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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 introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to provide a thick description of Athenian status, ultimately broaching larger questions about the relationship between Athenian citizenship and civic ideology. “Civic ideology” here refers to the conception that all Athenian citizens—and only Athenian citizens—were autochthonous (that is, descended from ancestors “born from the earth” of Attica) and engaged in the political and military life of the city. This survey of statuses will demonstrate, among other things, that Athenian democracy was both more closed and more open than civic ideology might lead us to think: on the one hand, only some citizen males exercised full citizen rights; on the other, even noncitizens and naturalized citizens were, to varying degrees, partial shareholders in the Athenian polis.

One of the substantial characteristics of “citizenship” was its restriction to certain groups of inhabitants. Whatever the permutations of governance envisaged by Greek constitutions, none of them proposed a wholesale enfranchisement. Governance was usually conducted without reference to groups such as the poor, the low-born, and resident aliens (metics), but almost always without reference to slaves or to women. Recent work on Greek discourses of participation in the city has moved away from a legalistic or institutional definition of “citizenship” and relies increasingly on the notion of “civic ideology,” which involves a “holistic” view of the city as a set of interrelated practices in the fields of politics, law, economics, religion, art, and domestic life.

The Panathenaic festival held in honor of Athena in her eponymous city is usually presented synchronically with little discussion of how it developed over the many centuries of its existence (566 bc to 4th century ad). This paper, with a view to Attic vase-painting and the Parthenon frieze, examines the first century of this major festival diachronically and suggests the possibility that certain elements, that seem traditional like the apobates race and the presentation of a peplos, are in fact later additions prompted by the changing political dynamic of Athens. The festival was part of a civic ideology, in which performance and communication were fundamental concepts

This chapter examines the captioning of honorific statues in the Hellenistic period, with emphasis on their metaphorical ‘grammar’ in terms of the accusative case. In particular, it analyses the politics underlying inscriptions on the bases of honorific monuments. It argues that captioning prevents the honorific statue from being an artefact of elitist eminence, and that the statue is about a transaction, where the community doing the honouring is primary. It also claims that the ‘subject’ of the honorific monument is the relationship, rather than the person represented. Finally, the chapter explains how the honorific monument affirms civic ideology and its power by re-establishing the symbolical balance involved in the euergetical exchange and displaying the primacy of the community.

This book explores the power of civic ideology to control powerful outsiders and insiders — as well as the limits of this power — by focusing on honorific portraits of the Hellenistic period. It considers the workings of images, representations, and memory, since honorific statues, as public art, tell us a lot about these themes, along with processes of competition and assertion on the ground and the role of families in these processes. Drawing on epigraphical sources combined with archaeology and art history, the book examines the honorific portrait within the context of social relations studied under the modern term ‘euergetism’. More specifically, it shows how the phenomenon of portraits in ancient art relates to the historical and anthropological context of city-states honouring worthy individuals through erecting statues, as well as the development of families imitating this practice. A number of test cases are discussed and approached from a variety of angles — Athens, Priene, the Oropian Amphiaraion, and the Epidaurian Asklepieion.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of ‘private’ or ‘family’ statues in public space in the Hellenistic period, along with the problems it poses to any simple interpretation of honorific statues in public space as the story of hegemonical civic ideology. Focusing on elite families as one of the major ‘competitive actors’ in the race for space and attention, the chapter considers the shape of private monuments, and why and where people set up such statues. Finally, it explores wider historical issues about the nature of the honorific monument in relation to the political and cultural histories of the post-Classical polis.

Traditionally, historians regard the demise of the Roman Republic as the end of politics. If politics is regarded as decision making that affects society as a whole, something certainly changed with the advent of single rule. Yet the traditional political institutions of senate and city council continued to exist for a remarkably long period of sixth centuries afterwards. It is argued that their role became social rather than political and that they became self-referential, offering the elite a platform to define and negotiate its own position and enact and negotiate major tensions and ambiguities of elite life. The behaviour of their members is best analysed under the heading of political culture, here defined as ‘a style of doing politics’. Such an approach focuses on the social meaning of the form of the behaviour rather than on the content of the decisions. The approach is underpinned by the theory of bounded rationality, which assumes that participants are bound by language and conventions. It is argued that a case study approach, focusing on specific texts or clusters of texts, offers the best way to proceed. It presents seven cases that will be studied in successive chapters, each representing a major tension or ambiguity inherent in Roman political culture.