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Reviews
| Politics and Society in Ancient Greece, by Nicholas F. Jones. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008. 167 pages. $44.95, cloth.
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| Politics and Society in Ancient Greece is a volume in the new Praeger Series on the Ancient World. Each of the volumes in the series is written by a distinguished scholar and is intended to provide advanced secondary and university students and their instructors with a brief survey of an important aspect of ancient history that reflects the current state of scholarship. In his volume, Professor Jones offers a lucid analysis of politics and political practices in classical Greece in their social context. Unlike other introductory accounts of Greek history, however, Politics and Society in Ancient Greece does not emphasize narrative political history but thematic analysis of the interaction of political and social institutions. |
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Even with this limitation, the topic is potentially vast. A recent count puts the number of cities in Greece during the classical period—roughly 500 to 323 BCE—at well over a thousand, each with its own distinctive constitution and institutions. Clearly, there were far too many cities to discuss all or even a significant number of them in a brief book like Politics and Society in Ancient Greece. The author persuasively argues, however, that this is not a serious problem since, except for Athens, the evidence is too meager to permit a reconstruction of the constitutions of the vast majority of Greek cities. Despite its title, therefore, the book is really about Athens and its institutions. |
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Professor Jones treats his topic in eight chapters. In the first chapter, he defines the terms of his study as political life in Athens from ca. 500 to 323 BCE and surveys the principal ancient sources, both literary and documentary, for Athenian political history. Chapter two reviews the historical development of the Athenian government from aristocracy to democracy and its principal institutions and their functions. The focus changes from Athens to its great rival Sparta in Chapter three. The author rightly describes the idiosyncratic history of Sparta as a "mystery" and cites it as proof that the constitutional development of Athens and other Greek city-states was the result of choices made by Greeks and not the inevitable working out of potentials inherent in Greek customs and practices. |
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The focus shifts back to Athens in the fourth chapter. Aristotle identified the court system as the key to the Athenian people's power in the democracy, and in Chapter four, the author describes how the Athens' legal system was organized and how it functioned in reality. Athenian ideology sharply divided the world of men and women, assigning the public sphere to men and the domestic sphere to women. The fifth chapter provides a lucid reconstruction of the various public roles played by men in Athens that unusually does not elide the profound differences between life in the city of Athens and its rural hinterland. The evidence for the history of Athenian women in the classical period is far more limited than that for men, but the author uses the rich evidence provided by Athenian comedy to reconstruct the main outlines of their daily life in the sixth chapter, highlighting the fact that, contrary to Athenian ideology, religion offered women a privileged space in the public life of Athens. In the final two chapters, the author broadens his analysis, providing brief biographies of prominent Athenian and non-Athenian political figures from Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens, to Cleopatra VII, the last independent ruler of a successor state of the empire of Alexander the Great. |
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As already mentioned, Politics and Society and in Ancient Greece is not the general survey of Greek political institutions and practices its title seems to promise. In compensation, however, readers will find in it a lucid analysis of the practical realities of Athenian politics in the classical period. Good examples are the author's perceptive discussion of how honorary decrees passed by village assemblies illuminate the powerful influence exercised by aristocratic patrons over rural life in Attica and how changes in residence patterns during the fifth century BCE help explain the systematic under-representation of rural interests in Athenian history. As a result, there are few books that offer beginning students and their instructors a better introduction to how Athenian government actually worked. |
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| California State University, Los Angeles |
Stanley M. Burstein |
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