Hellenism And Empire

Hellenism and Empire explores identity, politics, and culture in the Greek world of the first three centuries AD, the period known as the second sophistic. The sources of this identity were the words and deeds of classical Greece, and the emphasis placed on Greekness and Greek heritage was far greater then than at any other time. Yet this period is often seen as a time of happy consensualism between the Greek and Roman halves of the Roman Empire. The first part of the book shows that Greek identity came before any loyalty to Rome (and was indeed partly a reaction to Rome), while the views of the major authors of the period, which are studied in the second part, confirm and restate the prior claims of Hellenism.

Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire explores two key historical episodes that have generally escaped the notice of modern Greece, the Near East, and their observers alike. In the midst of the highly charged context of West-East confrontation and with fundamental cultural and political issues at stake, these episodes prove to be exciting and important platforms from which to reexamine the age-old conflict. This book reaches beyond the standard sources to dig into the archives for important events that have fallen through the cracks of the study of emerging modern Greece and the Ottoman Empire. These events, in which French travel writing, literary fiction, antiquarianism, and nineteenth-century western and eastern geopolitics merge, invite us to redraw the outlines of mutually dependent Hellenism and Orientalism.

Excerpt from The Progress of Hellenism in Alexander's Empire The following Lectures, delivered in the University of Chicago, represent the compendium of a long and brilliant development of human culture. To obtain a brief and yet accurate survey of it is certainly a desideratum to various classes of readers, and will, I trust, satisfy a real want. The general reader, who desires to learn something of the expansion of Greek ideas toward the East, will here find enough for a working knowledge of a very complicated epoch. The specialist, who has devoted himself to some department of this field, will find here those general views of the whole which are necessary to every intelligent research into the parts. More especially, the student or teacher of Christianity will find here the human side of its origin treated in a strictly historical spirit. To all such this little volume may be as welcome as were the lectures which compose it to the large and very sympathetic class who heard them in the summer of 1904. Compendiums have so often been written by mere literary hacks that the public has been misled to believe it an easy task, which can be accomplished at second hand. But no collection of extracts from larger books ever made a sound hand-book. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Rolf Strootman brings together various aspects of court culture in the Macedonian empires of the post-Achaemenid Near East. During the Hellenistic Period (c. 330-30 BCE), Alexander the Great and his successors reshaped their Persian and Greco-Macedonian legacies to create a new kind of rulership that was neither 'western' nor 'eastern' and would profoundly influence the later development of court culture and monarchy in both the Roman West and Iranian East.Drawing on the socio-political models of Norbert Elias and Charles Tilly, After the Achaemenids shows how the Hellenistic dynastic courts were instrumental in the integration of local elites in the empires, and the (re)distribution of power, wealth, and status. It analyses the competition among courtiers for royal favour and the, not always successful, attempts of the Hellenistic rulers to use these struggles to their own advantage.It demonstrates the interrelationships of the three competing 'Hellenistic' empires of the Seleukids, Antigonids and Ptolemies, casts new light on the phenomenon of Hellenistic Kingship by approaching it from the angle of the court and covers topics such as palace architecture, royal women, court ceremonial, and coronation ritual.

The vast empire that Alexander the Great left at his death in 323 BC has few parallels. For the next three hundred years the Greeks controlled a complex of monarchies and city-states that stretched from the Adriatic Sea to India. F. W. Walbank's lucid and authoritative history of that Hellenistic world examines political events, describes the different social systems and mores of the people under Greek rule, traces important developments in literature and science, and discusses the new religious movements.