Throughout his intellectual career, Pierre Bourdieu has constantly returned to a text from ancient literature: Plato’s Theaetetus.Footnote ¹ One passage in particular attracted the attention of the sociologist. As he looks down upon the Athenian Agora, before an audience made up of his companions, Socrates celebrates the philosophical detachment from the democratic city and comes to distinguish two groups. To the men engaged in the ordinary functioning of democratic life, who act in a hurry because ‘running water doesn’t wait,’ are opposed those who have time to talk things over at leisure. The latter are like strangers in the city, to the point that they are entirely ignorant of its topography: ‘To begin with, then, the philosopher grows up without knowing the way to the Agora, or the whereabouts of the law courts or the council chambers or any other place of public assembly.’Footnote ²

Pierre Bourdieu sees this digression as the locus of an original theorization of the ‘scholastic disposition’ and of the illusion that accompanies it like its shadow. For him, philosophy proceeds from twofold ignorance: ‘the (active or passive) ignorance not only of what happens in the world of practice […] and, more precisely, in the order of the polis and politics […],’ but also ‘the ignorance, more or less triumphant, of that ignorance and of the economic and social conditions that make it possible.’Footnote ³ Bourdieusian sociology, in fact, aims to dissipate this illusion, forcing us to risk the following hypothesis: Presenting the choice of philosophy as a breaking point, the Platonic text offered an inverted mirror through which Bourdieu could appraise his own conversion to sociology.

The Philosophical Fantasy

But let’s go back to classical Athens and the passage from Theaetetus. Plato presents the community of philosophers and the different groups that walk around the Agora as rival choruses. The choral metaphor is used here to describe philosophical companionship, under the authority of a master who plays the role of coryphaeus. ‘Would you like us to have a review of the members of our chorus?’ Socrates asks Theodorus.Footnote ⁴ Plato dramatizes the gap that separates this chorus of disinterested intellectuals from political factions, regardless of whether these lean toward democracy or oligarchy. Evolving in a closed circuit and prescribing its own laws, the chorus of philosophers claims to have escaped any form of involvement in the city: ‘the scrambling of political cliques for office, meetings, dinners, parties with flute-girls – such doings never enter their head even in a dream.’Footnote ⁵

Plato’s dramaturgy deserves, however, a closer look.Footnote ⁶ For it is not by chance that Socrates’ companions were on the outskirts of the Agora that day. Their teacher had just been summoned by the archon basileus following the accusation that Meletus had made against him.Footnote ⁷ The reference to the trial of 399 gives Socrates’ words a strange resonance. The account he provides of the opposition between the two choruses is filled with the foreboding of their confrontation and of his own death. His conviction also contributed to the withdrawal of the philosophers’ chorus into itself, since it convinced his disciples to stop participating actively in the political life of the city.

This process of secession comes fully to light in Plato’s Letter VII.Footnote ⁸ In this strange autobiographical text, Socrates’ disciple tells the story of his own conversion to philosophical life, concretized by the foundation of the Academy in 387/6. He claims that a double disappointment convinced him to leave the political arena: the violence and the injustice of the Thirty on the one hand and the disorder, impiety and injustice of the restored democracy on the other. This beautiful symmetry, however, is misleading, since it puts the radical oligarchy and the restored democracy on an equal footing. The Letter implies it was only natural for Plato to fall in with the oligarchs, because of his family ties: ‘Some of these men happened to be familiars (oikeioi) and acquaintances of mine, and they invited me to join them at once in what seemed to be a proper undertaking.’Footnote ⁹ It seemed so obvious he must have been close to the Thirty that he had to convince his audience, sixty years after the civil war, that he had dissociated himself from the crimes committed by his relatives.Footnote ¹⁰ Reading between the lines, however, we can see how extraordinarily attractive Critias and his allies were to the young man, convinced, as he confessed at the time, that when they seized power, it would mark a new golden age for the city.Footnote ¹¹

But Plato does not stop there and, to explain his abandonment of any political ambition, invokes his inability to bring together friends and partisans after democracy was restored. The order of the hetaireiai had been overturned, and the relations of philia, essential for participating in political life, were corruptedFootnote ¹²: The city, in short, was out of tune. Rife with new harmonies, it had become cacophonous, to the extent that Plato decided to travel far from Athens to found another chorus, which would be monophonic and dance in unison. To break with democratic chorality, with its radical plurality, and found a chorus far from the city: Such was the Platonic project.

Democratic Polyphony

Faced with the civil war of 403 and then with the death of their master, not all of Socrates’ followers made the same choice as Plato, who took refuge for a few years in Megara before returning to Athens to live, as if in exile, within the walls of the Academy. Far from breaking with the democratic city, on the contrary some continued to walk its main streets and participate in its political life. Tradition has preserved the name of one of them, Simon, who owned a shoemaker’s workshop on the outskirts of the Athenian Agora. It even claims that he was the first to have published a Socratic dialogue …

Let us imagine for a moment the cobbler-philosopher sitting at the threshold of his store, and let us suppose that, over the course of the year 403, he encountered most of the protagonists of our book. From his workshop, he might have observed the procession of the 12th of Boedromion that Lysimache was to welcome at the top of the Acropolis, just as he might have seen Archinus and Thrasybulus battling to convince the people to grant or refuse citizenship to the metics and the slaves who had taken part in the restoration of the democracy. He could have been intrigued by Nicomachus when he examined the documents necessary to reorganize Solon’s laws in the archives of Metrōon, a stone’s throw away from his store; he might even have had several conversations with Gerys, who came to sell his vegetables in the Agora, not far from the law courts where the speeches of Lysias were delivered and where the inheritance of Hegeso was disputed. Around each of these characters, he could have seen groups being formed, institutionalized and sometimes dissolved. Each one of these choruses greatly varied in terms of composition and the logic driving its acts, whether they were a political gathering, a religious community, a philosophical brotherhood, an extended oikos or a group of workers.

We have suggested that the notion of choruses offers a metaphor through which these diverse collectives can be understood. Granted, this metaphor is not a typical concept that historians ordinarily use to describe community life, such as the association or the network, which seem at first sight to offer a more stable descriptive framework. We nevertheless argue that the choral reference makes it possible to obtain fine-grained knowledge of the modulations of the Athenian city in 403, since it is anchored in Greek thought and social practices. Indeed, viewed through the lens of chorality, the Athenian community landscape appears in a new light, defined by plurality and contingency. Legal status is no longer a fixed barrier assigning place to individuals once and for all: Divergent temporalities constantly overlap and weave together the polyrhythmic fabric of the city.

The question that guides the whole of our investigation is ultimately about the choral essence of the city. Is it possible to see the Athenian polis, and all the groups of which it is composed, as a choral song? Illustrating the scope of the Athenian social space does not consist only in describing its polyphony, but also in listening to the harmonics, be they consonant or dissonant, which cut across it. The idea that musical harmony can provide the organizing principle of the civic community seems incongruous to us. It was, however, familiar to the Greeks. In the city of Camarina in Sicily, civic subdivisions were represented as the strings of a lyre, the first and the last of them (hupatē and nētē) giving their name to two phratries. The lyre thus served as a ‘geometrical and arithmetic model to appraise the city,’ and relations between the various communities were envisaged as musical intervals (diastēmata).Footnote ¹³ Elsewhere, as in Tenos, the term tonos (the musical tone) could indicate a civic subdivision, with the city then taking the shape of an arpeggio.

In the same way, a whole field of meaning associates music and song with conflict resolution, as if they had the power to put an end to the stasis by instilling harmony inside a community torn apart. The eunomia that Solon celebrates in his poems is precisely this civic harmony that foreshadows, in the manner of a promise, the beauty of its own song.Footnote ¹⁴ It is, moreover, striking to observe that the identification of civic discord with musical dissonance reappears on the stage of the Athenian theater at the very end of the fifth century, a few months before the democratic regime was overthrown. In the Frogs, performed during the Lenaia of 404, Aristophanes denounced not only the cacophonous harmonies but also the rhythmic complexity that characterized the new dithyramb. With its excessive polyphony, losing its way in overly sophisticated modulations, its choral song was, in the poet’s view, no more than an emblem of the chaos (dusnomia), toward which the new poets risked leading the city.Footnote ¹⁵

If, following on from the ancient authors, we identify the city with a more or less dissonant chorus, it is ultimately the consistency of what we call Athenian society that becomes unclear. Because, after all, does Athenian society even exist? Formulated in these somewhat abrupt terms, this question is not so absurd if we bear in mind that the very term ‘society’ has no equivalent in Greek. The word koinon (or koinōnia) designates all forms of gathering from the oikos to the polis without ever encompassing all the inhabitants of a city beyond its citizens. However, the notion of society, since the Middle Ages, has implicitly supposed a unitary approach to community, which is often described in the manner of an organism, within which each individual and group has its place. With the exception of Laws, in which Plato envisages the city as a hierarchical organism associating citizens, women, children and slaves, such an organicist conception of the city is absent from ancient Greek thought. The latter only acknowledged the existence of a polis once a community of citizens or rights-holders had been strictly delimited, and this never came to include all of its inhabitants.

To undertake a choral reading of the Athenian city, it might be more appropriate to walk in the footsteps of Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, and, more precisely, book III of Politics. The move may seem paradoxical, as Aristotle considered the city to be a whole, in which, according to his teleological perspective, each of the different fields of action in human life serves as a function for its end. But this ignores the fact that within it, like an insistent refrain, the choral metaphor eventually sketches out an alternative social ontology.

Aristotle, or the Choral City

When Aristotle sets out to define the polis, it is initially described as a composition or mixture of parts.Footnote ¹⁶ ‘Like any other whole that is made up of many parts, the city is to be classed as a composite thing,’Footnote ¹⁷ and chorality provides exactly the model required to illustrate this principle of composition (sunthesis). The identification of the city with a chorus naturally encourages us to consider the permanence of the city beyond its changes of political regime:

The city is here presented as a community of constitution shared between citizens (koinōnia politōn politeias): Aristotle establishes the principle of identifying a community with the political regime it has chosen. It is only out of linguistic habit that we persist in using the same name – ‘Athens’ – for the democratic polis of 450 and the oligarchic city of 404–403: The natural substratum of the political community (i.e. its territory and the successive generations of its inhabitants) is not enough in itself to ensure the continuity of a political community. It is its political regime and its customs and not any abstract identity – nor indeed the permanence of its legal identity – that define a city. That is, Aristotle explicitly mobilizes the choral model to appraise the impossible permanence of the city beyond its changes of constitution: The same group of choreutai never constitutes an identical chorus, since the tonality and the harmony of its song are different every time.

Under the aegis of the chorus, Aristotle also undertakes to expose the principle of composition that defines the polis. Consisting of the same parts, two wholes may differ according to their own arrangement, and the choral model illustrates this principle of composition from one community to another. Like a chorus, the city presents itself as a composition (sunthesis), and it is the arrangement of its parts alone that gives it its identity. Populated by the same citizens, two cities can differ according to the harmonies generated by the way their members are placed in subgroups.

A few paragraphs later, Aristotle continues his choral reading about how individual excellence can be disseminated throughout the whole civic body:

Here, Aristotle contrasts two types of political excellence (aretē) according to whether they derive from the reproduction of identical qualities in each of the citizens or whether they are born from the combination of distinct capacities. Because, for the philosopher, since the city is ‘made up of dissimilarities (ex anomoiōn),’ common excellence must be attained through the dissimilarity of the expertise of each of its parts.Footnote ²⁰ Dissimilarity is therefore a prerequisite for political excellence, and it is the chorus that offers the best model for this, through the contrasting voices of the coryphaeus and all those who surround him.

Even more surprisingly, Aristotle also uses the choral model to ascertain the benefits of unequal relations in the city for the common good (to koinē sumpheron):

The choral metaphor makes it possible to describe (relative, albeit necessary) inequality within the civic community. Aristotle uses it to appraise the common utility of hierarchical relationships as soon as a collective limits the horizon. A chorus could never accommodate a relationship so unequal that it fails give rise to any measure (such as that which links a free man to a slave, or a tyrant to his fellow citizens). Chorality makes inequality proportional and not incommensurable, even when it favors a monarch over a city.

Book III of Politics therefore offers an ideal representation of what the polis is in the light of the choral model. It could be formulated as follows: A city is a moveable arrangement of heterogeneous elements, and a good city is one that knows how to utilize dissimilarity for the common good, which supposes the recognition of unequal, though proportionate, relationships. It is not such a big step from this to considering that, seen as a chorus, Aristotle’s city converges with the ‘new ontologies’ of the social world defended by contemporary philosophy and social sciences when they invite us to think in terms of coordination rather than subordination, of interlinking relationships rather than substance or of the fractal rather than the unitary.Footnote ²² We could then say that the city is an assemblage, in the sense that it always presents itself as the interweaving of multiple choruses. Its unity, far from being presupposed, takes the form of a task or a question constantly brought to the fore as the sum of its gatherings is either cemented or broken down. Seen as a chorus, the city can no longer be considered a community if we persist in using the term to recognize a unitary and organicist conception of the social world.Footnote ²³

But are we fully faithful to the Aristotelian perspective when we apprehend the polis from the angle of association and plurality? This seems to be confirmed by another passage from book III, in which the philosopher considers, distantly echoing the thoughts of Protagoras, how the necessary political skills in the city are put together from the point of view of a communal potluck:

This democratic epistemology is both pluralist and associationist, since a gathering of men ‘without political value’ is better than the monody of an elite, even a very learned one. Undoubtedly nothing would be possible without each citizen’s individual skills, but the alchemy in which politics consists relies on common deliberations that transform the aggregation of individual expertise, always incomplete, into useful knowledge for the community. It is indeed plurality that makes the best judgments possible, and, to present a model for this collective form of intelligence, Aristotle gives the striking example of the common deliberations of the judges during the choral contests of the Dionysia.

But let’s not go too far, nor too fast, because Aristotle’s choral city is not identical to democratic chorality. In fact, if Aristotle thinks of the city as a chorus, he never conceives of it as a potentially dissonant association of choruses, since his conception of plurality relies on organic unity. While the choral model allows us to appraise the city’s internal plurality, Aristotle does not consider the city to be a combination of heterogeneous choruses. In this, it does not allow us to entirely think through the form of democratic plurality that is initially accomplished through the activities of the citizens.

Let us recall the words that Thucydides gives to Pericles, in his famous funeral oration:

The Athenian citizen that Pericles celebrates here is a multifaceted and even versatile (eutrapelos) man, able to change identity according to the contexts that require him to show different characteristics. This is, moreover, how he attains autarky: Like a city that ensures every element of production, deliberation and consumption without depending on the outside world, the Athenian citizen can also play any role, whether he speaks at institutions, works in the Agora or takes part in community festivals.

But how can we conceive of stasis in a city viewed through the lens of plurality? Does conflict still have a place in a rhizomatic and decentered city? By tearing people apart, doesn’t the stasis oblige us to put the community back center stage, if only because that is where competing conceptions of what the city should be clash with one another? Shouldn’t the experience of stasis make these different choruses exist as one community, not in spite of division, but because of it? For, as Nicole Loraux has reminded us, civil war creates a powerful bond between opponents and, as if in a chemical reaction, helps melt them into a single whole.

Back to the Event

Let us consider this hypothesis for a moment. In the heat of the moment, it seems that this process of coalescence was expressed in three complementary ways. First, the stasis reduced human plurality to a Manichean confrontation between friends and enemies or to the logic of the One and the Two.Footnote ²⁶ Secondly, by forcing every man to choose his camp and prohibiting neutrality, the dynamics of the conflict would have introduced a specific emotional regime. United in fear, hatred or hope, the different choruses of the city harmonized according to a phenomenon we could describe as an ‘emotional form of communal relationship (Vergemeinschaftung).’Footnote ²⁷ Finally, through the common affects that it generated, the civil war ushered all individuals into a unified time – that of the state of exception, where the usual norms were suspended, even subverted, and where words could even change their meaning.

Confrontation between friends and enemies, emotional communalization, a state of exception: Through this triptych an ideal type of stasis takes shape, which seems to have been fully realized in the Athenian civil war. Let us briefly recall a certain number of facts, fully developed during the preceding chapters, starting with the state of exception, which has become such a central element in political studies in the Western world.Footnote ²⁸

As we have seen, the Thirty dismantled democratic legality. Appointed to write a new constitution, they postponed its publication to establish a legal void which was favorable to arbitrary decisions. The publication of the nominal list of the three thousand Athenian citizens did not change a thing: ‘and even on occasions when they thought fit to publish it they made a practice of erasing some of the names enrolled and writing in others instead from among those outside the roll.’Footnote ²⁹ To include one citizen was therefore to mechanically drive out another, which amounted to institutionalizing anomia. Once they had returned to the city, the democrats made no mistake in dismissing all the political and legal decisions made during this whole period. They decided to erase from the Athenian archon’s list the name of the magistrate designated under the Thirty – who gave his name to the year and appeared at the top of all official documents – and replace it with the term anarchia (absence of power).

In this case, the state of exception went hand in hand with the drastic redefinition of friend and enemy. From the point of view of the Thirty, all those who were not registered on the civic list mechanically became enemies, killable at will. It was enough to cross a name off the register to deprive someone of all legal protection.Footnote ³⁰ What better way to show that the excluded were no longer subjects of law, but radical enemies who could be slaughtered with impunity? This was certainly done to make summary executions possible, even legitimate, be they individual or collective: The metics targeted by the Thirty come to mind, and the three hundred Eleusinians massacred all together after a mock trial.

The civil war also gave rise to intense shared emotions. In the city, it initially generated joy and expectation: The Thirty had a certain number of ‘sycophants and bad people (ponēroi)’ executed and ‘the city was delighted at these measures.’Footnote ³¹ But soon, people’s joy gave way to anguish and even terror: All the Athenians of the city came to share in the same hopes and the same fears, in accordance with the desires of the Thirty, who wished to make them accomplices of their crimes. Symmetrically, all the outcasts experienced the suffering of being uprooted and henceforth living a precarious existence. At the end of this process of polarization, the entire Athenian population found itself affected. In the manner of a pandemic, the civil war struck each man and woman in the comfort of their own homes, as described in an earlier song by the poet-legislator Solon:

This apocalyptic vision deserves, however, to be questioned. The civil war waxed and waned, with moments of intense conflict and more peaceful times. However powerful it may have been, the ‘bond of division’ never managed to reduce entirely the choral plurality of the Athenian city. To begin this process of theoretical and rhetorical de-escalation, we must take as our base chronological considerations and a very often forgotten fact: The stasis cannot be considered as a whole as the French Revolution once was. To put it another way, the civil war cannot be assimilated with the government of the Thirty, which was itself divided into several phases of unequal intensity.

Of Stasis as Arrythmia

We chose not to discuss thoroughly the chronological framework in this book. Our choice – for it is one – does not in any way mean that we reject an event-based history that means only to scratch the surface. It is rather because we do not wish to consider chronology as a definite framework, acting as a backdrop for events, but as a historical and historiographical problem in its own right: Establishing how the stasis unfolded amounts in itself to proposing an interpretation whether the historian is aware of it or not.

Let us recall in this respect some stubborn facts. Of the Athenian civil war, only the start and end points seem certain. It began with the capitulation of Athens in April 404 and ceased with the reconciliation agreed at the end of September or at the beginning of October 403. However, within this one-and-a-half-year interval, the Thirty’s experiment lasted only eight months at most, according to the democrat Cleocritus.Footnote ³³ Beyond such rare fixed dates, everything is subject to debate, first and foremost the most appropriate timing of those eight bloody months. According to Luciano Canfora, this macabre sequence began as soon as Athens capitulated in the spring of 404 and ended in December 404 or January 403: Following the argument of the Italian scholar, it seems the Thirty were therefore removed from power over nine months before the reconciliation, which amounts to attributing an equivalent or even greater time in power to the Ten (Fig. 11.1).Footnote ³⁴

Fig. 11.1 Chronology of the Athenian civil war according to Canfora.

Providing little evidence to support it, this proposal remains historiographically isolated. This is because most specialists agree that the ‘reign’ of the Thirty occurred between September 404 and May/June 403 for two reasons. First of all, the Athenian Constitution maintains, in a passage written in an official style, that the Thirty were established under the archonship of Pythodoros (i.e. after June or July 404).Footnote ³⁵ Secondly, Xenophon indicates that the Battle of Mounychia did not take place in winter, but at the end of the spring of 403: The Athenian historian specifies that, in the days that followed the confrontation, the democratic resistance fighters were able to collect fruit (opōra) fallen on the ground as provisions.Footnote ³⁶ Unless the manuscripts are to be corrected, this implies that the episode took place at the end of May or the beginning of June 403.

Taking this as a general framework allows us to roughly situate the various events of the civil war.Footnote ³⁷ As the first act of the democratic reconquest, the capture of Phyle could have taken place between December 404 and February 403, because of the abundant snowfalls mentioned by Xenophon on this subject.Footnote ³⁸ The following phase – sometimes called the ‘Acharnai surprise’ – could have taken place in April or May, shortly before the capture of Piraeus by the army of Thrasybulus.Footnote ³⁹ Finally, sounding the death knell of the Thirty, the decisive battle in Mounychia must have been fought in May or June 403 for the reasons presented previously (Fig. 11.2).Footnote ⁴⁰

Fig. 11.2 Chronology of the Athenian civil war according to Krentz

Whatever the chronological solutions adopted, one thing seems certain, even if it is rarely mentioned. The reign of the Thirty covered only half of the duration of the civil war, whereas the reign of the Ten, often considered a simple epiphenomenon before the reconciliation, lasted at least three to four months. Would it not therefore be an erroneous view to align the Athenian stasis only with the duration of the Thirty’s reign? Certainly. But we should still note that this one-sided perspective derives largely from the ancient sources. If it is difficult to establish the relative chronology of the civil war, it is not because of the gaps in our documentation, but because it was in most Athenians’ interests to maintain confusion over the matter. While some sought to prolong the period of the stasis to better stigmatize their adversaries (such as Nicomachus, accused of oligarchic crimes in anticipation for acts committed before Athens even surrendered),Footnote ⁴¹ others wished to reduce it in order to minimize their own collaboration with the disgraced regime (such as Mantitheus, who claimed to have come back to Athens ‘only five days before the men from Phyle returned from exile to Piraeus’).Footnote ⁴² As for the exiles or resistance fighters, most of them had nothing to gain by specifying the exact date they left the city, having sometimes done so extremely late.Footnote ⁴³ From this point of view, the amnesty acted like amnesia: A whole part of the civil war was deliberately forgotten by the Athenians and, following in their footsteps, by some parts of historiography.Footnote ⁴⁴

Far from being anecdotal, these chronological considerations make it impossible to interpret the civil war solely through the lens of its most brutal features, as if, during those eighteen long months, political intensities had not varied at all. But the same criticism deserves to be applied to the paroxysmal phase of the civil war – or, to put it another way, to its core of terror. For the reign of the Thirty itself cannot be considered from beginning to end as a pure moment of anomia, marked solely by violence and arbitrariness.

Again, chronology is crucial. During the eight months that the Thirty spent at the helm of the city, violence was not meted out evenly. In all likelihood, the dynamics of terror were unleashed after the capture of Phyle – that is to say, at the earliest in December 404, or even January or February 403.Footnote ⁴⁵ It was only after the democrats’ initial successes that Theramenes was condemned to death and that the Thirty, freed from this internal opponent, multiplied their exactions against the population.Footnote ⁴⁶ The true pivotal moment perhaps came even later. According to Xenophon, it was the surprise of Acharnai (in March or April 403?) that brought about the massacre of 300 Eleusinians – the worst crime of the entire civil war – when, ‘deeming their government no longer secure,’ the Thirty ‘formed a plan to appropriate Eleusis, so as to have a place of refuge if it should prove necessary.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Whatever the case may be, this murderous upsurge certainly came quite late in the day.Footnote ⁴⁸ This periodization is all the more attractive as it chimes with an allusion by Isocrates in Panegyricus, composed in 380, and mentioning the Laconizers who ‘put to death without trial more men in the space of three months than Athens tried during the whole period of her supremacy.’Footnote ⁴⁹ These three months could indeed correspond to the final phase of the Thirty’s government.

To examine this in greater depth, the oligarchic terror must be put into perspective, as Luciano Canfora has clearly shown. Certainly, the Thirty carried out numerous executions without trial; however, it is also true that after the reconciliation the Athenians tended to exaggerate the extent of their crimes in order to establish a true ‘black book of the civil war.’Footnote ⁵⁰ A repugnant ‘arithmetic of the victims’ intended to cause fright and anger was then developed: While the majority of the ancient authors speak about 1,500 deaths,Footnote ⁵¹ certain orators go so far as to mention 2,500 summary executions.Footnote ⁵²

While Canfora’s argument aims to feed into a debatable analogy between the regime of the Thirty and Stalin’s USSR,Footnote ⁵³ it nonetheless highlights the uncertainty surrounding the number of victims of the oligarchy. Rather than trying – in vain – to arrive at an objective total, it is necessary to understand the reasons that explain these strong variations. To this end, we should probably take Cleocritus at his word in the Hellenica: The oligarchs had unleashed, not a stasis, but a real polemos – a term designating war against an external enemy.Footnote ⁵⁴ Far from being innocent, this lexical choice suggests that the democrats tended to merge together the summary executions ordered by the Thirty and the victims who fell during the battles between the oligarchs and the democrats in the same macabre accounts, and even to aggregate to them the losses caused by the sporadic clashes between the Spartans and the army of Thrasybulus.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the same way, it is very probable that, to inflate the number of victims, the Athenians imputed to the Thirty all deaths during the civil war, from surrender to reconciliation, without seeking to discriminate between its various phases.

Let us be clear: There is no question here of exonerating the Thirty from their weighty responsibilities, but instead of showing that in 403 it was in the interests of every party to exaggerate their crimes and depict them as bloodthirsty monsters – or, more exactly, cruel ‘tyrants’ – according to the qualification chosen by the Athenians after the reconciliation.Footnote ⁵⁶ This damnatio memoriae helped impose a totalitarian reading of events, whereas the exactions of the Thirty, in reality, far from affected all the inhabitants of Attica to the same degree and according to the same rhythms. In terms of time, first of all, the outburst of terror was brief, as we have seen. Until the capture of Phyle (in December or January 403), many excluded from the list of the Three Thousand remained in the city without being any worse off.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the same way, the Eleusinians lived quietly in their deme, preserving their goods and their freedom, until they were brutally arrested and executed after the ‘surprise of Acharnai’ (in March or April 403?).Footnote ⁵⁸ In terms of space, then, whole sections of the Athenian population were hardly affected by the conflict, even in its phase of terror. Let us think in this context of all those who remained in the countryside to take care of their fields, going to the city only on rare occasions, like the anonymous litigant of the Defense in the Matter of the Olive Stump composed by Lysias.Footnote ⁵⁹ As for the numerous slaves (almost half of the population of Attica), the civil war only marginally disrupted their existence: With the exception of the few who rallied to Thrasybulus’ army, most continued to serve their owners, or, if they changed, only switched one slave master for another.

Extension of the Domain of Civil War?

By questioning its central truth – the reign of the Thirty – the very definition of stasis is shaken to the core. Should we reduce the civil war to these few weeks of outbursts of terror? Doesn’t this simply embrace the version of all those who had an interest in blaming the Thirty in order to make people forget their own turpitude (on the side of ‘those of the city’) or who were committed to facilitating the reconciliation (on the side of ‘those of Piraeus’)? For one could also sketch out an alternative history of the stasis that, instead of reducing its perimeter, would considerably enlarge it. Couldn’t the civil war in fact have begun well before the Thirty took power, in the aftermath of the terrible defeat of Aigos Potamos in 405? Mightn’t it have continued long after the reconciliation, until the oligarchic stronghold of Eleusis was taken over, in 401/0, or even until the trial of Socrates in the spring of 399? Can we not discern, upstream as well as downstream, the distinctive symptoms of the stasis – the creation of emotional communities, the distinction between friends and enemies, the state of exception?

Let us experiment by going back to a few months before the surrender of Athens. It was in the fall of 405 that the last great battle of the Peloponnesian War took place. Lysander managed to surprise the Athenian fleet at Aigos Potamos in Thracian Chersonese: It was annihilated, while 3,000 citizens were captured, then summarily executed.Footnote ⁶⁰ Having witnessed this first hand, Xenophon reported on the great fear this stirred up throughout the city. The Athenians were scared that their former ‘allies,’ so long tyrannized within the Delian League, would decide to take revenge over the exactions they had suffered. Mixing sorrow and guilt, the people’s lamentations spread across the whole city like wildfire.Footnote ⁶¹ The announcement of the disaster gave birth to an emotional community, as explored in the theater over the previous decades. Men executed en masse, women taken captive: Everyone was aware, having seen it many times on stage, of the terrible fate promised to a defeated city.Footnote ⁶²

This regime of high emotional intensity lasted until Athens capitulated, while, in parallel, new definitions of friend and enemy came into force in the city, as did the beginnings of a true state of exception. To understand this, let us return for a moment to Aristophanes’ Frogs: On the one hand, the poet pleads in the parabasis for the rehabilitation of all those who had been compromised during the regime of the Four Hundred (v. 686–705); on the other hand, he vilifies a number of internal enemies, dead or alive.Footnote ⁶³ Nothing new under the Athenian sun? Hadn’t Aristophanes used personal attacks since the start of his career twenty years earlier just like his comic rivals, who were every bit as vindictive as him? In reality, it’s all a matter of context: While comedies usually provided an opportunity for cathartic venting without any political consequence,Footnote ⁶⁴ the situation was very different in early 404. The Athenians were in disarray after the decisive defeat of Aigos Potamos, and comedy was an active part – and not a passive reflection – of the political game in which expeditious condemnations and sudden amnesties were cooked up. At the time of the performance, the trial of Cleophon had been ongoing for a few weeks (since December 405),Footnote ⁶⁵ while Patrokleides was undoubtedly already thinking about the decree – voted in a little later – that was to authorize the exiled oligarchs to return to their fatherland.

This redefinition of friend and foe – through a double game of integration and exclusion – was carried out in part by temporarily suspending the law. To understand this, we must leave the stage of the theater and enter the courts to meet up one last time with one of our characters, Nicomachus. A few years after the reconciliation, Lysias recalled his deleterious role after Aigos Potamos. He accused him of having contributed to Cleophon’s arrest by the Council at the instigation of Satyrus and, consequently, of having been ‘blatantly part of the oligarchic plot (sunestasiasen).’Footnote ⁶⁶ Occurring even before the surrender of Athens, this episode allowed his accuser to transform Nicomachus into a partisan by recalling the Thirty, of which Satyrus was one of the most virulent members.Footnote ⁶⁷ Above all, it aims to show that the state of exception and the stasis were already established in the city. From this point of view, the – extraordinary, even illegal – role of the Council in Cleophon’s condemnation can be linked to the regime of the Thirty, during which this institution was the instrument of all arbitrary convictions.

Of course, nothing here obliges us to believe Lysias’ client, who is developing an ad hoc argument to blacken the reputation of his opponent knowing that Nicomachus could not be accused of having collaborated directly with the Thirty, who had even forced him into exile. But the testimony of Lysias is not entirely without parallel: Xenophon also tends to place the beginning of the civil war at this precise moment (i.e. before Athens surrendered), mentioning clearly ‘the civil war (staseōs), in the course of which Cleophon was put to death.’Footnote ⁶⁸

In the same way that it is possible to trace the beginning of the stasis upstream, one could extend its course downstream from the reconciliation. For the official end of the civil war, on the 12th of Boedromion 403, did not make the conflict magically disappear. Certainly, all the Athenians then agreed ‘not to hold a grudge,’ whatever side they had been on. But it is doubtful that they forgot everything in the blink of an eye. With all due respect to Plato, ‘the citizens from the Piraeus and from the city’ could not be said to have ‘consorted with one another so kindly and so friendly’: The large Athenian family does not seem to have instantaneously reunited in concord or, to use a musical term, in harmony.Footnote ⁶⁹

Political life even continued to function according to the dialectic of friend and foe. For Athens’ sacred union was achieved at the expense of a few individuals, in particular of the Thirty, the Ten and the Eleven, who were judged to be responsible for the people’s shared misfortunes and were nominally excluded from the amnesty: The oath established a clear line of demarcation between citizens who could be rehabilitated and those who could not. Conflict therefore remained on the horizon in a ritual that expressed both the strongest union (that between co-jurors) and the most intense division (through the targeting of unforgivable enemies). Even within the reconciled community, political antagonisms were far from being extinguished. Not only in the years that followed were many citizens who had remained in the city hauled off to trial for having collaborated with the Thirty, but also the former resistance fighters quickly divided into partisans of a relatively open democracy (Thrasybulus and his close relations) and supporters of a more closed community (Archinus and his followers).Footnote ⁷⁰

Even more disturbingly, reconciliation seems to have been achieved by maintaining a sort of state of exception. Tradition indeed attributes to Archinus several extraordinary measures to prevent any return of the stasis. The one that struck people the most was, as we have seen, the summary condemnation of one of the democrats who had returned from Piraeus and dared to ‘hold a grudge’ (mnēsikakein), in contravention of the oath of amnesty.Footnote ⁷¹ In many ways, this summary execution echoes the expeditious sentences carried out under the oligarchy in agreement with the Council.Footnote ⁷² In addition, there were several decisions that contravened written commitments or reversed the normal course of legal proceedings. As for the oligarchs who took refuge in Eleusis, they were also subjected to violence in 401/0 at the end of a siege and after the assassination of the generals whom they had sent to negotiate with the democrats.Footnote ⁷³ Everything points to the fact that the Athenians had maintained certain exceptional practices to better ensure the return to civil peace. Should we see in this the proof of a subterranean continuity between a state of exception and the ordinary legal order?Footnote ⁷⁴ The temptation is all the stronger since certain measures taken in the emergency of 403 (such as the paragraphē) were subsequently integrated into the ordinary legal practice of the Athenians: The exception eventually became the norm.

From barely three months to more than five years: Depending on the definition one chooses, the chronological depth of the stasis therefore varies. Extending the perimeter of the stasis in such a way is not without its problems, however. First of all, it sets in motion a revisionist dynamic that is difficult to end. Why see the stasis beginning only after the defeat of Aigos Potamos? Why not go back to the trial of Arginusai in 406? Or even to the preceding oligarchic revolution in 411 and to the confrontation between the oligarchs who remained in the city and the fleet of Samos? And why stop there? Hadn’t the seeds of what was to come already been sown in 415 at the time of the mutilation of the Herms and the parody of the Mysteries of Eleusis? An endless regression therefore seems to be set in motion, making the Athenian stasis truly interminable. Above all, this chronological extension is based on partial analogies, false continuities and problematic equivalences.

For it must be stated loud and clear: Athenian democracy, even in its dysfunctional form before the surrender of the city, even when it was transitional after the reconciliation, never functioned on the same basis as the oligarchic regime of the Thirty or of the Ten, who waged a deliberate war against the majority of the city’s former citizens. Certainly, after Aigos Potamos in the fall of 405, the city entered into an emotional maelstrom; certainly, judicial manipulations occurred, leading to the execution of Cleophon and others. However, until the establishment of the Thirty, democratic institutions continued to function, and the citizens did not fear being disenfranchised or losing the protection attached to their status. While fear permeated the community, and there were plenty of low points, there was not yet a campaign of terror orchestrated by a minority against the majority. Between condemnable excesses under democracy and the institutionalization of anomia under oligarchy there is an extremely wide gap.

It is equally problematic to extend the civil war downstream. For however violent they may be, confrontations in court cannot be interpreted as maintaining a form of radical hostility. In spite of the similarities noted by Nicole Loraux,Footnote ⁷⁵ the judicial agōn is not equivalent to stasis, but rather is a means of taming it. As for the oath of amnesty, it would be a mistake to interpret this in terms of a confrontation between friends and enemies. Admittedly, the oath excluded a certain number of oligarchs; however, some additional clauses undid this exception, since even the Thirty, the Ten and the Eleven were able to reintegrate the community after having rendered their accounts, according to a procedure that, moreover, outrageously favored them.Footnote ⁷⁶ In reconciled Athens, radical enemies, who could be killed at will, no longer belonged.

Should we then invoke the way in which the state of exception resurfaced just as the reconciliation was taking place? Again, this is an attractive but misleading parallel. If there were indeed some extraordinary decisions, such as the summary execution of the democrat accused of having broken the oath of amnesty or the violent depletion of the oligarchic stronghold of Eleusis in 401/0, these had an extremely limited field of application in contrast with the practices of the Thirty, who had made suspending laws their mode of government. Then, with the exception of the paragraphē, these emergency measures had no institutional posterity in Athens after 403. Much more than a continued state of exception, the Athenian reconciliation can be described as the elaboration of a transitional form of justice seeking to ensure the return to democracy through a skillful mix of targeted convictions, selective forgetting and exceptional measures.Footnote ⁷⁷

In the end, we must come to terms with complexity and stand firmly in the middle of the fray. On the one hand, we cannot accept without debate the chronological divisions of certain key players in the conflict who tried to reduce the civil war to no more than the period that the Thirty were in power, or even to a few weeks of their reign. On the other hand, it is no more appropriate to make the civil war overflow upstream or downstream, as if the difference between democracy and oligarchy was only a question of degree, and not of nature. Today, like yesterday, determining the extension of the stasis is not only a historiographical choice, but an ethical and political one, since when someone proclaims that they are in a state of civil war while they are still living in a democracy, they risk bringing about the exact thing they claim to be fighting …

Let us then propose a final definition of civil war. It occurs when a bloody fight concerns the definition of the very foundations of the community; in this case, in 404, when a small, determined group wanted to put a brutal end to the plurality of the democratic collective life in favor of a binary distinction between the ‘included’ and the ‘excluded.’ Such a traumatic experience delivers in this respect one ultimate lesson: In spite of all their efforts, the Thirty failed in their Manichean enterprise. If some choruses disappeared or merged together, others appeared because of the crisis. To reread the civil war from a choral point of view means, in the end, leaving behind a sterile alternative that imagines no middle ground between perfect union and tragic destruction; it means giving full scope to forms of dissent that do not necessarily oppose enemies (hostis), but ‘nonfriends’ (inimicus). For it is one thing to consider politics as inseparable from conflict; it is another to affirm that the essence of politics lies in hostility and radical discord, whether this is assumed or repressed.Footnote ⁷⁸ Neither of the two is accurate: At the end of the civil war, the city was neither cacophonous, nor monophonous, but rife with plural and sometimes dissonant harmonics.

A Change of Pace? Athens after 403

At the end of our investigation, one final danger looms. Does our analysis not risk dissolving the events we have described? To put this differently, might the civil war actually have changed nothing about Athenian political life, which was multifaceted both before and after it happened? This would, of course, be an exaggeration. The city emerged from its trials transfigured, and it falls to us, at the very end of our journey, to identify the exact nature of these changes. In short, it is a question of passing from a conception of the event as a historical sequence – of which it is necessary to define, with accuracy, the chronological limits – to the event as a historical turning point – that is to say, as ‘what comes out of what has come to pass.’Footnote ⁷⁹

First of all, while the civil war never erased the plural nature of Athenian community life, it did succeed in limiting its expression within an institutional framework accepted by all. For Isocrates is right to affirm that the insane cruelty of the Thirty made the Athenians ‘all democrats.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Let us specify our meaning: After 403, the democratic regime did not have any alternatives that could be admitted to as such, except within the walls of philosophical schools.Footnote ⁸¹ This political consensus was conveyed by the resurgence of a potent anti-tyranny discourse, which we can see in the extraordinary popularity of the Tyrannicides after 403.Footnote ⁸²

More generally, the civil war brought about a change of pace in Athenian political life. The reconciliation indeed brought to a close a decade of unbridled political experiments, whether these were democratic (like the self-organized fleet of Samos, where Thrasybulus had started to make a name for himself) or oligarchic (like the closed community of the ‘best,’ dreamed up by Critias). Symptomatically, the Athenian Constitution, written in the 330s, ends its review of the different (r)evolutions (metabolai) that the city had experienced since its foundation in 403, as if political time had come to a stop in the aftermath of the reconciliation. Institutional upheavals certainly slowed down due to a series of well-known changes. Initiated as early as 410, a procedure for the revision of the Athenian laws led, after many vicissitudes, to the republication of all the laws in 400/399. Laws (nomoi) were henceforth clearly distinguished from simple decrees (psēphismata): No decree could contradict an existing law, while the introduction of new laws was made more complex and formal, slowing down the rhythm of legislative changes.Footnote ⁸³

This phenomenon of hierarchization also affected the statutory organization of the community and, in particular, served to increase the distance between citizens and noncitizens. In 403, the Athenians put an end to the (relative) fluidity of status created by the disruption of the Peloponnesian War: Having fallen into disuse, Pericles’ law on citizenship was reinstated, and, soon, marriages between Athenians and foreigners were prohibited, which had never been the case in the fifth century. Naturalizations were now carried out on an individual basis (and after a formal vote of the Assembly requiring a certain quorum) and not collectively, as in the previous century.

This process of stabilization is particularly perceptible in the intellectual field. In the fifth century, intellectual life functioned in an intermittent way; it took place in very diverse spaces – in the Agora, in shops or in private houses – and gathered groups of listeners around wandering ‘masters of truth,’ who were paid handsomely for their lessons.Footnote ⁸⁴ The sophists or sophoi were, as a result, a nebulous group, mixing tragedians, sophists, doctors and even soothsayers, to quote Aristophanes’ strange enumeration in the Clouds.Footnote ⁸⁵ However, after 403, these temporary groupings gradually gave way to real intellectual schools, located in very specific places (concentrated around the gymnasia)Footnote ⁸⁶ and henceforth operating on a long-term basis, with teaching cycles lasting several years.Footnote ⁸⁷ Isocrates was the first to start a school, barely ten years after the reconciliation, soon followed by Plato in 387/6. This stabilization of the intellectual field was further accentuated by the development of writing, which helped to establish teaching traditions over the long term.

But let’s be clear: This change of pace should not be taken as a dulling of democratic life. To put it another way, a slower pace is not necessarily a languid pace! In fact, the apparent consensus around the democratic regime did not prevent very diverse political options – of which some were only democratic in name – from continuing to clash in the city. Within the walls of his school, Isocrates thus became the champion of a ‘democracy’ so moderate that it resembled a real oligarchy, since the people were only meant to have supervisory powers over rulers who were selected on merit.Footnote ⁸⁸ It was, in name, a democracy, but in fact the ‘best’ were to hold all real power.

Moreover, the supposed ‘moderate democracy’ of the fourth century is largely a historiographical fiction.Footnote ⁸⁹ For while the reconciliation was indeed orchestrated by the ‘moderates’ from each of the two sides, it did not result in the demise of popular hegemony. Let us take the example of the supposed passage from popular sovereignty (in the fifth century) to the ‘sovereignty of laws’ (after 403). First of all, the distinction between laws and decrees had hardly any concrete influence on Athenian political life: The cumbersome procedure of the nomothesia was rarely implemented,Footnote ⁹⁰ whereas, through texts and inscriptions, we know of more than 500 decrees voted by the Assembly in the fourth century. Secondly, there is no evidence that the nomothetai were less democratic than the people gathered in the Assembly: Drawn by lot from among the members of the courts, they were a faithful representation of Athenian sociology.Footnote ⁹¹ The opposition between nomothetai, supposedly thoughtful and moderate, and an Assembly, quick to make hasty and radical decisions, is based on debatable prejudices. What ultimately changed was the pace at which decisions of a general nature could be taken, not their more or less democratic nature.

In the same way, the rigidification of status barriers does not imply the implementation of a more moderate policy. In the previous century, it was the advocates of a radical democracy, starting with Pericles, who had tightened access to citizenship in order to better regulate the redistribution of wealth and advantages of all kinds linked to the city’s growing imperialism.Footnote ⁹² Symmetrically, some Athenians, who were not very democratic, defended a more open approach to citizenship, willingly stigmatizing the city’s withdrawal into its autochthonous core.Footnote ⁹³

More generally, one could argue that the city was never as democratic as in the fourth century. The Constitution of the Athenians says so explicitly: ‘[After 403] the people has made itself master of everything, and administers everything by decrees and by jury courts in which the people is the ruling power, for even the cases tried by the Council have come to the people.’Footnote ⁹⁴ The rapid increase in the fees received for participating in the Assembly (misthos ekklēsiastikos) between 403 and 392 also testifies to this form of democratization. If the measure was initially symbolic in scope, given how little money it provided, it took on an undoubtedly democratic connotation over time, and Plato is not mistaken in targeting the misthos as the very symbol of popular hegemony.Footnote ⁹⁵

However, the introduction of the misthos at the Assembly has left very few written traces: It is only through the passing allusions of Aristophanes that one learns, almost fortuitously, of its existence.Footnote ⁹⁶ And when the ancient sources mention institutional changes after 403, it is in general to relativize their novelty. The distinction between laws and decrees – a radical innovation if ever there was one – was linked to Draco and Solon, the two great legislators of archaic times, as the Athenians boasted that they had left their ancestral laws in force.Footnote ⁹⁷ It was the same a few years later, in 394, when the Athenians erected their first statue in honor of the victorious general Conon. While this marked an innovation, introducing a new (and ambiguous) way for the demos to control the elites, the Athenians felt the need to connect it to a (false) precedent – the statuary group of the Tyrannicides – to conceal the break with tradition they were in fact accomplishing.Footnote ⁹⁸

This is the real change brought about by the civil war: The trauma of the stasis accentuated the denial by democracy of its own historicity.Footnote ⁹⁹ The real novelty was precisely the denial of all novelty. In other words, reconciliation led to a radical change in the regime of historicity – that is, in the way Athenians articulated past, present and future.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In the previous century, Periclean democracy seemed entirely oriented toward the future: In the work of Thucydides, the speech of the Corinthians emphasizes, with a mixture of admiration and fear, the historical temporality characteristic of the Athenians, where ‘the action […] fills constantly the future and obliterates the past and almost the present.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ While historians tend to exaggerate the ‘innovation’ of Periclean democracy,Footnote ¹⁰² this nevertheless allows us to identify, by contrast, a major turning point: After 411 and, to an even greater extent, after 403, Athenian public discourse tended to valorize the past in an obsessive way, advocating a return to the constitution of the Ancestors (patrios politeia).Footnote ¹⁰³

Thus, the restoration of democracy is the culmination of a slow process begun a decade earlier, during which the civic archives were reorganized, Draco’s and Solon’s laws (now posted on the Agora for all to see) were collated and revised and the Athenian Archon list was established – a set of measures that aimed to streamline the management of official documents and also to reflect the establishment of this new relationship with the past.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It was also shortly after the reconciliation that the Athenians began to reenact theatrical works composed in the fifth century. If certain particularly appreciated plays had already been revived before the outbreak of the civil war, such as Aristophanes’ Frogs, the practice now took root and soon became institutionalized. From this point of view, the performance of Oedipus at Colonus was a breakthrough. Written before the death of Sophocles in 406, it was put on stage posthumously in March 401 during the Dionysia thanks to the poet’s grandson. Playfully echoing the recent past,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ it showed the deadly consequences of the stasis, or, to borrow the words of Oedipus, of the discord’s ‘breath’:

Beyond its topical theme, this posthumous performance was the first step in embalming Athenian theater. For as early as 386, it became habit for an ancient tragedy to be reenacted during the Dionysia, probably every year, until the orator Lycurgus set the practice in stone in the 330s, transforming theater into a literary art passed down from one generation to the next.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

This impression of stagnation was further accentuated by two factors, one urban, the other historiographic. First of all, the completion of the Erechtheion in 406 marked the end of a sequence of major architectural projects initiated at the time of Cimon and Pericles. During the first half of the fourth century, the Athenians had lived in the intimidating shadow of the monuments built during the previous century, without making their own mark on the city. More profoundly, the citizens remained orphans of their past greatnessFootnote ¹⁰⁸: In 378, when they founded the second maritime confederation, the Athenians undoubtedly felt they were playing second fiddle to their glorious elders. It is necessary to acknowledge the historical disorder in which they found themselves for a good part of the fourth century. While their ancestors’ experience had been dictated by the ups and downs of their politico-military hegemony, they themselves had no such coherent narrative thread to hang on to. Be it Sparta, Thebes or Athens, no city was now powerful enough to dominate the Greek world in the long term and, consequently, to organize the succession of events into an intelligible historical sequence. Xenophon testifies to this disarray at the very end of Hellenica, when he concludes his account of the Battle of Mantinea in 362 with this disillusioned observation: ‘neither was found to be any better off, as regards either additional territory, or city, or sway, than before the battle took place; but there was even more confusion and disorder in Greece after the battle than before.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Disoriented and haunted by their fall from power, the Athenians long took refuge in the unconditional praise of their past, even when this meant masking the political innovations that they had introduced under the uniform varnish of the ancestral constitution. It is precisely this singular regime of historicity that has resulted in the cliché of a languishing, even decadent fourth-century democracy in contemporary historiography. For all that, this perception of historical time did not imply any weakening of democratic vitality, but rather another modulation of the relations between instituting moments and instituted functioning. Far from being diluted, the choral city had a bright future ahead of it.

Aristion’s Last Dance

For the history of Athenian chorality does not end in 403, nor even at the end of the classical era. It took several more centuries for democracy to breathe its last – not in 322, with the establishment of a (short-lived) system based on a property qualification, but on the 1st of March, 86 BC, when Roman legions entered the city. Like the Spartans in 404, the soldiers of Sulla destroyed the city’s walls, but contrary to the Lacedemonians, they did not stop there. The city was given over to the soldiers, and Plutarch made a chilling account of the acts of violence committed: ‘For without mention of those who were killed in the rest of the city, the blood that was shed in the agora covered all the Ceramicus inside the Dipylon gate; nay, many say that it flowed through the gate and deluged the suburb.’Footnote ¹¹⁰ The most recognizable emblems of the Athenian culture of the classical age – the Academy of Plato, the Lyceum of Aristotle and the sanctuary of Eleusis – were sacked. In the face of such disaster, many Athenians even chose to kill themselves: ‘But although those who were thus slain were so many, there were yet more who slew themselves, out of yearning pity for their native city, which they thought was going to be destroyed.’Footnote ¹¹¹ Contrary to the route taken by Thrasybulus when he restored the democratic regime, the Roman general, after having taken the city, moved toward Piraeus to seal the fate of its harbor for good. In the port of Athens, he made sure the warehouses and the arsenal were burnt and had most of the public buildings destroyed.

A few days before, while the besieged city was reduced to starvation, one man had, however, indulged in one final act of provocation against the Romans. He had danced …

By dancing the pyrrhic dance, Aristion and his companions made fun of the invader. Similar to the dithyramb but gathering together armed men, this choral dance was far from innocent: Foreshadowing the defeat to come, it mimicked the ultimate confrontation against the Roman legions while also celebrating Athenian choral culture. While Plutarch, as the Greco-Roman dignitary that he was, may have recognized in this the derisory gesticulations of a tyrant, Aristion’s dance expressed one of the most singular features of Athenian political identity. In a distant echo of Cleocritus’ words on the battlefield of Piraeus, it commemorated by an aesthetic gesture as fleeting as it is brilliant Athenian chorality and the democratic regime in the vain hope of warding off their imminent disappearance.