The book will give an initial impression of wide-ranging complexity. Indeed, it is not a survey. Aeschylus himself does not arrive until Chapter 8, and those interested in the relation of Aeschylus to Presocratic philosophy may even prefer to start with Chapter 14. Those who begin at the beginning and persevere will, I hope, be rewarded by the realisation that the book forms a single coherent argument.

They may also, I hope, receive the impression that the inventors of democracy still have, despite the primitive limitations of their form of it, much to teach us. We can for instance learn that the unlimited accumulation of individual wealth is incompatible with the democratic polis, or that the democratic polis depends on communal space. In our era of growing atomisation, Aeschylean drama expresses the idea of the common good with an aesthetic power well beyond what we are capable of producing. Ancient Greek culture is what I call a culture of limit, whereas consumer capitalism is a culture of the unlimited, by which our society and planet are being destroyed.

This is my third book about the radical transformation of Greek society and culture in the archaic and classical periods. Reciprocity and Ritual (1994) centred around the role of ritual in the development of the polis. Money and the Early Greek Mind (2004) related elements of the ‘Greek miracle’ (the genesis of philosophy and tragedy) to the fact that the Greek polis was the first pervasively monetised society in history. A central theme of Cosmology and the Polis is the interaction of ritual and money in the only Athenian literary texts that survive from the first half-century of Athenian democracy, the tragedies of Aeschylus.

My heartfelt thanks go to the Leverhulme Trust and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing me with the time to write this book. I am grateful also for comments on it to David Wiles and John Wilkins, to Paul Curtis for checking the references, and to Cambridge University Press for their courteous efficiency.