There is a moment in Camaraderie
when interruption is not to be understood.
I cannot bear an interruption.
This is the shining joy;
the time of not-to-end.
On the street we smile.
We go
in different directions
down the imperturbable street.
Gwendolyn Brooks, Riot
Movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter have challenged the assertions of white supremacy and neoliberalism through peaceful protest, organized democratically, in recent years. Two twenty-first-century political theorists comment on the legacy of ancient Athenian democracy, which seems at present to be threatened by antidemocratic tendencies, generated by the waves of supposedly “populist,” really white supremacist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, nativist politics in the US and Europe. The French theorist Jacques Rancière, in books including Hatred of Democracy, has responded to this growing tendency to turn neoliberal states into technocratic oligarchies.1 In a book titled Against Democracy, Jason Brennan, professor of strategy, economics, ethics, and public policy at Georgetown University, calls into question the practices of democracy in the US.2 In contrast to Rancière, Brennan’s treatment of democracy focuses on voting. He divides the voting population in the US into three categories: “hobbits,” “hooligans,” and “Vulcans.” He defines the first category in this way: “Hobbits are mostly apathetic and ignorant about politics. They lack strong, fixed opinions about most political issues. . . . They have little, if any, social scientific knowledge; they are ignorant not just of current events but also of the social scientific theories and data needed to evaluate as well as understand these events” (4). His second category thus: “Hooligans are the rabid sports fans of politics. They have strong and largely fixed worldviews. . . . They may have some trust in the social sciences, but cherry-pick data and tend only to learn about research that supports their own views. They are overconfident in themselves and what they know” (5). Note that the criterion for these classifications is knowledge of the social sciences; Professor Brennan is himself a social scientist. His third category: “Vulcans think scientifically and rationally about politics. Their opinions are strongly grounded in social science and philosophy. They are self-aware, and only as confident as the evidence allows. Vulcans can explain contrary points of view in a way that people holding those views would find satisfactory. They are interested in politics, but at the same time, dispassionate, in part because they actively try to avoid being biased and irrational. They do not think everyone who disagrees with them is stupid, evil, or selfish” (5). In other words, Vulcans resemble Professor Brennan.
Brennan proposes abolishing democracy as we know it. He argues that democracy, or voting, doesn’t work, citing numerous social scientific studies. Based on their findings, he concludes that political participation “corrupts” people, making them more dogmatic, and more ignorant (chapter 3, pp. 54–74). One vote in a democracy has no significance, so people don’t bother to be informed. Voting does not empower people (chapter 4). Democracy is incompetent (chapter 6). And in a democracy people who do know, people like him, are controlled by those who do not know (chapter 6).
In place of democracy, Brennan proposes what he calls “epistocracy,” that is, rule by those who know: “As noted in chapter 2, political knowledge is not evenly dispersed among all democratic groups. Whites on average know more than blacks, people in the Northeast know more than people in the South, men know more than women, middle-aged people know more than the young or old, and high-income people know more than the poor. In general, people who are already advantaged are much better informed than the disadvantaged. Most poor black women, as of right now at least, would fail even a mild voter qualification exam” (226). Furthermore, he writes: “The disadvantaged citizens . . . might know what kinds of outcomes would serve their interests, but unless they have tremendous social scientific knowledge, they are unlikely to know how to vote for politicians or policies that will produce these favored outcomes” (227). (“Tremendous” there, “tremendous social knowledge,” language very reminiscent of former US president Donald Trump.) As a consequence of these findings, Brennan proposes that only social scientists should vote, and rule. Or, that those who are permitted to vote would need to pass a qualifying examination to vote. Or that those who perform well on such a test should have more votes than those who receive lower marks on the examination. Or that random selection would occur, of panels of citizens who would spend many hours being educated on the issues of the day, and who would then be allowed to vote and decide on all questions.
Brennan acknowledges that there are some problems with the solutions he proposes. For example, during the Jim Crow era, he notes, “governments deprived blacks of the rights to vote by requiring them to pass nearly impossible literacy tests” (223). He does not take account of the myriad obstacles to voting we continue to see in elections. But his response to the Jim Crow era deprivations is that “governments claimed these tests had an epistocratic purpose, when in fact they only had a racist purpose. These tests were administered in bad faith. They were designed to be impossible to pass, and whites were not required to take them.” But, he adds, “the fact that governments used to hide their racism beneath an epistocratic disguise does not show us that epistocratic exams are inherently objectionable. Instead, the question we would need to ask about any such exam is just how badly it would be abused today” (224). This is the thinking of a naive, cunning, or willfully ignorant political theorist, who assumes that objectionable racist motives might not now determine how such tests would be administered.
This scholar’s work has been widely read and taken seriously in the academic and popular press. And his argument was followed up in a more recent book, the cover of which bears an endorsement by Brennan, entitled 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less. The author, Garett Jones, articulates his “central idea: that in most of the rich countries, we’ve taken democracy, mass voter involvement in government, at least a little too far.”3 One of the reforms he advocates echoes Brennan’s: “Giving a little more weight to more informed groups of voters, especially in the upper house of a national legislature, might be just the epistocratic nudge that representative democracy needs” (179). He relies on the ancient thinkers Aristotle and Polybius, as well as Machiavelli, who he believes preferred “Democracy Plus Oligarchy” (181). A reform that Jones’s readers might consider: “Requiring college degrees to vote in elections—but only to the upper house of parliament” (188). Turning toward oligarchy, perpetuating and even increasing racist, gender, and class discrimination, appeals to a growing body of propagandists in Western so-called democracy, who seek to turn back even the most modest of democratic procedures in their countries, which in fact have never instituted the direct democracy of the ancient city at the origins of this political form, nor its filling of political and administrative offices in the city through the drawing of lots.
In this chapter, I describe the ancient democracy, discuss its legacy, and point to the ways in which contemporary antidemocratic thinkers share some of the assumptions of ancient writers about the democratic swarm. I look also to a wider range of participants in the life of the ancient city, who brought new forms of knowledge to the polity, comic poets as well as statesmen, shoemakers as well as philosophers, as exemplified in the comedy Women at the Assembly, which depicts a communist takeover of Athens by its women, who redistribute sexual pleasure and the economic resources of their city.
Ancient Old Comedy and its comic choruses intervened in moments of political crisis in classical Athens, and in some instances promoted a radical democracy, a communism that extended even to women. Such comedy allowed for laughter, laughter at the powerful, at the demos itself, at the audience itself, a welcome instrument in troubled times, including our own, and in our case, disrupting the norms of condescending sociological debate. It is too easy to “cancel” Old Comedy for its hostile and demeaning remarks about women, about slaves, and targeted sexual practices, and ignore the fact that ancient comedy makes fun of everyone in sight and enjoys collective laughter as well as the presence in the city of others, slaves, farmers, women, foreigners. The ancient democracy took advantage of the complexity of the composition of the city’s population, not relying on “experts.”
Robert Sobak, in an article entitled “Sokrates among the Shoemakers,” offers a telling critique of the antidemocratic propagandists, based on his analysis of the richness of association, in the assembly and in “free spaces,” in a “collective, emergent intelligence refined through usage in and outside of the institutions of the state,” among all the classes in Athenian democracy:4
Telling any citizen-shoemaker within a strongly democratic system to “stick to his last” is a fundamentally political criticism. It is an attempt to short-circuit democratic knowledge production and dispersal, first by undermining the way nonelite knowers are evaluated, and then by excluding them from the epistemic system altogether. It is the first step on the road from a robust and diverse epistemic polyculture to a carefully crafted and tight controlled managerial monoculture. This disregard for and disaggregation of the socially constructed common knowledge of common people strikes at the very foundation of a truly democratic conception of politike techne, and thence at the ultimate success of demokratia as a governing system.5
The debate about democracy in the present should look back to this more multiplicitous understanding of the ancient city, its comic theater included.
The classical democratic Athenian polis of the fifth century BCE was fundamentally different from the great nearby empires of Egypt, Persia, and eventually Rome.6 Greek citizens of democratic cities knew their leaders, they had no divine emperors, no extensive imperial bureaucracies or standing armies. The average polis relied on its own citizens for protection. The richest citizens in the classical period served as cavalry, because they could afford the maintenance of horses; a heavily armed infantry was an important force in warfare, and its hoplites, or foot soldiers, provided their own equipment, and were of “middling” status.7 These soldiers were amateurs, a militia that defended their territory. The poorest of citizens, along with some slaves, rowed in the navy’s fleet and contributed to some important victories of the classical age, the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.8
A polis could be governed in any of several ways: monarchy, Greek for “rule by one man,” meant a king, who inherited his hegemony over the city; aristocracy denoted rule by “the best,” as they called themselves, rule by hereditary nobles; in oligarchies, control was held by “a few,” oligoi, often a small group of the wealthy. Tyranny was rule by a monarch who had usurped rule, taken power by illegal means. And then there was democracy, rule by the demos, “the people.” This brings us to Athens itself, where, from the sixth to fourth century BCE, its citizens conducted a radical experiment in governance. Instead of creating an oligarchy, as did the Spartans, through a period of class struggle, conflicts between the rich and the poor, the Athenians extended to all citizens the right and duty of governing their polis. Their democracy, “rule by the people,” has different connotations for different thinkers. Demos, the crucial word, can mean either “all the people,” that is, all the citizens, or, alternatively, the “poor,” for some, “the mob,” “the rabble.” This distinction becomes crucial, especially in the work of antidemocratic thinkers.
In a fascinating argument concerning the ontological status of ancient Athens, Greg Anderson presents an alternative understanding of demos, one that refuses the imposition of contemporary and anachronistic social scientific categories of analysis:
This communion [koinonia] known as “the Athenians” was a unitary, free-standing agency in its own right. Unlike, say, liberal civil society, it was not merely an aggregate of pregiven individuals. In the thought and practice of the Athenians, their koinonia was an ontologically autonomous thing-in-itself, a polyadic person or self that existed prior to and apart from themselves as discrete persons. As the human personality or essence of the polis, it was a kind of ageless primordial superorganism, one that had been continually present in Attica since the time of those first earth-born kings. As such, it had a certain subjectivity, a life, will, and an interest all its own. The Athenians called this living persona of their polis simply ho Demos, “the People.”9
Is the comic chorus, a “polyadic” swarm, not a better way of representing this multiple, heterogeneous, active being than the abstractions of political science?
The Athenians understood themselves mythically, as Anderson notes, to be autochthonous, that is, to have sprung from their land themselves, like plants, as recounted earlier, and claimed that this autochthony gave some residents the right to citizenship and to privileges denied to slaves and foreigners, privileges such as parrhesia. Such myths justified landownership and the distinction of citizens from other residents of the city.
In Athens, by the early sixth century BCE, there seem to have been intense social conflicts based on economic differences. The city was dominated by its aristocrats, who traced their ancestry back to heroes and gods. They owned the best land, met in an assembly to govern, and interpreted the laws as they saw fit. Noble landowners forced poorer farmers into sharecropping; some of these people, falling into debt, were sold into slavery. The poet and lawmaker Solon, mentioned in the chapter preceding on parrhesia, asked to help the city to avoid tyranny, the seizure of power by a strong man, was chosen to reform the state. Debt bondage remained a feature of the polis, but Solon freed former citizens from slavery, brought back enslaved Athenians who had been sold to other cities, made enslavement of citizens illegal, and reformed the structure of the governance of the polis, paving the way for democracy.10 Other reforms followed, as did a tyrant, Peisistratos. The Athenians told an inspiring and anachronistic fictional account of the end of the tyranny and the advent of democracy. Hippias, son of the tyrant, inherited tyrannical rule, his brother insulted the sister of an aristocrat, Harmodius; he along with his male lover, Aristogeiton, assassinated the tyrant’s son and were tortured and killed. The Athenians looked to their courageous act and their martyrdom as the foundation of democracy, and set up a monument to the two lovers in the agora, the central civic space of the city.11
There were further developments eroding the old kinship and tribal hierarchies of the Athenian polis, and eventually the central government included an assembly of all the citizens. Various offices were set up to administer the business of the city-state. Most officers of the city were eventually chosen by lot, that is, by lottery, by a drawing, by chance. These procedures proved very important for another of the twenty-first-century thinkers I mentioned earlier, Jacques Rancière, because it meant that any citizens who so desired had to be prepared to govern, to be magistrates, treasurers, tax collectors, to be equal to the tasks necessary for the city-state to function. All these officers of the state were assumed to be equal, to be equal to all other citizens, in the governance model called isonomia, “equality in law,” as opposed to eunomia, “excellence in law,” the justification of aristocratic or elite rule.
Officeholders underwent an audit automatically at the end of their service. Jurors for the legal system of the city were also chosen by lot, were understood to be equal to all other citizens, and were paid by the state, as we saw in the comedy Wasps. Eventually citizens were paid to attend performances of tragedy and comedy, as noted earlier. In various ways, the city distributed funds to its citizens.12 The wealthy were required to contribute to various institutions of the city, including the fleet and the dramatic festivals.13 The Athenian democracy, with its various instruments of governance by the people, was an anomalous institution, especially in light of other neighboring societies of this period, such as various Mesopotamian regimes, and Egypt, ruled by the pharaoh, a god on earth. The Athenians were their government.
There were exclusions to this rule by the people. Some of the residents in the ancient city of Athens were not descended from the ancestors who themselves had sprouted from the land. There were residents who had moved to Athens from other Greek cities, citizens in their own land but not in Athens. “Metics,” those non-Athenian free persons who lived in the city, were not eligible to participate in deliberations in the assembly, but were required to serve in person in the military.14 All women, even if born into the citizen class, were excluded from the democracy, had no role in the political life of the city, could not attend the assembly, nor speak, nor vote, nor testify in legal cases, nor serve on juries.
And there was a large body of slaves. Some of these slaves were born in Athenian households to slave mothers, although their fathers might have been their citizen-masters; they could be citizen-class infants, especially daughters, exposed to die or to be claimed by strangers, as was Oedipus. The slaves were sometimes prisoners of war, or people of any status captured by kidnappers and sold. In the later fourth century, after the conquest of the Greeks by the Macedonians, between 317 and 307 BCE, a later tyrant, Demetrius of Phaleron, is said to have ordered a general census of Attica, which arrived at the following figures: 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics or foreign, non-Athenian residents, and 400,000 slaves. These figures are disputed; in fact no one knows precisely how many slaves there were in the city, and what percentage of its residents were free persons, or citizens.
A famous and curmudgeonly Athenian citizen objected to the resemblance of arrogant Athenian slaves to free citizens and the annoying difficulty of determining who was slave and who free, although wealthier Athenians tried to set theirs apart from the “common” slaves and even poorer citizens, with finer clothing, representations of domestic intimacy, and more heroic physiognomy on funeral monuments. Slaves could often be differentiated ethnically from Athenian citizens; they bore names that identified them as “other,” referring for example to red hair, Xanthias, or “barbarian” descent, Thratta, of Thracian origin. Such naming recalls Orlando Patterson’s description of slavery as “social death.” And the Athenian legal system required that slaves, when their evidence was required in a legal trial, be tortured, as made clear by the scene in the Frogs in which the god Dionysos is threatened with such treatment.15
The legacy of ancient Athens is contradictory, including not just a radical and extraordinary insistence on equality among all citizens, but also a de facto oligarchic shape, as described above, and colonialism and engagement in imperialist adventures.16 For a brief period in the fifth century BCE the city-state of Athens dominated many other cities and enforced its hegemony over the eastern Mediterranean. Historians record episodes of savagery conducted against disobedient allies and enemies—the crucifixions of rebels, resisters clubbed to death in the marketplace of the Milesians, “now spectators as well as beneficiaries of imperial repression,” according to Plutarch in his Life of Pericles (28.2). Citizens of the island of Melos were massacred, their women and children enslaved.
Yet even the mutilation or drowning of enemy rowers did not prevent the Athenians from composing, performing, and sharing with allies, subjects, and foreigners the tragedies in which they emphasized Athenian mercy and hospitality toward the needy, and the benefits that these others should provide to the city and its empire in exchange.17 Yet classical historian John Ma, in discussing the ambitions of the fifth-century Athenian polis, insists: “I still believe in the usefulness of the concept of ‘empire’ [for Athens]: coercion, centralization, economic exploitation all characterize the Athenian arche”; and adds: “Empires cannot exist without torture, atrocities, and self-conscious, spectacular violence.”18
The Athenian state, as noted, relied internally on slaves. The philosopher Aristotle, long resident in Athens, made arguments in his Politics in favor of “natural slavery”; these principles were used for millennia to justify slavery. In his Politics he says: “One that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master, and one that can carry out labour with his body is subject and naturally a slave” (1252a32–34). “One who is a human being belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave, and a person is a human being belonging to another if being a man he is an article of property, and an article of property is an instrument for action” (1254a15–18). “He is by nature a slave who is capable of belonging to another (and that is why he does so belong), and who participates in reason so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it . . . ; the usefulness of slaves diverges little from that of the animals” (1254b21–28). These concepts, once applied to a great variety of enslaved persons, and especially to those the Athenians and other Greeks called “barbarians,” were racialized in the early modern era, as Africans and indigenous Americans were denoted as “natural slaves,” needing the governance of white masters.
These ideas were embraced and developed in the United States, especially in antebellum slaveholding states, and pro-slavery ideologues often made reference to the example of classical antiquity, a period of freedom for some enabled by the slavery of others. William Harper, in his Memoir on Slavery, argued for the great republics of the past as models for the US. Another pro-slavery polemicist wrote: “How came the distinguished heathen Republics of Greece and Rome to flourish, having the Institution of slavery as the foundation of their Constitution? The institution of slavery ever has been and ever will be the only sure foundation of all republican governments.”19 The naming of Athens, Georgia, site of the University of Georgia, in 1801, confirmed the imagined kinship of two slaveholding polities.
The afterlife of ancient democracy is complex: there was radical equality, offices held only by lot, by sortition, all citizens equal, officeholders audited at the end of their terms of office. But democracy was also a de facto oligarchy, based on nativism, in which only the autochthonous participated, where women, foreigners, and slaves were excluded, and where the economy relied on the labor of the slaves, the judicial system on the torture of slaves. The founders of the American state based their model of government not on Athenian democracy, which was seen as dangerously populist, but rather on the Roman republic, which protected itself against what was seen as the unruly mob, the demos, and throughout the republican period resisted any such developments as were seen in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The Romans maintained a group of senators, or elders, wiser heads, who prevented their state from falling into the hands of the people and of such popular reformers as the Gracchi.
The constitution of the American state preserved the ancient and time-honored institution of slavery, established a senate that was not based on arithmetic representation but, geometrically, on individual state’s power, two members, per state. And as we have seen in recent elections, the popular, democratic vote does not determine the winner of the presidency. In other ways, the US has perpetuated some of the worst elements of the ancient Athenian state, relying on slavery, even after abolition, and on torture to achieve its ends.
Lisa Lowe’s book The Intimacies of Four Continents argues that the abolition of legal slavery in the British Empire, and eventually throughout the Americas, long sought after, and supported by some Christian groups in Britain and the United States, in fact resulted in the virtual enslavement of new populations.20 The liberal narrative of “freedom” relied on the extension of unfreedom to others. Chinese “coolies,” for example, were brought to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, after the slave trade with Africa was abolished, and after the reproduction of the slave population in such sites as Jamaica failed, in order to replace the workforce. These new workers, although not technically “slaves” in the sense that they were the private property of their masters, retained many of the features of enslaved persons. In his seminal work on world slavery, Orlando Patterson discusses some of these phenomena, situations of limited slavery, of indentured servitude, and the like.21 In the context of the American South, in Slavery by Another Name, Douglas Blackmon shows how its criminal justice system, which targeted African American men, former slaves and descendants of slaves, arresting them for petty crimes and then selling them for enforced labor to mine owners, construction companies, and other corporations, simply perpetuated the slave system in another form.22 Those caught in these circumstances never achieved their freedom from confinement and forced labor, as they were condemned for resistance within the prisons, labor camps, and workforces of the postwar South, and as the fines they were assessed mounted and could never be paid.
Scholars such as Blackmon and Edward Baptist, who wrote The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and American Capitalism, have detailed slavery’s long shadow over the present. Along with the filmmaker Ava Duvernay, my colleague Dennis Childs, in his book Slaves of the State: Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary, has examined how the criminal justice system of the present perpetuates slavery, how the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution abolished slavery for all with the notable exception of those held in penal institutions. The US military has continued to torture people overseas, in such sites as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and there is now an archive at the University of Chicago containing over 10,000 documents that detail two decades of torture of black men by Chicago police officers.23 Evidence from that archive proves that “over 100 black men were tortured by officers in order to force confessions, drive them to incriminate co-defendants, or to intimidate possible witnesses to police brutality.”
There is no reason to think that such practices were confined to Chicago, and the record of continuing killings of African Americans by police officers throughout this country stands as an extreme example of racialized torture, provoking international protest. An article in the Washington Post published on March 5, 2017, describes a lawsuit claiming that “tens of thousands of immigrants detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were forced to work for $1 a day, or for nothing at all—-a violation of federal anti-slavery laws. . . . The lawsuit, filed in 2014 against one of the largest private prison companies in the country, reached class-action status . . . after a federal judge’s ruling. That means the case could involve as many as 60,000 immigrants who have been detained.”24 Nativism, white supremacy, racism, slavery, and torture persist, and there is no reason to believe that these practices will cease.
Recent history, the rise of so-called populism, votes for Brexit in the UK, for Marine Le Pen in France, for Donald Trump in the US, have resulted from and reawakened antidemocratic sentiments. The distinction I cited earlier, between demos meaning “all the people,” or demos meaning “the poor,” had affected antidemocratic theory even in antiquity. Here is Socrates in Plato’s Republic, before Alain Badiou’s rewriting, as he condemns democracy for leading inexorably to tyranny: “Then in democracy, there’s no compulsion either to exercise authority if you are capable of it, or to submit to authority if you don’t want to; you needn’t fight if there’s a war, or you can wage a private war in peacetime if you don’t like peace; and if there’s any law that debars you from political or judicial office, you will none the less take either if they come your way. It’s a wonderfully pleasant way of carrying on in the short run, isn’t it?” (558a) “Democracy . . . doesn’t mind what the habits and background of its politicians are; provided they profess themselves the people’s friends, they are duly honoured.” (558c). A young man’s “internal oligarchy starts turning into a democracy.” “[His desires] lead in a splendid garlanded procession of indolence, licence, extravagance, and shamelessness. They [these desires] praise them all extravagantly and call insolence good breeding, licence liberty, extravagance generosity and shamelessness courage” (559e). “[The democratic man] lives from day to day, indulging the pleasure of the moment. One day it’s wine, women and song, the next water to drink and a strict diet; one day it’s hard physical training, the next indolence and careless ease, and then a period of philosophic study. Often he takes to politics and keeps jumping to his feet and saying or doing whatever comes into his head” (561c-d). His interlocutor replies: “A very good description of the life of one who believes in liberty and equality.”
So, what is to be done? Is the answer the abolition of democracy, the antidemocratic changes urged by Jason Brennan, following in Plato’s footsteps? As Sobak notes, “Plato’s complaint about the rudeness of donkeys on the streets of the democratic polis (Resp 563c) . . . is a smear directed at workmen in particular and the demokratia in general. But if read from a different, nonelite perspective, it hints at the existence of a cultural landscape where freedom of speech, equality under the law, and a robust, diverse economy, in which men and women of all statuses and classes participated and mingled, helped fashion the city of Athens into an especially fluid ‘free space.’”25 Ancient Greek comedy puts on stage the range of these participants, men and women of all statuses and classes, even animals, in rowdy association, and challenges the complacencies of Western liberalism based on ancient models.
The comedy Ecclesiazusae, translated as Women at the Assembly, sometimes Assemblywomen, is a fine example of ancient comedy’s speculative staging of “politics.”26 It doesn’t really matter if this was the intention of “Aristophanes-as-author,” or if the play is a parody, a satire, a mocking of the strange utopian schemes circulating in Athens at the beginning of the fourth century BCE, after its defeat by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War.27 If the democracy, after several oligarchic coups, and humiliation in war, attempted to reconfigure itself after it had executed Socrates, if in the moment of confusion or opening that followed their defeat, the Athenians had tried to remake themselves, refashion their democracy, then this play presents a fascinating intervention in the field of possibilities or impossibilities.
Once again, I look in particular at the collective, at the ways in which the comic utopian impulse can inhabit another temporality, another spatiality, another order of identity, and in which comic collective practice takes on a life of its own. In this play the chorus is made up of “Attic women,” gynaikon Attikon. The role of the chorus is somewhat reduced from that which we have seen in other plays, such as the Birds, where the chorus plays an active role, establishing a sort of alternative sequence to a plot dependent on the characters and resolution of their dramatic issues. In Women at the Assembly the Attic chorus members enter separately, without the procession typical of some comedies. They are often absent from the action, which takes place between various principal women and others in supporting roles. The play, unusually, lacks a parabasis, the address directly to the audience, sometimes in what seems to be the voice of the playwright himself. And songs that typically divided the episodes from one another also are lacking in this play. Can these elements be explained by the fact that the premise of the entire play is the collective enfranchisement of all the Attic women? Or that the parabasis would seem misplaced in the mouth of the chorus leader here, or of a revolutionary, communist and utopian woman, the central character Praxagora? Her imaginative, strong-willed assertions and plans may themselves express a swarming potential in the collective of Attic women, an atmosphere, a Stimmung of solidarity between chorus and character. Or is relative diminution of the chorus due to the fact that the play, dated tentatively to about 390 BCE, was written after the defeat of the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, in a period of questioning of political arrangements, and in a moment when the collective voice of the demos has been called into question by the collapse of its hegemony and empire? As elsewhere, we can see comedy registering a political crisis, like that experienced in the United States after the presidential election of 2016, the assault on the Capitol by the former president’s mob, and a desire to rethink, to reformulate, politics in light of that crisis.
The chorus leader speaks early in Women at the Assembly, calling her allies into action. Several women enter separately, in an atypical arrival of the chorus. The citizen-class woman Praxagora addresses the crowd, some of whom have speaking roles; they are men dressed as men with sticks and in Laconian boots and men’s cloaks, wrapped tight and sporting beards. After some planning they are urged to lean on their sticks, to sing a rural elders’ song. And the chorus leader addresses them as “men,” andres (285), and reminds the chorus members that they must say “men,” and never forget their transvestism and their disguise.
The complexities of the conventional cross-dressing of ancient Athenian drama are exaggerated here, for comic effect, in a strange set of reversals. The women, dressed as men to pass for men in the assembly, are in fact male chorus members pretending to be women pretending to be men to pass for assemblymen. And the chorus leader rouses them to action: “Let’s go to the Assembly, men! (ondres = o andres)” (285). (S)he addresses them with men’s names, errs in calling them women, and then corrects herself as they dance together, as they dance off.
One of the actual men actually attending describes the arrival of an unusually large crowd at the assembly’s gathering, but notes that “we thought they all looked like shoemakers; really, the Assembly was awfully pale faced to behold” (385–87). Women, as on Attic vases, were conventionally thought to have pale skin, painted in white on vases, and cobblers, because they spent their days inside, were thought to resemble them. Shoemakers appear in Plato’s work, and in the reflections of Jacques Rancière on workers. Here they may represent a line of flight, a way of understanding the presence of women in the assembly as an incommensurable, anomalous, disruptive category among the heterogeneous population of the city. As Robert Sobak argues in his fascinating essay on social interaction in the democracy, “Does the shoemaker’s knowledge then not go beyond the sandal? . . . One way to begin to answer this question is to recognize that discrete, strictly bounded expertise does not exist in the world of lived experience, which is made up of individual and group relationships, and is where epistemic indiscretion helps define humans as social animals.”28 These shoemaker-like women, social animals if not literally animal, represent inhabitants of the city, part of the demos, a line of flight into the reality of the demos, the polis, which contained far more than the citizen body and its exclusive assembly. As Sobak further notes, “The fact that metics, slaves, and women, for example, had no formal political agency did not render them superfluous to the epistemic functioning of the city.”29 Sobak points to the network of associations, of knowledges, that exceeds a traditional analysis based on the city’s formal institutions and their representations in elite sources.
Some of the most salient work of the French theorist Jacques Rancière comes in engagement with the populace, with ancient democracy, and in critiques of the utopian Plato, as in The Philosopher and His Poor. Considering the noble lie of the Republic, Rancière points to the impossible and troubling presence of the artisan in the city. In the division of labor in the ideal polis, the artisan, the poor man, is required not to think: “The rights of philosophic virtue depend upon their strict separation from the virtue of shoemaking.”30 The artisan “is not a free man sharing in the virtue of the city, but neither is he a slave. . . . A false free man and part-time slave, the artisan belongs neither to his trade nor to the one who assigns him work. . . . The artisan is not simply a lowly being to be kept away from the government of the city. Properly speaking, he is an impossible being, an unthinkable nature.”31
In the Women at the Assembly the character Khremes gives a messenger’s speech describing the activities of the chorus members, the women disguised as men, looking like shoemakers, who had come to what he assumed was a special meeting to deliberate concerning the “salvation . . . of the city” (soterias tes poleos). Was the polis, then, in a crisis mode, and is the communist proposal of the women a speculation about that salvation, rather than a satire, as most readers assume? Khremes describes a “pale, nice-looking youth” who rose and addressed the demos, and who advocated giving the city (polin) over to the women (427–30). The mass of “shoemakers” made a lot of noise, and applauded this plan. This youth had also noted on their behalf that the women, sworn to secrecy about their rites, never reveal the mysteries of their festival, the Thesmophoria. The assembled group ended by voting to give the city over to the women. “That seemed to be the only thing that hasn’t been tried” (456–57). The observation seems to suggest a period of reinvention and experiment in the city, or at least of speculation about how to go forward in this time of difficulty for Athens. The extremity of this choice may be emphasized here, its ludicrousness, its hilarious impossibility. But there is also a utopian thrust, a leap into the void that has been created by the loss of empire and the exhaustion of the city in a time of political turmoil and rivalry among various states concerning the hegemony of the mainland. The male character Blepyros, husband of Praxagora, consoles himself concerning the prospect of these changes, including forced sex, with an evocation of ancient wisdom: “There is an ancestral saying, that however brainless or foolish our policies, all our affairs will turn out for the best” (473–75).
The chorus enters, stealthily approaching, urging caution lest the women and their deception be exposed. They re-equip themselves, returning to what they were before (499a–b). Praxagora addresses them as they all return to normal, readying themselves for new responsibilities in their former garments, now beardless. The metatheatricality of all this is quite apparent, actors, young men, pretending to be women pretending to be young men and then taking off their beards, as part of theatrical costume, and returning to their pretense of being women. Greek drama, saturated as it was with transvestism, reaches new such heights here, and calls attention to the polymorphous mutability of gender roles.32 Such mutability is exploited in the plot that follows, where the chorus recedes and the characters interact in ways that stress the revolutionary possibilities and dangers of female rule. Other references to gynaecocracy stress the dangers of the rule of women, in the form of Lemnian women who murder their husbands, or the Amazons who appear in many works of art, vases and sculpted friezes, in combat with the Greeks.33 These women were seen as monstrous, violating the codes of gender difference, and supporting the general Athenian view that women should not be given weapons. Here, in Aristophanes’ comedy, the women use their domestic skills and economic power to govern benignly, and to gratify their sexual desires, notoriously excessive and unsatisfied in the gender ideology of the Athenians.
Praxagora lists the benefits that will flow from the women’s rule, among them “no more poor people” (me peneta medena, 566). The chorus supports her plans, asking her to have a “philosophical mind” (phrena philosophon), in language that foreshadows the utopianism of Plato:
For it’s to the prosperity of all alike
that from your lips comes a bright idea
to gladden the lives of the city’s people (demon)
with countless benefits;
now’s the time to reveal its potential.
Yes, our city (polis) needs
some kind of sage scheme;
describe it in full, making sure only
that none of it’s ever been
said or done before;
they hate to watch the same old stuff
over and over again!
(574–80)
If we consider the reading of Alain Badiou of Plato’s Republic, and its implicit utopianism, then this comic vision of the future, the willingness to entertain radically new arrangements, a commune-ism of property and daily life, anticipate or echo the innovations proposed in the philosopher’s text. The novelty that the crowd, the spectators, demand in comic presentation is transferred, or linked, or asserted in relation to the novelty required of political ideas in this time of searching in the city.
Praxagora’s speeches that follow emphasize this novelty, which continues to refer ambiguously to both the ideas on governance that she proposes, and the comic situation in which women dominate. Although she expresses anxiety about the audience’s reception of her plan, so unconventional, a neighbor reassures her: “Don’t worry about quarrying new veins: for us, indifference to precedent takes precedence over any other principle of government” (586–87). This reaction seems more like a moment of political theory than a comic speech. And Praxagora goes on to set forth a communist agenda: everyone will own everything in common, and have a living from the same source. She will get rid of the rich and the poor. Her revolutionary plan does not extend explicitly to slaves: “No more rich man here, poor man there, or a man with a big farm and a man without land enough for his own grave, or a man with many slaves and a man without even an attendant (akoloutho). No, I will establish one and the same standard of life for everyone” (591–95). The plan of leveling the bioton, the standard of living, to include all may suggest that everyone, the common, will have the same number of slaves; as is most frequently the case, with the rarest of exceptions, slaves are excluded, or ambiguously not counted among those who make the “common,” the koinon.
Praxagora declares that her first act will be to “communize,” that is, make “common,” koinon again, the land, the silver or money, and everything else that belongs separately to each of them. The women will administer this commonalty, and those who own movable property such as coins will contribute it to this common fund. And in a startling prefiguration of the demand for “communal luxury,” as Kristin Ross designates the aims of the Paris Commune of 1871, Praxagora announces that all will share in the bounty of the common possessions: “No one will be doing anything as a result of poverty, because everyone will have all the necessities: bread, salt fish, barley cakes, cloaks, wine, garlands, chickpeas” (605–7). Although these may not seem like luxury goods to us, they made up the diet of most of the people of ancient Athens, many of whom seemed to have eaten meat only when it was distributed after the sacrificing of animals, rarely consuming expensive rare fish or other delicacies. Wine is clearly, it seems, a necessity, taken for granted as a basic ingredient of a common diet.
The communist, communalist, egalitarian plan realizes the egalitarianism, the isonomia, potential in democratic ideology, the advantages of which are discussed in a famous passage in Herodotus’s Histories. Herodotus puts the argument concerning the best form of government in the mouths of Persian nobles, who, after deposing various contenders for the role of emperor, seem to conduct a seminar in Greek political theory. Otanes, one of the nobles who conspired to defeat the Magi who threatened them, presents the case against monarchy: “A monarch subverts a country’s customs, takes women against their will, and kills men without trial. What about majority rule, on the other hand? In the first place, it has the best of all names to describe it—-equality before the law (isonomie). It is government by lot, it is accountable government, and it refers all decisions to the common people” (3.80, trans. Waterfield).34 The arguments concerning the relative merits of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy had already been introduced in the work of Pindar (Pythian 2), and would be rehearsed later by others, including Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates. Otanes, who loses the debate to those who prefer monarchy, exempts himself and his family from future domination by the emperor. But his arguments, especially the concepts of equality before the law, the selection of officers of the government by lottery, the accountability of the officers of the democracy, their exposure to an audit at the end of their service, and the practice of voting in the assembly on actions of the polis, make a strong case for the values of Athenian and other democracies in the fifth century BCE, practices that Praxagora wants to extend beyond male citizens, to their female counterparts, who will rule as a “majority,” a plethos.
A problem arises when the question of sexual equality looms; Praxagora wants to give the women resources “common to all” as well. “Equality,” koinonia, extends to sexual rights, and the old and ugly women, the ugly and runtish men, will have as much access to sexual pleasure as the beautiful. The question of offspring is settled neatly: a man will not claim children as his own, but the children “will regard all older men of a certain age to be their fathers” (636–37). This radical notion is taken up, with some limitations, not only by Plato in his description of Kallipolis in the Republic, but by other subsequent utopian communities. Praxagora suggests that this practice will protect older men from assault by the younger, since each will assume the other to be a near relation.
Although comedy may have advanced the possibility of freedom for slaves in the utopia of the Birds, where even the tattooed slave bird, the francolin, could find refuge, in Praxagora’s utopia the slaves are not free, and they will do the work. Her husband Blepyros asks: “Who will there be to farm the land?” And she replies: “The slaves (hoi douloi)” (651). It’s as simple as that, in a response that prefigures Aristotle’s reflections on automata, and Herbert Marcuse’s utopian projection of a world in which robots, automata again, will do the labor, allowing for a rich and gratifying cultural and erotic life for human beings. In Praxagora’s fantasy, other human beings take on this role, liberating her and her kind for all manner of pleasures.35
Theft will be eliminated under the new regime, which will be well regulated, like a well-regulated household overseen by a competent mistress. Praxagora will set up ballot boxes in the agora, near Harmodius, one of the two heroes, lovers, mentioned earlier, who were credited with the abolition of the sixth-century Athenian tyranny through their assassination of one of the tyrant’s sons, Hipparchus, in 514. The allusion to this great moment of democratic revolutionary liberation aligns Praxagora’s reforms with those of the Athenian experiment that followed the end of tyranny.
Praxagora also plans to have all the Athenians draw lots, receiving numbers that assign them to different collective dining halls. And women will stop the men on the way home from dining, to offer them lovely girls but requiring them first to gratify those women: “The inferior men (hoi phauloteroi) will chase after the handsome lads, . . . the law says that the pug-nosed and the ugly get first fuck” (702b–6). Rather than a misogynist gesture that condemns the ugly and old women, the law requires all the young to permit the older citizens first choice of sexual partners. As noted, the slaves remain a separate class in this ideal polity; the suggestion is that they are wont to steal away the affections of the free. Therefore, says Praxagora, “slave girls will no longer be allowed to wear makeup (kosmoumenas) and steal away the fond hearts of the free boys. They’ll be allowed to sleep only with slaves, with their pussies trimmed like a woolen barn jacket” (721–24). Free women will be nicely depilated, while the slave women (doulas) will have a clumsy, rustic look.
After these pronouncements comes the first sign of a serious decline in the role of the chorus in this play, and others. The text indicates chorou, that is, a song of the chorus, but does not preserve it before the entrance of a neighbor, and his two male slaves. We cannot know what the indication “chorus” means; is it a sign of a standard, generic song and dance, not composed by the playwright himself, or of a failure in the transmission of the text? In any case, in the fourth century, in the transition from Middle to New Comedy, the role of the chorus, so intensely present in the comedies of the high democratic period of the fifth century, has declined. As K. J. Dover noted some years ago, with respect to the Women at the Assembly and the later play Wealth, “[The] bare indication of a choral song becomes more familiar to us in Wealth, where the total number of lines sung by the chorus is only a dozen, and of those spoken by the chorus-leader only thirty, while one or more manuscripts present khoro no less than seven times. We may—indeed, we must—make allowance for some erroneous insertion of khoro in late antiquity, but even when such allowance has been made it is clear the Ass. and Wealth show a rapid progress in the direction of the ‘uninvolved chorus.’”36 The chorus is beyond “uninvolved.”
In New Comedy of the fourth century BCE, as in Menander’s Dyskolos, noted by Dover, “it seems a fair inference that the comic poet no longer regarded it as part of his own job to write the songs which served simply as entertainment during breaks in the action.”37 Some scholars have disputed the designations “Old,” “Middle,” and “New” for these different moods of comic presentation, arguing that they reflect not historical development, but rather different comic aims. But the differences, this breaking apart of the structure of Old Comedy, does suggest that the chorus comes to be understood as a separate entity in the progress of the drama, that is, as Aristotle argued in relation to tragedy, the plot, and its characters.38 The comedy of the fourth century resembles the Aristotelian reduction of the genre’s essential elements, in a centripetal swerve consistent with the end of the radical democracy of the fifth century. Dover attributes these developments also to “an awareness on his [Aristophanes’] part that comedy could expect much wider popularity in the Greek world—such as tragedy was coming to enjoy—if the elements of Athenian topicality, associated especially with the parabasis, were greatly reduced.”39
In the case of Women at the Assembly, there is no parabasis. It may be that the theme of the play itself, the seizure of power by women and their institution of a radical, communist democracy, inhibited the role of the chorus. The women have become the democracy, and the address to the audience has fallen away. The scenes that follow this diminution of the chorus’s role emphasize the results of the great reforms, which include the material objects of everyday life. Kitchen implements are summoned and line up animatedly, in a parody of a ritual procession, ready to be surrendered to the state in compliance with the new laws, a silent object chorus until some refuse to obey. Bounteous feasts are prepared for all, and another chorus goes missing.
Attention shifts from possessions and communal dining to the sex question, subject of much humor and mockery; the women are libidinous, as always, and eager to set in motion the new plan of equal distribution of eros. A spat between young and old women reveals perhaps not so much concerning the erotic life of women in this society, but rather men’s fantasies about eros, especially that the sex act must figure a penis, or a simulacrum thereof. In any case, the humor, for some, lies in the cat fight between women, and between generations of women, all of whom are seen to rely on dildos for their pleasure. The women in this scene proceed to fight over a young man who enters, as an older woman insists on her right, according to the new law, to possess him first. Although he claims his rights as a free man (eleuthero, 942), she stresses the link between the reforms and the democracy, saying: “If we still are democratizing (ei demokratoumetha), according to the law, to do this is the right thing” (944–45, trans. modified; not Henderson). They are still “doing democracy,” and this time the democracy includes all the citizen-class persons, women as well as men. The women have outvoted the men, and established the new nomoi, new laws, a new version of sexual equality.
The play ends with the invitation to the feast. The comic interlude with the old women is over, and the festivities begin. Blepyros, Praxagora’s husband, relishes the prospect of sex with one of the girls, so perhaps we are meant to assume that he has paid his dues with the older women. Instead of the chorus, the chorus leader speaks to the judges of the dramatic festival, in a parabasis-like speech, asking them to remember the “smart,” sophon, parts of the comedy, and the jokes. And he reminds them to keep their pledge, to judge the choruses (khorous) fairly, to keep in mind, then, all the competitors in the dramatic contest, not acting like hetairas, who remember only their most recent customers.
We haven’t seen much of the chorus, nothing of the chorus’s dancing of course, few of their words in this play, but it now chimes in, and describes the menu with the longest word ever, a fabulous dish, a description of the feast, fit for a hungry, war-weary audience, all its elements strung together:
limpets saltfish sharksteak dogfish
mullets oddfish with savory pickle sauce
thrushes blackbirds various pigeons
roosters pan-roasted wagtails larks
nice chunks of hare marinated in mulled wine
all of it drizzled with honey silphium
vinegar oil spices galore.
(1169–75, trans. modified; Henderson)
This is a feast worthy of the land of Cockaigne, or the Big Rock Candy Mountain, and the chorus, after launching this word picture of paradise, dances off the scene, euai, hos epi nike, euai, euai, euai, “hurray, to victory, hurray, hurray” (1182–83). They will be victors, are victorious, they have changed the city, they have not surrendered, not gone back on their reforms, and although there was a rough spot when the men resisted the new sexual regulations, the play ends ecstatically with this celebration of a luxurious, new, democratic, communist utopia ruled democratically by its women.
The feasting at the end of comic plays like this one, in part a response to food shortages in times of war and siege, can point outside the frame of the dramatic performance, to the festival that contains it. The Dionysiac celebrations incorporated abundance and plenty, a rejoicing at the opening of the new wine, for example, and these scenes have a metatheatrical dimension. The victory hailed at the end of Women at the Assembly can refer simultaneously to the playwright’s or producer’s victory in the dramatic contest, to the women’s victory over the forces that want to suppress their participation in the city’s life, political and erotic, and to a victory of the play’s radical, communist politics, a response to the needs of the city’s poor.
The misogyny and unconcealed hilarity concerning the sexual regulations of this new regime should not detract from the radical innovation of Praxagora’s proposals. In fact, the reforms set forth in her speeches, and endorsed by the women in the assembly, might be seen to extend what I would call the logic of democracy. That is to say, the implicit telos, the “final cause,” of the idea of rule by the demos, the people, all the people of the polis, all the city’s and the country’s inhabitants, male and female, free and slave, Athenian and not, is rule by all, isonomia, equality under the law, just as the call for parrhesia implicates saying, speaking all. The women prefigure a new extension, a new definition of the demos.
As a counter to what I see as a contemporary, interested attempt to label white supremacy and nativism “populism,” or to replace a fuller democracy with “epistocracy,” rule by the learned, I return to the work of Jacques Rancière, who has written extensively about democracy.40 Rancière’s book Hatred of Democracy, first published in 2006, returns to themes of an earlier book called in translation Disagreement, although the title La mésentente might be better rendered as Misunderstanding, or Dissension. In contrast to Jason Brennan, who is “against democracy,” conceived as the right or privilege of voting, Rancière bases his arguments on the question of equality as revealed through the lottery system of ancient democracy. In Disagreement, he makes a distinction between what he calls “politics” and “the police”: “The police is . . . first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise” (29). In contrast to all that is police, Rancière describes politics as “an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration” (29–30). As an example, Rancière cites Jeanne Deroin, who, as a woman, “in 1849, . . . presents herself as a candidate for a legislative election in which she cannot run. In other words she demonstrates the contradiction between a universal suffrage,” that is, the declaration of the rights of human beings, and the governing, policing system that excludes her gender from that universality. “This is the staging of the very contradiction between police logic and political logic” (41).
Rancière relies in this book and subsequently on the distinction I mentioned earlier, between the demos defined as all the people, and the demos as the poor, or, as he puts it, “the part that has no part,” that is, those whose speech, or claims, or demands, or shouts are heard not as discourse, but as noise. For Rancière, democracy is politics. In his view, ancient conservatives, antidemocratic thinkers, invented political theory, political “science,” so called, to control the demos, the people, the poor, and we see this ambition in the work of Plato, who argued for geometric, rather than arithmetic rule, rule by the best, those most deserving of power. That is to say, precisely what we see in the US Senate and the Electoral College—weighting the process in favor of the “best,” the few, the elder, the blest, the wealthiest, as opposed to a one-person, one-vote process. Rancière sees republican government, French and American, as “pastoral rule,” governing through what we might call biopolitics, the managing of the population. And he emphasizes the role of the lottery, the drawing of lots in Athenian democracy, which broke up the presumed naturalness of aristocratic domination, the geometricity of rule by the best, whether senators or epistocrats.
Democracy according to Rancière is “the dissolving of any standard by which nature could give its law to communitarian artifice via the relations of authority that structure the social body. The scandal [of democracy] lies in the disjoining of entitlements to govern from any analogy to those that order social relations, from any analogy between human convention and the order of nature” (Hatred of Democracy, 41). Sortition removes the entitlements to govern of kinship and wealth, puts into practice a radical equality, giving voice to those who have been voiceless. For Rancière, democracy, politics, would be Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus, Occupy around the world, in Hong Kong as well as on Wall Street, Diamond Reynolds live-streaming the police murder of Philando Castile, or Black Lives Matter and the weeks of protest around the world after the murder of George Floyd. Democracy, then, is not an established system of governance for Rancière: “Egalitarian society is only ever the set of egalitarian relations that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts” (96–97). Democracy is singular, and precarious, and comedy can bring it into being on stage.
Although the playwright Aristophanes is often considered to be a reactionary, a conservative at best, Mark Griffith concludes: “There is no evidence at all to suggest that Aristophanes was a radical reactionary, a Spartan sympathizer (Laconizer), a secret oligarch, or anything other than a staunch supporter of the democracy. But democracy of course could be practiced—and imagined—in several different ways among the Athenians, and Aristophanes’ own opinions may well have shifted from time to time during the turbulent years of the Peloponnesian War, especially its later stages.”41 As for democracy, especially as discussed by Jacques Rancière in his work on “disagreement,” or “misunderstanding,” and on the hatred of democracy, we can interpret several of these comedies as exemplifying what he defines as “politics,” the claims of “the part that has no part.”42 Remarkably, the comedies of Aristophanes depict swarms of disenfranchised, unenfranchised actors, and include not just parrhesia, saying it all, the free speech of the citizens ridiculing and insulting the powerful and corrupt, utopian fantasies of the redistribution of wealth, but also the rupture of the social codes that kept women, even citizen women, in their place, in their houses.
And one can imagine the extension of the rights of the demos to include slaves, preeminently those who have “no part.” In the communal, communist redistribution of all that the city possesses in Women at the Assembly, the collection of private property so that it can be shared among all the inhabitants of the city, including the women, there is a radical program that moves toward equality, toward isonomia, equality in the law. The Greek political notions of “the middle,” to meson, and of the “common,” koinon, are relevant to the assemblywomen’s radical reconfiguration of the polis. As potent, and less ambiguous, is the call for koinonia, that is, commonness, communality, communalism, communism, in the giving voice to those who have no part.43 The comic communalism performed in Women at the Assembly draws in its audience, past and present, to a joyful, sometimes hilarious and ecstatic process of egalitarian political praxis.