Guest Lecturer Greg Anderson - Life in a Different World: The Cosmic Ecology of Classical Athens

Professor Greg Anderson of the Ohio State University Classics Department is presenting in the second of four guest lectures in a series, "How to Talk about (Ancient) Politics". This series is presented with the help of funding from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

We tend to assume that there is an essential kinship between classical Athenian demokratia and our own modern liberal system of government today. We see them both as forms of “democracy,” as two different versions of the same ultimate thing. However, they are in fact two entirely different things, because they belong to two fundamentally different worlds of experience. To appreciate the full magnitude of this difference, we need to view it through the lens of pluriversal history, a radical alternative to conventional historical practice. Within the distinctly non-modern world of the classical Athenians, demokratia was an entire way of life. It included all of the contributions that male and female Athenians made to the well-being of their polis as a cosmic ecology of gods, land, and people.

More information on Professor Anderson can be found here.