Classical Greece was a high period for city networks, with trading centers dotting the map of the Aegean Sea like “frogs around a marsh” in the words of Aristotle. These were strange times, where Spartans annually declared war on their slaves. Where the Athenian reformer Solon banned the export of vital foodstuffs – on penalty of death – while at the same time laying the groundwork for unprecedented political pluralism. Yet we see an uncommon iteration of city networking that was well ahead of its time. Embedded in the lives of these cities was an early echo of the modern. Athens was the alpha city in a polis system of autonomous city-states that, at its height, spanned from Spain to Africa to the Black Sea with a total population of thirty million people. This was an incredible period of seafaring. Language, culture, aesthetics, and revolutionary political ideas flowed in the currents alongside goods and services in an elaborate trading network. Far from localized cultures of self-sufficiency, most Greek cities depended on trade for basics such as foodstuffs, but also for military, intellectual, and cultural production.

Chapter 2 surveys phrases with the verb boulomai that describe the ability to do “whatever one wishes” or to live “however one wishes” as freedom in order to demonstrate that democratic freedom was understood as the ability to bring one’s will to fruition. These phrases are found in a wide range of genres, including history, philosophy, oratory, drama, and epigraphy. By defining themselves as free in contrast to slaves, Athenians perceived their actions and decisions as emanating from themselves rather than a master. Freedom was thus defined as not simply a prerequisite status for citizenship, in contrast to birth or wealth, but a personal capacity for action. This positive freedom was a central aspect of citizen identity, rendering scholarly accounts focused on negative freedom incomplete. The distinctive feature of democratic freedom was the insistence on the self as master of action; as a citizen, one did what one wished. Positive freedom gave rise to procedural components in Athenian administration and law, notably voluntarism and accountability, as well as served as a distinctive core marker of identity in contrast with other states, such as Sparta and Persia.

A look at Spartan commemoration in the Peloponnesian War, focusing on Brasidas and the rhetoric of liberation. Brasidas was a new kind of Spartan that put freedom in the forefront, which led to Brasidas receiving more lavish commemoration but also drew Sparta into more wars.

Introduction to Spartan society and commemoration. A discussion of terms, methods, and themes. An introduction to memory studies. A look at the topography of ancient Sparta.

The author first addresses the contents and the nature of the proems of the Histories, secondly the arrangement of Ephorus’ work and, thirdly, the main contents of each of the thirty books that formed it.

The Introduction sketches out the key themes of the book, offers a justification for focusing on the identity of the American soldier as a key issue in the Army’s post–Cold War transformation and introduces the reader to literature on ‘warrior culture’. Just as Army leaders and ordinary soldiers often meant very different things when they spoke about warriors, so contemporary historians, anthropologists and classicists have used the term in various ways. Thus, the latter part of the Introduction spends some time examining how the term has evolved and been deployed in different contexts.

This chapter focuses on ancient Sparta as a representative case for the general reception of classical antiquity in heavy metal music. The Spartans are the basis of songs and albums by dozens of bands across the globe: their last stand at Thermopylae is the most popular ancient battle in metal music, and their king Leonidas is one of the most popular ancient figures. Their appropriation by metal bands is a product of their rise in popularity in popular culture since the premiere of the 2006 film 300, and as in pop-culture, their appeal resonates with political and nationalistic agendas, especially of Greek bands. Sparta’s wide appeal harmonises with metal’s core ethos of hypermasculinity, the liberation of animal instincts and the disruption of systems of conformity and control. As with other topics from the classical world, heavy metal music takes the Spartans from both ancient sources and modern media and remakes them in the image of its own counterculture, that of the few standing defiant against the many.

The relation between the opening section of Plato’s Laws and Xenophon’s Constitution of the Lacedaemonians usually goes unnoticed. I draw attention to its importance for understanding Plato’s project in the dialogue. Section 1 shows that the view proposed by Plato’s Athenian Visitor that Lycurgus made virtue in its entirety the goal of his statecraft was anticipated in Xenophon’s treatise. It has to be treated as an interpretation of the Spartan politeia alternative to that advanced by the Athenian’s interlocutors, which Plato could hope to be taken seriously as such. The second section focuses on the legislative programme the Athenian says he had hoped to hear ascribed to the Cretan and Spartan lawgivers. Plato can expect recognition by the reader that the programme is properly Spartan and Cretan by virtue of its echoes of the programme attributed to Lycurgus by Xenophon. The third section argues that in making law primarily concerned with fostering the proper development, conduct, and treatment of human beings at every stage of the life cycle, above all by provision for sound customary practices and the like, Plato adopts the approach to law making taken by Xenophon’s Lycurgus.

Chapter 3 focusses on the temple of Hera at Foce del Sele north of the Greek colony of Poseidonia-Paestum in southern Italy. New archaeometric analysis on the metopes from the Hera sanctuary near the mouth of the river Sele has made it possible to propose a new reconstruction of the oldest Hera temple on the site, which belongs to the first generation of Doric stone temples. The study of the architectural elements confirms the decorative nature of the first Doric friezes. Moreover, by analyzing the mythological subjects on the frieze and comparing them with other early Doric temples in Selinous, Delphi, and Athens, it can be shown that the tendency to choose Panhellenic themes over local traditions is a general feature of early Doric temples. Because of the detachment of the imagery from local traditions, the Doric temple is described as a “non-place” according to the definition of the French anthropologist Marc Augé. Conceiving temples as standardized “non-places” that could be set up in any given local environment was crucial to the agendas of Greek elites, who needed to reorganize agricultural and urban landscapes to regulate population pressure and social tensions – both in the colonies and in homeland Greece.

In his philosophical works Cicero addresses a number of questions concerning the role of old men in politics, most obviously in his dialogue De senectute of 44 bce. How best should the old participate in politics and the wider community – what, if anything, do the old have to offer that is special or unique? How should the generations fit together in the body politic, and should age be a factor in the structural organisation of states? Should the old rule? Through a close reading of De senectute, I argue: (1) Cicero develops a coherent line on the special political role of old men, which can be seen as a call to arms in the contemporary Roman political context; and (2) this line is not just a restatement of traditional Roman ideals: Cicero draws on and adapts some of the most important arguments from Plato’s Republic and his earlier De re publica when addressing these questions regarding the role of old men in politics.

Chapter 5 investigates the political uses of antiquity during wartime. It argues that the War of the Morea was a turning point in the reception of classical tradition that enacted the imperial topos of translatio imperii et studii. The mastery of Greek territories was also a mastery of archaeological sites and artifacts that renewed the culture of antiquity in Venice. The chapter shows that patrician collecting and the public display of antiquities as war trophies were inseparable from an aggressive military antiquarianism that supported the Republic’s new imperial regime with intellectual and cultural power from ancient Greece. Specifically, the occupation of Athens, with its famous history and symbolic potency, inspired strong associations between Venetian maritime supremacy and the fifth-century Athenian empire. But it also launched a new phase in the European rediscovery of Greek art and architecture through one of the darkest episodes of Venetian history: the bombardment and despoliation of the Parthenon.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It begins by justifying the study of ancient slavery then turns to the difficulties of studying slavery from the available evidence. Methods for recovering the experiences of slaves are explored, including the use of comparative evidence. Next, ancient and modern definitions of slavery are surveyed and the distinctions between slavery and other forms of unfree labor, including serfdom, are discussed.