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Ancient Answers to Modern Questions 2016 ISSEI conference, Łódź What’s Not New in the New Europe What’s Not New in the New Europe: Ancient Answers to Modern Questions A workshop at the ‘What’s New in the New Europe? Redefining Culture, Politics, Identity’ conference organized by The International Society for the Study of European Ideas and the University of Łódź, 11-15th July 2016, Łódź, Poland. Chair: Jakub Filonik ([email protected]) Introduction: Crisis has as long a history as the records that reveal to us the life of past societies. A number of the issues that now constitute ‘Europe at the crossroads’, as it is commonly seen in 2016, were present in antiquity, sometimes in quite similar but sometimes in utterly different forms. Back then, people likewise faced numerous threats to their life and livelihood, and felt the need to defend the social and political entities that defined them. They lived in a world of constant economic crises, wars, destruction of entire cities, migration, and social instability. The remedies for these pressing issues and their causes were the subject of public deliberation and theoretical reflection, in a constant search for a more stable and viable political order. Rather than simply idealizing the ‘wisdom of the Greeks’, this workshop seeks to identify those of the ancient experiences that can be fruitfully compared with the challenges lying ahead of modern Europe, along with their causes and proposed solutions. How, then, did the Greeks deal with their own crises? Given their political assumptions and realities, what would they have made of the ‘European experience’ today, and would their solutions be acceptable to us? Is there anything in particular in their answers that should now be followed or, to the contrary, avoided? The three main themes which emerge from these questions form the basis of our three panels. Panels – summary: In the first panel, ‘Crisis and society’, which discusses societal instability and its socio- political outcomes, our keynote speaker, Lene Rubinstein confronts the life of modern refugees, particularly women and children, with their ancient counterparts. She explores the abuse such individuals and groups faced in ancient Greece and investigates the emergence of political institutions of democratic Athens developed with the aim of protecting them. Brenda Griffith-Williams extends such comparisons to all migrants to examine the taxation of groups politically unrepresented in Athens and today due to their inability to vote, and discusses various forms of prejudice against them. Christian Thomsen explores the way in which the Greek world after 323 BCE changed from the community of citizens to that of inhabitants, where citizen status was no longer crucial to people’s shared identities, and tries to distinguish the reasons behind this change. Valentina Arena compares three ancient civilizations – those of the Near East (Hurrian and Hittite), archaic Greece, and Rome at the turn of the republic and Principate – and the way they approached societal crises linked to debt slavery through public discourse reflected in literary tradition. Finally, Georgina White debates whether Athenian liturgies, a form of private support for the state and communal activities, can serve as a model for contemporary ‘philanthrocapitalism’, and discusses its limitations. The second panel, ‘(Never-)ending wars’, is focused around the ubiquity of wars in the ancient Greek world along with the cultural changes that accompanied them and the proposed solutions to end various military conflicts, ancient and modern. Aleksandra Porada asks in her 1 2016 ISSEI conference, Łódź What’s Not New in the New Europe paper what is it that makes people rebel, and discusses the various answers to this question put forward by ancient authors by comparing them with theories in contemporary social sciences. Janek Kucharski discusses modern war crime legislation with reference to individuals who claimed to have had no choice during the short and bloody rule of a military junta of the so-called ‘Thirty’ in late 5th-century BCE Athens, asking about the extent of personal responsibility and the possible consequences of disobedience at that time. Anthi Dipla looks into the representation of women in the visual arts at the time of the Peloponnesian War, and investigates how the prevalent ideas about societal relations and gender roles may have changed as a response to military conflicts and social instability. Joanna Janik explores the ideas propounded by the 4th-century BCE thinker Isocrates for joint military expeditions and the common identity of all Greeks forged in opposition to the ‘barbarians’, and examines their possible implications for political discourse and practice. Lastly, Andrea Scarpato discusses the extent to which the idea of solidarity and international law can be successfully employed in interstate relations, based on a new interpretation of the dealings between Hellenistic empires. The third and last panel, ‘Redefining fundamentals’, explores ideological response to crisis and change and conceptual (re)foundations of the societies experiencing them. Mirko Canevaro asks whether we should extrapolate the modern pluralistic vision of democratic deliberation to ancient Greek democracies, where unanimity and consensus in public decision- making were crucial factors in political thinking and practice. Jakub Filonik discusses the key differences between the ancient Greek and modern conceptualizations of freedom in a democracy and their role in emphasizing people’s identities in political rhetoric. Michał Bizoń explores the extent of the ‘political’ in Plato’s Republic and how his concepts of degeneration of constitutions, freedom, and soul may be relevant to modern political thinking. In the finale, Michał Zacharski investigates the notion of mens rea (‘guilty mind’) in various modern legal systems and identifies the problems it entails by comparing it to the conceptions of intentionality present in the laws of ancient Athens. See the following pages for a list of abstracts (in alphabetical order of authors’ surnames) and a separate list of the main sources and references to each paper on p. 12. 2 2016 ISSEI conference, Łódź What’s Not New in the New Europe Keynote Speaker: Lene Rubinstein (Royal Holloway, UoL) Female and child refugees: an Athenian perspective According to UNHCR statistics, children under 18 made up 51% of the world's refugees in 2014. UNICEF, drawing on figures from Eurostat, noted that no fewer than 214,000 children under 18 sought asylum in the European Union between January and September 2015. In Sweden alone, 24,000 unaccompanied children claimed asylum in 2015. The vulnerability of child refugees entering the EU is increasingly being recognized as a problem. For example, in October 2015, the UNHCR voiced its concern that women and child refugees travelling through Europe are facing a high risk of abuse and violence, including sexual violence, and various initiatives to address this issue are being developed jointly by UNHCR and UNICEF. In the context of the current European refugee crisis, the relatively high proportion of the refugees constituted by women and children is a new development. Until quite recently the vast majority of refugees arriving in Europe were men of fighting age, while unaccompanied women and children made up a very large proportion of the refugee populations in areas closer to the zone of conflict, where they have, in the whole, remained rather less visible to the general public in Europe and North America. A similar problem arising from the invisibility of female and child refugees affects the study of migration and population displacement in the ancient Greek world. Our literary sources, especially historiography and oratory, tend to focus overwhelmingly on male refugees and exiles. Given the prominent part in Greek warfare that was played by male exiles and refugees of fighting age, this emphasis is of course not surprising. However, it is important to be aware that our evidence for the activities and conditions of male refugees provides only a part of a much larger and more complex picture. This paper explores the literary evidence for women and child refugees in the classical Greek world, especially those who were sent to neighbouring cities for safety as part of systematic evacuations, and who were often unaccompanied by male relatives. The literary evidence will be complemented by a survey of funerary monuments commemorating non-citizens who died in Athens, and it will be argued that this body of inscriptions may throw further light on the phenomenon. The vulnerability of women and child refugees in the ancient Greek world was arguably even more serious than in modern Europe. In addition to the risk of physical abuse and mistreatment, female and child migrants also faced a very real risk of kidnapping and subsequent enslavement. This risk applied to adult immigrants, too, but women and children were particularly exposed because of their lack of legal capacity. It will be suggested that some of the Athenian institutions (including that of the immigrant’s ‘patron’, or prostates) and procedures that applied to resident aliens make particularly good sense if it is taken into account that a considerable number of refugees were females and minors who were not accompanied by adult male relatives who could act as their ‘guardian’ (kyrios). 3 2016 ISSEI conference, Łódź What’s Not New in the New Europe Valentina Arena (UCL – London) Freedom from debts: a Near Eastern Song, a Greek story, and a Roman tale Throughout the Mediterranean ancient societies experienced slavery as a result of debt, and all tried to fight it in favour of its abolition. This paper focuses on three ancient societies, the Near Eastern society of the second millennium BCE, the archaic Greek world of Solon, and the community of early Rome, and investigates their ancient narratives concerning the abolition of debt bondage. Arena takes as her starting point the Hurrian poem entitled ‘Song of Release,’ composed in the mid-2nd millennium BCE, which Hittite scribes recorded in a bilingual Hurrian-Hittite edition.
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