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This chapter describes the range of philosophers discussed in this book, going from Plotinus and his school in Rome to the schools of Iamblichus in Syria (Apamea) and of his successors at Athens and Alexandria. The relations between these schools and the situation of the various philosophers in time, place, and social context are briefly sketched.

This chapter turns to the participatory democracy of ancient Athens to summon alternative possibilities for realizing democratic accountability in contemporary life. For the Athenians, democratic accountability was valuable not only for negative, protective reasons relating to the corruptibility of citizens and the tendency of officials to subvert the public good. It also played a vital role in generating political community and, thereby, in the constitution of the public good. Virtually every male citizen served in public office at some time. And everyone who served in public office faced public accountability proceedings before, during, and after their term in office. Gaps existed between rulers and the ruled such that public power could be abused, but those gaps were mobilized to spread both accountability and power among citizens. Entering into public view and being held publicly accountable were part of the process through which citizens were gathered together and related to one another as political equals in what Hannah Arendt called a “common world.” Such an understanding of mutual accountability as constitutive of community offers an instructive contrast to shallower treatments of accountability within recent debates.

This chapter discusses the role that choral performance and lyric poetry held in fifth‐century Athenian life. It begins by examining the evidence for choral performance in Athens, and goes on to discuss how lyric poetry was known and circulated. Since many ‘high’ forms of poetry were known by elite means, this leads to a discussion of elite poetic material in democratic society, looking at the institution of the symposium and deriving evidence from oratory and comedy, as well as evidence from material culture. The chapter argues that Athenian attitudes to elite poetry were aspirational and that large sections of the tragic audience would have responded to lyric references. The chapter concludes with a discussion of tragedy's relationship to democracy and to Athenian civic ideology.

This chapter explores how Greek tragedy evokes epinician poetry. The chapter begins with a discussion of epinician as a genre, drawing on both Pindar and Bacchylides. In particular, it explores how epinician was regarded in fifth‐century Athens: a society whose democratic values are frequently believed to be at odds with the aristocratic and individualistic values of epinician. The second part of the chapter explores how tragedy makes use of epinician motifs, using two case‐studies: Euripides' Heracles, and Electra. It is argued that in both these plays the clustering of epinician language is used to explore problematic values associated with epinician poetry: in particular, questions about what constitutes aretē (excellence), and the relationship between individual and community.

This chapter complicates the idea of any easy balance sheet of appropriation in which misappropriation always falls on the side of empire and colonialism and appropriation on the side of the anti‐ and postcolonial. The argument examines the different ways in which C. L. R. James and Eric Williams attempted to harness Athens as an empowering model for Trinidadian national identity. Although James and Williams approached Athens in different ways, they shared the determination to take back Classics from the colonial archive via which it had been transmitted. In the case of James, the discussion concentrates on his repeated analogies between the culture and society of Trinidad and the culture and society of classical Athens. In the case of Williams, the discussion focuses on his ability to make political capital out of his classical education in his early political career, focusing on his lectures and speeches for the PEM and PNM in the 1950s and 1960s.

Chapter four introduces the analysis of Chariton's poetics with an reconsideration of some remarkable characteristics singled out for one reason or another before: Chariton's general penchant for authorial intrusions – indicating a concern with self‐definition; his allusion to Aristotle's Poetics at the beginning of the last book (8. 1. 4) – inaugurating the invention of the happy ending and a new poetics of tragicomedy; the guidance of his readers through theatrical devices – most useful in a new form of literature; a large number of quotations from Homer – implying an intention to become a new Homer in prose; the setting of the story in Miletus and the alleged origin of Callirhoe from Sybaris (e. g. 1. 12. 8) – potential allusions to preceding low‐life strains of prose fiction, the Milesiaca and the Sybaritica; finally, the negative image of Athens – which sets the new literary form apart from the old classical models, especially Thucydides who provided the historical frame in which the story is set.

This chapter focuses on two dimensions of Herodotus' Aeginetan logoi: primarily, in terms of what they attempt to convey about Aeginetan identity prior to and during the Persian Wars; secondarily, in terms of the meta-narrative they construct regarding themes relevant to the subsequent history of Aegina: how her cultural, political, and economic identity contributed to the events which befell her later, especially at the hands of Athens. Herodotus' logoi explore the complexity of Aegina's position, literal and metaphorical, as a Dorian polis with a long-established maritime economy, whose geographical position in the centre of the Saronic Gulf symbolizes the complexities of her situation within the political realities of the later fifth century and the cultural categories and political alliances that came to be dominant in framing them. Here the focus is Aegina's relationship to Sparta and the Peloponnese.

This chapter explains some key features of how the thinkers in question viewed the relation between reason and revelation, and between God and human beings. The respect in which Saadia, Bahya, and Maimonides understood reason and religion to have a common object is centrally important. They understood Judaism to involve commands to cultivate the intellect and to strive for perfection through a mutually reinforcing spiral of intellectual and ethical activity. The main outline of the relation between understanding and ethical activity is described. That issue is placed in the overall context of the relation between ‘Athens’ (rational philosophy) and ‘Jerusalem’ (revelation and faith).

This chapter focuses on chronography, that is, the scholarly field which concerns the organization and articulation of time. It examines the extant fragments of the ancient chronographic tradition, which was initially dominated by competitive culture of Hellenistic scholarship, and by figures such as Eratosthenes of Cyrene and Apollodorus of Athens. Methodological problems, such as that of generic classification, are addressed throughout. The chapter deals first with works concerning Greek city-calendars, especially the festival calendars, before moving on to those which focus on the articulation and expression of linear, historical time. Here are treated issues of synchronism; the establishment of important dates, such as that of the fall of Troy and the acme of Homer; the correlation of fixed chronological markers with continuous systems, such as lists of eponymous magistrates, kings, or Olympic victors; the development of universal chronologies; and the notion of literary time-frames.

This chapter argues that Luke narrates the Christian mission to the Gentiles in Acts as an apocalypse (e.g., Luke 2:32). At its core, the Christian mission claims to be a revelation of God. Inasmuch as this revelation is carried in the formation of a people (“church”)—rather than merely being a list of academic theses—it entails a necessary challenge to constitutive patterns of pagan life. Embracing the theological vision of the Christian gospel simultaneously creates a new cultural reality. That this process of revelation and formation inherently destabilizes essential assumptions and practices of Mediterranean culture emerges paradigmatically in the scenes in Lystra, Philippi, Athens, and Ephesus (Acts 14, 16, 17, and 19, respectively). These passages, read narratively and in connection to their Graeco-Roman contexts, thus constitute the exegetical lens through which the problem of cultural destabilization is examined.

This chapter examines whether Greek civilization was based on slavery. The silence of classicists on the subject is not surprising. The discussion here is limited to Anglo-American scholarship, in an attempt to achieve a manageable focus, though a great deal of the last half-century's work on ancient Greek slavery has been written in French and German. Slavery may cover very different types of unfreedom, such as the chattel slave system of Athens and the helotage that was the predominant form of servitude practised by Sparta. Whether slaves, especially chattel slaves, are to be seen principally as living property or as socially dead outsiders evokes further levels of definition, which are also contested.

For the twentieth century, the political history of Athens was essentially ideological, involving great issues of freedom and tyranny, while that of the Roman Republic was merely a struggle for power, with no significant ideological content. But why should that be? The Romans were perfectly familiar with the concepts and terminology of Greek political philosophy and used them to describe their own politics, as Cicero explains in writing in 56 bc. Not surprisingly. Greek authors who dealt with Roman politics used the concepts of democracy and oligarchy, the rule of the many or the rule of the best, without any sense that it was an inappropriate idiom.

This chapter discusses one of the best-known instances of classical commemoration: the public funeral and collective burial and commemoration of the Athenian war dead. Its particular aim is to explore the various contexts in which Athenian practice might be understood. How do these monuments fit into the wider picture of Athenian burial and commemoration, in terms of both form and physical location? How do they relate to the political system and ideology of the city that created them? And how might these contexts shape the way in which the monuments were used and understood by contemporary and later viewers?