A. Giesecke, The Epic City: Urbanism, Utopia and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2007. Pp. xiv + 204, illus. ISBN 0-6740-2374-9/978-0-67402-374-1. £12.95/US$18.95 (original) (raw)
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International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2010
This book is about the polis and urbs in relation to Nature. Two of its four chapters look at the Greek ideal, focusing primarily on Homer, depictions of nature on vase paintings, and fifth-century Athens. The other two consider the Roman counterpart and focus primarily on Roman wall paintings, domestic architecture and gardens, Lucretius and Virgil. A few pages discuss Epicurus and Hellenistic authors as a bridge between Greek and Roman ideals. Giesecke argues that the Iliad and Odyssey should be considered utopian "on the ground that they strongly manifest the dream of a society for a better life" (p. 1), it being Homer's "purpose, at least to some significant extent, to present his audience with the picture of what constitutes an ideal society" (p. 11). In the Odyssey, "the ideal settlement is clearly the polis of the Phaiakians," whose "civic organization can be emulated, and one expects that this is what the wise Odysseus-and Homer's audience-will do" (Giesecke's italics) (pp. 28-9). In the Iliad, the polis ideal is represented on the Shield of Achilles and manifest in the figure of Achilles in whom, by poem's end, "a new heroism of social responsibility has been born." "The grand vision of and for humanity," in both poems, is "a eutopian vision realized in the embrace of the polis" which, "manipulat[ing] and transform[ing] the landscape by skilled human hands, by tekhnê," seeks "to control what is deemed dangerous and unpredictable in Nature" and to establish "a system of justice based on an ideology less primitive than 'an eye-for-an-eye'" (pp. 31-41). To jump forward to the classical period, Athens, "both ideologically and physically, … corresponded to the Homeric model for the ideal polis," as "within the city walls, Nature was everywhere held closely in check." However, because of its "adoption of an aggressive imperialistic policy …, unlike Homer's Achilles, Athens was unable to contain the beast within" (pp. 73-8). Unlike the Greek idealized vision of the city, "in the Roman world living in and with Nature became a thing much desired" (p. 82). The Romans "did more than open their cities' walls to Nature. They embraced her and held her
The aim of this contribution is to discuss some issues of the crucial period between the tyranny of Hippias in Athens and the early years of the Pentekontaetia (528/7 to c. 470) from the point of view of urban spaces. It is widely acknowledged that the city as a public and social space is produced by the community that shapes, organizes and lives (within) it to meet its political, religious, economic and other needs; on the other hand, urban spaces are symbolic and cognitive constructions that are able to embody and forge collective consciousness, identity and values. In the period under examination, major historical transformations led to the reshaping, reorganization and creation of Athenian public spaces, some of which now acquired strong performative power: they were shaped in order to represent and ‘stage’ the polis, while acting as the operational places of participatory life.
2023
This contribution presents, from a bird’s eye perspective, the archaeological and urbanistic aspects through which the poleis manifested themselves as city-states between the 8th and early 5th century BC. Several macroscopic elements that are an expression of the poleis will be examined: the central role played by urban and extra-urban sanctuaries; the definition of the public space of the agora; the organization of urban space; the creation of defensive systems and infrastructural works, such as hydraulic systems; the creation of a language of images for the city; the transformation of cemeteries; and the central role played by heroic cults. These aspects differ from polis to polis and from period to period, as a result of the specific socio-political dynamics at play in the history of these cities. Reference will be made to the best-known and most debated cases of Athens, Eretria, Argos, Corinth and others.
Bintliff, J. (2024). Early Greek Urbanism. . New York, Wiley-Blackwell: 17-37.
A Companion to Cities in the Greco-Roman World., 2024
Continuity or discontinuity? Urban historians of Europe tend to consider a town of 10,000 or more inhabitants as a city (de Vries 1984). In that case, we cannot see such agglomerations in the Aegean Early Iron Age (ca. 1100-700 BCE). Actually, it is unlikely that cities of that size existed on the Greek Mainland even at the height of the preceding Late Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization, where palaces and their associated towns were in the 30 ha range (perhaps 4,000 inhabitants?) (Bintliff 2020), although some of the earlier Minoan towns on Crete, especially Knossos, might have far exceeded such dimensions. 1 These relatively small cities were typical of most Bronze Age towns in the Mediterranean (Bintliff 2002). 2 However, as we shall discover, Classical Greek cities of the Aegean are, in any case, on a totally different scale. Independent city-states might be as small as 5 ha and possess only 500 citizens (e.g. Khorsiai: Fossey and Morin 1987). They would still possess a functioning citizen assembly, lawcourts, an army, and a dependent nourishing agricultural territory, so who can say their focal settlement was not urban in function? We might object to the limited monumentality of such small cities: i.e. was their appearance truly urban? This was exactly the point Pausanias would make in Early Imperial times when he felt mild outrage that the town of Panopeus in Phokis lacked almost all the expected public amenities of any respectable city (Description of Greece, 10.4). Yet as we have just outlined, it was not size or even monumentality that defined the "polis" center, but its complex functions. For those reasons, Panopeus was still a formal city within the Roman Imperium. Indeed, another school of European urban historians takes the line that it is exactly in the elaborate roles of an agglomeration that we must seek to separate towns from villages (Clark and Slack 1976). Returning then to the Early Iron Age (EIA) of the Aegean with our expectations lowered, can we see "townlike" settlements over these centuries, either surviving on the ruins of the destroyed Minoan-Mycenaean palatial cities or newly founded elsewhere, in the clearly disruptive period that followed that catastrophe? So far, very few EIA settlements appear more than villages in their spatial scale, and those few-perhaps predictably-are former major Bronze Age centers: Knossos, Argos, Thebes, and Athens. Multiple dispersed findspots of structures and ceramics seem to indicate the