STUDIUM DĚJIN ATHÉNSKÉ DEMOKRACIE NA UNIVERZITÁCH V ČESKÝCH ZEMÍCH A NA SLOVENSKU V LETECH 1882–1945
THE STUDY OF THE HISTORY OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY AT UNIVERSITIES IN THE CZECH LANDS AND IN SLOVAKIA IN THE YEARS 1881–1945

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the status and development of the study of the history of Athenian democracy at Prague Czech and German universities, at Masaryk University in Brno and Komenský University in Bratislava in the years 1882–1945. It proceeds from the analysis of archive sources, especially the lists of lectures and seminars, university activity reports, the lists of extensions and dissertation and habilitation theses. Special attention was also paid to inheritances and the individual reports of university teachers and preserved dissertation and habilitation theses. This period, a short time after discovering and publishing Aristoteles’s Athenian Constitution (1890), can be indicated as a period of the most voluminous and the most important study of the Athenian state system. At Prague German university the explanations of democratic Athens were focused mostly on history, because there worked two professors of antique history, the excellent specialists in the Greek part of classical civilization Heinrich Swoboda and Viktor Ehrenberg. On the contrary, the philosophical faculties of the other investigated universities provided teaching and dissertation theses about Athenian democracy within the bounds of classical philology. This fact can be explained by the late establishment of an independent department of ancient history at Prague Czech university (1904) and by one teacher giving the lectures of ancient history also at the newly established universities in Brno and Bratislava. Constitutional law problems in Athens were a matter of interest for the classical Czech philologists Josef Král, František Groh and Antonín Kolář, even if his performances had a comparative and popularization character. The most important documents of the study of the Athenian democratic system at universities in the Czech countries and in Slovakia are a published habilitation thesis by František Groh Studie k Aristotelovu spisu Athénaion Politeia (1898), a collection of university lectures of Emanuel Peroutka Ústavy států řeckých (revised and published by Karel Svoboda in 1916) and a typescript, dissertation thesis by Stanislav Icha Podstata demokracie athénské a příčiny jejího úpadku (1937/38).

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