Just over thirty years ago, François Hartog pondered what it might mean to devote an entire issue of the Annales to ancient history. Such an editorial endeavor, he suggested, was a bold gamble based on the conviction that the study of antiquity should not be confined to the domain of pure erudition, exclusively reserved for specialists. Like other historians, specialists in ancient history could heed Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’s invitation in the journal’s first issue, calling for historians to “demolish walls so high that they frequently block the view” as they “strive to pay attention to their neighbor’s work.”

It is commonly accepted that the definition of four property classes by Solon in early sixth century-BCE Athens marked a major step in the political construction of the Athenian state. However, as Claude Mossé argued thirty-five years ago, this reconstruction is mainly the result of a fourth-century-BCE historiography that positioned Solon as the founding father of Athenian democracy—casting doubt on the early existence of the so-called Solonian system. Although such an approach has often been considered as “postmodern” or “pessimistic,” I propose to follow Mossé’s path by considering the Solonian telē as occupational groups involved, along with many others, in the construction of the Athenian polis. This analysis results in the definition of an explicitly Archaic citizenship, conceived as a performance linked to specific behaviors and lifestyles.

This paper argues that there were two fundamental conceptions of the “common” in Archaic Greece. This distinction is worth teasing from contemporary practices of distribution, such as the division of bounty between warriors after a military expedition. Within this context we can observe a difference between the “common” that is not distributed—the part that a community sets aside before portioning out individual shares—and the “common” that results from the way in which individual parts are distributed: for instance, a division according to equal measures gives individuals the sense of belonging to a sharing community. Identifying these two forms as “exclusive commons” and “inclusive commons,” the article provides an analysis of their properties. It also outlines the consequences of the fact that the ancient Greeks came to apply this distributive schema to the polis itself and to conceive its political structure as the result of a global distribution of goods and prerogatives. The duality outlined here should thus be understood as one of the core structuring principles of ancient Greek political practice and thought.

Thirty years after Nicole Loraux published her 1986 article in L’Homme, this study revisits the question of political experience in the ancient Greek world. Its aim is to demonstrate the importance of the two definitions of the term “politics” as conceived by the Ancient Greeks. On the one hand, the political was conceived as an ensemble of activities with no specific institutional substance or form, a sphere of action that has no direct equivalent in the modern state, but rather relates to very varied experiences and practices undertaken in the context of conflict. On the other hand, politics was understood not only as organized access to different institutions, but also as the way in which a community structured and defined itself. Taking the Athenian crisis of 404-403 BCE as a case study, in particular the speech of Cleocritus preserved in Xenophon’s Hellenica, this paper proposes a new way of thinking about this dual expression of collective life. Far from the reconciliatory reading of Cleocritus’ speech proposed by Loraux, his appeal for harmony bears witness, in the turmoil and tension of events, to the way that politics (in the institutional sense) was sidelined to the exclusive benefit of the political and the collective practices associated with it. In conclusion, this case study opens up a more general consideration of the meaning of the “event” and its epistemological significance. By considering the crisis of 404-403 BCE at the heart of the “regimes of historicity” that characterized the history of Athens between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, this article aims to provide a clearer articulation of the foundational moments and established functioning of Greek democracy.

Public slavery was an institution common to most Greek cities during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Whether they worked on the city’s major construction sites, performed minor duties in its civic administration or filled the ranks of its police force (the famous Scythian archers of classical Athens), public slaves may be said to have constituted the first public servants known to Greek cities. Studying them from this perspective can shed new light on the long-running debate about the degree to which the polis functioned as a state. Direct democracy, in the Classical Athenian sense, implied that all political prerogatives be held by the citizens themselves, and not by any kind of state apparatus. The decision to delegate administrative tasks to slaves can thus be understood as a “resistance” (as defined by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres) on the part of the civic society to the development of this apparatus.

This article revisits the notion of citizenship (politeia) in the ancient Greek world, challenging the traditional conception, based principally on the works of Aristotle, that defines citizenship in terms of political participation. It considers the numerous decrees issued during the Hellenistic period bestowing legal privileges upon foreign benefactors (such as the right to own property, to trade, to enter into a legal marriage, to be exempted from certain taxes, and so on). If the Classical period’s tripartite division of status (citizens, resident aliens, and slaves) remained valid during the Hellenistic period and provided the “infrastructure” of civic societies, the system of privileges established by cities to honor deserving foreigners created a “concatenation” of different positions, which, without calling the hierarchy of legal statuses into question, introduced social fluidity into an interconnected world that was far removed from the Platonic and Aristotelian ideals of the autarchic city.