MARCEL DETIENNEof nature, both visible and invisible. On the one hand, we thus find a society that forms
an image of itself through a sacred king; on the other, one in which a certain idea of the
city,Hestia, is formed by a group that, for its part, comes to believe that the sovereignty
of this new unit, the city, resides in itself.
It is possible to observe how this ‘‘sovereignty of the group over itself ’’ operates in
practice. And the gods are directly involved. Let us consider a concrete case. At the end
of the sixth century, somewhere in the mountains of Crete, a little city engaged a scribe,
for a large fee. His name was Spensithios, and he was an expert in purple letters, that is
to say, Phoenician writing. His contract specified that he should set down in writing all
public matters (de ̄mosia), or, to be more precise, both the affairs of the gods and the
affairs of men. The two were kept clearly separate, as is attested by scores of epigraphical
documents. The contract also stated that Spensithios of Crete should be responsible for
the management of public sacrifices, those known as ‘‘common’’ or ‘‘ancestral,’’ which
were an essential part of the communal affairs of any city. As all Hellenists know, the
ritual calendar, with all its information, relayed about fifty percent of the ‘‘laws’’ of Solon.
But the essential point for me is that ‘‘the affairs of the gods,’’ the first section of ‘‘public
matters,’’ were debated, discussed, and decided in the assembly and—moreover—in the
first part of the assembly. The assembly decided by a majority vote how the new calendar
should be organized and the order in which the various gods would be honored. So the
sovereignty of the group over itself clearly also covered its gods and their affairs. I should
perhaps interject, in passing, that there was a hierarchy in the way that things were or-
dered: the affairs of the gods were dealt with first, and by this select circle of citizens from
long-established families. But why and how did mortals, human beings, gain such a hold
over ‘‘the affairs of the gods’’? It turns out that among these people, ‘‘our’’ Greeks, the
gods, the gods of Olympus and the whole world, never thought of inventing such a thing
as a ‘‘city.’’ Cities were an invention of men, of mortals, and one fine day the gods woke
up to this fact. In no time, they were jostling at the gate, clamoring for the privileges of a
so-called poliad deity—as it were, a better paid ‘‘chair’’ than an ordinary seat in the
pantheon.
Of all the human activities, politics was thus the one that was specifically constructed
by human beings: politics, the government of men by men, a government with full sover-
eignty that, what is more, sought to affirm that autonomy, in other words, was ‘‘a law
unto itself.’’
The autonomy of the political domain did not simply fall from the sky. It was prob-
lematic, fragile, had to be invented by whatever available means. To come back to this
field in which so much still remains to be done, I would like, finally, to suggest that a
number of important aspects of action, decision, and the strategies of politics took shape
and were analyzed with reference to the divine powers. Hestia, who represented such a
complex category, is certainly one of them. I also believe that the Aphrodite-Ares pair,
which is of major importance and represents the relationship between the rituals of war-
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