Ioannis K. Xydopoulos - Violence and Community: Law, Space and Identity in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean World

Violence and community were intimately linked in the ancient world. While various aspects of violence have been long studied on their own (warfare, revolution, murder, theft, piracy), there has been little effort so far to study violence as a unified field and explore its role in community formation. This volume aims to construct such an agenda by exploring the historiography of the study of violence in antiquity, and highlighting a number of important paradoxes of ancient violence. It explores the forceful nexus between wealth, power and the passions by focusing on three major aspects that link violence and community: the attempts of communities to regulate and canalise violence through law, the constitutive role of violence in communal identities, and the ways in which communities dealt with violence in regard to private and public space, landscapes and territories. The contributions to this volume range widely in both time and space: temporally, they cover the full span from the archaic to the Roman imperial period, while spatially they extend from Athens and Sparta through Crete, Arcadia and Macedonia to Egypt and Israel.

Ioannis K. Xydopoulos is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek History at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is the author of Social and Cultural Relations between the Macedonians and the Other Greeks (2006) and The Image of the Thracians in Classical Historiography (2007).

Kostas Vlassopoulos is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek History at the University of Crete. He is the author of Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism (2007), Politics: Antiquity and its Legacy (2010) and Greeks and Barbarians (2013).

Eleni Tounta is Assistant Professor of Medieval History at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the author of Medieval Mirrors for Princes: Histories and Narratives in the Norman South of Italy (2012) and co-editor of Usurping Ritual Volume III: State, Power and Violence (2010).

Edited by Ioannis K. Xydopoulos, Kostas Vlassopoulos and Eleni Tounta

First published 2017

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2017 Ioannis K. Xydopoulos, Kostas Vlassopoulos and Eleni Tounta

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Names: Xydopoulos, I. K., editor. | Vlassopoulos, Kostas, 1977 editor. |
Tounta, Eleni, 1973 editor.
Title: Violence and community : law, space and identity in the ancient
Eastern Mediterranean world / edited by Ioannis K. Xydopoulos, Kostas
Vlassopoulos, and Eleni Tounta.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016047497 | ISBN 9781472448323
(hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315548159 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: ViolenceGreeceHistory. | CommunitiesGreece
History. | Law, GreekHistory. | GreeceHistory. |
GreeceCivilizationTo 146 B.C.
Classification: LCC HN10.G7 V56 2017 | DDC 303.609495dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047497

ISBN: 978-1-472-44832-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-54815-9 (ebk)

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