The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens - Softcover

Loraux, Nicole

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890951099 ISBN 13: 9781890951092

Publisher: Zone Books – MIT, 2006

Synopsis

An exploration of the roles of conflict and forgetting in ancient Athens.

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.

About this title

About the Author

Nicole Loraux (1943-2003) was the author of The Divided City, The Children of Athena, The Experiences of Tiresias, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, and Mothers in Mourning, among other titles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Zone Books – MIT
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1890951099
• ISBN 13: 9781890951092
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360