something i get increasingly frustrated about with historical work is the tendency to go 'most of our sources are from athens and we know most about athens therefore i will focus on athens' but then the chapter is named like. this and that phenomenon in ancient greece. way to uphold the athenian mirage!!1! fortunately there are also many scholars right now working on not just other regions and their cultural landscapes but also. the inherent bias and projection and misconceptions we have inherited from athens and everyone working from athens. and that work is hard because indeed much less is excavated and much less is there to be excavated and the textual sources are also scarce but nevertheless the results are so worth it. our ideas on ancient greece are changing every day
#i should read more about places that aren't athens#but yeah a lot of stuff is athens in disguise so thats a little tricky @est-pulcher
some stuff!
Aegina/Localism/Religion
Polinskai︠a︡, I. (with Jameson, M. H.). (2013). A local history of Greek polytheism: Gods, people and the land of Aigina, 800-400 BCE. Brill. -> full on methodological reconsideration of greek religion as we know it through the athenian lens, with the Dorian island Aegina as case study
E. Aston, Mixanthropoi: Animal-human hybrid deities in Greek religion. Liège, 2001.
J. Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago and London, 2002.
Thessaly
Aston, E. (2024). Blessed Thessaly: The Identities of a Place and Its People from the Archaic Period to the Hellenistic. Liverpool University Press.
Mili, M. (2015). Religion and society in ancient Thessaly. University Press.
Arcadia
J. Roy, “On Seeming Backward: How the Arkadians Did It.” in Sociable Man: Essays on Ancient Greek Social Behaviour in Honour of Nick Fisher, ed. S. D. Lambert, Swansea, 2011, p. 67-86.
T. H. Nielsen, and J. Roy (eds.). Defining Ancient Arkadia. Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre 6. Copenhagen, 1999.
myth and landscape/regionalism
G. Hawes. Myths on the Map: The Storied Landscapes of Ancient Greece. Oxford, 2017.
R. Buxton, Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology. Cambridge, 1994.
i haven't researched northwest Greece or the western peloponnese much yet, so i don't have any scholarship on those regions soz. let alone the islands or colonial greek regions
May I also add, from memory: C. Morgan, Early Greek States beyond the Polis (London 2003)
and, a little bit older: S. E. Alcock, R. Osborne (eds.), Placing the Gods. Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece (Oxford 1994)
Both more focused on pre-classical periods, since that's what I'm most interested in, but might be useful
#wanting more on the Argolid & Thebes & Aetolia @herb-on-a-stick
for Thebes/Boeotia I can vouch for Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece by Paul Cartledge! At least two of my friends (among which @allbeendonebefore, who has read more by Cartledge. See the replies) quite liked this book. Cartledge has also written on Sparta, Lakonia and Messenia, but I don't think the Argolid features in that. Cartledge did co-edit
Cartledge, P., & Christesen, P. (2024). The Oxford history of the archaic Greek world. Volume I, Argos to Corcyra. Oxford University Press.
but I haven't read this one yet myself.
I read Tomlinson, R. A. (1972). Argos and the Argolid: From the end of the Bronze Age to the Roman occupation. Routledge and Kegan Paul., but I was not super impressed, especially because of the reliance on Pausanias for local cults.
