In the last days of September of the year 480 BCE, King Xerxes proceeded to Athens, after having had his victory at Thermopylae. Also his naval forces moved southward for the final stroke. Among the Persian naval contingent were 120 triremes from Thrace, 100 ships from Ionia, 60 ships from Aeolia including Lesbos and Samos, and an unspecified number of ships from the Greek islands, including the Cyclades, and lastly,… Read more
We are pleased to share in the Text Library a revised translation of selections from Book 2 of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War that tracks Key terms. The selected part of Book 2—chapters 34–65—includes some important and famous sections, and within these are particular focus passages indicated by highlighting: Pericles’ Funeral Oration The plague in Athens Pericles’ last speech Thucydides’ assessment of Pericles This edition was the result of a community-driven… Read more
Members of the Kosmos Society have been reading sections of Xenophon’s Anabasis, and this post provides a brief historical context to that work. The text is available on Perseus, both in Greek and in an English translation by Carleton L. Brownson (1922). Historical context The Anabasis by the Athenian soldier, historian and philosopher Xenophon, also known as The Anabasis of Cyrus, The March of the Ten Thousand and The March… Read more
The spectator on the aft deck A clay model found in a tomb at Amathos[1] tells us the story of a man who comfortably sits on the back of his ship without a helm, having such a clear vision over the well-built ship—and where it is going to—that we could call it a modeled scene of a theōriā: the figure being a spectator who looks with his eyes and his… Read more
As long as people have been trading with each other, they have created debt. And as long as people have created debt, some have been unable to pay what they owe. This was as true in ancient Athens as it is today. Before about the 6th century BCE in Attica, among a population consisting primarily of peasants and small farmers, borrowing occurred among members of local communities in the form… Read more