In the past 40 years, Greek antiquity has witnessed several scholarly revolutions. With the emergence of critical theory alongside major archaeological, epigraphic, and papyrological discoveries, long-held assumptions and traditional methodologies have received robust challenges with new avenues of enquiry emerging in turn. Attention to gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity has broadened the field of topics and subjects of study, and so women, children, slaves, and foreigners have once more come to reinhabit Greek spaces and scholarship. New archaeological discoveries have challenged and complexified our understanding of the Greek city-state, Macedonian dynasties, and prehistoric Mycenaean and Early Iron Age sites, while literary theory has been completely transformative for readings of Greek literature. The collection focuses on four major topics: art and archaeology, politics and political history; social history and Greek society; and ancient Greece’s literary production.
The study of Greek antiquity is a study of multiplicity – of locales, eras, and widely divergent systems of government, literary production, and social practices. From the nearly 200 city-states of the Archaic and Classical periods of the 7th-4th centuries, to the Mycenaean palace-states of Greek prehistory (1600-1100 BCE), and to the transformation of Greek cities under Hellenistic rule (323-31 BC) CE), we see multiple incarnations of Greek civilization. Ancient Greece also encompasses a wide geographic focus, far broader than the borders of the modern state. The cities of Greek antiquity dotted mainland Greece, western Turkey, Sicily and Southern Italy by 600 BCE; by the time of Alexander, Greek culture spread from Macedon to Libya to the banks of the Indus. Consequently, scholarship’s conception of ancient Greece has also grown consequently broad, juxtaposing and combining the study of art, archaeology, literature, religion, economics, and political and social history to create more nuanced, balanced, and thorough narratives of Greek civilization.
