VI. Arcadia: Ethnicity and Politics in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BCE [*] Maria Pretzler The emergence of Arcadian identity, and its culmination in the foundation of an Arcadian state in 370 BCE, was a crucial factor in the disintegration of the Peloponnesian League. With very few exceptions Arcadia becomes visible in the ancient literary sources only in the late archaic… Read more
VII. Messenian Ethnicity and the Free Messenians [*] Nino Luraghi The birth of an independent polity in Messenia, in what used to be the western part of the Spartan state, represents the most conspicuous change that the ethnic revival of the early fourth century brought to the political map of the Peloponnese. Although both its extension and its internal structure varied in the… Read more
VIII. Ethnicity and Democracy in the Peloponnese, 401–362 BCE Eric Robinson In 370 BCE civil strife broke out in Tegea between a conservative party favoring Tegea’s traditional laws (patrious nomous) and a popular, nationalistic party in favor of all Arcadians coming together en tô koinô to make common decisions. The populists won, but only after they armed the dêmos and gained the aid of Mantineans who… Read more
IX. The Archaeology of Ethnê and Ethnicity in the Fourth-Century Peloponnese Catherine Morgan It is nowadays hardly controversial to view poleis and ethnê not as distinct forms of state, but as tiers of identity with which communities identified with varying enthusiasm and motivation at different times. [*] States were palimpsests of social action, and behaviour enacted over different social and/or physical… Read more
X. Subjection, Synoecism and Religious Life Robert Parker The Eleans have bought Epeion for thirty talents (Xenophon Hellenica 3.2.30); the Eleans refuse to surrender the Marganeis and Skillountians and Triphylians, claiming that “these cities are ours” (6.5.2); the Eleans capture Lasion, which “of old had belonged to them, but at present was enrolled in (συντελεĩν εἰς) the Arkadikon” (7.4.12). The Spartans force the Mantineans to “dioecize… Read more
XI. The Development of Greek Ethnê and their Ethnicity: An Anthropological Perspective Christoph Ulf Standard definitions of koinon/league have been, and often still are, based on the assumption of the existence of units that defined themselves in ethnic terms (ethnê), which extend far back in time. This tendency is connected with the conviction that all human communities are “ethnic” in that they are founded on biological… Read more
Contributors Klaus Freitag is Professor of Ancient History at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule in Aachen. The history of the Gulf of Corinth is one of his main areas of specialization, to which he devoted the book Der Golf von Korinth. Historisch-topographische Untersuchungen von der Archaik bis in das 1. Jh. v. Chr. (Munich 2000). Peter Funke is Professor of Ancient History at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Munster. He has… Read more
Preface [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version of this book.] On the cover of this book is an image of… Read more
1. Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought [1] I. The Speech of the Muses At the start of the Theogony, Hesiod describes his poetic initiation. As he was tending his lambs under Mt. Helicon, the Muses “taught him beautiful singing” (καλὴν ἐδίδαξαν ἀοιδήν, Theogony 22), when to him for the first time they made this pronouncement: ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ’… Read more
Chapter 1. Experimenting in the Field of Polytheisms [*] The discovery that gods make good objects of research was not made by contemporary anthropology. The very first anthropologists never failed to recommend making an inventory of the various kinds of powers at large in a village or scattered the length and breadth of a kingdom. However, by the end of the nineteenth… Read more
