Outsiders In The Greek Cities In The Fourth Century Bc Routledge Revivals

During the fourth century BC the number of Greeks who did not live as citizens in the city-states of southern mainland Greece increased considerably: mercenaries, pirates, itinerant artisans and traders, their origins differed widely. It has been argued that this increase was caused by the destruction of many Greek cities in the wars of the fourth century, accompanied by the large programme of settlement begun by Alexander in the East and Timoleon in the West. Although this was an important factor, argues Dr McKechnie, more crucial was an ideological deterioration of loyalties to the city: the polis was no longer absolutely normative in the fourth century and Hellenistic periods. With so many outsiders with specialist skills, Alexander and his successors were able to recruit the armies and colonists needed to conquer and maintain empires many times larger than any single polis had ever controlled.

Vols. 1-8, 1880-87, plates published separately and numbered I-LXXXIII.

The Greek World After Alexander 323–30 BC examines social changes in the old and new cities of the Greek world and in the new post-Alexandrian kingdoms. An appraisal of the momentous military and political changes after the era of Alexander, this book considers developments in literature, religion, philosophy, and science, and establishes how far they are presented as radical departures from the culture of Classical Greece or were continuous developments from it. Graham Shipley explores the culture of the Hellenistic world in the context of the social divisions between an educated elite and a general population at once more mobile and less involved in the political life of the Greek city.

First Published in 1956 The Greek Tyrants is concerned primarily with an early period of Greek history, when the aristocracies which ruled in the eighth and seventh centuries were losing control of their cities and were very often overthrown by a tyranny, which in its turn gave way to the oligarchies and democracies of the classical period. The tyrants who seized power from time to time in various cities of Greece are analogous to the dictators of our own day and represented for the Greeks a political problem which is still topical: whether it is ever advantageous for a State to concentrate power in the hands of an individual. Those early tyrannies are an important phase of Greek political development: the author discusses here the various military, economic, political, and social factors of the situation which produce them. The book thus forms an introduction to the central period of Greek political history and will be of interest to scholars and researchers of political thought, ancient history, and Greek philosophy.

Most studies of fourth century Athens end with the battle of Khaironeia or with the death of Alexander, and while these may have been epochal points for other parts of Greece, neither was definitive for Athens. In Fourth Century Athens and the Hellenistic World, renowned historian of ancient Greece Philip Harding looks forward rather than back to illustrate how seamless was Athens’ transition into the Hellenistic world. Harding argues that it was the fourth-century, rather than the fifth, that eventually became the model for the Hellenistic city in government, diplomacy, education, taxation and administration of justice. Furthermore, it was Athens of the fourth century that provided the spiritual inspiration for Hellenistic culture. Whilst the spread of Hellenism to the east of Asia Minor and Egypt through the foundation of cities is rightly attributed to Alexander and his successors, Harding here argues for the recognition that Athens was truly the model for these new cities with implications for subsequent learning, religion, philosophy and rhetoric, literature and art.