Athens: Citizenship and democracy

The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens. By Philip Brook Manville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), xiv + 265 pp., $17.95/£14.95 paper.

Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War. By Barry S. Strauss (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), xv + 283 pp., $16.95/ £12.95 paper.     

Testing settlement models in the early Roman colonial landscapes of Venusia (291 B.C.), Cosa (273 B.C.) and Aesernia (263 B.C.)

This paper examines settlement density and settlement patterns in the Roman colonial territories of Venusia, Cosa and Aesernia, located in three different landscapes of central southern Italy (modern Basilicata, Tuscany and Molise). Using a series of GIS tools, we conducted a comparative analysis of the density and spatial distribution of sites dating to the Hellenistic period (ca. 350–50 b.c.). We used the legacy settlement data collected by previous large-scale, intensive, site-oriented field surveys to test the validity of two competing rural settlement models of early Roman colonization: the conventional model of neatly organized settlements regularly dispersed across the landscape and the recently proposed theory that colonists adopted a polynuclear settlement strategy. After calculating the extent to which the archaeological datasets conform to the regular or polynuclear model, we conclude that only a very small portion of the colonized areas actually meets traditional expectations regarding the organization of early colonial settlements. Our analyses show that the legacy survey data is more consistent with the polynuclear settlement theory, but the data also reveals some completely unexpected patterns, suggesting that early Roman colonial landscapes were more diverse than previously thought.     

Ancient Athens: democracy and empire1

This paper looks at the principal features of the Athenian democracy in the fifth century BC and of the Delian League, the fifth-century alliance which became an Athenian empire, and asks how it was that at the same time the Athenians built up an unprecedented degree of democracy in their internal affairs and an unprecedented degree of rule over other Greek states.