This article explores the potential of combining high-performance computing techniques and a set of integrated digital methods to investigate the cityscape of ancient Hermione, Greece. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), terrestrial laser scanning, image-based modelling techniques and high-performance computing have been combined to provide a fully-three-dimensional (3D) representation of the city landscape, which encompasses both the topography and those still visible archaeological features, which are nowadays annexed into the modern buildings.
Perikles is usually seen as a great statesman and clever leader of the Athenians. In the mid fifth century BC, he seems however to have been in serious political trouble and may well have been in danger of losing the political struggle against his opponent Kimon. The fact that his incentives changed considerably at this point in time seems to have escaped attention in the literature. In contrast, we see Pericles’ rational responses to fierce competition as a motivation, which exerted its influence alongside several other motivating factors, for several important policy measures introduced by Perikles at this particular time: the pay to jurors, the new law on citizenship (which has been a puzzle to many historians), and the building projects on the Acropolis and elsewhere. An economic rational-actor approach thus provides a diachronic analytical benefit by focusing on the way incentives change over time and it provides a synchronic benefit by dealing with various decisions in a common framework.
In Classical Athens, being at war was much more common than peace. The military expenditures were correspondingly large. The real enigmatic issue, however, is not financial but where they found the manpower needed for this policy. The number of warships (triremes) was so great that there is no way that the citizen could have dominated in the crews. The main source is likely the non-citizen, free population of Attica. Slaves, one the other hand, would have been very popular as rowers during the final phase of the Peloponnesian war, but not necessarily before. The manpower losses in connection with naval conflicts must have had a significant impact on Athenian society in several ways. We discuss three examples: the switch from ostracism to the graphe paranomon, the new law on citizenship under Perikles, and why the Athenian Assembly put the victorious generals on trial after the victory at Arginoussai.
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