The Dating of Fifth-century Attic Inscriptions

1966 ◽  
Vol 86 ◽  
pp. 86-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Meiggs
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Athenian History

The study of Athenian history in the fifth century, and particularly in the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, derives much of its flesh and blood from inscriptions, but most inscriptions lose their full value if they cannot be dated. From the Peace of Nicias in 421 onwards it was customary to include the name of the archon in the prescript of decrees, but before the Peloponnesian War the practice was rare and random. The alliances with Egesta, Leontini and Rhegium (IG i2 19, 51, 52) were dated in this way, but not the treaty with Hermione (SEG × 15). The settlement imposed on Chalcis by Athens after the crushing of her revolt is not dated (IG i2 39), whereas earlier regulations for Miletus (IG i2 22) include the name of the archon of the year. Sometimes a single archon's name will date a whole series of records: the first tribute list, for example, is explicitly dated by archon, but the name is lost and the lists that follow are numbered only in relation to the first; the archon, however, is recorded in the thirty-fourth list, and the name is preserved, Aristion archon for 421/0, and from this we can safely infer that the first list records the payments of 454/3. Similarly the early accounts of the Parthenon, while recording the first secretary of the Boule, do not mention the archon and merely add the number in the series; but from 437/6 at least the archon's name was added, and the survival of the name of Crates, archon for 434/3, at the head of the thirteenth list enables us to date the remaining records in the series.

History in [Demosthenes] 59

1990 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 407-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Trevett
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Main Interest ◽  
Rhetorical Practice ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
Athenian History ◽  
Scholarly Attention

It is well known that Athenian orators, when they made reference to the historical past, usually eschewed prolonged narrative in favour of brief allusions to familiar episodes from Athenian history. Perhaps the most striking exception to this custom is the long and detailed account of fifth-century Plataean history in the pseudo-Demosthenic speech Against Neaera (Dem. 59.94–103). The main interest of this passage, however, lies not in its divergence from contemporary rhetorical practice, but in its clear reliance on Thucydides for its account of the siege of Plataea during the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, it is unique in Attic oratory in the extent of its reliance on an identifiable historical work. Yet, considering its significance, this passage has received very little scholarly attention, and merits a closer reexamination.

scholarly journals Old Persian in Athens Revisited (Ar. Ach. 100)

Mnemosyne ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 657-681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Willi
Keyword(s):  
Central Element ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Old Persian

AbstractThe Old Persian line in Aristophanes' Acharnians (100) is commonly believed to contain nothing but comic gibberish. Against this view, it is argued here that a responsible reconstruction of an Old Persian original is possible if one takes into account what we nowadays know about late fifth-century Old Persian. Moreover, the result, whose central element is the Persian verb for 'writing',fits in with both general considerations on linguistic realism in drama and the historical reality of diplomatic interaction between Greece and Persia during the Peloponnesian War.

Coins and amphoras—Chios, Samos and Thasos in the fifth century B.C.

1981 ◽  
Vol 101 ◽  
pp. 78-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold B. Mattingly
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
The South ◽  
Floor Level ◽  
South West ◽  
New Material ◽  
Material Evidence

The American excavators in the south-west area of the Forum at Corinth have revealed an intriguing architectural complex, which they have called the ‘Punic Amphora Building’. Evidently it housed a thriving import business with a speciality in fish and wine, whose trade extended in one direction to Sicily and perhaps Spain and in the other to Chalkidike and Chios. Masses of fragments of Punic and Chian amphoras were found crushed and pounded in the make-up of successive floor-levels in the courtyard, together with numerous pieces from Mende and elsewhere. Many others emerged from the single floors of most of the rooms or were discovered in the littered debris from the final phase of occupation. The life of this business house was somewhat short, but a domestic building on the same site had earlier been partly devoted to the same trade. All this activity ceased with dramatic suddenness; the emporium went out of use and in the late fifth century it was overlaid in one area by a new road. The end seems to be securely dated c. 430 B.C. by Attic black-glaze pottery in the final floor-level or in the debris covering the last floor. Professor Williams plausibly links the collapse of business with the interruption of Corinth's trade caused by the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War: one of Athens' first war measures was to blockade both the Saronic and the Corinthian Gulfs. This new material evidence for Corinthian commerce is most welcome in itself and, as I hope to show in this paper, it may help clarify other problems.

scholarly journals Citizens and Soldiers in Archaic Athens

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans van Wees
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Democratic Regime ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Working Population ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
The Military

A reconsideration of the precise nature and extent of the military obligations of citizens in classical Athens reveals that under Athens’ democratic regime these obligations were relatively limited and not systematically enforced. The relevant classical legislation, later historical tradition, and some contemporary archaic evidence are combined to show that in archaic Athens, by contrast, formal military obligations were more extensive and more stringently enforced, but applied only to the leisured elite. The bulk of the working population was also obliged to serve, but only in ‘general levies’, with whatever arms and armour they could afford. This system was fully developed already under Solon and remained in operation until the late fifth century BC, when social and economic changes and the exceptional strain of the Peloponnesian War caused it to be abandoned.

scholarly journals THE ARCHERS OF CLASSICAL ATHENS

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-102
Author(s):  
David M. Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Armed Forces ◽  
The State ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Military Innovation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Creation

The armed forces that Athens took into the Peloponnesian War had four distinct corps. The two that have been studied the most are the cavalry corps and the navy. The same level of focus is now paid to the hoplite corps. In contrast to these three branches, the archers continue to be largely unstudied. Indeed, the last dedicated study of this corps was published in 1913. This neglect of the archers by military historians is unjustified. The creation of the archer corps in the late 480sbcwas a significant military innovation. For the rest of the fifth century, Athens constantly deployed archers in a wide range of important combat roles. In the late 430s the state spent as much on them as it did on the cavalry.

Cracking the Code: Narrative and Political Mobilization in the Greek Resistance

1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Hart
Keyword(s):  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Material Costs ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
History Of

That narrative can be more than a mechanical recitation of events is epitomized in Thucydides’ challenge to historiographical paradigms current during the fifth century B.C. In his definitive history of the war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenian general in effect tells a “story” with a beginning, middle, and end. Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is anything but a neutral description of events. Instead, the collection interprets the conflict for the reader. The tale contains a discussion of the role of alternative military strategies and of the war’s wider political implications. According to Thucydides, the fractionization and polarization engendered by war as a mode of resolving political conflicts is too high a price to pay for victors and losers alike. Thucydides warns of psychic as well as material costs. Thus, the ancient political scientist tells the story of the Peloponnesian War to assert that the “sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama” (White 1987: 21).

Tissaphernes in Thucydides

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. D. Westlake
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opening Phase

Of all the leading personalities who left their imprint on the history of the Peloponnesian war Tissaphernes was to Thucydides the most enigmatic. Although judgements on the ability and character of individuals occur more frequently in the eighth book of the History than in other parts, Thucydides apparently did not feel himself to be in a position to include an explicit judgement on Tissaphernes. Nor does Tissaphernes, unlike many major and minor characters, receive even a brief descriptive introduction, though such introductions are also exceptionally plentiful in the eighth book. Thucydides has been successful in collecting an abundance of detailed information about the part played by Tissaphernes in the opening phase of the Ionian war and yet has failed to produce a satisfactory picture of him. In this paper attention will first be drawn to special problems arising in the case of Tissaphernes which do not arise in the presentation of other leading characters. My main purpose, however, is to attempt to establish that the account of him by Thucydides is basically inconsistent and that this inconsistency occurs because the material in the eighth book has not been fully integrated.One source of difficulty for Thucydides in writing about Tissaphernes was that he seems to have had little opportunity to acquire knowledge of Persia and the Persians. There is no indication that he spent any part of his exile in or near Asia, and the notorious sparsity of his references to Greek relations with the Persians before the outbreak of the Ionian war suggests that his contacts with them were scanty. In this respect he was not exceptional. Before the end of the fifth century even the best educated Athenians seem to have possessed only a dim or distorted impression of Persia, as is illustrated in different ways by the Persae and the Acharnians.

The Black Medeas of Weimar and Nazi Berlin: Jahnn-Straub and Straub-Grillparzer

1992 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-166
Author(s):  
Glen W. Gadberry
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Dramatic Character ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Race Ethnicity

While earlier dramatists treated Medea as a dramatic character, it was Euripides who gave her enduring theatrical prominence. Beyond crafting a timely attack upon a treacherous Corinth to appeal to Athens at the start of the Peloponnesian War, Euripides developed Medea to question the social role of women within a proudly patriarchal society. And he may have been the first to make Medea a non-Greek, a Colchian, a “barbarian”—a term that had become more derisive in the fifth century. In the Golden Age, a female foreigner was marginalized by gender and by heritage/race/ethnicity; a justified or sympathetic Medea challenged Athenian prejudices about both. Yet this Medea is problematic: a seriously aggrieved wife is driven to horrible acts against Greeks—Jason, his sons, the king of Corinth, and as a complicating fillip of multi-gender vengeance, the female rival. Our sympathies are subverted: a wronged Medea could also be a bloody figure of feminine and alien power, fatal to men and women, public and domestic order.

Thucydides and hegemony: Athens and the United States

2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 593-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Ned Lebow ◽  
Robert Kelly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The World

Fifth century Greeks distinguished between hegemonia (legitimated leadership) and arkhe (control). Thucydides employed this distinction to track the changing nature of the Athenian Empire during the Peloponnesian War, and the ways in which a diminishing concern for balancing self-interest against justice corroded Athenian authority, made survival of the empire increasingly problematic and encouraged the disastrous expedition to Sicily. The Melian Dialogue—often cited by realists to justify a power-based approach to foreign policy—is intended to symbolize this decay. Building on our analysis of Thucydides, we examine the British, Soviet and American experiences with hegemony. A striking feature of the contemporary American situation is the extent to which American leaders claim hegemonia but deny any interest in arkhe. Rightly or wrongly, much of the rest of the world has the reverse perception. This seeming contradiction has important implications for US foreign policy and world politics more generally.

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