Kosmos Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens

'Kosmos' is the word the ancient Greeks used for human social order. It has therefore a special application to the Greeks' peculiar social and political unit of communal life that they called the 'polis'. Of the many hundreds of such units in classical Greece the best documented and the most complex was democratic Athens. The purpose of this collective 1998 volume is to re-evaluate the foundations of classical Athens' highly successful experiment in communal social existence. Topics addressed include religion and ritualization, political friendship and enmity, gender and sexuality, sports and litigation, and economic and symbolic exchange. The book aims to make a major contribution, theoretical as well as empirical, towards understanding how the social order of community life may be sustained and enhanced.

1. Introduction: defining a kosmos Paul Cartledge; 2. Interpersonal relations on Athenian pots: putting others in their place Robin Osborne; 3. Political friendship and the ideology of reciprocity Malcolm Schofield; 4. The politics of affection: emotional attachments in Athenian society Lin Foxhall; 5. Between koinon and idion: legal and social dimensions of religious associations in ancient Athens Ilias Arnaoutoglou; 6. Gymnasia and the democratic values of leisure Nick Fisher; 7. The seductions of the gaze: Socrates and his girlfriends Simon Goldhill; 8. The Athenian political perception of the idiotes Lene Rubinstein; 9a. Enmity in fourth-century Athens P. J. Rhodes; 9b. The rhetoric of enmity in the Attic orators S. C. Todd; 10. The well-ordered polis: topographies of civic space Sitta von Reden; 11. The threat from the Piraeus Jim Roy; 12. Encounters in the Agora Paul Millett.

The purpose of this collective 1998 volume is to re-evaluate the foundations of classical Athens' highly successful experiment in communal social existence. Topics addressed include religion and ritualization, political friendship and enmity, gender and sexuality, sports and litigation, and economic and symbolic exchange.