1b- Federalism in Greek Antiquity

The course on Greek History and the way prof. Franchi has planned it became really stimulating.

In my previous post I started asking how is it possible to apply the concepts of Federalism and Ethnicity to Ancient Greek? Both concepts are part of present debates and take from granted the ideas of state, modern representative democracy and modern definition of ethnicity. So at first sight I found it to be anachronistic to apply them to ancient Greek.

Then I started to read the book “Federalism in Greek Antiquity” by Hans Beck and Peter Funke, and in fact I am not the only one (neither the first one, of course) to note that we are looking into Ancient Greek History with the glasses of modern concepts: the present-perspective-glasses. In fact, under the title “A brief history of scholarship….” in chapter 1 the authors described how the studies of Federalism on Ancient Greece reflected the discussion on Federalism that were taking place in modern society.

For example, the first time Edward Freeman applied the idea of Federalism to Ancient Greece (in the book History of Federal Government, 1868) he linked it to “freedom” from greater powers as he saw it linked in the case of USA. Then, in the late 1800's and early 1900s, the German scholarship focused on the notion of double citizenship to define Greek federal state, and at that time a political controversy had arisen in German state-law regarding the extent of federal arrangements for Germany. (Becke and Funke, 2015)

And not only that, all three Prof. Franchi lessons, Becke and Funke's book and “Greek History” of Bettalli, Agata e Magnetto (2013) manual suggest that not until the 1980s scholars starded to integrate history with other disciplines like archeology, literature,  sociology, geography,  ecc. Multidisciplinarty is a perspective that we now tend to adopt in order to understand reality. Ethnicity and federalism are in the forefront of scholars and by applying them to ancient time we are doing exactly the same that we have always done: using the present-perspective glasses.

It is clear that we cannot stop being ourselves even when we study others. Subjectivity is unavoidable and at this point I'll just give up the rigid ideas of Federalism and Ethnicity that I inherited from my previous studies and I'll focus on what it is useful of them to reinterpret Ancient Greek.

If you cannot fight against it, join it.