480 BCE: The Persian Attack on Athens and its Impact on the Study of Ancient Greece

The present volume is a result of a conference entitled ‘480 BCE: Reconsidering the Chronological Anchor of Archaic and Classical Greece’, which took place in Conference Center Soeterbeeck, Ravenstein, the Netherlands (part of Radboud University, Nijmegen) from 23 to 26 June 2022. Its content is largely based on the papers and discussions at that event.
The conference was organized under the aegis of Anchoring Innovation, the Gravitation Grant research agenda of the Dutch National Research School in Classical Studies, OIKOS. This program is financially supported by the Dutch ministry of Education, Culture and Science (NWO project number 024.003.012). The working hypothesis of the program is that for innovations to take hold in a group or society, they need to be ‘anchored’ in something familiar to that group or society. ‘Innovation’ is ‘what is perceived or constructed as innovation, the successful adoption of something ‘new’, while ‘anchoring’ operates as ‘a label for the many different ways in which people connect the new to the old, the traditional, the already known.’ The research program centers on technological innovations in Antiquity. The present book aims to add a new perspective on the program’s tenets, by considering research itself as an endeavor in which new views, in order to become accepted in the scholarly community, need to be anchored in an existing scholarly conception – in this case, in the Persian attack on Athens as a watershed in Greek history.