Greek core 1 - Aristocracy and Democracy

Hdt “declines to judge between conflicting accounts” - “intellectual honesty” and “persuasive rhetoric”, “now fashionable and proper method to generate credibility for the author”

Dewald and Marincola (Hdt)

Hdt’s chronology seems more “episodic, rather than continuous or biographical”. Powerful families could impose their stories “on the wider public”

Oswyn Murray (Hdt)

Hdt “transcribed speech”

Jennifer Robert (Hdt)

Hdt used time not as a “measurable quantity but as an associative and emotional quantity”, divided into the “heroic age and post heroic”. The wealth of families were a variable for whether their history became public memory

Moses Finley (Hdt)

Visual source for Croesus pyre story

Myson Amphora, 525-475 BC

Primary source (other than Hdt) for Croesus pyre story

Bacchylides Ode 3

Symposium was derived from the eastern “nomad tradition of reclining” to eat which was formalised in urban courts, introduced to Greece in the 7th century, after democracy is introduced dancing is done by symposiasts not professionals

John Boardman (Symposiums)

Symposium - “the krater was central to the symposium”, myth was not the “principal topic” but “wine was the province of Dionysus” so “Dionysian imagery blossomed”

James Whitley (Symposiums)

Symposium - Homer gives us a sense of how in the Bonze age “central authority sponsored large feasts”, “exclusive province of the elite until the end of the Archaic period”, the symposium allowed men to “get to know each other’s views”

Kathleen M. Lynch (Symposium)

Symposium was the “focus of aristocratic culture in the archaic period”, “an insistence on equality among the participants”

Oswyn Murray (Symposium)

Symposium - “the krater has a place of honour in such a komos”

Francois Lissarrague (Symposium)

Symposium made Greeks reconsider what was ‘exotic’ imagery and instead see the symposium “as part of a common heritage belonging to cultures throughout the Mediterranean”

K. Topper (Symposium)

Non vase visual source for symposiums

Tomb of the Diver, near the Greek colony of Paestum, c. 480 BC, painted walls

reclining couch in a symposium

kline

a table in a symposium

trapeza