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Fergus Millar is one of the most influential contemporary historians of the ancient world. His essays and books, above all The Emperor in the Roman World and The Roman Near East, have transformed our understanding of the communal culture and civil government of the Greco-Roman world. This second volume of the three-volume collection of Millar's published essays draws together twenty of his classic pieces on the government, society, and culture of the Roman Empire (some of them published in inaccessible journals). Every article in Volume 2 addresses the themes of how the Roman Empire worked in practice and what it was like to live under Roman rule. As in the first volume of the collection, English translations of the extended Greek and Latin passages in the original articles make Millar's essays accessible to readers who do not read these languages. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

She should've narrowed her thesis a little...
Ms. Wiltshire attempts a lot in this book -- to trace the theme of personal rights over 2000 years of history from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and into colonial America, culminating in the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution.The nature of the task and the size of the book make more than a cursory attempt at a historical lineage impossible.Nevertheless, Ms. Wiltshire has provided some introductory framework for the discussion.

Some portions of the book (particularly her discussion of the ninth and tenth amendments and her attempt to paint the Apostle Paul as a natural law theorist) are contrived.

I thought the book was a reasonable introduction to the subject until I read her conclusion and a separate essay she wrote on the book, in which she stated that her purpose in writing was to place the origin of the bill of rights in a classical, as opposed to a Judeo-Christian, context.While I would agree with her that the typical fundamentalist exaggerates when he paints the framers of the Constitution as almost entirely orthodox Christians, I would disagree with her conclusion that Christianity was not a primary influence.For a better treatment of this view, read Forrest McDonald's "Novus Ordo Seclorum:Intellectual Origins of the Constitution," where he concludes that it is futile to say with any dogmatism that the "founding fathers thought," or "the founding fathers intended," because the framers of the Constitution were a diverse group with diverse backgrounds and interests. ... Read more

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How Happy is the Person Who Says I am a Turk
There is one country in Europe where people feel nostalgic for the 1930s, and where they almost unanimously cherish the memory of a one-party state which multiplied statues of its great leader on every street corner. The country is Turkey and the golden age that Turks remember with nostalgia is the first two decades of the republic founded in 1923 by Mustapha Kemal, the father of all Turks. The climax of this era of bliss and hope occurred with the tenth anniversary celebrations of the declaration of the Turkish Republic, when Atatürk famously declared: "How happy is the person who says I am a Turk!"

Nostalgia is a thoroughly modern sentiment. Or maybe a postmodern one: it is fair to say that modernity ended with the end of hope for tomorrow. Since then, people have looked for their utopias in the past rather than in the future. As Esra Özyürek notes, quoting another author, the twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. A belief in the future is now only a relic of the past. What people look for in the past is the kind of pride and hope in the future that seems to have disappeared from our present.

By locating their modernity in the past, rather than in the present or future, and by cultivating a vivid memory of the 1930s as a modern past utopia in which the citizens united around their state, many Turks with a nationalist-secular worldview tend to reject the visions, revisions and divisions that characterize the present situation. They are discontent with the new definition of modernity that the European Union imposes on Turkey, becoming resistant to criticisms of the way Turkey has handled the Kurdish issue and human rights violations. They firmly oppose the rise of political Islam and what they perceive as attacks to the foundations of the secular state.

For nostalgic Republicans, the end of the single-party regime and the transition to democracy formed the starting point of selfishness and factionalism in Turkey. They agree that the golden age came to an end with the first fair general elections of 1950, when the Democrat Party replaced the Republican People's Party. Everything apparently got worse afterwards. Suddenly, there was more than one vision for the future of the country, and citizens were divided along the lines of gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. People started putting their private interest above the common good embodied by the state.

Of course, paradise is always and forever lost, and nobody in Turkey really wants to turn back the clock backward to the 1930s. The militaristic and patriarchal feelings associated with the early Republican era no longer match the contemporary ideals of European modernism, which promotes voluntarism, spontaneity, and free will in state-citizen relations. The nationalist march songs with lyrics glorifying the construction of railroad tracks and the devotion to the leader are revisited today with a new aesthetic of postmodern kitsch and disco rhythm. Nostalgia is also used to silence the opposition, as when the remix of nationalist songs blasted by discotheques compete with the calls to prayer of the muezzin.

In Nostalgia for the Modern, Esra Özyürek explores how nostalgia for the single-party era is indicative of a new kind of relationship citizens have established with the founding principles of the Turkish Republic, one that manifests itself in affective, domestic, and otherwise private realms generally considered outside the traditional field of politics. She takes as the sites of her ethnography the seventy-fifth anniversary Republic Day celebrations arranged by civil society organizations; the popular life histories of first-generation Republicans who transformed their lives as a result of the Kemalist reforms; the commercial pictures of Atatürk that privatize and commodify a state icon; the pop music albums that remixed the tenth-anniversary march originally made in 1933; and museum exhibits about the family lives of citizens that articulate metaphors of national intimacy.

Özyürek sees a parallel between the neoliberal policies of market reforms and structural adjustment and what she describes as the privatization of state ideology. Both are characterized by a symbolism of privatization, market choice, and voluntarism that contrasts with the statist, nationalist and authoritarian ideology of Kemalism in the former period. With neo-Kemalism, a secular state ideology, politics, and imaginary finds a new life and legitimacy in the private realms of the market, the home, civil society, life history, and emotional attachment, transforming the intimate sphere along the way.

This shift of secular ideology from the public to the private, which (just like neoliberal economic reforms) involves processes of destatization and restatization, occurred just at the same time as, and in reaction to, the growing importance in the public sphere of religious beliefs and practices that were once confined in the private realm. Secularism went private just when Islam went public, as both had to face the shift produced by market reforms and liberalization. This exploration of cultural imaginaries associated with the neoliberal ideology opens up new possibilities for political anthropology: according to the author, "anthropologists are uniquely equipped to understand the newly hegemonic culture of neoliberalism in the fields of economy, society and politics."

There is also an autobiographical aspect to this ethnography. For Esra Özyürek, fieldwork was intimately linked to family work. As she confesses, "I am the granddaughter of a parliamentarian of the single-party regime and the daughter of two staunch Kemalist and social democrat activists affiliated with the Republican People's Party." Raised as an orthodox Kemalist, her mother is a firm believer in Westernization, secularism, and Turkish nationalism. She doesn't hesitate to chastise her daughter for her sympathy with the cause of veiled university students. Her father is also a stalwart Republican who was elected to Parliament in the course of her research. Analyzing further her motivations for undertaking this project, the author notes that "this study became a tool for me to negotiate daughter-parent relations and establish myself as an adult in some ways." Coming of age as an anthropologist also involves dealing with the father-figure of Atatürk, whose towering presence makes itself felt in every chapters of the book.

Written as a scholarly essay with a rich theoretical apparatus, Nostalgia for the Modern can also be read as a very personal rendition of the author's effort to come to terms with her Turkish identity. ... Read more

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Designed for school districts, educators, and students seeking to maximize performance on standardized tests, Webster's paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently assigned readings in English courses. By using a running thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this edition of A Smaller History of Greece by William Smith was edited for students who are actively building their vocabularies ... Read more

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Polybius was a Greek statesman and political prisoner of Rome in the second century b.c.e. His Histories provide the earliest continuous narrative of the rise of the Roman Empire. In this original study informed by recent work in cultural studies and on ethnicity, Craige Champion demonstrates that Polybius's work performs a literary and political balancing act of heretofore unappreciated subtlety and interest. Champion shows how Polybius contrived to tailor his historiography for multiple audiences, comprising his fellow Greeks, whose freedom Rome had usurped in his own generation, and the Roman conquerors. Champion focuses primarily on the ideological presuppositions and predispositions of Polybius's different audiences in order to interpret the apparent contradictions and incongruities in his text. In this way he develops a "politics of cultural indeterminacy" in which Polybius's collective representations of political and ethnic groups have different meanings for different audiences in different contexts. Situating these representations in the ideological, political, and historical contexts from which they arose, his book affords new and penetrating insights into a work whose subtlety and complexity have gone largely unrecognized. ... Read more

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Superb for those who want to read more deeply
Craige Champion's Cultural Politics in Polybius's Histories is not a great introduction to the reading of Polybius' Histories. I would recommend Brian McGing's book for that. However, for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of what Polybius is doing in his Histories, Champion is an excellent choice.
My plan for this review is to reflect the three sections of Champion's book. The first part of the review will outline the theoretical framework that Champion brings to his reading of Polybius. Champion sees many complexities in Polybius that have to be carefully sorted out.
The second part of the review will show how Champion applies this framework to Book 6 of the Histories and to the question of whether Polybius saw Rome as having already entered a period of decline by the time he was writing.
The last section will speak shortly to Champion's third section and its explorations of the contemporary political contexts of the period of the composition of the Histories. Champion believes that it is only by understanding that political context that we can fully understand what Polybius was doing.
Finally, I want to venture a few qualms about Champion's theoretical structure and to suggest a few ways it could be broadened.
And by the way, because I am lazy, from now on Polybius will be P, Champion will be C, Polybius' Histories will be H and Champion's book will be CPPH.

For those of you who know their work, Champion's theoretical framework is a combination of Quentin Skinner, G.E.R. Lloyd and K.S. Sacks. C feels that Lloyd has established the use of polarity as one of the most dominant analytical resources of the ancient Greeks. In particular, C feels that whole of H is organized around the polarity of Hellene-barbarian. The end result is that P is able to create a "politics of cultural indeterminacy". This is done by making the Romans to sometimes appear to have the virtues of the Greek people and sometimes to have the failings of barbarians. Another way to see this polarity is to be rational, farsighted, courageous, and generous versus emotional, reactive, cowardly and greedy.
P uses this cultural indeterminacy because he is writing for several audiences simultaneously. He is writing to show the Roman governing elite how they appear to the Greeks and the Greeks how the Romans were able to be so successful in coming to dominance in the Mediterranean. In other words, C sees P as writing both for Romans who are suspicious of the Greeks and for Greeks who are chafing at being ruled by Romans.
Because he is writing for several audiences, P uses several rhetorical devices. P establishes a certain vocabulary for the barbarians. This vocabulary is also put to use on women, the masses and youth. This part of C argument is convincingly outlined in several appendices which catalog the use of certain terms and their cognates.
C also talks about the use of different authorial voices in H. Here C takes from the work of Sacks and talk about subjective and indirect historical writing. P is usually credited with being (along with Thucydides) the ancient historian most determined to write something approaching what we would call objective history. But C points out that P is also "by far the most intrusive narrator among the ancient historians" (p.26). In other words, P has a tendency to pop up and tell you what he thinks about somebody or something. But, in his indirect historian mode, P can also be more subtle and have the story or some character's speech tell you what P thinks.
Chapter 2 looks at the way that P uses his various devices to construct the ethnicities of various peoples along the Hellene-barbarian polarity. There are several peoples for whom P has no use. Anyone who reads the H, knows how he felt about Illyrians, Cretans and Aitolians. Toward others he was more ambiguous, e.g., Macedonians and Carthaginians. But most of the chapter is, of course, about the ways that the Romans and the Greeks regarded each other.

The second section of the book is for me the best. Chapter 3 is a brilliant dissection of P's Book 6- the one on the Roman "constitution". But P also discusses the Roman army camp, the funeral rites of the Romans and the way the Roman elite used their religion to keep the masses in line. Champion ties all these disparate parts together quite nicely.
One of the famous sections of Book 6 is P's discussion of how governments evolve from one form to the next in a natural process of decline. Chapters 4 and 5 of CPPH argue for one of C's most interesting themes. C. claims that P is arguing that Rome has already entered the process of decline. P is also writing a parallel history of the Achaean League within his larger Roman history. The Achaean League is in that same process of decline. I found this whole section of CPPH to be very convincing.

The final section of the book I suppose you could call the Skinnerian section of the book. In this section, C is outlining what he sees as the most relevant historical contexts of P's time for an understanding of H. C discusses the ideology of the Roman senatorial elite and their attitudes toward the deleterious effects of Greek culture. C also discusses some of the political maneuverings within the various factions of the Achaean League and how those factions might regard P and his work.

I mentioned that I had a few qualms about the theoretical framework that Champion brings to bear on P. I am not sure that I can agree with all of the interpretations that C makes in his third section. It sometimes seems as if he has P walking an impossible tightrope between appealing to both the Roman senatorial elite and the anti-Roman factions among Achaean politicians.
I do like his use of the work of Lloyd for no other reason than, if Lloyd is right, P would have no trouble recognizing some of the readings that C makes. I am just not sure but what other frameworks than Skinner's might have been more useful or revealing. I am very impressed with Richard White's work in The Middle Ground. I would love to see someone use it to elucidate the mutual (mis)understandings of the Romans and Greeks of the period.
And, by the Dog, can we please start using some Straussian reading resources when doing reading like this? I am not saying that anyone should take over Strauss' views on the history of political philosophy. But his writings on the techniques of esoteric writing are an enormous resource for anyone attempting to understand someone like P who is writing toward multiple audiences and who doesn't want all the different audiences to know what is going on.
I do not want to end of a churlish note. Let me end as I started. This is a wonderful book, full of insights and very suggestive of further study. Most of all, it will lead you back to Polybius for further reading and that is what all secondary literature should aim at. ... Read more

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Arthur Eckstein's fresh and stimulating interpretation challenges the way Polybius' Histories have long been viewed. He argues that Polybius evaluates people and events as much from a moral viewpoint as from a pragmatic, utilitarian, or even "Machiavellian" one. Polybius particularly asks for "improvement" in his audience, hoping that those who study his writings will emerge with a firm determination to live their lives nobly. Teaching by the use of moral exemplars, Polybius also tries to prove that success is not the sole standard by which human action should be judged. ... Read more

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"Society, Culture and Politics in Byzantium" is the fourth selection of papers by the late Nicolas Oikonomides to be published in the "Variorum Collected Studies Series". Its focus is upon the Byzantine world after the Fourth Crusade and during the Palaeologan period, though several studies deal with a longer time span. The twenty-eight articles included look first at questions of language and literacy, and then at the relationships between art and politics. The final sections examine aspects of the history of the later empire, in the age of its decline, caught between the economic penetration of the Western European states and the expansion of the Ottoman Turks, and consider the development of Byzantine institutions, monasteries and the Church in this period. ... Read more

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Between 279 and 229 B.C., the Aitolian koinon, afederation of mountain cantons in west central Greece, expanded toincorporate many of the neighboring lands and peoples lying betweenthe Adriatic and Aegean Seas. This new political configurationcontributed to the development of modern systems of federal democracybased on proportional representation. Despite these institutionaladvances, the Aitolians and their polity are reviled in the ancienthistorical tradition, which views them as backward, semibarbarousbrigands.

The Politics of Plunder is the first English-language book inover a century to examine the political history of the Aitolian koinonin its era of expansion. Joseph Scholten presents a chronologicalreconstruction of the koinon's course of expansion, synthesizing anumber of recent studies covering Aitolian topography, epigraphy, andinstitutional development that help to compensate for deficiencies inthe ancient narrative record. His study is the first to ask how apeople and a polity so detested by their contemporaries succeeded inmaking such fundamental contributions to their regional politicalculture.

Scholten's careful investigation charts a middle course that neitherwhitewashes the Aitolians nor credulously accepts the biased ancienttradition. This balanced approach provides a much-needed freshperspective on the Aitolians and their koinon. Discussing the historyof the ancient Aegean Greek world and the political, economic, andsocial history of the Hellenistic Era, this book will interest anyoneconcerned with those subjects or fascinated by the development ofancient Greek political institutions and theories, particularlyfederalism.

"The Aetolians of the 3rd cent. BCE (even more than the Macedonians,if not quite at the level of the Gauls) were the bogey-men andwhipping-boys for every Greek state, from Athens to Achaea, thatconsidered itself more civilized. Polybius in particular couldn'tstand them. Primitive, treacherous, murderous, piratical--the epithetspile up like snow on Helicon. Yet, paradoxically, these sub-Homericruffians also instituted a remarkably modern-sounding democraticfederation, which even (despite Greek ethnic exclusiveness) offeredmembership to non-Aetolian groups.Resolving the paradox hasstimulated Scholten to produce a really wonderful book. He hasreinforced the scanty literary sources with some of the most thoroughepigraphical and numismatic work I have ever seen in a work ofscholarship. Best of all, he has walked every inch of Aetolia andknows its geography backwards. His research (while not palliating theAetiolians' "predatory economic self-service". a nice phrase) setstheir federation in its political context as never before, and, what'smore, does so in elegant and drily ironic prose. The Politics ofPlunder invites comparison with N.G.L. Hammond's Epirus, and will, Isuspect, in the long run prove a more durable and substantialachievement."--Peter Green ... Read more

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Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era.

Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city.

In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system.

Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture. ... Read more

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In eighteenth-century Greek culture, Iosipos Moisiodax (c.1725-1800) was a controversial figure, whose daring pronouncements in favor of cultural change embroiled him in ideological conflicts and made him a target of persecution. The first intellectual in Southeastern Europe to voice the ideas of the Enlightenment in public and without qualification, he advocated the use of vernacular Greek in education and aspired to see the backward and intellectually conservative Balkan societies remodeled along European lines. In the first modern book-length treatment of this passionate reformer, Paschalis Kitromilides skillfully retraces Moisiodax's career and contrasts the Greek Enlightenment with the Western Enlightenment as a whole, enriching our understanding of each tradition in the process. Moisiodax's efforts failed tragically in his own lifetime, but his vision of the Enlightenment was an impressive project of intellectual reconstruction that had a considerable effect after his death, both in the promotion of modern scientific ideas and in the enunciation of republican politics in Southeastern Europe. The methodology of literary history has traditionally dominated inquiries about his life and about the Greek Enlightenment in general, but here both man and movement are examined from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on a broad range of sources and combining insights from the social sciences, cultural history, and political theory, this work reveals Moisiodax as a figure of major significance in the ideological tradition of Southeastern Europe. ... Read more

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The Enlightenment As Social Criticism
A suitably analytical and superbly informative study of a key figure in modern Greek thought, Iosipos Moisiodax (d. 1800).The important story of the introduction of Enlightenment ideas and values into Balkan and,particularly, Greek education in the eighteenth century has attracted fartoo little attention from scholars writing in English.This book is asolid addition to that bibliography.The author employs whateverbiographical data are available, as well as his command of the broaderintellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe, to fix the sources andtrace the evolution of Moisiodax's views.The title suggests a somewhatnarrower scope of inquiry than is actually delivered: the book can alsoserve as an introduction to most of the main issues and personalities ofthat crucial period in the history of modern Greek culture. ... Read more

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Alexander the Great changed the face of the ancient world. During his life and after his death, his image in works of art exerted an unprecedented influenceon marbles, bronzes, ivories, frescoes, mosaics, coins, medals, even painted pottery and reliefware. Alexander's physiognomy became the most famous in history. But can we really know what meaning lies behind these images?Andrew Stewart demonstrates that these portraitswildly divergent in character, quality, type, provenance, date, and purposeactually transmit not so much a likeness of Alexander as a set of carefully crafted clichs that mobilize the notion "Alexander" for diverse ends and diverse audiences. Stewart discusses the portraits as studies in power and his original interpretation of them gives unprecedented fullness and shape to the idea and image called "Alexander." ... Read more

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Un magnífico trabajo académico
El Profesor Andrew Stewart ha hecho un magnífico trabajo que es ya una referencia inexcusable en lo que respecta a la iconografía de Alejandro Magno. Dado que la influencia de Alejandro en el ámbito de la cultura ha sido enorme, y su influencia en el campo de la estética de la representación aún relativamente poco estudiada (en relación con otros aspectos de su legado como son los sociales o políticos) este es un libro del que disfrutarán enormemente aquellos profesionales interesados en Alejandro desde cualesquiera que sean sus ámbitos de interés específico. Un espléndido libro para ver, leer y disfrutar.

Prof. Dr. P. Arcos, Universidad de Oviedo (España)

How to merge art and history
I'm currently self-studying Alexander, and I chose this rather pricey book because I really wanted to learn why there are so many images, so many different images, of Alexander that have survived from ancient history.I had read multiple biographies, but there is something about the face of any historical figure that teases and intrigues; yet Alexander's many faces are confusing rather than enlightening.I also wanted to understand why this world conqueror's image kept appearing on coins and many other artifacts for centuries after his death.I rather suspected, however, that I was getting an "art book" way over my head.

This book turned out to be one of the most percipient and fascinating books I've read on Alexander, precisely because Andrew Stewart brings not only the arcane expertise of a world-class art student to his task, but has the important facts of Alexander's life and the conflicting sources about it at his fingertips.My own personal way of making a note of perceptive comments I want to re-read, is to take that paragraph with a colored tab.The whole book is littered with tabs, and I now feel my perception of both Alexander the man, Alexander the man as he wished to appear to his world, and Alexander the man as he lived on in legend and accomplishment, is highly enhanced by Stewart's book.

This volume must contain every single image of Alexander in statuary, bust, painted pottery, rings, jewels, and coins that can be found; it has a description for each; it lists every source in ancient literature in which Alexander's image is discussed; it covers how he looked, how his image changed, how he controlled that image for political and social purposes, and much more.It is a treasure trove for those who want to learn more about this most fascinating mortal.

Highly recommended; I am most grateful for Stewart for sharing his expertise so well that even a learner can find multiple new impressions and a much clearer vision of both the face, and the man. ... Read more

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When Worlds Elide responds to the various incarnations of _the Greek_ legacy that continues to mark our politics, our society, and our education. It offers both an elaboration of these incarnations and a critique of how they are understood and used politically, culturally, theoretically, and pedagogically. ... Read more

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The Iliad and Political Theory
The book treats the Iliad as a work of normative political theory.If this sounds attractive to you, you will almost certainly appreciate this book.Hammer does a fine job of teasing out a coherent and extremely interesting theory from this great poem.And if you are interested in the Iliad but have never thought of it as a work of political theory, you are likely to find very interesting new insights here.The book is an academic book, but quite accessible to "the intelligent general reader" who happens to have an interest in these questions. ... Read more

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