The Greek Praise Of Poverty

Author : William D. Desmond
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : History
ISBN : STANFORD:36105114505766

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The Greek Praise of Poverty by William D. Desmond Pdf

William Desmond, taking issue with common popular and scholarlyviews of the ancient Greek Cynics, contends that early Cynics likeAntisthenes and Diogenes were not cultural outcasts or marginal voicesin classical culture; rather, the Cynic movement through the fourthcentury B.C. had deep and significant roots in what Desmond calls theGreek praise of poverty. Desmond demonstrates that classical views ofwealth were complex and allowed for the admiration of poverty and thevirtues it could inspire. He explains Cynicism's rise in popularity in theancient world by exploring the set of attitudes that collectively formedthe Greek praise of poverty. Desmond argues that in the fifth and fourthcenturies B.C., economic, political, military, and philosophical thoughtcontained explicit criticisms of wealth and praise of poverty.

Author : Filippo Carlà-Uhink,Lucia Cecchet,Carlos Machado
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2022-09-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000644999

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Poverty in Ancient Greece and Rome by Filippo Carlà-Uhink,Lucia Cecchet,Carlos Machado Pdf

This volume presents an innovative picture of the ancient Mediterranean world. Approaching poverty as a multifaceted condition, it examines how different groups were affected by the lack of access to symbolic, cultural and social – as well as economic – capital. Collecting a wide range of studies by an international team of experts, it presents a diverse and complex analysis of life in antiquity, from the archaic to the late antique period. The sections on Greece, Rome, and Late Antiquity offer in-depth studies of ancient life, integrating analysis of socio-economic dynamics and cultural and discursive strategies that shaped this crucial element of ancient (and modern) societies. Themes like social cohesion and control, exclusion, gender, agency, and identity are explored through the combination of archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence, presenting a rich panorama of Greco-Roman societies and a stimulating collection of new approaches and methodologies for their understanding. The book offers a comprehensive view of the ancient world, analysing different social groups – from wealthy elites to poor peasants and the destitute – and their interactions, in contexts as diverse as Classical Athens and Sparta, imperial Rome, and the late antique towns of Egypt and North Africa. Poverty in Ancient Greece and Rome: Discourses and Realities is a valuable resource for students and scholars of ancient history, classical literature, and archaeology. In addition, topics covered in the book are of interest to social scientists, scholars of religion, and historians working on poverty and social history in other periods.

Author : Gottfried Schweiger,Clemens Sedmak
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 652 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2023-10-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781000982763

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The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty by Gottfried Schweiger,Clemens Sedmak Pdf

The problem of poverty is global in scope and has devastating consequences for many essential aspects of life: health, education, political participation, autonomy, and psychological well-being. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty presents the current state of philosophical research on poverty in its breadth and depth. It features 39 chapters divided into five thematic sections: Concepts, theories, and philosophical aspects of poverty research Poverty in the history of Western philosophy and philosophical traditions Poverty in non-Western philosophical thought Key ethical concepts and poverty Social and political issues The handbook not only addresses questions concerning individual, collective, and institutional responsibility towards people in extreme poverty and the moral wrong of poverty, but it also tackles emerging applied issues that are connected to poverty such as gender, race, education, migration, and climate change. Additionally, it features perspectives on poverty from the history of Western philosophy, as well as non-Western views that explore issues unique to the Global South. Finally, the chapters in the first part provide an overview of the most important aspects of social science poverty research, which serves as an excellent resource for philosophers and philosophy students unfamiliar with how poverty is empirically researched in practice. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty is an essential resource for students and researchers in philosophy, political science, sociology, development studies, and public policy who are working on poverty.

Author : Robert Gorman,Vanessa B Gorman
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 493 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2014-11-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780472052295

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Corrupting Luxury in Ancient Greek Literature by Robert Gorman,Vanessa B Gorman Pdf

Traces the principle that luxury corrupts its possessor as seen through a millennium of Greek literature

Author : Claire Taylor
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2017-09-15
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780191090639

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Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being by Claire Taylor Pdf

Poverty in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athens was a markedly different concept to that with which we are familiar today. Reflecting contemporary ideas about labour, leisure, and good citizenship, the 'poor' were considered to be not only those who were destitute, or those who were living at the borders of subsistence, but also those who were moderately well-off but had to work for a living. Defined in this way, this group covered around 99 per cent of the population of Athens. This conception of penia (poverty) was also ideologically charged: the poor were contrasted with the rich and found, for the most part, to be both materially and morally deficient. Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being sets out to rethink what it meant to be poor in a world where this was understood as the need to work for a living, exploring the discourses that constructed poverty as something to fear and linking them with experiences of penia among different social groups in Athens. Drawing on current research into and debates around poverty within the social sciences, it provides a critical reassessment of poverty in democratic Athens and argues that it need not necessarily be seen in terms of these elitist ideological categories, nor indeed solely as an economic condition (the state of having no wealth), but that it should also be understood in terms of social relations, capabilities, and well-being. In developing a framework to analyse the complexities of poverty so conceived and exploring the discourses that shaped it, the volume reframes poverty as being dynamic and multidimensional, and provides a valuable insight into what the poor in Athens - men and women, citizen and non-citizen, slave and free - were able to do or to be.

Author : David J. Armitage
Publisher : Mohr Siebeck
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2016-09-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 3161543998

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Theories of Poverty in the World of the New Testament by David J. Armitage Pdf

How was poverty interpreted in the New Testament? David J. Armitage explores key ways in which poverty was understood in the Greco-Roman and Jewish milieux of the New Testament, and considers how approaches to poverty found in the texts of the New Testament itself relate to these wider contexts. - back of the book.

Author : William Howard Adams
Publisher : Potomac Books, Inc.
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2012-10-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9781612344171

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On Luxury by William Howard Adams Pdf

Diamond-encrusted, alligator-skin handbags. Eighteen-course feasts. Yachts the length of city blocks. In the twenty-first century, many point to such conspicuous consumption as reflecting the moral failings of a rampant capitalism that sacrifices community values on an altar of greed. Television shows such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians illustrate the folly of wealth without responsibility even as they elevate their subjects on pedestals of desire. Our discomfort with extravagance is not new. The ancient Greeks and Romans fretted over the ideal relationship between morality and luxury. Politics, religion, and economics influenced the debate, with the concept of luxury as a moral question becoming a core issue in Christian theology and even a cornerstone of the founding of America. People have long feared luxury's evil influence. Society has publicly and privately extolled the virtues of moderation and restraint, and condemned luxury as a breeding ground for vice and sin. After capitalism and the consumer revolution removed its stigma, the concept of luxury underwent a radical transformation, from a vice to be feared to a marketing tool of the new capitalist era. In this lively and thought-provoking narrative, William Howard Adams shows how this simultaneous distrust and embrace of luxury has pervaded Western thought for three millennia, leading us to the question, what price the soul?

Author : Ndekha, Louis
Publisher : University of Bamberg Press
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2023-11-29
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9783863099510

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Identity and Socio-Economic Relations in Luke’s Gospel by Ndekha, Louis Pdf

Author : William Desmond
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2014-12-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9781317492863

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Cynics by William Desmond Pdf

Once regarded as a minor Socratic school, Cynicism is now admired as one of the more creative and influential philosophical movements in antiquity. First arising in the city-states of late classical Greece, Cynicism thrived through the Hellenistic and Roman periods, until the triumph of Christianity and the very end of pagan antiquity. In every age down to the present, its ideals of radical simplicity and freedom have alternately inspired and disturbed onlookers. This book offers a survey of Cynicism, its varied representatives and ideas, and the many contexts in which it operated. William Desmond introduces important ancient Cynics and their times, from Diogenes 'the Dog' in the fourth century BC to Sallustius in the fifth century AD. He details the Cynics' rejection of various traditional customs and the rebellious life-style for which they are notorious.The central chapters locate major Cynic themes (nature and the natural life, Fortune, self-sufficiency, cosmopolitanism) within the rich matrix of ideas debated by the ancient schools. The final chapter reviews some moments in the diverse legacy of Cynicism, from Jesus to Nietzsche.

Author : Daniele Pevarello
Publisher : Mohr Siebeck
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2013-11-19
Category : Religion
ISBN : 3161525795

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The Sentences of Sextus and the Origins of Christian Ascetiscism by Daniele Pevarello Pdf

Daniele Pevarello analyzes the Sentences of Sextus, a second century collection of Greek aphorisms compiled by Sextus, an otherwise unknown Christian author. The specific character of Sextus' collection lies in the fact that the Sentences are a Christian rewriting of Hellenistic sayings, some of which are still preserved in pagan gnomologies and in Porphyry. Pevarello investigates the problem of continuity and discontinuity between the ascetic tendencies of the Christian compiler and aphorisms promoting self-control in his pagan sources. In particular, he shows how some aspects of the Stoic, Cynic, Platonic and Pythagorean moral traditions, such as sexual restraint, voluntary poverty, the practice of silence and of a secluded life were creatively combined with Sextus' ascetic agenda against the background of the biblical tradition. Drawing on this adoption of Hellenistic moral traditions, Pevarello shows how great a part the moral tradition of Greek paideia played in the shaping and development of self-restraint among early Christian ascetics.

Author : Richard Evans
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2017-02-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781317066880

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Mass and Elite in the Greek and Roman Worlds by Richard Evans Pdf

This volume has its origin in the 14th University of South Africa Classics Colloquium in which the topic and title of the event were inspired by Josiah Ober’s seminal work Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989). Indeed the influence this work has had on later research in all aspects of the Greek and Roman world is reflected by the diversity of the papers collected here, which take their cue and starting point from the argument that, in Ober’s words (1989, 338): ‘Rhetorical communication between masses and elites... was a primary means by which the strategic ends of social stability and political order were achieved.’ However, the contributors to the volume have also sought to build further on such conclusions and to offer new perceptions about a spread of issues affecting mass and elite interaction in a far wider number of locations around the ancient Mediterranean over a much longer chronological span. Thus the conclusions here suggest that once the concept of mass and elite was established in the minds of Greeks and later Romans it became a universal component of political life and from there was easily transferred to economic activity or religion. In casting the net beyond the confines of Athens (although the city is also represented here) to – amongst others – Syracuse, the cities of Asia Minor, Pompeii and Rome, and to literary and philosophical discourse, in each instance that interplay between the wider body of the community and the hierarchically privileged can be shown to have governed and directed the thoughts and actions of the participants.

Author : Pauline Allen,Bronwen Neil,Wendy Mayer
Publisher : Evangelische Verlagsanstalt
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783374027286

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Preaching Poverty in Late Antiquity by Pauline Allen,Bronwen Neil,Wendy Mayer Pdf

In 2002 the influential scholar of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown, published a series of lectures as a monograph titled Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire. Brown set out to explain a trend in the late Roman world observed in the 1970s by French social and economic historians, especially Paul Veyne and Evelyn Patlagean, namely that prior to the fourth century and the rise in dominance of Christianity, the poor in society went unrecognized as an economic category. This corresponded with the Greco-Roman understanding of patronage, whereby the state and private donors concentrated their largesse upon the citizen body. Non-citizens, for instance, were excluded from the dole system, in which grain was distributed to citizens of a city regardless of their economic status. By the end of the sixth century, rich and poor were not only recognized economic categories, but the largesse of private citizens was now focused on the poor. Brown proposed that the Christian bishop lay at the heart of this change. The authors set out to test Brown's thesis amid growing interest in the poor and their role in early Christianity and in Late Antique society. They find that the development and its causes were more subtle and complex than Brown proposed and that his account is inadequate on a number of crucial points including rhetorical distortion of the realities of poverty in episcopal letters, homilies and hagiography, the episcopal emphasis on discriminate giving and self-interested giving, and the degree to which existing civic patronage structures adhered in the Later Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries.

Author : Ivy Bedworth
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2016-05-23
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781365131929

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Rationalising the Bible — Volume 3: The New Testament by Ivy Bedworth Pdf

"Rationalising the Bible" is a collection of volumes that cover the books of the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Bible. Written by mostly unidentified authors, the Bible is generally attributed with being the moral compass of the world of Judeo-Christian religious adherents. In fact, the Bible is mostly mythological history, inaccurate science, exaggerated reports of violence and discrimination against the people who settled the Fertile Crescent, and a set of laws plagiarised from those already in existence in the area. Even the writing of it, claimed to be that of the patriarchs, can clearly be identified, in the reading of it, as belonging rather to a period when all people in the civilised world were writing their stories. It was not written, as atheists often charge, by illiterate nomadic tribespeople in pre-history. Instead, it was written by politicians and priests at a time when the western civilisations were making their mark on the world's politics.

Author : Geoffrey Greatrex,Hugh Elton,the assistance of Lucas McMahon
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2016-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781317055457

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Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity by Geoffrey Greatrex,Hugh Elton,the assistance of Lucas McMahon Pdf

Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity examines the transformations that took place in a wide range of genres, both literary and non-literary, in this dynamic period. The Christianisation of the Roman empire and the successor kingdoms had a profound impact on the evolution of Greek and Roman literature, and many aspects of this are discussed in this volume - the composition of church history, the collection of papal letters, heresiology, homiletics and apologetic. Contributors discuss authors such as John Chrysostom, Ambrose of Milan, Cassiodorus, Jerome, Liberatus of Carthage, Victor of Vita, and Epiphanius of Salamis as well as the Collectio Avellana. Secular literature too, however, underwent important changes, notably in Constantinople in the sixth century. Several chapters accordingly reassess the work of Procopius of Caesarea and literature of this period; attention is also given to the evolution of the chronicle genre. Technical writing, such as military manuals and legal texts, are the focus of other chapters; further genres considered include monody, epigraphy and epistolography. Changes in visual representation are also considered in chapters devoted to diptychs, monuments and coins. A common theme that emerges from the chapters is the flexibility and adaptability of genres in the period: late antique authors, whether orators or historians, were not slavish followers of their classical predecessors. They were capable of engaging with their models, adapting them to their own purposes, and producing work that deserves to be considered on its own merits. It is necessary to examine their texts and genres closely to grasp what they set out to do; on occasion, attention must also be paid to the transmission of these texts. The volume as a whole represents a significant contribution to the reassessment of late antique culture in general.

Author : Michael Lovano
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 747 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2019-12-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9798216168447

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The World of Ancient Greece [2 volumes] by Michael Lovano Pdf

This book opens the world of the ancient Greeks to all readers through easily accessible entries on topics essential to understanding Greek high culture and daily life. The ancient Greeks provided the foundation for Western civilization. They made significant advances in science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, and government. While many readers might have heard of Plato and Aristotle, however, or be familiar with the classic works of Greek tragedy, most people know significantly less about daily life in the ancient Greek world. This encyclopedia opens the world of the ancient Greeks, spanning Greek history from the Bronze Age through Roman times, with an emphasis on the Classical and Hellenistic Eras. The encyclopedia provides roughly 270 easily accessible entries on topics essential to understanding everything from Greek high culture to daily life. These entries are grouped in topical sections on the arts, science and technology, politics and government, domestic life, and other subjects. Sidebars on particularly noteworthy people, places, and concepts provide related information, while primary documents allow readers to delve into the mindset and feelings of the ancient Greeks themselves. Extensive bibliographic references give curious readers direction for further research.