Bonnie Honig (Handbuchartikel) (original) (raw)
Greece & Rome, 68.1, 2021
Pontus, and Armenia. 1 The onomastics of these areas are complex owing to the various historical processes in which they were enmeshed: centuries of migration, conquest, and cultural change meant that, in addition to the 'native' cultural traditions of inland Asia Minor, the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman empires, as well as migratory movements like that of the Celts, left a deep onomastic impact. The issue is further complicated because the majority of the evidence comes from the Roman Imperial period, making diachronic comparison more difficult. This excellent volume offers a new documentary basis for studying social, cultural, and economic processes of change in these important areas of the ancient world: the full collection of the evidence makes it easier to classify names into different linguistic groups, an issue that has bedevilled the study of onomastics in Asia Minor for a very long time; it will also be possible to study regional divergences in the onomastics of different areas.
Mercenary military service was an established phenomenon in the Greek world since the fifth century BCE. The excellent knowledge of military arts and the scarcity of employment opportunities for a larger number of mercenary soldiers in Greece meant that the Greeks would readily leave their homeland to render their services to anyone who was prepared to pay for them, should such an opportunity arise. From the end of the Peloponnesian War until Alexander's expedition against the Achaemenid Empire, the Greeks formed the largest contingent of mercenaries in the Persian army. Likewise, Alexander and the majority of Hellenistic monarchs also sought the Greek mercenaries' services, with the armies of the Ptolemies, the Seleucids and others owing much of their might to them. The role of mercenaries in the Hellenistic world was first systematically discussed in G. T. Griffith's monograph (1935), now considered a seminal work on the subject. 1 Since its publication, the subject of mercenary service in the Greek world, as well as its social and political aspects, became the research focus of scholars of Greek military history. 2 One of the most recent publications on this subject (2022) was the proceedings of the conference "Shaping Politics and Society-Mercenaries in the Greek World," which took place on 3-5 October 2016 at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Although the proceedings' editors point out that not all the contributions of the conference participants were included into the volume (p. 5), the fourteen chapters found inside make up a quite impressive collection. The published contributions were divided into four thematic clusters. The first of these ("Ideologie oder Wirklichkeit: Die Dichotomie ,Bürgersoldat -Söldner'") comprises three chapters. 3 M. Bettali analyses statements in Demosthenes' speeches on the Athenian use of mercenary soldiers against the threat from Macedonia. It emerges that, in the orator's opinion, the foundation of Athens' strength should lie in a land army based
Bibliography DEM DEC Jun2018v2
This is the current Bibliography on democratic decay on the Democratic Decay Resource (DEM-DEC) - www.democratic-decay.org. It covers constitutional, international and transnational law and will be updated monthly based on new research, items that come to attention, and suggestions from DEM-DEC users.