Cosmopolis
Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire
Daniel S. Richter
Reviews and Awards
"This complex and stimulating book breathes life into old questions and sheds new light on deceptively familiar texts."--Felix Racine, The Classical Review
"This is a sophisticated study that engages a considerable number of different texts with intellectual vigor and depth of argumentation, proposing new readings and drawing innovative connections."--Paul Dilley, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"This is an important book, and one that will be read profitably by scholars and advanced students interested in the intellectual and cultural history either of the Greek world in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE or of the Roman Empire in the second century CE."--David Cherry, History: Reviews of New Books
"This is an outstanding synthesis of dazzling intellectual range and temporal sweep that teems with original apercus. Tracing the development of ancient ideas about the community of mankind, Richter shows how Greekness evolved from an ethnic and regional category in self-conscious opposition to 'barbarian' into a potentially universal form of cultural identity that even ethnic 'barbarians' might claim."--Maud W. Gleason, Stanford University
"Richter's Cosmopolis changes the way we see identity and community in ancient Greece. Where most studies begin from the premise that Greeks were perpetually obsessed with excluding 'others,' Richter describes the emergence of the idea of a human community, and its development in the more expansive and interconnected Hellenistic and Roman worlds. This is important, progressive work, which any cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean will read with pleasure and profit."--Tim Whitmarsh, Corpus Christi College, Oxford