Periclean Athens Research Articles

The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens

Philosophical BooksVolume 33, Issue 4 p. 198-199 The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens E. L. HUSSEY, E. L. HUSSEY ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORDSearch for more papers by this author E. L. HUSSEY, E. L. HUSSEY ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORDSearch for more papers by this author First published: October 1992 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0149.1992.tb00697.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume33, Issue4October 1992Pages 198-199 RelatedInformation

The public realm and the public self: The political theory of Hannah Arendt

From the time she set the intellectual world on fire with her reflections on Eichmann (1963), Hannah Arendt has been seen, essentially, as a literary commentator who had interesting things to say about political and cultural matters. In this critical study, Shiraz Dossa argues that Arendt is a political theorist in the sense in which Aristotle is a theorist, and that the key to her political theory lies in the twin notions of the “public realm” and the “public self”. In this work, the author explains how Arendt’s unconventional and controversial views make sense on the terrain of her political theory. He shows that her judgement on thinkers, actors, and events as diverse as Plato, Marx, Machiavelli, Freud, Conrad, Hobbes, Hitler, the Holocaust, the French Revolution, and European colonialism flow directly from her political theory. Tracing the origins of this theory to Homer and Periclean Athens, Dossa underlines Arendt’s unique contribution to reinventing the idea and the ideal of citizenship, reminding us that the public realm is the locus of friendship, community, identity, and in a certain sense, humanity. Arendt believes that no one who prefets his or her private interest to public affairs in the old sense can claim to be fully human or truly excellent.

Rome: Late Republic and Principate

The University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (nine volumes) makes available to students and teachers a unique selection of primary documents, many in new translations. These readings, prepared for the highly praised Western civilization sequence at the University of Chicago, were chosen by an outstanding group of scholars whose experience teaching that course spans almost four decades. Each volume includes rarely anthologized selections as well as standard, more familiar texts; a bibliography of recommended parallel readings; and introductions providing background for the selections. Beginning with Periclean Athens and concluding with twentieth-century Europe, these source materials enable teachers and students to explore a variety of critical approaches to important events and themes in Western history. Individual volumes provide essential background reading for courses covering specific eras and periods. The complete nine-volume series is ideal for general courses in history and Western civilization sequences.

The Church in the Roman Empire

The University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (nine volumes) makes available to students and teachers a unique selection of primary documents, many in new translations. These readings, prepared for the highly praised Western civilization sequence at the University of Chicago, were chosen by an outstanding group of scholars whose experience teaching that course spans almost four decades. Each volume includes rarely anthologized selections as well as standard, more familiar texts; a bibliography of recommended parallel readings; and introductions providing background for the selections. Beginning with Periclean Athens and concluding with twentieth-century Europe, these source materials enable teachers and students to explore a variety of critical approaches to important events and themes in Western history. Individual volumes provide essential background reading for courses covering specific eras and periods. The complete nine-volume series is ideal for general courses in history and Western civilization sequences.

The Greek Polis

The University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (nine volumes) makes available to students and teachers a unique selection of primary documents, many in new translations. These readings, prepared for the highly praised Western civilization sequence at the University of Chicago, were chosen by an outstanding group of scholars whose experience teaching that course spans almost four decades. Each volume includes rarely anthologized selections as well as standard, more familiar texts; a bibliography of recommended parallel readings; and introductions providing background for the selections. Beginning with Periclean Athens and concluding with twentieth-century Europe, these source materials enable teachers and students to explore a variety of critical approaches to important events and themes in Western history. Individual volumes provide essential background reading for courses covering specific eras and periods. The complete nine-volume series is ideal for general courses in history and Western civilization sequences.

The city as a political community

The contemporary American city as an open polity and an open economy is regarded as a trivial affair incapable of doing much to affect the lives of its inhabitants for good or ill. Judged by the standard of a Periclean Athens, the subordinate city of the modern nation state may seem uninspiring. Yet the subordinate cities of antiquity were far from trivial and they sustained a rich cultural life for centuries. Unlike the cities of antiquity, our cities do not have a rich common cultural life. They are not communities. Often, they are mere money mining camps, lacking in any commitment or solidarity on the part of the governing elite or the public. They are economic sites for combining and recombining atoms. As such, they are self-condemned to powerlessness and emptiness. But the subordinate position of the contemporary city need not render it powerless and empty of meaning. With an adequate, shared common purpose as a humane cooperative, the city could motivate a dedicated elite and a committed citizenry in the shared enterprise of building a common set of values to give the lives of the city's people meaning and warmth in the chill of an existentialistic world.

Love of Glory and the Common Good

How the city, the political community, may ask its citizens to sacrifice their lives for the sake of its preservation has plagued us since the birth of political philosophy. This article examines Thucydides' presentation of Pericles' attempt to solve this problem by reconciling the highest good of the individual and the good of the city by means of the love of glory. I contrast the central themes of Pericles' speeches in Thucydides, especially his renowned funeral oration, with other parts of Thucydides' presentation of Periclean Athens, in particular his famous account of the plague, to demonstrate his doubts about the efficacy of the Periclean solution to the political problem.

Love of Glory and the Common Good

How the city, the political community, may ask its citizens to sacrifice their lives for the sake of its preservation has plagued us since the birth of political philosophy. This article examines Thucydides' presentation of Pericles' attempt to solve this problem by reconciling the highest good of the individual and the good of the city by means of the love of glory. I contrast the central themes of Pericles' speeches in Thucydides, especially his renowned funeral oration, with other parts of Thucydides' presentation of Periclean Athens, in particular his famous account of the plague, to demonstrate his doubts about the efficacy of the Periclean solution to the political problem.

The Gods of the East Frieze of the Parthenon

There has been only one attempt, by Elderkin in 1936, to explain the order of the gods on the east frieze of the Parthenon. His premise, that the juxtapositions of the figures are deliberate, is accepted for this paper. The general division of the Olympians into two groups of eight, headed by Zeus and Athena, breaks down into two chief pairs: Zeus-Hera, Athena-Hephaistos, with two subordinate groups of five figures, in turn further subdivided, usually by pairs. Analysis of dress, gesture, attribute, and seating arrangement, help ascertain the overall iconography of the figures. Each god is shown in a specific cult guise, not necessarily the most important religious cult, but one significant in Periclean Athens. The cults represented on the north half of the frieze are important politically; those of the south half have two different aspects: ancient Attic cults of land, produce, and fertility, and cults associable with Pan-Hellenism. Finally, the reason for including the gods on the frieze is discussed, for there is no tradition in Athens of depicting the twelve Olympians. There are a few vases that show sacrificial processions (some with the honored god present), but the immediate source of inspiration may have been the Persian tribute reliefs in Persepolis.

Autobiography: The Gold of Writing Power

Not only do we mine greatness of talent, but we mine greatness of spirit. We seize upon those moments of aspiration without which no greatness is possible. We seek moments that our students may write about-the greatness of a wonderful moment, a perceptive father, brother, or sister. Each of us, you and I, lives in a hope that we may touch greatness. Greatness perhaps is a word fitly spoken when the heart of the student is ready and the mind is aflame. Before greatness, as the world would recognize it, must come an aspiration, and before an aspiration must come a superb teacher in one's youth. You and I remember the side comment Jesse Stuart's teacher made to him as she passed him in the hall, reached high up, and patted the top of his head, saying, I'd just like to be around long enough to see what is coming out of that head of yours. No one knows yet how greatness is born in the soul of a boy, how it is shaped, how that boy is made aware. But in the absence of science, I would sooner trust the English teachers of our nation to give answers to those still unanswered questions than any other group. As you and I understand, the proportion of great men and women in America is only a small fragment of the greatness possible. In the time of Pericles in Athens, sociologists today tell us, one man in four thousand became great by the standards of later ages. In our country even a productive period such as the Revolution or the flowering of New England did not bring forth great men in n thing like the burst of genius in Periclean Athens. This statement is not to say that Americans are born less gifted than the ancient Greeks. The difference is in the education; the difference is in the incitements to greatness, the incitements to achievement, large and small. And what is our task in this?

Preface

The relationship between intellectuals and the schools constitutes a classical problem, dating, I suppose, from the earliest efforts of the Sophists to reconstruct the curriculum of Periclean Athens. But it is a problem that has changed radically in modern times, as the intellectual community has grown in size,power, and self-consciousness, and as the schools have become increasingly popular professionalized, and bureaucratized. At the outset, one is immediately involved in definitions, since the way the problem is perceived will depend ultimately on how its terms are defined. Shall we, with Seymour Martin Lipset, include as intellectuals "all those who create, distribute, and applyculture," or shall we rather, with Richard Hofstadter, distinguish more precisely between men of intellect, who "examine, ponder, wonder, theorize,imagine," and men of intelligence, who "grasp, manipulate, re-order, and adjust"? The choice will not only determine which men we consider at particular times in history, it will inevitably condition our judgments of these men and of the roles they played. Similarly, shall we define the school in quite specific twentieth-century terms, as a formal institution clearly distinguishable from, say, the church or the museum, or shall we define it more comprehensively to include all the institutions in which continuous, deliberate,systematic instruction takes place? Once again, the choice will be decisive in determining which data bear on the problem and how we treat those data.

Theopompos on Thucydides the Son of Melesias

THE historian was not the only distinguished man of this name in Periclean Athens. In fact, he was probably less well known in his own day than three other men named Thucydides, a poet, a Thessalian who became an honorary citizen of Athens, and the famous opponent of Perikles.1 Only one of these three men continued to be remembered, mainly in connection with his great adversary, Perikles; this was the son of Melesias from the deme Alopeke.2 It appears that was Perikles' opponent from the time of Kimon's death (see below, 4A) until his own ostracism in 443 B.C., which marks the beginning of Perikles' undisputed rule. During this period, Athens gained and lost a land empire, and moved the seat of the Confederacy from Delos to Athens, thus establishing the Athenian Empire. We do not know what part played in the deliberations which preceded these actions but he must have been very active since he is singled out in our literary tradition as the adversary of Perikles. H. T. Wade-Gery has already given us a fine historical and critical monograph on Thucydides the son of Melesias,3 but he refrained from examining carefully the literary sources on which our knowledge of Thucydides' activity is based. It is the purpose of this paper to re-examine these sources and to reconstruct one of them, the account given by Theopompos in the tenth book of his History of Philip. Such an examination is especially justified because neither the historian nor Ephoros (to judge from Diodoros) even mentions the son of Melesias, and most of our knowledge of this man comes from later sources.4

The Spring of Civilization: Periclean Athens ed. by Charles Alexander Robinson, Jr.

Book Review| January 01 1955 The Spring of Civilization: Periclean Athens ed. by Charles Alexander Robinson, Jr. The Spring of Civilization: Periclean Athens. Edited by Robinson, Charles AlexanderJr.New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1954. Pp. 464. $7.50. James N. Truesdale James N. Truesdale Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1955) 54 (1): 144–145. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-54-1-144 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation James N. Truesdale; The Spring of Civilization: Periclean Athens ed. by Charles Alexander Robinson, Jr.. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 January 1955; 54 (1): 144–145. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-54-1-144 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1955 by Duke University Press1955 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Spring of Civilization: Periclean Athens

The Spring of Civilization: Periclean Athens

The Spring of Civilization: Periclean Athens

The Spring of Civilization: Periclean Athens

Excellently Illustrated: The Spring of Civilization: Periclean Athens

Excellently Illustrated: The Spring of Civilization: Periclean Athens

Lost Greek Historians Judged by Their Fragments

The fragments of ancient historians are regarded by many people as a storehouse of unrelated scraps of historical evidence. It is natural that a modern student of history should take this attitude, since he welcomes any new piece of evidence offered to him and is likely to be more interested in the information itself than in the source from which it comes. Indeed, it may happen that an isolated fragment quoted from an obscure lost historian has an almost absolute value for him. For example, according to the account in Plutarch, Diyllus, ‘by no means an insignificant historian’, recorded that the Athenians, on the motion of a certain Anytus, voted a gift of ten talents to Herodotus, presumably as a reward for giving readings from his history. We know next to nothing about Diyllus, except that he wrote twenty-six books dealing with the last quarter of the fourth century b.c., and this isolated remark of his, preserved by Plutarch, tells us little more. But a fragment of this kind has considerable interest for the historian; its value is like the value of an inscription which records the proposal and passing of a law. At the same time, since a single instance does not justify a general conclusion, it does not give enough information on which to base any conclusive opinion about the rewards given to literary men in Periclean Athens. No more does a single inscription make it possible to pass judgement on the legislative activities of any particular period. The historian must collect and compare a number of such inscriptions before he is entitled to form an opinion.

Polis and Idia in Periclean Athens

Polis and Idia in Periclean Athens

<italic>Polis</italic> and <italic>Idia</italic> in Periclean Athens

Polis and Idia in Periclean Athens Get access W. S. Ferguson W. S. Ferguson Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 45, Issue 2, January 1940, Pages 269–278, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/45.2.269 Published: 01 January 1940

When Did the Polis Rise?

It is to-day a known and undisputed fact that the Polis was not only the characteristic and historically important type of Greek State, but that as a religious and political community it was for centuries the foundation and the support of Greek culture. But so far a true ‘history of the Polis’ has not been written. A reason for this may be that the Polis stands as the abstract representative of an enormous number of concrete independent States widely differing in form and development and known to us through traditions widely differing in quality. We must try, and the attempt has already been made, to define the main lines of this historical phenomenon and its evolution, and before all else to obtain a clearer view of the beginning, climax, and end of this evolution in time and manner.To do this it is not sufficient to study only the external historical facts. In like manner we cannot be content merely to observe, for instance, under the Empire of Alexander or in the Hellenistic State-world the political insignificance of the Polis, and hence to conclude its downfall; or in the perfection of political leading, and the splendour of Empire and culture, in Periclean Athens to see the perfection of the Polis.