The Divided City ─ On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens

Athens, 403 B.C.E. The bloody oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty is over, and thedemocrats 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 "pastmisfortunes," 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.Continuinga criticism of Athenian ideology begun in her pathbreaking study The Invention of Athens, NicoleLoraux argues that this crucial moment of Athenian political history must be interpreted asconstitutive of politics and political life and not as a threat to it. Divided from within, the cityis formed by that which it refuses. Conflict, the calamity of civil war, is the other, dark side ofthe 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 appearsas the process of dividing up, of disagreement -- -in short, of agreeing to divide and choose. Notonly does Loraux reconceptualize the definition of ancient Greek democracy, she also allows thecontemporary reader to rethink the functioning of modern democracy in its critical moments ofinternal stasis.

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.