Ancient Greece wasn't one big country like modern Greece is today. Instead, areas of land belonged to ‘city states’ (poleis), which all acted separately from the others. Sometimes they would make alliances with each other to fight enemies like the Persians — sometimes the Greek city states would fight each other.
Much of the thought and the practice of human life is irredeem-ably related to Ionia, to Achaea, to classical Greek civilisation. Certainly one, if not the only one, of the central imaginings of ourselves and our world is Ionian. Our mapping of ourselves in our world also owes a huge debt to the classical. The emergence, materialisation, and extra-territorialisation of Ionian spaces of philosop…
The market today resembles a Leviathan, a great beast growing in accordance with no law outside of the vain rapacity of its uncanny monstrosity, extending its boundaries beyond the nation-state, beyond government intervention, beyond ecologically safe limits and beyond our will to enter into it. It has become properly automatic, functioning for no purpose outside of itsel…
Cities, Monuments and Objects in the Roman and Byzantine Levant celebrates Gabriel Mazor and his lifetime of work at the monumental city of Nysa-Scythopolis, Bet She?an Bays?n. This metropolis, part of the storied Decapolis, or league of ten cities, that flourished during the Hellenistic, Roman-Byzantine and very early Islamic periods until the devastating earthquake of AD 748, has been the sin…
“Most things in the history of Greece have become a subject of dispute” is how Pausanias, the second-century a.d. author of a famous guide to sites throughout Greece, summed up the challenge and the fascination of thinking about the significance of ancient Greek history (Guide to Greece 4.2.3). The subject was disputed then because Pausanias, a Greek, lived and wrote under the Roman Empire,…
Thessaly was a region of great importance in the ancient Greek world, possessing both agricultural abundance and a strategic position between north and south. It presents historians with the challenge of seeing beyond traditional stereotypes (wealth and witches, horses and hospitality) that have coloured perceptions of its people from antiquity to the present day. It also presents a complex and…
It is proposed here to show upon what principles and by what rules Greek and Roman society was governed. We unite in the same study both the Greeks and the Romans, because these two peoples, who were two branches of a single race, and who spoke two idioms of a single language, also had the same institutions and the same principles of government, and passed through a series of similar revolution…
A Great Civilization Many people believe that the greatest of all the civilizations of the ancient world was the civilization of Greece. However, it is a little misleading to speak about ancient Greece as though it were a single civilization. Ancient Greece was not a unified country. It was a collection of independent city-states. The ancient Greek word for city-state was polis (/poh* lihs/). A…