Suchergebnisse

"This is an anthology of private funerary poems in Greek from the archaic period until later antiquity. The vast majority of these poems were inscribed on tombs or grave stelai and served to identify, celebrate and mourn the dead. It is not in fact very difficult to distinguish such 'funerary' poems from other types of inscription, even if there are important overlaps in style and subject between, say, some honorific and some epitaphic verse-inscriptions; what can be much more difficult, however, is to distinguish 'public' from 'private' inscriptions, and indeed to decide what, if anything, is at stake in the distinction and how that distinction changed over time. Our earliest verse epitaphs seem to be 'private', in the sense that, as far as we can tell, they were designed and erected by the family of the deceased. For the fifth century, however, our evidence is predominantly Attic, and, from the first three-quarters of the century in particular, we have very few clearly 'private' such inscriptions, as opposed to those either sponsored or displayed (or both) by public authorities; this was the age of public burials and public commemorations in polyandry or 'multiple tombs', which (quite literally) embodied the spirit of public service demanded of male citizens. 'Private' poems too, of course, reflected the ideology of the city in which they were displayed, and we must not assume that a 'public-private' distinction mapped exactly on to some ancient equivalent of a modern 'official-unofficial' one. 'Private' inscriptions, for example, might need 'public' blessing to be erected in a particularly prominent place or even to use a particular language of praise."--

Christiane Kunst lässt in ihrer Sammlung antiker Quellen zum Themenbereich "Römische Wohn- und Lebenswelten" die Zeitgenossen selbst zu Wort kommen. Literarische Quellen und epigraphische Zeugnisse, die zweisprachig, lateinisch und deutsch, vorgelegt werden, vermitteln ein anschauliches Bild der antiken Stadt in ihren konkreten Wohn- und Lebensverhältnissen.

Known from ancient authors such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato, and more than 2,500 inscriptions, proxeny (a form of public guest-friendship) is the best attested interstate institution of the ancient world. This book offers a comprehensive re-examination of our evidence for this important Greek institution and uses it to examine the structure and dynamics of the interstate system of the Greek world, and the way in which these were transformed under the Roman Empire. Based on a detailed analysis of the function of the formulaic language of honorific decrees, this volume presents a new reconstruction of proxeny, and explores the way in which interstate institutions shaped the behaviour of individuals and communities in the ancient world. It draws on other material which has not been systematically exploited to reconstruct the proxeny networks of Greek city-states. This material reveals the extraordinary density of formal interconnections which characterized the ancient Greek world before the age of Augustus and reflected both trade and political contacts of different kinds. 0It also traces the disappearance of both proxeny and the broader institutional system of which it was part. Drawing on nuanced analysis of quantitative trends in the epigraphic record, it argues that the Greek world underwent a profound reorientation by the time of the Roman Principate, which fundamentally altered how Greek cities viewed relations with each other. Readership: For scholars and students interested in the history of ancient Greek institutions, epigraphy, ancient international relations, ancient Greek political structure, and the world of ancient Greece more generally