scholarly journals Towards a Female Topography of the Ancient Greek City: Case Studies from Late Archaic and Early Classical Athens (c.520-400 BCE)

2012 ◽  
pp. 86-106
Author(s):  
Lisa C. Nevett
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Late Archaic ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek City

CONSTRUCTING THE ‘URBAN PROFILE’ OF AN ANCIENT GREEK CITY: EVIDENCE FROM THE OLYNTHOS PROJECT

2020 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 329-378
Author(s):  
Lisa C. Nevett ◽  
E. Bettina Tsigarida ◽  
Zosia H. Archibald ◽  
David L. Stone ◽  
Bradley A. Ault ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Infrastructure ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek City ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Relevant Evidence ◽  
Classical Studies ◽  
Legacy Data ◽  
Greek World

This article argues that a holistic approach to documenting and understanding the physical evidence for individual cities would enhance our ability to address major questions about urbanisation, urbanism, cultural identities and economic processes. At the same time we suggest that providing more comprehensive data-sets concerning Greek cities would represent an important contribution to cross-cultural studies of urban development and urbanism, which have often overlooked relevant evidence from Classical Greece. As an example of the approach we are advocating, we offer detailed discussion of data from the Archaic and Classical city of Olynthos, in the Halkidiki. Six seasons of fieldwork here by the Olynthos Project, together with legacy data from earlier projects by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and by the Greek Archaeological Service, combine to make this one of the best-documented urban centres surviving from the Greek world. We suggest that the material from the site offers the potential to build up a detailed ‘urban profile’, consisting of an overview of the early development of the community as well as an in-depth picture of the organisation of the Classical settlement. Some aspects of the urban infrastructure can also be quantified, allowing a new assessment of (for example) its demography. This article offers a sample of the kinds of data available and the sorts of questions that can be addressed in constructing such a profile, based on a brief summary of the interim results of fieldwork and data analysis carried out by the Olynthos Project, with a focus on research undertaken during the 2017, 2018 and 2019 seasons.

Introduction: Searching for Gold in an Age of Iron

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Meredith E. Safran
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Patrimony ◽  
Historical Societies

This volume introduction analyzes a pervasive fantasy in American popular media: the desire to escape an “iron age” deemed materially and morally degraded in comparison with an idealized lost world that people hope somehow to recover. This idealized “golden age” is viewed with the painful longing of nostalgia and the sorrow of belatedness from the degraded “iron age” of the viewer’s present time, often accompanied by inquiry into how and why golden conditions no longer obtain. Self-proclaimed heirs to classical antiquity’s cultural patrimony adopted this myth with alacrity, and its deployment can be traced continuously throughout the classical tradition, including in popular media not conventionally associated with classicism. The introduction reviews key strands of golden-age discourse in ancient Greek and Roman texts, including views on human-divine relations, gender relations, and technological innovations; and modern receptions of historical societies as golden ages to be emulated, especially Periclean Athens, Thermopylae-era Sparta, and Augustan Rome. Case studies include the Vergilian concept of “Arcadia” as deployed in the sci-fi television series The 100 and “golden age thinking” as a psychological malady in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Architectural Expression of Public and Private Water Supply at Morgantina, Corinth, Athens, and Delos

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora P. Crouch
Keyword(s):  
Water Supply ◽  
Water System ◽  
Equal Weight ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Greek City ◽  
Urban Amenity ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Local Geology ◽  
The Individual

Water in ancient Greek cities can be considered under several rubrics— aesthetic enrichment of urban spaces, ornamentation of enclosed precincts, nuisance or danger in the form of flood or excessive storm runoff, domestic amenity, public ritual and spectacle, to name a few. This chapter focuses on public fountains, which were both amenity and necessity, contrasting them with the more humble domestic arrangements of the same cities. The appearance, function, and location of fountains cannot be understood as merely visual matters, even though the form and ornamentation of fountains made significant architectural and aesthetic contributions to the cityscape. Rather, understanding the local geology and climate and the principles of hydraulic engineering makes possible a new and clearer understanding of this architectural type. The technological and geological basis of water supply is of equal weight in urban development with the formal presentation of water as an urban amenity. Water management in ancient Greek cities expressed in its physical forms both the simplicity and the sophistication of their hydraulic technology. The physical arrangements were expressed in the same vocabulary of the Greek orders and decorative details that were used for other buildings and fittings, and in the same range of local and imported materials. Placement of the water system elements not only facilitated their use but also indicated the high value placed on water and on its use. The dangers of too much water or not enough were not only solved by Greek technological tradition but also expressed in the physical forms given to the individual parts and to the water system as a whole. Each of the water elements I have studied is simple, fulfilling its function economically, yet each is sophisticated enough that modern day practice is just beginning to catch up with these crafty ancients. For instance, having both the flowing water of fountains and wells, and the stored rainwater of cisterns, meant that the water supply of a Greek city was diversified for greater safety in time of war or shortage, and for ecological soundness. In the late twentieth century we are just beginning to understand the utility of redundancy.

Greek Settlements and Karst Phenomena: Corinth and Syracuse

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora P. Crouch
Keyword(s):  
Water System ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Karst Water ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek City ◽  
The Road ◽  
Aegean Islands ◽  
Karst Waters ◽  
The Relationship

To get a sense of the relationship between karst geology and Greek settlement, we will look at examples from the Greek mainland, the islands of the Aegean, and Sicily. There is no attempt here to be comprehensive, as the necessary field work has not been done to make that possible, but rather these examples are selected to suggest the way that karst water potential played an important role in site selection and development. The major examples selected are Athens and Corinth for mainland Greece, Rhodes for the Aegean Islands, Assos and Priene for Ionia, and Syracuse and Akragas for Sicily. Other places will be cited briefly if the details from those sites are particularly illuminating. Karst phenomena, as we have seen, are found throughout the Greek world. Since Athens is perhaps the best documented Greek city, and has in addition a phenomenal karst system as its monumental focus, it receives here a section of its own, Chapter 18, The Well-Watered Acropolis. In Chapter 11, Planning Water Management, we discuss Corinth’s water system in comparison with that of her daughter city Syracuse. Here, however, we will consider the aspects of water at Corinth that derive from the karst geology of the area. This city is an excellent example of the adaptation of urban requirements to karst terrane, the siting of an ancient Greek city to take advantage of this natural resource. Ancient Corinth was built on gradually sloping terraces below the isolated protuberance of Acrocorinth, which acts as a reservoir, with the flow of waters through it resulting in springs (Fig. 8.1). That karst waters are to be found in perched nappes even at high altitudes accounts for the spring of Upper Peirene not far below the summit of Acrocorinth, as well as the two fountains half-way down the road from its citadel, and the fountain called Hadji Mustapha, at the immediate foot of the citadel (as reported by the late seventeenth century traveler, E. Celebi, cited in Mackay, 1967, 193–95.) The aquifers also supply the aqueduct (probably ancient) from Penteskouphia southwest of Acrocorinth.

Topography of Athens

Classics ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey M. Hurwit ◽  
Ioannis Mitsios
Keyword(s):  
Coastal Plain ◽  
Aegean Sea ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek City ◽  
Urban Core ◽  
Ancient City ◽  
History Of ◽  
City States ◽  
City State ◽  
The City

The ancient city-state (or polis) of Athens was contiguous with the region known as Attica, a large, triangular peninsula extending southeastward from the Greek mainland into the Aegean Sea. In the western angle of Attica, on a coastal plain surrounded by four mountains (Hymettos, Pentelikon, Parnes, and Aigaleos), lay the city itself. Although the modern city has thickly spread up the slopes of the mountains as well as to the sea, the study of Athenian topography concentrates on the monuments, buildings, and spaces of the ancient urban core, an area roughly 3 square kilometers surrounding the Acropolis and defended in the Classical period by a wall some 6.5 kilometers in length. Athens is the ancient Greek city that we know best, and it is unquestionably the Greek city whose art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and political history have had the greatest impact on the Western tradition and imagination. As a result, “Athenian” is sometimes considered synonymous with “Greek.” It is not. In many respects, Athens was exceptional among Greek city-states, not typical: it was a very different place from, say, Thebes or Sparta. Still, the study of Athens, its monuments, and its culture needs no defense, and the charge of “Athenocentrism” is a hollow indictment when one stands before the Parthenon or holds a copy of Sophocles’ Antigone. This article will refer to the following periods in the history of Athens and Greece (the dates are conventional): late Bronze, or Mycenaean, Age (1550–1100 bce); Dark Age (1100–760 bce); Archaic (760–480 bce); Classical (480–323 bce); Hellenistic (323 –31 bce); and Roman (31 BCE–c. 475 ce).

Civic Institutions

2009 ◽  
pp. 196-210
Author(s):  
Sara Forsdyke
Keyword(s):  
Parallel Evolution ◽  
Formal Institutions ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek City ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
The Rich ◽  
City State ◽  
The City ◽  
Civic Institutions

This article looks at the parallel evolution of civic institutions, all of which culminated in the polis, the ‘city-state’, as the backdrop to the rich cultural legacy of the fifth and fourth centuries. Historians have demonstrated that the formal institutions of the Greek city-state are best understood as emerging from, but still very much embedded within, a much broader range of collective practices and discourses. Nevertheless, it is the dynamic interplay between the institutional structures of the state and these broader practices and discourses that has been the focus of much of the most fruitful scholarship on the ancient Greek city-state over the past thirty years. The discussion then turns to some of the most interesting areas of investigation in current scholarship on the interaction between formal institutions and broader cultural activities and norms in the Greek city-state.

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