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4 Conclusions The social historian attempts to find out, among other things, what life was like for ordinary people and how society worked: its cultural ideals and its everyday realities. The task is difficult in the case of ancient Greece, since modern scholars must rely upon a limited corpus of literary works that are skewed toward the upper classes, the educated few whose wealth and leisure gave them the freedom to explore ideas. Most ancient literature was written both by and for the male citizen elite; insofar as it commented on the lives of ordinary people, it did so with an elite bias. Evidence from archaeology and epigraphy helps correct this bias and creates additional sources of information about all classes of society. Soil and stone yield up house plans, bathtubs, and honorary decrees that complement the manuscript tradition. These fresh discoveries also spur us to question old texts in new ways. The Athens that has emerged from the latest generation of scholarship is less schematic and idealized, more detailed and gritty than it often was during the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. The image of sun-struck marble columns and statues against a lofty azure sky has given way to dark mixed with light, forming many shades of gray. Democracy and chattel slavery developed hand in hand; the civic prosperity that sponsored the Parthenon arose in part from silver extracted in state-owned mines by thousands of slaves working under lethal conditions; women in Athens were demonstrably more oppressed than those in other Greek city-states. The achievements of the Greeks are now measured against their flaws, and the philhellenic reverence that has sustained Americans from Isadora Duncan to Victor D. Hanson and Jon Heath in Who Killed Homer? has for the most part been replaced by a more complex understanding.1 Indeed, the last thirty years have seen tremendous advances in our knowledge of the ancient conclusions 175 world: thanks to the painstaking work of scholars posing fresh questions, we know much more than we did before about the fabric of ancient society. Our view of ancient Athens now incorporates the rural demes of Attica as well as the urban center; we know more about how Athenians organized both oikos and polis; we understand better than before the social structures and networks that tied Athenians together, including the bonds of kinship, friendship, and citizenship. It would be interesting to examine how the Athenians, at an institutional level, dealt with suffering—through the state-sponsored dole, for example, or the pooled resources of clubs and associations—in a much-needed update to A. R. Hands’ Charities and Social Aid in Greece and Rome (1968). But it is also worthwhile to consider the standpoint of the individual moral agent confronted with the pain or jeopardy of another human being—to follow in this way the theme of other-concern that winds like Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of social relations, linking one part of society to the next, contributing to social cohesion. The architecture of Greek houses “suggests that a concept of privacy and of private (as opposed to public) life was already emerging by . . . the late fifth century” (Nevett 1999, 155), but the emotional responses and moral attitudes inculcated through close relationships among philoi could be carried from the household into the courtroom or agora: eleos was explicitly something that one might “bring from home” (Dem. 25.81). Conversely, the notion of shared humanity may have served as a reminder, within the oikos or on the city streets or on military campaign, of how one should behave—of what it meant to be an Athenian and hence part of a community that imagined itself to be especially civilized and compassionate. For this was an important aspect of the self-image of Athens. The speaker of For the Invalid, dated to 403 or shortly thereafter, says that Athenians are the most pitying: eleēmonestatoi.2 Fifty years later, Isocrates uses similar language in his Antidosis, where the Athenians are said to be the most pitying and gentle .3 Demosthenes, in a letter dated to 323, urges leniency toward the sons of Lycurgus on the grounds that Athenians are always ready to show pity and humanity (Dem. Ep. 3.22): eleon kai philanthrōpian. In the courtroom, meanwhile , litigants could be praised for their capacity for pity or excoriated for a lack thereof.4 It would seem that other-concern could serve as a yardstick for measuring...

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