Athenian Frontiers

This paper demonstrates that Pindar’s Eleventh Nemean ode participates in ongoing discourses of contested ethnicity in the fifth century Aegean. Specifically, it implicitly urges an anti-Athenian sense of ethnic solidarity between Tenedians, other Aiolians, and Sparta.

Every four years, on 28 Hekatombaion, ancient Athenians celebrated the Great Panathenaia in honour of the goddess Athena with sacrifices and extensive games drawing competitors from all over Greece. Despite this international participation in the games, the festival in the archaic and classical periods showcased the city’s elites in a celebration of Athenian exclusivity. Scholars have focused primarily on this phase of the Panathenaia (e.g. Neils 1992, 1996); if they discuss the Hellenistic festival, they emphasise continuities with earlier periods (e.g. Mikalson, 196-198; Tracy 1991).

This paper offers a new interpretation of IG II² 204 (RO 58), an Attic decree dating from 352/1 BCE. The exact circumstances and motivations leading to its enactment have long been disputed, thanks both to the damaged state of the stone itself and to the unsatisfactory literary evidence for the circumstances of the decree.

This paper argues for a systemic, institutionalist, and imperial approach to the Athenian economy in the generation after the Peloponnesian War. The slow recovery of trade after Athens’ defeat—having been dispossessed of its former imperial infrastructure—required leading citizens to revisit the means by which the dēmos could improve their markets and increase their revenues. What emerged was Agyrrhios’ Grain-Tax Law of 374/3 BC (Rhodes and Osborne 2003: 118-129).

This paper will sketch in 15/20 minutes the development in archaic Athens of a proper conceptualization of the frontiers of the chora as the limits of the polis. It will trace in archaic legal texts its emergence in connection with the growing understanding of the polis as the city plus its hinterland.