Athens: Material Culture Approaches to the Classical City
Caspar Meyer, Spring Term 2016, Thursdays
Throughout much of the archaic and classical periods Athens was the foremost city of the Aegean
region, famed for its power and creativity. Most modern studies of the city are traditional in the sense
that they explore its archaeological and textual legacies in terms of the light they shed on its citizens’
skills and intellectual achievements. The aim of this course is to challenge the marginalization of
objects in current literature by focusing on how humans and materials co-produced each other in
classical Athens. We will critically review recent works in materiality and material culture studies and
examine the opportunities they present for understanding the work which different types of resource
(from clay to metals and marble) and artefact (such as clothes, furniture, coins, and measuring pots)
performed in different contexts of production, exchange and consumption.
Topics to be covered:
Introduction: the ‘material turn’ in c21st historiography, Was Athens a consumer society?; Cloth,
clothing, and the gendered body; Democracy as an archival practice; Transport and mobility; Mining
and quarrying; Measuring and standardization; Coinage and the illusion of autarchy; The materiality of
the Platonic soul; Marble and memory: building Periclean Athens
Introductory bibliography
Acton, Peter 2014: Poiesis: Manufacturing in Classical Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Arrington, Nathan 2015: Ashes, Images, and Memories: the Presence of the War Dead in FifthCentury Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brooke, Holmes 2010: The Symptom and the Subject: the Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient
Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Davidson, James 1998: Courtesans & Fishcakes: the Consuming Passions of Classical Athens.
London: Fontana.
Hurwit, Jeffrey M. 2004: The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lee, Mirielle M. 2015: Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lynch, Kathleen M. 2011: The Symposium in Context: Pottery from a Late Archaic House Near the
Classical Athenian Agora. Athens: American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Ober, Josiah 2008: Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Seaford, Richard 2004: Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.