Greek History (1)

Historians have often overlooked the stoning of the Athenian Lykides in Herodotus 9.5, despite it being a rare and shocking event. Those who have treated the topic of Greek stoning have tended to present it as somewhat “democratic:” it involves a judgment of the demos against a threatening individual (Pease 1907; Gras 1984; Rollinger 2004). But this normalization of stoning as an acceptably Athenian form of violence ignores the fact that it seems to have been extremely rare, and the repetition of Lykides’ story through the Roman period demonstrates the shock value it carried.

“If anyone commit hybris against a child or a man or woman, whether free or slave, or if he do anything paranomon to any of these, there shall be prosecution for hybris ...” (Aeschin. 1.15 ~ Dem. 21.47)

Archaic and classical poleis experienced unusually high rates of both political violence (Gehrke, Hansen, Arcenas) and economic growth (Scheidel et al., Ober, Bresson). Because violent political conflict and economic growth are thought to be mutually exclusive (Collier, North et al., Hegre et al.), these findings confront ancient historians with an intriguing question: given the deleterious effects of political violence on economic growth, how can we account for unusually high rates of both phenomena in ancient Greece?

In this paper I present select mythic traditions from the archaic and early-to-mid classical periods concerning the physical abduction of female figures which also involve movement across or around the Mediterranean. I highlight two traditions of lesser known figures (Mestra, Sinope and the Asopides), focusing on the earliest Greek sources for these stories (e.g., the Hesiodic Catalogue).

In the past twenty years, the prevailing model of archaic Greek aristocracy has shifted from one of conflict between elites and the state to one that questions the very concept of aristocracy. Scholars have painted a picture of archaic aristocracies as relatively open hierarchies where belonging and status were performed rather than preordained (Duplouy 2006, Wecowski 2011, Fisher and Van Wees 2015). This paper uses Pindar’s Aeginetan odes to question whether aristocracies were as open in practice as in theory.

The Arcadian Federation’s synoecism of Megalopolis in 370 or 368 BCE transformed 1500 km2 of Southwestern Arcadia from an area dominated by tribal states (ethnoi) and small poleis into a single polis state (Nielsen).  This event appears in the textual record in Pausanias 8.27 and Diodorus 15.72.  In this paper, I apply social network analysis (SNA) to the mythic genealogies of Arcadia to determine whether this entire territory was incorporated into Megalopolis at once or over a long period of time.  In this way, I demonstrate the usefulness of this