Tracing cultural revolution in classical Athens

The language of ‘revolution’ makes for powerful rhetoric, whether in a political realm or in the institutional politics which governs the award of academic research grants.1 In an earlier book,Rethinking Revolutions through Classical Greece, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006, we have explored how the rhetoric of revolution has come to be applied to classical Greece. There is no straightforward equivalent in ancient Greek for the term ‘revolution’, but what happened in classical Greece has been repeatedly claimed to constitute a revolution inWestern civilization.The adjective ‘revolutionary’ is one that can never be used as a neutral description: whenever a revolution is hailed it is hailed for ideological and political reasons. The affirmation or denial that a particular change constitutes a revolution is the affirmation or denial that what changes is something peculiarly valuable or significant. In surveying the use of the term ‘revolution’ with regard to classical Greece as a whole or particular features of classical Greek culture, we uncover part of the political history of classics in subsequent history. Inevitably, the decision to devote a book, and indeed a research project, to investigating the changes in Athenian culture at the end of the fifth century itself implies that those changes were particularly significant. This book, however, is less concerned with whether or not those changes justify using the rhetoric of revolution than with analysing the changes which have made laying claim to a cultural revolution in classical Athens at least prima facie plausible. The book as a whole offers something of a description of the profound changes in Athenian culture at the end of the fifth century bc, and makes some preliminary attempts to understand why the changes came about and whether and how they may have been linked.