INTRODUCTION: IN TERMS OF ATHENS

Abstract

Athens, again? Classicists have long issued frustrated reminders that there was a great deal more to Greek antiquity than ‘classical Athens’. At the beginning of the fifth century BCE, Athens was but one of roughly 850 distinct Greek poleis that together constituted the Greek world,1 and the famed Athenian democratic experiment came to an end in the fourth, less than two centuries after it began. And yet none of those ancient Greek states is so richly attested as Athens, and it is Athens that continues to exert the firmest grip on the public imagination, especially during times of political convulsion. The last year alone has seen countless think-pieces on Thucydides’ account of the plague of 430 BCE, ominous invocations of the Platonic notion that tyranny is an outgrowth of democracy run amok, critically acclaimed web-based performances of Theater of War’s Sophocles-inspired Antigone in Ferguson, and a flurry of commemorative events both in Greece and abroad around the 2,500th anniversary of the Battles of Thermopylae and Salamis. But despite its persistent presence in the public imagination, Athens seems to have fallen somewhat out of fashion within the academic field of Classics. Of the 157 dissertations-in-progress reported to the Society for Classical Studies in 2017–18 (the most recent year for which data is published), only a dozen or so appear to have been centered on classical Athens and texts—tragic, comic, historiographical, philosophical, epigraphical, or otherwise—born of the Athenian democratic milieu.2 Athenian works continue to be read in translation in university-level courses on philosophy, politics, literature, and others, and yet it can be difficult to locate Greek texts and commentaries suitable for undergraduates on works that, in earlier centuries, had formed the core of university instruction. (Isocrates’ Panegyricus and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia mark two examples of ‘core’ Athenian texts that are hardly easy to assign to Greek-learners today.) At the same time that interest in Athens has contracted in Classics, the field has expanded in salutary ways: recent decades have seen a reorientation to the literary production, material culture, and historical questions of other places and eras—from Hellenistic Alexandria to the Hellenized world of the ‘Second Sophistic’ and beyond. As we scanned this shifting academic and political landscape with the public’s interest in Athens firmly in view, we wanted to reflect on where and how political