This chapter surveys the major Athenian inscriptional genres as well as their placement and distribution over time, and attempts to convey what it might have meant to a passerby to experience the ‘inscribed’ city.

This chapter deals with the Athenian buildings aimed at hosting dramatic performances or related to the world of the theater, one of the most important and enduring legacies of ancient Greece to the Western world. The Late Classical Theater of Dionysos at the southern slopes of the Acropolis (second half of the fourth century BC) and the neighboring Odeion of Perikles (mid-fifth century BC) soon became tangible symbols of the city’s wealth and power.

Besides providing a brief illustrated account of Athens’ influential and widely disseminated Athena/owl silver coinage, this chapter surveys the huge silver mining and processing industry of southeast Attika, the role of coinage in the public and private economies of Athens and in international trade, and the minting of a bronze coinage for use at the Eleusinian festival.

The Athenians believed in the importance of the rule of law and implemented this ideal through their legal procedures. The courts of Athens were based on the principles of equality before the law, fairness in procedure, no punishment without law, and the accountability of officials.

In the shadows of its Classical past, Athens during the Roman period saw a number of changes at the hands of imperial or local individuals, particularly for political and ideological, religious, and cultural and educational motivations. This chapter explores how the city grew and developed under the Romans, creating a unique urban space that expressed a multifaceted identity.

The rediscovery of Athens by Western travelers from the fifteenth century onwards led to an international fascination with the ruins of the city and their relationship with descriptions in ancient literature. The publications and manuscripts of these journeys preserve crucial documentation for the remains of Athens, its temples, topography, and inscriptions, much of which has been lost over the subsequent centuries.

Though millennia of building and rebuilding in the city center have affected archaeologists’ ability to recover domestic architecture and assemblages from the Archaic and Classical periods, the evidence which does survive provides a window into the daily lives of ordinary Athenians. Ancient Athenian houses hosted many activities, including family life, ritual practice, and craft production.

Inhabited from the Stone Age to the present, Athens is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. We know it best from the Classical period (500–300 bc), because in addition to its impressive archaeological remains, such as the Parthenon, a vast variety of informative inscriptions and texts, from philosophical dialogues to comic jokes, attests to its importance. The names of its most famous citizens – Aischylos, Aristophanes, Perikles, Plato, Sokrates, Solon, Themistokles, Thucydides – are not unfamiliar to the educated public. Long after Pindar (fr. 76), Athens remained well known in European history as the “bulwark of Greece,” having routed the Persian menace not only once at Marathon, but also a second time at Salamis. Many of the institutions invented by the Athenians – democracy and theater being the obvious ones, but also practices such as jury pay, impeachment, and a ‘tomb for the unknown soldier’ – are still with us today.

This chapter studies working life at Athens, sketching the range of occupations in the Athenian economy, from farming in the countryside to artisans, vendors, and purveyors of services in the city.

This chapter explores the complex relations between the city of Athens (asty) and its large territory (chora), which formed the two essential entities of the Greek polis.

Sieckmann argues that the central claim of Robert Alexy’s criticism of legal positivism is that there is a necessary connection between morality and the content of law, and that the separation thesis is thus false. In his earlier writings Alexy adduced three distinct arguments in support of the connection thesis: the argument from injustice, the argument from principles, and the argument from the necessary claim of law to correctness. He later substituted for these a more general argument from the dual nature of law. Alexy situates his critique within the perspective of a participant, as distinguished from the perspective of an observer. Sieckmann maintains that Alexy changed the focus of the debate about legal positivism from an exclusive concern with questions of legal validity to a more general concern with questions of the nature of law by emphasising that in addition to the usual classifying connections between morality, on the one hand, and legal systems, acts and norms, on the other, there are also qualifying connections. Sieckmann concludes that Alexy showed legal positivism to be a not fully satisfactory theory of law for those adopting the participant’s perspective.

A book such as this confirms the canonical status of Winterreise. The song cycle is widely acknowledged to be a great work, as reflected in its constant presence on concert platforms and in recording catalogues, its influence on other composers, and its continuing fascination for scholars. Yet it took time before Winterreise achieved its celebrated status. Schubert’s contemporaries were initially uncertain about the merits of the “terrifying songs,” and full performances did not take place in public until the 1850s. The 1928 centennial commemoration of the composer’s death encouraged multiple live and recorded performances of the cycle, but only after World War II, with the invention of the long-playing record, did recordings by internationally celebrated advocates such as German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau establish Winterreise’s canonic status.

Bertea considers two ways of understanding the social thesis, along the lines of either legal conventionalism or the conception of law as a shared activity, arguing that on neither interpretation of the social thesis can legal positivism account for the necessary normativity of law, that is, for the necessary capacity of law to impose (genuine) obligations and confer (genuine) rights on both officials and citizens. He points out that there are fundamentally two ways in which legal positivists conceptualise legal obligation – either as a genuine requirement set forth in the law or as a perspectival requirement – and that on the former conceptualisation, legal obligations will bind only those who are committed to the legal enterprise, that is, the officials, and that on the latter, they will bind only those who adopt the standpoint of the legal system itself. Further, he objects that on the former conceptualisation, legal positivism fails to account for legal obligations that apply to the citizens, and that on the latter interpretation, it turns out that law might not be necessarily normative in the first place.