Thucydides’ well-known endorsement of Pericles praises his ability to perceive the fears of the Athenian demos and steer them in the direction that benefits the affairs of the state. This endorsement reflects a preoccupation that permeates his History: the role that individual and collective emotion plays in political decision-making and action. This… Read more
Archaic Greek poems referred to a specific historical context and to a specific audience. To understand the meaning of these poems, it is necessary to reconstruct their contexts. Because of the lack of evidence about archaic Greece, different societies have to be compared: in the case of Sappho and Alcaeus,… Read more
Descriptions of communities in the early Greek epics—like descriptions of places, people and things in general—tend to be cursory. Three features, however, recur with some frequency, each of which belongs to the public sphere: a central meetingplace (agorē), freestanding temples, and a city wall that encircles the entire settlement. Communities… Read more
Based on hitherto unpublished archival material, this paper offers a brief biographical account of Charles Louis William Merlin, who served on Her Britannic Majesty’s consular service in Greece for almost 50 years (1839-1887). His extensive correspondence (1864-1892) with the British Museum, offers the opportunity to reconstruct Merlin’s role in the… Read more
“Ritual” has long attracted classicists. While building on anthropological theories, however, the field of classics has not yet fully explored or integrated recent developments into its hermeneutics. While anthropologists have written and thought a great deal about “ritual” and the adequacy of the term for describing repetitive actions in religious… Read more
