Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece

Cambridge University Press, 9/28/2006
EAN 9780521862127, ISBN10: 0521862124

Hardcover, 336 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English

From the time of the Roman Empire onwards, fifth- and fourth-century Greece have been held to be the period and place in which civilization as the West knows it developed. Classical scholars have sought to justify these claims in detail by describing developments in fields such as democratic politics, art, rationality, historiography, literature, philosophy, medicine and music, in which classical Greece has been held to have made a revolutionary contribution. In this volume a distinguished cast of contributors offers a fresh consideration of these claims, asking both whether they are well based and what is at stake for their proposers and for us in making them. They look both at modern scholarly argument and its basis and at the claims made by the scholars of the Second Sophistic. The volume will be of interest not only to classical scholars but to all who are interested in the history of scholarship.

Introduction Robin Osborne
1. When was the Athenian democratic revolution? Robin Osborne
2. Revolutions in human time
age-class in Athens and the Greekness of Greek revolutions James Davidson
3. Reflections on the 'Greek Revolution' in art
from changes in viewing to the transformation of subjectivity Jas' Elsner
4. What's in a beard? Rethinking Hadrian's Hellenism Caroline Vout
5. Religion and the rationality of the Greek city Thomas Harrison
6. Rethinking religious revolution Simon Goldhill
7. Paying attention
history as the development of a secular narrative Carolyn Dewald
8. Talking about revolution
on political change in fourth-century Athens and historiographic method Danielle Allen
9. Was there an Eleatic revolution in philosophy? Catherine Osborne
10. The origins of medicine in the second century AD Helen King
11. The 'New Music' - so what's new? Armand D'Angour.

Review of the hardback: 'Rethinking Revolutions is a wide-ranging and stimulating collection of papers that do much to cause us not only to look at frequently-touted aspects of antiquity with fresh eyes, but to re-examine how the narratives of the past have been constructed by later ages, including our own. ... Readers of this book will have their critical faculties sharpened and become privy to a number of new ways of thinking about ancient Greek culture and about what we and other have made of it. Talk of Greek revolution(s) may never be the same again.' POLIS: The Journal of the Society for Greek Political Thought