#greek history

adri-le-chat:

A collection of free Hellenic History PDFs, from the Bronze Age to Modern day Greece. If you are interested in works about Ancient Greek Religion, please look through my blog as I give them away freely.

if you struggle with opening a PDF or need a pdf that is locked behind a paywall, use sci-hub to access them.

Bronze Age

Cline, E. H. (2012). The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean. OUP USA. [link]

Dickinson, O. (2007). The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age: Continuity and Change Between the Twelfth and Eighth Centuries BC (1st ed.). Routledge. [link]

Harding, A. (2021). Bronze Age Lives. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. [link]

Knapp, B. A., & Dommelen, V. P. (2015). The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean (Illustrated ed.). Cambridge University Press. [link]

Taylor, Lindsay, (2019) The Snake Goddess Dethroned: Deconstructing the Work and Legacy of Sir Arthur Evans. Honors College. [link]

Archaic Greece

Dillon, M., & Garland, L. (2010). Ancient Greece: Social and Historical Documents from Archaic Times to the Death of Alexander the Great (Routledge Sourcebooks for the Ancient World) (3rd ed.). Routledge. [link]

Raaflaub, K. A., & Wees, V. H. (2012). A Companion to Archaic Greece (1st ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. [link]

Rayor, D. J., & Johnson, W. R. (1991). Sappho’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece (First ed.). University of California Press. [link]

Shapiro, H. A. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece (Cambridge Companions to the Ancient World). Cambridge University Press. [link]

Classical Greece

Kinzl, K. H. (2010). A Companion to the Classical Greek World (1st ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. [link]

Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (1996). “Reading” Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period. Clarendon Press. [link]

Hellenistic and Roman Greece

Bugh, G. R. (2006). The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World (Illustrated ed.). Cambridge University Press. [link]

Erskine, A. (2005). A Companion to the Hellenistic World. Wiley-Blackwell. [link]

Stevens, K. (2019). Between Greece and Babylonia: Hellenistic Intellectual History in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Cambridge Classical Studies). Cambridge University Press. [link]

Byzantine Greece

Garland, L. (2011). Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium AD 527–1204 (1st ed.). Routledge. [link]

Hussey, J. M., & Louth, A. (2010). The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford History of the Christian Church) (Illustrated ed.). Oxford University Press. [link]

K. (2021). Alexiad (09) by Komnene, Anna [Paperback (2009)]. Penguin Clasics, Paperback(2009). [link]

Lauritzen, F. (2013). The Depiction of Character in the Chronographia of Michael Psellos (Studies in Byzantine History and Civilization). Brepols Publishers. [link]

Neville, L. (2019). Byzantine Gender (Past Imperfect) (New ed.). Arc Humanities Press. [link]

Psellos, M., & Kaldellis, A. (2006). Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters: The Byzantine Family of Michael Psellos (Michael Psellos in Translation) (1st ed.). University of Notre Dame Press. [link]

Psellos, M., Papaioannou, S., & Barber, C. (2017). Michael Psellos on Literature and Art: A Byzantine Perspective on Aesthetics (Michael Psellos in Translation) (1st ed.). University of Notre Dame Press. [link]

Shepard, J. (2009). The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c.500-1492 (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. [link]

Venetian possessions and Ottoman rule (15th century – 1821)

Davies, S., & Davis, J. L. (2007). Between Venice and Istanbul: Colonial Landscapes in Early Modern Greece (Hesperia Supplement) (Volume XL ed.). American School of Classical Studies at Athens. [link]

Halstead, H. (2018). Greeks without Greece: Homelands, Belonging, and Memory amongst the Expatriated Greeks of Turkey (Routledge Studies in Modern European History) (1st ed.). Routledge. [link]

Naar, D. E. (2016). Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) (1st ed.). Stanford University Press. [link]

Vionis, A. K. (2013). A Crusader, Ottoman, and Early Modern Aegean Archaeology: Built Environment and Domestic Material Culture in the Medieval and Post-Medieval Cyclades, … Studies Leiden University Press). Leiden University Press. [link]

Zarinebaf, F., Bennet, J., & Davis, J. L. (2005). A Historical and Economic Geography of Ottoman Greece: The Southwestern Morea in the 18th Century (Hesperia Supplement). American School of Classical Studies at Athens. [link]

Modern Greece

Avdela, E., Gallant, T., Papadogiannis, N., Papastefanaki, L., & Voglis, P. (2017). The social history of modern Greece: a roundtable. Social History,43(1), 105–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2018.1394037[link]

Beaton, R. (2004). Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Revised ed.). Cambridge University Press. [link]

Featherstone, K., Papadimitriou, D., Mamarelis, A., & Niarchos, G. (2011). The Last Ottomans: The Muslim Minority of Greece 1940–1949 (New Perspectives on South-East Europe) (1st ed. 2011 ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. [link]

Honor, Masculinity, and Ritual Knife Fighting in Nineteenth-Century Greece. (2000). The American Historical Review. Published. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/105.2.359[link]

McGuckin, J. A. (2010). The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture (1st ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. [link]

Books That Cover Multiple Eras

Carney, E. D., & Müller, S. (2020). The Routledge Companion to Women and Monarchy in the Ancient Mediterranean World (1st ed.). Routledge. [link]

James, S. L., & Dillon, S. (2015). A Companion to Women in the Ancient World (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World) (1st ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. [link]

Llewellyn-Jones, L. (2003). Aphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Woman of Ancient Greece (Illustrated ed.). Classical Press of Wales. [link]

Mackridge, P. (2010). Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (Illustrated ed.). Oxford University Press. [link]

Ober;, J. (2021). The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (The Princeton History of the Ancient World) by Josiah Ober (2015–05-04). Princeton University Press; First Edition edition (2015–05-04). [link]

Petropoulos, J. (2014). Greek Magic (Monographs in Classical Studies) (1st ed.). Routledge. [link]

Rawson, B. (2011). A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World Book 86) (1st ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. [link]

Tziovas, D. (2016). Greek Diaspora and Migration since 1700. Taylor & Francis. [link]

I hope this collections helps y’all with knowing more about Greek History - I haven’t read them all, and that is something I plan to fix. Feel free to recommend more books, knowledge is good!

cousin-possum-kc:

tlaquetzqui:

cousin-possum-kc:

tlaquetzqui:

kyliafanfiction:

I really hate it when fiction, when trying to be gritty and establish that their setting is free of frippery, or the land is super duper poor, etc, will say that the currency, rather than being gold or silver, is like ‘iron’ or ‘steel’ when like…

leaving aside the fact that iron rusts and such, it’s also… well, useful. You have better things to do with Iron then stuff it in a vault. Make shit out of it.

Gold? Pretty much only use for gold other then money (until we started using it in computer chips and stuff) is to sparkle. You can’t use it for much beyond a store of value.

There’s a reason why human society picked gold, and not something else.

I think they’re usually trying for a medieval-fantasy version of “bullets are currency”, seen in some post-apocalyptic settings.

And copper and bronze coins were used in Bronze Age societies, so there is a precedent for using the same thing for money as for making weapons and tools out of. (Copper and bronze are a lot easier to work than iron, though, so it’s easier to convert your currency into usable material.)

Apparently China sometimes used iron coins in place of copper, when copper was too expensive—like making ammunition with steel casings instead of brass.

Didn’t Sparta have iron currency?

Apparently that is either a fabrication or a legend, in Plutarch (he attributes the use of iron coins to Lycurgus but Lycurgus lived before Greece had any coins), or else someone, Plutarch or his source, misunderstanding “cooking spits” (obeloi) as “coins” (oboloi)—I think the words are related, and it’s possible that Spartans used cooking spits as a convenient unit of account given the communal feasts were central to their culture. Certainly, though, trading with others, Spartans used the same coins as the rest of Greece.

I would suspect Sparta’s main internal exchanges were barter, given the tightly controlled command economy; since almost every working person in Sparta was a slave (mostly state-owned helots but also privately-owned slaves like in the rest of Greece) or a free noncitizen protegee of one of the elite (Sparta’s only citizens were its nobles), there was no real need for a medium of exchange beyond the goods those slaves and protegees would give their elite masters and patrons, who could relatively conveniently just move the goods around among themselves.

The weird thing about the Spartan economy is it was illegal for the elite to have sources of revenue besides their state-allotted farmland, and an elite who could no longer afford to contribute to the aforementioned communal feasts was permanently stripped of status. (There was no way to rejoin the elite class, or otherwise enter it from outside, which meant its numbers permanently declined.)

Interesting. You learn something new every day, I guess.

That last bit about the elites seems like an extremely short-sighted system.

Oh, it was. One of the things that led to the downfall of sparta was how small the elite warrior class was getting. But the notion was to try to keep all the citizens equal to prevent like, class conflict or something within the elite that the slaves would take advantage of. So it came from a place that made sense.

We have to remember that in Sparta, the slave to citizen ratio was insane, like 7 to 1, according to Herodotus. You don’t get numbers like that anywhere else until the Carribean Sugar plantations. And given how it turned out for the French in Haiti, the Spartans were right to be paranoid about that.*

—

*For reference, the Haitian revolution was presaged by a conflict within the white planter class against France that eventually cracked the system wide open and allowed the slaves to take over, winning legal freedom/citizenship within the French Republic (since this was happening at the same time as the French Revolution) in the process, and then later full on Independence thanks to Napoleon being a complete idiot about Haiti and L'Ouverture.

So I was listening to a podcast on ancient history that focused on queer women in Greece and Rome and I wanted to get a sense for how widespread are some of the assumptions we make about ancient sexuality.

Those who have studied gender and sexuality in Greece and Rome have surely come across the most popular theory addressing the definitions of ancient sexuality, that modern conceptions of sexuality (hetero- and homosexuality) were nonexistent and instead ones sexuality was defined by specific sex acts. Normative sexuality involved a binary between the one penetrating and the one being penetrated. Thus, for a man, penetrating a woman or another man was within the bounds of normative sexual behavior, as was a woman being penetrated. This is obviously penis-centered in nature and thus anything not involving a penis falls outside the bounds of normative sexuality, or at least that is what we assume. We do not have enough historical evidence to make claims about how sexual acts between women were viewed by society in Greece and Rome (as the podcast did) because our understanding of ancient sexuality is focused on this binary penetrator and penetrated.

For all we know, women could engage in sexually pleasurable relationships with other women and no one batted an eye (I am not saying they did, just that it could have been the case). What I am saying is that based on our source material it is equally possible that pleasure between women was not talked about because it was not seen as anything unordinary.

Martial has two epigrams about a “monstrous” woman (Bassus) who has sex with other women, but his gripe is that she tries too much to be “like a man” not specifically that she has sex with women.

One of the other things that really bothered me about the podcast was the assumption that to be a penetrator meant to absolutely dominant, and thus that being penetrated automatically must mean being on the receiving end of something hostile and violent. This might be the end result of using terminology like dominant and submissive for ancient sexual roles which have taken on specifically modern connotations. Nevertheless, it is an absurd assumption to make and leads to some equating the majority of ancient sex with rape.

Lastly, to characterize ancient pederasty as “heteronormative” is just a bad take.

writing a dramatic performance about the tomb of Philip II called The Vergina Monologues

“There are several species of Hellebore. The name comes from the Greek words ‘elein’ (to injure) and 'bora’ (food), indicating that Helleborus is poisonous. In some belief systems, it’s been believed to be a purgative, sometimes of bad things generally, used for things like protecting livestock from evil spells & (in powdered form) for invisibility. According to herb lore, the roots of the hellebore plant are are used to treat melancholy diseases & madness.

The original name for Hellebore was

"Melampodium.” According to the Greek historian Pliny, the plant was named for the soothsayer Melampus who used it to cure depression in ancient times. On a happier note & in spite of poisonous nature of the plant, it is often called the “Christmas Rose” or “Christ herbe” because it blooms in winter.

Caption chosen separately.

Drawing titled 'Heleborus’ by @cat.schappach

centrumlumina:

Why doesn’t Tumblr talk more about Alcibiades?

• “All this statecraft and eloquence and lofty purpose and cleverness was attended with great luxuriousness of life, with wanton drunkenness and lewdness, with effeminacy in dress, — he would trail long purple robes through the market place, — and with prodigal expenditures.”
• A student and possibly-lover of Socrates, and saved his life in battle once. Also the Symposium (you know, with the story about how people used to be two people joined together) is full of their soap opera relationship drama about Alcibiades trying to seduce Socrates.
• In the middle of being a successful Athenian general in the Athens-Sparta war, he got exiled for being an atheist and smashing up some sacred statues of dicks.
• Rather than go live quietly in exile he switched sides and joined the Spartans until they kicked him out too for sleeping with the King of Sparta’s wife.
• But he was such a good general that Athens asked him back to win more battles for them, only to kick him out again just before the war ended.
• Nevertheless showed up at the Athenian’s last stand battle to give them some good tactical advice, which they ignored and promptly got their asses kicked.
• Was finally murdered a year later, either by Spartan assassins or by the angry family of a girl he’d hooked up with.
• Basically his entire life was being kickass and flamboyant and sleeping with inappropriate people and getting kicked out of countries.
• Oh, and he had the decks of his boats removed so he could string bedding across the gap and build a comfortable nest to sleep in.

WHY ARE WE NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS.

Peak dumbass energy

apollo x icarus

change my mind