Plutarch's Cities

Plutarch's Cities is the first comprehensive attempt to assess the significance of the polis in Plutarch's works from several perspectives, namely the polis as a physical entity, a lived experience, and a source of inspiration, the polis as a historical and sociopolitical unit, the polis as a theoretical construct and paradigm to think with. The book's multifocal and multi-perspectival examination of Plutarch's cities - past and present, real and ideal-yields some remarkable corrections of his conventional image. Plutarch was neither an antiquarian nor a philosopher of the desk. He was not oblivious to his surroundings but had a keen interest in painting, sculpture, monuments, and inscriptions, about which he acquired impressive knowledge in order to help him understand and reconstruct the past. Cult and ritual proved equally fertile for Plutarch's visual imagination. Whereas historiography was the backbone of his reconstruction of the past and evaluation of the present, material culture, cult, and ritual were also sources of inspiration to enliven past and present alike. Plato's descriptions of Athenian houses and the Attic landscape were also a source of inspiration, but Plutarch clearly did his own research, based on autopsy and on oral and written sources. Plutarch, Plato's disciple and Apollo's priest, was on balance a pragmatist. He did not resist the temptation to contemplate the ideal city, but he wrote much more about real cities, as he experienced or imagined them.

1 - Introduction
2 - Plutarch's Chaeronea
3 - Plutarch and Delphi
4 - Plutarch and the City of Rome in Plutarch's Own Times
5 - City and Sanctuary in Plutarch
6 - Athenian Monumental Architecture, Iconography and Topography in Plutarch's De Gloria Atheniensium
7 - Stereotyping Sparta, Stereotyping Athens: Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch
8 - Ritual Politics and Space Control in Plutarch's Alcibiades and Other Athenian Lives
9 - Alcibiades and the City
10 - Athenian Civic Identities in Plutarch's Portrayals of Phocion and Demetrius of Phalerum: From the polites to the kosmopolites
11 - Plutarch and Thebes
12 - Plutarch's Northern Greek Cities
13 - Plutarch's Troy: Three Approaches
14 - The City and the Self in Plutarch
15 - The City and the Ship: Reception and the Use of a Metaphor in Plutarch's Parellel Lives
16 - The Place of the polis in Plutarch's Political Thinking
17 - Plutarch's Civitas Dei
18 - Plutarch on Superstition, Atheism, and the City
19 - Afterword: Plutarch's Cities: Where To?

Lucia Athanassaki is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Crete and co-chairman of the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song; Visiting Professor at the University of Washington (2010), and the University of Virginia (1990-91). Fellow at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington DC (2019); Recipient of an Excellence Award by the Hellenic National Research Council (2012); Visiting Scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (2004); Dean of the School of Letters at Crete and chairman of the editorial board of Ariadne (2014-18). She is author and co-editor of six books and more than fifty articles. Frances B. Titchener is Distinguished Professor of History and Classics. She was recognized as the USU College of Humanities Teacher of the Year (1993), was the first USU Professor to be awarded the CASE Professorship of Utah (1995), and was recognized as Outstanding Collegiate Level teacher by the American Philological Association (now Society for Classical Studies) (1999). She was awarded a Fulbright (Research) Grant to Belgium (2003) and was a visiting Professor in Leuven Belgium (2010) and Rethymno Crete (2017). She is the Editor of Ploutarchos, the International Plutarch Society journal, and co-editor of six books, as well as the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Plutarch.