Mirko Vonderstein of de Gruyter for agreeing to publish this volume. Hans Rupprecht Goette has kindly allowed the reproduction of several photos from his archives throughout the book. Our thanks are also due to Carol Lawton, Sheila Dillon and Sheramy Bundrick for their assistance. We are grateful for the generous sponsorship of both the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Athens-Greece Society of the Archaeological Institute of America. This publication has been supported by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, administered by the Archaeological Institute of America.
Classical Archaeology in Context: Theory and Practice in Excavation in the Greek World, edited by D.C. Haggis and C. Antonaccio, 2015
This paper explores the structure and mechanics of the Greek agora by focusing specifically on three urban contexts in the Peloponnese from the eighth century B.C.E. through the Late Classical period (Argos, Elis and Megalopolis). Although largely underrepresented in established discourses on the Greek agora, the diverse archaeological evidence from the Peloponnese has the potential to recalibrate traditional narratives, helping to formulate a more nuanced appreciation of Greek commercial and civic space independent from an athenocentric model. It is argued here that the Peloponnesian experience offers new perspectives into the urban integration, structure and use of the Greek agora because of divergent conditions from city to city. Rather than articulate a universal model of the Greek agora, this paper demonstrates that there is often great variation among agoras, even among cities within a single region of the ancient Mediterranean. In fact, none of the Peloponnesian agoras included in this study are exactly alike. This is because the Greek agora responded to unique urban conditions within a particular context. Its spatial mechanics and social structure are never exactly replicated elsewhere. Ultimately this leads to the conclusion that there cannot be just one definition of the Greek agora, but many.
Table of content Avant-propos 1 1. Alain Duplouy, In search of Attica: The spatial roots of Athenian politics and society 5 PART I: LATE BRONZE AGE ATTICA 2. Nikolas Papadimitriou, Mycenaean Attica: How much "Mycenaean" and how much "Attica"? 45 3. Konstantinos Kalogeropoulos, Around the Erasinos river. The northern and southern Mesogeia plain in the Late Bronze Age 77 PART II: ATTICA FROM THE EARLY IRON AGE TO THE CLASSICAL PERIOD 4. Floris van den Eijnde, Between polis and ethnos. A network approach to the development of the Athenian polis 117 5. Maximilian Rönnberg, Changing preferences and local particularities in the placement of burials in Attica from the Late Helladic to the Archaic period 151 6. Nikolaos Arvanitis, Alain Duplouy and Anastasia Strousopoulou, Vari: Anatomy of an Attic district 189 7. James Whitley, From cups to kraters: The surfaces of writing in Early Attica (800-500 BC) 223 PART III: ATHENS AND ITS DISTRICT 8. Tonio Hölscher, The Archaic Agora of Athens. Its location within the topographical system of the city 257 9. Anarita Doronzio, Κατά κώμας. Athenian settlement dynamics 291 10. Vincenzo Capozzoli, The so-called “urban demes” of Athens during the Archaic period: Challenging multidimensional spaces beyond a binary logic 309 11. Alexandra Alexandridou, Regionalism within Early Iron Age Athens: The domestic nucleus at the Academy 341 PART IV: METHODOLOGICAL, CHRONOLOGICAL AND REGIONAL COMPARANDA 12. Pavlos Karvonis, Land use in Roman Attica: The archaeological data 369 13. Emeri Farinetti, Beyond Attica: Landscape approaches to the neighbouring regions of Boeotia and Megaris 387 14. Paolo Carafa, Politics, people and landscapes: From Attica to ancient Latium 413 PART V: NEW TOOLS 15. Roald Docter et al., The Thorikos Archive: Digitisation, annotation and operationalisation of the legacy data collection 445 16. Barbora Weissova and Clarissa Haubenthal, 40 years of research in Attica: The Attica Archive of Ruhr University Bochum goes digital 451 17. Annarita Doronzio, The Atlas of the Athenian Funerary Evidence (11th-7th c. BC): A first comparison of data on the funerary ritual of Submycenaean and Protogeometric graves 469 18. Alain Duplouy, The Chronique archéologique de la religion grecque goes digital: A new tool for the study of cults 475