MARCEL DETIENNEtarity between deities. As Georges Dume ́zil has stressed, any attentive observer cannot fail
to note the ‘‘structural’’ aspect of Greek culture. Moreover, it is possible to analyze these
networks of relations between the same sets of deities over a full twelve centuries, from
Homer right down to Porphyry. This is a wonderful field for experimentation, and I have
recently begun to explore it in a work on Apollo. It is a very rich seam, crying out to be
exploited.
There may be gods everywhere, but which are the gods of the political domain? What
is so particular about them? Is it not rather surprising that there should be any need for
gods in a space defined by assembly practices whose major object seems to be the affairs
of the human group? What are the gods doing in a space that seems principally concerned
with human matters and is devoted to a Common Good (xuno ̄n) that is the business of
all the group members?
We can study the beginnings of such phenomena in many different societies. Those
that came about in dozens of communities in Italy between the eleventh and the thir-
teenth centuries owe nothing to those that arose among the Cossacks of Zaporojie, in
quite a different history, or to all the ‘‘places for politics’’ that can be detected in the soil
of Graecia Magna or on the shores of the Black Sea. But I believe that the beginnings of
the tiny, first Greek cities deserve the full attention of a comparativist-cum-Hellenist,
fascinated by the ever-changing colors of their ‘‘places for politics,’’ that shimmering
quality which the Greeks calledpoikilo ̄s.
Let me concentrate on three examples of beginnings in the Greek terrain: the precari-
ous city of the Achaeans who came to besiege the town of Priam, the imaginary city of
the Phaeacians; and the early archaeological and material evidence found at Megara
Hyblaea, in Sicily, dating from about 730b.c.
First, theIliad. The Greeks who sailed to Troy hailed from many different places. In
the midst of the ships hauled up onto the beach, they created a space where the Achaeans
assembled to deliberate together. The spot was known as anagora: the word referred at
once to the physical place of the assembly, the men who came there to deliberate, and the
words that they exchanged there. We also know that this space marked out by the warriors
who gathered to speak there contained an ‘‘agora,themis, and the altars of the gods.’’ Let
us, for the moment, leave asidethemisand all that the word evokes in the way of decisions
debated and taken. The most significant point is that altars for the gods were here—for
the gods of all the Greeks? Maybe, maybe not. At any rate, there are gods in this place,
which, by virtue of the series of practices of sharing between the warriors there, may be
called a place of ‘‘equality.’’
Next, the Phaeacians. The name of Nausicaa’s grandfather was Nausithoos. In the
past, he had lived in the neighborhood of the rowdy and violent Cyclops, who despised
the gods and their altars and had no conception of what an assembly, anagora, was. They
exasperated Nausithoos, who decided to move away and eventually came to found the
city of the Phaeacians. He did so as a proto-founder of what we, using a Latin word, came
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