Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State - by Hans Beck (Paperback)

About the Book

"This is a fluently written history of ancient Greece seen from the perspective of localism and the origins of the Greek City-State. Much like our own time, from the 8th century BCE until and even beyond its imperial end, the Greek world was constantly expanding and experiencing growing connectivity with the world at large. Conquest, exploration and exchange all grew Greece's global presence and helped develop an expanded world where a need to define and cherish the local would inevitably arise. Beck draws on a breathtaking range of materials: texts, some of them rare, by both well-known and obscure writers; numismatics, visual culture, pottery analysis, landscape and traditional field archaeology. He brings all this together in developing fine-grained case studies about tensions between metropolis and local communities such as Miletus, Ithaca, and rural Attica in relation to Athens and other major centers"--

Book Synopsis

Much like our own time, the ancient Greek world was constantly expanding and becoming more connected to global networks. The landscape was shaped by an ecology of city-states, local formations that were stitched into the wider Mediterranean world. While the local is often seen as less significant than the global stage of politics, religion, and culture, localism, argues historian Hans Beck has had a pervasive influence on communal experience in a world of fast-paced change. Far from existing as outliers, citizens in these communities were deeply concerned with maintaining local identity, commercial freedom, distinct religious cults, and much more. Beyond these cultural identifiers, there lay a deeper concept of the local that guided polis societies in their contact with a rapidly expanding world.

Drawing on a staggering range of materials---including texts by both known and obscure writers, numismatics, pottery analysis, and archeological records-Beck develops fine-grained case studies that illustrate the significance of the local experience. Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State builds bridges across disciplines and ideas within the humanities and shows how looking back at the history of Greek localism is important not only in the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, but also in today's conversations about globalism, networks, and migration.

Review Quotes

"This is a very stimulating book, which makes a very valuable case that deserves to be read widely and with attention."
-- "Orbis Terrarum"

"Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State is that rare, genuinely original book. . . . . Highly recommended"-- "Choice"

"There is much to praise in this book. The investigation, written in a vivid and pleasant style, is clear and erudite, with many welcome references to fragmentary historians. It will be a stimulating read not only for specialists, but also for students or for scholars interested in the topic without being familiar with Ancient Greece."-- "Sehepunkte"

"In creating a compelling case for the importance of the local, Beck provides a much-needed corrective to a scholarly orthodoxy that has underestimated the importance of place. Throughout, Beck displays a dazzling virtuosity with regard to his command of the scholarship and his ability to mesh literary sources--many of them drawn from relatively obscure and fragmentary authors--with numismatics, visual imagery, pottery styles, landscape archaeology, and archaeological field survey. It will certainly add a fresh new voice to the ongoing debate about connectivity."--Jonathan Hall, author of Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian

"By incorporating some of the key turns in the field of ancient history over the last thirty years--spatial, temporal, global, and local, as well as the move towards network based explanations--Beck has produced an important history that reads quite differently from the narrative familiar to many. He emphasizes the local not merely as a category of analysis but as a source of conflicting, resistant, alternative modes of discourse that added immeasurably to the richness of archaic and classical culture."--Jeremy McInerney, author of Ancient Greece: A New History

About the Author

Hans Beck is professor and chair of Greek history at the University of Münster, adjunct professor in the faculty of arts at McGill University in Montreal, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of many books, including A Companion to Ancient Greek Government; with Peter Funke, Federalism in Greek Antiquity; and, with Kostas Buraselis and Alex McAuley, Ethnos and Koinon: Studies in Ancient Greek Ethnicity and Federalism.