Classical Athens

The relief fragment in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Inv. 12059 of unknown provenance comes from the left corner slab of the tympanon of a small pediment and carries a relief depicting a leftwards reclining Papposilenus, who can be identified by the close-fitting woolen garment. The relief together with the projecting ledge on which the Silenus lies is carved from one block. The relief fragment Inv. 4760 in the Acropolis Museum, which shows  the figure of a Papposilenus reclining to the right wearing an identical woolen garment, can  be attributed to the right corner of the same pediment on the grounds of measurements, technical features and style. Papposilenus supports himself with his right arm on a wineskin, whose neck he squeezes in such a way that the wine can pour into the drinking horn. Both relief fragments come from the pediment of a small building, very probably a temple-shaped choregic monument. The naiskos, which can be dated to the 2nd half of the 4th century BC on account  of the relief style, stood (very probably) on the Street of the Tripods east of the entrance to the sanctuary of Dionysos.

Das Relieffragment im Athener Archäologischen Nationalmuseum Inv. 12059 unbekannter Herkunft stammt von der linken Eckplatte des Tympanons eines kleinen Giebels und trägt die Reliefdarstellung eines nach links gelagerten Papposilens, der durch das eng anliegen- de  wollene  Trikot  identifiziert  werden  kann.  Das  Relief  ist  zusammen  mit  der  vortretenden  Standleiste, auf dem der Silen liegt, aus demselben Block gearbeitet. Das Relieffragment Inv. 4760 im Akropolis-Museum, das die Figur eines nach rechts gelagerten Papposilens mit  einem identischen Wolltrikot zeigt, ist auf der Grundlage der Maße, der technischen Merkmale und des Stils der gegenüberliegenden rechten Ecke desselben Giebels zuzuweisen. Mit dem rechten Arm stützt der Papposilen sich auf einen Weinschlauch, dessen Hals er auf eine Weise zusammendrückt, dass sich der Wein in das Trinkhorn ergießen kann. Die beiden Relieffragmente stammen vom Giebel eines kleinen Gebäudes, sehr wahrscheinlich eines tempelförmigen choregischen Monuments. Der Naiskos, der aufgrund des Reliefstils in die 2. Hälfte des 4. Jhs. v. Chr. datiert werden kann, stand (sehr wahrscheinlich) an der Tripodenstraße östlich vom Eingang zum Dionysosheiligtum.

Spirit, Power and Axis of everything, in our mortal eyes there is Emptiness: for the truly complete in these empty ones is empty. The Moon, the Axis of everything in our world, is therefore empty for them, and SHOULD BE empty. // Дух, Сила и Ось всего, в смертных очах — Пустота: ибо истинно полное в них, пустых, пусто. Луна, Ось всего в нашем мире, для них посему и пуста, и ДОЛЖНА БЫТЬ пустой.

The classical polis develops a new sense of community and a public control system of their functions. Such new features involve both the increase of urban and architectural structures, linked to a renewed image of the civic body, and the necessity of to carry out political and social shapes which are based on a objectification of the reality, by means of the use of the scripture and measuring modes. The paper offers an analysis attempt of the phenomenon starting from the example of Athens, which is not only the fifth century polis more known regard to the administrative, economic and social organization, but also the city where the public management of the state is more advanced and the citizenship more involved. The Periclean Athens, particularly, offers an attempt to organize on democratic base the first polis myriandros of the Greek world.

En estas páginas vamos a tratar un tipo particular de atimia, la atimia por deudas en Atenas clásica, así como el tema de la rehabilitación de atimoi (en un sentido más amplio) en momentos decisivos o claves de la historia de Atenas vinculados a situaciones de crisis aguda en los que se percibe una voluntad/necesidad de ampliar el cuerpo cívico. La rehabilitación de atimoi en masa (en ocasiones junto a otros colectivos) tuvo que ser demográfica y militarmente significativa en época clásica. Palabras clave: deudores públicos, decreto de Patroclides, rehabilitación de colectivos excluidos en la ciudadanía, demografía.

and Keywords Homicide was considered the most important crime in Athenian law because the killer at tempted to usurp the state's monopoly of legitimate violence. To express the special na ture of homicide, the laws of Athens created special courts and procedures. The person accused of murder was considered polluted and was banned from agora and shrines. There were four basic categories of homicide: intentional homicide tried at the Areopa gus, involuntary homicide and planning a homicide tried at the Palladion, and just homi cide according to the laws tried at the Delphinium. Similar rules and procedures were found in other Greek communities. In the Laws, Plato proposed certain reforms for Athen ian homicide law.

Classical (Periclean) Athens continues to be held up as a model of a working direct participatory democracy. Every year new works emerge on the same theme; but it is a romantic myth, not a historical truth. This work traces historical Athenian political development from the sixth through to the fourth centuries BCE. It demonstrates its consistency with the periodization in Pseudo-Aristotle's "Constitution of the Athenians" or Athenaion Politeia, a papyrus recovered in the late nineteenth century, several decades after George Grote's multi-volume "History of Greece" had cemented the romantic view of Athenian participatory democracy that continues to dominate classical scholarship and significant areas of contemporary democratic political debate. Alas, the "Ath Pol" was assailed by many scholars both then and later as impossibly wrong wherever it clashed with Grote's outlook. Yet my reconstruction of the evidence shows Ath Pol was right; it is the academic "experts" who were sucked by Grote and his fellow romantics. This led them to actually emend the ancient texts where they failed to match with Grote. We have inherited a scholarly fiasco that still needs correcting today. People use ancient Athens to push a whole raft of agendas that have nothing to do with the historical reality of ancient Greece. I found it exciting (and also alarming) to see how this happened.

The reason Plato and other fourth century BCE writers appear opposed to Athenian democracy is not because they were born elitist snobs,. but because most modern presentations of ancient democracy are not presenting historical reality but nineteenth-century romantic fiction. It is an object lesson in how historical evidence has been selectively used and manipulated to present as history something that never existed. Athenian direct democracy is a historical fiction. Athens was ruled not by assemblies, but by a Council of 500 and, in the early fifth century BCE, by a second religious Council of Areopagus. The famous assembly met rarely in the fifth century, mostly as the only way possible to muster and rally armies for war. The assembly met with increasing frequency in the 4th century BCE, and progressively degenerated towards mob rule - as eighteenth-century CE readers saw, before Athenian history was romantically re-written a few decades later. There was no election of vast numbers of state officials by lot every year; that was a successful 1890 English fiction. There was no mid-fifth century Athenian empire; and no extensive court system in that time. The architectural evidence about courts is clear: large court buildings were much later, in the fourth century BCE; and the court system didn't work at all well. We have been fed C19th British romantic myths pretending to be ancient history.

The second half of this book traces the development of the romantic view of Athens consolidated by Grote, and its growth into the C20 and now the twenty-first century, where it continues to inspire all sorts of ludicrous theories about democratic possibilities built on a lie. It is perhaps the greatest historical and political myth of what could be broadly called the modern era. I have tried to write in plain English throughout, despite the need for rigorous academic footnoting. Clear footnotes at least mean the argument and evidence is easy to follow.  I hope you enjoy this myth-busting assault on an incredibly widespread romantic fiction.

Este libro analiza un conjunto de regímenes políticos muy diversos que se desarrollan en el Mediterráneo Antiguo. Este estudio busca enriquecer nuestra apreciación de los procesos que conducen de las situaciones anteriores al surgimiento del Estado a la centralización inherente a las estructuras estatales, sin perder de vista el papel de los poderes locales. El desarrollo de estas organizaciones permite reflexionar sobre la política como dimensión fundamental de las prácticas sociales, para lo cual contamos en determinados contextos con las propias observaciones de los antiguos sobre esta esfera de la vida en comunidad. Son procesos que también intervienen decisivamente en la configuración de los regímenes políticos las interacciones entre grupos sociales, que en algunas sociedades se perciben a partir de elaborados conceptos, a punto tal que estas reflexiones siguen alimentando hoy día las discusiones sobre las formaciones gubernamentales. Pero la apropiación contemporánea de dichas nociones, para su uso y a veces su brutal abuso, no deja de trazar implícita o explícitamente un vínculo con las situaciones históricas en las que las mismas aparecieron.
Por otra parte, la dinámica de los regímenes políticos no se desarrolla de manera aislada, sin interacción con otras organizaciones. Las guerras expansivas de unos sobre otros es un lugar común en la Antigüedad; la situación se estabiliza si los dominadores son capaces de anular o dar lugar a las reivindicaciones que los subyugados plantean ante la dominación. A veces, esto deriva en una crisis de las estructuras de gobierno, llevando a la reconfiguración de los regímenes políticos. En estas páginas los lectores hallarán las elucidaciones de los autores sobre estos tópicos y podrán cotejar sus diversas perspectivas, similitudes y diferencias entre las problemáticas históricas, los marcos teórico-metodológicos elegidos. Tendrán, en cierto modo, la ocasión de reconstruir el estimulante intercambio que entre ellos ha tenido lugar.

There has been much discussion in recent years as to whether the Athenian amnesty of 403 BC can be understood in terms of political forgiveness. A number of scholars have denied that it can. Nevertheless, if the oaths, covenants, and laws are properly analysed, it will become clear that, though ancillary to
the earliest clauses of the agreement, the promise μὴ μνησικακεῖν was a blanket measure forbidding prosecutions for crimes under the Thirty and before in the courts after 403. The covenants (συνθῆκαι) chiefly laid down conditions for future relations between Athens and Eleusis. The promise not to dredge up the past was just one concern, and should not be confused with the agreement in its entirety. This article re-examines the agreement as a whole in light of recent
discussion of the meaning of amnesty in the ancient world, and argues that the oath μὴ μνησικακεῖν, sworn subsequently, affirmed just one of the covenants, not, as is sometimes held, every covenant. Other clauses may have been reaffirmed
by separate oaths. The legislation (νόμοι) which followed was designed to give clearer legal definition to μὴ μνησικακεῖν, but was distinct and separate from the covenants of amnesty. The Appendix by Edward Harris discusses the suits for homicide mentioned at [Aristotle] Ath. Pol. 39.5.

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the memory of Nicias was contested in Athenian public discourse after the failure of the Sicilian expedition. Defending the reliability of Pausanias’ testimony (1.29.11-12), it makes the case that the conspicuous absence of Nicias’ name on the public funeral monument of 412 BC prompted Pausanias to report the story he had read in Philistus (FGrHist 556 F 53). Thucydides’ silence concerning this damnatio memoriae of Nicias stems from the historian’s disapproval of the Athenians’ action; his eulogy of Nicias (7.86.5) is a deliberate correction of the exclusion of Nicias’ name from the Athenian casualty list. By the middle of the 4th century, Nicias played again a positive role in Athenian social memory, as Demosthenes’ positive reference to him in one of his assembly speeches shows (D. 3.21). This restoration of Nicias’ reputation is largely due to the Athenians’ memorial practices: the annual public funeral orations downplayed defeats and integrated them into the idealized version of Athenian history which celebrated all the fallen as manifestations of timeless Athenian excellence. Over the decades, the details of particular campaigns and the failings of individual generals faded from common historical consciousness. This process facilitated the rehabilitation of Nicias’ reputation in the eyes of later generations of Athenians.

KEYWORDS: Social memory; Sicilian expedition; Nicias; logos epitaphios; Pausanias

In their analysis of the Athenians' shared image of their past as an essential element of Athenian collective identity, scholars have largely focused on polis-wide commemorative activities such as the Athenian public funeral oration for the war dead. Taking the inherent multipolarity of social memory into account, this paper examines the collective memories of two types of Athenian subgroups , namely demes and tribes, and explores how their shared memories and the 'official' Athenian polis tradition mutually influenced and sustained each other in th-and th-century Athenian public discourse. Im Zentrum der Analyse des Geschichtsbilds der Athener als integralem Element ihrer kol-lektiven Identität standen bisher vornehmlich die polisweiten Formen des öffentlichen Ge-denkens, wie z. B. die öffentliche Leichenrede für die gefallenen Athener. Ausgehend von der dem kollektiven Gedächtnis inhärenten Multipolarität widmet sich dieser Beitrag den in den Demen und Phylen gepflegten Erinnerungen und untersucht, wie diese und die ‚offizielle' athenische Polistradition sich im öffentlichen Diskurs der Athener im. und. Jahrhundert v. Chr. gegenseitig beeinflussten und stützten.

This article has two objectives. First, and in particular, it seeks to reinterpret the ostracism procedure of early democratic Athens. Since Aristotle, this has been understood as a rational, political weapon of collective defense, intended to expel from Athens a disproportionately powerful individual. In this article, by putting emphasis on the materiality, gestures, and location of ostraka-casting, I propose instead that the institution can more fruitfully be understood as a ritual enactment of civic unity. Second, and more generally, I hope to explore the frames within which early Athenian democracy is placed: while Greek kingship and tyranny (i.e.“primitive” polities) have been very successfully explored through anthropological and cross-cultural comparison, Greek democracy for the most part has remained in the domains of
the institutional historian and political theorist. Taking a phenomenological and comparative approach, this article asks how the citizens of early democratic Athens experienced and
comprehended their new sovereignty and the invented procedures of mass decision-making through which it was expressed.

The characteristics of Athenian democracy in the fourth century B.C. differ from those of  the fifth. No longer relevant was the social projection that was part of the reforms of Cleisthenes and Ephialtes, in which the rights of the poor were justified through their participation in the fleet and the empire. In Athens, as in other Greek cities, the term demokratia continued to be applied to the extent that the Ecclesia and the Boule remained as representative organs, although it is known that their powers were severely restricted or supervised by powerful evergetai or even by a foreign state. The city underwent fierce tension as a result of the attempt by oligarchs to control the democracy, which made resistance a necessity. The conflict was resolved in favour of restrictions, with the support of the Macedonian monarchy. In the end, democracy would be reduced to a propaganda term, surviving only under the protection of the Hellenistic basileis.

The military successes of the Athenian Iphicrates to the command of a highly professional and qualified body of mercenary peltasts during the Corinthian War constitutes one of the factors that opened the way to a new understanding of the warfare and the society in the fourth century Greece, in which the crisis of the old identification between hoplite, citizen and landowner goes along with that of the polis itself and her ideological base.

Comedy has often been put forward as a genre of ancient writing where we may, in some topics and subjects, be able to get closer to the broader base of popular opinion than in some other, more clearly elite-centred kinds of writing. This does not, however, apply to all kinds of comedy – or indeed all kinds of elite writing. Yet in terms of Old Comedy – the comic plays as written Aristophanes and his predecessors during the Classical era – this characterisation feels quite apt. The comedies of this period were of course subject to some limitation and conventions stemming from their genre, but they were in constant interaction with the opinion and worldviews of a fairly broad set of (freeborn) audiences of their contemporaries. This talk seeks to kick off the web seminar series by taking a look at Aristophanes’ ways of using ethnic categories and stereotypes as a material for his comedy.

The Great Hadrianic Peristyle of a Hundred Columns in Athens

The research during 2013 and 2014 in the library of Hadrian demonstrates that the plan of the compound was  designed on a rectangle with dimensions 300 and 400  Roman feet (pedes). Accordingly, it appears that the pool  in the middle of the compound was 200 pedes long. Certain interaxial column spaces of the peristyle were equal to one Roman rod or 10 pedes. The discovery of  column fragments from Phrygian marble (pavonazzetto) allows for the reconstruction of the Corinthian order in the internal peristyle. Τhe dimensions are combined with in situ features on the stylobate and the walls.

The aim of this paper is to show that tokens were used in festivals in Hellenistic Athens and that
the well-known practice of the Roman period had its forerunners already in the Hellenistic period.
Neglected aspects of imagery and legends on tokens, as well as find contexts, help shed new light
on the particular roles tokens played in the civic festivals of Athens. Perhaps the first instance
when tokens were used in festivals was with the institution of theoric distributions in the fourth
century B.C. Furthermore, I aim to explore the role of the Council of Five Hundred and of some
magistrate boards which worked closely with the Council in the distribution of tokens. The adjunct
catalogue provides an overview of the tokens discussed in the paper.

The anaylisis of the public and personal economic factors, joined to that prosopographical of the political leaders at the time and that of the citizenship rights, undertaken before, betray a complex but coherent scene of the Athenian society at the end of fifth century and early fourth century B.C., where all of these elements interact and explain each other. The adverses economic conditions contribute to increase the tensions and the risk of losing rights.

Athens was an ancient city like no other. Named for a goddess, epicenter of the first democracy, birthplace of tragic and comic theater, locus of the major philosophical schools, artistically in the vanguard for centuries, it looms larger than any other ancient polis in contemporary thought from historical scholarship to tourist attractions. The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens is a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the ancient city, its topography and monuments, inhabitants and cultural institutions, religious rituals and politics. Chapters in the volume link the religious, cultural, and political institutions of Athens to the physical locales in which they took place, so that readers gain a sense of the life and realia of the ancient city. Discussion of the urban plan with its streets, gates, walls and public and private buildings will give readers a thorough understanding of how the city operated, how various people flowed through it, what they saw, heard, smelled and perhaps tasted. Drawing from the newest scholarship on various aspects of the city as well as on-going excavations of its Agora, sanctuaries, and cemeteries, this volume examines how the city was planned, how it functioned, and how it was transformed from a democratic polis into a Roman urbs.

The article analyzes the functioning of the Athenian assembly during the fifth cen-tury BC, taking into account the effects of the use of persuasive speech and the thinking pro-cess that was developed in this collective space. In this light, the ways of public participation are considered comparing them with the audience performance in the theater. The hypothesis of a homology between assembly and theater is also proposed. Finally, it is emphasized the role of the emotional matter in the decision-making process.

Cavalry tactics require a well-thought-out horse and rider training on a regular basis as well as a cavalry led by a commander who has tactical skill, sufficient horsemanship and knowledge of horses. As a cavalry commander and horseman Xenophon studied the developments on the battlefield during the 5th and 4th century BC. He carefully analysed cavalry tactics of various enemies of Athens and he put forward recommendations on how the Athenians should train their cavalry. His works On Horsemanship and On the Cavalry Commander therefore show the most modern cavalry requirements of that time. They are important documents showing how the different styles of cavalry deployment came to influence each other. This paper wants to explain which foreign tactics he studied and why Xenophon advised specific horse training exercises to the Athenians.

This paper presents the events classical authors deemed as key moments in the rise and fall of Athens and Sparta, and examines the vocabulary they used to describe change: its extent (momentary or long-lasting), nature (evolution, transition, reversal, destruction, or renewal), and effects (positive or negative). It relies mainly on Thucydides and Isocrates and uses supporting evidence where appropriate. The Persian Wars, the end of the Peloponnesian War, and the battles of Knidos, Naxos, and Leuktra were frequently thought of as the causes of Athens' and Sparta's growth or collapse, prosperity or misfortune. These events were not only key moments in the balance of power in interstate relations, but also part of a particular argumentation which exploited and presented the phenomenon of change in several ways and through varying narratives. The study of the vocabulary pertaining to the rise and fall of the two cities reveals, on the one hand, the different ways one can treat change and, on the other hand, that the relevant words can convey neutral, positive, or negative connotations, depending especially on an author's intentions when emphasising a particular event.

Dans le cas de l'Athènes classique, la famille — et en particulier ces institutions essentielles que sont le mariage et l'adoption — est étudiée généralement sous deux angles qui tendent à évacuer la question du patrimoine : l'angle juridique, et celui de l'anthropologie culturelle. On s'attache ici à montrer l'intérêt d'une approche économique, à travers l'étude de l'accumulation foncière, envisagée comme un révélateur des stratégies matrimoniales et successorales. Les transferts de terres par mariage surviennent avant tout entre proches parents, en particulier dans le cas d'une fille « épiclère ». Les plaidoyers des orateurs attiques permettent ainsi de mettre en lumière des stratégies qui, prolongeant l'indivision d'un patrimoine à la faveur d'unions endogames ou d'un célibat des cadets, tendent à rétablir une forme de primogéniture, un droit d'aînesse qui ne dit pas son nom, contre l'obligation légale d'un partage du patrimoine entre héritiers mâles. À l'inverse, dans le cas des unions exogames, le patrimoine maternel transmis aux enfants se limite à la dot, qui comprend rarement des biens immobiliers, et reste nettement inférieure aux parts dévolues aux héritiers mâles. Des transferts de patrimoine importants peuvent néanmoins survenir dans le cas d'une union exogame, lorsque le mariage est suivi d'une adoption, comme l'illustrent certains plaidoyers du IV e siècle. Toutefois, s'ils permettent de contourner la loi qui donne la priorité à la lignée masculine dans la succession au détriment des héritiers par les femmes et des parents par alliance, ces arrangements conduisent avant tout à s'approprier des revenus, non des terres, ce qui favorise, au sein de la « classe liturgique », un processus de reconversion des patrimoines fonciers en direction d'activités urbaines et commerciales.

Slavery is one of the most prominent aspects of the ancient Greek civilization, yet exact role of slavery in Greek society and economy is
still a matter of debate. The example that is most analyzed is Classical Athens, mainly on the account of the comparative abundance of primary sources. However, this wealth of sources is partially deceiving, because it allows scholars to see that slavery was of considerable importance, but only rarely to go beyond this general conclusion. One of the biggest obstacles is the lack of reliable numerical data: how numerous were slaves in ancient Athens, what percentage of the total population they were? This paper analyzes the primary source material that was used to solve the issue, as well as efforts of various scholars in that regard. Our knowledge of Athenian state and society makes fairly obvious that
Athenians themselves did not know the number of their slaves. The conclusion is that we cannot ever hope to obtain anything resembling a precise number, but a reasonable range at best. The real number probably fluctuated from decade to decade, depending on rates of slave supply, mortality and manumission.

The first part of this chapter provides a general introduction to the concept of war-induced trauma and discusses three challenges that the application of this modern concept to the ancient Greek world poses, i.e. the problem of retrospective diagnoses of PTSD, the absence of a theoretical concept of combat trauma in ancient Greece, and the question whether combat trauma is a universal or historically and culturally specific phenomenon.
The second part uses Thucydides’ account of the Athenian retreat from Syracuse in 413 BC as a case study to argue that the Athenians and their allies were exposed to extreme war experiences that by far exceeded the hardships of normal military campaigns and therefore likely resulted in psychological trauma for at least some of the survivors.
Drawing on known causes of contemporary war-induced trauma, Ι make the case that the Athenian value system and the particular social, tactical and technological environments during the Sicilian campaign rendered the Athenian soldiers especially susceptible to developing post-traumatic symptoms. In addition to this circumstantial evidence, Thucydides’ vivid depiction of the Athenian soldiers’ anxiety, self-blame and despair (7.75) indicates that the survivors he spoke to in his attempt to record the events of the war as accurately as possible (1.22.2) still suffered greatly under the weight of their traumatic experience in Sicily.

During the classical period, the trireme was the principal warship-type in the Mediterranean region. Although it carried sails for cruising and steering, they were galleys designed to fight using oar power. The main weapon of a trireme was the bronze-plated ram situated on the prow. In battle, the trireme was propelled solely by its 170 rowers and is believed to have achieved 10 knots at the critical moment of impact. The ram could smash a hole in the enemy vessel and so cripple her, but could not sink her. The ancient texts suggest that ancient warships that had been “sunk”, or put out of action, could be collected and towed away. Boarding an enemy vessel with the view to deciding the issue by hand-to-hand combat was also an important tactic. The Greek naval victory over the Persians at Salamis, 480 BC, allowed the Athenians to deploy large fleets in the Aegean and thus liberate the Greeks from Persian oppression. As the naval leader of an alliance of Greek states, called the Delian League, Athens could use its fleet to carve out an empire for herself. By 431 BC her dominance in the eastern Mediterranean brought her into conflict with Greece’s major land power, Sparta and its allies. The Peloponnesian war (431-404 BC) was the grand struggle that finally brought Athens to its ruin by the total destruction​ of her naval arm and fleet of triremes in 404 BC. Athens had thus lost the ability to overcome her enemies.

Lisa Kallet famously argued that public finance was beyond the grasp of the Athenian dēmos (“people”) in the Gedenkschrift for the great epigrapher David M. Lewis. In her view, non-elite Athenians knew next to nothing about what the state spent.  Consequently, they gratefully accepted the financial advice that politicians gave them.  Kallet concluded that the preferences that public spending reflected were thus those of, not the dēmos, but their elite politicians.  Kallet’s argument was part of her larger claim that it was elite politicians, not the dēmos, as Josiah Ober had argued, that dictated the content of the public culture that elite and non-elite Athenians shared. This article suggests that her famous argument went too far. It makes the case that the dēmos had the necessary general knowledge and the necessary understanding of public finance in order to make sound independent decisions about the state’s budget. It thus argues that the sums that the state spent on different activities did bear out the general preferences of non-elite Athenians. In the assembly, it was these citizens who authorised the extraordinary activities of their states and the changes to its recurring activities. In doing so, the dēmos were always well informed of the financial implications of their votes. The council of five-hundred members monitored the revenues and the expenses of the polis closely. Hence this democratic council could advise the dēmos whether extra funds had to be raised for what they had previously voted for. In the assembly’s debates the politician who supported a proposal had to cost it accurately, and to show how this cost related to the polis’s fiscal position. If a rival politician convinced assembly-goers that his proposal was unaffordable, he would also have to advise how its cost could be reduced, or where new income or cash-reserves could be found to pay for it. In voting for such a proposal, assembly-goers were therefore making a decision not only on its merit but also on how much public income should be devoted to it.
Kallet simply failed to acknowledge that the dēmos acquired valuable general knowledge about public finance simply by participating in politics. Their constant adjudicating of the assembly’s debates about public finance taught them a great deal about what the state spent on its three major public activities. What they had learnt about budgeting in their demes and in their private lives also helped them to take such decisions. It is thus more than likely that the dēmos was able to judge whether a proposal in the assembly cost the same as what was normally spent on such things. This would have made it easier for them to change their pattern of spending and hence what they spent on one class of activities relative to others. Over time, such votes allowed assembly-goers to spend more on what they saw a priority and less on what they saw as less of a priority. As the classical period progressed, they became much better too at managing public income and setting budgets for public expenditure.
Their constant adjudicating of such public-spending debates developed their general knowledge of what was spent on the state’s three major activities. What they had learnt outside the assembly about budgeting helped them to take such decisions. Consequently, the dēmos was able to judge whether a proposal cost the same as what was normally spent on such things. This made it easier for them to change their pattern of spending and hence what they spent on one class of activities relative to others. Over time, such votes allowed assemblygoers to spend more on what they saw a priority and less on what they saw as less of a priority. As the classical period progressed, they became much better too at managing public income and setting budgets for public expenditure.

The article examines the urban economy of the famous Athenian district of Kerameikos through the restitution of the road network and the main economic activities that took place there between the Classical and Hellenistic periods, up to the Roman age, through a reconstruction carried out thanks to the literary sources and archaeological evidence.

El objetivo del presente trabajo consiste en intentar demostrar que, al menos en el período comprendido entre el final de la guerra del Peloponeso y la paz del Rey (403-386), del análisis prosopográfico de las figuras individuales protagonistas del momento, combinado con la aproximación a las realidades sociales, no se puede deducir que haya posiciones mecánicamente encuadradas, permanentes o inmovilistas de los políticos en facciones o corrientes, comparables a los partidos de la Historia contemporánea

This paper intends to illustrate the monuments of the Periklean building programme, of the mid-late 5th century BC, as overtly formative media in relation to Athenian cultural memory. In  essence,  it  will  be  argued  that  the  monumental  creations  of  this  period  embody  a  configura-tion  of  Athenian  temporality;  organizing  synoptic  episodes  into  an  ethno-cultural  continuum.  A  required  element  to  this  process  involves  the  incitement  of  landscapes,  as  the  framework  into  which  cultural  memory  is  positioned  and  incited.  This  also  includes  the  election  of  totemic  fig-ures, which act simultaneously as emblems of distinct eras and coalescence group memory around heroic  events.  The  provision  of  those  elements  necessary  for  cultural  remembering  within  these  monuments,  indicate  them  as  affording  an  overtly  formative  arena  for  Athenian  collective  identity. Moreover, as well as organizing Athenian temporality via narratives of primordial origin, the monuments also display the inclusion of historical, biographical, memory into registers of cultural remembering.