This article begins with a remark by Jean-Pierre Vernant in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France about the inadequacy of Max Weber's historical sociology for the study of ancient religions. Despite posing shared research questions and often reaching similar conclusions, Vernant, one of the most influential twentieth-century ancient historians, neither engaged nor acknowledged Weber and thereby secured his absence in the field of ancient religions generally. Vernant's narrative of the historical emergence of Greek rationality is at direct odds (...) with Weber's views on the matter inSociology of Religionand elsewhere, and I argue that, beyond methodological concerns, Vernant's fundamentally Durkheimian position inherits early twentieth-century polemics between French and German sociologists. Vernant's relationships with Marcel Mauss, Ignace Meyerson, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and his participation in the French Resistance, moreover, reaffirmed his Durkheimian views about society and committed him to a long tradition of anti-German scholarship. I conclude with a brief coda on the historiographical implications of these observations for the study of religion and its relation to social life. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag ordnet Herodots Erzählung von der fürstlichen Belohnung des Atheners Alkmeon durch den Lyderkönig Kroisos in die allgemeine Debatte über die Konstitution der griechischen Eliten in archaischer Zeit ein. Dabei steht die Frage nach den materiellen Ressourcen im Vordergrund, die als Basis des distinktiven exklusiven Lebensstils Gegenstand einer intensiven Konkurrenz zwischen den Aristokraten waren. Dieser Wettbewerb produzierte notwendig Gewinner und Verlierer. Sozialer Aufstieg bzw. Abstieg führten zu einer erheblichen Instabilität der Zusammensetzung der Gruppe an der Spitze der gesellschaftlichen (...) Pyramide. (shrink)

At Metaphysics A 5 986a22-b2, Aristotle refers to a Pythagorean table, with two columns of paired opposites. I argue that 1) although Burkert and Zhmud have argued otherwise, there is sufficient textual evidence to indicate that the table, or one much like it, is indeed of Pythagorean origin; 2) research in structural anthropology indicates that the tables are a formalization of arrays of “symbolic classification” which express a pre-scientific world view with social and ethical implications, according to which the presence (...) of a principle on one column of the table will carry with it another principle within the same column; 3) a close analysis of Aristotle's arguments shows that he thought that the table expresses real causal relationships; and 4) Aristotle faults the table of opposites with positing its principles as having universal application and with not distinguishing between those principles that are causally prior and those that are posterior. Aristotle's account of scientific explanation and his own explanations that he developed in accordance with this account are in part the result of his critical encounter with this prescientific Pythagorean table. (shrink)

The master narrative of a profound crisis in traditional faith leading to a hardening of authority and religious persecution in late fifth-century Athens has a long scholarly history, one that maintains a persistent presence in current research. This paper proposes to reexamine some aspects of religious authority in late fifth-century Athens through one case-study: the trial of Andocides in 400 BCE. Instead of proposing a new reconstruction of the events that led to this trial, it will compare and contrast the (...) rival rhetorics of authority deployed by Andocides in De mysteriis and Ps.-Lysias in In Andocidem and attempt to locate them in their respective social and cultural contexts. (shrink)

The idea that the household was the fundamental building block of ancient Greek society, explicit in the ancient sources, has now become widely accepted. It is no exaggeration to say that ancient Athenians would have found it almost inconceivable that individuals of any status existed who did not belong to some household; and the few who were in this position were almost certainly regarded as anomalous. In ancient Athens, as elsewhere, households ‘are a primary arena for the expression of age (...) and sex roles, kinship, socialization and economic cooperation’. It has been suggested for modern Greece that our own cultural biases, along with the Greek ideology of male dominance, have led to the assumption that the foundations of power in Greek society lie solely in the public sphere, and that domestic power is ‘less important’. In a less simple reality the preeminent role of the household cannot be underestimated. Here I hope to question similar assumptions about ancient Greece, focusing in particular on the relationships that existed between Athenian households and the property of the individuals, particularly women, within these households. (shrink)