Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece

Description

From the time of the Roman Empire onwards, fifth- and fourth-century Greece have been held to be the period and place in which civilization as the West knows it developed. Classical scholars have sought to justify these claims in detail by describing developments in fields such as democratic politics, art, rationality, historiography, literature, philosophy, medicine and music, in which classical Greece has been held to have made a revolutionary contribution. In this volume a distinguished cast of contributors offers a fresh consideration of these claims, asking both whether they are well based and what is at stake for their proposers and for us in making them. They look both at modern scholarly argument and its basis and at the claims made by the scholars of the Second Sophistic. The volume will be of interest not only to classical scholars but to all who are interested in the history of scholarship.

Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King s College. He has published widely on all aspects of Greek literature and on ancient culture. His books include Reading Greek Tragedy (1986), The Poet s Voice (1989), Foucault s Virginity (1992), Who Needs Greek? (2002), Love, Sex and Tragedy (2004) and The Temple of Jerusalem (2004). He is in demand as a lecturer across Europe and the USA and has appeared regularly on television and radio. Robin Osborne is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King s College. His numerous publications include Greece in the Making (1996), Archaic and Classical Greek Art (1998), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (1999, edited with Simon Goldhill) and Greek Historical Inscriptions from the End of the Peloponnesian War to the Death of Alexander (2003, edited with P. J. Rhodes).

Review of the hardback: 'Rethinking Revolutions is a wide-ranging and stimulating collection of papers that do much to cause us not only to look at frequently-touted aspects of antiquity with fresh eyes, but to re-examine how the narratives of the past have been constructed by later ages, including our own. ... Readers of this book will have their critical faculties sharpened and become privy to a number of new ways of thinking about ancient Greek culture and about what we and other have made of it. Talk of Greek revolution(s) may never be the same again.' POLIS: The Journal of the Society for Greek Political Thought Review of the hardback: 'The volume provides some interesting insights on the history of classical scholarship and serves as a useful reminder of the extent to which contemporary issues and the history of interpretation shape our understanding of the past.' Classics Ireland