Lysias, the son of Cephalus, was an Athenian logographer, a wealthy metic and a staunch democrat: In the Dictionary of Received Ideas about Greek antiquity, the entry devoted to Lysias would probably read along these lines. If there was ever a man identified with a status, a social class, a professional function and a political identity, it is indeed the orator Lysias, whose family, originally from Syracuse, benefits from an exceptional documentary focus. Considering all the available evidence and his path through life as a whole, a completely different image of the man emerges. Outside of the brief context of the civil war, Lysias was never depicted as a metic and never defined himself as such; nothing, moreover, indicates that he particularly suffered from this status or that he sought to be a naturalized Athenian at any price after the failure of his bid for citizenship in 403. Likewise, considering his life as a whole, his attachment to the democratic regime is not as clear to see as his vibrant proclamations in Against Eratosthenes suggest: The company he kept and the choice of his clients plead for a much more nuanced approach. Finally, his conversion to logography also deserves to be put into perspective: Was he not already considered a brilliant ‘sophist,’ albeit not a logographer, before the beginning of the civil war? He certainly continued to be considered as such after the reconciliation. Beyond the din of stasis, which forced everyone to choose their camp and froze individuals in clear-cut positions, Lysias’ life reveals that Athenian society was much more fluid than it appears in terms of status, partisanship or profession. On deeper examination, the life of Lysias seems marked by a form of uncertainty due not only to gaps in the source material, but also to the irreducible complexity of Athenian community life. Around this ill-defined man gravitate shifting choruses whose principles of composition and recomposition can be defined by taking advantage of the exceptional light shone on them by the shock of the civil war.

The privatization of publicly owned and operated industries and services that has occurred in certain countries over the last forty or fifty years is routinely condemned on the political left, yet the grounds of that condemnation often remain unspecified. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the practical advantages of what Cass Sunstein has called “incompletely theorized agreements” in facilitating collective action. But the advantage of distinguishing between different kinds of objections is that doing so allows us to assess their implications independently and therefore weigh and balance different factors in our practical reasoning. Sometimes we might want to object to privatization on straightforward economic grounds: when Chicago sold its parking meters on a seventy-five-year lease for just $1.15 billion, giving up a long-term revenue stream in order to balance the budget for just one year, it seemed less like selling the family silver than selling the family silver mine.