Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Classical Studies
  4. Ancient history
  5. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

23990 results in Ancient history

Page 986 of 1200

  • 7 - Sicily, 478-431 b.c.

    • By D. Asheri, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 147-170

  • Summary

    The Concert of Greek Sicily was successfully orchestrated by Hiero until his major partner Theron died in 472. The fall of the Emmenids marked not only a radical constitutional change in the city state of Acragas, but also the dissolution of the entire Acragantine epicracy. The end of tyranny at Syracuse precipitated the immediate dissolution of the Deinomenid epicracy in eastern Sicily. The events of 459/8 can plausibly be viewed as the second phase in the growth of the Sicel movement as well as of Ducetius' personal leadership. The Sicel movement's most enduring result was the furtherance of Sicel assimilation into the cultural Siciliote koine of the late fifth century BC. The three decades following the fall of the tyrannies were crucial to Syracuse's constitutional and socio-economic development and its rise to the rank of a major hegemonic power in the West.

  • 8e - Athenian Cults and Festivals

  • from 8 - Greek culture, religion and society in the fifth century b.c.
  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 245-267

  • Summary

    The rituals of Greek polis festivals contain elements of great antiquity. Particular traits of animal sacrifice as found especially in the Athenian ceremony of ox-murder, Buphonia, have been traced to the Paleolithic period, and the women's festival of Thesmophoria has been credited with a Stone Age character, too. Much of the documentation still consists in the material remains of cults in the sanctuaries as recovered and analysed by archaeology. But the growth of literacy led to the greater regulation of religion including leges sacrae, were published in the form of inscriptions under the pressure of the democratic system. The Athenian year begins in summer after harvest, with the first month, Hekatombaion, roughly corresponding to July. Divination had played its part in overthrowing the tyrants. The mysteries became part of the prestige of Athens and retained their authority, and their identity, for about one thousand years.

  • Preface

  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp xiii-xvi

  • Summary

    This volume is unlike any which has preceded it. Earlier volumes have covered the whole of the Mediterranean and Near East. We hardly stray beyond Greece, deferring developments elsewhere to Volume VI. We are thus stressing that this is a period when, for the first and last time before the Romans, great political and military power on the one hand and cultural importance on the other, including the presence of historians to describe that power, are located in the same place. By contrast, Persia and the empires which preceded it were powerful but not articulate; the Jews were articulate but not powerful. This gives the volume a coherence which its predecessors and immediate successors lack.

    Some of the coherence arises from the nature of our sources, which make an Athenian standpoint hard to avoid. That point was noticed by Sallust in the first century B.C.:

    As I reckon it, the actions of the Athenians were indeed vast and magnificent, but rather less substantial than report makes them. But because writers of genius grew up there, Athenian deeds are renowned as the greatest throughout the world. The talent of those who did them is judged by the powers of praise of these outstanding literary geniuses. (Bell. Cat. 8.2—4)

  • 8c - Rebuilding in Athens and Attica

  • from 8 - Greek culture, religion and society in the fifth century b.c.
  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 206-222

  • Summary

    From about 460 the western part of the hill was dominated by Phidias' colossal bronze Athena Promachos. The prompt replacement of the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton by a new pair made by Critius and Nesiotes, may be seen in this light. In the sixth and early fifth centuries the Athenians had endeavoured to make modest provision for the instruments of government, especially in the time of Cleisthenes. The great Doric temple, which stands miraculously preserved on the hill overlooking the Agora from the west, was under construction at the same time as the Parthenon, probably in the middle 440s. Doric was the dominant order in fifth-century Athens, but in the latter part of the century Ionic was used to design buildings which offered a wonderful contrast. Incidentally an Attic type of column-base was developed, with a concave moulding between two convex.

  • 9 - The Archidamian War

  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 370-432

  • Summary

    Open warfare between Athens and the Peloponnesian League began in 431. Thucydides oscillates between two beginnings of the war, the Theban attack on Plataea in the spring and the Spartan invasion of Attica eighty days later. Archidamus analysis of the strengths of the Athenian position is hardly different from that of Pericles. During the Archidamian War there were five invasions, only hampered by Athenian cavalry who kept the light-armed away from the city itself. The longest invasion, in 430, lasted forty days, the shortest, in 425, lasted fifteen days. The invasions of 430 and 427 were said to be particularly damaging. National characters and institutions played their part in the way in which war policies were formed. The name of Plataea meant much for Spartan sentiment, and Archidamus made some attempt at a settlement on the basis of a Plataean return to neutrality.

  • 8h - Athens as a Cultural Centre

  • from 8 - Greek culture, religion and society in the fifth century b.c.
  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 306-369

  • Summary

    The contributions to fifth-century Athenian culture by non-Athenian poets and prose writers were immeasurably greater than the surviving remains indicate. Anaxagoras, Diogenes and probably also Democritus brought the fruits of rational explorations of the physical universe, and the sophists had accompanied their teaching of rhetoric by far-reaching rational analyses and criticisms of the structure of human society and the problems besetting it. All layers of Athenian society will have been beneficiaries of the stimulus which the influx of foreigners brought to the economic life of the city. But their impact on its cultural life will have been most immediately felt by the upper classes. The doctrines of the Ionian physicists as popularized by the rationalism of the sophists were thought to be doing precisely that and were regarded by many as a threat to the established Greek religion.

  • 6 - The Thirty Years' Peace

  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 121-146

  • Summary

    A mission to Athens from the Persian commanders is followed by an Athenian embassy headed by Callias son of Hipponicus and by a settlement. In the years immediately following the Cyprus expedition, Thucydides reports only one pair of events, a Spartan expedition to Delphi, which entrusted the shrine to the Delphians, followed by an Athenian counter expedition handing it over to the Phocians. The Chersonese had been subject to a prolonged period of Thracian raids, and Pericles not only strengthened the cities population with his thousand Athenian settlers, but fortified the isthmus from sea to sea. Although Athens had made her attempt to bolster the Phocian position in Delphi, more effort was done to sustain her naval empire. The first event after the Thirty Years' Peace thought worthy of report by Thucydides is in 440, a war between Samos and Miletus about Priene.

  • 8a - Art: Archaic to Classical

  • from 8 - Greek culture, religion and society in the fifth century b.c.
  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 171-183

  • Summary

    The naturalism of the late Archaic period was distinctly untypical of the Greek artistic tradition as a whole. From the Geometric period onward every successive style of Greek art has regularly been disciplined by strict canons of formal order. The conflict with the Persians, as Herodotus and Aeschylus make clear, was as much a moral as a military one. The story of high classical Greek art is for the most part the story of Athenian art, and it is in the great monuments of the Periclean building programme that the emerging dual nature in the art of the time is most apparent. The clear, patterned forms of Archaic and the simple solidity of Early Classical drapery are replaced by irregular eddies, furrows and shadows. Capturing impressions seems to have become an end in itself in much of the art of the last three decades of the fifth century.

  • 11 - The Spartan Resurgence

  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 464-498

  • Summary

    At Sparta envoys from Chios and Erythrae were supported by one from Tissaphernes, satrap of Sardis. At the end of summer a major Athenian force reached Samos under Phrynichus. Near the end of winter the Athenian conference with Tissaphernes took place, at which Pisander and his colleagues first agreed to surrender all Ionia but at the third session they baulked at the demand that the King should be allowed to build and sail as many ships as he wished along his Aegean coast. In the spring of 407 the Athenian envoys on their way up-country met a Spartan embassy on its way down, under one Boeotius, claiming to have obtained all that they could wish from the King, together with Cyrus the King's younger son coming as satrap of Lydia, Great Phrygia and Cappadocia, and commander of all Persian forces in the west.

  • 8f - Athenian Religion and Literature

  • from 8 - Greek culture, religion and society in the fifth century b.c.
  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 268-286

  • Summary

    For the fifth-century Athenian audience the dominant literary phenomenon was the drama. Drama emerged from a context of ritual celebration and remained even in its developed form an act of worship, honouring the god in his precinct. The relation between religion and literature was a phenomenon unique in the history of the West. There are some aspects of the religious element in Sophoclean tragedy which seem to stem from sources darker and deeper than the final Aeschylean vision of civic order based on divine reconciliation. The focus of his tragedy is often not the community but the lonely, stubborn protagonist who defies it, recalcitrant to the end, impervious to persuasion or threat. Comedy was first included in the programme of the Dionysia in 486 BC. From fear and reverence for the gods, even for Dionysus himself, comedy brought the worshipper a momentary dispensation.

  • 8d - Panhellenic Cults and Panhellenic Poets

  • from 8 - Greek culture, religion and society in the fifth century b.c.
  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 223-244

  • Summary

    Many of the innumerable ancient Greek festivals included athletic and cultural contests. The four Panhellenic game festivals namely, the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean, were in origin very different in size and significance from each other. The Olympic Games, which were held in honour of Zeus, seem to have acquired a wider importance quite early in the Archaic period. The Pythian Games at Delphi began as a purely musical event. The Isthmian and Nemean Games also took their classical form in the early sixth century. The gods in whose honour these festivals were held were panhellenic deities, and in gathering at their sanctuaries the Greeks felt very strongly the bonds of a common religion and culture. The poems of Pindar and Bacchylides demonstrate in another important way the unifying force of these great festivals, in that so many of them were composed for Sicilian patrons.

  • 3 - The Delian League to 449 b. c.

  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 34-61

  • Summary

    In its early years, the Delian League was both a body fighting against Persia on behalf of the Greeks and a body through which Athens found opportunities to extend her own power. Friendship between Sparta and Athens came to an end as a result of the Messenian War which followed the great earthquake of 464. In Greece Athens' new alliances, and the desire to conquer Aegina at last, drew her into the First Peloponnesian War. War against the Persians continued in Athens. A fleet of two hundred Athenian and allied ships was sent to Cyprus. This force in Cyprus received an appeal for help from the Libyan king Inaros, who had incited Egypt to revolt against Persia, and it was decided to help. Greeks had fought for Egyptian kings and had settled in Egypt in the seventh and sixth centuries, and many Greeks still lived there in the fifth century.

  • 8b - Classical Cities and Sanctuaries

  • from 8 - Greek culture, religion and society in the fifth century b.c.
  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 184-205

  • Summary

    The Greek city was a creation of the Archaic period, in architectural form as in political, religious and social life. Next to the major temples, the city walls were the most impressive works of architecture. Marble was used on a bigger scale in the fifth century, for whole temples and occasionally other buildings. At Acragas in the course of the century a series of temples was built; at Athens a great building programme was carried out in the second half of the century. The Doric and Ionic orders, fully developed in the sixth century, attained perfection by the middle of the fifth. The greatest sanctuaries attained a complex form in course of time, without a formal plan. The stoa played a vital role in Greek life and architecture. The uses of the stoas cover the whole range of Greek political, religious and social life.

Page 986 of 1200