People Of Athens Research Articles

Lysias’s Speech On the Refusal of a Pension and Athenian Citizens with Disabilities

The article examines speech XXIV by Athenian orator Lysias “On the Refusal of a Pension” (V–IV c. BCE) This text provides not only an excellent example of a legal speech written by a renowned Attic orator but also invaluable material for the study of social policy of Athenian democracy, namely — adaptation and survival of people with disabilities in the ancient Greek polis. The author of the article agrees with those researchers who have no doubts concerning the authorship of the speech and its intention to be delivered during the litigation on dokimasia of “infirm” people in the Council 500. The article considers the information about the disabled people in Athens and the allowance granted to them, and analyses topoi frequently used by litigants in legal speeches. Similarly to other Athenian trials, the outcome of this is not known, nor is the fate of the disabled person and whether he managed to assert his position. The analysis of the strategies of litigants indicates that appealing to pathos, enhancing the image of a good citizen, and discrediting the opponent in combination with irony, humor, and dramatization of the trial, to a certain extent, often made an impact on judges and resulted in a favorable decision The whole repertoire of these tactics was effectively utilized by the orator in speech XXIV, therefore is reasonable to suggest that the success was almost guaranteed. It is also noteworthy that the Athenian law that granted the allowance to adynatoi was unique for the Ancient Greece and, in all probability, was connected with the development of Athenian democracy.

A Cidade e o Teatro em Cavaleiros de Aristófanes: O Poeta e o Político ”“ Introdução à tradução de Cavaleiros.


 
 
 A peça Cavaleiros, de Aristófanes, data de 424 a.C. e é a comédia mais política dentre as que nos restaram do comediógrafo, logo também é a mais política da comédia antiga grega. O enredo da peça é uma disputa, ou agón, entre um escravo (o Barraqueiro, que representa o demagogo Cléon), recém-comprado pelo Povo, personificado como o patrão, e um vendedor de chouriços (o Vendetripa, que sugerimos representar o Poeta coÌ‚mico), pela liderança de Atenas. A rivalidade e o antagonismo entre o Vendetripa e o Barraqueiro escondem uma identidade e duplicação de um no outro. O Povo de Atenas é a presa disputada por ambos, que usam de impudência e de malícia para conseguir o governo da pólis. Mas, no final, o Vendetripa se revela amigo verdadeiro do Povo, enquanto o Barraqueiro apenas finge ter amor ao Povo, para enriquecer. Traduzimos os nomes das personagens enfatizando suas características de vendedores do mercado: Vendetripa, Barraqueiro, Bom de Feira, Zeus Feirante.
 
 

The Essence That Is Belonging Together: Identity, Embodiment, and Skillful Coping During the 2015 Greek Referendum

In the forward of Heidegger’s Identity and Difference, Joan Stambaugh proposes that in his statement “identity is belonging together,” the emphasis ought to be placed on the word belonging. By emphasizing belonging rather than together, one is better able to jettison thinking that centers identity as a fundamental trait of Being, the traditional view of identity held by metaphysics. This article will explicate this idea by drawing from a series of unstructured interviews conducted with young people in Athens during the 2015 July 5th Greek Referendum. This article argues that with attention devoted to the practice of skillful coping, the essence of identity, rather than a reflective cognitive undertaking, correlates to what Heidegger refers to as the event of appropriation. When finding the self affected by the world, what becomes revealed is an intimate identification with the world and things within it as it unfolds. With mobile media technologies, we are privileged to witness a particular way of being affected by the world, one where material and immaterial locations (such as social media arenas) converge together and whose perceptual distinctions become inseparable. Subsequently, we can also witness how the act of skillful coping, the motivated relationship between the body and the object, stands as the principal site where engulfment and investment become unconcealed.

The Possibility of Inquiry: Meno's Paradox from Socrates to Sextus by Gail Fine

Reviewed by: The Possibility of Inquiry: Meno's Paradox from Socrates to Sextus by Gail Fine David Ebrey Gail Fine. The Possibility of Inquiry: Meno's Paradox from Socrates to Sextus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv + 399. Cloth, £55.00. In the first half of this book, Gail Fine provides a renewed defense of her reading of Meno's famous paradox; in the second, she provides novel accounts of how Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and Sextus Empiricus responded to the paradox. For reasons of space, I focus on the first half, where Fine defends the same basic account of Meno's paradox she put forward in her influential "Inquiry in the Meno" (1992). The book goes further, considering and dismissing several alternatives not considered there and arguing at length against recent accounts in the secondary literature, especially those of Dominic Scott and David Charles. According to Fine, Meno's paradox rests on Meno misunderstanding what Socrates means by "not knowing at all." On her reading, Meno takes this to refer to a cognitive blank, then raises a problem for inquiring in a cognitive blank; Socrates does not think of "not knowing at all" as a cognitive blank, and so responds that it is possible not to know at all and still have true beliefs that allow one to inquire. Is Fine right that Meno's paradox rests on misunderstanding "not knowing at all" as a cognitive blank? While this is a key point in the book, the only evidence Fine cites (71) is that, shortly before the paradox, when Meno accuses Socrates of being like a torpedo fish, Meno says that he can "no longer say [eipein] at all what it [virtue] is" (80b4). But this seems to point to Meno's inability to provide an acceptable answer to "what is virtue?"—not to his thinking he is in a cognitive blank about virtue. If someone reports that she cannot say what time the train leaves, she may still have views, but think that they are insufficiently justified to say. In fact, Socrates suggests earlier in the dialogue that one should only say what virtue is if one knows what it is. At the beginning of the dialogue Meno asks Socrates to "say" (eipein) whether virtue is teachable (70a). Socrates claims that Gorgias has given Meno the habit of expecting fearless and magnificent answers, as is reasonable from those who know (70b–c). But Socrates claims that people in Athens would laugh at the idea of answering Meno's question because they are so far from knowing whether virtue is teachable that they do not even know what it is (70c–71b). It is only after Meno suggests that he may have learned from Gorgias what virtue is that Socrates asks Meno to say (eipein) what it is (71d). Meno alludes to this earlier conversation in his torpedo fish objection, when, having been refuted, he reports that he no longer can say what virtue is. Meno points to two different problems in his statement of the paradox. Fine treats it as clear that the first is a "targeting objection": how can you specify the thing you are inquiring into. She translates the sentence in question as "[f]or what sort of thing, from among those you don't know, will you put forward as the thing you're inquiring into?" (80d6–7). As translated, it is not clear that Meno is pointing to a targeting problem; one would like an argument for thinking this. But it is also not clear that this is the best way to translate the sentence. "What sort of thing" (poion) can be governed by the participle, "put forward," without being governed by the main verb, "inquire" (see Smyth, 2643). If read this way, Socrates is saying "[f]or what sort of thing, from among those you don't know, will you put forward when you inquire?" Up until this point, Socrates's and Meno's inquiries have involved putting forward proposed answers to the "what is it?" question. One could interpret Meno's question as pointing to a problem with putting forward such an answer, [End Page 537] rather than with specifying...

Translation and preliminary validation of the Greek version of the Xerostomia Inventory in older people

IntroductionThe Xerostomia Inventory (XI) has been developed to assess self-perceived xerostomia. The aim of this study was to describe the translation and the preliminary validation of the XI in older Greeks. Materials and methodsThe XI was translated into Greek and then back translated into English. Minor modifications were performed after a pilot testing and the final scale was interviewer-administered in 100 older participants visiting Open Care Community Centers for Older People in Athens. The preliminary validation procedure included calculation of the internal consistency reliability using Cronbach's α coefficient and corrected item-total correlations, principal component analysis, investigation of the discriminant validity by testing any variation related to sociomedical and oral variables and concurrent validity assessing the correlation between the XI and the response to a single question about self-perceived mouth dryness. ResultsThe factor analysis XI revealed a modified seven-item scale (XI-7), showing good internal consistency (Cronbach's α: 0.78). There were significant correlations with self-perceived mouth dryness, indicating satisfying concurrent validity, and significant differences related to depression, diabetes, antidepressive medications and polypharmacy showing acceptable discriminant validity. ConclusionsThe preliminary investigation of the Greek version of the Xerostomia Inventory revealed a 7-item questionnaire that demonstrated good internal consistency and validity and will be further tested in older patients.

RHETORICAL APPROACH OF FLAVIUS CLAUDIUS JULIAN'S LETTERS

This study examines the rhetorical practice of two rhetorical letters(Letter to Themistius the philosopher and Letter to the Senate and the People of Athens) written by Flavius Claudius Julian the emperor. Its purpose is to describe the way that Julian organizes the texts' coherence and intertextuality and draw conclusions about the text, the context of the letters and Julian’s political character.

Costing Festivals and War

August Boeckh famously criticised the Athenians for wasting public income on festivals instead of building up their armed forces. As evidence this pioneer of economic history cited the claim of Demosthenes that the citizens of fourth-century Athens had spent more on the City Dionysia and Great Panathenaia than on a single naval expedition and the suggestion of Plutarch that the Athenians of the previous century had spent more on the production of tragedies than on the maintenance of their empire. However, Boeckh never attempted estimates of the total costs of the festival-program or warfare to back up his view. Interest in the relative cost of festivals has only been rekindled with the recent shift of focus towards the social context of Athenian drama. Ancient-theatre experts have carefully costed the City Dionysia and, in light of their unexpectedly high estimates, endorsed the evidence which Boeckh cited in support of heavy festival spending. In so doing they have called into question the consensus of those working on Athenian war-making. Military historians may have shied away from estimating the global cost of war but they do believe that this far exceeded spending on all other public activities. To adjudicate these different views of Athenian funding priorities this article estimates and compares systematically the costs of the festival-program and the city’s armed forces. Total expenditure on religious celebrations was indeed surprisingly high and comparable to the running costs of the democracy. But it was considerably less than what was spent on the armed forces. In times of war the average level of military expenditure ranged between five and more than fifteen times what was spent on state festivals. This spending differential and the bellicosity of classical Athens confirm that it was not drama or festivals but war which was the overriding priority of the Athenian people.

Theater of the people: spectators and society in ancient Athens

* Conventions and Abbreviations Used * Acknowledgments * Introduction. Theater and People in Athens * Chapter 1. The Idea of the Audience and Its Role in the Theater * Chapter 2. Space and Spectators in the Theater * Chapter 3. The Economics of the Theater: Theoric Distributions and Class Divisions * Chapter 4. Noncitizens in the Theater * Chapter 5. Women and the Theater Audience * Epilogue * Notes * Bibliography * Index

Revenge in Athenian culture

Revenge was an all important part of the ancient Athenian mentality, intruding on all forms of life - even where we might not expect to find it today. Revenge was of prime importance as a means of survival for the people of early Greece and remained in force during the rise of the 'poleis'. The revenge of epic heroes such as Odysseus and Menalaus influences later thinking about revenge and suggests that avengers prosper. Nevertheless, this does not mean that all forms of revenge were seen as equally acceptable in Athens. Differences in response are expected depending on the crime and the criminal. Through a close examination of the texts, Fiona McHardy here reveals a more complex picture of how the Athenian people viewed revenge.

Conversations in the dark: How young people manage chatroom relationships

This paper reports a small number of interviews with young people in Athens about their use of Internet chatrooms as a means of meeting people. In the last few years there has been a growing public concern about the dangers of socialising with strangers in chatrooms, but what do the users themselves think about the risks involved, and what strategies have they adopted to manage these risks? Some of the practices adopted by these young people are surprising and counter to the conventional advice given by official authorities.

Depicting Democracy: An Exploration of Art and Text in the Law of Eukrates

AbstractThis paper examines the range of symbolic associations surrounding the relief sculpture (Democracy crowning the Athenian people) that accompanied the law proposed by Eukrates against the establishment of tyranny. It examines some of the investments made in it by various communities and individuals. The role of personifications in political allegory is examined. This analysis shows both the potency of personifying representations of the Athenian people and the interpretative complexities that they create.

Small States in the Athenian Empire: The Case of the Eteokarpathioi

Evidence from the Athenian Tribute Lists and the “Eteokarpathian decree” ( IG i 3 1454) reveals a complex and reciprocal relationship between Athens and a small subject ally, the koinon of the Eteokarpathioi (on the island of Karpathos in the Dodecanese). On the one hand, Athens intervened militarily to guarantee the koinon ’s continued existence; on the other, the Eteokarpathioi “took the initiative in getting themselves assessed,” becoming tribute-paying members of the empire ( IG i 3 278.VI.14, 434/3 B.C.E.), and became euergetai of the Athenian people with their gift of special building material (cypress from their sanctuary of Apollo) for the temple of Athena Athenon medeousa . The decree reveals how Athens might intervene in small communities to protect them against more powerful neighbors and thus illustrates the circumstances under which small states or communities might find it advantageous to be part of the Athenian empire.

A Personification of Demos on a New Attic Document Relief

This article presents a previously unpublished document relief discovered during excavations on the north slope ofthe Acropolis ofAthens in 1937.Although fragmentary, this relief contributes to the corpus of 4th-century B.C. document reliefs by providing a well-preserved depiction of what is most likely Demos, the personification of the Athenian people, awarding a crown to a mortal man. The iconography of Demos is reviewed and an appendix presents a list and concordance of all extant representations of Demos on Attic document reliefs.

Implicating the demos: a reading of Thucydides on the rise of the Four Hundred

AbstractIn the midst of his account of the events, Thucydides says that it was difficult to switch Athens from democracy to the oligarchic rule of the Four Hundred (8.68.4). Most modern scholars have agreed, viewing the rise of the Four Hundred primarily as a coup effected by violence, terror and deceit. This interpretation does not conform to Thucydides' narrative (8.47-70), however, which shows that it was not very hard to end the Athenian democracy. Although terror, violence and propaganda have their place in Thucydides' account, modern treatments overemphasize them and so ignore or gloss over Thucydides' charge that the Athenian people did not resist oligarchy very strenuously and so bear a large share of responsibility for it. In Thucydides' narrative Peisander et al. are open about plans for oligarchy (if not for the extremely limited oligarchy that they eventually put in place at Kolonos) both on Samos and in Athens, and meet little resistance from democratic supporters. In addition, Thucydides' rhetoric repeatedly mutes what resistance there is, as if to underscore its weakness. Thucydides' Athenians for the most part quickly and easily abandon their democracy. There was a ‘terror’ campaign, but its scope, effect and need has been exaggerated. In particular, there is no reason to think that the location of the Kolonos meeting – where the Athenians voted the limited oligarchy of the Four Hundred into power – terrified them into doing so. Thucydides' comment on the difficulty of the task of the Four Hundred is ironic. There is a jarring contrast between Thucydides' judgement and his narrative which, when recognized, compels readers to re-examine their own assumptions and expectations. The attention modern commentators have given to Thucydides' words about intimidation and propaganda have left them deaf to the other interesting story Thucydides has to tell about the role the Athenian demos played in the move to oligarchy.

Tritogeneia und das Gebet der Athener

Summary: ΤΡΙΤΟΓΕΝΕΙΑ, the epitheton of Athena means ‘Erztochter’ (‘Archdaughter') and the TPI- ΤΟΠΑΤΟΡΕΣ are in the opinion of the former people of Athens the ‘Archfathers’ (cf. Rhein. Mus. 104, 1961, 346 sqq.). In a prayer spoken to the Τριτοπάτορες (παις μοι τριτογενής ε'ίη μή τριτογένεια) τριτογενης and τριτογένεια resp. express the wish that a right boy, not a girl should be born on the third day of a month.

Herodes Atticus and the Rhetoric of Tyranny

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 170s, the emperor Marcus Aurelius sent a lengthy official communication from his field headquarters at Sirmium to the people of Athens. They subsequently erected an inscribed copy of the massive document that filled at least two plaques of Pentelic marble, each measuring a ponderous 2.3 m by 1.8 m. Published by James Oliver in 1970, the surviving portions, apart from some more or less disjointed fragments, preserve almost the entire text of the second, concluding plaque.' On it are recorded the emperor's judgments in a number of appeals on cases originating in various courts at Athens, as well as general rules he set forth regarding admission to the Areopagus, Boule, and Panhellenium. At several points during the course of the letter, and especially in the conclusion, a section whose importance for comprehending the document as a whole has hitherto been unrecognized, the name of that paragon of late rhetoric, Herodes Atticus, appears. Although Oliver acknowledged the connection between this document and the famous trial before Marcus Aurelius at Sirmium involving Herodes and an Athenian faction that Philostratus describes in the second book of his Lives of the Sophists, Oliver devoted most of his energy to elucidating the document's constitutional and social implications.2 In the quarter-century since then, other studies have improved on his text, notably those of C. P. Jones and S. Follet, whereas our understanding of the letter's historical context has failed to advance appreciably.3 In particular, there has been a lack of attention to the document as a unity, with scholars seeing it as an ancient equivalent of the omnibus bills so popular among lawmakers in the United States. This approach has meant that the document's potential for illuminating the so-called feud between Herodes and the Athenians remains underappreciated, as does its significance in imparting concrete reality to a phenomenon long thought to be merely the stuff of rhetoric in the Roman Empire-Greek tyranny.4

Socrates' and Callicles' Settlement--or, The Invention of the Impossible Body Politic

A detailed analysis of Plato's Gorgias allows to see how the famous debate between Might and Right has been rigged, since Socrates and Callicles agree on everything against the people of Athens. But then, once the moral red herring has been pushed aside, it is still possible to see in the dialog the traces of the conditions of felicity proper to politics and ignored by Socrates' appeal to Reason as well as by Callicles' appeal to Force. The Body Politic made impossible by their settlement, can be made possible again as soon as other definitions of science and politics are provided.

The Introduction of Asklepios in Athens : Religion and the People of Athens in the Last Half of the Fifth Century

The Introduction of Asklepios in Athens : Religion and the People of Athens in the Last Half of the Fifth Century

Décret du peuple athénien pour Pausanias de Mélitè, gymnasiarque à Délos

Publication and commentary on the decree put up in Delos, by which the Athenian people honoured in 157/6 the gymnasiarch Pausanias of Miletus, who had held office on the island in the previous year.

Theseus and Athens

Theseus is celebrated as the greatest of Athenian heroes. This work explores what he meant to the Athenians at the height of their city-state in the fifth century B.C. Assembling material that has been scattered in scholarly works, Henry Walker examines the evidence for the development of the myth and cult of Theseus in the archaic age. He then looks to major works of classical literature in which Theseus figures, exploring the contradictions between the archaic, primitive side of his character and his refurbished image as the patron of democracy. His ambiguous nature as outsider, flouting accepted standards of behavior, while at the same time being a hero-king and a representative of higher ideals, is analysed through his representations in the work of Bacchylides, Euripides, and Sophocles. This is the only work of scholarship that examines the literary representation of Theseus so thoroughly. It brings to life a literary character whose virtues, flaws, and contradictions belong in no less a degree to his creators, the people of Athens.