The Rise And Fall Of States According To Greek Authors

A survey of how Greek historians explained the conditions of a state's success and the dangers of power

Winner of the 1999 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize in Middle Eastern Studies. Described by the BKFS reviewer as "e;A ground-breaking work on a subject that has been almost totally neglected."e;"e;Why write history in Persian?"e; Persian historical writing has received little attention as compared with Arabic, especially as seen in the early (pre-Mongol) period. Within the larger context of the development of Islamic historiography from the tenth through the twelfth centuries, the case of Persian historical writing demands special attention. Discussions tend to concentrate on its sources in pre-Islamic Persian and in Arabic works, while the reasons for its emergence, its connections with Iranian and Arabic models, its political and cultural functions, and its reception, have been virtually ignored. This study answers these questions and addresses issues relating to the motivation for writing the works in question; its purpose; the role of the author, patrons and audiences; the choice of language and the reasons for that choice; the place of historical writing in the broader debate over the suitability of Persian for scholarly writing.

A major new history of classical Greece—how it rose, how it fell, and what we can learn from it Lord Byron described Greece as great, fallen, and immortal, a characterization more apt than he knew. Through most of its long history, Greece was poor. But in the classical era, Greece was densely populated and highly urbanized. Many surprisingly healthy Greeks lived in remarkably big houses and worked for high wages at specialized occupations. Middle-class spending drove sustained economic growth and classical wealth produced a stunning cultural efflorescence lasting hundreds of years. Why did Greece reach such heights in the classical period—and why only then? And how, after "the Greek miracle" had endured for centuries, did the Macedonians defeat the Greeks, seemingly bringing an end to their glory? Drawing on a massive body of newly available data and employing novel approaches to evidence, Josiah Ober offers a major new history of classical Greece and an unprecedented account of its rise and fall. Ober argues that Greece's rise was no miracle but rather the result of political breakthroughs and economic development. The extraordinary emergence of citizen-centered city-states transformed Greece into a society that defeated the mighty Persian Empire. Yet Philip and Alexander of Macedon were able to beat the Greeks in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, a victory made possible by the Macedonians' appropriation of Greek innovations. After Alexander's death, battle-hardened warlords fought ruthlessly over the remnants of his empire. But Greek cities remained populous and wealthy, their economy and culture surviving to be passed on to the Romans—and to us. A compelling narrative filled with uncanny modern parallels, this is a book for anyone interested in how great civilizations are born and die. This book is based on evidence available on a new interactive website. To learn more, please visit: http://polis.stanford.edu/.

The essays collected in this book present the first comprehensive appreciation of The Fall of the Roman Empire from historical, historiographical, and cinematic perspectives. The book also provides the principal classical sources on the period. It is a companion to Gladiator: Film and History (Blackwell, 2004) and Spartacus: Film and History (Blackwell, 2007) and completes a triad of scholarly studies on Hollywood’s greatest films about Roman history. A critical re-evaluation of the 1964 epic film The Fall of the Roman Empire, directed by Anthony Mann, from historical, film-historical, and contemporary points of view Presents a collection of scholarly essays and classical sources on the period of Roman history that ancient and modern historians have considered to be the turning point toward the eventual fall of Rome Contains a short essay by director Anthony Mann Includes a map of the Roman Empire and film stills, as well as translations of the principal ancient sources, an extensive bibliography, and a chronology of events

Some critics of the Roman historian Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17) have dismissed his work as a compendium of stale narratives and conventional attitudes. Gary B. Miles reveals in Livy's history a creative interplay between traditional stories, contemporary ideological assumptions, and the historian's own perspective at the margins of Roman aristocracy. Drawing on a range of critical approaches, Miles considers Livy's stance as a historian, the ways in which he reworked his sources, and his interpretation of such historical phenomena as recurrence, continuity, and change. Miles focuses on the foundation stories with which Livy begins his account, detecting in Livy's rendition certain original conceptions of historical time including the suggestion that Roman identity and greatness might be preserved indefinitely through successive reenactments of a historical cycle. Miles pays particular attention to two stories—those of the abduction of the Sabine women and of Romulus and Remus, showing how Livy's versions of these traditional narratives—far from leading to a simplistic moral—address unresolved political issues of his day. According to Miles, Livy shows an unusually tenacious willingness to confront dilemmas in historiography and Roman ideology which were commonly ignored or suppressed by both his predecessors and his contemporaries.

This volume in The Edinburgh Leventis Studies series collects the papers presented at the sixth A. G. Leventis conference organised under the auspices of the Department of Classics at the University of Edinburgh. As with earlier volumes, it engages with new research and new approaches to the Greek past, and brings the fruits of that research to a wider audience. Although Greek historians were fundamental in the enterprise of preserving the memory of great deeds in antiquity, they were not alone in their interest in the past. The Greeks themselves, quite apart from their historians and in a variety of non-historiographical media, were constantly creating pasts for themselves that answered to the needs - political, social, moral and even religious - of their society. In this volume eighteen scholars discuss the variety of ways in which the Greeks constructed de-constructed, engaged with, alluded to, and relied on their pasts whether it was in the poetry of Homer, in the victory odes of Pindar, in tragedy and comedy on the Athenian stage, in their pictorial art, in their political assemblies, or in their religious practices. What emerges is a comprehensive overview of the importance of and presence of the past at every level of Greek society. In the final chapter the three discussants present at the conference (Simon Goldhill, Christopher Pelling and Suzanne Said) survey the contributions to the volume, summarise its overall contributions as well as indicate new directions that further scholarship might follow.

The modern age is not the only one in which Romans and visitors to Rome have been fascinated with the city's striking juxtapositions of past and present. Rome's wealth of history also captured the imagination of the ancients. Livy's Written Rome, by Mary Jaeger, shows how one writer explored the relationship between events in Roman history, the landscape in which they occurred, and the monuments that commemorated them. While Augustus reconstructed the physical city to reflect the ideology of the Empire, the historian Livy created a written Rome and taught his readers to look beyond the city's dramatically altered landscape. In so doing, they gained insight into the lessons of the lost Republic. Drawing upon modern discourse on the connection between private mental spaces and public civic spaces, this first in-depth study of Livy's use of the urban landscape offers discerning views on his interpretation of ancient theories of historiography. Livy's Written Rome discusses the Roman idea of the monument as a place where memory and space intersect and includes fresh readings of several historical episodes, including the battle over the Sabine Women, the sedition of Marcus Manlius, and the trials of the Scipios. Scholars have long criticized Livy as a historian because his work is not in accord with modern historiographical standards. Yet even his critics agree that Livy is a masterful literary artist, and recent work on Livy has argued for the complexity and originality of his thought. Across the humanities, recent scholarship has focused on the role of memory in civic consciousness and identity. This book explores the ways in which Livy's texts question traditional assumptions about the preservation and use of the past. In doing so, it identifies a new and important facet of Livy's representation of urban Rome. Livy's Written Rome will be of interest to classicists and historians, students of ancient historiography and classical rhetoric, as well as general readers interested in memory, monuments, and historical narrative. Mary Jaeger is Professor of Classics, University of Oregon.

The Hydraulic State explores the hydraulic engineering technology underlying water system constructions of many of the ancient World Heritage sites in South America, the Middle East and Asia as used in their urban and agricultural water supply systems. Using a range of methods and techniques, some new to archaeology, Ortloff analyzes various ancient water systems such as agricultural field system designs known in ancient Peruvian and Bolivian Andean societies, water management at Nabataean Petra, the Roman Pont du Garde water distribution castellum, the Minoan site of Knossos and the water systems of dynastic (and modern) China, particularly the Grand Canal and early water systems designed to control flood episodes. In doing so the book greatly increases our understanding of the hydraulic/hydrological engineering of ancient societies through the application of Complexity Theory, Similitude Theory and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis, as well as traditional archaeological analysis methods. Serving to highlight the engineering science behind water structures of the ancient World Heritage sites discussed, this book will be of interest to archaeologists working on landscape archaeology, urbanism, agriculture and water management.