Challenging the modern assumption that ancient Athens is best
understood as a "polis," Edward Cohen boldly recasts our
understanding of Athenian political and social life. Cohen
demonstrates that ancient sources referred to Athens not only as a
"polis," but also as a "nation" ("ethnos"), and that Athens did
encompass the characteristics now used to identify a "nation." He
argues that in Athens economic, religious, sexual, and social
dimensions were no less significant than political and juridical
considerations, and accordingly rejects prevailing scholarship's
equation of Athens with its male citizen body.
In fact, Cohen shows that the categories of "citizen" and
"noncitizen" were much more fluid than is often assumed, and that
some noncitizens exercised considerable power. He explores such
subjects as the economic importance of businesswomen and wealthy
slaves; the authority exercised by enslaved public functionaries;
the practical egalitarianism of erotic relations and the broad and
meaningful protections against sexual abuse of both free persons
and slaves, and especially of children; the wide involvement of all
sectors of the population in significant religious and local
activities. All this emerges from the use of fresh legal, economic,
and archaeological evidence and analysis that reveal the social
complexity of Athens, and the demographic and geographic factors
giving rise to personal anonymity and limiting personal
contacts--leading to the creation of an "imagined community" with a
mutually conceptualized identity, a unified economy, and national
"myths" set in historical fabrication.
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