Ten years after producing the Persians in 472 BC, in which Greeks and barbarians are locked in conflict with each other, Aeschylus in the Suppliants explores the inextricable intertwining of Greekness and barbarity. While even in the Persians Aeschylus recognizes the ultimate ‘kinship' between Greek and barbarian (the women of Atossa's dream – one wearing Persian robes, the other Dorian – are described as ‘sisters of one race': Aesch. Pers. 180–7), in the Suppliants the poet develops this theme and casts it in sharper relief. In this later play, now generally accepted (despite archaic or archaizing elements) to have been produced in the late 460s, Aeschylus is more actively interested in the ways in which kinship both intersects with and is complicated by cultural polarity, and at the same time undercuts and complicates ‘Otherness'.
The Forest Owlet (Athene blewitti) is critically endangered and at extremely high risk of extinction owing to its restricted distribution. An expedition was organized to determine the density of the Forest Owlet in the Melghat Tiger Reserve in February 2004 where they had been observed sporadically in the previous 5 years. We hoped to identify as many individuals as possible and to observe interspecific interactions in order to understand the social framework in which the species survives. A total of 43.4 km of jungle roads was checked; we confirmed the presence of three of the 13 previously reported individuals, and found 11 previously undetected owlets. Owlets were found in areas with several interconnected forest clearings which allowed the owlets to forage in them. In all cases where the Forest Owlet occurred, a village or agricultural fields of the indigenous people (Adivasis) was within a 0.5-km radius. It appears that Forest Owlets preferred to establish feeding territories in areas disturbed by anthropogenic activity such as clearing dead trees and undergrowth for fire, trampling undergrowth while searching for firewood, burning areas around the agricultural plots, or driving herds of cattle through the area. All of these activities appear to optimize the habitat for the sit-and-wait foraging Forest Owlet, facilitating detection and tracking of prey in open areas with sparse and short undergrowth, allowing a better all-round view due to a lower density of trees.
Democratic Athens seems to have been the first place in the Greek world where there developed systematically a positive theorising of kingship. Initially this might seem surprising, since the Athenians had a strong tradition of rejecting one-man-rule. The study of kingship among the political thinkers of the fifth and fourth century has not received much scholarly attention until recent years, and particularly not the striking fact that it was democratic Athens, or at least writers directing themselves to an Athenian democratic audience, that produced a positive theorising of kingship. The aim of this essay, then, is not only to show how the political language around kingship became a way of forming definitions of what democracy was and was not, but also (more significantly), among some fourth-century intellectuals, of shaping new ideas about what it could be.
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