MARCEL DETIENNEown Apollo. But an altar was not enough to make a city. There was also a need for
sacrificial fire that had been brought from the central altar of the founder’s native city.
So Hestia, the deity of fire in general and sacrificial fire in particular, always came
along too on the voyage, bringing a seed of fire kept in a cooking pot. Very early on,
Hestia, the virgin deity of the fire that was never extinguished, was set up to preside over
a very public edifice known as thePrytane ̄ion, what some might call a town hall, the
center of the executive department for Communal Affairs. Hestia represented what you
might call ‘‘a particular idea of the city.’’ Symbolically, she embodied the unity of the
multiplicity of individual domestic hearths and altars. She was a figure at once concrete
and abstract. With her central altar in the Prytane ̄ion, she presided over the sacrificial
commensality that was officially practiced by the magistrates, theprytane ̄is, who received
their powers as magistrates from her altar, the altar of Hestia. ‘‘Political’’ authority thus
came from Hestia; not from Apollo the Founder nor from any god known as a god ‘‘of
the city,’’ a poliad god,polias-polieus. In this eminently ‘‘public’’ place, Hestia reigned
over the complex interplay of what I earlier called ‘‘sameness and equality.’’ This was the
place where the multiple configurations of ‘‘citizenship’’ were constructed, all the rights
and obligations of those who came forward to speak.
When one observes the assembly practices of these early cities, it is not hard to see
that they take place in a space in the shape of a circle, or a semicircle, and that they are
peculiar to a space called anagora, a fixed space that is common to the greatest possible
number of citizens. It is a space that is both common andpublic,demosion, as the Greek
puts it. Theagora, which in Crete is sometimes called theagoraof the assembled citizens,
functions as a deity of effective publicity. Here charges were proclaimed in cases of homi-
cide, and certain benefactions were publicly accepted. These were public applications of
speech of a legal nature, and they helped to create something that seems to become essen-
tial in the constitution of a ‘‘place for politics’’ in Greece, namely publicity. It was neces-
sary to publicize—make known to all—the decisions taken by a majority of those who set
out to deliberate on what we may now call ‘‘public affairs’’ and who aimed to have these
decisions observed and applied by others in their city. To this end, these little cities of
between two hundred and five hundred men, with territories of no more than between
five and ten square kilometers, at about the same time invented the art of writing on
bronze tablets and stonestelae. These were sometimes affixed to walls, sometimes dis-
played in what were considered to be public places. The intention, sometimes explicitly
spelled out in these inscriptions, was to place on view, for all to see, the decrees that had
been passed and the decisions that had been taken—‘‘words solidly established [thesmoi],’’
as Solon puts it. In Chios, for example, a narrow island roughly level with Smyrna, an
early-sixth-centurysteleurges the elected magistrates,in the name of Hestia, to observe
the decisions of the people, thedemosof Chios. Inscribing words onstelaeand writing on
walls were the constitutive practices of ‘‘the political domain’’ in the village-cities that
engaged in various forms of assembly. But what with all this talk of public space, publicity,
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