How to Do Things with History: New Approaches to Ancient Greece

Description

How to Do Things with History is a collection of essays that explores current and future approaches to the study of ancient Greek cultural history. Rather than focus directly on methodology, the essays in this volume demonstrate how some of the most productive and significant methodologies for studying ancient Greece can be employed to illuminate a range of different kinds of subject matter. These essays, which bring together the work of some of the most talented scholars in the field, are based upon papers delivered at a conference held at Cambridge University in September of 2014 in honor of Paul Cartledge's retirement from the post of A. G. Leventis Professor of Ancient Greek Culture. For the better part of four decades, Paul Cartledge has spearheaded intellectual developments in the field of Greek culture in both scholarly and public contexts. His work has combined insightful historical accounts of particular places, periods, and thinkers with a willingness to explore comparative approaches and a keen focus on methodology. Cartledge has throughout his career emphasized the analysis of practice - the study not, for instance, of the history of thought but of thinking in action and through action. The assembled essays trace the broad horizons charted by Cartledge's work: from studies of political thinking to accounts of legal and cultural practices to politically astute approaches to historiography. The contributors to this volume all take the parameters and contours of Cartledge's work, which has profoundly influenced an entire generation of scholars, as starting points for their own historical and historiographical explorations. Those parameters and contours provide a common thread that runs through and connects all of the essays while also offering sufficient freedom for individual contributors to demonstrate an array of rich and varied approaches to the study of the past. Cover How to Do Things with History Copyright Contents Acknowledgments List of Contributors Introduction Part one: Theory and Practice 1. The “Great Leap” in Early Greek Politics and Political Thought: A Comparative Perspective 2. Pericles’ Utopia: A Reading of Thucydides and Plato 3. How to Turn History into Scenario: Plato’s Republic Book 8 on the Role of Political Office in Constitutional Change 4. “Cyrus appeared both great and good”: Xenophon and the Performativity of Kingship 5. Jurors and Serial Killers: Loneliness, Deliberation, and Community in Ancient Athens Part two: Economy and Society: Violence, Gender, and Class 6. The Sparta Game: Violence, Proportionality, Austerity, Collapse 7. Marx and Antiquity 8. Marxism and Ancient History 9. Building for the State: A World-​Historical Perspective Part three: Source Pluralism 10. Picturing History: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Tyrannicide in the Art of Classical Athens and Early Imperial China 11. Imaginary Intercourse: An Illustrated History of Greek Pederasty 12. The Boys from Cydathenaeum: Aristophanes versus Cleon Again 13. How to Write Anti-​Roman History Afterword Index