Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 2 Seiten: 729-731.

In this article it is suggested that George Grote’s History of Greece employed a narrative history of Greece in an attempt to resolve the philosophical problem of the compatibility of individual liberty with considerable obligations to society. His philosophical achievement has been largely ignored by modern classical scholarship, even those who follow his lead in treating fifth-century Athens as the epitome of Greek civilization. The present reading of Grote’s History is informed by John Stuart Mill’s use of Athenian examples. Outlining (...) the evidential, moral and spatial parameters of Grote’s fifth-century Athens, it is argued that Grote understood fifth-century Athens to be amodel intellectual and liberal society, in which the performance of obligations by citizens coexisted with individual and political liberty. Grote explained the decline of Athenian power in the fourth century BC by reference to the neglect of obligations, and in doing so, married historical explanation to political theory. (shrink)

Recent research in the field of New Institutionalist analysis has developed the view that institutions are grounded not only upon authoritative rules but also upon accepted practices and narratives. In this paper I am interested in the ways in which honorific practices and accounts of identity set out in ancient Greek inscriptions contribute towards the persistence of polis institutions in the Hellenistic period. A diachronic survey of Erythraian inscriptions of the classical and Hellenistic periods gives an impression of the adaptation (...) and proliferation of forms of discourse established in the classical period. It demonstrates the ongoing prominence of the rhetoric of identity in conversations that went on not only between peer polities and within real or imagined kinship groups but also in negotiations between powerful and weak state entities and in inward-facing discourses on euergetism. (shrink)