Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
309
result(s) for
"Classical Athens"
Sort by:
The Parthenon enigma
\"A revolutionary new understanding of the most famous and influential building in the world, a thesis that calls into question our basic understanding of the ancient civilization that we most identify with. For more than two millennia, the Parthenon has been revered as the symbol of Western culture, the epitome of the ancient society from which we derive our highest ideals. It was understood to honor the city-state's patron deity Athena, and its intricately sculpted surface believed to depict a celebration of civic continuity in the birthplace of democracy. But through a close reading of a lost play by Euripides, accidentally discovered on a papyrus wrapping an Egyptian mummy, Joan Connelly began to develop a new theory that has sparked one of the fiercest controversies ever to rock the world of classics. Now, she recounts how our most basic sense of the Parthenon and of the culture that built it may have been crucially mistaken. Re-creating the ancient structure from its natural environment to its pediment, and using a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, she uncovers a monument glorifying human sacrifice set in a world of cult rituals quite unlike anything conventionally conjured by the word \"Athenian.\" \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The ancient Greek roots of human rights
Although the era of the Enlightenment witnessed the rise of philosophical debates around benevolent social practice, the origins of European humane discourse date further back, to Classical Athens. The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights analyzes the parallel confluences of cultural factors facing ancient Greeks and eighteenth-century Europeans that facilitated the creation and transmission of humane values across history. Rachel Hall Sternberg argues that precursors to the concept of human rights exist in the ancient articulation of emotion, though the ancient Greeks, much like eighteenth-century European societies, often failed to live up to those values.Merging the history of ideas with cultural history, Sternberg examines literary themes upholding empathy and human dignity from Thucydides’s and Xenophon’s histories to Voltaire’s Candide, and from Greek tragic drama to the eighteenth-century novel. She describes shared impacts of the trauma of war, the appeal to reason, and the public acceptance of emotion that encouraged the birth and rebirth of humane values.
eBook
The imagery of the Athenian symposium
\"This book offers a new interpretation of sympotic scenes in sixth- and fifth-century BC Athenian vase painting. Through these images, the book explores what it meant to be a Greek community and how Athenians thought about past and present\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Polis and Personification in Classical Athenian Art
Ancient Greek artists pioneered in the allegorical use of personifications of political ideas, events, places, institutions, and peoples in visual arts. This book surveys and interprets these personifications within the intellectual and political climate of the golden age of Athens.
eBook
Western ways : foreign schools in Rome and Athens
Western Ways is the first comparative study of its kind of foreign schools of archaeology in Rome and Athens. Through the foreign schools in the two cities, the book discusses the organisation of the study of classical archaeology, and offers new perspectives on research funding, national prestige and international collaboration in the period during which archaeology became a scientific area of study. It is a study in the failure of ideals, but also of success. The book focuses on the years spanning the Second World War, and shows how the foreign schools have interwoven prestige with scholarship, and how this dynamic was placed under pressure during the war years and in the immediate post-war period, in effect preserving a status quo: internationalisation was perceived as a means to safeguard the future of classical studies. The \"classical\", this book suggests, is not national, but the study of it has been. The potential specialist readership spans the fields of classical archaeology, classical studies, classical reception, the history of ideas, art history, as well as nineteenth and twentieth century European history. The book gives an analytical account of foreign schools in Rome and Athens in the interplay between national and international perspectives.
Book
Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens
This book asks an important question often ignored by ancient historians and political scientists alike: Why did Athenian democracy work as well and for as long as it did? Josiah Ober seeks the answer by analyzing the sociology of Athenian politics and the nature of communication between elite and nonelite citizens. After a preliminary survey of the development of the Athenian \"constitution,\" he focuses on the role of political and legal rhetoric. As jurymen and Assemblymen, the citizen masses of Athens retained important powers, and elite Athenian politicians and litigants needed to address these large bodies of ordinary citizens in terms understandable and acceptable to the audience. This book probes the social strategies behind the rhetorical tactics employed by elite speakers. A close reading of the speeches exposes both egalitarian and elitist elements in Athenian popular ideology. Ober demonstrates that the vocabulary of public speech constituted a democratic discourse that allowed the Athenians to resolve contradictions between the ideal of political equality and the reality of social inequality. His radical reevaluation of leadership and political power in classical Athens restores key elements of the social and ideological context of the first western democracy.
eBook
Student commentary on Pausanias Book 1
\"Patrick Paul Hogan's A Student Commentary on Pausanias Book 1 introduces the first book of Pausanias' 'Description of Greece' to students of Classical Greek. Pausanias' second century CE work is the only surviving ancient description of the monuments and artwork of mainland Greece. Book 1 of the 'Description' covers Athens, its demes, and Megara--that is, Attica, the heart of the ancient Greek world. It offers not only a walking description of buildings, statues, and artwork by an ancient traveler but also insight into the mindset of an educated Greek of the Roman imperial age: his reaction to Roman domination and Classical Greek history and culture, his deeply felt religious beliefs, and his ideas regarding Hellenism and Hellenic identity. This textbook, the first on Pausanias aimed at students in almost a century, brings Pausanias back into the classroom for a new generation of readers. It is based on the Greek text edited by M.H. Rocha-Pereira and includes philological and historical commentary by Hogan. This volume elucidates difficult syntax and helps the reader with the immense number of names and places Pausanias mentions. It is suitable for students of Classical Greek at the graduate and undergraduate levels, whether Classical philologists or Classical archaeologists and art historians. Professors of archaeology will find this textbook an excellent starting point for any course on Pausanias and easily supplemented by their own knowledge of material remains and modern finds\" -- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Athenian Economy and Society
In this ground-breaking analysis of the world's first private banks, Edward Cohen convincingly demonstrates the existence and functioning of a market economy in ancient Athens while revising our understanding of the society itself. Challenging the \"primitivistic\" view, in which bankers are merely pawnbrokers and money-changers, Cohen reveals that fourth-century Athenian bankers pursued sophisticated transactions. These dealings--although technologically far removed from modern procedures--were in financial essence identical with the lending and deposit-taking that separate true \"banks\" from other businesses. He further explores how the Athenian banks facilitated tax and creditor avoidance among the wealthy, and how women and slaves played important roles in these family businesses--thereby gaining legal rights entirely unexpected in a society supposedly dominated by an elite of male citizens.
Special emphasis is placed on the reflection of Athenian cognitive patterns in financial practices. Cohen shows how transactions were affected by the complementary opposites embedded in the very structure of Athenian language and thought. In turn, his analysis offers great insight into daily Athenian reality and cultural organization.
eBook
Athens on Trial
The Classical Athenians were the first to articulate and implement the notion that ordinary citizens of no particular affluence or education could make responsible political decisions. For this reason, reactions to Athenian democracy have long provided a prime Rorschach test for political thought. Whether praising Athens's government as the legitimizing ancestor of modern democracies or condemning it as mob rule, commentators throughout history have revealed much about their own notions of politics and society. In this book, Jennifer Roberts charts responses to Athenian democracy from Athens itself through the twentieth century, exploring a debate that touches upon historiography, ethics, political science, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, gender studies, and educational theory.
eBook