Violence and Community: Law, Space and Identity in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean World

Description

Violence and community were intimately linked in the ancient world. While various aspects of violence have been long studied on their own (warfare, revolution, murder, theft, piracy), there has been little effort so far to study violence as a unified field and explore its role in community formation. This volume aims to construct such an agenda by exploring the historiography of the study of violence in antiquity, and highlighting a number of important paradoxes of ancient violence. It explores the forceful nexus between wealth, power and the passions by focusing on three major aspects that link violence and community: the attempts of communities to regulate and canalise violence through law, the constitutive role of violence in communal identities, and the ways in which communities dealt with violence in regards to private and public space, landscapes and territories. The contributions to this volume range widely in both time and space: temporally, they cover the full span from the archaic to the Roman imperial period, while spatially they extend from Athens and Sparta through Crete, Arcadia and Macedonia to Egypt and Israel. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 Abbreviations......Page 8 Notes on contributors......Page 10 1 Introduction: the study of violence and community in ancient Greek history......Page 12 2 Making law grip: inequality, injustice, and legal remedy in Solonian Attica and ancient Israel......Page 39 3 How to cast a criminal out of Athens: law and territory in archaic Attica......Page 61 4 Macedonians in Bottiaea: ‘warriors’ and identities in late Iron Age and archaic Macedonia......Page 83 5 Socialisation, identity and violence in classical Greek cities......Page 110 6 Binding curses, agency and the Athenian democracy......Page 153 7 Reintegrating the exiles: violence, urban landscape and memory in early Hellenistic Tegea......Page 170 8 Violating the security of the oikia: thefts from houses in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods......Page 186 Index......Page 205