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Study of Athenian society suggests that in drawing social distinctions, moderns may have attempted to thwart or simply ignore a fundamental aspect of human nature. Athens' financing of certain fifth-century military operations with money and treasure dedicated to the polis' gods nicely illustrates the overlapping political, religious, economic, and military aspects of Athenian society. America's democratic ideology and lack of a strong moral matrix mean that modern Americans have few standards by which to judge their actions and choices other than freedom itself. In classical Athens, religion suffused every aspect of public life, from the theater to the military to the political assembly. If democracy has become a religion and the attempt to separate church and state in America has therefore failed, it may be because human societies have such a strong tendency to organize themselves around a set of interlocking principles and beliefs.

This chapter discusses the basic structure of Athenian government. It also describes how it resembled the governments of other Greek city-states, and reviews the intricate relationship between “society” and “government” in ancient Athens. It first introduces a conservative reconstruction of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Not long after the period of Solon's reforms, Athens fell under the control of the tyrant Peisistratus and his sons. The important trends that began under Peisistratus are reported. In addition, Athenian history in the classical period is elaborated upon. The Lamian War (323–322) ended in Athenian failure. In 322, classical Athenian democracy and independent Athenian government both ended.

This chapter takes the argument out of the theatre and into the lawcourts, one of the contexts which most clearly reveals the increasingly theatrical tenor (or ‘cast’) of Athenian society at large and of its public discourses. In a survey of the corpus of legal oratory from classical Athens, it is argued that the analogy between a trial and a theatrical performance was close and multilayered. There were strong similarities between the writing of roles for a play and the composition of speeches for delivery in court; there was a considerable degree of overlap between what was expected of tragic actors and litigants in terms of vocal performance.

This chapter specifically aims to find a path that traverses — or a midway point between — both approaches to the study of the Greek world influenced by Actor-Network Theory and more traditional Durkheimian approaches centered on the city. It considers the model of the choros (as it was conceptualized by classical authors) as capable of offering a productive paradigm for understanding the mechanisms of belonging at work within Athenian civic society during the classical period. The choral reference also refers to a certain way of writing history—one inspired by the models of the novel and the choral film— that seems particularly fitting for describing the complex way in which the Athenian social sphere functioned. The article formulates the following hypothesis: a choral approach, at the crossroads between the specifically Greek conception of the chorus and the contemporary conceptualization of the chorus in the field of fiction, makes it possible to stay as close as possible to the ways in which the social sphere was composed, the formation of groups, and the identities at the various levels of community life. This hypothesis to put to the test by examining a unique moment in Athenian history: the years between 404 and 400.

This chapter examines the significance of the murder of sons by their mothers in Greek tragedy and classical Athenian society as a whole. It draws on a wide range of material derived not only from fragments of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, but also from the minor tragic poets and Roman tragedy. The prominence of metaphors of madness in the fragments which survive from plays dealing with this theme suggests a way of understanding how the Athenian audience of the time interpreted the actions of these women. It is argued that whereas the motif of filicide is absent from earlier versions of the same stories, it seems to have been understood as particularly suitable to tragedy.