Morality and Behaviour in Democratic Athens: A Social History.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Zustand: Minimal besto�n, ansonsten im einwandfreien Zustand. / Condition: Minimally scuffed, otherwise in perfect condition. - Content: The idea for this book came from five interrelated facts that began increasingly to intrigue me during the academic year 1990�91, which I spent on sabbatical in the stimulating atmosphere of Cambridge. Firstly, I observed that whereas many excellent works had been written on various sub-systems of Athenian society (politics, culture, economy, slavery, family, women and religion, for example), no attempt had been made to study them as parts of an integrated whole. In this book I shall try to examine the workings and interactions of these sub-systems in the context of the wider social system to which they and the individuals who participated in them belonged. My second observation followed closely on the first. Since these subsystems were all parts of a self-consistent social system, they must have been held together by some version of what is generally known as morality or a moral system. (Throughout this study I shall be using these terms in Hobbes� sense (�those qualities of humankind that concern their living together in peace and unity�) rather than in the customary sense of rules concerning the suppression or regulation of vice, profane practice or debauchery.) Although many excellent books have been written about Greek morality, I do not believe that any work has yet been devoted exclusively to the study of Athenian morality. In this book I shall try to bring together and evaluate the evidence we currently have concerning the moral system that underpinned Athenian society throughout almost two hundred years of democratic rule. The third observation was that most books on the subject of Greek morality had interpreted morality as a loosely defined assemblage of ideas that should be approached using conceptual tools derived from the history of ideas. No author had yet examined the Athenians� moral ideas and tehaviour (or, more broadly, their moral and social systems) as interrelated entities. In this book I propose to reveal the characteristic features of the code of behaviour (or, in contemporary language, the unwritten laws�) mat the Athenians developed to make democracy practicable throughout the manifold and complex fields of activity that constituted their social life (politics, land tenure, the employment of slaves, interpersonal and class relations, conflict resolution, state power, the army, foreign relations, religion and the economy). This book is, in other words, also a social history of democratic Athens. Fourthly, I observed a disparity between the conceptual tools with which classicists and ancient historians investigated the moral norms of ancient societies and those used in adjacent fields of research. The former group relied by and large on a-personal and hence culturally determined concept of morality, often following K. J. Dover in believing that the researcher�s own moral experience must be his or her best guide to unravelling that of the Greeks. This book will be taking a different approach to the Athenians� moral system, using analytical tools developed in psychology, the behavioural sciences, ethology and game theory. I believe that these tools are more impersonal and less likely to be compromised by cultural bias than any that rely upon the researcher�s moral experience alone. Deriving from several disciplines, in which they have been greeted as considerable advances, they are brought together in my book to create a fully rounded analytical approach that is not merely appropriate to the study of ancient Athens, but may, with certain adjustments and refinements, be used to evaluate objectively the moral systems of many other small-scale societies, both past and present. My fifth observation was that throughout the wider field of social studies the study of man�s society and culture tended to be regarded as separate from the study of man as a biological organism. Dubious as to the legitimacy of the widespread practice of abstracting �constitution� from �society�, �society� from �collective behaviour� and �collective behaviour� from an individual�s biologically and culturally conditioned sentiments, and inspired by Professor Burkett�s call to apply �biological methods� to the study of ancient societies (Burkerti996), I shall be attempting in this book to reintroduce man�s biological aspect into the study of Athenian society and mores. Though I am by training an ancient historian, my longstanding familiarity with the behavioural sciences has convinced me that their methods offer us a key to certain problems in ancient history that cannot satisfactorily be resolved using the ancient historian�s analytical apparatus alone. In the course of the thirteen-odd years that it has taken me to write this book, I have received endless help and advice from a long list of friends. I am more than grateful to Moshe Amit, Paul Cartledge, John Crook, Peter Garnsey, Manuela Giordano, Wilfried Nippel, Anthony Snodgrass and Nigel Spivey for many extremely helpful discussions. I have also profited by the comments and criti seminars and conferences Jerusalem, Leicester, Londe Stanford. Special thanks a Christian Habicht, Nigel 1 help that made my extende ant. My greatest debt is tc Frank Walbank, Alex Yakol have shown the greatest pa and helping me with thei manuscript assumed its pres and extremely sensitive effor wife Ora, my children Oriel putting up with my system; commitments to Athenian. Finally, a few general rem; are BC unless otherwise indi ram. except where otherwise poleis), without italics, to si CMy� and the cumbersome.The fifty-five illustration intended to give the text d< am. ch expand upon ideas tl integral part of the book�s are by the comments and criticisms of the organisers of and participants in seminars and conferences in Bellagio, Cambridge, Chicago, Exeter, Jerusalem, Leicester, London, Naples, New York, Oxford, Princeton and Stanford. Special thanks are due to Paul Cartledge, Glen Bowersock, Christian Habicht, Nigel Spivey and Dick Whittaker for the practical help that made my extended visits to Cambridge and Princeton so pleasant. My greatest debt is to Avner Offer, Martin Ostwald, Brent Shaw, Frank Walbank, Alex Yakobson and the late John Graham, all of whom have shown the greatest patience in reading large sections of this book and helping me with their criticisms over long periods of time. The manuscript assumed its present form thanks to Rosamund Annetts� patient and extremely sensitive efforts. Last but not least, I would like to thank my wife Ora, my children Oriel, Jonathan and Ruth and my mother Clara for putting up with my systematic and all too authentic prioritisation of my commitments to Athenian society over my commitments to my family. Finally, a few general remarks concerning the text that follows. All dates are bc unless otherwise indicated. All translations from the Greek are my own, except where otherwise indicated. I have used the term �polis� (plural: poleis), without italics, to sidestep the ambiguities associated with �state�, city� and the cumbersome �city-state�. The fifty-five illustrations with which this book is punctuated are intended to give the text depth and dimension. The captions, many of which expand upon ideas that appear in the text only in outline, are an ntegral part of the book�s argument. ISBN 9780521125352