This article reconsiders history's ways of reporting in prose. Ways of analysing and writing history so as to evoke a past are contrasted with ways of analysing and writing history so as to frame theses about a past. Academic norms now favour theses. It was not always so. This article contrasts very early European theories about writing prose, including key writings by Johannine Christians and by Heraclitus. Influenced by Martin Heidegger's existentialist phenomenology, this article reasserts the worth of the evocative (...) in history by attempting to reprise its philosophical foundations and by reconstructing the place of prose in the history of ideas. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper examines ideas of individual freedom in the Hellenistic city-states. It concentrates on the civic ideas expressed in the laws and decrees of Hellenistic cities, inscribed on stone, comparing them with Hellenistic historical and philosophical works. It places different Hellenistic approaches alongside modern liberal, neo-Roman republican and civic humanist theories of individual liberty, finding some overlaps with each of those modern approaches. The argument is that the Hellenistic Greeks developed innovative ways of combining demanding ideals of civic virtue and (...) the common good with equally robust ideals of individual freedom and ethical choice. They did so not least by adapting and developing traditional Greek approaches close to modern civic humanism, in ways very relevant to modern debates about how to reconcile civic duty, the common good and pluralism. (shrink)

Democracy and tragedy captured a delicate poise in ancient Athens. While many today perceive democracy as a finite, unquestionable and almost procedural form of governance that glorifies equality and liberty for their own sake, the Athenians saw it as so much more. Beyond the burgeoning equality and liberty, which were but fronts for a deeper goal, finitude, unimpeachability and procedural norms were constantly contradicted by boundlessness, subversion and disarray. In such a world, where certainty and immortality were luxuries beyond the (...) reach of humankind, tragedy gave comfort and inspired greatness. Before the disciplinary segregation and the delimiting of the poetic and artistic, tragic art dramatized the paradox of existence in a most political manner. The purpose of this paper is to explicitly highlight the crucial links that existed between democracy and tragedy during their formative years in ancient Athens. What was it about democracy that necessarily incited and depended upon the ascendency of tragedy during the time of the Athenian city-state? And why and how did a peculiar institution such as Athenian tragedy play so central a role in the democratic polis of Athens? (shrink)