The Origins of the Athenian Economic ARCHE
Abstract Histories of the Athenian Empire (478–404 BC) have traditionally been offered as political and military narratives. They explain the origins of a naval alliance created in 478/7 BC, the so-called Delian League under Athenian leadership and its development into an ‘empire’ (arche) sometime in mid-century. Moreover, most treat the phenomenon as comprehensible as a self-contained period of enquiry. This article takes issue with both approaches. Through close examination of a wide variety of evidence connected with Athenian activity during the formative years of the ‘Delian League’ (478 to ca. 465), it argues that the Athenians made immediate use of the League navy and funds to appropriate resources, profits and territory for themselves, especially in Thrace, beginning with the capture of Eion on the Strymon, but also that these interests explain other early activities. Finally, it argues that the Athenians' economic behaviour should be understood in the context of Athenian aims and activities in the Archaic period.
The erection and mutilation of the Hermai
A paper on the herms needs no excuse. There is no proper treatment in English of the origins of the herm or of the erection of herms by Hipparkhos. The Eion herm monument has been well studied by Jacoby and Harrison, but the recent treatment by Clairmont demands their reconsideration. The scholarly literature on the mutilation has been very narrowly focused on the questions of who mutilated the herms and why. These questions are clearly closely inter-related, and yet the attempts to answer the question ‘why?’ have been singularly unsatisfactory. Some have arbitrarily chosen to emphasise a single feature of the herm, and with little evidence have made wild claims: thus Farnell could write that ‘the mutilation of the phallic Hermai of Athens produced… in the Athenians the despondent sense that the luck of the state was gone and the divine power of fertilisation impaired’, Crome that ‘with this mutilation must be connected the religious world of the phallus cult of the old native population which had certainly always been strange to the oligarchs’. Others have ignored the fact that it was specifically herms that were mutilated and have reduced the activity of the hermokopidai to a massive act of general impiety, as Dover does when he argues that the mutilation was politically significant because as an act of impiety it would seem to bring down the wrath of the gods on the whole community, as a conspicuous act of vandalism it would make the number of people involved seem large, and as an offence against nomos it would prompt concern for the fact that a body of men had set themselves beyond the law.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.