Greek City-states Research Articles

Give and take

Appealing to the original meaning of the Greek term nomos, Hannah Arendt claims that a bounded legal space is constitutive for political community. Can this seemingly anachronistic claim be substantiated in the conceptually strong sense that every polity - the Greek city-state as much as a hypothetical world state - must constitute itself as a nomos? It is argued that whereas Arendt falls short of justifying this claim, a reflexive reading of nomos can do the trick: the space of political community is necessarily bounded because no polity is imaginable that does not raise a claim to an inside as the community’s own space. A world state, were it ever to be founded, would globalize nomos, not suppress it. Whence the political problem: how does a polity deal with its outside? This problem is particularly pressing because Carl Schmitt’s defense of nomos radically challenges Arendt’s position. A reinterpretation of her analyses of the foundation of a political community suggests how the representational structure of a politics of boundaries parries Schmitt’s challenge.

Review Article: Greek Vases in Etruria

Objects require a definable provenance if they are to be understood for what they were. This is a truism of archaeology often invoked by those who deplore the modern business of collecting antiquities. In the case of Greek painted pottery, however, it remains a principle more easily called upon for the sake of sanctimonious effect than applied in pursuit of scientific results. The archaeological context of many surviving examples of figured vases in Greece during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. is, typically, an Etruscan tomb. Yet no one supposes that all these vases were originally created by Greek artisans for deposition as Etruscan grave goods. A plausible case has been made for certain producers (notably Nikosthenes of Athens) devising some kind of export strategy for a range of ceramic shapes and certain batches of vessels being decorated as if to suit Etruscan taste (e.g., the so-called Tyrrhenian amphoras). The possibility that immigrant Greek craftsmen set up workshops in Etruria remains attractive for particular stylistic groupings (e.g., the Caeretan hydriae) . Nonetheless, it is an undeniable fact of archaeological circumstance that vases produced in Greek city-states have been found mostly at a distinct remove from their first destination. They are, in other words, the dislocated spoils of an ancient antiquities market.

FIRE, SACRIFICE, IPHIGÉNIE

Gluck's Iphigenie en Aulide (1774), his first opera written for the French stage, never settled on an ending. In order to analyse the historical conditions of this musical reluctance, this argument reads the opera's literary source, Jean Racine's Iphigenie, developing a three-fold link: to the fireworks that followed the first performance of Racine's tragedy in 1674 in the garden of Versailles, to the discovery in 1774 by Joseph Priestley of oxygen and related developments in the poetics of fire, and to changes in the political culture of sacrifice and so necessarily in the ends of tragedy. Racine's cosmic storm around a sacrificial pyre that auto-ignites, the self-immolation of the monarch created by the garden festival, and this opera which now ends with a chorus of soldier-workers crowned as kings all point to music's fabled ability to predict and determine the political, a danger recognized by governments from the Greek city-state to the present. In the course of a revolution that had been precisely figured in Gluck's music, Iphigenie the victim becomes the young queen who had been Gluck's singing pupil in Vienna, Marie-Antoinette.

The Enigma of Ignatius of Antioch

If we affirm against recent criticism the authenticity of the Middle Recension of the Ignatian letters, we are nevertheless left with the enigma of Ignatius' relations with Polycarp. This paper explains that enigma in terms of two distinct cultural worlds of early second-century Christianity that come together in the meeting of these two church leaders. Ignatius was the first great missionary bishop who reinterpreted church order, the eucharist and martyrdom against the backcloth of the Second Sophistic in Asia Minor, with its pagan processions, cult and embassies that celebrated the social order of the Greek city state in relation to imperial power. Much of Ignatius' iconography was alien to Polycarp, though the latter was finally to canonise both him and his writings by focusing on his impressively enacted refutation of Docetism through his portrayal of his forthcoming martyrdom.

Megara Hyblaia and Selinous: The Development of Two Greek City-States in Archaic Sicily. By Franco De Angelis.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsMegara Hyblaia and Selinous: The Development of Two Greek City-States in Archaic Sicily. By Franco De Angelis.R. Ross HollowayR. Ross Holloway Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 110, Number 2April 2006 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 8Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/AJS40027173 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright © 2006 by the Archaeological Institute of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Franco De Angelis: Megara Hyblaia and Selinous. The development of two Greek citystates in archaic Sicily

Franco De Angelis: Megara Hyblaia and Selinous. The development of two Greek citystates in archaic Sicily. Oxford: Oxford university school of archaeology 2003. XXII, 247 S. 51 Abb. 34 Taf. (Oxford university school of archaeology. Monographs. 57.) 48 £.

The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (review)

Reviewed by: The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity Brent D. Shaw The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. By Benjamin Isaac. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. xiv + 563 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Given the intrinsic historical importance of the idea of racism and its virulent Nachleben in European and world history, it is surprising that this is the first serious scholarly work to confront the problem of race and racism in Greco-Roman antiquity. The author rightly rejects the few existing works—for example those by Nicholas Sherwin-White, Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome (Cambridge, 1967), and Yves Dauge, Le Barbare: Recherches sur la conception romaine de la barbarie et de la civilisation (Brussels, 1981)—as having little that is worthwhile to contribute to an understanding of the problem. There have been, it is true, a host of recent works in ancient history on the modish subject of ethnicity. But Isaac's work is not another discourse on difference. It is, as he puts it, a history of hate (p. 50). He argues that most modern work on race, even by eminent scholars such as George Fredrickson and Michael Banton, has labored under the combined misconceptions of modernizing definitions of race and a faulty knowledge of the ancient evidence on racism. Isaac therefore begins his investigation with a lengthy introduction in which he attempts to formulate definitions that clearly separate "race" and "racism" from other kinds of classifications of human groups, like popular prejudices, cultural biases, and ethnic stereotyping. Isaac contends—correctly in this reviewer's opinion—that racism was not a creation of the nineteenth century. Some, of course, have ventured earlier dates. In his famous lectures on race at the College de [End Page 227] France in 1976, Foucault thought that the origins of racial consciousness could be traced back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Il faut défendre la société [Paris, 1997], pp. 57–74). It is nevertheless true that the words "race," "racialism," and "racism" did not occur with their modern meanings in English until the first decades of the twentieth century (p. 25). It is also true that the "factual" underpinnings of race were newly scientized in the nineteenth century, especially by the science of biology. But it is equally true that concepts fundamental to race and racism had a long prehistory before this most recent modern phase in their existence. The views of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza in The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, 1994) therefore seem close to Isaac's views on the subject: "Racism has existed from time immemorial, but only in the nineteenth century were there attempts to justify it on the basis of scientific arguments" (p. 36, n. 84). Close, but not quite, since Isaac persuasively argues that scientific ideas were already being deployed to underpin concepts of race in Greco-Roman antiquity. He further argues, as the title of his work indicates, that there was a specific point in time when the components necessary to the creation of a coherent ideology of race came together. Racism therefore did not exist "from time immemorial." It was invented in the context of the Greek city-state. Having made these gains, however, the author perhaps concedes too much to the skeptics by allowing that ancient racism might only be a "proto-racism" (pp. 2, 36, and passim). His arguments and the evidence point in the opposite direction: both sustain the presence of strong concepts of race and racism in antiquity. What happened in the most recent phase of their development was their legitimation in modern scientific, usually biological, modes. Isaac, indeed, criticizes most current social scientific definitions of race as constructed too narrowly in a way that conveniently suits modern circumstances alone, thereby creating a self-fulfilling field of what can and cannot be counted as "race" and "racism" (pp. 17–21). Because of excessive emphasis on biological elements or because they are far too devoted to a single case (the American) and its set of factors (distinctive somatic appearance, skin color), modern definitions simply mirror the world that they are attempting to analyze. Isaac's own definition of racism (pp. 34–35) is sufficiently specific...

Structural work

The structural-cum-symbolic amplification of minor differences: how small-scale, interpersonal or factional disputes are turned into large-scale struggles between nations, kingdoms or their totalized like - thus making macrohistories out of microhistories and vice versa. The phenomenon depends on structural relays of various sorts that endow the opposing local parties with collective identities and the opposing collectives with local or interpersonal sentiments. In the occurrence, the small-scale struggles are transformed into abstract and irreconcilable causes-to-die-for, their outcome depending now on the larger correlation of forces. The discussion focuses on three ethnographic/historical examples: the recent Elián Gonzalez affair in the US; the nationalization of peasant disputes in the Cerdanya, Catalonia during the 17th to 19th centuries; and civil strife in Corcyra and other Greek city-states during the Peloponnesian War. The last was an important source of Hobbes’s idea of the state of nature. It shows that it takes a lot of culture to make a state of nature.

Helots and Their Masters in Laconia and Messenia ed. by Nino Luraghi, Susan E. Alcock (review)

REVIEWS 242 spring. She comments, “… men’s actual behavior and pronouncements, even in Salem, appear to be best understood not in relation to women but instead in relation to other men and their interests” (182). In this same chapter the author extends her discussion of the stresses placed upon both men and women as their gender roles become social rather than biological constructions, and underlines that the violence directed towards women in Salem was a product of changes in both female and male identities. In the remaining chapters Hartman undertakes a sweeping revisitation of early modern and modern Western history with “Women and Households Left In.” She emphasizes that social changes began in individual households and gradually permeated the larger communities, rather than the other way around. Equally, she seconds others’ conclusions that the Catholic Church was not in fact in crisis at the time of the Reformation, but rather that the different reform movements were a chameleon energy that served to advance the interests of a number of disparate groups, male and female, who were simultaneously engaged in other—often gendered—struggles. At the heart of the many reform efforts, for Hartman, was a shoring-up or defense of the (nuclear) family which, “by the early modern era had largely ceased to be [a] presumed natural, enduring , semisacred mixture of property and kin” but “[f]rom the lowest to the highest social levels … had instead become a more consciously fashioned entity, one requiring regular care and attention …” (228–229). Turning to the modern period, Hartman extends her discussion to affirm that the extraordinary advances made in Western Europe during the era of industrialization represents not European “superiority” as many would have it, but instead a natural consequence of many generations of Europeans coping with the consequences of late marriage. She likewise undermines our modern perception that a woman’s place has always been in the home, showing (primarily via the work of John Gillis) how the idealization of cloistered female domesticity grew out of the Victorian period and, by contrast, the extent to which women in late-marriage societies have historically passed in and out of households as part of a pattern of life-cycle service. Hartman’s principal goal in The Household and the Making of History is to bring discussion of the implications of the Western Family Pattern to the table and inspire scholars from any number of disciplines to pick it up and apply it to their own work. Her book covers a tremendous amount of territory as she attempts both to present as much evidence as possible in support of her primary argument (the primacy of the Western Family Pattern in explaining any number of social phenomena over the course of the last 1,000 years) and demonstrate its possible application. Fascinating in and of itself, Hartman’s book definitely leaves us waiting and hoping for a subsequent study which might offer a more narrowly focused application of her findings. CHRISTINE THUAU, French and Francophone Studies, UCLA Helots and Their Masters in Laconia and Messenia, ed. Nino Luraghi and Susan E. Alcock (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press 2003) vii + 314 pp. Helots were the servile population that sustained the ancient Greek city-state of REVIEWS 243 Sparta. They worked lands held by the citizen-soldiers of Sparta who used the agricultural produce to make required contributions to the city’s communal messes. It is generally pointed out that with helots laboring in the fields, Sparta was able to develop an elite class of citizens whose primary function was to train and fight as professional hoplite soldiers. Although helots played a vital role in ancient Sparta’s economy and were a significant factor in the development of Spartan institutions, there is very little that is known about them. The collection of essays in Helots and Their Masters in Laconia and Messenia: Histories, Ideologies, and Structures, edited by Nino Luraghi and Susan E. Alcock, however, offers a variety of approaches to the study of helotry to help counteract the dearth of information in our sources. The key contribution of this volume is that it combines essays with diverse methodologies, thus illustrating the feasibility of interdisciplinary collaboration...

Encyclopedia of leadership

'The enormous demands on leadership in today's world-the rise of militant followings; struggle of long-suppressed people to rise to leadership positions; heightened demand for moral, principled leadership - all these dynamic forces contribute to making this encyclopedia timely - and timeless' - James MacGregor Burns, Williams College, author of Leadership and winner of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award 'This authoritative reference source, edited by Pulitzer prize-winning presidential biographer Burns and written by some 400 scholars from 17 countries, comprehensively covers a burgeoning new field of academic study-leadership. Its scope is amazingly broad, reflecting interdisciplinary applications of subject. The 373 alphabetically arranged entries are accompanied by 150 photos and other illustrations, with 300 sidebars drawn from a variety of sources. Approximately one third of entries provide biographical information about men and women who have made significant contributions to field. Other categories include case studies, leadership studies, followership, women and gender, personal characteristics of model leaders, leadership styles, and leadership theories. The appendixes following main body of work include a six-page select bibliography of books related to leadership, a directory of 250 leadership programs with accompanying mission statements, key foreign policy and war speeches of U.S. presidents, and excerpts from sacred texts illuminating the role of leaders and leadership concepts. Bottom Line: Because of its breadth, ease of navigation, high level of scholarship, clear writing and practical format, this model encyclopedia should help establish leadership as a normative field of study. Highly recommended' - The Library Journal From earliest times people have been entranced by stories about leaders - about Greek city state rulers, Roman consuls, Chinese emperors, religious potentates, military conquerors, and politicians. Perhaps more importantly, leadership is a challenge and an opportunity facing millions of people in their professional and personal lives. The Encyclopedia of Leadership brings together for first time everything that is known and truly matters about leadership as part of human experience. Developed by award-winning editorial team at Berkshire Publishing Group, Encyclopedia includes hundreds of articles, written by 400 leading scholars and experts from 17 countries, exploring leadership theories and leadership practice. Over a third of work - some 500,000 words - is devoted to biographical essays and to case studies focused on leaders (and their followers). Articles and sidebars show leadership in action-in corporations and state houses, schools, churches, small businesses, and nonprofit organizations. Questions Encyclopedia of Leadership answer: - What is a leader? - What is a great leader? - How does someone become a leader? - What are types of leadership? - How can leadership theories help us understand contemporary situations? - How can I be a good (and maybe great) leader? The Encyclopedia of Leadership is an unprecedented learning resource. Scholars, students, professionals, and active citizens will turn to Encyclopedia for guidance on theory and practice of leadership, for stories of great leaders, and for tools and knowledge they need to lead in 21st century. Key Features: - Four volumes - 400 substantive articles, ranging in length from 1000-6000 words - 200 photographs and other illustrations - 250 sidebars drawn from public records, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and ethnography Article categories: - Biographies - Case studies - Followers and followership - Gender issues - Leadership in different disciplines - Leadership in different domains - Leadership styles - Personality characteristics - Situational factors - Theories and concepts The Encyclopedia of Leadership is an vital tool for librarians with collections in business, management, history, politics, communication, psychology, and a host of other disciplines. Students and teachers in courses ranging from history to psychology, anthropology, and law will also find this an invaluable reference. Editorial Board Laurien Alexandre, Antioch University Bruce Avolio, University of Nebraska, Lincoln Martin Chemers, University of California, Santa Cruz Kisuk Cho, Ewha Womans University Joanne Ciulla, University of Richmond David Collinson, Lancaster University Yiannis Gabriel, Imperial College, London Zachary Green, Alexander Institute and University of Maryland Keith Grint, Oxford University Michael Hogg, University of Queensland Jerry Hunt, Texas Tech University Barbara Kellerman, Harvard University Jean Lipman-Blumen, Claremont Graduate University Larraine Matusak, LarCon Associates Ronald Riggio, Claremont McKenna College J rgen Weibler, Fernuniversitat Hagen Contributors Include Warren Bennis (Management) John Chandler (Higher Education) Cynthia Cherrey (International Leadership Association) Bob Edgerton (Mau Mau Rebellion) Gene Gallagher (Religion) Betty Glad (Camp David Accords and Tyrannical Leadership) Louis Gould (Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson) Allen Guttmann (Modern Olympics Movement and Women's Movement) Ronald Heifetz (Adaptive Work) Dale Irvin (Ann Lee) David Malone (Billy Graham) Martin Marty (Martin Luther) Kenneth Ruscio (Trust) Robert Solomon (Friedrich Nietzsche) Robert Sternberg (Intelligence and Tacit Knowledge) Fay Vincent (Sports Industry) Gary Yukl (Influence Tactics and Group Performance)

The Rural History of Ancient Greek City States: The Oropos Survey Project. By Michael B. Cosmopoulos, James Newhard, Nike Sakka, and Lawrence Stene.

<i>The Rural History of Ancient Greek City States: The Oropos Survey Project</i>. By Michael B. Cosmopoulos, James Newhard, Nike Sakka, and Lawrence Stene.

The Fifth Annual Congress of the Italian Society of Hair Restoration • Siracusa, Italy

1. James Arnold, MD 1. Saratoga, California The Italian Society of Hair Restoration met May 24-26, 2001, in Siracusa, Sicily, at the center of the ancient Greek city-state we know as Syracuse. The modern city of Siracusa surrounds a bay containing the island of Ortega, the founding site of

MARY ANN TÉTREAULT, Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Pp. 318. $18.50 paper.

In her pivotal work on Kuwaiti politics, Mary Ann Tétreault provides an “insider's guide” to the private and public spaces in which struggles over communal power are pursued by the government, the Parliament, and the people of Kuwait. Tétreault is careful to call her text “Stories of Democracy,” as she realizes the reflexive nature of what democracy means at different periods in history (before oil, after oil, under Iraqi occupation, in post-Liberation Kuwait); for different people in Kuwait (women, the merchants, government officials, tribal leaders, service politicians, opposition leaders); and in different contexts (the mosque, the diwaniyya or men's social club, the civic association, Parliament, the government). With this in mind, she argues that “democracy” is a “concept that ‘moves' depending on one's assumptions” (p. 3). Her basic message is that Kuwaiti politics resembles the politics of the Greek city-state, and she relies on various forms of Aristotelian comparison to explore this concept. Moreover, Tétreault illustrates that much of Kuwaiti politics resembles a high-stakes soap opera. For example, she calls the bad debt crisis “one of the longest running soap operas in Kuwaiti politics” (p. 164). In Chapter 4, she labels Kuwaiti politics “a family romance, whose grip on political actors constrains their choices” (p. 67). Toward the end of her text in chapter 8, Tétreault combines these metaphors when she observes that in the city-state that is Kuwait, politics are “the product of a domestic public life that seems all too often like life in a large and contentious family” (p. 206).

Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust

IN THE SUMMER OF 1994, Jacques Derrida presented a paper to a conference London, delivering the English-language version of what was to become Mal d'archive: Une impression freudienne the North London Freud House, Maresfield Gardens.1 In the opening passages of Archive Fever, Derrida presented his audience with the image of the arkhe, as a place where things begin, where power originates, its workings inextricably bound up with the authority of beginnings. In the brief account of the operation of the Greek city-state that he gave on that occasion (and the various printed versions that followed), he pointed to its official documents, stored the arkheion, the superior magistrate's residence. There, the archon himself, the magistrate, exercised the power of procedure and precedent, his right to interpret them for the operation of a system of law. In Derrida's description, the arkhe-the archive-appears to represent the now of whatever kind of power is being exercised, anywhere, any place or time. It represents a principle that, Derrida's words, is in the order of commencement as well as the order of commandment. The mal (the fever, the sickness) of the archive is to do with its very establishment, which is the establishment of state power and authority.2 And then there is the feverish desire-a kind of sickness unto death-that Derrida indicatedfor the archive: the fever not so much to enter it and use it as to have it. For those historians who heard or read Archive Fever, it raised the puzzling question of what on earth an archive was doing there the first place, at the beginning of a long description of another text (someone else's text, not Derrida's), which dealt, as he himself would go on to do at length, with Sigmund Freud and the topic of psychoanalysis.3 For the main part, Archive Fever is a sustained

From Simonides to Isocrates: The Fifth-Century Origins of Fourth-Century Panhellenism

This article attempts to gather the evidence for panhellenism in the fifth century B.C. and to trace its development both as a political program and as a popular ideology. Panhellenism is here defined as the idea that the various Greek city-states could solve their political disputes and simultaneously enrich themselves by uniting in common cause and conquering all or part of the Persian empire. An attempt is made to trace the evidence for panhellenism throughout the fifth century by combining different kinds of evidence: that is, both poetic and historical texts, as well as the testimonia for monuments which are no longer extant. Any thought of a panhellenic crusade was impossible before the Persian invasions, but such an expedition, under the dual leadership of Athens and Sparta, was espoused by Cimon. After his death it remained an item of popular talk for the rest of the century and this talk intensified during the second half of the Peloponnesian War. The paper has six parts: the first finds hints of panhellenist ideology in the fragments of Simonides' Plataea elegy and in Aeschylus' Persians. The second part attempts to explain several puzzling passages in Herodotus in terms of his reflecting contemporary panhellenist discourse, especially in his account of Aristagoras of Miletus at Sparta. Part three reconstructs Cimon' s belief in dual hegemony and his plans for a joint Athenian-Spartan expedition against the Persian empire. Part four connects an anecdote about Miltiades with the Cimonian monuments and argues that the artistic program of the Stoa Poikile was intended to support Cimon's panhellenist aspirations. Part five discusses panhellenist sentiments in late fifth-century Greek poetry, and dates the Olympic Oration and Funeral Oration of Gorgias to the period 408-405 B.C., Finally, part six relates the panhellenist writings of Isocrates to earlier developments.

Art and the Greek city state: an interpretive archaeology

Introduction 1. The design of archaic Korinth: the question of a beginning and an interpretive archaeology 2. Craft production in the early city state: some historical and material contexts 3. Early archaic Korinth: design and style 4. Consumption: perfume and violence in a Sicilian cemetery 5. Trade and the consumption of travel 6. Art, design and the constitutive imagination in the early city state.

Necessity in Foreign Policy

In 432 B.C.E., representatives from the Greek city-state of Sparta traveled to the oracle at Delphi to ask whether they should go to war over Athenian violations of the Thirty Years' Peace Treaty. After receiving a positive response, the Spartans convened a meeting of the Peloponnesian League to canvass the opinions of their allies. Delay not, urged the Corinthians. We have arrived at the moment of necessity.' Throughout the ages, many statesmen have echoed the Corinthians' call to action by justifying foreign policy undertakings with a rhetorical strategy and form of argument that appeals to the exigencies of necessity. Political realists, with their skepticism concerning the role of ethical considerations in policy deliberations, have been especially vocal in asserting that some policies are driven by unavoidable necessities. According to realist thought, under certain circumstances national leaders must act in ways that contravene moral norms. Their primary duty, notes George Kennan, is to the interests of the society they represent, not to the moral sensibilities of particular individuals within that society.2 Ignoring one's interests, squandering one's resources in fits of altruism, adds

The Middle Class and Democracy in Socio-Historical Perspective

The Middle Class and Democracy in Socio-Historical Perspective

Relativism and Pluralism in Ancient Greece

In the relations of the Greek city-states to each other, David Kovacs finds situations analogous to those that arise in a multicultural society. He tells us how the Greeks at first achieved harmony and then lost it, an experience close to our own. The question that remains is, how are we to re-establish a moral matrix that will bring social peace without sacrificing individual and group distinctiveness? Even though Greek city-states were frequently warring with one another, they managed to achieve a degree of cooperation and commonality. Kovacs believes that equilibrium was maintained because of the bond provided by nomos, customs whose force derived ultimately from religion. He cites evidence from the writings of Herodotus and Euripides to show the extent and strength of this unwritten code. But its strength was diminished over the years, notably by the teachings of Sophists, relativistic philosophers who became the educators of Greek youth. Even though other philosophers including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle attempted to counter the influence of the Sophists, relativism—and the ravages of war and plague—caused Greeks to lose faith in their touchstone. Kovacs sees in the loss of nomos a parallel to present-day social and moral disintegration resulting from the ascendancy of relativism and deconstructionism. He believes that we need to develop a new kind of nomos—shared beliefs in objective right and wrong—that will provide social glue and moral guidance.

Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State

How did the classical Greek city come into being? What role did religion play its formation? Athens, with its ancient citadel and central cult, has traditionally been the model for the emergence of the Greek city-state. But this original and controversial investigation, Francois de Polignac suggests that the Athenian model was probably the exception, not the rule, the development of the polis ancient Greece. Combining archaeological and textual evidence, de Polignac argues that the eighth-century settlements that would become the city-states of classical Greece were defined as much by the boundaries of civilized space as by its urban centers. The city took shape through what de Polignac calls a religious bipolarity, the cults operating both to organize social space and to articulate social relationships being not only at the heart of the inhabited area, but on the edges of the territory. Together with the urban cults, these sanctuaries in the wild identified the polis and its sphere of influence, giving rise to the concept of the state as a territorial unit distinct from its neighbors. Frontier sanctuaries were therefore often the focus of disputes between emerging communities. But other instances, particular Greece's colonizing expeditions, these outer sanctuaries may have facilitated the relations between the indigenous populations and the settlers of the newly founded cities. Featuring extensive revisions from the original French publication and an updated bibliography, this book is essential for anyone interested the history and culture of ancient Greece.