WORKING PAPERS BY DATE - 2005

DECEMBER
120519 Music for Monsters: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Bucolic Evolution, and Bucolic Criticism
Alessandro Barchiesi, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract: The paper has been written for a collection whose aim is charting the entire development of a genre, pastoral or bucolic poetry, throughout Graeco-Roman antiquity. My discussion complements studies of poems that can be labelled ‘bucolic’ or ‘pastoral’ through an external vantage point: the perception of bucolic and pastoral in the perspective offered by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a maverick, bulimic epic poem, a poem in which many traces of other genres can be identified and everything undergoes a transformation of some sort. The examination of some individual episodes in the epic suggests ways in which the bucolic/pastoral tradition is being reconsidered, but also challenged and criticized from specific Roman viewpoints, not without satiric undertones.
120518 Map Resources for Roman North Africa
Brent D. Shaw, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract - This is the early draft of a collation of the map resources that are available for the study of Roman North Africa. It is hoped that, even in this early stage of presentation, it will be of some use to those who are seeking cartographic resources for research on the region.
120517 Arrian the Personal Historian
Kyle Lakin, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract: Current scholarship ignores the personal nature of the second preface of Arrian's Anabasis. This preface reveals that the Anabasis can be read as a work about Arrian's own personal identity. Arrian's biographical history allows us to speculate that his identity was in flux throughout his life. By understanding the Anabasis as Arrian's way to claim to be a Greek, we can better interpret his characterization of Alexander.
120516 Legal Pluralism in Archaic Greece
Kyle Lakin, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract: The theory of legal pluralism argues that law's function in modern society must be understood as a negotiation between different sets of legal orders operating simultaneously. This paper argues that archaic Greece, too, was a legally plural society and explores two negotiations as evidence: 1) the relationship between Drakon's murder law and the procedure of blood-money negotiation; 2) the Gortyn Law Code and oath-trials.
120515 Seasonal Mortality in Imperial Rome and the Mediterranean: Three Problem Cases
Brent D. Shaw, Princeton University
No longer available as a working paper. This is now published as Chapter 4 [in] Glenn R. Storey ed., Urbanism in the Preindustrial World: Cross-Cultural Approaches (Tuscaloosa, The University of Alabama Press, 2006), pp. 86-109.
120514 The Fabric of Continuity
Constanze Güthenke, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract: Abstract: Review article of M. Alexiou. After Antiquity. Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (2002) and J.C.B. Petropolus, Eroticism in Ancient and Medieval Greek Poetry (2003), two recent books dealing with issues of continuity and methods of studying cultural transmission in post-classical Greek texts; forthcoming in Classical and Modern Languages.
120513 Religion in Roman Historiography and Epic
Denis Feeney, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract: A version of this paper is due to appear as a chapter in the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Roman Religion (edited by Jörg Rüpke). The paper gives an overview of the religious dimensions to Roman epic and historiography, and argues for taking seriously the literary questions of representation, genre, and convention which are often elided by historians who wish to disinter hard evidence for ‘real’ religious attitudes and practice from these texts.
This paper has now been published in J. Rüpke (ed.), A Companion to Roman Religion (Oxford, 2007), pp. 129-142.
120512 The Palaikastro Hymn and the modern myth of the Cretan Zeus
Mark Alonge, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract: The Palaikastro Hymn—better known as the Hymn of the Kouretes—does not celebrate a god of pre-Hellenic pedigree, who is Zeus in name only, as scholars have believed with virtual unanimity. Rather, an understanding of the conventions of Greek hymnic performance in its ritual context goes far to elucidating many of the ostensibly peculiar features of the Hymn. Moving out from Palaikastro, in eastern Crete, to survey the island as a whole, I show that the Cretan iconographic and epigraphic records contradict the widely accepted theory of a special, Minoan “Cretan Zeus.”
120511 Military and political participation in archaic-classical Greece
Ian Morris, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - In this paper I examine the “bargaining hypothesis” about democracy by calculating nd political participation ratios in Greece (MPR and PPR). I find that high (>10%) MPR coincided with high PPR, but was only one path toward state formation. Except in extreme situations like the Persian invasion of 480, high MPR and PPR depended on specific patterns of capital accumulation and concentration. In situations of high capital concentration rulers could substitute high spending for high MPR and PPR, preserving desirable social arrangements. Through time, the importance of capital concentrations grew. War made states and states made war in ancient Greece, as in early-modern Europe, but in different ways.
120510 The collapse and regeneration of complex society in Greece, 1500-500 BC
Ian Morris, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - Greece between 1500 and 500 BC is one of the best known examples of the phenomenon of the regeneration of complex society after a collapse. I review 10 core dimensions of this process (urbanism, tax and rent, monuments, elite power, information- recording systems, trade, crafts, military power, scale, and standards of living), and suggest that punctuated equilibrium models accommodate the data better than gradualist interpretations.
120509 The growth of Greek cities in the first millennium BC
Ian Morris, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - In this paper I trace the growth of the largest Greek cities from perhaps 1,000- 2,000 people at the beginning of the first millennium BC to 400,000-500,000 at the millennium’s end. I examine two frameworks for understanding this growth: Roland Fletcher’s discussion of the interaction and communication limits to growth and Max Weber’s ideal types of cities’ economic functions. I argue that while political power was never the only engine of urban growth in classical antiquity, it was always the most important motor. The size of the largest Greek cities was a function of the population they controlled, mechanisms of tax and rent, and transportation technology.
120508 The Athenian Empire (478-404 BC)
Ian Morris, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - In this paper I raise three questions: (1) How, and how much, did the Athenian Empire change Greek society? (2) Why did the Athenian Empire (or a competitor state) not become a multiethnic empire like Persia or Rome? (3) In the long run, how much did the Athenian Empire’s failure matter? I conclude: (1) The Athenian Empire increased the tempo of state formation in classical Greece and is best understood as an example of state formation not imperialism. (2) Counterfactual analysis suggests that Athens failed to become the capital of a multi-city state because of human error, and as late as 406 BC the most predictable outcome was that Athens would emerge as capital of an Ionian state. (3) Not much.
120507 The eighth-century revolution
Ian Morris, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - Through most of the 20th century classicists saw the 8th century BC as a period of major changes, which they characterized as “revolutionary,” but in the 1990s critics proposed more gradualist interpretations. In this paper I argue that while 30 years of fieldwork and new analyses inevitably require us to modify the framework established by Snodgrass in the 1970s (a profound social and economic depression in the Aegean c. 1100-800 BC; major population growth in the 8th century; social and cultural transformations that established the parameters of classical society), it nevertheless remains the most convincing interpretation of the evidence, and that the idea of an 8th-century revolution remains useful
120506 Troy and Homer
Ian Morris, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - This is a review of Joachim Latacz’s book Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery (2004), focusing on the archaeological issues.
120505 The Riddle of the 'sp(h)ij-': The Greek Sphinx and her Indic and Indo-European Background
Joshua Katz, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract - The name of the Sphinx, the Greek female monster who had fun killing passers-by who could not answer her riddle, has long been an etymological conundrum. On the basis of literary, linguistic, and anthropological evidence from, above all, Greece and India, this paper comes to a novel understanding of the Sphinx’ origin, concluding that her oldest moniker, (S)Phí:k-, is related to a newly uncovered Greek noun phíkis ‘buttocks’ and to a Sanskrit word for the same body part, sphij-, a hitherto misunderstood form of which appears, in turn, in a riddle in the oldest Indic text, the Rigveda. This derivation situates the Greek creature squarely in the cross-culturally typically aggressive and sexually charged genre of riddling.
This paper is now published in La Langue poétique indo-européenne: actes du Colloque de travail de la Société des Études Indo-Européennes (Indogermanische Gesellschaft / Society for Indo-European Studies), Paris, 22-24 octobre 2003, ed. Georges-Jean Pinault & Daniel Petit (Leuven—Paris: Peeters, 2006), pp. 157-94.
120504 What Linguists are Good for
Joshua Katz, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract - Linguists are good for a lot. This is a personal account of why departments of Classics should embrace them (us).
This has been published in Classical World 100 (2007), pp. 99-112.
120503 Review of Joachim Latacz’s 'Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery'
Joshua Katz, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract - In this book, a translation of a German bestseller, the most vigorous proponent of the view that the Iliad is a reliable source of information about the city of Troy in the Late Bronze Age, presents the evidence from two very different fields: archaeology and linguistics/philology. Though especially sympathetic to the idea that certain significant details in Homer reflect society as it was long before the eighth century B.C., in a shared Greco-Anatolian setting, this reviewer, a linguist/philologist, is nevertheless dismayed by Latacz’s presentation of the evidence. To take just one egregious example of bias disguised as fact—a “fact” that certain colleagues are unfortunately already citing as gospel—there is, pace Latacz and Frank Starke, no evidence for the claim that an actual Hittite document reveals as a forebear of the king of Ahhiyawa (~ Achaia) a man by the name of Kadmos.
This has been published in Journal of the American Oriental Society 125 (2005), pp. 422-25.
120502 Self-Aggrandizement and Praise of Others in Cicero
Robert Kaster, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract - Ciceronian invective has received a great deal of attention; yet Cicero’s deployment of praise — of himself and others— and others’ praise of Cicero open an equally revealing window on late Roman Republican culture. This paper uses Cicero’s defense of P. Sestius (March 56 BCE) to give this aspect of Ciceronian discourse some of the attention it is due.
120501 The Function of Criticism ca. 432 BC: Texts and interpretations in Plato’s 'Protagoras'
Andrew Ford, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract: Plato’s Protagoras is a unique text in the history of criticism, the only extended example of practical poetic criticism that we have from classical Greece. This long passage (338E-347C) shows a group of fifth-century intellectual luminaries debating the meaning of a dense lyric poem by Simonides: the text is quoted at length and its language examined closely and methodically and wildly. My paper first attempts to pinpoint how this passage — often written off as a parody or a joke or misunderstood as a simplistic polemic against “sophistry” — fits into the work. I argue that Plato is more serious here than is usually supposed, and that the passage gives his best account of uses and limits of literary criticism. In a coda, I consider an analysis of the passage by Glenn Most, which suggests some reflections on recent developments in academic literary criticism.
NOVEMBER
110516 Spartacus Before Marx
Brent D. Shaw, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract - The story of the pre-Marxian ideology of Spartacus is not without its own peculiar interests. It is a strange narrative prompted both by the birth of a modern analytical, and political, interest in slavery, and in parallel debates over the meaning of liberty and servitude.
110515 Thucydides and the invention of political science
Josiah Ober, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract - Thucydides self-consciously invented a new form of inquiry, which can reasonably be called “social and political science.” His intellectual goal was a new understanding of power and its relationship to human agency and the deep structures of human society. His understanding of agency and structure is in some ways reminiscent of the reflexivity theory developed by Anthony Giddens.
110514 Solon and the 'Horoi': Facts on the Ground in Archaic Athens
Josiah Ober, Princeton University
No longer available as a working paper. This is now published as: Josiah Ober, "Solon and the Horoi." In J. Blok and A. Lardinois (eds.), Solon: New Historical and Philological Perspectives (E.J. Bill: Leiden), 441-456.
110513 “I Besieged that Man”: Democracy’s Revolutionary Start.
Josiah Ober, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract - The origins of democracy at Athens should be sought in a revolutionary moment in 508/7 B.C. and the subsequent institutional reforms associated with Cleistehenes. An revised version of the argument first offered by the author in "The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 B.C.E: Violence, Authority, and the Origins of Democracy," in C. Dougherty and L. Kurke (ed.), Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 1993), 215-232.
110512 Democratic Athens as an Experimental System: History and the Project of Political Theory.
Josiah Ober, Princeton University
Download PDF Abstract - Athens as a case study can be useful as an “exemplary narrative” for political science and normative political, on the analogy of the biologicial use of as certain animals (e.g. mice or zebrafish) as “model systems” subject to intensive study by many researchers.
110511 The Ethics and Economics of Ptolemaic Religious Associations
Andrew Monson, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - This paper considers the economic status of the members in Ptolemaic religious associations and offers a model to explain why they participated. Drawing on Charles Tilly’s comparative study of trust networks, I suggest that religious associations institutionalized informal ethical norms into formal rules that lowered the costs of transacting and facilitated cooperation among villagers. The rules related to legal disputes illustrate how associations exercised this power and even tried to prevent the Ptolemaic state from intruding in their network. NB: This has been published in Ancient Society 36 (2006), 221-238.
110509 Marriage, families, and survival in the Roman imperial army: demographic aspects
Walter Scheidel, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - This paper provides a survey of marriage and family formation in the army of the Principate, and assesses the main determinants of the life expectancy of professional Roman soldiers.
This paper has now been published in "The Blackwell Companion to the Roman Army" P Erdkamp (ed.), Blackwell: Oxford and Malden, 2007, pp. 417-434.
110508 Real slave prices and the relative cost of slave labor in the Greco-Roman world
Walter Scheidel, Stanford University
No longer available as as working paper. The final publication is in Ancient Society 35 (2005) 1-17.
110507 Stratification, deprivation, and quality of life in the Roman world
Walter Scheidel, Stanford University
No longer available as a working paper. The final publication is in M. Atkins and R. Osborne, eds., Poverty in the Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 40-59.
110506 Sex and empire: a Darwinian perspective
Walter Scheidel, Stanford University
Revised May 2006. See 050603 entry.
110505 The monetary systems of the Han and Roman empires
Walter Scheidel, Stanford University
Revised February 2008. See 020803 entry.
110504 The comparative economics of slavery in the Greco-Roman world
Walter Scheidel, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - A comparative perspective improves our understanding of the critical determinants of the large-scale use of slave labor in different sectors of historical economies, including classical Greece and the Italian heartland of the Roman empire. This paper argues that the success of chattel slavery was a function of the specific configuration of several critical variables: the character of certain kinds of economic activity, the incentive system, the normative value system of a society, and the nature of commitments required of the free population. High real wages and low slave prices precipitated the expansion of slavery in classical Greece and Republican Rome, while later periods of Roman history may have witnessed either a high-equilibrium level of slavery or its gradual erosion in the context of lower wages and higher prices.
This paper has now been published in "Slave Systems, Ancient and Modern" E. Dal Lago and C. Katsari (eds.), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2009, pp. 105-126.
110503 Roman funerary commemoration and the age at first marriage
Walter Scheidel, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - This paper offers a critical assessment of the debate about the customary age at first marriage of men and women in Roman Italy and the western provinces of the early Roman empire. While literary sources point to early female and male marriage (around ages 12-15 and 18-20, respectively) in elite circles, the epigraphic record is mostly consistent with Saller’s thesis that non-elite men did not normally marry until their late twenties. Shaw’s thesis that non-elite women married in their late teens is plausible but remains difficult to test. Comparative data from late medieval Tuscany raise doubts about the applicability of these findings beyond urban environments.
This paper has been published in Classical Philology 102 (2007) 389-402
110502 The demography of Roman state formation in Italy
Walter Scheidel, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - This paper seeks to provide a basic demographic framework for the study of integrative processes in Italy during the Republican period. Following a brief summary of the state of the debate about population size, the paper focuses on distributional issues such as military and political participation rates and geographical mobility, and concludes with a simple model of the dynamics of Italian integration.
The final publication is in: M. Jehne and R. Pfeilschifter (eds.), Herrschaft ohne Integration? Rom und Italien in republikanischer Zeit (Frankfurt: Verlag Antike, 2006), 207-226.
110501 Military commitments and political bargaining in ancient Greece
Walter Scheidel, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - This paper explores the relationship between military commitments and political bargaining in Greek poleis and beyond. While it is possible to document a number of instances of concurrent political and military mobilization, comparative evidence suggests that state type may be a more important determinant of military mobilization levels than regime type.
OCTOBER
100501 Egyptian grain transport
JG Manning, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - I review here a recent publication of a papyrus document dating to the Ramesside period concerning the transportation of grain.
MAY
050503 The Voices of Jocasta
Richard P. Martin, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract: The poem contained in the Lille Stesichorus papyrus presents several features that can be usefully compared with aspects of characterization and theme in the Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles. If we assume that an Athenian audience in the later 5th century knew the Stesichorean composition, the dramatic choices made by Sophocles take on new meaning. This paper is forthcoming in the proceedings of the International Conference on Ancient Drama held at Delphi, Greece (July 2002).
050502 Gnomes in Poems: Wisdom Performance on the Athenian Stage
Richard P. Martin, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract: An ethnography-of speaking-approach to proverb-use lets us explore the deployment of this genre as part of personal self-projection and of social life. Greek drama, by presenting proverbs in the mouths of its staged characters, makes use of the ordinary performance value of this “genre of speaking” while constructing a broader theatrical event. Characters can be judged on the basis of their skill at proverb-use, and important junctures in the plays can be marked by the employment of gnômai. Resistance to proverbs, and misuse of the genre (whether or not intentional) further mark speakers. This paper will appear in the Festschrift for John Papademetriou.
050501 Land tenure, rural space, and the political economy of Ptolemaic Egypt (332 BC-30 BC)
JG Manning, Stanford University
Download PDF Abstract - In this paper I argue that statist (or “despotic”) assumptions of royal power does not adequately describe the nature of political power in the Ptolemaic development of Egypt. I examine the process of Ptolemaic state formation from the point of view of the expansion and the settlement of the Fayyum, the foundation of Ptolemais in the Thebaid, and from the point of view of new fiscal institutions.
APRIL
040501 The Ptolemaic economy, institutions, economic integration, and the limits of centralized political power
JG Manning, Stanford University
Revised May 2006. See entry 050604.
FEBRUARY
020501 Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture
Richard P. Martin, Stanford University
No longer available as a working paper. This is now published as "Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture," pp. 36-54 in M. McDonald and J.M. Walton (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theature, Cambridge University Press, 2007.