THE GODS OF POLITICS IN EARLY GREEK CITIESand public opinion, I am perhaps moving too fast, as the gods are now reminding me.
Long before the printing press and the wide diffusion of debates in our eighteenth-century
Europe of only yesterday, in every village-city there were temples with walls and sanctuar-
ies with space: it was there, in the temples of Apollo, Artemis, Hera, Poseidon, and others,
that public documents such as the rules of sacrifice and the decisions of the assembly
werepublished, that is to say, exhibited, posted. Temples and sanctuaries were public
places, open to all. There was no Holy of Holies, and the ‘‘priests’’ were annually elected
magistrates who were expected to give an account of the spending of public money. The
sanctuaries of theagora, the temples on the Acropolis, and the altars scattered through
the countryside were all public places, places of publicity by decision of the council and
the assembly, which could thus make known to all and sundry what they ought to do.
Just as there were gods on theagora, on the acropolis, in the Prytane ̄ion, and in the
council chamber, there were gods for becoming a citizen, for all males born from parents
who lived in the city territory. Such youths had to be presented to the altars and members
of their phratry, and then be accepted into ade ̄me, which was a city in miniature, with its
own assemblies, its own sacrifices, its own particular gods, and its own sanctuaries, which
were used to publicize the decrees passed by thede ̄memembers, thede ̄motes.^5
In a polytheistic society, the gods are everywhere. But not in a random manner. There
are certain domains in which they seem to be concentrated, certain types of experience in
which they are organized in unusual or improbable ways. The multiplicity of gods seems
to make it possible to think through and form an image of a large number of the activities
and problems that people encountered in their social lives. I think we should try to dis-
cover whether or not gods, particular gods, were directly involved in what I shall—if I
may—call ‘‘the autonomy of the political domain in itself.’’
Let me spell this out. I have described the practices of the deliberative assembly and
the repeated and regulated exercises performed by a decision-taking group that progres-
sively comes to think of itself as a unity made from a plurality and that creates for itself
this new public space. All these practices sooner or later, depending on the circumstances,
played their part in forging the by no means ordinary idea ofthe group’s sovereignty over
itself. Yes, sovereignty, and I am of course thinking of those first Greek cities, which
never needed to behead a sovereign or to abolish an ancien re ́gime. But now, as a careful
comparativist, my thoughts also turn to the whole of ‘‘traditional’’ West Africa, which
does not appear to have any ‘‘public places.’’ Indeed, you could even say that there is no
space at all there between the power of the king or royal chieftain and society, which is
organized into clans. The king accumulates in his person all the powers that are dissemin-
ated among the clans and lineages. As the Africanist Alfred Adler puts it, in many cases
the sacralized power that is vested in him leaves no separating gap between his person,
which is set about with prohibitions, and the society, made up of clans and lineages. This
society seems to base its idea of itself on its recognition that the king assumes the (often
weighty) privilege of ensuring the society’s union with the whole collection of the forces
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