Divided City : On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens

by Nicole Loraux; Translated by Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort

• ISBN13: 9781890951085
• ISBN10: 1890951080
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-03-01
• Publisher: Zone Books

Summary

Athens, 403 B.C.E. The bloody oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty is over, and the democrats have returned to the city victorious. Renouncing vengeance, in an act of willful amnesia, citizens call for-if not invent-amnesty. They agree to forget the unforgettable, the "past misfortunes," of civil strife or stasis. More precisely, what they agree to deny is that stasis-simultaneously partisanship, faction, and sedition-is at the heart of their politics. Continuing a criticism of Athenian ideology begun in her pathbreaking study The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux argues that this crucial moment of Athenian political history must be interpreted as constitutive of politics and political life and not as a threat to it. Divided from within, the city is formed by that which it refuses. Conflict, the calamity of civil war, is the other, dark side of the beautiful unitary city of Athens. In a brilliant analysis of the Greek word for voting, diaphora, Loraux underscores the conflictual and dynamic motion of democratic life. Voting appears as the process of dividing up, of disagreement-in short, of agreeing to divide and choose. Not only does Loraux reconceptualize the definition of ancient Greek democracy, she also allows the contemporary reader to rethink the functioning of modern democracy in its critical moments of internal stasis.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	7	(2)
Preface	9	(6)
Part One: The Divided City: Mappings
To Forget in the City	15	(30)
To Repoliticize the City	45	(18)
The Soul of the City	63	(30)
Part Two: Under the Sign of Eris and Some of Her Children
The Bond of Division	93	(30)
Oath, Son of Discord	123	(22)
Of Amnesty and Its Opposite	145	(26)
On a Day Banned from the Athenian Calendar	171	(26)
Part Three: Politics of Reconciliation
Politics of Brothers	197	(18)
A Reconciliation in Sicily	215	(14)
Of Justice as Division	229	(16)
And Athenian Democracy Forgot Kratos	245	(20)
Notes	265	(78)
Bibliography	343	(12)
Index	355