E Anna 693 0605

Rethinking the Political in Ancient Greece
Vincent Azoulay, Translated from the French by Angela Krieger

In Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales Volume 69, Issue 3, 2014, pages 605 to
626
ISSN 2268-3763
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Politics in Ancient Greece
385
Special Issue
Rethinking the Political
in Ancient Greece*
Vincent Azoulay

Just over thirty years ago, François Hartog pondered what it might mean to devote
an entire issue of the Annales to ancient history.1 Such an editorial endeavor, he
suggested, was a bold gamble based on the conviction that the study of antiquity
should not be confined to the domain of pure erudition, exclusively reserved for
specialists. Like other historians, specialists in ancient history could heed Marc
Bloch and Lucien Febvre’s invitation in the journal’s first issue, calling for histori-
ans to “demolish walls so high that they frequently block the view” as they “strive
to pay attention to their neighbor’s work.”2
This article was translated from the French by Angela Krieger and edited by Chloe
Morgan and Stephen Sawyer.
* Unless otherwise indicated, Greek texts are cited from the Loeb Classical Library
published by Harvard University Press. Throughout this issue of the Annales we refer to
the English translations of French works whenever they are available. For a bibliography
detailing the original references, see our website: http://annales.ehess.fr. See also the
“Historiographical Pursuits” section devoted to ancient Greek history on the same site.
1. Published in 1982, this special issue of the Annales (37, nos. 5/6) in fact covered a
range of rather different fields. In addition to the introduction by François Hartog (on
the relationship between ancient history and history), only two articles were devoted
to Greek history (one by Moses Finley on the place of documents in the economic
history of antiquity; the other by Annie Schnapp-Gourbeillon on the origins of writing
in Archaic Greece), while three other contributions examined the Roman forum (Filippo
Coarelli), prehistory (Jean-Paul Demoule), and archaeology in eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Europe (Alain Schnapp).
2. François Hartog, “Introduction : histoire ancienne et histoire,” Annales ESC 37, nos. 5/6
(1982): 687-96. 387
Annales HSS 69, no. 3 (July-September 2014): 387–408.
509374 UN04 23-12-16 06:25:07 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 387

VINCENT AZOULAY
This new issue devoted to the political experience of ancient Greece is the
product of a similar desire for decompartmentalization. Indeed, the contributions
collected here highlight approaches and inquiries shared by all historians, regard-
less of their preferred period or field: reflections on the margins of freedom for
actors in a constrained environment, in the tradition of microstoria; the potential
of both an interconnected history and a reticular vision of Greek cities; an acknowl-
edgment of the interplay of spatial scales, marked by the rejection of a model of
the city polarized around a single center; a new focus on the conditions in which
“sources” were produced, the context in which they were performed, and the range
of their reception; and the desire to alternate between the short and the long term
as well as between structure and event in the writing of history. In all these respects,
ancient history today appears to be moving toward normalization around a shared
historiographical horizon, as attested by one of the Annales’ most recent issues on
the subject of social statuses, in which the perspective of ancient historians over-
lapped with those of specialists of other periods in a particularly fruitful way.3
Even so, this is a recent development. The situation was quite different
when Hartog wrote his introduction, hence the militant tone of his discourse. At
the time, numerous traditions of study coexisted within the field of ancient Greek
political history alone, without ever dialoguing. It may be helpful, then, to begin
with a brief overview of these powerful divisions—and of the dynamics that are

specific to each of these historiographical currents—in order to appreciate the shifts
that have taken place over the last thirty years, and to which this issue attests in
its own way. Drafting an inevitably partial (and French) inventory, I shall begin
with a few emblematic works published in the mid-1980s.
In 1984, François de Polignac returned to the origins of Greek cities by
borrowing from the field of archaeology to show the decisive role community
practices played in the emergence of the civic phenomenon. According to Polignac,
the first civic communities, far from defining themselves in legal terms, were
structured around collective rituals, particularly hero cults and processions to
frontier sanctuaries.4 Unlike the traditional genealogical perspective that, since
Aristotle, had presupposed the passage from family to tribe and from tribe to
city, Polignac highlighted the processes of territorial attachment and the role that
important community rituals played within them. This was a way of restoring
religious practices to their key role in the emergence of the civic phenomenon,
following the perspective opened up by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges whereby
the social bond was based on religious belief rather than legal agreement.5 Above
all, it continued in the tradition of research launched by Jean-Pierre Vernant and
3. See Annales HSS 68, no. 4 (2013), in which articles by a Hellenist (Julien Zurbach)
and a Romanist (Nicolas Tran) were published alongside studies concerning similar
themes in early modern and modern history.
4. François de Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State [1984], trans.
Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
5. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and
388 Institutions of Greece and Rome [1864], trans. Willard Small (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1877).

POLITICS IN ANCIENT GREECE
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, both of whom had already stressed the crucial role of commu-
nity practices in the Archaic Greek world—whether this concerned the division of
shares in sacrifice or plots of land, collective hunting, participation in communal
banquets, or civic choruses.6 Polignac’s work nonetheless established two major
breakthroughs. First, it showed how much archaeology could contribute to the
anthropological analysis of ancient Greece (which until then had been primarily
text-based); second, it displaced the focus from the center (the famous meson so
dear to Vernant) to the periphery.
During the same period, Nicole Loraux cautioned against certain dangers
within this tradition of anthropological study, of which she herself was a product.7
By focusing on community rituals, she argued, anthropologist-historians had con-
structed an immobile vision of the city, stuck in repetitive—and even cyclical—
time. Even worse, they seemed to have promoted an overly pacific image of the
ways that civic communities functioned, based on the dubious presupposition that
collective rituals almost mechanically generated the adherence of participants and
reinforced their desire to live together. Faced with this idealized representation,
Loraux intended to restore the intensely conflictual aspect of the Greek political
experience, particularly the role played by stasis—civil war. In the mid-1980s,
anthropologists of the Greek city were thus encouraged to pay attention not only
to places where community practices took place (in the center or on the periphery)

but also to the conflicts that continually threatened to tear the city apart, despite
its efforts to ward off such a threat.
Just a few years before, Jacqueline Bordes had published an important book
on the notion of politeia in Classical Greece.8 This work positioned itself within a
traditional branch of literary studies grounded in philology and previously illus-
trated by the research of Jacqueline de Romilly, who had supervised Bordes’s
thesis at the Sorbonne.9 While her questions were considerably removed from
those of the social sciences, Bordes nonetheless laid the foundations for a broader
perception of the political in ancient Greece by showing that, from Herodotus to
Aristotle, the notion of politeia covered two distinct realities: it assumed at once
an individual value designating citizens’ rights and a collective quality defining
6. For example, see: Claude Calame, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their
Morphology, Religious Role, and Social Functions, trans. Derek Collins and Janice Orion
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Nicole Loraux, “La cité comme cuisine et
comme partage,” Annales ESC 36, no. 4 (1981): 614-22; Jesper Svenbro, “À Mégara
Hyblaea : le corps géomètre,” Annales ESC 37, nos. 5/6 (1982): 953-64; and Pauline
Schmitt Pantel and Alain Schnapp, “Image et société en Grèce ancienne : les représenta-
tions de la chasse et du banquet,” Revue archéologique 1 (1982): 57-77.
7. Nicole Loraux, “To Repoliticize the City” [1986], in The Divided City: On Memory and
Forgetting in Ancient Athens, trans. Corinne Pache with Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books,
2002), 45-62.
8. Jacqueline Bordes, Politeia dans la pensée grecque jusqu’à Aristote (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1982).
9. Jacqueline de Romilly, “Le classement des constitutions d’Hérodote à Aristote,”
Revue des études grecques 72, nos. 339/343 (1959): 81-99. 389

VINCENT AZOULAY
the political regime adopted by a community. Yet, when understood under the
second definition, the politeia is never reduced to its institutions alone: when an
author writes a politeia, often awkwardly translated as “constitution,” he describes
not only the form that a political regime takes (monarchical, aristocratic, or demo-
cratic) but also all the many ways that citizens live (what the Greeks called nomoi,
tropoi, and even epitēdeumata). The principal challenge thus lies in determining
the balance between these two aspects of politeia, which vary according to the
moments and the authors being studied: “The most instructive and the most diffi-
cult task is to determine within the notion the relative importance of, on the one
hand, the sovereign (archē) defining the regime and, on the other, how citizens
lived (laws, morals, states of mind).”10 While Bordes’s book did not have a huge
impact when it was released, it nonetheless paved the way for a renewed examina-
tion of the definition of the political in ancient Greece, as subsequent publications
attest: from the research published in the journal Ktèma11 to the work of Paul
Demont, who used a philological analysis of “leisure” (scholē) and “tranquillity”
(apragmosunē) to show how these notions defined a political way of being in the
world.12 These founding reflections also served as the basis for studies of political
thought during the Classical period that were not limited to the history of ideas
but attempted to comprehend philosophical debates within the framework of an
intellectual field restored to its competitive logic and organizing principles—partic-

ularly the relationship Athenian “intellectuals” maintained with the democratic
politeia.13
Barely three years later, in 1985, Philippe Gauthier published a treatise on
Hellenistic cities and their political organization.14 In a highly detailed institutional
study, Gauthier analyzed the multiplication of honors that the Greek poleis granted
their benefactors between the fourth century BCE and the early Roman period.
This work, based on a corpus of hundreds of inscriptions, took the epigraphist
Louis Robert as its guide and, following his lead, challenged the idea that Greek
cities faced any sort of decline during the Hellenistic period: not only did the city
“not die at Chaeronea”15 under the assault of Philip of Macedon in 338 BCE, but
it remained very much alive up until the Romans arrived in the East in the second
10. Bordes, Politeia dans la pensée grecque, 17.

11. For example, the dossier “Politeia et Politeuma,” Ktèma 15 (1990).
12. Paul Demont, La cité grecque archaïque et classique et l’idéal de tranquillité (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1990).
13. Vincent Azoulay, “Isocrate, Xénophon ou le politique transfiguré,” Revue des études
anciennes 108, no. 1 (2006): 133-53; Azoulay, “Champ intellectuel athénien et stratégies
de distinction dans la première moitié du IVe siècle : de Socrate à Isocrate,” in Individus,
groupes et politique à Athènes de Solon à Mithridate, ed. Jean-Christophe Couvenhes and
Silvia Milanezi (Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2007), 171-99. In a
similar vein, see Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of
Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
14. Philippe Gauthier, Les cités grecques et leurs bienfaiteurs, IVe-Ier siècle avant J.-C. Contri-
bution à l’histoire des institutions (Athens/Paris: École française d’Athènes, 1985).
15. Louis Robert, “Théophane de Mytilène à Constantinople” [1969], in Choix d’écrits,
390 ed. Denis Rousset (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007), 603.

century BCE and certainly well beyond.16 Far from attesting to the control of
prominent citizens over the institutions of a declining city, the decrees honoring
benefactors reflected the people’s persistent supervision of the civic elite—the
community preserving the legitimate monopoly of distinction and continuing to
define the way in which benefactors were supposed to behave. The hundreds of
inscriptions discovered since the book’s publication have only reinforced Gauthier’s
analysis, which was innovative for his time. The stereotypical image of moribund
Greek cities crushed by the power of Hellenistic sovereigns was thus progressively
replaced by the representation of a dynamic civic universe animated by intense
political, legal, and economic exchanges. Using decrees, Hellenistic cities, which
existed in a network and shared a political culture spread by “peer polity inter-
action,”17 constantly reiterated a normative political discourse that in its very repeti-
tion participated in the maintenance and promotion of democratic values.18 In this
respect, the golden age of Greek democracy should perhaps be situated during the
early Hellenistic rather than the Classical period, at least where quantity—if not
quality—is concerned.19
Crossing Historiographical Traditions: Cities in Reflection


The purpose of this broad historiographical panorama is to highlight the implicit
“division of labor” that long prevailed within Greek history and which ultimately
produced three fundamentally divergent visions of the civic phenomenon: the
“city of anthropologists,” focused on the Archaic period and principally based on
archaeological, iconographic, and textual documentation (with a predilection for
poetic sources, particularly Homer and Hesiod); the “city of philosophers and
philologists,” interested above all in the great canonical texts of the Classical
period, especially Herodotus, Plato, and Aristotle; and the “city of epigraphists,”
resolutely focusing on the Hellenistic period and making massive—and even exclu-
sive—use of inscriptions. These three “cities” are characterized by rather different
representations of the political, though this has not necessarily generated violent
polemics between them. When they do not mutually ignore one another, the three
16. Anna Heller, “La cité grecque d’époque impériale : vers une société d’ordres ?,”
Annales HSS 64, no. 2 (2009): 341-73.
17. John Ma, “Peer Polity Interaction in the Hellenistic Age,” Past and Present 180, no. 3
(2003): 9-39. The vectors of these interactions are multiple: the institution of foreign
judges, arbitration procedures between cities, conventions surrounding asyleia, etc.
18. Jean-Marie Bertrand, “Formes de discours politiques : décrets des cités grecques et
correspondance des rois hellénistiques,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 63
(1985): 469-81.
19. Philippe Gauthier, “Les cités hellénistiques,” in The Ancient Greek City-State, ed.
Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1993), 211-31, here 217-18.
Gauthier evokes a “democratic koinē.” See also Christian Mann and Peter Scholz, eds.,
“Demokratie” im Hellenismus. Von der Herrschaft des Volkes zur Herrschaft der Honoratioren ?
(Mainz: Verlag Antike, 2011). 391

VINCENT AZOULAY
historiographical currents can certainly subscribe to a larger, common narrative that

allows each of them to situate their position without encroaching upon the others’
respective chronological territories. While the community supposedly defined itself
via major community rituals during the Archaic period (with the city emerging
from these repeated performances), the Classical city is thought to have undergone
a progressive legal formalization, illuminated by the fourth-century philosophers,
before a political sphere entirely defined by the ordered functioning of civic insti-
tutions flourished during the Hellenistic period, as thousands of decrees seem to
attest.
This issue of the Annales, bringing together specialists of different periods and
disciplinary horizons (history, philosophy, archaeology, and epigraphy), is based on
the shared conviction20 that dividing the workload in this way is sterilizing and
that confronting these different traditions of study is the only way to reveal each
of their weaknesses and consequently open up new paths for surpassing them.
Let me rapidly take stock of the problems each of these currents must con-
front, beginning with the “city of anthropologists,” which, having once been at the
forefront of methodological innovation, must now profoundly renew its lines of
inquiry and critically rethink some of its most deep-seated presuppositions.21 First,
is it not necessary to challenge the extraordinary force attributed to major collective
rituals in the construction of the civic community? Indeed, rituals are quite often

rather “uneventful,” only stirring in participants the satisfaction of conforming to
a rule.22 Furthermore, even if rituals are credited with a certain social effectiveness,
can all of them legitimately be placed on the same level? Not all collective practices,
whether or not they are ritualized, naturally contribute to the affirmation of civic
identity. In the construction of what is “common” (koinon), for example, it is
undoubtedly necessary, as Arnaud Macé demonstrates, to consider distribution
practices—whether relating to plots of land, shares in sacrifice, booty, or inherit-
ance—in their own right, rather than calling upon the inclusive (and debatable)
categories of “ritual”23 or “collective practices.”24
Second, the representation of the Greek city as polarized around a center,
either political or religious, now seems insufficient. In recent years, Polignac—in
20. Pauline Schmitt Pantel’s thesis, which combines archaeology, iconography, literary
sources, and epigraphy—and is inspired as much by Jean-Pierre Vernant as by Louis
Robert—remains exemplary in this respect: see Pauline Schmitt Pantel, La cité au ban-
quet. Histoire des repas publics dans les cités grecques (Rome: École française de Rome, 1992).
21. In particular, see Pascal Payen and Évelyne Scheid-Tissinier, eds., Anthropologie de
l’Antiquité. Anciens objets, nouvelles approches (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).
22. See Nicolas Mariot, “Qu’est-ce qu’un ‘enthousiasme civique’ ? Sur l’historiographie
des fêtes politiques en France après 1789,” Annales HSS 63, no. 1 (2008): 113-39. Mariot
rightly criticizes the “integrating paradigm” of most studies devoted to civic celebrations.
23. Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific
Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
24. Paulin Ismard, “Le public et le civique dans la cité grecque : hypothèses à partir
d’une hypothèse,” in Le banquet de Pauline Schmitt Pantel. Genre, mœurs et politique dans
l’Antiquité grecque et romaine, ed. Vincent Azoulay, Florence Gherchanoc, and Sophie
392 Lalanne (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012), 317-29.

part deconstructing his own thesis—has astutely highlighted the existence of struc-
turing territorial logics that cannot be reduced to the center/periphery dialectic
and which even surpass the scale of the polis.25 On the basis of a subtle analysis
of the Athenian network of associations, Paulin Ismard has restored the image of
a decentralized city, open to the outside world and characterized by a high degree
of fluidity between different social identities that conjointly contributed to the
definition of citizenship: in Athens, a whole series of places on the fringes of civic
structures were gathering points for the expression of community.26
Third, anthropologist-historians have often neglected the way these collective
practices could be associated (or not) with a certain legal formalization—particularly
with a statutory definition of community. In his article, Alain Duplouy confronts
this central question head on by following the presuppositions of the anthropologi-
cal approach through to their ultimate conclusions. At the end of his deconstruction
of the famous “Solonian property classes,” he arrives at a behavioral definition of
Archaic citizenship, devoid of stable legal content and evolving along with individ-
ual and collective performances. While this vision of the Archaic period, marked
by intense social mobility and a form of institutionalization that was still embryonic,
has the virtue of being coherent, it will unavoidably generate debate—as it has
already done.27 Without taking a definitive position in an ongoing historiographical
controversy, one can at least suggest a way of sidestepping this by placing it along-

side the propositions of a renewed epigraphic tradition. In her study of the privi-
leges granted to foreigners in Hellenistic cities, Christel Müller astutely demonstrates
how social performance and legal status can be combined within the very definition
of citizenship, challenging any manichaean approach to the statutory phenomenon.
Finally, the anthropology of the political in ancient Greece is still far from
resolving the question of conflict that was reinvigorated by Loraux. First of all,
much work still needs to be done to distinguish, among the collective practices
that had the potential to create the community (koinōnia), those that occurred
during moments of extreme tension. Indeed, as I hope my own contribution to
this collection demonstrates, “rituals” found themselves invested with a specific
political value during instances of conflict. Next, it is necessary to renounce the
catastrophist vision developed by Loraux, who identified the political with stasis
(and with the corresponding movement to repress it), and to include even conflicts
of a lower intensity in our analysis, for, though they did not endanger the very
existence of the community, they were no less vectors of real politicization.
25. François de Polignac, “Sanctuaires et société en Attique géométrique et archaïque :

réflexion sur les critères d’analyse,” in Culture et cité. L’avènement d’Athènes à l’époque
archaïque, ed. Annie Verbanck-Piérard and Didier Viviers (Brussels: Fondation archéo-
logique de l’université libre de Bruxelles, 1995), 75-103.
26. Paulin Ismard, La cité des réseaux. Athènes et ses associations, VIe-Ier siècles av. J.-C. (Paris:
Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010); Martha C. Taylor, Salamis and the Salaminioi: The
History of an Unofficial Athenian Demos (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1997).
27. Julien Zurbach, “The Formation of Greek City-States: Status, Class, and Land
Tenure Systems,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 68, no. 4 (2013): 617-57. 393

VINCENT AZOULAY
The “city of philosophers and philologists” also benefits from being revisited
in light of the other currents of study related to the political in ancient Greece.
For a long time, philosophers have expounded a far too theoretical vision of the
politeia and its functioning, based on a drastically reduced selection of sources
feeding historiographical debates in a closed circuit. Yet it seems to me difficult
to comprehend exactly how the specific mores (epitēdeumata) of each political
regime—a key element in the definition of the politeia in the collective sense, as we
have seen—were constructed using only canonical philosophical texts as sources.
In this respect, as Duplouy shows, adopting an anthropological approach makes it
possible to understand the ways community practices contributed to creating a
habitus specific to each city. One thinks, for example, of Thucydides’s depiction
of Athens as a particularly festive community characterized by an exceptional pro-
liferation of competitions and religious celebrations that made it unique among
Greek cities.28
Similarly, if one remains confined solely to the analysis of philosophical texts,
it is difficult to understand how the politeia in the individual sense was defined. Once
more, the confrontation with another tradition of study concerning politics—the “city
of epigraphists”—makes it possible to move beyond an abstract definition of the
phenomenon. Müller’s text thus brings to light the eminently composite nature
of citizenship—conceived as a bundle of laws, privileges, and obligations—through

a close reading of Hellenistic decrees honoring foreign benefactors. Crossing
approaches and sources therefore makes it possible to refine the definition of the
politeia on an individual as well as on a collective scale.
The “city of epigraphists” has likewise found itself confronted with the need
to depart from the autarchy that long characterized it. Over the course of the
twentieth century, the discipline effectively set itself apart within the field of
Greek history, notably because of the lengthy initiation necessary to master its
language and codes. Epigraphists generally remained impervious to the inquiries
that emerged from the social sciences, which were considered passing fads. A
process of decompartmentalization has only recently begun thanks to mavericks
such as Jean-Marie Bertrand and John Ma, who are careful to integrate discourse
analysis and anthropology into their approaches.29 While epigraphists are now much
more open to other historiographical currents, their research nonetheless remains
marked by an institutionalist interpretive framework, directly determined by the
nature of the sources they use: the thousands of decrees engraved by Greek cities
during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Following Aristotle, most specialists in
28. “We have competitions and sacrifices regularly throughout the year.” Thucydides,
History of the Peloponnesian War 2.38.1. See also Pseudo-Xenophon, Constitution of the
Athenians 2.9 and 3.1-2.
29. Bertrand, “Formes de discours politiques”; John Ma, Antiochus III and the Cities of
Western Asia Minor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Ma, Statues and Cities: Honor-
ific Portraits and Civic Identity in the Hellenistic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013). For a decompartmentalized approach, see Pierre Fröhlich and Patrice Hamon,
eds., Groupes et associations dans les cités grecques de l’époque hellénistique et impériale (Geneva/
394 Paris: Droz, 2012).

inscriptions support a conception of citizenship based exclusively on participation

in magistracies and assemblies. This position ignores the fact that, for the ancient
Greeks, the politeia included various levels of participation that were carefully
distinguished from one another and, in particular, accorded an important place to
both profane and sacred ritual practices, as Josine Blok has convincingly demon-
strated.30 In this respect, the whole approach of “epigraphic citizenship” undoubt-
edly merits deconstructing. Using the notions of agency and performance so dear
to sociologists and anthropologists, Müller demonstrates that citizenship during the
Hellenistic period was divided up into a multitude of rights and privileges (rights to
property, trade, a legitimate marriage, exemption from certain taxes, and so on)
that the city could decide to grant to foreign benefactors in part or as a whole,
thereby setting in motion or maintaining a certain social dynamic at its heart with-
out upsetting the hierarchy of legal statuses. Once more, the intermixing of differ-
ent “cities” is a starting point for a renewed vision of citizenship in ancient Greece.
Traversing periods, transgressing the established divisions of sources, alter-
nating between the short and the long term, varying the scales of study, and inter-
weaving different analytical methods are among the paths explored throughout
this collection, with the aim of better grasping the originality of the ancient Greek
political experience. Rather than summarizing each article’s contribution, I would
like to propose a possible journey through this special issue of the Annales by

highlighting two aspects that, it seems to me, emerge most prominently out of the
whole. The first of these concerns the construction of civic communities and the
articulation between the dynamics of affiliation created by collective practices
and the rigidity of the status hierarchy; the second concerns the civic ideology of
participation, the importance of which has ambivalent implications for the very
definition of the political in ancient Greece.
Constructing the Community:

Between Inclusion and Exclusion
If the authors in this issue share any conviction, it is that the civic phenomenon
is not a given, but is constructed over time. As Duplouy stresses, for example, the
city is “the result of a long, empirical process aimed at defining the contours of a
social community that gradually came to consider its members as citizens.” From
this perspective, the challenge consists of delimiting how processes of inclusion
within the community took place over the course of the Archaic period. Were they
organized and framed within an overarching structure—the city—which guaran-
teed their validity? To make this argument would be to misunderstand the actual
functioning of Archaic cities, where institutional frameworks were far from all-
encompassing. Thus, Archaic “law codes” were in no way aimed at the overall
30. Josine H. Blok, “Becoming Citizens: Some Notes on the Semantics of ‘Citizen’ in
Archaic Greece and Classical Athens,” Klio 87, no. 1 (2005): 7-40. 395

VINCENT AZOULAY
organization of the city, but instead corresponded to a “a series of disjointed ele-

ments that d[id] not necessarily form a system, responding first and foremost to
isolated and concrete individual preoccupations.”31 This observation leads Duplouy
to reassess the impact of Solon’s legislative work by deconstructing the very exis-
tence of the “Solonian property classes” said to have modulated citizens’ access
to civic institutions according to their property-based wealth. Far from correspond-
ing to the legal reorganization of the community, he argues, the “property classes”
were dynamic, partial, and scattered categories that did not form a coherent whole.
These disjointed elements only appear to have been reinterpreted according to a
comprehensive model over the course of the Classical period, while the myth of
the ancestral constitution (patrios politeia)—in which Solon was credited with an
almost demiurgic role—was forged after the end of the Peloponnesian War.
This caustic analysis nonetheless leaves one question open: how did parallel
processes of exclusion—as opposed to inclusion—occur in the city? The phenom-
ena of disaffiliation were just as dynamic as those of affiliation, to the point where,
during the time of Solon, a legal framework became necessary. Indeed, while the
historicity of the Solonian property qualifications can legitimately be called into
question, another reform attributed to the legislator has not been debated: the
abolition of enslavement as a punishment for debt. In pre-Solonian Athens, there
existed “debt bondsmen” and “debt slaves,” the former working to settle their

debt (the resolutory form) and the latter reduced to slavery after failing to reimburse
their debt (the executory form).32 By forbidding debt slavery (and not debt bond-
age), Solon established an original means of protecting the civic body, widening
the gap between citizens (who were protected by the new measure) and non-
citizens (who were not). Furthermore, this was the reason Athenians subsequently
brought their slaves from abroad, taking advantage of the simultaneous develop-
ment of chattel slavery and in turn feeding its dynamic rise during the sixth century.
After Solon, modes of community affiliation thus occurred against the back-
drop of a reinforced legal distinction between citizens and everyone else. In this
context, how could more supple forms of affiliation to the Athenian community
be maintained? Was it not necessary to establish procedures for identifying those
who, as Athenians, could benefit from the protection Solon had put in place? The
evidence available at this time precludes a definitive response to this question.
These questions of inclusion and exclusion also underpin Arnaud Macé’s
contribution, which considers the way the “common” (koinon) was constructed in
Greek cities during the Archaic period. Far from resulting from an abstract legal
construction, the “common” should, according to Macé, be linked to the social
practices that generated it and, in this case, to phenomena of distribution (shares
31. Alain Duplouy cites the following study: Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, “What’s in a
Code? Solon’s Laws Between Complexity, Compilation and Contingency,” Hermes 133,
no. 3 (2005): 280-93.
32. Zurbach, “The Formation of Greek City-States,” 630. See also Edward M. Harris,
“Did Solon Abolish Debt-Bondage?,” The Classical Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2002): 415-30.
396 According to Harris, Solon abolished not debt bondage, but debt slavery.

in booty, land, and sacrifices). Beginning with a precise semantic study, Macé
demonstrates that distributive practices led to two major and quite distinct types
of “common.” On the one hand, there were things that were common because
they were distributed in equal parts between all beneficiaries: what was common
was thus born out of the very act of sharing and was realized in its own dispersal.33
On the other hand, there existed things that were common precisely because they
were removed from distribution in order to constitute a separate reserve: placed at
the center of the community, such goods were “no one’s property,” or res nullius.34
In relation to previous studies, Macé nonetheless proposes a different under-
standing of “no one’s property.” Yan Thomas defined such things by their funda-
mentally “unappropriable” nature, distinguishing within public space “a zone of
public property” of which the state freely disposed (and which it could buy and
sell) and a “zone of public use” (town squares, theaters, markets, porticos, roads,
rivers, watercourses, etc.) “of which the unavailability was absolute,” including for
the state itself.35 According to Macé, this distinction did not apply in Archaic
Greece, where things that were set aside during distributions would have in no
way been intrinsically unappropriable. On the contrary, they were profoundly vul-
nerable to each individual’s appetites, and only the sovereign decision to set them
aside made them unavailable, a decision that could always be reversed. That was
why this type of common property required, if not a state, at least an agent—the

city—to protect it from possible attempts at appropriation.
The consequences of this redefinition are far from anecdotic: when it desig-
nates goods that are set aside and protected from everyone’s individual desires,
the koinon incarnates a principle that transcends the concrete community, behind
which looms the figure of the state (conceived as the presiding authority over these
goods belonging to no one); when it refers to common shares dispersed between
all, the koinon designates, on the contrary, a horizontal principle of which the
distinguishing feature is that it does not have a specific locus, but is spread across
the whole civic body by means of the distributions themselves. In this respect,
Macé’s study makes it possible to support a hypothesis previously advanced by
Pauline Schmitt Pantel and recently revived by Ismard: in Archaic Greece, the
public was “placed under the sign of a fundamental duality, or at least traversed
by a double movement—the progressive delimitation of a specific common space
and, conjointly, the incessant sharing of what was defined as being ‘in common.’”36
Without making it clearly explicit, anthropologist-historians have tended to
favor the second of these alternatives, preferring to highlight a definition of the
common that was not established in any stable form, the production of which could
only be ensured by the infinite repetition of collective distributions. This marked
33. “All koinon contains within it the potential of division.” Schmitt Pantel, La cité au
banquet, 112.
34. Yan Thomas, “La valeur des choses. Le droit romain hors la religion,” Annales HSS 57,
no. 6 (2002): 1431-62.
35. Ibid., 1435.
36. Ismard, “Le public et le civique dans la cité grecque,” 318. 397

VINCENT AZOULAY
preference has led them to neglect the existence of a public space removed from
the citizens’ supervision. However, this is not really surprising: modern scholars
have simply relayed the ideology of the Greek cities themselves, which celebrated
the citizens’ horizontal participation in the community and not their vertical adher-
ence to an overarching whole.
Macé’s article opens up new avenues of research that still need to be
explored. To confine ourselves to the “inclusive common” so dear to anthropo-
logists (characterized by the granting of equal shares to all), is it not necessary to
establish a typology of distributions? Does everything that is distributed (shares
in sacrifice or game, plots of land, spoils of war, etc.) then have the same capacity
to generate and maintain the community (koinōnia)? Should one not take into
account the nature of the objects that were distributed and the symbolic meaning
attached to them—for example, by attributing a separate place to gifts of food,
which the Greeks viewed as having particularly strong unifying effects?37 Next,
would it not be advisable to distinguish between the routine distributions that
occurred according to an anticipated calendar and the exceptional distributions
that took place during moments of acute crisis? Is it not, moreover, in these
moments of extreme tension that sharing assumes a fully political nature by contrib-
uting to refounding the civic body along new lines? In this respect, colonial experi-
ences offer many lessons, since the community’s foundation was bound up in the

distribution of plots of land among newcomers who had set off in search of adven-
ture in a context marked by political, social, and economic crisis.
There is yet another question, one that is rarely posed since it seems such a
given that distributions always have a cohesive effect: Should we not consider
the disintegrative potential of sharing? Indeed, distributions lead to their share
of conflictual situations. The Iliad certainly offers the best and most formidable
illustration of this, since the epic can be summed up as a division of war booty
gone wrong. The distribution of land could contribute to tearing apart a community
just as much as its unification, since it often took place following the victory of
one side over another: during the fourth century, it was even the mark of a tyranni-
cal power that did not hesitate to expropriate the lands of its enemies and redistrib-
ute them to its accomplices.38 Even in less extreme cases, distributions remained
moments of tension—even confrontation—relating to the very definition of the
group that might benefit from them. Indeed, this is the flipside of every process
of division: these distributions, which established a form of koinōnia between the
lucky recipients, symmetrically excluded all those who did not have a right to them.
Right. There it is: the legal issue, already mentioned in relation to the Solonian
property classes, again becomes crucial as soon as it is a question of exclusion rather
than inclusion. When considered from this angle, distribution practices do not
37. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the
Pacific (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1991), 18-21. On these effects, see Vincent
Azoulay, Xénophon et les grâces du pouvoir. Charis et charisme dans l’œuvre de Xénophon
(Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004), 113-33 and 364-66.
38. David Asheri, Distribuzioni di terre nell’antica Grecia (Turin: Accademia delle Scienze,
398 1966).

appear to have in any way contradicted the formalization of actual legal statuses,
but instead contributed to their crystallization.
In this respect, two examples are particularly evocative. The first concerns
the division of colonial land during the Archaic period and the groups to whom it
was given. The name of the gamoroi of Syracuse, mentioned by Duplouy, thus
etymologically designates “those who received, through distribution, a part of the
city’s territory.” The gamoroi—representing the Syracusan elite and descending
from the first colonizers—apparently defined their sense of belonging to the
community through the memory of this initial distribution.39 The lexicographer
Hesychius was not wrong when he observed that “the term applies equally to
‘those who work hard on the land,’ to ‘those who received a parcel of land,’ and
to ‘those who, due to their property class, manage public affairs.’”40 Is this semantic
oscillation not a way of suggesting that distributions could, over the long term,
lead to legally sanctioned differentiations between statuses? It should be added
that the inclusion of some went hand in hand with the exclusion of others, since
this inaugural distribution resulted in the “natives”—the Kyllyrians—being placed
in servitude and obliged to cultivate the land (perhaps even their former land) that
was distributed to the newcomers.41
The second example concerns the catalyzing effect of certain distributions
in fifth-century Athens.

Many years before this, when Pericles was at the height of his political career and had
sons born in wedlock, ... he proposed a law that only those should be reckoned Athenians
whose parents on both sides were Athenians. And so, when the king of Egypt sent a present
to the people of forty thousand measures of grain, and this had to be divided up among
the citizens, there was a great crop of prosecutions against citizens of illegal birth by the
law of Pericles, who had up to that time escaped notice and been overlooked ... . As a
result, a little less than five thousand were convicted and sold into slavery, and those who
retained their citizenship and were adjudged to be Athenians were found, as a result of
this scrutiny, to be fourteen thousand and forty in number.42
Plutarch is referring here to the voting of the 451 BCE law on citizenship, after
which it was necessary to have two Athenian parents in order to be recognized as
39. Benedetto Bravo, “Citoyens et libres non-citoyens dans les cités coloniales à
l’époque archaïque,” in L’étranger dans le monde grec, ed. Raoul Lonis (Nancy: Presses
universitaires de Nancy, 1992), 43-85.
40. Alain Duplouy, “The So-Called Solonian Property Classes: Citizenship in Archaic
Athens,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 69, no. 3 (2014): 411-439, here 429.
41. Herodotus, Histories 7.155. See Yvon Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet
Lloyd (Ithaca: University of Cornell Press, 1988), 102 and 115.
42. Plutarch, Pericles 37.3-4. The date of the reform is deduced from a passage found
in Pseudo-Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution 26.4: “In the year of [the archonship of]
Antidotus, owing to the large number of the citizens an enactment was passed on the
proposal of Pericles confining citizenship to persons of citizen birth on both sides
(astoin).” 399

VINCENT AZOULAY
an Athenian citizen. Accounting for the various factors that prompted Pericles to
propose this measure is a delicate matter, since the supposed hardening of Atheni-
ans in the face of the growing influence of metics in the city is pure speculation.43
While the law may have had an ideological component, its aims were primarily
socioeconomic, for it was voted in order to limit the number of potential beneficia-
ries of civic distributions—“owing to the large number of the citizens,” as stated
in the Athenian Constitution.44 In his account, Plutarch makes this socioeconomic
perspective his own by showing how distributive practices and measures to create
a legal framework could be combined. If he is to be believed, the sequence
unfolded over several acts. To begin with, the Assembly voted the law on citizen-
ship in 451. After five years during which it was not really applied, the measure
was activated at the moment when the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus gave the
community a gift of wheat in 446/445. This distribution triggered a number of
trials and, in short, the establishment of a new statutory hierarchy separating citi-
zens from illegitimate children (nothoi). What is significant in this case is the way
that this collective distribution had legal—and even administrative—repercussions,
provoking not only legal proceedings but also the establishment of identification
and census procedures in order to separate the wheat of the citizens from the chaff
of the “half-breeds.”
The whole sequence more generally reflects a deeper logic. Athenians

decided to legally redefine the civic body because the division of wealth needed
to be regulated, notably the distribution of the multiple indemnities that had just
been put in place (for the dikastes and probably the Bouleutai) and all manner of
advantages tied to the city’s growing imperialism. Redefining the circle of potential
beneficiaries in a restrictive way subsequently became a major political issue.
Both examples demonstrate the need to consider the relationships between
distributive practices (which contributed to creating the community through the
very dynamic of division) and forms of legal structuring (which tended to hierarchi-
cally divide the civic body into distinct statuses) in terms of a dialectic. These
complex ties reflect a broader tension between politics and the political in ancient
Greece, as I have attempted to demonstrate in my own contribution to this issue.
Let me briefly explain what should be understood by such an oscillation. “Politics”
can be defined as a process of public decision-making based on forms of collective
deliberation and unfolding within a formalized institutional framework. Beyond its
procedural aspect, it also, as Cornelius Castoriadis has demonstrated, substantially
encompasses an examination of the community’s ultimate goals.45 Conversely, “the
political” designates a diffuse and noninstitutionalized field of action encompassing
43. See: Alfred French, “Pericles’ Citizenship Law,” Ancient History Bulletin 8 (1994):
71-75; Cynthia B. Patterson, Pericles’ Citizenship Law of 451/50 B.C. (Salem: Ayer, 1981).
On the reasons for the law, see Vincent Azoulay, Pericles of Athens, trans. Janet Lloyd
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 81-83.
44. Pseudo-Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution 26.3-4.
45. For example, see Cornelius Castoriadis, Ce qui fait la Grèce, vol. 1, D’Homère à
Héraclite, ed. Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas, and Pascal Vernay (Paris: Éd. du Seuil,
400 2004), 59.

all of the discourses, rituals, and collective practices that contribute to forging a
shared feeling of belonging within the community, including processions, sacrifi-
ces, festivals, banquets, distributions, choruses, theatrical performances, and so on.
To avoid the risk of slipping back into an irenic vision of how the ancient Greek
city functioned, it should immediately be clarified that these community practices
could only assume a real integrating force within the framework of conflict.
Far from being in direct opposition, these two levels of the expression of
collective life tend to become entangled as soon as equal attention is paid both to
what is expressed and what is silenced in the ancient sources. The speech that
Cleocritus delivered in Athens during the civil war of 404-403 BCE, which Xeno-
phon relays in Hellenica, provides an excellent example. Reading this vibrant call
for harmony literally, the reader might conclude that the Athenian community
was constructed solely through unifying collective practices. But the fact that the
political takes center stage here does not necessarily mean that politics no longer
had any role to play. Discord at the time was simply so great that it could not be
resolved through the usual institutional outlets of the Assembly, the Council, and
the courts, and it was easier to seek common ground between opponents by mobi-
lizing the memory of these moments of community effervescence.
Conversely, there are cases in which modern interpreters of ancient sources
only tend to pay attention to politics in the institutional sense, when they should

also be interested in the practices of the political that lie in the background. The
term nomos—too hastily translated as “law”—certainly offers the most striking
example of this. In his study of the vast lexical family descending from the Indo-
European root nem- and the Greek verb némw, the linguist Emmanuel Laroche has
shown that in a Homeric context the verb always signifies “to distribute.”46 During
the Classical period, certain authors still enjoyed staging this semantic origin of the
term: in Minos (subtitled Péri nomoũ), a dialogue once attributed to Plato, the author
thus plays on different meanings of nomos—the peasants’ nomóς as well as the
musicians’ and the legislators’ nómoς —and finds their common point precisely in
distribution (of lands, seeds, and even rules).47 Rather than tracing a linear evo-
lution from informal distributive practices to judicially established law, it is thus
tempting to emphasize the contiguities and intersections between the two phe-
nomena, which in a way incarnate two complementary sides of the construction of
the koinon.
The same ambivalence is nested in the term isonomia, which should be
understood not only as the passive equality of all citizens before the law but also
as their active equality before the procedures associated with division.48 Before it
46. Emmanuel Laroche, Histoire de la racine nem- en grec ancien : némw, némesiς, nómoς,
nomízw (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1949), 8.
47. Pseudo-Plato, Minos 317D-E. These reflections on the law were inspired by Antoine
Chabod’s stimulating master’s dissertation: see Chabod, Pratiques méliques de loi en Grèce
archaïque (Master-2 diss., University of Strasbourg, 2013).
48. Laroche, Histoire de la racine nem, 186-87. Most recently, see Kurt Raaflaub, “Isono-
mia,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient History, 13 vols., ed. Roger Bagnall et al. (Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), ad loc. 401

VINCENT AZOULAY
was harnessed by democrats during the period of Cleisthenes’s reforms, isonomy

could already signify the equitable division of material goods amongst a group
of equals within an aristocratic context—isonomia thus according with isomoira.49
Isonomia came to define the equal access of all citizens to political rights by exten-
sion: what better way could there be to say that communal distribution practices
(the political) could be translated institutionally (politics)? Rather than thinking
in terms of opposition or consecution, the time has come to consider the complex
and shifting articulations between these two scales of expression of community
life at each moment of ancient Greek history.
Redefining the City: Challenging Participation

By insisting so heavily on the role of inclusive distributions in the construction of
the koinon, one tends to promote a horizontal vision of the political, based on the
active implication of all citizens placed on an equal level before procedures associ-
ated with division. The crucial importance of participation is furthermore one of
the rare commonplaces accepted by all the strands of research focusing on politics
(and the political) in ancient Greece, despite their differences. For anthropologist-
historians, it is simply obvious, as Duplouy opportunely reminds us when he states

that: “Instead of describing the relationship between citizens and their city as
‘membership,’ which implies a top-down vision, I prefer to see Archaic citizenship
as a form of ‘participation.’” But this presupposition is just as ingrained for philoso-
phers, who remain influenced by the Aristotelian definition of citizenship based
on the “right to participate in judicial functions and in office (metechein kriseōs kai
archēs).”50 And, as Müller points out, epigraphists also share the same conceptual
horizon, while tending to reduce citizenship simply to participation in institutions,
as did Aristotle.
Both Ismard and Müller’s contributions make it possible to introduce several
nuances into this historiographical topos. In no way does this amount to under-
estimating the power of participation in the ancient Greek world. As Castoriadis
often repeated, ancient Greek cities established a form of political participation
that was completely unprecedented in the history of humanity. Neither I, nor the
contributors to this issue of the Annales, have any intention of presenting this as a
falsifying ideology under the pretext that only a fraction of the population—male
citizens—would have been capable of fully “metechein.”
Even so, participation cannot single-handedly condense the Greek political
experience in its entirety. Indeed, by focusing exclusively on it, one runs the risk
of obscuring the existence of something beyond (or just beneath) participation,
which a careful reading of the ancient sources makes it possible to detect once the
49. See Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece [1967], trans. Janet Lloyd
(Cambridge: Zone Books, 1996), 100-1 and 191-92n61.
402 50. Aristotle, Politics 3.1275a23.

“background noise” of civic ideology has been filtered. It is important not to remain
imprisoned by the city’s own discourse about itself—a discourse that tends to
highlight the active implication of citizens at the same time as it masks the non-
participative aspects of the politeia.
Ismard strives to do just that by restoring the importance of a major institution
within Greek cities, public slavery, which nonetheless can only be glimpsed in the
ancient sources. Through what can be likened to veritable detective work, Ismard
manages to reconstruct the singular features of this status group and the diverse
occupations of its members. The tasks assigned to public slaves (dēmosioi) offer a
rough sketch of the range of skills that we usually associate with the functioning
of a state: the group included guardians of weights and measures, those in charge
of public archives, assistants to elected magistrates, police officers tasked with
keeping order, and the court clerks who drew up the inventory of public goods.
Indeed, these “servants” (in the literal sense of the word) of the city incarnated
the many facets of civic authority, including the most coercive. Furthermore, they
were the only group to maintain a form of administrative continuity in the polis:
their specific skills meant that they could remain tied to the same task for many
years in a row, unlike magistrates, who were elected or randomly selected for a
term of one year and could not generally fulfill the same function for a second term.
As Ismard observes, public slaves “carried out precisely the functions of civic

administration that were beyond the regular rotation of magistratures, and, in this
sense, embodied the only form of ‘bureaucracy’ the polis had ever known.”
This meticulous investigation leads to two conclusions. On the one hand,
the extent of the dēmosioi’s missions demonstrates that they constituted the infra-
structure upon which the very possibility of civic participation rested. Owned by
the city, public slaves were a part of what was considered res nullius, indispensable
when it came to ensuring that the community functioned. On the other hand, their
servile status reveals the degree to which the Greeks relegated everything relating
to the administration of the state to the background: entrusting slaves with such
crucial tasks—many of which would today be carried out by graduates from only
the most prestigious schools—attests to “forms of resistance by the polis as a society
to the existence of a state as a separate authority.” Put differently, the institution
of public slavery was a way for the city to resolve the contradiction between the
desire to be auto-transparent, living in the immanence of its own collective prac-
tices, and the unavoidable need for a form of state administration that was above
the citizens’ supervision. By bringing the public slaves’ hazy silhouettes to life,
Ismard’s study sheds an oblique light on the repressed figure of the state in ancient
Greece, which the ideology of participation actively contributed to concealing.
Nonetheless, as Müller’s article demonstrates, the nonparticipative dimen-
sions of the politeia were effaced not only at the level of the city but also at the
level of the individual. I have already said that citizens’ rights bound together
different levels of participation and should not be conceived as a monolithic unit
defined only by their relationship to civic institutions. But the essential lies else-
where: in reality, the individual politeia was a composite cluster of rights, which
did not necessarily imply active forms of participation (contrary to what many 403

VINCENT AZOULAY
epigraphists, chiefly Gauthier, have suggested). In order to understand this, one

should perhaps begin with the following oft-repeated quote by Moses Finley:
All men, unless they are Robinson Crusoes, are bundles of claims, privileges, immunities,
liabilities and obligations with respect to others. A man’s status is defined by the total of
these elements which he possesses or which he has (or has not) the potential of acquiring. ...
[I]t is not a matter of one man having one more privilege or one more liability than
another. Rather it is a matter of location on a spectrum or continuum of status.51
The decrees studied by Müller offer the best proof of this, since the city accorded
foreign benefactors numerous privileges, claims, and immunities that were, in the-
ory, the prerogative of citizens. In the decrees, these rights are unfolded and laid
out before our very eyes: far from forming one single piece, the honors that were
granted made up something of a harlequin’s coat, composed of rather heterogene-
ous parts. Upon a closer inspection of this strange mosaic, certain rights evidently
referred to a form of participation, such as eisodos, access to the city’s authorities
(particularly the Council and the Assembly) or metousia pantōn, participation in
everything in which citizens by birth participated. Similarly, eisplous and ekplous
(the rights to enter and exit the port), eisagōgē and exagōgē (the rights to import and
export) as well as epinomia (the right to pasture) can be conceived as offering

foreign benefactors the possibility of actively participating in the city’s economic
life. However, it is difficult—even impossible—to accord a “participative” value
to ateleia (exemption from taxes), isoteleia (fiscal equality with citizens), the asylia
of goods (protection against their seizure), and asphaleia (personal security). These
privileges were similar, if not to civil rights, at least to forms of protection that also
defined the status of citizen—alongside “political” rights in the strict sense—and
which could thus be granted to deserving foreigners piece by piece.
In this respect, it is worth considering honorific decrees for foreigners along-
side the phenomena of civic dishonor (atimia), which were in a way their negative
equivalent. Indeed, a passage composed by the Attic orator Andocides in the early
fourth century BCE attests to the existence of forms of partial atimia depriving
Athenian citizens of a part of their rights and privileges without definitively exclud-
ing them from the politeia.52 Andocides, who experienced atimia himself and was
exiled for a long period, lists a number of cases of partially deprived citizens. “They
were only partially (meros ti), not wholly (pantapasin), disfranchised,” he affirms,
citing people convicted of stealing or corruption, deserters, those convicted of
cowardice, and those who had thrown their shield or mistreated their parents. The
51. See the following chapters in Moses I. Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1981): “Between Slavery and Freedom” [1964], chap. 7,
pp. 116-32 (citation p. 131); “The Servile Statuses of Ancient Greece” [1960], chap. 8,
pp. 133-49.
52. Andocides, On the Mysteries (1), 74-76. See: Robert W. Wallace, “Unconvicted or
Potential Átimoi in Ancient Athens,” Dikè 1 (1998): 63-78; Deborah Kamen, Status in
404 Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 69-78.

orator is careful to specify that these individuals “were deprived of their personal
rights (ta sōmata), while retaining possession of their property (ta chrēmata).”53 For
them, personal indignity thus did not lead to the loss of the right to own property,
which it should be remembered was one of the legal traits that distinguished
citizens from resident aliens, or metics.
But that is not all, for Andocides mentions a number of other cases in which
atimia implied the removal of only certain components of citizenship, such as that
of the soldiers who remained in Athens during the regime of the Four Hundred
in 411 BCE: “They enjoyed all the rights of ordinary citizens, except that they
were forbidden to speak in the Assembly or become members of the Council.
They lost their rights (became atimoi) in these two respects, because in their case
the limited disability took this particular form. Others were deprived of the right
of bringing a public indictment, or of lodging a denunciation; others of sailing up
the Hellespont, or of crossing to Ionia; while yet others were specifically debarred
from entering the Agora.”54 Without going into a detailed analysis, this enumeration
sketches in counter-relief an eminently composite definition of citizenship, which—in
accordance with Finley’s hypothesis—appears to be the agglomerate of the diverse
privileges, rights, and capacities that the city was capable of removing piece by
piece.
If considered in relation to the decrees honoring foreigners, Andocides’s

tirade leads to another observation. In the Greek world, personal statuses were not
fixed, since position within the civic hierarchy depended in part on the actions
accomplished by each individual, be they positive (like good deeds) or negative
(like desertion, cowardice, and betrayal). Indeed, where status was concerned, the
city could operate as much by subtraction (in the case of the atimoi) as by addition
(for deserving foreigners), contributing to the creation of a gradation that was much
more subtle than has previously been claimed.
Even so, this dynamism should not obscure the fact that the boundaries
between the three major statuses—citizens, resident aliens, and slaves—remained
relatively impermeable in the ancient Greek world. We should also bear in mind,
as Müller reminds us, that the fragments of citizenship granted to foreigners still
did not allow them to change their status: “an isoteles remained a resident alien even
if he no longer paid the metoikion and possibly even benefited from other, more
consequential advantages. These privileges perhaps made him a ‘quasi-citizen,’
but they could not make him a citizen, for the statutory gulf remained insurmounta-
ble.” Conversely, citizens penalized with atimia remained members of the politeia,
albeit in a debased form, and could even hope to be restored to their former
situation—as the case of Andocides, who became a citizen once again in 403 BCE,
clearly demonstrates.
Ultimately, there is no doubt that Finley’s formulation must be corrected.
During the Classical and Hellenistic periods, there was never any real unbroken
53. Andocides, On the Mysteries (1), 75.

54. Andocides, On the Mysteries (1), 75-76 [translation modified]. 405

VINCENT AZOULAY
continuum of statuses leading from slave to citizen, for the boundaries between
each status category were quite clearly defined and remained difficult to cross.
There was, however, a large spectrum of different positions within each status,
which made it possible to combine statutory rigidity and intrastatutory fluidity, as
well as the overall stability of the civic hierarchy and internal dynamism. This
certainly provides an explanation for the long-term stability of Greek cities, which
found in this subtle combination a means of both ensuring the devotion of foreign-
ers and sanctioning dishonest citizens, without tampering with the fundamental
balance of the politeia.
At the end of this journey, it is perhaps necessary to return once more to what it
means today to publish this group of contributions in a special issue of the Annales.
First, from a point of view internal to Greek history, it was undoubtedly a matter
of assessing the current state of affairs following the deaths of a number of founding
fathers (and mothers). Indeed, the different “cities” have been orphaned since
Loraux, Vidal-Naquet, and Vernant passed away in the early 2000s, Romilly in
2010, and, most recently, Gauthier in 2013. While we in no way want to “take
stock” of our inheritance, as it were, the time had perhaps come to attempt an
evaluation of the shifts that have occurred since certain interpretive paradigms

were put in place in the 1970s and 1980s.
Furthermore, the desire to grasp the renewal of this “French vision of
Greece,” which was sometimes too hastily identified with the “Paris school”
founded by Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, explains the resolutely French nature of
this dossier at a time when ancient history has never been more international.
In this respect, it is also a militant act in the face of the anglophone world’s relative
isolation from French and, more broadly, continental (Italian, German, and Span-
ish) research on ancient Greece. This special issue therefore presents the occasion
to restore the plurality of voices within the French tradition of political studies in
a way that, thanks to the English translation of the Annales, will perhaps have a
chance of being heard on the international stage.
Beyond the stakes that are internal to the discipline, there is one final factor
that, to my mind, justifies the publication of this group of articles in the Annales:
the desire to dialogue not only with other periods in history, but also with other
disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Reading the different articles in
this issue from this perspective, one can only be struck by the variety—and even
the heterogeneity—of references that are called upon, blending at once the work
of anthropologists (Pierre Clastres), economists (Paul Samuelson, leader of the
neoclassical tradition), jurists (Yan Thomas and the controversial Carl Schmitt),
philosophers (Cornelius Castoriadis), and even sociologists (Pierre Bourdieu).
Over and above the impression of diffuseness, a common element nonethe-
less links these diverse contributions: the critical and reflexive use of concepts
originating in the social sciences. Indeed, rather than simply transposing them,
each author seeks to adapt the references employed to the field of ancient history.
406 Macé thus reexamines Samuelson’s definition of public goods by demonstrating

that in Greece these were in no way characterized by their intrinsic unavailability.

Ismard takes up Clastres’s well-known thesis, specifying nonetheless that one
cannot remain confined to the alternative between “societies with a state” and
“societies without a state” when thinking about the ancient Greek city, since the
polis was situated in a dynamic between the two. My own contribution strives to
critically adapt Schmitt’s reflections on the political—defined by the well-known
distinction between friend and enemy—by incorporating not only the role of low-
intensity conflicts, but also the integrating force of philia. I also attempt to put the
importance that definitions of democracy such as those of Castoriadis and Jacques
Rancière have placed on founding moments back into perspective, in light of
recent reflections on regimes of historicity. Finally, Müller makes reasoned use
of the concept of agency by refusing to conceive this “capacity to act” simply in
terms of resistance to established hierarchies and instead viewing it as a potentiality
lying at the heart of civic structures, which activate it.55
Within the framework of this dialogue with the social sciences, it becomes
possible to restore to the Greek political experience its actualizing power, or, to
put it differently, its capacity to speak to us once more. But this depends on
avoiding two symmetrical risks: on the one hand, the ideology of the “Greek
miracle,” which remains robust and is generally coupled with a belief in the direct
line of filiation between ancient Greece and the Western world; on the other, the

temptation to return the Greek city to a form of absolute alterity, which undoubt-
edly exoticizes it but also neutralizes it. And yet, in relation to Europeans, the
ancient Greeks are precisely not in the same position as the Tupi-Guarani tribes
studied by Clastres, for over the very long course of Western history the Greek
political experience has been passed on through a series of mediations—made up
of rapprochement and distancing, studied fidelity and conscious betrayal—that
have given it the worrisome privilege of continuing to speak to us without our
always knowing why.
As long as one is careful to maintain this dual distance, it becomes possible
to discern, through specific case studies, the original features of a political confi-
guration that still beckons to us today. In the end, “it is in no way a matter of
enhancing the value of Greek culture (atrocities like group massacres were far too
common), but of considering it instead like a sort of germ (I insist upon this word,
as opposed to ‘model’) that remains fertile for us.”56 The Greeks certainly had no
55. In a completely different context, see Judith P. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London/New York: Routledge, 1993), 12-16.
56. Castoriadis, Ce qui fait la Grèce, 1:40. Some pages later, Castoriadis remarks “If we
are asked the question ‘why do you want to understand the ancient Greek world,’
we would certainly reply that we want to understand it for the sake of understanding
it. We are made in such a way that understanding or knowing is already an end in
itself, which does not call for any justification. But that coexists with the notion of
understanding in order to act or transform ourselves. Ultimately, even if we remain the
same at the end of the journey, we will no longer really be the same, since we will
know—or will think we know—why we have decided to remain the same.” Ibid., 1:52. 407

VINCENT AZOULAY
ontological or ethical superiority over other peoples. They remain, however, the
first to have collectively challenged the institutional significations of their own
society, paving the way for an incessant examination of the community’s ends—an
examination inherited by all who decide to take up the challenge.
Vincent Azoulay
Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée
Institut universitaire de France
408

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Rethinking the Political in Ancient Greece

Vincent Azoulay, Translated from the French by Angela Krieger

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Annales HSS 69, no. 3 (July-September 2014): 387–408.

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10. Bordes, Politeia dans la pensée grecque, 17.

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Crossing Historiographical Traditions: Cities in Reflection

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historiographical currents can certainly subscribe to a larger, common narrative that

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25. François de Polignac, “Sanctuaires et société en Attique géométrique et archaïque :

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inscriptions support a conception of citizenship based exclusively on participation

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Constructing the Community:

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organization of the city, but instead corresponded to a “a series of disjointed ele-

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was harnessed by democrats during the period of Cleisthenes’s reforms, isonomy

Redefining the City: Challenging Participation

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epigraphists, chiefly Gauthier, have suggested). In order to understand this, one

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53. Andocides, On the Mysteries (1), 75.

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that in Greece these were in no way characterized by their intrinsic unavailability.

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