Review of J. Ma, N. Papazardakas, and R. Parker, eds., Interpreting the Athenian Empire (Duckworth 2009) (original) (raw)

Between ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’ and The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (and beyond)

Polis 41: 176-202, 2024

This article discusses the fortune of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s famous article ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’, and reassesses its basic thesis that the Athenian Empire was popular among the lower classes of the allied cities in the light of recent developments in the field. After surveying the article’s immediate and more recent reception, and discussing its relation with The Origins of the Peloponnesian War and The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, it isolates four key new trends in Greek history that, while going against some of Ste. Croix’s basic convictions, end up reinforcing his overall case. These are: a renewed attention to the mass and elite dichotomy, with recent work interpreting Greek oligarchy as a fundamentally reactive and anti-demotic regime; the recognition of the continued relevance of Persian med- dling in the later fifth-century; a sea-change in Attic epigraphy which has led to the post-dating of several ‘imperial’ decrees; the new recognition of the dynamism of the Greek economy, and of the economic function of the Athenian Empire itself. Finally, the article addresses the paradigm of class struggle and stresses how democracy and economic dynamism, to which the Athenian Empire contributed, fostered the growth of slave markets and worsened the exploitation of ‘marginal’ regions as slave suppliers.

Rethinking Athens Before the Persian Wars

Rethinking Athens Before the Persian Wars, 2019

available now: https://www.utzverlag.de/catalog/book/44813 In recent years, scholarly interest in Ancient Athens has been enlivened by spectacular archaeological discoveries. The new finds from the pre-Classical city called for a synoptic reassessment of the material remains, their interpretation and the previous methodological approaches, since the dense records of later historical phases had shaped the perception of Athens before the Persian Wars. Under theses premises, the International Workshop held at the Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München in February 2017 invited its participants to rethink early Athens. The papers assembled in this volume aim to question traditional perspectives and offer a multidisciplinary framework for the discussion of archaeological, literary and epigraphical testimonia.

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.