Athenian Tragedy and Cleisthenian Space: Some Reflections on the Way the City Landscape was Formed
de Polignac, François
Athenian Tragedy and Cleisthenian Space: Some Reflections on the Way the City Landscape was Formed - 2021.
37
The creation by Cleisthenes, in the late sixth century, of the ten tribes to frame the Athenian civic body left a durable imprint on the life of the city in many areas. Modern historians have long privileged an interpretation of this reform as a rational, purely abstract, operation deriving from a wish for isonomy and homogeneity that decisively broke with the local reality and the imbalances of Archaic Athens. More recently, however, other analyses have argued for a more pragmatic view and one more respectful of local traditions, translating, to be sure, a consistent political project, but less abstract and less radical. Deviating through the representation of the Athenian space projected by the fifth-century tragedy, though at first sight rather unrelated to the institutional work of Cleisthenes, makes it possible to look at the issue in a different light. An analysis of the way Attica is staged in plays like Heracleidae or The Suppliants confirms that the Athenian territory designed by Cleisthenes was no abstract space, detached from its previous reality, but is seen as consisting of concrete loci whose significance and historical and symbolic value, fused in a new whole, are led to redefining themselves in relation to one another. By working out forms of conjunction and articulation between the various constitutive spaces of the Athenian City, the theater identifies loci where the various traditions come into combination with the institutional realities of the city, without getting confused with them or supplanting them. These loci thus play a crucial role in the construction of a city “landscape” where the different components of the civic experience and their own spaces can meet.
Athenian Tragedy and Cleisthenian Space: Some Reflections on the Way the City Landscape was Formed - 2021.
37
The creation by Cleisthenes, in the late sixth century, of the ten tribes to frame the Athenian civic body left a durable imprint on the life of the city in many areas. Modern historians have long privileged an interpretation of this reform as a rational, purely abstract, operation deriving from a wish for isonomy and homogeneity that decisively broke with the local reality and the imbalances of Archaic Athens. More recently, however, other analyses have argued for a more pragmatic view and one more respectful of local traditions, translating, to be sure, a consistent political project, but less abstract and less radical. Deviating through the representation of the Athenian space projected by the fifth-century tragedy, though at first sight rather unrelated to the institutional work of Cleisthenes, makes it possible to look at the issue in a different light. An analysis of the way Attica is staged in plays like Heracleidae or The Suppliants confirms that the Athenian territory designed by Cleisthenes was no abstract space, detached from its previous reality, but is seen as consisting of concrete loci whose significance and historical and symbolic value, fused in a new whole, are led to redefining themselves in relation to one another. By working out forms of conjunction and articulation between the various constitutive spaces of the Athenian City, the theater identifies loci where the various traditions come into combination with the institutional realities of the city, without getting confused with them or supplanting them. These loci thus play a crucial role in the construction of a city “landscape” where the different components of the civic experience and their own spaces can meet.
Réseaux sociaux