Kosmos: Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens

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