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2 results

  • 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.

  • 8g - Society and Economy

  • 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 287-305

  • Summary

    The only statement which can be made with security about Athenian society and economy in the Periclean period is that they were evolving rapidly but unsystematically. Settlement and landholding patterns are being seen to have generated specific aspects both of the economy and of public finances. The conceptual distinctions between economy, society and polity are being used more confidently. Fiscal demands emerge as generating a system of economic and social interactions. The more the study of the Athenian legal system emancipates itself from presuppositions derived from Roman law to take seriously the role of juries in forming and reflecting social norms. An eventual systematic treatment of the female-male relationship as a component of Athenian society will probably obliterate much current Athenian social history, but its chronological focus will have to be the semi-visible century from 430 to 320 rather than the near-darkness of the Periclean period.