| With the publication of The Ancient City in 1864, Fustel de Coulanges established what was to be the dominant theme of the relationship between the individual and the city in the ancient world for more than a century. "In such a society," Coulanges wrote, "individual liberty could not exist. The citizen was subordinate in everything and without any reserve, to the city; he belonged to it body and soul." More importantly, Coulanges goes on to write:; The ancients, therefore, knew neither liberty in private life, liberty in education, nor religious liberty. They had not even the idea of it. The human person counted for very little against that holy and almost divine authority which was called the country or the state. For Coulanges there was no separation between the individual and the city; society was a fusion of the two--inseparably linked and indistinguishable. In other words, the public and the private spheres were collapsed.; This picture of Athenian society dominated the academic world until the late 1960s and 1970s when ancient historians and classicists began to turn to the Oratorical tradition to add to their knowledge of Athenian life. Oratorical speeches were used to supplement other ancient texts such as Aristotle's Athenian Constitution, to construct more accurate accounts of legal and social practices. The larger theoretical issues, however, have remained substantially untouched, partially due, perhaps, to different disciplinary emphases, and partially due to the lack of interest on the part of political theorists. Political theory remains, by and large, wedded to Coulanges' model of Athenian society.; Specifically, the goal of this dissertation is to move the conception of Athenian society as fusion of state and individual--Coulanges' model, and the model that is dominant in political theory today--toward a model which reflects a stronger, although not absolute, dichotomy between the public and the private spheres in Athenian society in the fourth century sc B.C., as well as make tentative movements toward a "rights-based" model of Athenian democracy. |
