Jeremy McInerney - Böcker

The Oxford History of the Classical Greek World (OHCGW) offers a new comprehensive account of the history and culture of ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Over seven volumes, the series deals with all aspects of the Greek world during this seminal period of Classical antiquity, from the Persian Wars to the Age of Alexander the Great. The scope is broad both in geographic and temporal terms. Ancient Greece is typically understood as the Aegean Sea and its littoral regions, with an emphasis on the southern end of the Balkan peninsula. OHCGW pays close attention to this space but also explores developments in the larger Greek world, including much of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions. In doing so, the series accounts for the tight interplay between Greek and non-Greek cultures. It also moves away from traditional narratives, crafting an account that is appropriate for a twenty-first-century global audience.A diverse international team of scholars at different stages of professional careers bring to the series different disciplinary and academic traditions from a wide range of scholarly contexts. The slate of contributions reflects the editors' ideas about the role of the history of Classical Greece within a modern, globalized, and diversified world. To this effect, OHCGW is guided by several conceptual and analytical principles, including alertness to the local diversity; decentered historical narratives; entangled story-telling and diverse focalizations; the integration of literary and material bodies of evidence.OHCGW is designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the topics and subjects that are the focus of scholarly investigation among experts working in the fields of Ancient History and Classical Studies. Volume I: Environment and Resources turns to the physical world inhabited by the ancient Greeks and how they interacted with this world, highlighting how creative responses to the environment nourished a bouquet of rich cultural practices that became formative for Greek civilization.

Independent city-states (poleis) such as Athens have been viewed traditionally as the most advanced stage of state formation in ancient Greece. By contrast, this pioneering book argues that for some Greeks the ethnos, a regionally based ethnic group, and the koinon, or regional confederation, were equally valid units of social and political life and that these ethnic identities were astonishingly durable. Jeremy McInerney sets his study in Phokis, a region in central Greece dominated by Mount Parnassos that shared a border with the panhellenic sanctuary at Delphi. He explores how ecological conditions, land use, and external factors such as invasion contributed to the formation of a Phokian territory. Then, drawing on numerous interdisciplinary sources, he traces the history of the region from the Archaic age down to the Roman period. McInerney shows how shared myths, hero cults, and military alliances created an ethnic identity that held the region together over centuries, despite repeated invasions. He concludes that the Phokian koinon survived because it was founded ultimately on the tenacity of the smaller communities of Greece.

Spanning the Minoan and Mycenaean origins of Greece to its eventual conquest by Rome, this new single-author survey combines an authoritative and engaging retelling of the history of ancient Greece with an assessment of the relevance of the Greeks today. Beautifully illustrated with examples of art, archaeology and architecture – from the frescoes of Akrotiri to the spectacular discovery of the Tomb of the Griffin Warrior in 2015 – this account foregrounds the variety and diversity of what it meant to be Greek. Dedicated chapters on Athens and Sparta highlight the differences of culture and civic structure within the Greek world, as well as the political tensions that would precipitate the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent Macedonian Hellenistic Age. Numerous maps and timelines support the clear chronological narrative, while ‘Spotlight’ features at the end of each chapter offer a visual commentary on specific concepts, places and institutions, such as the oracle of Delphi and the image of Alexander the Great. Greece in the Ancient World is the story of a culture that transformed the Western world. The Greeks’ achievements and failures, their ideals and their faults, established a legacy that remains at the heart of our modern life.

Ancient Greece: A New History is a new, single-authored survey of the ancient Greek world that brings the past to life with a fresh narrative and vivid images. Drawing on the latest archaeological research and textual evidence, award-winning teacher and scholar Jeremy McInerney shows that many of the issues that concerned the ancient Greeks—justice and inequality, nationalism and xenophobia, medicine and science—are relevant today.Key features include more than 200 color images; chapter-opening timelines, detailed maps and plans; chapter-ending illustrated “Spotlight” features; and instructor and student resources.

Though Greece is traditionally seen as an agrarian society, cattle were essential to Greek communal life, through religious sacrifice and dietary consumption. Cattle were also pivotal in mythology: gods and heroes stole cattle, expected sacrifices of cattle, and punished those who failed to provide them. The Cattle of the Sun ranges over a wealth of sources, both textual and archaeological, to explore why these animals mattered to the Greeks, how they came to be a key element in Greek thought and behavior, and how the Greeks exploited the symbolic value of cattle as a way of structuring social and economic relations. Jeremy McInerney explains that cattle's importance began with domestication and pastoralism: cattle were nurtured, bred, killed, and eaten. Practically useful and symbolically potent, cattle became social capital to be exchanged, offered to the gods, or consumed collectively. This circulation of cattle wealth structured Greek society, since dedication to the gods, sacrifice, and feasting constituted the most basic institutions of Greek life.McInerney shows that cattle contributed to the growth of sanctuaries in the Greek city-states, as well as to changes in the economic practices of the Greeks, from the Iron Age through the classical period, as a monetized, market economy developed from an earlier economy of barter and exchange. Combining a broad theoretical approach with a careful reading of sources, The Cattle of the Sun illustrates the significant position that cattle held in the culture and experiences of the Greeks.

Griffins, centaurs and gorgons: the Greek imagination teems with wondrous, yet often monstrous, hybrids. Jeremy McInerney discusses how these composite creatures arise from the entanglement of humans and animals. Overlaying such enmeshment is the rich cultural exchange experienced by Greeks across the Mediterranean. Hybrids, the author reveals, capture the anxiety of cross-cultural encounter, where similarity and incongruity were conjoined. Hybridity likewise expresses instability of identity. The ancient sea, that most changeable ancient domain, was viewed as home to monsters like Skylla; while on land the centaur might be hypersexual yet also hypercivilized, like Cheiron. Medusa may be destructive, yet also alluring. Wherever conventional values or behaviours are challenged, there the hybrid gives that threat a face. This absorbing work unveils a mercurial world of shifting categories that offer an alternative to conventional certainties. Transforming disorder into images of wonder, Greek hybrids - McInerney suggests - finally suggest other ways of being human.

A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean presents a comprehensive collection of essays contributed by Classical Studies scholars that explore questions relating to ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean world. Covers topics of ethnicity in civilizations ranging from ancient Egypt and Israel, to Greece and Rome, and into Late AntiquityFeatures cutting-edge research on ethnicity relating to Philistine, Etruscan, and Phoenician identitiesReveals the explicit relationships between ancient and modern ethnicitiesIntroduces an interpretation of ethnicity as an active component of social identityRepresents a fundamental questioning of formally accepted and fixed categories in the field