Language and History in Ancient Greek Culture

About this book

Spanning forty years this collection of essays represents the work of a renowned teacher and scholar of the ancient Greek world. Martin Ostwalds contribution is both philological and historical: the thread that runs through all of the essays is his precise explanation for a modern audience of some crucial terms by which the ancient Greeks saw and lived their livesand influenced ours. Chosen and sequenced by Ostwald the essays demonstrate his methodology and elucidate essential aspects of ancient Greek society. The first section plumbs the social and political terms in which the Greeks understood their lives. It examines their notion of the relation of the citizen to his community; how they conceived different kinds of political structure; what role ideology played in public life; and how differently their most powerful thinkers viewed issues of war and peace. The second section is devoted to the problem first articulated by the Greeks of the extent to which human life is dominated by nature (physis) and human convention (nomos) a question that remains a central concern in modern societies even if in different guises. The third section focuses on democracy in Athens. It confronts questions of the nature of democratic rule of financing public enterprises of the accountability of public officials of the conflict raised by imperial control and democratic rule of the coexistence of "conservative" and "liberal" trends in a democratic regime and of the relation between rhetoric and power in a democracy. The final section is a sketch of the principles on which the two greatest Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides constructed their outlooks on human affairs. Ultimately the collection intends to make selected key concepts in ancient Greek social and political culture accessible to a lay audience. It also shows how the differencesrather than the similaritiesbetween the ancient Greeks and us can contribute to a deeper understanding of our own time.