THE CITY IN CHORUS: FOR A CHORAL HISTORY OF ATHENIAN SOCIETY
Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard
The controversial challenge introduced twenty years ago by actor–network theory (ANT) is well known. ‘Society’ functions so little as a concept that it should be dismissed so that the various forms of composition and association that serve as the theatre for social activity can be observed. Going against the Durkheimian tradition, Bruno Latour and those close to him intended to call into question the commonly held conception that makes society ‘as a whole’ a ‘substance’ providing all areas of activity with a type of specific causality.1 However, ANT did not simply take up the reservations that had long been formulated by ethnomethodology. It claimed to go beyond the canonical opposition between structure and agency. In this respect, it was less about restoring the place of actors and interactions than shedding light on the processes of assembly and composition (surpassing the distinction between nature and culture) between heterogeneous elements that would form the heart of the social, conferring upon sociology the status of ‘science of associations’.
The influence of ANT is more or less explicitly assumed in a number of recent projects in the field of classical studies that favour the description of civic societies in terms of networks and circulation.2 In fact, such a research perspective goes against the Durkheimian tradition that so greatly influenced Greek studies in France, making the city – which is identified with civic authorities and likened to a centralising body – the key actor in the changes affecting Greek societies. Like all epistemological advancements, this perspective is not free from the dangers of generating an uncontrolled use of certain key notions, the term ‘network’ becoming a fetish capable of defining collective action in its most diverse forms.3 Moreover, extensive use of the term often leads to indefinitely delaying – and even occulting – the (eminently Durkheimian) question of the constituting identity of the community (in its singularity, with its boundaries, specific values and so on).
1 A FORGOTTEN METAPHOR OF THE DURKHEIMIAN SCHOOL
Within the Durkheimian tradition itself, however, there is a figure – or a paradigm – that is likely to go beyond the opposition between structure and agency and, moreover, to resolve the shortcomings of the overly extensive use of the term ‘network’. This figure has a clear ‘Greek reference’, since it concerns the chorus: choros. It is necessary to insist upon the importance of the choral reference within the Durkheimian school, less in the corpus of the founder than in that of his disciples when they focused not on the constitution of society as a whole and the individual’s place within it but on the forms of relations between groups and on the frameworks within which social activity is organised. The approach actually implied a significant shift with regard to Durkheim’s body of work in that it ultimately led to an examination of both how the various levels of society function and how the different social spaces composing it are articulated.
The Durkheimian school’s interest in the choral phenomenon was also the result of a dialogue with British social anthropology. In his 1922 ethnographic study of the Andaman Islanders, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown saw dance as a privileged medium for expressing social unity and harmony.4 In 1928, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard studied the social role of one of the most important dancing ceremonies for the Azande: the beer dance (gbere buda).5 For him, the ceremony enacted sexual desire and its condemnation, celebrating the institutions of marriage and family. However, neither of these two anthropologists referenced antiquity, and the study of dance was not part of a broader reflection on the choral mode.6 In Marcel Mauss’s work, however, the memory of the ancient chorus was already used metaphorically to examine a founding moment in the ‘realization’ of the social body along the lines of a primitive scene, with ‘the magical act’ at its centre:
A circle of impassionated spectators collects around the action being performed. They are brought to a halt, absorbed, hypnotized by the spectacle. They become as much actors as spectators in the magical performance – rather like the chorus in Greek drama. The society as a whole becomes expectant and obsessed by the rite.7
In particular, the chorus provided a way of thinking about the connection between individualism and holism:
The round, the dance, and the rhythm are the work of the crowd, but each individual brings his or her own personal variation to the theme. Within the homogenous horde, gifts of improvisation are widespread, with each individual following the next in the dance and adding a phrase, which is welcomed and repeated by the crowd, thus becoming part of the common heritage.8
Marcel Granet was the scholar who extended the choral paradigm the furthest within the framework of his study of ‘seasonal festivals’ in ancient China. Indeed, Granet saw the primordial figure of peasant community life in the choral principle.9 By directing different choruses that embodied the different elements composing the community during ‘sung jousts’, peasant society revealed different aspects of itself. These rites had a primarily religious purpose. During these important solemn ceremonies unfolding in ‘holy places’, explains Granet, the human order was anchored to the cosmic order. Next came a political purpose – these ceremonies were decisive moments when it came to building seigneurial authority. But Granet further insisted upon a singular aspect involving the portrayal of division and reunion. Through these ceremonies and the distinction between choruses, society as a whole experienced its own divisions at the same time as it resolved them.
To what extent can this forgotten metaphor from the Durkheimian school inspire our approach to Greek civic societies? It is first advisable to examine the meaning of the indigenous use of the notion. To what extent was the choros able to offer a model through which the Greeks came to describe their own society?10 Beyond the schematic distinction opposing analysis of the city in institutional terms or ritualistic terms (‘the assembly city’ vs. ‘the sacrifice city’), can the city be defined as a chorus or a sum of the choruses that compose it? We would immediately like to add the following question to the first one: to what extent can the choral model, notably through its use in contemporary fiction, inspire a specific form of historical writing capable of taking into account how Athenian society functioned? We would thus like to venture the hypothesis that the model of the choros as it was conceptualised by the ancient authors offers a rich paradigm of meaning for observing the various groups that belonged, in various capacities, to Athenian civic society during the classical period. Furthermore, the choral reference offers an enlightening narrative means for describing the complex way in which the Athenian social sphere functioned. All in all, an approach using choral terms, which stands at the crossroads of the specifically Greek conception of chorality and its contemporary conceptualisation in the realm of fiction (novels or films), makes it possible to remain extremely close to forms of social composition on different scales of social activity.11
This hypothesis can be put to the test through a discussion of a singular moment in Athenian history: the years between 404 and 400. We shall begin with a famous episode at the end of the civil war narrated by Xenophon. At the end of the Battle of Munychia, during which the oligarch Kritias died, Kleokritos, the herald of the mysteries of Eleusis – who was on Thrasyboulos’ side – spoke up. In his vibrant appeal to the defeated oligarchs, he came to mobilise the figure of the chorus in order to discuss what united Athenian citizens beyond their political differences:
And Kleokritos, the herald of the initiated, a man with a very fine voice, obtained silence and said: ‘Fellow citizens, why do you drive us out of the city? Why do you wish to kill us? For we never did you any harm, but we have shared with you in the most solemn rites and sacrifices and the most splendid festivals, we have been companions in the choroi (καὶ συγχορευταὶ) and schoolmates and comrades in arms, and we have braved many dangers with you both by land and by sea in defence of the common safety and freedom of us both. In the name of the gods of our fathers and mothers, in the name of our ties of kinship and marriage and comradeship – for all these many of us share with one another – cease, out of shame before gods and men, to sin against your fatherland, and do not obey those most accursed Thirty, who for the sake of their private gain have killed in eight months more Athenians, almost, than all the Peloponnesians in ten years of war’.12
2 CHOROS: THE STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF AN INDIGENOUS CATEGORY
2.1 Choral practice at the heart of Athenian civic life
Kleokritos rapidly listed a group of practices that he felt contributed to making the Athenian community, including festivals, sacrifices, school, the army and choruses. We have chosen to isolate the chorus from among this range of integrating activities because the Greeks themselves made special use of the choral figure for thinking about how the city functioned.
It is a well-known fact that choral practice was a deeply rooted reality in the lives of ordinary Athenian citizens – particularly through the widespread practice of the dithyramb, a singular choral formation involving singing and dancing in a circle (the kyklios choros). During the fifth century, a thousand citizens (or those who were becoming citizens) found themselves directly implicated in such performances every year. Such performances – more than comedy or tragedy – constituted the supreme civic spectacle and were characterised by a competition between ten choruses of fifty boys and ten choruses of fifty adult citizens, one per tribe.13 These dithyrambic choruses performed not only during the Dionysia, but also during the Thargelia in honour of Apollo, the Panathenaia, and probably the Prometheia and the Hephaisteia.14 Furthermore, far from remaining confined to the large civic cults that were held in the urban centre (asty), choral practice was deployed across the different scales according to which civic life functioned. Thus, during the Bendideia of Piraeus, the Tauropolia in Halai and at Brauron, choruses in various formations were involved in celebrating the cults, including boys and girls, men and women, at the same time.15 It is hardly surprising then to see continually asserted the idea whereby classical Athens, the supreme festive city, carried choral practice to a level of unparalleled excellence. In Xenophon’s depiction of him, Socrates declares it clearly:
Did you never reflect that, whenever one chorus is selected from the citizens of this city – for instance, the chorus that is sent to Delos – no chorus from any other place can compare with it, and no city can collect so goodly a company?16
Athenian choral practice was extremely distinctive, differing considerably from the rest of the Greek world. Beyond the ‘song culture’ shared by most Greek cities,17 each city developed specific forms of chorality according to how its politeia functioned, the politeia being understood here in the broad sense of the term as the nature of its political regime as well as its specific customs. The Athenian conception of choral practice, which was closely connected to the deepening of its democratic model, was primarily concerned with the plurality of an activity that began on the local level and extended to the civic level. The extraordinary density of different communities in Athenian society during the classical period has been much discussed in scholarship. The many groups composing it – both private (thiasoi, orgeônes and genê) and public (demes, phratries and tribes) – created countless networks between the various elements forming the civic body. For ancient authors, this extraordinary associative vitality was part of the democratic nature of the Athenian regime.18 Similarly, the multiplicity of choruses and their presence at very different types of festivals according to an agonistic framework displayed a deeply democratic element in that its purpose was to prevent an overly powerful chorus from emerging, one that would claim to incarnate the city as a whole during a given ceremony. As Leslie Kurke has shown, Pindar’s corpus offers a glimpse of a completely different way of organising chorality in Thebes during the early fifth century. Through the formation of choruses overseen by important families, the Theban elite sought to embody the city as a whole.19 In Alcman’s Sparta, the choral dance was supposed to symbolise the close union between civic order and cosmic order, the chorus of young girls being meant to incarnate the whole community.20 More broadly, despite being divided according to age groups, Spartan choruses expressed a homophony in which the eukosmia running through the political community was achieved.
In Athens, however, the city as a whole was never conceived as a single chorus capable of incarnating the city itself, except in the writings of Plato and Xenophon, who opposed the democratic regime. In the Laws, Plato explicitly defended a non-competitive conception of choral practice. Delighted with its own singing and dancing, the city found unity in choral practice, in what seems like a form of social magic.21 Xenophon depicted Socrates as celebrating the Athenian chorus sent to work on civic theôria (state pilgrimage) for Delos precisely because the city was presented as a single chorus, unlike the multiple choral performances characteristic of the democratic dithyramb.22 Socrates’ two disciples aimed to redefine the choral phenomenon as it existed in Athenian society in their time, and their implicit condemnation of Athenian chorality was part of their wider criticism of the democratic regime.
The specificity of Athenian practice lay in the dissociation of the roles of chorêgos, coryphaeus (chorus leader) and poet. In Thebes, it seems that the members of the city’s most important families were able to hold both the position of chorêgos (thus helping to finance the chorus) and the position of chorus leader,23 while in archaic Sparta, the poet most probably also played the role of coryphaeus. This was not the case in Athens, where these three roles were clearly separate.24 A deliberate choice should be acknowledged here, one aiming to avert the charismatic authority that came with the dual power of financing the ceremony and conducting the chorus.
Choral activity assumed such importance in the democratic city because it was a part of the paideia, or education, of all young Athenian women and men, and it strongly contributed to preparing them for their respective roles within the community. If the ancient authors are to be believed, it was one of the vectors through which the norms that were essential to how the civic community functioned were communicated to the whole city.
2.2 The chorus and the transmission of civic values
In the Laws, Plato suggests that a group of choruses should be created in order to instil the right attitudes in citizens as early as possible, and that these choruses should subsequently be maintained throughout the citizens’ lives.25 According to him, the ideal city would therefore be composed of three choruses, each constituted by a different age group: children, the under thirty, and men between thirty and sixty years old. The chorus was subsequently presented as the ideal medium for educating citizens and conveying community values, the city being presented as a combination of choruses serving the ‘chorus of choruses’ that constituted the city. Plato evokes in particular
the duty of every man and child – bond and free, male and female – , the duty of the whole city, to charm themselves unceasingly with the chants (epaidousan) we have described, constantly changing them and securing variety in every way possible, so as to inspire the singers with an insatiable appetite for the hymns and with pleasure therein.26
The various choruses imagined by Plato, which potentially encompassed all members of the community (‘every man and child – bond and free, male and female’), were thus articulated in a clever composition, the coherency of which lay in dancing and singing together. This shared pleasure exerted an extremely powerful link between members of the community, which Plato conceived as being a true enchantment (epôidê). This is a beautiful definition of the social magic implied by the choral ritual, which instituted the community by defining an interior (those who participated in the choruses) and an exterior (those who were excluded from them).27
Can this specifically Platonic conception of the chorus be applied to Athenian democracy, which presented a rather different form of chorality marked by plurality and competition? Probably, if one considers the way in which comic choruses claimed to educate the people (didaskalos), as explained in the opening of the parabasis of The Frogs (performed in the theatre of Dionysos in 405): ‘It’s right and proper for the sacred chorus to help give good advice and instruction to the city’ (v. 686–7). Athenians strongly valued the educational role of the chorus, and the advice Aristophanes gave on this occasion was what led to the people to honouring him with a laurel crown.28
2.3 The chorus and democratic aesthetics
The incredible success of choral activity in Athens can undoubtedly be explained by the close – almost consubstantial – link it maintained with the Athenian system of isonomy. Choral practice, which was organised within the framework of tribes founded by Kleisthenes and placed under the control of magistrates (archons),29 expressed the founding principles of the Athenian regime of isonomy through the way in which it was concretely deployed. By placing its members in a circle or a square, sometimes under the aegis of a coryphaeus, the chorus first displayed the principle of equality between citizens visually. Furthermore, in its circular form, it presupposed that all of its participants could see each other, thus staging the transparency that was specific to the democratic regime, which made the publicising of the law and the magistrates’ supervision an essential aspect of civic life.30 In this respect, the chorus was well and truly a part of the order of the ‘festival’, according to the definition Rousseau proposed in his Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre (1758). In this work, Rousseau celebrates the festival in order to distinguish it from the theatre, which, by distancing the spectator, is a moment of separation at once between the actor and the role he or she embodies, between the audience and the stage, between the spectators themselves, and between the spectators and the rest of the social body:
People think they come together in the theatre, and it is there that they are isolated. It is there that they go to forget their friends, neighbours, and relations in order to concern themselves with fables, in order to cry for the misfortunes of the dead, or to laugh at the expense of the living.31
On the contrary, by creating confusion between the stage and the public when playing the role of ‘distanced commentator or emphatic chatter’,32 the chorus abolishes the distance that is specific to the theatre and which Rousseau denounces. In this respect, the chorus should be considered as one of the key elements of a true democratic aesthetic.33
2.4 The chorus and stasis
Despite mobilising hundreds of individuals (which made it a vector for spreading civic values not only for citizens, but for all members of the community) and creating friendship and unity through the repetition of ritualised performances (a crucial aspect of a true democratic aesthetic), the chorus should nonetheless not be considered a factor in cohesion and an ever more perfect union.
Beyond the appeasing discourses of Plato and Xenophon, choral activity covered a series of tensions and even divisions. Within the chorus, strong rivalries could divide the individuals who composed it and who apparently danced to the same tune. Who exactly would be the leader, or coryphaeus? The chorus thus embodied a sphere of competition that made it possible to illustrate the profound hierarchies within the group.
Above all, different choruses generally competed with each other. Seen from this perspective, the choral model maintained unique connections with stasis, and the chorus should be considered within a spectrum of collective activities leading from war34 on the one hand to peace and harmony on the other.35 In this respect, the establishment of agonistic choral practices following the clash that opposed Kleisthenes’ and Isagoras’ respective factions at the end of the sixth century is far from insignificant. As early as 508/507, the reorganisation of the chorus, in accordance with the Kleisthenian system of ten tribes, can indeed be interpreted as a way of blocking stasis from reoccurring. Through the organisation of choral competitions within the framework of the dithyrambs, a specific form for managing stasis was invented, the Kleisthenian tribes aiming precisely to break up pre-existing cliental ties and factional divisions. By replacing impious stasis with healthy competition, the Athenians strove to strike a new internal civic balance.36 Choral confrontation, in the agonistic mode, thus made it possible to depict and overcome divisions by sublimating them.37
But these tensions inherent in how the chorus functioned should not conceal another form of division, which is less visible but no less structural. Like all collective rites, choral activity radically separated those who participated in it – albeit on the level of competition – from those who would never be part of the circle. Athenian society also included a good number of individuals outside of the choruses, who were the objects of a radical form of exclusion. While the chorus offered a privileged path for accessing a way of thinking about the unity and divisions within the Athenian community using its own categories, the existing rifts between the various choruses composing the city still need to be taken into account in order to avoid deluding ourselves with an over-positive and harmonious conception of the social world.
3 A CHORAL HISTORY: CONTEMPORARY THEORISATION
Among the ancient authors, no one actually conceptualised society – taken not in the various elements composing it, but in its organic totality – in the image of a chorus. Plato was the only one that tried to describe all of his utopian society in Laws from the perspective of a combination of choruses. In this respect, the ancient choral paradigm did not suffice when it came to describing the complex way in which all of Athenian society was understood to function during the classical period. It is therefore necessary to shift away from the ancient conception of the chorus towards a contemporary theorisation of what ‘choral history’ can be – by venturing that there can be a form of choral writing for history, one that is capable of restoring the complexity of the Athenian community. There is no doubt that cinema and literature can inform history, not only as a source but indeed by offering unique methods for writing history.38 How could there be any doubt that the historian could in return take advantage of a narrative form specific to these media?
Since Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, the choral novel has provided some of the most beautiful historical reflections in the fictional register. But the ‘choral’, far from forming a clearly established genre or having its own aesthetic canon, is embodied in a different narrative logic depending on the way in which the construction of the story is ‘put together’. One could perhaps attempt to establish a basic taxonomy of the different types of choral films and novels, but that would not address the primary challenge represented by the more or less polyphonic aspect of every choral story. Indeed, nothing seems to unite the great monophonic tale that is In Search of Lost Time (which is, in its own way, a choral novel) or The Sound and the Fury, which is centred on three voices over which a superior moment (or truth) never prevails. More recently, the literary critic Vincent Message has extended his reflection precisely to the choral genre by attempting to define what he calls the ‘pluralist novel’. The kaleidoscopic construction of the story in addition to the multiplication of voices and linguistic registers seems to be at the heart of the pluralist novel, the major representatives of which would be Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie in contemporary literature. Yet, if Message is to be believed, the polyphonic nature of the pluralist novel is only a clue in a larger examination of the forms used to compose the social, which are given a central place in the narrative. ‘Instead of charting the arrival of a subject-in-the-making in a preconstituted Whole, the continuous and difficult movement of organizing a Whole that would like to be more than the sum of its parts is revealed for us to see.’39 Thus, ‘the collective effort of a society that is always in the making’ would appear to be the true subject of the pluralist novel. One assesses how much the historian can gain from these reflections surrounding the choral genre and how it has developed. When examined through the historian’s lens, choral writing leads one to question in an original way the homogeneity of the social space, the articulation of the various spheres of action plunged in distinct temporal textures, and the contemporaneousness of disputing actions. In this respect, the stasis of 404/403 offers an exceptional area of study, since the event shows how the various elements composing Athenian society were recomposed. Indeed, Plato describes the consequences of the event within Athenian society as a great blending (synmixis): ‘So kindly and so friendly was the way in which the citizens from the Piraeus and from the city consorted with one another, and also – beyond men’s hopes – with the other Greeks.’40
But giving a detailed description of different choruses is not an easy task. We would be wise to distrust two principles that organise the cartography of Athenian society adopted by modern historians. The first seeks to describe this society according to its own classifications of status by distinguishing between metics, citizens and slaves, as if they were all impenetrable universes. On the contrary, thinking about Athenian society in choral terms makes it possible to X-ray the various levels of social intensity without considering them to be immediately determined by specific status positions. It should be recalled that the tragic chorus – which was at once the ‘voice of the city’ and that of ‘other marginal people’, women, foreigners, and even slaves – shows the city in precisely all its diversity. Furthermore, numerous female choral rituals in classical Athens are known, whether it was the arktoi for Artemis in Brauron, the dancing parthenoi for the Erechtheids, or the Eleusinian cults, which included female dances.41 Similarly, certain choruses were able to welcome and blend citizens and metics, such as the dramatic choroi of the Lenaia.42 The second principle usually separates the different spheres of action at work in the city in terms of impermeable purposes. Thus, political life is considered part of a distinct operating logic from that of economic activity, which is itself independent from religion, and so on. Yet the choral model cuts across these various realms of action, which makes it possible to avoid confining the analysis to areas of activity that have already been defined. In this respect, the choral approach makes it possible to observe both politics (which is composed of citizens acting in places where civic decisions are made) and the political (which is defined as all of the practices that contribute to the expression of a civic identity). It should also be noted that, by its very existence, the chorus in Athens was the product of political institutions (politics) – since, within the dithyrambic framework, it was composed according to the principle of the Kleisthenian division of the civic body into ten tribes – but that its activity in fact consisted of the ritual celebration of Dionysos (the political).43
4 THE CORYPHAEUS AND THE CHORUS
So how should the chorus composing Athenian society be described? And, above all, how should the choral history of Athens at the end of the fifth century be written? The challenge lies in reconstructing a plurality of collectives without beginning with preconstituted and already organised aggregates and especially by not presupposing the existence of a single whole (the ‘Athenian society’) with a clear hierarchy of statuses. The approach subsequently consists in beginning with the individual who plays the role of coryphaeus (the chorus leader) in order to continually attempt to reconstitute the choruses that surrounded this figure. We need to emphasise that such a heuristic postulate does not in itself imply a specific conception of how Athenian society functioned. It is in no way about defending the primacy of the individual and even less about considering society as a collection of individuals according to the presupposition of methodological individualism. After all, the chorus provided the spectacle of a collective created by its monophonic singing, which did not presuppose the independence of each of the actors but immediately considered them collectively. In other words, the chorus was a group as long as it never forgot that it was a more or less stable aggregation of individuals who were never more than (to use the expression of Cornelius Castoriadis) ‘moving fragments of the social’.44 According to this perspective, the choruses were the supreme embodiment of the ‘singular plural’ form perfectly illustrated by Attic tragedy, in which chorists often sang the same text, sometimes saying ‘I’ and sometimes saying ‘we’.
If the choral model makes it possible to think of the individual as always being inserted into collective groups that he or she carries and which carry him or her, it has the additional advantage of providing a means of thinking about forms of grouping that are not necessarily set in stone, without being evanescent either. Choruses, which were created by repeated performances, had no other existence or duration than that of the effective activity of the collective. They subsequently make it possible to approach the social as a provisional construction that could indeed find a stable form (for example, by taking a legal shape that ensured the group’s permanency) but without this being a rule. The civil war of 404/403 provides an opportunity to examine the surge in moving choruses that were recomposed numerous times because of the turmoil.
Let’s briefly consider the case of two individuals whose biographical trajectories emerge from the ancient sources due to the events of 403, with the understanding that only an in-depth study – within the framework of a ‘choral’ book that is currently being written – would be capable of proving the relevance of the methodological proposition we are advancing. Based on their unique destinies, it is possible to reconstitute a plurality of collectives that form just as many choruses in Athenian society during the classical period. The final question of our study will nonetheless focus on Athenian society as a combination of choruses.
4.1 Gerys the Athenian
Let’s first focus on Gerys, who we know participated in the Battle of Munychia with Thrasyboulos’s army. He was undoubtedly a slave who sold vegetables, but he became an isoteles metic following Thrasyboulos’ decree in 401, which granted exceptional privileges to non-citizens who contributed to re-establishing democracy.45 This isoteles metic with a barbaric name and who was known through a belated epitaph had a son with the perfectly Greek name of Theophilos.46 But his upward (or integrative) trajectory in Athenian society is not what interests us the most here. Using this individual’s ‘minuscule life’, it is above all possible to reconstitute different choruses that were largely transversal with regard to traditional distinctions between statuses but which constituted the essential structures of Athenian community life. The figure of Gerys offers a glimpse of the chorus of agoraioi, the men who shared the space of the agora regardless of whether they were citizens, metics or slaves. Here, a spatialised approach to Athenian society encourages us to go beyond a strict reading in terms of status categories in order to identify, on the contrary, alternative places within which social hierarchies were recomposed differently. Similarly, using Gerys, it is perhaps possible to identify a Thracian chorus, whose centre was apparently Piraeus itself and more specifically the sanctuary of Bendis located in Munychia – the very place where, in 403, the decisive battle took place in which Thrasyboulos and his men defeated the oligarchs. The Thracian aspect prevails over every other division of status. The Thracian chorus to which Gerys perhaps belonged brought together metics, xenoi and slaves. If one takes a closer look at the history of the Thracian orgeônes of Bendis, they established close connections with the citizen community as a whole.
4.2 Lysimache the priestess
While Gerys is an evanescent silhouette, barely sketched out in the documents that have come down to us, this is not the case for Lysimache, the priestess of Athena Polias and, as such, the guarantor of the most sacred rituals of the Athenian city. Although she is well known through a number of inscriptions, particularly the base of the statue erected in her honour on the Acropolis after her death in the 360s,47 she was never directly evoked in the ancient authors’ writings about the Athenian stasis. And yet the priestess must have been present alongside the democratic Thrasyboulos when he and his troops climbed to the Acropolis to make their sacrifice to Athena on 12 Boedromion 403.48 It is highly probable that the priestess of Athena played a central role in this ritual sequence, embodying the rather specific contribution of Athenian women to the resolution of the conflict.
By carefully scrutinising the available documentation, it is possible to draw a picture of Lysimache in all her humanity and reconstruct her unique mode of action within the city, going against the clichés surrounding the passivity and perpetual minority status of Athenian women.49 Furthermore, it is possible to reconstruct the chorus of ‘servants of Athena’ that gravitated around her and which was marked by strong polarities, including, on the one hand, a polarity between the priestesses of Athena themselves – such as Myrrhine, the randomly selected ordinary Athenian50 who was opposed to Lysimache, the ‘super-autochthonous’ descendant of Erechtheus; and, on the other hand, a polarity between the various priestesses and all the women who worked under them, sometimes occasionally (such as the arrhêphoroi and ergastinai) and sometimes permanently (such as Lysimache’s servant – or diakonos – Syeris, who was probably Egyptian).51 These women, who lived together in the same places and sometimes worked together, formed a community united by strong ties that transcended status and even ethnic boundaries, all for the glory of Athena. The presence of a foreigner in this group makes it possible to imagine the existence of a chorus extending beyond the civic circle and potentially open to any woman who wanted to enter its circle.
4.3 Conclusions
Gerys and Lysimache, who perhaps crossed paths, present the historian with two diametrically opposed cases. At first glance, Gerys seems to be among those forgotten figures in history, whom the historian can only restore to light across a series of hypotheses based on the fact that he was named in both Thrasyboulos’ decree in 401 and an epitaph from the second half of the fourth century. As for Lysimache, who was celebrated by civic epigraphy and indirectly mentioned by Aristophanes, she is in many ways too well known, so much so that historians have continually tended to reduce her to an archetype: that of woman or priestess. Gerys and Lysimache therefore appear to be either too unknown or too well known to offer any insight into how Athenian civic society functioned.
And yet, when examining both their irreducible singularity and their place within their own chorus(es), their trajectories help us form a distinct cartography of Athenian society during the classical period, one that departs from the usual picture offered by historians. Promoting a ‘pragmatic’ approach, we first favour an analysis of the shape of the Athenian community life by shedding light on its occasional reconfigurations according to the city’s specific places and spheres of activity. The various community identities do not manifest themselves in a continuous, homogenous way across each area of social experience, which is undoubtedly one of the advantages of a choral approach to Athenian society. The agora, the battlefield, the civic court and funeral spaces all constitute singular places in which community identities were reconfigured.
This choral approach also makes it possible to gain a deeper understanding of how status hierarchies functioned in the city. Historians usually describe Athenian society during the classical period as a continuous spectrum of status groups ranging from the lowest to the highest position, from slave to citizen – a vision that seems to offer the archetype of the well-ordered city in which statuses were stratified along a clear and simple spectrum. But perhaps this ’well-ordered’ Athens was simply imagined by contemporary historians who, on the basis of a few carefully chosen sources, unwittingly followed the idealised representation of Athenian society offered by some of the literature of the time. A few recent studies have helped to describe more precisely how classical Athens functioned, by shedding light on the existence of a number of statuses that could not simply be reduced to the division between those who were free and those who were slaves or between citizens and foreigners. The generic statuses of slave, citizen, metic and freedman thus turn out to be inadequate when it comes to describing the complexity of Athenian society.52 The ultimate end of such a reading nonetheless remains debatable. Is it about creating a sharper representation of society during the classical period, one conceived as a range of stratified statuses – in other words, adding new levels to a description of society that historians persist in representing as a scale or pyramid? Should we not change our approach to personal statuses? It is one thing to show that the status of slave or foreigner is broken down into a multitude of different legal positions, and another thing altogether to question the very notion of status and to use it to reinterpret how the hierarchy of statuses functioned in the city.
A choral analysis obviously makes it possible to gain a deeper understanding of the latter perspective. Indeed, it encourages an analysis of the way in which having a particular status could not be separated from a specific community configuration, which was expressed differently according to a given area of social experience. Being a foreigner did not refer to the same reality if one was part of the active Thracian chorus during the Bendideia of Piraeus, temporarily aboard an Athenian trireme or selling vegetables in the agora. In this respect, it encourages one to adopt a spatialised conception of personal statuses that sheds light on the plural and differentiated configurations in which hierarchies of status were experienced and expressed in the city.
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1 In particular, see the introduction to Latour 2005.
2 Most recently, see Taylor and Vlassopoulos 2015.
3 Against the wide-ranging use of the notion of network, see already the comments of Latour 1999: 15–25. Latour insists upon the notion of transformation and translation initially implied by the notion.
4 Radcliffe-Brown 1922.
5 Evans-Pritchard 1928: 458: ‘The dance therefore also belongs to that group of social institutions which allow sexual play to a moderate and discreet extent, the functions of which are to canalize the forces of sex into socially harmless channels, and by doing so to assist the processes of selection and to protect the institutions of marriage and the family.’
6 Rutherford 2013.
7 Mauss [1902] 2001: 162. Mauss continues: ‘The rhythmic movement, uniform and continuous, is the immediate expression of a mental state in which consciousness of each individual is overwhelmed by a single idea, a single sentiment, a single hallucinatory idea, a common objective. Each body shares the same passion, each face wears the same mask, each voice utters the same cry. In addition, we have the terrific impression produced by the rhythm of the music and singing. To see all these figures masked with the image of the same desire, to hear all mouths uttering proof of their certainty – everyone is carried away, there is no possibility of resistance to the conviction of the whole group’ (p. 163). In an article for the Année Sociologique the following year, Mauss (1903: 561–2) again discussed the importance of the choral theme by examining the origin of rhythm: ‘Where does [rhythm] come from? From special conditions in which poetry was formed. Indeed, poetry was primitively, regularly, and necessarily sung. Both among primitive peoples and across the various countries in Europe, primitive poetry was essentially something that was spoken in a chorus. “Singing together” and the chorale are what cause rhythm. [. . .] A primitive chorus presupposes [. . .] a group of men who manage to agree in their voices and their gestures, forming one and the same dancing mass. A community animated by rhythmic movements, there you have a condition that is immediate, necessary and sufficient for the rhythmic expression of the feelings of a community [. . .]. Thus, a social reality and a determined group of singing and dancing individuals appears behind rhythm.’ See Kowalzig 2013: 180–1.
8 Mauss 1903: 564.
9 For the singularity of Granet’s work within the Durkheimian school and its reception, see: Freedman 1975: 624–48; Hirsch 2011. See also the important comments of Humphreys 1971: 172–96, particularly those on the connections between Louis Gernet and Marcel Granet.
10 See Kurke 2007: 100.
11 In that sense, this approach could be characterised as standing in between an emic perspective (the Greek conception of chorality) and an etic prospect (how to write a choral history of ancient Athenian society?).
12 Xenophon, Hellenica 2.4.20–2.
13 On the social and political implications of that specific organisation, see Wilson 2011: 24.
14 See Wilson 2003: 163–96 and particularly 168. It is thus known that choruses of men sang paeans at the Thargelia (Wilson 2000: 314) and that choruses of young girls were held on the twenty-eighth day of the month of Hekatombaion during the Panathenaia.
15 Parker 2005: 182–3.
16 Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.3.12.
17 Herington 1985: 3–5.
18 Aristotle, Politics 1313a–b. See Ismard 2010.
19 Kurke 2007: 100.
20 Ferrari 2008. See more generally Calame 1997.
21 Kowalzig 2013; Peponi 2013a; see also Peponi 2013b.
22 Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.3.12. The agonistic nature of choral competitions in Delos has been much discussed. What matters for this chapter is that Socrates himself saw the most beautiful expression of Athenian choral practice in this chorus ‘of the whole city’. See Rutherford 2004: 89–90.
23 Kurke 2007: 100–1.
24 Wilson 2011: 33.
25 Plato, Laws 2.664b–7a.
26 Plato, Laws 2.665c.
27 Bourdieu 1982: 58–63. See, in a different perspective, Kurke 2013 and Calame 2017: 42 on the etymological link between choros and chara (joy) in Laws 2.654a. 28 See the two anonymous Lives of Aristophanes (Dübner 1877: XXVII, 46–55). See also Calame 2017: 31 (on Acharnians 628–58).
29 [Aristotle], Athenaion Politeia 54.3.
30 The chorus evolves around a place that is at once empty and central. See Xenophon, Oeconomicus 8.20: ‘Just as a troop of dancers about the altar is a beautiful spectacle in itself, and even the free space looks beautiful and unencumbered (katharon).’ On the core values of chorality, see the important contribution of Kurke 2012.
31 Rousseau [1758] 1960: 16–17.
32 Dupont 2007: 299.
33 That is the aesthetic dimension of politics, which is particularly noticeable in Pericles’ famous funeral oration: philosophoumen te kai philokaloumen. See Castoriadis 1997: 287: ‘Pericles does not say we love beautiful things (and put them in museums), we love wisdom (and pay professors or buy books). He says we are in and by the love of beauty and wisdom and the activity this love brings forth, we live by and with and through them – but far from extravagance, and far from flabbiness.’
34 See Socrates, according to Athenaeus, 14.628e: ‘Whoever honours the gods best with dances are the best in war.’
35 In particular, see Pausanias, 5.16.6: the quarrel between the sixteen cities of Elis, which was resolved by organising agônes for the Heraia, weaving a peplos for the goddess, and establishing two choruses bearing the memory of the confrontation. See Scheid and Svenbro 1996: 10–21.
36 Wilson 2003: 182.
37 Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.5.16–18: ‘When will they reach that standard of obedience to their rulers, seeing that they make contempt of rulers a point of honour? Or when will they attain that harmony, seeing that, instead of working together for the general good, they are more envious and bitter against one another than against the rest of the world, are the most quarrelsome of men in public and private assemblies, most often go to law with one another, and would rather make profit of one another so than by mutual service, and while regarding public affairs as alien to themselves, yet fight over them too, and find their chief enjoyment in having the means to carry on such strife? . . . No, no, Pericles, don’t think the wickedness of the Athenians so utterly past remedy. Don’t you see what good discipline they maintain in their fleets, how well they obey the umpires in athletic contests, how they take orders from the choir-trainers as readily as any?’
38 See the following recent works: de Baecque 2008; Witt 2013.
39 Message 2013: 13.
40 Plato, Menexenus 243e.
41 On the topic of the arktoi for Artemis in Brauron, see Kowalzig 2007: 284. On the parthenoi dancing for the Erechtheids, see Euripides TrGF 65. On Eleusinian cults, which included female dances, see Pausanias 1.38.6. On women’s participation in choral activity in Athens, see Budelmann and Power 2015.
42 See Wilson 2000: 28–31.
43 See Azoulay 2014.
44 Castoriadis 1986: 223–4.
45 Osborne 1981–3: III, D6, l. 13.
46 IG II2 7863 (= Hansen 1989: no. 595). The link with has been convincingly proposed by Osborne 1981–3: I-II, 34. See also on this epitaph the remarks of Vlassopoulos 2015: 125–6.
47 IG II2 3453.
48 Xenophon, Hellenica 2.4.38–43.
49 Georgoudi 1993.
50 IG I3 35. See Blok 2014.
51 Keesling 2012.
52 See, recently, Kamen 2013; Canevaro and Lewis 2014; Zurbach 2014; Ismard 2015: ch. 3; Azoulay and Ismard 2018.