Localism And The Ancient Greek City State

Much like our own time, the ancient Greek world was constantly expanding and becoming more connected to global networks. The landscape was shaped by an ecology of city-states, local formations that were stitched into the wider Mediterranean world. While the local is often seen as less significant than the global stage of politics, religion, and culture, localism, argues historian Hans Beck has had a pervasive influence on communal experience in a world of fast-paced change. Far from existing as outliers, citizens in these communities were deeply concerned with maintaining local identity, commercial freedom, distinct religious cults, and much more. Beyond these cultural identifiers, there lay a deeper concept of the local that guided polis societies in their contact with a rapidly expanding world. Drawing on a staggering range of materials—including texts by both known and obscure writers, numismatics, pottery analysis, and archeological records—Beck develops fine-grained case studies that illustrate the significance of the local experience. Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State builds bridges across disciplines and ideas within the humanities and shows how looking back at the history of Greek localism is important not only in the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, but also in today’s conversations about globalism, networks, and migration.

A Greek historian investigates the importance of local identity in the Mediterranean world in a “rare, genuinely original book . . . Highly recommended” (Choice). Much as our modern world is interconnected through global networks, the ancient Greek city-states were a dynamic part of the wider Mediterranean landscape. In Localism and the Ancient Greek World, historian Hans Beck argues that local shifts in politics, religion and culture had a pervasive influence in a world of fast-paced change. Citizens in these communities were deeply concerned with maintaining local identity, commercial freedom, distinct religious cults, and much more. Beyond these cultural identifiers, there lay a deeper concept of the local that guided polis societies in their contact with a rapidly expanding world. Drawing on a staggering range of materials—including texts by both known and obscure writers, numismatics, pottery analysis, and archeological records—Beck develops fine-grained case studies that illustrate the significance of the local experience. Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State builds bridges across disciplines and ideas within the humanities. It highlights the importance of localism not only in the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, but also in today’s conversations about globalism, networks, and migration.

Which dimensions of the religious experience of the ancient Greeks become tangible only if we foreground its local horizons? This book explores the manifold ways in which Greek religious beliefs and practices are encoded in and communicate with various local environments. Its individual chapters explore 'the local' in its different forms and formulations. Besides the polis perspective, they include numerous other places and locations above and below the polis-level as well as those fully or largely independent of the city-state. Overall, the local emerges as a relational concept that changes together with our understanding of the general or universal forces as they shape ancient Greek religion. The unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion becomes tangible in the manifold ways in which localizing and generalizing forces interact with each other at different times and in different places across the ancient Greek world.

Explores the many ways in which ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices operated in their various local contexts.

Situated on opposite flanks of Eurasia, ancient Mediterranean and Han-Chinese societies had a hazy understanding of each other's existence. But they had no grounded knowledge about one another, nor was there any form of direct interaction. In other words, their historical trajectories were independent. In recent years, however, many similarities between both cultures have been detected, which has energized the field of comparative history. The present volume adds to the debate a creative method of juxtaposing historical societies. Each contribution covers both ancient China and the Mediterranean in an accessible manner. Embarking from the observation that Greek, Roman, and Han-Chinese societies were governed by comparable features, the contributors to this volume explain the dynamic interplay between political rulers and the ruled masses in their culture specific manifestation as demos (Greece), populus (Rome) and min (China).

“Eat local” has become a popular marketing slogan in recent years, based on the idea that food grown or raised nearby is better for you and friendlier to the environment than similar products shipped in from many miles away. That slogan reflects a broader worldview suggesting that everything local, including government and knowledge, is better than what originates somewhere else. Small Isn’t Beautiful acknowledges that some things that are local are good, but denies that what’s local is always or even often better than what’s far away. “Localism” is based on an “undeserved aura of respectability, virtue, and good sense” and can produce results that are misguided or even dangerous. Particularly when it comes to public policies, decisions made at the local level are rarely superior and are sometimes unjust. Small Isn’t Beautiful exposes the supposed “virtue” of localism as a hodgepodge of weak arguments and misleading hunches. Trevor Latimer's engagingly written and provocative book will appeal to all readers who want to understand localism beyond slogans and marketing.

Contains 35 articles devoted to different aspects of the Greek polis and is intended not only as a present for Mogens Herman Hansen on his sixtieth birthday, but also as a way of thanking him for his significant contributions to the field of Greek history over the past three decades.

The author uses Pausanias's Periegesis to illuminate the spatial dynamics of Greek myth, showing how apparently conflicting local versions belonged to a unifying cultural expression.

The adage that an army “marches on its stomach” finds renewed emphasis in this collection of essays. Focusing on military diet and supply from Homer through the Roman Empire, Diet and Logistics in Greek and Roman Warfare explains regional dietary options and reassesses traditional notions of “provisioning” while exploring topics ranging from strategy and subterfuge to trade and terror. Through fresh insights drawn from current research and excavation spanning the Greco-Roman world, contributors confirm how providing food and drink for soldiers was critical to every army’s success and survival. This volume stimulates reevaluation of ancient militaries and encourages new research.

This is a study of Hellenistic athletics from the perspective of the victors. By analyzing agonistic epigrams as poetry on commission, it investigates how successful athletes and horse owners and their sponsors wanted their victories to be understood. Based on the identification of recurring motifs that exceed the conventions of the genre, a multiplicity of agonistic cultures is detected on three different levels - those of the polis, the region and the empire. Kings and queens used athletics in order to legitimate their rule, cities tried to compensate for military defeats by agonistic successes, and victorious aristocrats created virtual halls of fame to emphasize their common regional identity. Without a doubt, athletic victories represented far more than just leisure activities of Hellenistic noblemen. They clearly mattered in terms of politics and social status.