Our Athenian Yesterdays

Part One (“Losing Athens in Translation”) begins by introducing the case study, surveying “democratic Athens,” the consensus modern account of the “way of life” (politeia) which the Athenians called demokratia. This account is a conventional historicist construct, one that forces non-modern experiences to comply with a standard modern template of social being. It thus objectifies the polis as a disenchanted, functionally differentiated terrain inhabited by natural, pre-social individuals. Here, experience is neatly compartmentalized into discrete “orders,” “realms” or “fields,” such as the material and the ideational, the natural and the cultural, sacred and secular, public and private, the political, the social, the economic, and the religious. Athenian demokratia is duly historicized as “democracy,” as a specialist political system which bore a family resemblance to the liberal, egalitarian governments of our own time. And order in Athens is then assumed to radiate out from this male-dominated political system over all other societal fields and realms. As the following chapters will show, there are significant problems with this “democratic Athens” account.