through decisions and actions. So Aristotle rigorously excluded the religious from his
account in hisPolitics. Plato had gone further, subordinating religion to politics. In
his account of the founding of an ideal state,The Laws, he notes that since it is crucial
for those in the state ‘‘to have the right thoughts about the gods’’ (888b), the state
should regulate religious observance.
With Augustine’s City of God, there emerges a more categorical distinction
between religion and politics: ‘‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’’ The modern
recognition of distinguishable, internally coherent regions of human behavior can be
traced to this work. Here Augustine draws a fundamental distinction between the
earthly city and the heavenly city. Although Christians are forced to live in this
imperfect world, they should keep their eyes on heaven. Augustine’s philosophical
argument reflects and epitomizes a real political development. With Christianity the
old civic unity of religion and politics was sundered; church and state were separated.
Augustine’s vision dominated the medieval world. Political philosophers, beginning
with the Renaissance, adopted his insights by standing his argument on its head. Thus
Machiavelli, though lamenting the dissolution of the integrated lives of the ancients,
nevertheless accepts that the religious and the political have nothing to do with one
another; without denying religion, he proceeds to study the political ‘‘on its own
terms,’’ without God.
The modern idea of the social emerges in the Enlightenment when Machiavelli’s
intellectual heirs, such as Hobbes, developed Social Contract Theory. These thinkers
were interested in the nature of human communities. The problem drew them on to
the question of origins, and they began to consider human group interactions as they
might have existed separate from and even preceding the development of the political
state. So at the outset the idea of the social might be characterized as the ‘‘human
pre-political.’’
Athenian Society
Ancient discussions of status privilege what we might call ‘‘political society,’’ categor-
ies of the person as defined by the state. In broadest perspective the various political
statuses can be divided into two groups: natives (citizens, women, children) and aliens
(metics, barbarians, slaves). Status categories were united by their shared subordin-
ation and dependence on the citizen. The point is illustrated by the Greek concept of
the family, oroikos.Theoikosincluded more than the modern idea of the ‘‘nuclear
family.’’ In addition to parents and children, possessions – slaves, livestock, even farm
tools – were members of theoikos. What all these members of theoikoshave in
common is their subjection to the father. The same dependence ideally prevailed in
the more general political community. Resident aliens, for example, could not repre-
sent themselves in Athenian law courts, but had the protection of the law only on the
condition that a citizen protector (in Greek, aprostate ̄s) was willing to stand up and
speak on their behalf.
Ancient slaves did not comprise an economic class, but a political status. Athenian
slaves had no specialized economic function: they are to be found in almost every
capacity, often working side by side with free men. From the time of Solon it was
illegal for Athenians to enslave Athenians. As a consequence freedom became a
Religion and Society in Classical Greece 287