The BES Spring Meeting 2015 is scheduled to take place in Dresden in May 2015! More information to follow in due course on this site!

The BES Spring Meeting 2014 was held in Edinburgh on 24 May 2014. It was organised by Drs Benjamin Gray and Mirko Canevaro.

The theme of the meeting was 'Ancient Citizenship beyond the Assembly'.
The meeting took the form of a one-day workshop on ‘Ancient Citizenship beyond the Assembly’. Some ancient definitions of citizenship and politics concentrate on the formal role of the citizen in ‘ruling and judging’ (e.g. Aristotle in some parts of his Politics), but others treat the scope of citizenship and politics as much broader, encompassing many social and cultural activities. Ancient inscriptions offer some of the most direct and interesting evidence for investigating these broader areas of ancient civic life, and ancient ideas about their nature, significance and relationship to citizenship and politics. At the workshop, a combination of speakers from Edinburgh and outside will present papers for discussion on diverse aspects of the life of ancient cities: for example, religion, education, theatre, family, friendship and leisure, as well as mainstream politics. One question for discussion was whether there was anything like modern ‘civil society’ in ancient cities. Another was to what extent ancient Greeks and Roman citizens themselves distinguished between different spheres of civic life and different types of civic activity, or reflected on the scope and limits of the political. Was the narrow or the broad notion of citizenship dominant in particular times and places, and how did they relate to each other?

All papers took place in the Meadows Lecture Theatre, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Teviot Place, Edinburgh EH8 9AG.

10.45-11.15: coffee.

Morning session:

11.15: Benjamin Gray (Edinburgh), Introduction: the scope of politics in Greek inscriptions

12.15: Roberta Fabiani, A new stone from Iasos: phylai, phylarchoi and the cult of Zeus Patroos

13.15: lunch.

Afternoon session:

14.30: Will Mack (Oxford), Can you be the polites of more than one polis? Some contrasting views on grants of politeia and the politics of citizen identity

15.30: Polly Low (Manchester), Polis and koinon at Hellenistic Erythrai

16.30: tea and posters

Pavement inscription, Edinburgh, Lady Stair's Close.