Resources and their (Re-) Construction in Literature during the 4^th Century BC. The Past as Resource Knowledge

During the first phase of the project Greek poetic texts– especially from Hesiod and Arat – were reviewed from different perspectives. Subject were on the one hand their metapoetic reflexion of agrarian and cultural resources, on the other the recent evaluation of these discourses. Besides agriculture, astronomy and seafaring the mythical narrative tradition and the mythical presentation of resources as well as the representation of mobility and migration were in the focus of the study.

During the second phase the project is analysing the literary and rhetorical (re-) construction of resource knowledge about the past, or the past as a resource. In practice the role of real, reconstructed or constructed (fictional) historical knowledge in philosophic and political discourses about (social) orders is studied as well as how it was created. 4^th cent. BC Athens is especially suited for this research, because an intensive discussion of different orders and the own (imaginary) past took place during this time and the related discourses are well documented in writing. As a consequence of the Peloponnesian War a political, military and economic restructuring took place in the Greek world during the beginning of the 4^th cent. BC. Athens lost influence and went through an external and internal re-orientation, but still remained a central political and cultural actor. The philosophic-theoretical literature, as well as numerous political and juridical speeches relate – implicitly or explicitly, in a positive or negative sense – to these socio-cultural dynamics. The knowledge comprehended in these texts can be considered as a resource as defined by SFB 1070. Project C02 analyses mainly Plato’s ‘Republic’ and ‘Laws’, as well as about one hundred Athenian political and juridical speeches (for example of Andokides, Lysias, Isokrates, Isaios, Demosthenes, Aischines and Hypereides) in order to understand how this assumed knowledge about Athenian history was turned into a – manipulable – resource. The project consists of two case studies: one based on Classical Philology (The Ideal State: Knowledge as a Resource – Knowledge about Resources in Plato’s ‘Republic’ and ‘Laws’), the other (Ancient Athens and Democracy: An Imagined Order? Resource Knowledge in Political Discourses of the 4^th cent. BC) on Classical History.