Greek History

While the Cretan andreion has of late been the focus of important studies on citizenship and commensality (Seelentag 2015, Whitley 2018), this paper focuses on the andreion’s economic role. It argues that the Cretan andreion can be considered as part of a broader system of redistribution and mobilization beyond the aim of providing citizen subsistence. There existed in sixth- and fifth-century Crete intersecting public economies in kind and coin.

One of the features noted of Greek and Persian relations in the so-called archaic “age of tyrants” is the concentration of tyrants who sprung up on the western frontier of the Persian Empire. It is generally held that the Persians imposed these tyrants over the subject Greek cities under a system of ritualized friendship (i.e.

By 432 B.C., the alliance of Athens with Perdikkas’ internal enemies had precipitated a fall in the formerly amiable Atheno-Macedonian relations. This paper focuses through the lens of timber commerce on this peculiar termination of goodwill with Perdikkas. The main contention is that Perdikkas effectively opposed Athenian imperialism by restricting his monopolistic supply of silver fir (Abies alba), since timber from this Abies taxon was a nonpareil resource for shipbuilding and available only in Macedon.

In this paper, I demonstrate how the island polis Kos used inscriptions as a medium for connectivity within the larger Hellenistic community of cities. This case study sheds light on a paradox in the position of the Greek city in the early Hellenistic era. Greek cities in this period were confronted with the new and ever-shifting hegemonies of the diadoch dynasties. At the same time, however, they managed to maintain a striking degree of cultural similarity and intense cosmopolitan interactions among each other, even across the boundaries of these empires.