Plague and theatre in ancient Athens
Until a recent archaeological discovery, our understanding of what happened in Athens during the plague had been almost entirely reliant on the gripping narrative of Thucydides, which seems so dramatically shaped that some have wondered whether the historian embellished his vivid, harrowing eye-witness report.
Thucydides and Xenophon: Political Historians of Ancient Greece
We now little about Thucydides (also transliterated as Thoukydides) except what we can glean from his own book, The History of the Peloponnesian Wars.
The foreign policy of Macedon c.513 to 346 BC
The work of the three main contemporary historians for fifth century Greece are examined and some concluding comments regarding our use of them for the study of fifth century Macedon are made.
Destructive state interest and panhellenism in Thucydides
Thucydides in his text about the war between Athens and Sparta derides individuals, either members of a community or states in an international system, acting to increase their own power at the expense of others and promotes the same individuals to act in ways that support the community.
Inaros' rebellion Against Artaxerxes I and the Athenian Disaster in Egypt
The reconstruction of the rebellion of Inaros here will be based on Diodorus Siculus, Thucydides and Ctesias, but also on Aramaic and Egyptian documents from Egypt written in demotic script.”
The Myth of the Synagogue on Delos
The identification of a synagogue on Delos has been problematic ever since it was first made in 1913 because while there is some evidence relating to Jews and/or Samaritans on Delos not one single piece of it refers to a synagogue or association house. When we come to look at the material relating to how a building on the island came to be identified as a synagogue…
Thucydides and the invention of political science
Thucydides self-consciously invented a new form of inquiry, which can reasonably be called “social and political science.” His intellectual goal was a new understanding of power and its relationship to human agency and the deep structures of human society. His understanding of agency and structure is in some ways reminiscent of the reflexivity theory developed by Anthony Giddens.