Carol C.'s bibliographies of ancient Greece have been a service to the list.
In the past Carol has also drawn our attention to G.E.M. de Ste. Croix and his book The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. This book speaks more to the slave nature of the Greek "mode of production" than directly to the issue of "democracy", and that may be why Carol left it off this time. But, indirectly, if it is true that ancient Greece was a slave society in the same way as Rome, it certainly colors in a very big way how we describe the political arrangements they made among the remaining non-slave population. Meiksins Wood (who Carol also cites) argues against seeing Greece as a slave society and is very enthusiastic about its democracy. Her book is more polemical and recent, so that she may come off more convincing at first glance. As I recall though, the two of them really don't interact that much and, to me, one was left feeling that both agreed that the extent of slavery was an empirical question and that they acknowledged they were trying to answer it in the absence of much comprehensive empirical evidence. Paul P.S. de Ste Croix, teaching many years at Cambridge, was perhaps the most prominent of the marxist historians of ancient Greece. He wrote only a few books and died a few years ago before completing his work on early Christianity. Posthumously, his students have edited the book and will publish it next month (Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy). Among other things it is said to skewer the idea of early Christianity as a "religion of the poor", showing that early on it was taken up by the Roman upper classes. At 10:34 AM 10/17/2006 -0500, you wrote:
M.I. Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece. Robin Osborne, Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attika. Martin Ostwald, Nomos and the Beginnings of Athenian Democracy. Chester G. Starr, The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece, 800-500 BC. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy. Chester Starr, Individual and Community: The Rise of the Polis, 800-500 BC. Walter Beringer, "Freedom, Family, and Citizenship in Early Greece," in The Craft of the Ancient Historian: Essays in Honor of Chester G. Starr, ed. John W. Eadie & Josiah Ober. --- All these are 1988 & earlier, but 'news' doesn't change very rapidly in the field of classical scholarship. Carrol
