Progress Review: 'Archaic Athens at War: The Evidentiary Issues' - Mischa Piekosz

My thesis seeks to understand how archaic Athens waged war. Therefore, I will analyze the development of Athens’ public institutions, public life, and identity throughout the archaic period, and whether archaic Athens was militarily successful. However, to conduct this research, we must first valuate the sources of the archaic period. What sources do we have for the period? When was the literary evidence written and what where its sources? Therefore, in this seminar, I will focus on the evidentiary issues of archaic Athens. I will first discuss general evidentiary issues, focusing on the imbalance between the different types of sources we have, and on how the Athenians actively reshaped their memory of the past. Next, I will discuss the three main types of evidence: literary evidence, epigraphical evidence, and material evidence. Literary evidence will focus the archaic fragments that have survived and the classical texts that have written about the archaic period. I will also analyze the effect of the sack of Athens on literary record. Concerning epigraphical evidence, I will focus general issues, such as dating and reconstruction, and on the provenance of private vis-à-vis public inscriptions. Lastly, the section of material evidence will focus on the interpretative issues of ceramics, steles and statues.