City Countryside And The Spatial Organization Of Value In Classical Antiquity

This book presents papers by fourteen distinguished Classicists on the ancient dichotomy polarity of 'city' and 'countryside' as a reflection of ancient values and cultural ideology.

How do people respond to and evaluate their sensory experiences of the natural and man-made world? What does it mean to speak of the ‘value’ of aesthetic phenomena? And in evaluating human arts and artifacts, what are the criteria for success or failure? The sixth in a series exploring ‘ancient values’, this book investigates from a variety of perspectives aesthetic value in classical antiquity. The essays explore not only the evaluative concepts and terms applied to the arts, but also the social and cultural ideologies of aesthetic value itself. Seventeen chapters range from the ‘life without the Muses’ to ‘the Sublime’, and from philosophical views to middle-brow and popular aesthetics. Aesthetic value in classical antiquity should be of interest to classicists, cultural and art historians, and philosophers.

From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

Human communities thrive on prosocial behavior. This book demonstrates from a wide range of perspectives how such behavior is anchored and promoted in classical antiquity by a varied and conceptually rich discourse of ‘valuing others’.

In ancient Athenian democracy there were one hundred and thirty-nine official demes, or recognized population centres, which formed the foundation of the political system introduced by Kleisthenes in 508/7 BC. Enrolment in one of these demes was a prerequisite for citizenship and participation in the Athenian socio-political system. Acharnai was by far the largest of the Kleisthenic demes and one of the best known from the ancient sources, most notably Thucydides and Aristophanes' comedy Acharnians; it therefore provides a rare opportunity for a comprehensive investigation into the workings of a rural deme. In this volume, Kellogg combines literary, prosopographical, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence to create an encompassing overview of this dynamic and historical settlement with a well-developed identity and unique traditions. Such an investigation also functions as a corrective to a 'one size fits all' approach to rural Attica, which privileges the city and its political and economic opportunities over the countryside where most of the Athenian citizenry lived. This volume constitutes a new and distinctive contribution to the study of ancient Athens, and is a major advance in the analysis of the critically important role of the Attic demes in the economic, political, social, and religious structures of Athenian democracy.

Places and spaces are key factors in how individuals and groups construct their identities. Identity theories have emphasised that the construction of an identity does not follow abstract and universal processes but is also deeply rooted in specific historical, cultural, social and material environments. The essays in this volume explore how various groups in Late Antiquity rooted their identity in special places that were imbued with meanings derived from history and tradition. In Part I, essays explore the tension between the Classical heritage in public, especially urban spaces, in the form of ancient artwork and civic celebrations and the Church's appropriation of that space through doctrinal disputes and rival public performances. Parts II and III investigate how particular locations expressed, and formed, the theological and social identities of Christian and Jewish groups by bringing together fresh insights from the archaeological and textual evidence. Together the essays here demonstrate how the use and interpretation of shared spaces contributed to the self-identity of specific groups in Late Antiquity and in so doing issued challenges, and caused conflict, with other social and religious groups.

Ever since Jesus walked the hills of Galilee and Paul travelled the roads of Asia Minor and Greece, Christianity has shown a remarkable ability to adapt itself to various social and cultural environments. Recent research has demonstrated that these environments can only be very insufficiently termed as "rural" or "urban". Neither was Jesus' Galilee only rural, nor Paul's Asia only "urban". On the background of ongoing research on the diversity of social environments in the Early Empire, this volume will focus on various early Christian "worlds" as witnessed in canonical and non-canonical texts. How did Early Christians experience and react to "rural" and "urban" life? What were the mechanisms behind this adaptability? Papers will analyze the relation between urban Christian beginnings and the role of the rural Jesus-tradition. In what sense did the image of Jesus, the "Galilean village Jew", change when his message was carried into the cities of the Mediterranean world from Jerusalem to Athens or Rome? Papers will not only deal with various personalities or literary works whose various attitudes towards urban life became formative for future Christianity. They will also explore the different local milieus that demonstrate the wide range of Christian cultural perspectives.

A complete geographical and thematic overview of the village in an antiquity and its role in the rise of Christianity. The volume begins with a “state-of-question” introduction by Thomas Robinson, assessing the interrelation of the village and city with the rise of early Christianity. Alan Cadwallader then articulates a methodology for future New Testament studies on this topic, employing a series of case studies to illustrate the methodological issues raised. From there contributors explore three areas of village life in different geographical areas, by means of a series of studies, written by experts in each discipline. They discuss the ancient near east (Egypt and Israel), mainland and Isthmian Greece, Asia Minor, and the Italian Peninsula. This geographic focus sheds light upon the villages associated with the biblical cities (Israel; Corinth; Galatia; Ephesus; Philippi; Thessalonica; Rome), including potential insights into the rural nature of the churches located there. A final section of thematic studies explores central issues of local village life (indigenous and imperial cults, funerary culture, and agricultural and economic life).