Macedonian kings used four methods of divination common among the Greeks – extispicy and other sacrifices, teratology, oneiromancy, and oracles – and resembled the Greeks in regard to when and how they consulted seers. The evidence mainly concerns Alexander III but allows conclusions to be drawn about traditional Macedonian royal practice. This practice differed from Greek divination on two counts: the employment of Egyptian and Babylonian seers by both Alexander and his Successors and the combination of royal divination with ruler cult; in other words, the combination of some sacrifices made by or for Macedonian kings with sacrifices made to them as quasi-divine beings. Demetrius Poliorcetes illustrates the perils of combining divination and ruler cult. This chapter also surveys Macedonian divinatory personnel, notably Aristander of Telmessus, Alexander's chief seer, but also including unnamed Babylonian seers employing astrological methods foreign to the Greeks and Macedonians.

Alexander continues to be a subject of military as well as historical or cultural interest. In modern times, he began as the greatest of Great Captains, then became the inventor of modern mobile warfare, the model for romantic military genius, and, in recent decades, the unlikely precedent for leaders as different as Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. The writers promoting him include both Clausewitz and the contemporary Israeli writer, Martin Van Creveld; his detractors include Frederick the Great of Prussia and the most influential modern British military writer, B. H. Liddell-Hart. Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Montesquieu are among the civilians who join military men in giving opinions of Alexander as both a strategist and a fighter of battles. This chapter begins, however, with Julian, whose dialogue, Caesares, is the first extended comparison of great generals in the Western literary tradition. From there it moves to Machiavelli and thence to Italian as well as French writers, before going on to recent literature dominated by writers in German and English. The chapter ends with speculation as to why Alexander remains an authoritative yet iconoclastic figure in military history.

The war council, a neglected aspect of the army of Alexander III of Macedon, was a frequently convened, often influential body to be compared with - but in some respects contrasted with - the better known Macedonian army assembly. The account of war councils in Xenophon's Anabasis provided a precedent for both Arrian and the other Alexander historians to follow or depart from, but Roman legal and political concerns also made themselves felt, especially in Curtius.

Chapter 9 The Organization of Greek Armies F.S. Naiden, Search for more papers by this author F.S. Naiden, Search for more papers by this author F. S. Naiden, Search for more papers by this authorE. Edward Garvin, Search for more papers by this authorJohn Vanderspoel, Search for more papers by this author Book Editor(s):Waldemar Heckel, Search for more papers by this authorF. S. Naiden, Search for more papers by this authorE. Edward Garvin, Search for more papers by this authorJohn Vanderspoel, Search for more papers by this author First published: 01 May 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119438847.ch9 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat A Companion to Greek Warfare RelatedInformation

This chapter examines the role played by religion in the courts, assemblies, and governmental administration of Greek poleis. Religion provided legitimacy to the legal system as a whole, religious rituals affected legal and legislative business, and polis regulations governed many aspects of rituals. The law against impiety safeguarded rituals, as opposed to enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy. No less important than polis laws and regulations were the by-laws and rules issued by smaller, less powerful bodies such as religious associations, demes, phratries, and donors establishing foundations. Rather than have two legal systems, one religious and one secular, as in modern Israel or medieval England, the Greek poleis had a twofold, integrated system in which religious and secular concerns were fused, and in which religion provided both a moral foundation and a supportive set of rituals.

Were the great men of antiquity - generals of the Roman Republic, Alexander the Great, later Roman Emperors- masters of grand strategy, or is this a modern concept with no application to the ancient world? Reflections on Macedonian an Roman Gran Strategt presents different answers to this question based on the critique of modern and ancient sources, the search for an ancient battlefield, and the evidence provided by ancient sundials.

Reviewed by: Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion ed. by Esther Eidinow, Julia Kindt, Robin Osborne F. S. Naiden Esther Eidinow, Julia Kindt and Robin Osborne (eds.). Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii, 423. $120.00. ISBN 978-1-107-15347-9. Did the pagan Greeks have a theology? Until a few years ago, classicists did not think so. This reviewer can remember a Harvard talk about Antigone’s “religious beliefs” that led certain authoritative members of the audience to warn that this phrase was misleading. Like some Anglicans, Greeks had the benefit of practicing a religion without beliefs. Then Harvard began to lose its grip. This reviewer would be glad to lay claim to more of the blame than he deserves, but Julia Kindt did far more with her Rethinking Greek Religion (Cambridge 2012). The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (Oxford 2015), edited by Kindt and Esther Eidinow, gave more room to beliefs than previous handbooks dealing with this subject. The year 2012 witnessed a conference at Cambridge University devoted to the subject of ancient Greek pagan theology, and the conference papers have now appeared as a collection of essays. No longer, says the genuine Cambridge, shall the Greeks suffer without a theology of their own. The Greeks, this volume argues, had as many theologies as there were authors, genres, or locales to provide them. In her own contribution to this volume, Kindt argues that all Greek theologies are culturally on a par. No hegemonic theology should be tolerated, not even a putative theology of the classical polis. Kindt also warns against sorting theologies according to author and genre. As a Religionshistoriker, she objects to this English and American tendency to turn religion into an adjunct of literary study. The weakness of this volume is, alas, that it is too literary. Several essays do not deal with literary subjects, but rely too much on literary rather than epigraphical sources. Hannah Willey’s essay illustrates the perils of this orientation. Although her subject is Greek law, she does not discuss at any length even one [End Page 433] passage in an epigraphical text or in the orators, and no wonder: theology is not a topic for orators or legislators. She thus starts—and seldom strays—from Plato’s remarks on res divinae, especially in the Laws. This focus does not allow her to articulate the religious norms to which Plato is responding. One of these norms was litigators’ use of chthonic curses to influence the outcome of lawsuits. Meanwhile, they and everyone else in the courtroom swore oaths invoking Olympian gods. Sometimes the curses and the oaths are mutually irrelevant; sometimes they work at cross-purposes; and sometimes they are mutually contradictory. How did individuals or the community accommodate these disparities? Neither Willey nor Gunther Martin, in his essay on the Athenian Assembly, answers these questions. They have not consulted the epigraphical and papyrological sources. Other essays assign theologies to Homer and Hesiod (Barbara Graziosi), Heraclitus (Saul Tor), Old Comedy (Eric Csapo), and Tragedy (Simon Goldhill). These are essays in literary criticism in which the gods receive their due. Millette Gaifman’s survey of the theology of divine statues centers on the problem of a god appearing besides a statue of himself or herself. Verity Platt treated the same issue at greater length in Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge 2011). Robin Osborne contributes a chapter on sacrifice using both literary and epigraphical sources. There is little Burkert, Vernant, and Detienne in this piece, for Osborne has grasped that these theoreticians of sacrifice have provided an ersatz theology for Greek religion as a whole. Yet he avoids the inevitable question of what role ritual should play in a concept of religion in which gods and theology are more important than older scholarship conceived them to be. Esther Eidinow has an answer to this question: “theology,” by which she means “popular theology,” lies “embedded” in rituals and customs. These practices link worshippers socially and discursively, and “theology” is one way to describe the links. This exposition is tantalizing, but complicated, taking up half the...

A generation ago Moses Finley said that the councils and the assemblies in the Homeric poems were not genuine deliberative bodies but looser, less productive gatherings. Finley and others regarded these bodies as transitional, so that regular councils and assemblies appear only later, in systems like those identified with Lycurgus and Solon. In recent years scholars have returned to an older view that Homeric deliberative bodies were well enough organized to make decisions, even if leaders or dissenters could undermine these decisions. Differences between councils, on the one hand, and assemblies, on the other, have not been prominent in this scholarship. The noteworthy exception is Fabian Schulz's 2011 dissertation on parallels between Homeric councils and the Spartan Gerousia, in which he draws several comparisons between βουλαί and ἀγοραί.

Moses Finley’s Communist Party Membership F. S. Naiden Despite the flurry of recent publications occasioned by the centennial of Moses Finley’s birth in 1912, the question of his membership in the Communist Party USA remains unsettled. In articles in the 2014 special issue devoted to Finley by the American Journal of Philology, this writer and Daniel Tompkins both surmised that Finley joined the Party in the late 1930s and remained a member until the mid-1940s. In his response, Brent Shaw doubted whether Finley belonged to the party.1 Other publications, such as the edited volumes Moses Finley and Politics and M. I. Finley, An Ancient Historian and his Impact, skirted this question.2 On one occasion, Finley himself denied being a member. On another, he declined to answer the question. Both times he was under oath.3 Incontrovertible evidence now shows that Moses Finkelstein, as he was then named, joined the Party in 1937–8. The Party official who enrolled him, Emily Randolph Grace, reported this information in a biographical note she wrote about Finley in order to prepare for an international conference in 1960. In this very short piece, published only last year, she wrote that “In 1937–1938 Finley joined the CPUSA, suspended his academic work, and engaged in political activities … as executive secretary of the so-called Boas Committee,” a nation-wide organization of students and teachers advocating academic freedom, but which she termed “anti-Nazi.”4 In 1960, Emily Grace was living in the Soviet Union, where such notes were a common way for scholars to prepare for conferences by learning about their Western counterparts. As the Russian historian Sergei [End Page 739] Karpyuk explains in his 2016 article about Emily Grace, these concise reports circulated before an impending conference without being published.5 Karpyuk himself brought about the publication of Grace’s note, which appeared on the 30th anniversary of her death in 1986. He knew her through her work at the Institute of World History in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In the late 1930s, Emily Grace served as the membership secretary of a Communist Party cell on the West Side of Manhattan. Her note does not say who else belonged, but her own career as a scholar and editor suggests that this group, probably of a dozen or so, consisted of scholars, teachers, and writers. Born in 1911, Emily Grace graduated from Bryn Mawr (BA 1933, MA 1934), and joined the Party in 1936. Unlike Finley, she was publicly known as a Communist. After enrolling him, she remained within his circle of acquaintances. She taught in party-run schools, just as he did, and wrote for the party-line American Review of the Soviet Union, published by the American Russian Institute where Finley served as director after World War II. In 1946, she married another Communist, the economist Vladimir Kazakévich, and three years later the couple moved to the Soviet Union, never to return. The US government suspected Vladimir of spying.6 Two years before, Finley left the American Party in a different fashion, returning to academic work at Columbia, where he finished his dissertation in 1951. Since Finley’s wife Mary had joined the Party in 1935, his own decision to join three years later is unsurprising. From 1938 to 1946 he did indeed devote himself to political activism, mostly in New York. Emily Grace may have influenced his decision to join. She happened to be a classicist, with two degrees in Ancient Greek. In 1949, she would receive a Classics Ph.D. from Yale. Her dissertation, “The Sparta of Agis and Cleomenes: A Study of the Ancient Literary Sources,” had the same oblique relation to Marxist themes in economic history as Finley’s dissertation on the Athenian horoi.7 For each of these two scholars, the other was that rarissima avis, a Communist Hellenist of nearly the same age. Kazakévich’s contact with Finley foreshadowed his later work-place [End Page 740] contact with the Bryn-Mawr trained classicist Harriet Monroe, who served on his office staff during his years at the American Russian Institute.8 In other ways, Finley and his Party...

Ἀσέβεια is one of Greek religion's vexatious topics. It was a crime, or γραφή, as well as a religious wrong according to ‘sacred law’. It happened to be the charge in the most famous Greek trial, that of Socrates, and thus became part of alocus classicus, with the result, as Kenneth Dover showed, that later reports of ἀσέβεια trials were often distorted by the influence of Socrates' example. Focussing mostly on the sources found reliable by Dover, this article proposes that ἀσέβεια sometimes resembled μίασμα, which was contagious religious pollution. An impious person could sometimes spread his or her ἀσέβεια, and others could catch it.