Sparta: History, State and Society

SummaryThis paper explores the relationship between the historical dynamics and the transformations observed in pre‐Roman cult places in eastern Iberia between the fourth and second centuries BC. These are analysed through a case study: the sanctuary of La Luz (Murcia), located in the Segura Valley, in south‐east Iberia. Three main religious changes are discussed from this perspective: the development of the sanctuary in the fourth century BC, the changes observed in its archaeological record in the third century BC, and finally its destruction in the second century BC. These offer a diachronic view of the transformations, and illustrate the different levels at which they were expressed, from the archaeological record to the landscape. The work aims to provide a different perspective from previous studies in this area and a new view of the cult places in south‐east Iberia within their socio‐political landscape and the Mediterranean historical context.

The inspiration behind the pre-modern bronze round coinage standardised across China by the First Emperor of Qin in the 3rd century BC have remained fairly obscure and are still a contentious issue. We demonstrate in this article that the various theories arguing for an exclusively endogenous impetus behind the spread and development of Chinese round coinage vouched for by many scholars in either East Asia or the West all carry inherent contradictions. In contrast, circumstantial and archaeological evidence in support of partly exogenous origins are mounting. Evidence from the Middle East points to the early invention and wide circulation of round coinage in Lydia, Greece and the Achaemenid Empire. The expansion of the Persians into India in the 6th century BC and the later incursions by Alexander and the Greco-Bactrians in the fourth and third centuries BC all facilitated and may have decisively contributed to India’s adoption of round coinage. Similarly, the flow of ideas, artistic motifs and metallurgic knowhow from West Asia to China via Central Asia had occurred much earlier than the 3rd century BC. Active adoption of foreign (Central Eurasian steppe) customs in the fourth century BC is recorded in Chinese pre-imperial records and confirmed by recent archaeological findings across Eurasia. Ongoing archaeological work in China’s western provinces could further highlight this ancient phase of globalization that, quite literally, still shapes our most fundamental grasp of money.

The greatest period of Celtic expansion occurred between the fourth and third centuries BC, with the conquest of new territories on the margins of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Historians often underemphasize this period: while the barbarian raids and the rise of mercenary service in the fourth century BC are stressed, colonization is neglected. In addition, Celtic society at that time was radically different from those found in coeval Mediterranean cultures. Imports from the south were much less common than in previous centuries, and attempts at urbanization were abandoned. Celtic society became distinctly rural, with its craft industries, settlement, and sanctuaries dispersed throughout the countryside. Although there were local variations, art and religion assumed original and consistent characteristics. Celtic society was composed of peasants and warriors and dominated by large aristocratic families.

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

Real-world treatment patterns and outcomes in a national study of veterans with Waldenström macroglobulinemia, 2006-2019.

The few ancient authorities that mention the unusual appearance of the Aphrodite express their sense of wonder, but do so without any attempt to decipher its enigmatic meaning. Tacitus emphasizes the obscure meaning of this formless object: sed ratio in obscure . In art history, two common modes of representations of Aphrodite in art history include: the dressed and the naked Aphrodite. Consider, for example, the late fourth-century BC Cypriote statue of Aphrodite holding a winged Eros. The figure of the goddess is fully dressed and adorned: she wears a richly decorated diadem with feminine naked figures and vegetal images, a necklace and earrings. The fourth century BC is known for its development of a new formal presentation of the nude goddess associated primarily with the famous statue of Praxiteles, the Knidian Aphrodite. Plato clearly separates Aphrodite's feminine beauty from what he considers to be a higher form of ideal beauty. Keywords: Aphrodite; divine appearance; divine beauty; Plato; statue of Praxiteles; Tacitus

After a focus on social and cultural history in the last issue, this issue's offerings return us to more traditional subjects – political institutions, and historiography. That spring review ended with religion, which is where we start here: an apposite reminder that religion pervades all aspects of the Roman world. It is precisely that principle which undergirds our first book, Dan-el Padilla Peralta's Divine Institutions. Padilla Peralta is interested, at root, in how the Roman state became such through the third and fourth centuries bce. That is a story usually told – in a tradition going back to the ancient historians themselves – via a swashbuckling tale of successive military campaigns. Padilla Peralta, however, sets that anachronistic narrativization aside, and instead builds a careful case that between the siege of Veii and the end of the Second Punic War ‘the Roman state remade and retooled itself into a republic defined and organized around a specific brand of institutionalized ritual practices and commitments’ (1). Specifically, he shows that the construction of temples and the public activities they facilitated were a key mechanism – one as important as warfare – by which the consensus necessary to state formation was generated: the Republic more or less stumbles into a bootstrapping formula that proves to be unusually felicitous: high visibility monumental enterprises are paired with new incentives for human mobility in ways that dramatically and enduringly reorganize the rhythms of civic and communal experience. (17–18) In particular, Padilla Peralta argues that output was greater than input; that the genius – whether accidental or deliberate – of this formula was that it facilitated a confidence game whereby the res publica appeared more capable – via the apparent support of the gods whom its visible piety secured – than was in fact the case.

The study of the use of language in political documents of Lykians and Karians, has shown that in this respect there was no linear, uninterrupted development towards the use of Greek as the sole official language, and consequently towards ubiquitous and continuous Hellenization. Evidence for the use of Greek must be differentiated according to its context, whether sepulchral, religious, political, and consider the perspective of its author, whether interior or exterior, communal or monarchic. Thus, in Karia an unequivocal preference for the local language as the 'state language' can be ascertained at a time when resolutions of the community did not occur under monarchic directive. Paradoxically, the free indigenous community was reluctant to continue what the indigenous rulers of the country in the fourth century BCE had promoted. Keywords: Greek language; Hellenization; Karian script; Lykian communities; political institutions

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

The conflict between professionals and amateurs is a basic theme in Russian military affairs and hence in the literature of army life; it might even be claimed that it was exacerbated by such literature. Romashov’s protest is against the superficial futility of army life in peacetime; it is not directed at the failings of the Russian military specifically. If we ask why so many Russian writers of the pre-revolutionary period dealt at some length with the military life we are inviting a similar reply: because they lived in Russia. Kuprin was, to a quite remarkable degree, the victim of Russian military institutions. The involvement of Russian writers with the military life was a function of experience, and this is a vital point. Russian literature with a military setting is by no means free from the difficulty, but the teleological problem is certainly far less in evidence.

: This research supports The Army Family Action Plans (1984-1989) by examining the relationship of satisfaction with the perceived level of organizational support for families and overall satisfaction with military life among civilian spouses of Army members. The report is based on an analysis of the responses of 2,814 Army spouses tot he 1985 DOD Survey of Military Spouses. The relationship of satisfaction with perceived organizational support for families to overall satisfaction with the military as a way of life was analyzed for four categories of Army spouses: spouses without children married to enlisted members, spouses with children married to enlist members, spouses without children married to officers, and spouses with children married to officers. To assess the unique contribution of the independent variable to overall civilian spouse satisfaction with the military way of life, fifteen subdomains of satisfaction relating to the military way of life were used as control variables, as were the gender of respondent and pay grade of the military spouse. Keywords: Organizational support; Family environment; Family progress; Satisfaction with Army life; Community; Family members; Attitudes; Military personnel.

Part I of this study, a survey of inmates in the Athenian prison, traces the emergence of imprisonment as a political weapon in periods of partisan tension, civil discord, and breakdown in intra-elite cooperation in classical Athens. Part II complements the aggregative and quantitative analysis of Part I with close readings of Athenian accounts of incarceration from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Athenian narratives of imprisonment reveal profound shifts in perceptions of the prison particularly in response to the undemocratic regimes of 411/10 BCE and 404/3 BCE. Early and mid-fifth-century authors often portray imprisonment as a mechanism of democratic self-governance, a judicial procedure used (and abused) by the dêmos and its leaders to check antidemocratic factions, seeking to destabilize popular rule. Post-404/3 BCE narratives of imprisonment, by contrast, represent the prison as coopted by elites hostile to democracy in Athens and abroad, and emblematic of antidemocratic subversion, oligarchy, and tyrannical ambition. The conclusion attempts to reconcile ancient perceptions of the prison as a political institution with the conventional tripartite classification of Athenian imprisonment as custodial, coercive, and punitive.

This paper explores how a conception of the rule of law (embodied in a variety of legal and political institutions) came to affirm itself in the world of the ancient Greek city states. It argues that such a conception, formulated in opposition to the arbitrary rule of man, was to a large extent consistent with modern ideas of the rule of law as a constraint to political power, and to their Fullerian requirements of formal legality, as well as to requirements of due process. The article then analyses how this ideal was formulated in the Archaic period, and how it became a key feature of Greek identity. Finally, it argues that in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE it came to be used as the measure of the legitimacy of Greek political systems: democracy and oligarchy, as they engaged in an ideological battle, were judged as legitimate (and desirable) or illegitimate (and undesirable) on the basis of their conformity with a shared ideal of the rule of law. Then as now, to quote Tamanaha, ‘the rule of law’ was ‘an accepted measure worldwide of government legitimacy’.

Age-old scholarly dogma holds that the death of serious theatre went hand-in-hand with the 'death' of the city-state and that the fourth century BC ushered in an era of theatrical mediocrity offering shallow entertainment to a depoliticised citizenry. The traditional view of fourth-century culture is encouraged and sustained by the absence of dramatic texts in anything more than fragments. Until recently, little attention was paid to an enormous array of non-literary evidence attesting, not only the sustained vibrancy of theatrical culture, but a huge expansion of theatre throughout (and even beyond) the Greek world. Epigraphic, historiographic, iconographic and archaeological evidence indicates that the fourth century BC was an age of exponential growth in theatre. It saw: the construction of permanent stone theatres across and beyond the Mediterranean world; the addition of theatrical events to existing festivals; the creation of entirely new contexts for drama; and vast investment, both public and private, in all areas of what was rapidly becoming a major 'industry'. This is the first book to explore all the evidence for fourth century ancient theatre: its architecture, drama, dissemination, staging, reception, politics, social impact, finance and memorialisation.

The coins of the Phoenician city-states were struck in the fifth and fourth centuries bce. Influenced by coins struck in Greece and eastern Greece, Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, and Aradus struck coins in silver and bronze. These coins functioned as the “small change” for the gold coins struck by the imperial mint of Achaemenid Persia. The production of these coins aided in everyday commerce and in the collection of tariffs and taxes. Early studies of these coins were inevitably connected to the great royal collections of Europe in London and Paris. Major studies of these coins appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recent archaeological discoveries in Lebanon have included an inscription which expanded knowledge of the king list of the Phoenician city of Sidon in the fifth and fourth centuries bce. New historical sources such as this inscription published by Maurice Dunand in 1965 have enabled scholars to propose new and more accurate chronologies for the earliest coins of the Phoenicians. Sidon was the largest of the Phoenician mints, with coins struck between the late fifth century and the coming of Alexander the Great in 332 bce. Tyre, Aradus, and Byblos also struck coins, and together with those of Sidon, provided the denominations required to fuel the Phoenician (and therefore Persian) economy of the period. These coins enabled the Phoenician city-states to compete more favorably with their Greek and East Greek neighbors to the west. The coins of Tyre undoubtedly inspired the Tyrian colony of Carthage to strike coins beginning late in the fourth century bce.