11-05-2012, 03:43 PM
Well yes I think that was part of what confused me Sean, a lot of this work is clearly aimed at those sort of American scholars. Fair enough, that's fine. Its just that serious Classicists seem to ignore them...so why write a rebuttal on an academic press like CUP?
BTW speaking of CUP they are to be commended for putting out yet another awesomely turned book, the paper...the cover...everything is gorgeous. I know that's irrelevant, but still, its nice.
So one of the thing that gets me is he does try to make this universal statement, that we can fruitfully cf data from hoplites, medieval archers etc...and it just never bears out. He asks the question "how did the Athenian amateur deal with the stress of combat?" and goes into all this psychological stuff.
The thing is, he also points out elsewhere that the mindset of the Greeks was a lot different: they literally walked on shit and piss and offal, they saw death daily, they had a civic system that was ok with the idea of death (though the accumulation of miasma was a problen, see Parker for that). He could have happily postulated all that without trying to aim for stuff like the "normative consensus".
Also, the other bare fact is, most hoplites would not really be veterans in our sense of the word. One of the massive shifts in the Hellenistic age (starting with Alexander actually) is that soldiers would campaign...and campaign...and campaign....and indeed this DOES have a marked shift on the culture of the time, but we're dealing with Classical Athens.
Viewing Classical Athens is a discrete entity is dangerous incidentally, we do tend to think of the "aristocracy" as international: that is the whole point of wide-scale euergetism like the Alkmaionidai and Delphi etc, in fact people like Pindar and Bakkhylides would have been out of work otherwise....in the earlier periods many of these people would have been married to those in other polities too. So you have a highly mobile elite class, trans-Hellenic, who would have been much more at home with one another than the, say, the farmers of their "own" polity.
Things change during the Classical period, obviously, in fact we can interpret Perikles' citizen law basically trying to stop elites like the above have so much power over Athens, but none the less we can discern different strata and classes within Athens. Is there any evidence that the Eupatridai like the Eteoboutadai shared many values with those we conventionally call Nothoi? Well...not to the extend we can call anything consensus, certainly by the time we involve tradesmen, farmers, veterans, the disenfranchised etc. Athens, any Greek polity, was far too complex to think of in such ways.
As for Athens as the norm vs elsewhere, yes this is tedious but an accident of the evidence I guess, but obviously we know that it wasn't the "norm" and that no such thing existed. It's always worth bearing in mind though, in serious terms, that much of what we associate with Greek culture was spawned in Asia minor, places like Ephesos and Halikarnassos etc, that certain "outlyers" like Kyrene and most of Sicily were also massive power players and that the Hellenistic polities like Alexandria reached something Athens never could.
Athens was/is awesome, but outside of their brief empire the reason we focus on them so much is because they a) made the shift to literary models early, therefore when the oral traditions (still productive elsewhere) died Athens had a tremendous literary output and b) They were sort of retroactively fashioned into this idea of "classical Greece" partly by the Alexandrians but largely by the Romans.
BTW speaking of CUP they are to be commended for putting out yet another awesomely turned book, the paper...the cover...everything is gorgeous. I know that's irrelevant, but still, its nice.
So one of the thing that gets me is he does try to make this universal statement, that we can fruitfully cf data from hoplites, medieval archers etc...and it just never bears out. He asks the question "how did the Athenian amateur deal with the stress of combat?" and goes into all this psychological stuff.
The thing is, he also points out elsewhere that the mindset of the Greeks was a lot different: they literally walked on shit and piss and offal, they saw death daily, they had a civic system that was ok with the idea of death (though the accumulation of miasma was a problen, see Parker for that). He could have happily postulated all that without trying to aim for stuff like the "normative consensus".
Also, the other bare fact is, most hoplites would not really be veterans in our sense of the word. One of the massive shifts in the Hellenistic age (starting with Alexander actually) is that soldiers would campaign...and campaign...and campaign....and indeed this DOES have a marked shift on the culture of the time, but we're dealing with Classical Athens.
Viewing Classical Athens is a discrete entity is dangerous incidentally, we do tend to think of the "aristocracy" as international: that is the whole point of wide-scale euergetism like the Alkmaionidai and Delphi etc, in fact people like Pindar and Bakkhylides would have been out of work otherwise....in the earlier periods many of these people would have been married to those in other polities too. So you have a highly mobile elite class, trans-Hellenic, who would have been much more at home with one another than the, say, the farmers of their "own" polity.
Things change during the Classical period, obviously, in fact we can interpret Perikles' citizen law basically trying to stop elites like the above have so much power over Athens, but none the less we can discern different strata and classes within Athens. Is there any evidence that the Eupatridai like the Eteoboutadai shared many values with those we conventionally call Nothoi? Well...not to the extend we can call anything consensus, certainly by the time we involve tradesmen, farmers, veterans, the disenfranchised etc. Athens, any Greek polity, was far too complex to think of in such ways.
As for Athens as the norm vs elsewhere, yes this is tedious but an accident of the evidence I guess, but obviously we know that it wasn't the "norm" and that no such thing existed. It's always worth bearing in mind though, in serious terms, that much of what we associate with Greek culture was spawned in Asia minor, places like Ephesos and Halikarnassos etc, that certain "outlyers" like Kyrene and most of Sicily were also massive power players and that the Hellenistic polities like Alexandria reached something Athens never could.
Athens was/is awesome, but outside of their brief empire the reason we focus on them so much is because they a) made the shift to literary models early, therefore when the oral traditions (still productive elsewhere) died Athens had a tremendous literary output and b) They were sort of retroactively fashioned into this idea of "classical Greece" partly by the Alexandrians but largely by the Romans.
Jass
