The World of Prometheus

by Allen, Danielle S.

• ISBN13: 9780691094892
• ISBN10: 0691094896
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-11-25
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

For Danielle Allen, punishment is more a window onto democratic Athens' fundamental values than simply a set of official practices. From imprisonment to stoning to refusal of burial, instances of punishment in ancient Athens fueled conversations among ordinary citizens and political and literary figures about the nature of justice. Re-creating in vivid detail the cultural context of this conversation, Allen shows that punishment gave the community an opportunity to establish a shining myth of harmony and cleanliness: that the city could be purified of anger and social struggle, and perfect order achieved. Each member of the city--including notably women and slaves--had a specific role to play in restoring equilibrium among punisher, punished, and society. The common view is that democratic legal processes moved away from the "emotional and personal" to the "rational and civic," but Allen shows that anger, honor, reciprocity, spectacle, and social memory constantly prevailed in Athenian law and politics. Allen draws upon oratory, tragedy, and philosophy to present the lively intellectual climate in which punishment was incurred, debated, and inflicted by Athenians. Broad in scope, this book is one of the first to offer both a full account of punishment in antiquity and an examination of the political stakes of democratic punishment. It will engage classicists, political theorists, legal historians, and anyone wishing to learn more about the relations between institutions and culture, normative ideas and daily events, punishment and democracy.

Author Biography

Danielle S. Allen is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Introduction	3	(10)
PART ONE: THE PRELIMINARIES	13	(84)
What Is Punishment?	15	(24)
Introduction	15	(3)
``Revenge'' versus ``Punishment'': Rereading the Oresteia	18	(7)
Studying Punishment as Authority: Reading the Prometheus Bound	25	(10)
Precis	35	(4)
Institutional Context	39	(11)
Introduction	39	(1)
Penal Institutions and Democratic Power	40	(5)
The Lay Prosecutor and the Parameters of Judgment	45	(5)
Cultural Context	50	(23)
Anger/Orge	50	(9)
The Agon and Honor	59	(3)
Reciprocity	62	(3)
Social Memory, Social Knowledge	65	(3)
Language	68	(4)
Conclusion	72	(1)
Punishment and Its Tragic Problems	73	(24)
The Mythic Imaginary	73	(2)
Method	75	(2)
Disease and Remedy	77	(9)
Power, Tyranny, and Law	86	(8)
Conclusion	94	(3)
PART TWO: THE PROCESS OF PUNISHING	97	(146)
Initiation, Part One	99	(23)
Knowledge, Power, Action	99	(3)
Investigation	102	(5)
Initiation: Metics, Proxenoi, and Xenoi	107	(2)
Initiation: Slaves	109	(2)
Initiation: Women	111	(11)
Initiation, Part Two	122	(25)
The Male Citizen Prosecutor	122	(6)
Back to the Bees and Wasps Again	128	(6)
The Household: Women and Men Together	134	(7)
City as Collective	141	(6)
The Negotiation of Desert, Part One	147	(21)
The Magic of Speech	147	(1)
Pity and Anger	148	(3)
The First Norm of Public Agency: Deserving to Punish and Dispelling Charges of Sycophancy	151	(17)
The Negotiation of Desert, Part Two	168	(29)
Introduction	168	(1)
The Second Norm of Public Agency: Using Social Memory and Law	168	(11)
The Rule of Judgment versus the Rule of Law	179	(4)
The Rule of Law in Plato and Aristotle	183	(7)
The Third Norm of Public Agency: Shaping the Democratic Community	190	(7)
Execution	197	(46)
War, Peace, and the Formalism of Punishment	197	(3)
The Details: Punishments and Their Executors	200	(2)
Two Forms of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting	202	(3)
The Symbolism of Remembering and Forgetting	205	(8)
War and Peace, the Body and Silence	213	(11)
Punishments of Reintegration	224	(8)
Punishments that Redefine the ``Whole'' Community	232	(5)
The Amnesty	237	(6)
PART THREE: INTERVENTIONS IN THE CONVERSATION	243	(50)
Plato's Paradigm Shifts	245	(37)
The Symbol of Leontios	245	(2)
Reform over Reciprocity	247	(4)
The Erasure of Orge	251	(6)
Undoing the Athenian ``Principle of the Public'': The Republic	257	(6)
The Just City and the Power of the Symbol	263	(14)
The Incurables and the Necessity for Anger/Orge in the Just City of the Laws	277	(5)
Aristotle's Compromises	282	(11)
On Justice and Desert	282	(11)
EPILOGUE: The Reform of Prometheus and Promethean Rebellion	293	(40)
APPENDIXES
A. The Number of Magistrates in Athens	305	(12)
B. The Nature and Scope of Arbitration in Athens	317	(6)
C. The Relative Frequency of Penal Words within Each Orator	323	(1)
D. Further Argument about the Decree of Cannonus	324	(2)
E. Catalog of Cases of Punishing (or Attempts at Punishing) in Tragedy	326	(7)
Endnotes	333	(72)
Bibliography	405	(26)
Index	431