How to Do Things with History: New Approaches to Ancient Greece

How to Do Things with History is a collection of essays that explores current and future approaches to the study of ancient Greek cultural history. Rather than focus directly on methodology, the essays in this volume demonstrate how some of the most productive and significant methodologies for studying ancient Greece can be employed to illuminate a range of different kinds of subject matter. These essays, which bring together the work of some of the most talented scholars in the field, are based upon papers delivered at a conference held at Cambridge University in September of 2014 in honor of Paul Cartledge's retirement from the post of A. G. Leventis Professor of Ancient Greek Culture. For the better part of four decades, Paul Cartledge has spearheaded intellectual developments in the field of Greek culture in both scholarly and public contexts. His work has combined insightful historical accounts of particular places, periods, and thinkers with a willingness to explore comparative approaches and a keen focus on methodology. Cartledge has throughout his career emphasized the analysis of practice - the study not, for instance, of the history of thought but of thinking in action and through action. The assembled essays trace the broad horizons charted by Cartledge's work: from studies of political thinking to accounts of legal and cultural practices to politically astute approaches to historiography. The contributors to this volume all take the parameters and contours of Cartledge's work, which has profoundly influenced an entire generation of scholars, as starting points for their own historical and historiographical explorations. Those parameters and contours provide a common thread that runs through and connects all of the essays while also offering sufficient freedom for individual contributors to demonstrate an array of rich and varied approaches to the study of the past.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter 1: The "Great Leap" in Early Greek Politics and Political Thought: A Comparative Perspective, Kurt A. Raaflaub Chapter 2: Pericles' Utopia - Reading of Thucydides and Plato, Emily Greenwood Chapter 3: How to Turn History into Scenario: Plato's Republic Book 8 on the Role of Political Office in Constitutional Change, Melissa Lane Chapter 4: "Cyrus appeared both great and good": Xenophon and the Performativity of Kingship, Carol Atack Chapter 5: Jurors and Serial Killers: Loneliness, Deliberation, and Community in Ancient Athens, Alastair J. L. Blanshard Chapter 6: The Sparta Game: Violence, Proportionality, Austerity, Collapse, Josiah Ober and Barry R. Weingast Chapter 7: Marx and Antiquity, Wilfried Nippel Chapter 8: Marxism and Ancient History, Kostas Vlassopoulos Chapter 9: Building for the State: A World-Historical Perspective, Walter Scheidel Chapter 10: Picturing History: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Tyrannicide in the Art of Classical Athens and Early Imperial China, Jeremy Tanner Chapter 11: Imaginary Intercourse: an Illustrated History of Greek Pederasty, Robin Osborne Chapter 12: The Boys from Cydathenaeum: Aristophanes versus Cleon Again, Edith Hall Chapter 13: How to Write Anti-Roman History, Tim Whitmarsh Afterward, Paul Cartledge

About the Author :
Paul Christesen, William R. Kenan Professor of Ancient Greek History in the Department of Classics at Dartmouth College, is the author of Olympic Victor Lists and Ancient Greek History and Sport and Democracy in the Ancient and Modern Worlds. He is also co-editor, with Donald Kyle, of The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity, and author of more than 30 articles. He is currently working with Paul Cartledge of Cambridge University on the Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World. He regularly speaks about these topics to scholarly and general audiences in the United States and Europe. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Review :
"How to Do Things with History is a very interesting and well-designed book, featuring a multiplicity of approaches and methodologies. It provides many insights to all students of ancient history." -- Classical Journal-Online "As a tribute to a foremost ancient historian who did many things with history, the volume is a success." -- The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought "An Oxford volume, but for a Cambridge stalwart-Paul Cartledge, the inaugural Leventis Professor of Greek culture. The book began in a conference to mark his retirement in 2014, and the stellar cast-list is itself testimony to Cartledge's influence and esteem; these have been matched by his immense energy in communicating with a broader public, not least through his engagement with Friends of Classics and Classics for All. Paul deserves a tribute of the highest quality, and he gets one here." -- Classics for All "Big questions are recurrently put, new ways are found to look for answers, ancient and modern worlds intertwine, and simple models illuminate but also fall short of the rich messiness of life. And Paul Cartledge will welcome all those ideas with the infectious enthusiasm that he has shown about so much for so long." -- Christopher Pelling, Classics for All "Recommended." -- CHOICE