A Tale of Two Kings: Competing Aspects of Power in Aeschylus' Persians

Ramus ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Luxury Goods ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Western View

The frequent assumption that they [the Persians] were as greatly concerned on these levels [historically, culturally, strategically] with Greece [as they were with the east] is a misconception which stems from our own western view of the world and from the unfortunate fact that Greece has given us our main literary sources of information on the Achaemenids. It was the Greeks who were fascinated by Persia, by Persian mores, and, yes, by Persian court art and luxury goods—not the reverse. If only the Persians had spawned the likes of Aeschylus and Herodotus, our perceptions of their preoccupations would be quite different.Athenians were indeed fascinated by Persia as their art and literature attest. The fascination was both cultural and political, but not without tensions. Part of that fascination manifested itself in the allure of Persian kings and what they represented. The kings ruled over a vast empire, larger than any the Mediterranean world had yet seen. They sought in their iconography and building programmes to exert a particular identity for themselves and the Achaemenid dynasty. Although the Athenians were not imperialists of the type we see in Persia, Rome or the figure of Alexander, they did build for themselves a small, Hellenic empire (archē) and they adopted a number of Persian mechanisms of power and some aspects of Achaemenid iconography for representing their power. Aeschylus' Persians, produced in 472 BCE, helps us understand the Athenians' developing archē, specifically how the representations of the two Persian Kings in the play helped the Athenians differentiate and define their power vis-à-vis the Great Persian Menace and, more importantly, the rest of the Greeks. By understanding better the engagement by the Athenians with Persian culture, we can better understand how the Athenians conceptualised their own power and position in the Aegean in the early 5th century BCE.

Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case

1971 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 270-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. William Skinner
Keyword(s):  
Whole Body ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mediterranean

Our repertoire of concepts and theories concerning peasantries has been built up through contributions from scholars working in many parts of the world. Latin Americanists and India-wallahs, in particular, have played a major role in the development of models, but we have also heard from specialists in Indonesia, Japan, Europe, the Mediterranean world, and even Africa. But where is China in all this ? Why are students of the world's largest peasantry silent? In part, it is because we are so few and too preoccupied with our own peasants to have time for anybody else's. More to the point, however, the whole body of inherited anthropological wisdom concerning peasantries seems somehow alien and irrelevant to students of Chinese society.

Wandering philosophers in Classical Greece

2000 ◽  
Vol 120 ◽  
pp. 86-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Montiglio
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mediterranean

The wandering philosopher is best known to us as a Romantic ideal that projects one's longing for physical and mental withdrawal. Rousseau's ‘promeneur solitaire’ does not cover great distances to bring a message to the world. His wanderings, most often in the immediate surroundings, rather convey spiritual alienation. But the ‘promeneur solitaire’ is not the only kind of wandering philosopher known in Western culture. Itinerant philosophers existed already in antiquity. During the Roman empire, many sages wandered all over the Mediterranean world. They went about for the sake of intellectual and spiritual enrichment, but essentially to spread their teaching and to intervene in local quarrels as religious consultants. Wandering connoted their ambiguous status in society—both in and out—and thereby enhanced their charisma and endowed them with an aura of superior power.

Heracles and the Mastery of Geographical Space

2021 ◽  
pp. 408-417
Author(s):  
Antonio Ignacio Molina Marín
Keyword(s):  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Geographical Space

The myth of Heracles was modified through the ages and rewritten in accordance with the needs of each period. Given that Heracles was a liminal hero, every time the limits of the world were extended, the spaces Heracles was believed to have reached changed too. Heracles is not satisfied with merely knowing and observing the inhabited world, with controlling it through knowledge; rather, he is a transformer and an alterer of spaces. More than an explorer of the world’s geography, he is a creator of it, and a force of nature in this regard. He is a symbol of Hellenism but also a unifier of Greeks with other peoples, and indeed a unifier of the Mediterranean world in particular.

The Structure of Cities in Southeast Asia, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries

1980 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Reid
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The World ◽  
Principal Source ◽  
International Trading ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The One ◽  
Trading Routes ◽  
Vital Factor

Maritime Southeast Asia is one of those parts of the world destined by geography to be an international marketplace. Not only is it the largest of the world's archipelagos, penetrated throughout by sea and river, it also lies athwart one of the major international trading routes, between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean on the one hand and China and Japan on the other. These factors have always given to maritime Southeast Asia a role akin to the Mediterranean world, in which sea-borne trade was the vital factor in urban growth and in political power. In addition, however, Southeast Asia was the principal source of the items in greatest demand in the world's markets in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and camphor.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak ◽  
Carolina López-Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Third Party ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The World ◽  
Mediterranean History ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Political Agents

In this introductory chapter the editors speak to the relevance of the Phoenicians as active cultural, economic, and political agents in ancient Mediterranean history. The Phoenicians are the constantly underrated, even marginalized “third party” in a story written as a tale of Greek and Roman success in the Mediterranean world. But it is no exaggeration to say that the world that the Greeks and Romans experienced, and to some extent the world we live in today, would have been quite different had the Phoenicians not existed. The editors stress the need for an updated overview stemming from the multiple countries and disciplines that have advanced our study of the Phoenicians in recent decades. They also lay out the rationale behind this Handbook, its organization, and its goals.

Building Accident Causes at a Stage of Construction and Acceptance in Operation

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3.2) ◽  
pp. 311
Author(s):  
Sergiy Pichugin ◽  
Lina Dmytrenko
Keyword(s):  
Construction Site ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
The Past ◽  
Internet Resources ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Common Causes ◽  
The World

This work covers the consequences of accidents in buildings and structures during the process of construction and acceptance in operation. Attention is focused on the frequency of repetition of this type of accidents, using the graph of the structures’ operation stages. The article describes and analyzes such incidents related to construction. Information on accidents was collected using various sources of information: Internet resources, literary sources, scientific works, as well as reports from the world's journalistic services. The findings are presented more than the past ten years and cover construction incidents around the world. The material is systematized and presented in the form of a table on the basis of which the corresponding diagrams are constructed. The result of the study is the relevant conclusions about the typification of accidents during construction and their regularities. The most common causes of accidents are identified, which allow to obtain more detailed study of the problem and further provide for cases of such accidents at the construction site. Attention is focused on the dependence of the construction’s quality at the level of the country's welfare. In addition, the conclusions contain the main tasks for the solution of this problem and ways of their implementation.  

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Paul A. Rahe
Keyword(s):  
Persian Wars ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mediterranean

This introductory chapter considers the implications of the aftermath of the Persian Wars. Prior to Sparta's defeat of the Persian army, there was every reason to suppose that the Greek resistance would collapse and that Hellas would soon fall. When the dust had settled, however, it gradually dawned on all concerned that affairs had undergone a decisive change; and everyone in and on the periphery of the Mediterranean world began to reassess. That such a turn of events could take place—that a ragtag navy and militia, supplied by tiny communities hitherto best known for their mutual hostility, should annihilate an armada greater than any the world had ever known—this was then and remains today both a wonder and an occasion for rumination. But this chapter shows that such an incredible outcome had its own issues. The unity displayed by the Hellenes during the war was unprecedented, after all. Whether or not this alliance would hold after the war, however, became a great cause for concern for those living in the postwar world.

scholarly journals Sources of the image of Aphrodite in Empedocles

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 293-308
Author(s):  
Anna Afonasina
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Metal Casting ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The World ◽  
Important Study ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Mediterranean

Empedocles uses two forces to describe the world process, the emergence and destruction of space - Love and Strife, which work in turn, and in due time, replace each other. It is obvious that love is responsible for unification and creation, and hostility for division and destruction. At first glance it seems quite natural that it is the power of unification that Empedocles calls Aphrodite. However, when you look closely at the fragments of the poem, the image of Aphrodite is not so unambiguous: she acts as a god-craftsman, that is, not just watches from afar as the roots of things are connected to each other, but mixes them with her own hands and is directly involved in the creation of living beings. We meet her involved in such activities as metal casting, pottery, and artwork. This naturally leads to the question from where did she get so many different functions? To answer this question, one should turn to literary sources about Aphrodite both before and after Empedocles’ life (in the context of Homer’s epos and Hesiod’s poem), consider the religious tradition of Cyprus and especially the East, neighboring Greece, from where, in the opinion of some scientists, the goddess could get into the Mediterranean cultural landscape (most important study here is the work by Nano Marinatos), to study archaeological data and findings related to Aphrodite. Taking into account Empedocles’ interest to bloodless sacrifices I will try to tie his views with the later orphic tradition. At the same time, in order to protect myself from losing the way in the forest of such huge massif it is necessary to restrict the area of this study. I will concentrate only on the activities of Aphrodite as she is presented in Empedocles.

Baal in Hellas

1917 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 201-211
Author(s):  
Theodore H. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Northern Africa ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human History ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Races Of Mankind

In proportion to their numbers the Semitic peoples have exercised a greater influence on the course of human history as a whole than any other of the large races of mankind. As far as our records carry us, it appears that the early spirit of exploration and adventure, as distinct from racial migration, had its origin with them. Even in Homeric times, the Phoenician trader or pirate was a familiar feature of the Mediterranean world. Greece, commonly regarded by us as the home of true culture, admitted that she owed to Phoenicia her first introduction to the art of writing. Semitic establishments were spread over the whole of the ancient world, and the only state that ever seriously contested with Rome the sovereignty of the world was Carthage. Though not famed more for military prowess than other races, the Semitic branch of mankind in the seventh century of our era swept over northern Africa and western Asia, overflowing at two points into Europe itself.

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