MARCEL DETIENNEFor roughly ten years I have been engaged in comparative inquiry in a field that may
be described as consisting of ‘‘places for politics.’’^2 That will be the subject of the first part
of this essay.
People often like to believe that ‘‘the political domain,’’ or ‘‘politics,’’ fell from the
skies one fine day in Pericles’ Athens, in the miraculous form of democracy. Needless to
say, its subsequent history is superbly linear. It leads us ineluctably from a predestined
American Revolution, by way of the so-called French Revolution, straight to our own
dear Western societies, which are so happily convinced that their divine mission is to
convert other peoples to the true religion of democracy.
I have always shown the greatest filial respect for thegent helle ́niste, that is, the tribe
of Hellenists, and in that spirit I have been determined to learn more about certain early
beginnings in the hundreds of small cities that made their appearance between the eighth
and seventh centuriesb.c. I should, however, acknowledge, confidentially, that across the
globe—for Hellenism is universal—eminent historians, such as the French ‘‘Immortals of
the Acade ́mie Franc ̧aise,’’ and many German scholars of weighty authority have long been
arguing, sometimes courteously, sometimes pugnaciously, about the invention in Greece
of the domain of politics. What was its date, day, hour, and place of birth, the color of its
eyes, and the nature of its sex (a matter of major interest in the American universities of
today: in French,le politique, the domain of politics, differs fromla politique, political
practice; the Greekto ̄politiko ̄nis a neuter, which seems to have been introduced by a
certain lecturer who came from Halicarnassus to Athens, by name Herodotus).
As soon as I had taken stock of the state of the question in Greek studies, I made
good my escape from ‘‘the Greek city,’’ wasting neither time nor ink in drawing up an
inventory of the modish guises in which it has been presented in Munich, in the Quartier
Latin, and in Cambridge, to mention only the most prestigious houses of intellectual
fashion. I would not venture to pass judgment on the sentiments of those Hellenists, but
the Greek city gods are grateful to me (as they have recently assured me) for having tried
to find out how such a thing as the domain of politics can be fabricated. I have come
across people who insist that every society is political, that politics means power, or that
it all began with drawing a distinction between friend and foe. But I found nothing to
deter me from starting out anew, more or less from scratch.
The comparative study that I have mentioned—which is now published^3 —begins by
observing a number of concrete practices that seemed to me to be constitutive of the
political domain. By this I mean the practices of assembly, or, rather, the ways in which
people assembled. It seems to me that it is possible to study these even in situations
involving very early beginnings, that is to say, in very simple forms.
People assembling: I shall focus on the practices of people deliberately assembling in
order to debate affairs of common interest. I am not concerned with a whole series of
other kinds of assemblies: for instance, people getting together in order to go fishing or
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