Interpreting the monuments of Athens in light of literature, R. E. Wycherley brings before us the city the ancients knew. Philosophers, statesmen, travelers, dramatists, poets, private citizens—the words of all these suggest how the city looked at various periods, how its monuments came to be built, and how they served the people in daily life. Professor Wycherley concentrates on the classical period, illustrating his work with plans, reconstructions, and photographs. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Most visitors to the Acropolis in Athens pause to wonder how the large marble pieces were hauled up the sacred mount. In fact, even with today's far more advanced construction equipment, it would be impossible to match the precision with which the ancient builders built the imposing structures of the Parthenon in just eight years! The Stones of the Parthenon is a riveting investigation of the technological achievements of the ancient Greeks. This highly readable account explains how an 11-ton Doric column capital was quarried and transported to Athens. The author's intricate line drawings clearly illustrate the methods and tools employed in the accomplishment of this feat of ancient craftsmanship.

In Horos, Thea Potter explores the complex relationship between classical philosophy and the ‘horos’, a stone that Athenians erected to mark the boundaries of their marketplace, their gravestones, their roads and their private property. Potter weaves this history into a meditation on the ancient philosophical concept of horos, the foundational project of determination and definition, arguing that it is central to the development of classical philosophy and the marketplace. Horos challenges many significant interpretations of ancient thought. With nuance and insight, Potter combines the works of Aristotle, Plato, Homer and archaic Greek inscriptions with the twentieth-century continental philosophy of Heidegger, Derrida and Walter Benjamin. The result is a powerful study of the theme of boundaries in classical Athenian society as evidenced by boundary stones, law and exchange, ontology, insurgency and occupation. The innovative book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of ancient Greek social history, philosophy, and literature, as well as to the general reader who is curious to know more about classical life and philosophy.

Ancient Athenians were known to reuse stone artifacts, architectural blocks, and public statuary in the creation of new buildings and monuments. However, these construction decisions went beyond mere pragmatics: they were often a visible mechanism for shaping communal memory, especially in periods of profound and challenging social or political transformation. Sarah Rous develops the concept of upcycling to refer to this meaningful reclamation, the intentionality of reemploying each particular object for its specific new context. The upcycling approach drives innovative reinterpretations of diverse cases, including column drums built into fortification walls, recut inscriptions, monument renovations, and the wholesale relocation of buildings. Using archaeological, literary, and epigraphic evidence from more than eight centuries of Athenian history, Rous's investigation connects seemingly disparate instances of the reuse of building materials. She focuses on agency, offering an alternative to the traditional discourse on spolia. Reset in Stone illuminates a vital practice through which Athenians shaped social memory in the physical realm, literally building their past into their city.

This book presents a range of topics, conveying the broad scope of Richard Tomlinson's archaeological quests and echoing his own research methodologies; it is is a token of appreciation for a British professor of archaeology, who spread knowledge of the Greek civilization, manifesting the brilliant spirit of the versatile ancient Greek builders.

In The Empty Place: Democracy and Public Space Teresa Hoskyns explores the relationship of public space to democracy by relating different theories of democracy in political philosophy to spatial theory and spatial and political practice. Establishing the theoretical basis for the study of public space, Hoskyns examines the rise of representative democracy and investigates contemporary theories for the future of democracy, focusing on the Chantal Mouffe's agonistic model and the civil society model of Jürgen Habermas. She argues that these models of participatory democracy can co-exist and are necessarily spatial. The book then provides diverse perspectives on how the role of physical public space is articulated through three modes of participatory spatial practice. The first focuses on issues of participation in architectural practice through a set of projects exploring the ‘open spaces’ of a postwar housing estate in Euston. The second examines the role of space in the construction of democratic identity through a feminist architecture/art collective, producing space through writing, performance and events. The third explores participatory political democratic practice through social forums at global, European and city levels. Hoskyns concludes that participatory democracy requires a conception of public space as the empty place, allowing different models and practices of democracy to co-exist.

This vivid history of the city in Western civilization tells the story of urban life through bodily experience. Flesh and Stone is the story of the deepest parts of life—how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, where they ate, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love—all in the architecture of stone and space from ancient Athens to modern New York. Early in Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story then moves to Rome in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the body. The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the Christian city—the Venetian ghetto, cloisters, and markets in Paris. The final part of Flesh and Stone deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body cut free from pagan and Christian beliefs. Flesh and Stone makes sense of our constantly evolving urban living spaces, helping us to build a common home for the increased diversity of bodies that make up the modern city.