The Divided City : On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens

by: Loraux, N.

Price: 27,30 EURO

1 copy in stock

This title provides an exploration of the roles of conflict and forgetting in ancient Athens. It was Athens, 403 BCE. 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 reconceptualise 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

PART ONE: THE DIVIDED CITY: MAPPINGS
I To Forget in the City 15
II To Repoliticize the City 45
III The Soul of the City 63
PART TWO: UNDER THE SIGN OF ERIS AND SOME OF HER CHILDREN
IV The Bond of Division 93
V Oath, Son of Discord 123
VI Of Amnesty and Its Opposite 145
VII On a Day Banned from the Athenian Calendar 171
PART THREE: POLITICS OF RECONCILIATION
VIII Politics of Brothers 197
IX A Reconciliation in Sicily 215
X Of Justice as Division 229
XI And Athenian Democracy Forgot Kratos 245

Subjects:
404-403 B.C
Amnesty
Amnesty Greece Athens
Amnistie Grèce Athènes
Athens (Greece) History Thirty Tyrants, 404-403 B.C
Athens (Greece) Politics and government Philosophy
Athènes (Grèce) Histoire 404-403 av. J.-C. (Trente Tyrans)
Democracy
Democracy Greece Athens
Greece Athens
History
Politics and government

The Divided City : On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens

by: Loraux, N.

• ISBN-13: 9781890951085 / 978-1-890951-08-5
• ISBN-03: 1890951080 / 1-890951-08-0
• Zone Books, New York, 2002

Price: 27,30 EURO

1 copy in stock