A reader familiar with the traditional periodization of Byzantine history may find it surprising that in this study the momentous events of 1204 – the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade and the subsequent disintegration of the Byzantine Empire – hardly figure as a meaningful chronological break.
An interview with Andrej and Ivana Petrovic, authors of Inner Purity and Pollution in Greek Religion (Volume I: Early Greek Religion)
Thank you for talking to us about your book Inner Purity and Pollution in Greek Religion, Andrej and Ivana. Can we start with the way you work together? You say a little in your introduction about how you work up your thoughts in tandem. It sounds like an exceptionally close form of co-authoring. Do tell … Read more
An excerpt from Ivana and Andrej Petrovic’s entry, Inner Purity and Pollution in Greek Religion
Throughout this book we have explored the inner stance of Greek worshippers, such as they appear in individual and varied guises of the pre-Platonic sources, rather than that of ‘the Greek worshipper’ as a generalized amalgam. The outcomes, we believe, are several.
An interview with Paul Cartledge, author of Democracy: A Life
Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions, Paul.
Can we start with your motivation for writing this book? Was it your knowledge of the ancient world and Greece’s political systems, or concerns about the modern world?
A combination. I think I’m a kind of ‘natural’ democrat in the sense of being (an) anti-elitist egalitarian, but it wasn’t until I was a student first at the University of California and then Oxford that I got a chance to show my true democratic colours
An excerpt from Paul Cartledge’s entry, Democracy: A Life
Every schoolchild knows that it was the ancient Greeks who invented democracy. But first it must always be remembered that there were some one thousand ancient Greek political entities, often very different, always radically self-differentiated, in the extended and diverse ancient Greek world of Hellas between say 500 and 300 BCE, when demokratia emerged, rose, peaked, and declined or was destroyed.