On January 11, 2015, millions of people marched in the streets, in Paris and all over France, stunned by the attacks against the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo and French people of Jewish faith. Both a procession of mourning and an expression of national unity and reassurance in the face of terror, these demonstrations resembled a collective exorcism: Many citizens felt compelled to participate, regardless of their political affiliation, as if, after a moment of shock, everyone felt the need to get moving again. For the participants, this was a moment of extraordinary intensity, provoking wild and contradictory emotions, mixing fear, hostility, a spirit of vengeance, solidarity and fraternity – in short, they felt they were experiencing a historic event.

The magnitude of this collective reaction gave rise to the greatest hopes. Many saw in the fervor of these demonstrations the opportunity to renew frayed social ties, as if their mutual trauma had opened a breach in time. This is perhaps characteristic of all historic events: to conjure up other ways of ‘building society,’ of ordering bodies and minds before being confined to the oblivion of history, swept away by official speeches. But through its very emergence, any authentic event opens up the possibility as much of unification as of radical division.

In fact, just as France was experiencing this moment of fellowship in January 2015, several more or less explicit forms of division appeared. Within hours of the attacks, it was clear that not everyone wanted to take part in these collective marches and moments of shared emotion. While many people joined the demonstrations, many others were absent, to the extent that some saw the mammoth processions of January 11 as an expression of the fear of a middle- and upper-class, ethnically homogeneous France. No, decidedly not everyone was ‘Charlie’: Social networks offered an exceptional sounding board to the voices breaking with the united song of the chorus. There was a legitimate distrust of the people’s holy union, based on principles too general and generous to be honest and instrumentalized by a flagging president and government who had invited known dictators to join them at the head of the parade.

How to ‘build society’: Such was the question that imposed itself in public debate during the month of January 2015. Begun even before the opening of this sequence of terror and completed while a pandemic was busy reactivating old fears, this book aims to dig deeper into this issue, following a path that leads to the confines of a famous ancient Greek city, Athens. Calling on Athenian society of the fifth century BC to examine the present, our enterprise may at first seem absurd, given how distant the rules that governed this society are from us. Naturally, it is difficult to relate to a system founded on the political exclusion of more than three-quarters of the inhabitants who lived there (i.e. the free women, the foreigners and the slaves). Yet in the face of this quite understandable difficulty, it is advisable to recall that the Athenians of the fifth century instituted the first political regime based on the participation of a considerable proportion of the population, within which distinctions of wealth did not hinder legal equality in any way, and that to this form of unprecedented communal organization they gave the name of democracy, which continues to offer a backdrop – or an arrière-pays – to appraise politics today.

Undoubtedly the return to Athens could not offer us the unmediated ‘Lessons of History’ that our concerns and our helplessness seem to require. Thucydides and Plato cannot re-enchant our present. The Athenian experience may, however, help us to sharpen several decisive questions of our time: In what form do the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that run through a group build a true society that is more than the sum of its disparate networks? Conversely, by what processes does a society come to tear itself apart, or even disintegrate? How do heterogeneous social arenas and temporalities coexist within it? Under what conditions should the fervor of exceptional situations be maintained without sinking into totalitarian unity? All these questions unfold with clarity in one quite singular moment of the history of Athens.

The end of the fifth century BC marked the end of ‘the greatest movement that had ever stirred the Hellenes, extending also to some of the Barbarians, one might say even to a very large part of humankind.’Footnote ¹ Conceived as a single, long conflict by Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) resulted in the defeat of Athens and the dissolution of its maritime empire. Long marginalized, the Athenian oligarchs took advantage of the debacle to exact their revenge in the city: With the support of Spartan troops, a commission of thirty Athenians put an end to the democratic institutions that had governed political life for more than a century. Under the leadership of Critias and Charicles, the Thirty drastically reduced the civic body – henceforth limited to 3,000 citizens – and multiplied the number of extrajudicial executions, arbitrary dispossessions and collective banishments.Footnote ²

In the face of these abuses, democrats did not remain unresponsive: At the end of the year 404, Thrasybulus assembled an army of volunteers, made up of exiled Athenian citizens, metics and even slaves. Departing from Thebes, this heterogeneous troupe first seized the fortress of Phyle in northern Attica, before taking control of the strategic port of Piraeus a few weeks later. Taking advantage of the wait-and-see attitude of the Spartans and the divisions within the oligarchy, ‘those of Piraeus’ won several resounding victories over ‘those from the town (astu).’ Although the negotiations proved long and difficult, a truce was concluded in the early fall of 403.

On the Twelfth Day of Boedromion

Nearly fifty years later, the Athenians could date Thrasybulus’ army’s victory precisely: Each year, on the twelfth day of the month of Boedromion, they celebrated; more than a simple restoration of democratic institutions, this was the refoundation of the regime inaugurated nearly a century earlier by Cleisthenes in 508/7 BC. On this occasion, the Athenians celebrated their newfound freedom, ‘for on that day the exiles returned from Phyle’Footnote ³ by making a sacrifice to Athena, allowing the city to thus commemorate the memory of its regained unity.

Fig. 0.1Map of Attica.

What the Athenians celebrated exactly is, however, far from obvious. Which event in particular marked in their eyes the reunification of the city and the final end of the civil war? On the twelfth day of the month of Boedromion, when the victors took possession of the city, the Athenian community reacted in two diametrically opposed ways. After eight months of civil war, the army of Thrasybulus entered the town and marched to the Acropolis to make a sacrifice to the goddess Athena.Footnote ⁴ Then, going down to the Pnyx, the victorious general called together an assembly at which all Athenians undertook to respect the terms of reconciliation, ‘to be true to [their] oath’ and ‘to live under the laws that had previously been in force.’Footnote ⁵

Fig. 0.2The Agora, the Pnyx and the Acropolis (view from northwest).

The city had thus offered up two very different visions: on the one hand, that of a procession giving thanks to Athena; and on the other, that of a political community, gathered together in the main venue for democratic deliberation on the hill of Pnyx.

The Acropolis and the Pnyx: two canonical representations of the city, or, more exactly, two ways to build the ideal type of the Greek city. These two representations function most often in an inverted way. Civic rites are generally considered as a means to build and reinforce the unity of the political community. The procession of 403 could therefore be seen as the definitive symbol of the reunification of the city around a ritual in honor of Athena. It offered the reassuring image of a city united anew, after having been torn asunder by civil war. Conversely, a public assembly is the place where disagreement and, potentially, political division are expressed.

However, on this day of October in 403, these two events functioned the other way around: While the ostensibly inclusive ritual demonstrated the divisions within the community, it was at the Assembly – a locus of often violent political confrontations – that the city regained its unity. It would be wrong, however, to interpret the procession to the Acropolis in the light of the Panathenaia, the great civic rite at which the city’s unity took center stage.Footnote ⁶ While it followed the same route, Thrasybulus’ procession had a completely different meaning. The scene does not offer any of the Panathenaia’s much-admired order, as illustrated in schoolbooks and admired at the British Museum by tourists from all around the world. Beyond a simple reconciliation with the gods, this was the occasion for one camp to claim victory over the other. Indeed, the procession and the sacrifice concerned only the democrats of Piraeus: The men remaining in the city were excludedFootnote ⁷; furthermore, the participants were undoubtedly armed, as if the threat still loomed large and the democrats were ready to throw themselves on the first tyrants they spotted, just like Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who, one century earlier, had taken advantage of the procession of the Panathenaia to assassinate Hipparchus, the son of the tyrant Peisistratus. Rife with division, the procession exhibited the visible separation between democrats and oligarchs, ‘those of Piraeus’ and ‘those of the town,’ participants in the ritual and simple spectators, all breathing in the smoke of the sacrifices without being able to reach the feast.

In contrast to this, it was at the Assembly that the recovered unity of the community became obvious, as the former oligarchs and the exiled democrats stood side by side. All listened to the unifying speech of Thrasybulus, which, in the form that Xenophon gave it, enjoined the victors to keep their word and to respect the vanquished. Far from being a place of dissensus or conflict, the Assembly, on this twelfth day of Boedromion of the year 403, was the place where the two camps sealed their truce.

The City in Chorus(es)

Of the two conceptions of the city we have just described – the ‘city at sacrifice’ or ‘the city in assembly’ (both of which are heirs to ancient sources and have been extensively employed by historians of the Greek world) – neither of them alone says anything about the true reality of the city. However, there is another noticeable configuration through which the civic imagination likes to represent the polis and the different groups that make it up: that of the chorus. In fact, it is not the metaphor of the procession or of sacrifice that ancient authors used to appraise the union of the community. Rather than the procession moving linearly through space, they preferred to privilege the idea of the chorus, which turns in on itself, organizes a common experience and aims to create harmony among its participants.

To understand this, let us go back a few weeks and to the hill of Mounychia in Piraeus, after the great battle between democrats and oligarchs where the bloodthirsty Critias perished, since this provides the first step toward reconciliation. After the democrats’ victory, Cleocritus, the herald of the mysteries of Eleusis – who was on Thrasybulus’ side – spoke up. He enjoyed considerable prestige because of the bond his family maintained with one of the most important cults of Athenian civic religion: that of Demeter and Persephone in Eleusis. In his vibrant appeal to the defeated oligarchs, he evoked the notion of the chorus in order to discuss what united Athenian citizens beyond their political differences:

Fig. 0.3Map of Piraeus.

Festivals, sacrifices, choruses and the army: Cleocritus rapidly listed a group of practices that he felt contributed to making the Athenian community what it was. We have chosen to isolate the chorus from among this range of inclusive activities because the Greeks themselves made special use of the notion of the chorus for thinking about how the city functioned.

The Chorus, an ‘Absolute Metaphor’

Let us start with an affirmation: The chorus plays the role of an ‘absolute metaphor’ in Athenian thought – like other images, such as weaving, slavery or navigation.Footnote ¹⁰ Chorality evokes the ideal ordering of a collective, be it objects in the domestic sphere, various human groups or the cosmos itself. It is in the form of a chorus that Ischomachus, in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, presents the arrangement of the pots in the kitchen of his oikos when he affirms: ‘There is nothing, in short, that does not gain in beauty when set out in order. For each set looks like a chorus of utensils, and the space between the sets is beautiful to see, when each set is kept clear of it, just as a cyclic chorus (kuklios choros) about the altar is a beautiful spectacle in itself, and even the free space looks beautiful and unencumbered.’Footnote ¹¹ In the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise On the Cosmos, it is the stars and the sky themselves that are assimilated to a chorus in which the divinity is the coryphaeus – that is to say, the entity who regulates its moves:

From the domestic arena in Ischomachus’ house to the ordering of the stars in the sky, all collective forms can be appraised by means of the choral metaphor.Footnote ¹³ Plato’s work offers the most striking illustration of this: In the philosopher’s dialogues, the chorus is used to represent groups of all kinds, both human and nonhuman, from the entourage of certain sophists or politicians to entire age groups of young men, but also groups of animals, gods and even vices and virtues.Footnote ¹⁴ The metaphor is all the more structuring as it can describe forms of association that are valued, even enchanting – like shining stars – or, on the contrary, very worrying – like the flatterers who, at the court of Alexander the Great, gathered into a detestable chorus under the leadership of a certain Medeus of Larissa.Footnote ¹⁵

What sense can we make of this extensive use of the choral metaphor? Hans Blumenberg has shown that metaphor is an integral part of any philosophical discourse, in which statements and concepts are never fully clarified.Footnote ¹⁶ Any metaphysics is thus carried by metaphors and representations that cannot be translated back into concepts but ‘have never ceased to pervade, tincture and structure them.’Footnote ¹⁷ The world as a book to be deciphered,Footnote ¹⁸ truth as light, life as a sea voyageFootnote ¹⁹ are all absolute metaphors that cross intellectual history, offering horizons of meaning through which thinking can ultimately unfold. These metaphors function to orient and represent the world as a whole, and while they go beyond what can be expressed theoretically, they nevertheless produce knowledge.

In this sense, chorality is indeed an absolute metaphor in Greek thought; that is to say, a means of representing – as part of the order of the world – the arrangement or organization of a collective in the broadest possible terms. If the image is prevalent, it is because it is based on experience and knowledge so common that it does not need to be explained.

At the Heart of Civic Life

It is a well-known fact that choral practice was a deeply rooted reality in the lives of ordinary Athenian citizens – particularly through the widespread performance of the dithyramb, a singular choral formation involving singing and dancing in a circle (the kuklios choros). During the fifth century, a thousand citizens (or young men who were about to become citizens) found themselves directly implicated in such performances every year. Such performances – more than comedy or tragedyFootnote ²⁰ – formed the civic spectacle par excellence and were characterized by a competition between ten choruses of fifty boys and ten choruses of fifty adult citizens, one from each tribe.Footnote ²¹ These dithyrambic choruses performed not only during the Dionysia but also during the Thargelia in honor of Apollo, the Panathenaia and probably the Prometheia and the Hephaisteia.Footnote ²² Furthermore, far from remaining confined to the large civic cults that were held in the urban center (astu), choral practice occurred at all levels of civic life. Thus, during the Bendideia of Piraeus, the Tauropolia and in Brauron, choruses in various formations were involved in collective worship, including both boys and girls and men and women at the same time.Footnote ²³

Choral activity assumed such importance in the democratic city because it was a part of the paideia, or education, of all young Athenian women and men, and it significantly contributed to preparing them for their respective roles within the community. If the ancient authors are to be believed, it was one of the vectors through which the community’s core norms were communicated to the whole city. In the Laws, Plato suggests that a group of choruses should be created in order to instill the right attitudes in citizens as early as possible, and that these choruses should subsequently be maintained throughout the citizens’ lives.Footnote ²⁴ According to him, the ideal city would therefore be composed of three choruses, each composed of a different age group: children, those under thirty and men between thirty and sixty years old. The chorus was subsequently presented as the ideal medium for educating citizens and conveying community values, with the city’s combined choruses feeding into the ‘chorus of choruses’ that constituted the city. Plato evokes in particular ‘the duty of every man and child – slave and free, male and female –, the duty of the whole city, to charm themselves unceasingly with the chants (epaidousan) we have described, constantly changing them and securing variety in every way possible, so as to inspire the singers with an insatiable appetite for the hymns and with pleasure therein.’Footnote ²⁵

The various choruses imagined by Plato, which potentially encompassed all members of the community (‘every man and child – slave and free, male and female’), were thus articulated in a skillful composition, the coherency of which lay in dancing and singing together. This shared pleasure exerted an extremely powerful link between members of the community, which Plato conceived as being a true enchantment (epōidē). This is a delightful definition of the social magic implied by the choral ritual, which created the community by defining an interior (those who participated in the choruses) and an exterior (those who were excluded from them).Footnote ²⁶

This philosophical fantasy appears radical in that it anticipates including slaves in this enchanted circle. This exaltation of the choral model is not, however, specifically Platonic: There is indeed a song culture common to most ancient Greek cities.Footnote ²⁷ But perhaps it is necessary to go further. If the chorus is so important in Athens, it is because it represents a properly democratic aesthetic. The hypothesis can be tested in many different ways. By placing its members in a circle or a square, sometimes under the aegis of a coryphaeus – the chorus-leader – the chorus primarily displays visually the principle of equality between citizens. Furthermore, its circular form presupposes that all of its participants can see each other, thus mimicking the transparency that was specific to the democratic regime and made public visibility of the law and of magistrates’ supervision an essential aspect of civic life.Footnote ²⁸

As the visual representation of a collective gathered around an empty center, the shape of the circle can offer a model of the type of order that is characteristic of the civic ideal. Jean-Christophe Bailly even believes he can see in circle dances a figuration of the political operation par excellence, in which ‘the space of the city comes to conceive itself as a whole, fueled by a center which gives it measure and legality, but which can only do so because it is an inappropriable point, situated between the men.’Footnote ²⁹ The chorus thus appears to produce ‘a center effect’Footnote ³⁰ of a properly political nature. Built around a place that is at the same time not capable of being appropriated and under everyone’s control,Footnote ³¹ the city could be said to take the ideal form of a choreia.

In this respect, the chorus can truly be considered of the same order as ‘festivals,’ according to the definition Rousseau proposed in his Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre (1758). In this work, Rousseau distinguishes festivals from theater, which, by distancing the spectator, provides a moment of separation between the actor and the role they embody, between the audience and the stage, between the spectators themselves and between the spectators and the rest of the social body:

For Rousseau, spectacles steal our being, whereas, at a festival, ‘the contagion of public friendship’ wins over every individual, turning them into the private actors of a collective emotion.Footnote ³³ In contrast to this, by creating confusion between the stage and the public when playing the role of an emphatic and empathic commentator,Footnote ³⁴ the chorus abolishes the distance that is specific to theater and which Rousseau denounces. In this respect, the chorus should be considered one of the key elements of a true democratic aesthetic.Footnote ³⁵

Chorus and Social Hierarchies

Despite mobilizing hundreds of individuals (which made it a vector for spreading civic values not only to citizens but to all members of the community) and creating friendship and unity through the repetition of ritualized performances (a crucial aspect of a true democratic aesthetic), choruses should nonetheless not be considered a factor in cohesion and an ever more perfect union.

Beyond the appeasing discourses of Plato and Xenophon, choral activity obscured a series of tensions and even divisions. Within a given chorus, strong rivalries could divide those within it who apparently danced to the same tune. Who could then be seen as the leader, or coryphaeus? Choruses thus embodied a sphere of competition that illustrates the deep-reaching hierarchies within the group.

In fact, Athenian choruses are far from being loci of perfect equality. First of all, the chorēgos plays an eminent role there: He has de facto authority over the various people whom he hires, since he provides directly for their upkeep for several months of the year.Footnote ⁴² It is he who recruits, at his own expense, a professional to train the choreutai, and he provides a sufficiently large space (the chorēgeion) so that the chorus can comfortably rehearse its complex moves; by the same token, it falls to him to manage the entire troupe and to disburse the expenses related to the performance itself, in particular the costumes. It is also he who, in the event of victory, collects the prize of the dithyrambic contest – a large bronze tripod – which he often dedicates to the gods to ensure his success goes down in history. The chorēgos thus wields such power that Xenophon compares his authority to that of the head of an oikos, an army or a city.Footnote ⁴³ It should not be surprising, therefore, that a real king can be compared to a chorēgos, making his followers dance like puppets on strings and, beyond that, dominating the whole people. It is in this way that Philip of Macedonia allegedly acted, according to the orator Demosthenes, recruiting traitors within several Greek cities who were ready to deliver their fatherland to him.Footnote ⁴⁴ Faced with these choral maneuvers, the dēmos thus looked on as it was dispossessed of its own power.

Another character stands out: the coryphaeus; that is to say, the chorus-leaderFootnote ⁴⁵ – of whom Aristotle affirms that by becoming autonomous (as a protagonist, the main actor) he gave birth to tragedy.Footnote ⁴⁶ The very form of the dithyramb, such as it was established in the fifth century BC, gives him a privileged place: Strophes (sung by the coryphaeus alone) alternate with antistrophes (sung in unison by the chorus). It is he who intones the song, provides the melody and strikes the rhythm: Everyone follows him.Footnote ⁴⁷ This prominent position is also reflected in the metaphorical use of the term by ancient authors, who see it as a means of symbolizing the ascendancy of an individual over those around him. The metaphor is notably used in a famous passage of the Theaetetus, which depicts the philosophers as a chorus, with Socrates specifying that he is only going to ‘speak of the chorus-leaders (coryphae); for why should anyone talk about the inferior philosophers.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Better still, as we have seen, the divinity itself, in On the Cosmos, can be likened to a coryphaeus organizing the world around him.

But the texts provide a glimpse of other forms of more subtle hierarchies proper to choruses. The aulete thus occupies a central place: It is he who organizes the dance and the song of the choreutai evolving around him, probably in concentric circles.Footnote ⁴⁹ Within the troupe itself, some choreutai even seem to have been more equal than others. The geranos (the ‘crane dance’), for example, which took place in Delos in honor of Apollo, distinguished within the chorus not only a coryphaeus (called the geranoulkos) but also a ‘first dancer,’ executing solo rather free variations, and a ‘second dancer,’ in charge of orchestrating the movements of the rest of the troupe.Footnote ⁵⁰ This specific case suggests the existence of micro-hierarchies, undoubtedly quite fluid and difficult to locate given the lack of documentation.

The fact remains that these hierarchies between chorēgoi, coryphaeoi, auletai and choreutai are clearly less rigidly defined in Athens than elsewhere in the Greek world. Not only is the chorēgos not confused with the poet, nor with the coryphaeusFootnote ⁵¹ – which would increase his influence on the chorus – but chorēgia is a compulsory duty that rich citizens and metics are obliged to carry out: This limits de facto the gratitude felt by the choreutai toward their (more or less) generous financer, as Pseudo-Xenophon deplores.Footnote ⁵² In the same way, the coryphaeus does not crush the choreutai with his magnificence but behaves more like a primus inter pares. This is especially the case from the end of the fifth century when the music takes ever greater precedence over the words.Footnote ⁵³

The Chorus Put to the Test of Civil War

These internal hierarchies are sufficiently deep-reaching to raise the question of the coherence of the choral group and the rivalries within it. Far from being a purely harmonious place, the chorus is always also a competitive playing field, where each individual strives to better the next coryphaeus and even replace him. These rivalries are rarely manifest, if only because the group must sing and dance in unison to have a chance of winning the competition while pleasing the gods.Footnote ⁵⁴ But some clues suggest that this little world was far from irenic – as in the case of one poisoned young chorus boy, which resulted in his chorēgos coming before the Athenian courts (Antiphon, On the choreutes). This internal rivalry is also sometimes dramatized. In some tragedies the chorus is divided into two half-choruses carrying opposing voices: The clearest case stages, in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the trial of Orestes and the division of the chorus into two camps unable to decide between the adversaries without the support of a god.Footnote ⁵⁵

Beyond these internal quarrels, the choral experience translates into intense competition between the different choruses within the framework of a competition arbitrated by the community. Each chorēgos competes to put together the most beautiful ensemble and to win the prize, even if it means spending a lot of money to achieve it. As Xenophon reminds us in the Hipparchus: ‘For evidence of this [spirit of emulation] I may refer to the choruses, in which many labors and heavy expenses are the price paid for trifling rewards.’Footnote ⁵⁶ This competitive spirit sometimes drove participants to try and destabilize their adversaries, such as when Meidias sought by all means (corruption, destruction of material and assault!) to make the chorēgia of Demosthenes the least spectacular possible.Footnote ⁵⁷

Seen from this perspective, the choral model maintained unique connections with stasis, and the chorus should be considered within a spectrum of collective activities that run the gamut from war to peace and harmony.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this respect, the establishment of agonistic choral practices following the clash that opposed Cleisthenes’ and Isagoras’ respective factions at the end of the sixth century is far from insignificant. As early as 508/7, the reorganization of choruses, in accordance with the Cleisthenic system of ten tribes, can indeed be interpreted as a way of blocking stasis from reoccurring. Through the organization of choral competitions as part of the dithyrambs, a specific form for managing stasis was invented, in which the Cleisthenic tribes aimed precisely to break up preexisting cliental ties and factional divisions. By replacing impious stasis with healthy competition, the Athenians strove to strike a new internal civic balance.Footnote ⁵⁹ Choral confrontation, in the agonistic mode, thus made it possible to depict and overcome divisions by sublimating them.Footnote ⁶⁰

But these tensions inherent in how choruses functioned should not conceal another form of division, which is less visible but no less structural. Like all collective rites, choral activity radically separated those who participated in it – albeit as part of a competition – from those who would never be part of the circle. Athenian society also included a good number of individuals outside of the choruses, who were the objects of a radical form of exclusion. While choruses offer a privileged way into thinking about unity and division within the Athenian community by using its own categories, the rifts within and between the various choruses that exist in the city still need to be taken into account in order to avoid deluding ourselves with an overly positive and harmonious conception of the social world.

A Choral History: Contemporary Theorization

In order to overcome this risk, this book aims to shift our focus from the ancient conception of the chorus to the contemporary theorization of what we will call a choral history. We are arguing, in short, that by writing a choral history, we are able to restore the complexity of the Athenian society at the end of the fifth century.

This position has already been taken up by some of the social sciences.Footnote ⁶¹ When they turned their attention to the organizational frameworks of social life and the relations between the various groups that compose it, the sociologists of the Durkheimian school mobilized the choral metaphor.Footnote ⁶² For Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, the memory of the ancient chorus was used metaphorically to examine a founding moment in the ‘realization’ of the social body along the lines of a primitive scene, with ‘the magical act’ at its center: ‘A circle of impassioned spectators collects around the action being performed. They are brought to a halt, absorbed, hypnotized by the spectacle. They become as much actors as spectators in the magical performance – rather like the chorus in Greek drama. The society as a whole becomes expectant and obsessed by the rite.’Footnote ⁶³ In particular, the chorus provided a way of thinking about the connection between individualism and holism:

Marcel Granet was the scholar who extended the choral paradigm the furthest as part of his study of ‘seasonal festivals’ in ancient China. Indeed, Granet saw the primordial notion of peasant community life in the choral principle.Footnote ⁶⁵ By directing different choruses that embodied the different elements composing the community during ‘sung jousts,’ peasant society revealed different aspects of itself. These rites had a primarily religious purpose. During such solemn and important ceremonies, which unfolded in ‘holy places,’ human order, explains Granet, was anchored to cosmic order. Next came a political purpose – these ceremonies were decisive moments when it came to building seigneurial authority. But Granet further insisted upon a singular aspect involving the portrayal of division and reunion. Through these ceremonies and the distinction between choruses, society as a whole experienced its own divisions at the same time as it resolved them.Footnote ⁶⁶

However, we have to admit that the reference to ancient chorality vanished after the mid-twentieth century: While the notions of philia, habitus or hexis are part of the current vocabulary of contemporary social sciences, no one today thinks of describing collective action devices by referring to the choruses of classical Athens. Moreover, it is in the field of literary theory or cinema that contemporary reflections on chorality offer precious resources for the historian. If there is no longer any doubt that cinema and literature can inform history as a discipline – not only as a source, but as a specific modality of historical writingFootnote ⁶⁷ – how can we doubt that in return the historian might benefit from a literary or cinematographic narrative form?

Plurality, Polyphony, Dissonance

Since Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, the choral novel has provided some of the most beautiful historical reflections within the register of fiction. But the ‘choral’ mode, far from forming a clearly established genre or having its own aesthetic canon, is embodied in a different narrative logic depending on the way in which the story is ‘put together.’ One could perhaps attempt to establish a basic taxonomy of the different types of choral films and novels. The first involves to varying degrees the omniscience of the narrator, the great architect of a narrative understood as an organic whole and guided by an explicit principle of composition. Conceived in the manner of a ninety-nine-piece puzzle in which ‘it is not the elements that determine the whole, but the whole that determines the elements,’Footnote ⁶⁸ Pérec’s La Vie mode d’emploi offers the most radical example of this in its description of the lives of the characters living side by side in the Parisian building of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier. The second type does not presuppose any a priori unity between the different characters who are presented in isolation from each other and only run into each other at more or less random junction points. The story then unfolds under a regime of narrative uncertainty and very often finishes with an open ending. Robert Altmann’s famous Short Cuts, adapted from several short stories by Raymond Carver, is a model of this. In the final type of choral work, the different segments of the action – potentially isolated – can be brought together ‘from the outside’ by the same, more or less distant event, the effects of which are experienced to varying degrees. Laurent Mauvignier’s novel Autour du monde, which captures the fate of eleven characters across the globe all affected by the tsunami of March 2011, is an example of this.Footnote ⁶⁹

This brief typology is obviously rudimentary. Indeed, nothing seems to unite the great monophonic tale that is In Search of Lost Time (which is, in its own way, a choral novel) or The Sound and the Fury, which is centered on three voices over which a superior truth never prevails. More recently, the literary critic Vincent Message has extended his reflection precisely to the choral genre by attempting to define what he calls the ‘le roman pluraliste.’ The kaleidoscopic construction of the story in addition to the multiplication of voices and linguistic registers seem to be at the heart of the pluralist novel, the major representatives of which in contemporary literature would be Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie. Yet, if Message is to be believed, the polyphonic nature of le roman pluraliste only hints toward the broader forms of composition of the social, which are given a central place in the narrative. ‘Instead of charting the arrival of a subject-in-the-making in a preconstituted Whole, the continuous and difficult movement of organizing a Whole that would like to be more than the sum of its parts is revealed for us to see.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Thus, ‘the collective effort of a society that is always in the making’ would appear to be the true subject of le roman pluraliste. It is easy to imagine how much the historian can gain from these reflections surrounding the choral genre and how it has developed. When examined through the historian’s lens, choral writing leads us to question in an original way the homogeneity of the social arena, the articulation of the various spheres of action plunged in distinct temporal textures and the contemporaneousness of discordant actions.

Dividing Athenian Society Differently

In this respect, the stasis of 404–403 offers an exceptional area of study, since the event shows how the various elements of Athenian society were decomposed and recomposed. Indeed, according to Plato – through the mouth of Aspasia – the event resulted in a great blending (sunmixis):

Despite its ironic tone, this vision is well in line with Platonic fantasies of unity – a city first divided in two, then reunited in a single chorus, now singing in unison. However, we would like to take a step back from this grand narrative of reconciliation by showing that the ‘great mixture’ created by the stasis led to the formation of multiple choruses with shifting contours, dismantling and recomposing themselves well beyond the Assembly of the twelfth of Boedromion and the official end of hostilities.

Such a choral approach makes it possible to break away from a set of schematic representations of society and, in particular, to challenge two principles that generally organize its description.

The first usually separates the different spheres of action at work in the city. In this way, political life is considered part of an operational logic distinct from that of economic activity, which is itself independent from religion, and so on. Yet the choral model cuts across these various realms of action, making it possible to avoid confining analysis to areas of activity that have already been defined. In this respect, the choral approach makes it possible to observe both politics (which is composed of citizens taking action in places where civic decisions are made) and the political (which is defined as all of the practices that contribute to the expression of a civic identity).Footnote ⁷² It should also be noted that, by its very existence, the chorus in Athens was the product of political institutions (politics) – since, within the dithyrambic framework, it was constituted according to the principle of the Cleisthenic division of the civic body into ten tribes – but that its activity in fact consisted of the ritual celebration of Dionysos (the political).

The second principle seeks to describe this society according to its own classifications of status by distinguishing between metics, citizens and slaves, as if they were distinct and impenetrable groups. Here, each category has attached its own subjective rights that, like property, define the position of every individual in society. A citizen thus ‘possesses’ the right to do such and such a thing, and this right is sometimes accorded to metics, free women married to full citizens, freedmen or slaves. This kind of description is undeniably efficient, in that it provides a convincing representation that allows us to explain some of the configurations presented in the ancient sources. But it is limited and, in practice, sometimes erroneous. Thinking about Athenian society in choral terms makes it possible to examine in greater depth the various levels of social intensity without considering them to be immediately determined by specific status positions. It should be recalled that the tragic chorus – which was at once the ‘voice of the city’ and that of other ‘marginal’ people, women, foreigners and even slaves – shows the city in precisely all its diversity. Let us think of the Helots of Eupolis, in which Athenian citizens embody a chorus of Spartan helots, or the Babylonians of Aristophanes, with their chorus of tattooed slaves.Footnote ⁷³ Similarly, certain choruses were able to welcome and blend citizens and metics, such as the dramatic choroi of the Lenaia performed each winter.Footnote ⁷⁴ As for the chorēgoi, they could be citizens as well as metics: Holding this office was a question of wealth, not of status, at least in most cases. On another level, numerous female choral rituals in classical Athens are known to have existed, from the arktoi for Artemis in Brauron to the dancing parthenoi for the Erechtheidai, to the Eleusinian cults, which included female dances.Footnote ⁷⁵

In this perspective, the choral phenomenon cannot be understood in terms of identity and otherness, according to a binary structuralist scheme, but must rather be considered a blurring, displacement or even ‘estrangement’ of distinctions of gender, origin and status.Footnote ⁷⁶

Rethinking Collectives through the Chorus’ Lens

The choral scheme thus makes it possible to engage in a novel description of Athenian society that seems a priori to be in line with contemporary interpretations based on the notion of networks. This latter approach has given rise to numerous works in ancient history over the last twenty years: The network even seems to have become a fetishized concept capable of defining collective action in its most diverse forms – whether it aims to shed light on the relationships between different characters or groups within a single city or to describe the circulation of information patterns.Footnote ⁷⁷ The contribution of a choral history lies first of all in the fidelity that it claims to a certain ‘emic’ representation of the social world, since we intend to borrow a descriptive category through which, under the term of choros, the Athenians themselves imagined collective action. But this is perhaps not the main tenet of our argument. We suggest that the concept of choros allows us to overcome the difficulties generated by the immoderate use of the notion of networks. Indeed, the new rhizomatic landscape of the classical city has too often tended to neglect the breaking points, the discontinuities and the conflicts between the different components of the city in favor of a grand integrating narrative.

In contrast to this, the choral scheme systematically sketches out a closed space in which a circle of participants is distinguished from those who are excluded; at the same time, these choruses, shot through by hierarchies of differing strengths, unceasingly recompose themselves in a dynamic way and, above all, position themselves in relation to each other in a competitive field. Thinking of the Athenian city through the choral prism consists of choosing an observation post at a good distance from both Plato’s indivisible polis and a radically decentered city of networks.

Our proposal of choral history thus promotes a certain vision of collectives and their mode of composition. What are the salient features?

First of all, the chorus allows us to find a path between individualism and holism. Clearly, chorality does not imply defending the primacy of the individual, much less considering society as a collection of individuals, according to the presupposition of methodological individualism. The chorus offers the spectacle of a collective, created by its monophonic singing,Footnote ⁷⁸ which does not presuppose the independence of each of the participants but immediately considers them collectively. In other words, the chorus represents a more or less stable aggregation of individuals who are never more than (to use the expression of Cornelius Castoriadis) ‘moving fragments of the social.’Footnote ⁷⁹ For all that, the choreutai do not act as an indistinct, even fusional mass either: Within the group, certain figures stand out – the coryphaeus, the aulete, perhaps the first and second dancers. Above all, the staging tends to distinguish the participants at certain key moments of the performance: In the tragic setting, for example, the choreutai seem to enter in three rows of five, or five rows of three, and not as a unified group.Footnote ⁸⁰ According to this perspective, choruses were the supreme embodiment of the ‘singular plural’ form perfectly illustrated by Attic tragedy, in which chorists often sang the same text, sometimes saying ‘I’ and sometimes saying ‘we.’Footnote ⁸¹

Secondly, a choral perspective highlights the mixture of constraint and adhesion that is present not only at the origin of the collectives but also in their dissolution. While the Athenian choruses were in principle based on voluntary commitment, the chorēgos nevertheless held coercive power – for example, that of imposing fines – in the event of recruiting challenges.Footnote ⁸² This balance between obligation and voluntary commitment was also valid for the chorēgoi themselves: Obliged to assume these costly charges, the richest Athenians very often voluntarily accepted the call to be able to boast of their generosity during a possible future trial. It is precisely such a combination that presided over the emergence of many choruses in the turmoil of the civil war – be they the successive rallies to Thrasybulus’ troops or the constitution of the Three Thousand, who made the choice to remain in the city but at the same time had to obey the orders of the Thirty. It is also what can make them fragile: a lack of sufficient institutionalization.

In fact, this ‘choral model’ also has the advantage of taking into account forms of grouping that are not necessarily set in stone. Choruses, which were created by repeated performances, had no other existence or duration other than that of the activity of the collective. They subsequently made it possible to approach any social elements as a provisional construction that could indeed find a stable form (e.g. by taking on a legal status that ensured the group’s permanency) but without this being a rule. The civil war of 404–403 provides an opportunity to examine the surge in moving choruses that were recomposed numerous times because of the turmoil. The duration was quite similar: In the case of the dithyramb, the experiment lasted a few months, during which the participants met with each other continuously before confronting their rivals and determining a winner. Better still, even though the choruses were destined to dissolve after the competition, they nonetheless produced long-term bonds that could be reactivated periodically within the tribe – the latter serving as a recruitment framework not only for the choruses but also for the army or the Council of Five Hundred. In the same way, if many choruses, active during the few months of the stasis, disappeared after the reconciliation, the links that had been forged in them did not vanish all at once.

An analysis in choral terms allows, moreover, the role of emotions in the city to be underlined. For choruses also function – perhaps even primarily – as emotional communities, where everyone feels the same joys and sorrows, even if this expression is ritualized.Footnote ⁸³ Plato affirms this in his own way by maintaining that choral practice gives rise to joy, a feeling of elation experienced by the participants, not by the spectators.Footnote ⁸⁴ In its tragic dimension, the events of 403 brought to a climax the emotions that build collective identities: The democrat Thrasybulus is well aware of this power when he incites the exiled, just before the battle of Mounychia, to advance ‘with the same heart’ to the sound of the paean; the oligarch Critias says the same thing when he defines the political regime by the participation of all its members in the same hopes and the same fears, as we will see.

Finally, a choral description of Athenian society avoids analyzing each chorus individually as a social world closed on itself. By multiplying the scales of analysis, it makes it possible to highlight the relations – harmonious or conflictual – between these various choruses. Far from the Platonic dream of a unified choral city, the investigation must give full scope to the phenomenon of competition and complementarity between choruses that are not necessarily placed in the same spheres of action.

To write a choral history of Athens is therefore to specify how the collectives that spread throughout the city functioned. It is to underline the hierarchies and the internal tensions that run through them; it is to estimate their duration and sometimes their institutionalization (or their disappearance); it is also to insist on the role that collective practices and shared emotions play in them; it is finally to scrutinize the relations between the different choruses by paying acute attention to the intervals that separate them and to their exterior aspects. In short, it is to reconstruct a plurality of collectives, without starting from preconstituted and already organized aggregates, and especially without presupposing the existence of a unique whole – ‘Athenian society’ – clearly hierarchized into distinct groups.

Our approach will consist of starting from an individual, playing the role of coryphaeus, and trying to systematically reconstitute the choruses that surround and encircle them. A crucial question then arises, which is both an epistemological issue and a writing challenge: How are we to select the individuals who will allow us to observe this choral functioning? Is it not a huge risk that further contributes to the history of great men, as has been written since Antiquity? How can we avoid being prisoners of the documentation that sheds light on certain characters more than others, leaving whole sections of society in the dark? If the historian must necessarily make do with the limits of their documentation, perhaps it is possible to try and mitigate its effects by following two main principles. First of all, we will be attentive to the plurality of the collectives in which each character, even the well-known ones, is involved and which they contribute to structuring. Thus, rather than analyzing the actors of the event by classifying them, following the ancient sources, into two watertight camps – the democrats and the oligarchs – we will try to grasp the dynamics of the heterogeneous groups that temporarily gather around Critias and Thrasybulus, swelling or shrinking according to the circumstances (Chapters 1 and 2). Above all, we will try to bring to light more unexpected figures who serve precisely to thwart this supposed bipartition of political life: Such is the case, in particular, of the numerous ‘centrists,’ who came from both camps and gathered around Archinus, one of the leaders of ‘those of Piraeus,’ shortly after the reconciliation (Chapter 3). In the same way, we will highlight all those who do not enter any of these political choruses, by necessity or by choice, of which Socrates is certainly the figurehead (Chapter 4).

But in order to escape from the ‘great men trap,’ we have also set up a device that ensures an oscillation between two types of chorus-leaders with very different profiles. In an expected way, several chapters of the book are interested in real coryphaeoi (i.e. in individuals who, de facto, exert a structuring influence on the groups which surround them, such as Critias, Thrasybulus, Archinus or the priestess of Athena, Lysimache; Chapter 5). However, our investigation also highlights individuals who do not exert any notable influence on those close to them but whose figures benefit from sufficient documentary light to be able to reconstitute the various choruses in which they evolved: The poor worker Eutherus (Chapter 6), the rich heiress Hegeso (Chapter 7), the former slave Gerys (Chapter 8) and the bureaucrat Nicomachus (Chapter 9) are cases in point. As for the orator Lysias, while he appears only at the end of the story, this is because he occupies a special position in the narrative device as the main producer of sources on the civil war (Chapter 10).

This oscillation between structuring figures and small lives is a way of expressing, as a form of unresolved tension, our questioning of the nature of the Athenian community as it appears in the context of stasis. It is an attempt to study, from the ground up and without any preestablished hierarchy, not ‘Athenian society’ – as if such a thing existed – but its mechanisms of composition and recomposition, activated and illuminated by various events.