Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State

Hans Beck is professor and chair of Greek history at the University of Munster, 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.

• MapList of IllustrationsPrefaceChapter One: Localism and the Local in Ancient GreeceChapter Two: Attachment to the LandChapter Three: Senses and SensationChapter Four: The Gods in PlaceChapter Five: Big Politics, through the Local LensChapter Six: Toward a Local History of Ancient GreeceAcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesIndex

"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 "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