Classical Athenian Debates

A quite narrow, institutional conception of politeia, close to modern notions of la politique (politics), was exploited by Classical Athenian orators. They could use the language of politeia to circumscribe the formal political sphere of assembly, council, and magistracies. For instance, in the speech Against Timarchus Aeschines states, regarding a bar on assembly speaking by those who have sold their own bodies, that the law examines those engaged in formal politics, not those focused on their private affairs (οὐδὲ γὰρ ὁ νόμος τοὺς ἰδιωτεύοντας, ἀλλὰ τοὺς πολιτευομένους ἐξετάζει).Footnote ²²

Significantly, in keeping with Schmitt Pantel’s view with which I opened, the opposition Aeschines draws is between formal political life and the “private” realm (τὰ ἴδια). That is also the main relevant distinction made in other fourth-century Attic speeches,Footnote ²³ as well as in civic epigraphy: a pervasive formula of honorific decrees throughout antiquity was that the benefactors had proved themselves useful both to citizens “in private” or “individually” (ἰδίαι) and to the whole polis or dēmos (people) “in public affairs” or “in common” (κοινῆι). The latter part of this formula captures formal interaction with the dēmos as a whole, mediated through its institutions, laws, and magistrates, as opposed to the one-to-one, more informal interaction conveyed by ἰδίαι.

As these examples begin to show, Classical Athenians usually treated the public or civic sphere and the political sphere as roughly coextensive, as reflected in the converging application from the mid-fifth century BCE of the terms κοινόν, δημόσιον, and πολιτικόν (approximately, “public,” “civic,” and “political”).Footnote ²⁴ Ritualized interactions with the gods (τὰ ἱερά) could sometimes be treated as a separate sphere,Footnote ²⁵ but they were also often bundled together into this single, overarching category of public, civic, or political life.Footnote ²⁶ As I observed in my introduction, this all left little room for explicit recognition of an intermediate, mixed social sphere, outside politics but not private. This is not to suggest that no such sphere existed in practice in Classical Athens. Paulin Ismard has convincingly shown that sociological analyses of ancient Athens can distinguish a “relatively autonomous” sphere of civic politics and a broader social sphere of interaction, which partly overlapped with each other.Footnote ²⁷ The latter included different types of voluntary relations and associations common in the Greek world, based on (for example) commercial exchange, conviviality, education, or unofficial worship of gods, all of which had overlapping private and public dimensions. Crucially for this article, Ismard also argues that the Classical Athenians themselves never explicitly identified an intermediate social sphere with its own dynamics, even as they participated in something that to modern eyes looks very much like it; the Classical notion of “community” (κοινωνία) covered much more than the social sphere, including also the family and the polis as a whole.Footnote ²⁸

Several reasons can be reconstructed for this Classical Athenian resistance to acknowledging a third space of polis life. As Schmitt Pantel shows, drawing on the work of Paul Veyne and Christian Meier, collective activities such as communal dining and the social groupings that resulted had been central to the Archaic polis. Indeed, those practices played a crucial role in the very emergence of ideas and practices of citizenship, still in gestation in the Archaic world.Footnote ²⁹ Such collective practices remained important in fifth-century BCE Athens. However, newly sophisticated fifth-century conceptualizations were so predicated on treating political equality and political engagement as hallmarks of collective civic life that they normally left everything to the “private” sphere except formal polis activities—participation in political institutions, war, or ritual—in which citizens were demonstrably equal and focused on the polis (and any non-citizens involved were clearly subordinate to citizens and civic expectations).Footnote ³⁰ This assertion of the newly dominant political over the social would have been a way of resisting some of the hierarchical and fissiparous tendencies of the Archaic legacy, in particular the threat that informal groupings could enable patronage or faction-building.

As early as the later fifth century, however, some Athenian rhetoric pushes against the sharp “public”/“private” (κοινόν/ἴδιον) distinction, even while continuing to uphold it. Thucydides’ Pericles gestures towards an intermediate social sphere in his argument that the Athenians conduct their civic life (πολιτεύομεν) in a spirit of freedom evident not only in their public affairs (τά πρὸς τὸ κοινóν), but also in their lack of suspicion in everyday dealings with one another (ἐς τὴν πρὸς ἀλλήλους τῶν καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἐπιτηδευμάτων ὑποψίαν).Footnote ³¹ However, he immediately resolves this apparent contrast between political and social life into the familiar, less nuanced opposition between “public” and “private,” attributing social relations to the latter: despite the easy-going approach to private affairs (τὰ ἴδια) he has just sketched, Thucydides’ Pericles stresses that the Athenians are very respectful of the law in formal civic affairs (τὰ δημόσια).Footnote ³²

This pushing at the bounds of the “public”/“private” (κοινόν/ἴδιον) distinction became more intense in the fourth century BCE. In his Against Timocrates, while arguing against leniency towards those who transgress in public life, Demosthenes suggests that the laws of a polis are concerned with two sets of questions: first, with how we should treat one another, have (business) dealings, determine how to behave in private affairs, and live together in general (δι’ ὧν χρώμεθ’ ἀλλήλοις καὶ συναλλάττομεν καὶ περὶ τῶν ἰδίων ἃ χρὴ ποιεῖν διωρίσμεθα καὶ ζῶμεν ὅλως τὰ πρὸς ἡμᾶς αὐτούς); and, second, with how each individual should behave towards the collective polis (τῷ κοινῷ τῆς πόλεως) if he wishes to engage in politics (πολιτεύεσθαι) and claims to care for the city.Footnote ³³ The first category once again gestures towards a third sphere of social interaction, not least because Demosthenes lists the issue of how citizens should interact with one another separately to that of how they should regulate their “private” life. Nonetheless, when he seeks in the next sentence to summarize the two categories he has to fall back, like Thucydides’ Pericles, on the κοινόν/ἴδιον dichotomy, identifying social relations with “the private” (τὸ ἴδιον): laws “concerning private affairs” (περὶ τῶν ἰδίων) must be gentle and humane (ἠπίως κεῖσθαι καὶ φιλανθρώπως) for the benefit of the common people, but those concerning relations with the civic sphere (περὶ τῶν πρὸς τὸ δημόσιον) must be harsh and severe, so that those engaged in formal politics (οἱ πολιτευόμενοι) will not wrong the people. Demosthenes thus expresses an inchoate division between a strictly political sphere, demanding stern rules and austere virtues, and a sphere of informal interaction between citizens, requiring gentle, humane virtues. This division partly prefigures many of the Hellenistic and Roman developments that will be analyzed below. However, Demosthenes does not explicitly identify the latter sphere as something separate from, and richer than, “the private.”Footnote ³⁴

If practical rhetoric started almost to call out for a more explicit, systematic recognition of a distinct social sphere, this might have been expected to push fourth-century intellectuals in that direction. In reality, however, they did not take that conceptual leap, presumably still wary of the consequences for civic equality and solidarity of social interaction free from political scrutiny. As Vincent Azoulay has shown, adapting Schmitt Pantel’s view,Footnote ³⁵ those fourth-century intellectuals who took account of this trend did not so much distinguish social from political life as expand the scope of politeia to cover much of what is classed in modern political theory as le politique (the political), including a much wider range of interactions and notably the informal ones of symposium, club, or chance meeting. Azoulay draws attention to the speech attributed in Xenophon’s Hellenica to the herald Kleokritos in 403 BCE, urging his opponents in Athens’ civil war to recognize the two sides’ wealth of shared experiences, including religious and educational ones, and their great political importance as foundations of concord (ὁμόνοια).Footnote ³⁶

As Azoulay has also demonstrated, this example forms part of a broader attempt by Xenophon to focus political attention on informal customs, norms, and interactions, in dialogue with advocates of more traditional, narrower conceptions of politeia. In a similar way, Isocrates explicitly distinguished laws concerned with the private sphere of contracts (τοὺς περὶ τῶν ἰδίων συμβολαίων) from those laws, taken much more seriously by the Athenians of old, which deal with the everyday practices of citizens (τοὺς περὶ τῶν καθ’ ἑκάστην τὴν ἡμέραν ἐπιτηδευμάτων).Footnote ³⁷ His aim was not to class these “practices” (ἐπιτηδεύματα) as a third category between private and political, but rather to show, like Xenophon, that any effective understanding of politeia or exercise of citizenship and political rule (ἀρχή) must treat customs and practices as intrinsic to political order, rather than supplements to it.Footnote ³⁸ These ideas are strongly consistent with fourth-century philosophers’ broad definitions of politeia, which partly built on traditional Greek thinking.Footnote ³⁹

Perhaps the richest Classical conceptualization of the collective life of a polis beyond political institutions is Aristotle’s discussion in his Nicomachean Ethics of the “communities” or “associations” (κοινωνίαι) which make up a polis, including associations of sea-travelers, soldiers, and demesmen as well as religious groups and dining clubs.Footnote ⁴⁰ Significantly, however, Aristotle was not singling out these associations as a separate sphere from institutionalized politics, complementary but not subordinate to it. He still regarded the polis as a single political “community” (κοινωνία), an overarching structure which actually subsumes and regulates the other κοινωνίαι. For Aristotle this hierarchy is necessary because the polis strives towards what is advantageous for life as a whole, whereas its constituent associations focus on one advantage related to their particular purpose (such as safe travel or pleasurable dining).Footnote ⁴¹ Any form of organized collective life with its own character and goals, independent from the polis’ unifying political project of the good life in common for all, would be tantamount to factionalism or even strife (stasis). Aristotle’s approach was consistent with Athenian practice: sub-polis associations tended to be structured like poleis-in-microcosm, and were also subject to supervision by the polis as a whole.Footnote ⁴²

This overview of Classical Athenian approaches can shed new light on a question which is currently the subject of intense debate. Did Classical Athenians understand citizenship (πολιτεία) as a broad composite of different forms of participation in the collective life of the polis, as Josine Blok has recently argued with an emphasis on its religious dimension?Footnote ⁴³ Or did they rather conceive citizenship principally as a matter of participation in formal political institutions, a traditional view restated forcefully by Pierre Fröhlich in response to Blok?Footnote ⁴⁴ The most convincing response is to recognize that the two views coexisted within Classical Athenian thought, and even within the thinking of an individual such as Aristotle.Footnote ⁴⁵ This must be partly explained by the widely shared reluctance to recognize a third, social sphere of polis life, for fear this would open a back door to inequality or factionalism. This reluctance meant that, when confronted with interactions which did not easily fit into the public/private binary, two options remained: to accommodate them, first, within a particularly capacious notion of the private sphere (as did Demosthenes and Thucydides’ Pericles) or, second, within a particularly capacious notion of the political sphere (like Xenophon, Isocrates, and Aristotle in the examples above). These two options carried with them correspondingly narrow and broad conceptions of politeia (πολιτεία), which were mutually sustaining because each captured something important but not, by itself, the full complexity of citizenship.

Asserting the Social over the Political

Perhaps the first emphatic challenge to the overwhelmingly political conception of communal life dominant in Classical Athens came from Epicurus in the later fourth century BCE. Epicurus urged wise men to break free of the “prison” of routine and political life (ἐκ τοῦ περὶ τὰ ἐγκύκλια καὶ πολιτικὰ δεσμωτηρίου),Footnote ⁴⁶ encouraging them not to engage in politics (πολιτεύεσθαι).Footnote ⁴⁷ As part of this argument, he developed a vision of the desirable common life that was strongly social rather than political, excluding conventional political institutions and activities. To describe the human interactions which give rise to shared standards of justice and the common good, he referred to participation in mutual “community” or reciprocal “dealings” (ἐν τῇ πρὸς ἀλλήλους κοινωνίᾳ, ἐν ταῖς μετ᾽ ἀλλήλων συστροφαῖς); those who achieved reliable relations with their neighbors “lived together most pleasantly” (ἐβίωσαν μετ᾽ ἀλλήλων ἥδιστα).Footnote ⁴⁸ Citizenship is not entirely absent from this picture—in one instance, the community (κοινωνία) in question is qualified as being “of the fellow citizens” (τῶν συμπολιτευομένων)Footnote ⁴⁹—but Epicurus’ emphasis, perpetuated by his successor Hermarchus,Footnote ⁵⁰ was squarely on more informal social intercourse.

This counter-cultural stress on the social dimension of communal interaction was paralleled in some third-century accounts of civic life by outsiders. In his travelers’ guide to Athens, for example, Heraclides Creticus offers a sociocultural portrait of the city’s monuments, festivals, spectacles, and philosophy, without any trace of its political institutions.Footnote ⁵¹ The “social” approach to civic life was not, however, immediately echoed in the polis discourse and political theory of citizens themselves, who were predictably hostile to it. This is attested in a rich corpus of inscriptions from the early and mid-Hellenistic period (late fourth–early second century BCE). Many of the most revealing derive from the eastern Aegean and western Asia Minor, the region which dominates the rest of this article. These presented an image of communal life very familiar from the Classical Athenian democracy: a unified space of formal civic activities, including combat and ritual but especially collective political participation, governed by a single set of norms focused on citizen equality, collective autonomy, and the common good.Footnote ⁵² This left little room for a distinct social sphere. These inscriptions do not contain explicit reflection on the spheres of civic life like that attested in speeches and works of political philosophy for Classical Athens, but they repeatedly assert the familiar “public”/“private” (κοινόν/ἴδιον) division.Footnote ⁵³ It might be expected that the more experimental political units of the early and mid-Hellenistic world, including new mixed foundations and unions of two or more poleis in sympoliteiai or federations, would have encouraged a reassessment of the spheres of collective life. There is, however, no clear sign in our admittedly limited evidence for these communities’ ideology that they radically questioned the κοινόν/ἴδιον binary at this stage.Footnote ⁵⁴

This basic binary was to remain a prominent foundation of Greek political consciousness even into the later Hellenistic and Roman periods. However, a more social conceptualization of communal life does begin to emerge in some literature and official documents of the second and first centuries BCE. This is strongly, but certainly not exclusively, evident in representations of interaction not confined to any one polis. Two different texts from this period—a second-century inscription granting privileges to the Athenian branch of the theatrical guild of Dionysiac Artists, passed by the Delphic Amphictyony (the federation responsible for the Delphic sanctuary), and a speech imagined by the first-century historian Diodorus Siculus for a Syracusan who lived four hundred years before—praise the civilized interactions of humanity in general, said to be inspired by Athens’ example. Between them, these texts present civilized human relations as based on “intimacy” (χρῆσίς), “trust” (πίστις),Footnote ⁵⁵ “common life” (κοινὸς βίος), and “living together” or symbiōsis (συμβίωσις).Footnote ⁵⁶ The abstract noun συμβίωσις, used to refer to social relations and sociability (and sometimes marriage), seems to have come into regular usage precisely in the second and first centuries BCE, though the root verb was clearly well-established much earlier.Footnote ⁵⁷ All the terms cited evoked relatively open-ended interaction, which did not require common citizenship and political institutions but could suffuse the new Roman cosmopolis across the Mediterranean, binding together not only local communities but also more far-flung individuals whose interests happened to coincide.

Crucially, in a much more substantial departure from past trends, this social conceptualization of human interaction in some cases came to supplant more political visions, even of internal polis life, in poleis’ own discourse and political theory. This was far from a uniform tendency, but certain citizens and political thinkers came to deploy concepts previously used mainly to describe relations among strangers who were certainly not fellow citizens, and usually lived in different places, as central terms for praising interactions among citizens within a single polis. One such concept was “peace” (εἰρήνη),Footnote ⁵⁸ and another was “humanity” (φιλανθρωπία). Though this latter virtue had featured quite prominently in earlier civic rhetoric, before the later Hellenistic period it was never used in inscriptions, and only rarely in literary texts, to refer to relations among fellow citizens of the same polis. After around 150 BCE, however, it became quite common to use it in this way across different genres.Footnote ⁵⁹

Concepts such as these cut across traditional political conceptions of internal civic interaction. Their intrinsic connection with relations among separate states, or strangers, carried connotations of flexible, voluntary interaction. As a result, when these concepts were applied to ongoing, intensive relations among residents of the same place, those connotations helped to conjure something close to social interaction. The word φιλανθρωπία (“humanity”) also suggested unconditional benevolence, rather than justice,Footnote ⁶⁰ which further distanced it from traditional political virtue. It often had connotations of top-down charity or patronage, very evident in Xenophon and Isocrates,Footnote ⁶¹ but it could also have a more neutral meaning of generous openness and compassion for others as fellow humans, consistent with its etymology,Footnote ⁶² which must have eased its adoption to describe relations among notionally equal fellow citizens.

In some exceptional cases, “social” language even drove out talk of politeia from contexts where it had been axiomatic. Greek cities vividly revealed their self-understanding in inscriptions recording how the citizen body had been reconciled after a period of strife, often with the help of a board of foreign arbitrators or judges. In the Classical and early to mid-Hellenistic periods, documents of this type tended to stress that the aim of the reconciliation had been to restore the polis as a structured political community of participatory citizens. Indeed, according to a formula attested several times in inscriptions from Hellenistic poleis, the aim of reconciliation was explicitly that citizens should “conduct their political life” (πολιτεύεσθαι) in concord (ὁμόνοια).Footnote ⁶³

A decree passed by the citizens of Mylasa for their eminent citizen Ouliades, probably in the first century BCE, contains a section concerning his efforts to resolve disputes among his fellow citizens, which appears to perpetuate this tradition but also adapts it, revealing changes in civic self-understanding.Footnote ⁶⁴ The citizens of Mylasa singled out Ouliades as an individual: he was not one member of a board of foreign judges charged with reconciliation, as in the normal Hellenistic pattern, but an almost king-like domestic benefactor, who rose above the civic fray to bring concord single-handedly. It was probably not unconnected with this shift that they also presented the results of Ouliades’ reconciliation in a novel way: they quite literally “depoliticized” the familiar formula about citizens “conduct[ing] their political life” (πολιτεύεσθαι) in concord, attributing to Ouliades the different aspiration that citizens should “conduct their shared life with one another” (τὴν μετ’ ἀλλήλων συναναστροφὴν ποιεῖσθαι) in concord.Footnote ⁶⁵

The implication was that Ouliades’ intervention enabled citizens not so much to resume stable, free self-government (πολιτεύεσθαι) as to pursue in concord a more general shared life (συναναστροφή, literally “activity in common”) of social interaction and interdependence, in which specifically political activities (free debating, voting, ruling) had no special priority. Indeed, those activities had partly been transferred upwards: other parts of this decree emphasize the personal leadership and financial expenditure of Ouliades himself, especially in diplomacy, a form of intervention which would not have been open to less wealthy citizens.Footnote ⁶⁶

The abstract noun συναναστροφή (“shared life”) seems to have come into regular use, like συμβίωσις (“living together”), from the second century BCE: the only attestations earlier than c. 200 BCE are, interestingly, Epicurean ones.Footnote ⁶⁷ In this case, the root verb συναναστρέφεσθαι is also scarcely attested earlier, though it does feature in an Epicurean treatise and even in a later third-century epigraphic formula in Delphian decrees granting the status of proxenos (a form of official representative) to foreigners.Footnote ⁶⁸ The contemporaneous rise of the abstract nouns συναναστροφή and συμβίωσις in itself suggests a later Hellenistic search for a new vocabulary to convey collective relations that did not fit established models of the public or political. From the second century onwards, συναναστροφή is attested in multiple sources. Many derive from later centuries, but already in the second and first centuries BCE it was used in inscriptions, Epicurean philosophy, and other literary texts to refer to relations of sociability or friendship.Footnote ⁶⁹

Downplaying politics in favor of the social was, as noted above, a hallmark of Hellenistic Epicureanism; but even the Peripatetics, the school most committed, through Aristotle, to the traditional polis, seem to have adapted their thinking in the later Hellenistic period in the same direction as the citizens of Mylasa. Perhaps the most famous claim of Aristotle’s political theory was that a human is a “political animal,” who can truly flourish only as a participatory citizen in a polis. As Julia Annas points out, the later Hellenistic Peripatetics adapted this central thesis to give greater weight to more general social interaction.Footnote ⁷⁰ The anthology compiled in the fifth century CE by Stobaeus preserves a summary of Peripatetic ethics, traditionally attributed to the Augustan philosopher and teacher Arius Didymus.Footnote ⁷¹ Even if its authorship is ambiguous, this summary certainly preserves the themes and language of later Hellenistic Peripatetics.Footnote ⁷² When it turns to address Aristotle’s Politics at its end, the text does repeat the claim that a human is a “political animal.”Footnote ⁷³ However, in its earlier elaboration of basic Peripatetic ethical teaching about human nature and relationships, the summary describes a human being not as a “political animal” but as a “mutually loving and communal animal” (φιλάλληλον καὶ κοινωνικὸν ζῷον).Footnote ⁷⁴

This partly picks up a claim in Aristotle’s own Eudemian Ethics that a human is a “communal animal” (κοινωνικὸν ζῷον), but that is a specific description of humans’ propensity to form sociable family bonds in the structured household (oikos) rather than mating randomly.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the Peripatetic summary, by contrast, the more complex and general phrase “mutually loving and communal animal” evokes broader, more open-ended and voluntary forms of sociability and cooperation, with “intimates” (οἰκεῖοι) and fellow citizens as well as family members. Indeed, this solidarity is immediately afterwards explicitly broadened to encompass fellow members of large ethnic groups, and even all human beings.Footnote ⁷⁶ Although solidarity with fellow citizens was still emphasized, local political interaction was no longer given quite so central a place in humans’ essential nature.

Something close to this Peripatetic adaptation of Aristotle’s “political animal” argument—to the effect that sustaining social bonds is essential to human nature—was also advanced in a later Hellenistic honorific decree of Priene in Ionia for the citizen Athenopolis. In its introduction, that decree claims that Athenopolis kept his promises to his fellow citizens, considering that “what characterizes him [literally, what belongs to him] most of all is his maintaining of assiduousness towards those conducting their lives together with him” (νομίζων το[ῦτο α]ὑτῶι μέγιστον ὑπάρχειν τὸ τὴν πρὸς τοὺς συν̣α̣ναστρ[ε]φ̣ο̣[μέν]ους ἐκτένειαν συντηρεῖν).Footnote ⁷⁷ It is telling that, as in later Hellenistic Peripatetic thought, this quasi-Aristotelian attitude is expressed with the accent on social rather than political interaction: Athenopolis’ solidarity is said to be directed towards “those conducting their lives together with him” (τοὺς συν̣α̣ναστρ[ε]φ̣ο̣[μέν]ους). In an interesting confirmation of the decree’s overlap with Peripatetic terminology and thinking, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (first/second century CE) used this same verb, συναναστρέφεσθαι, together with the adjectives found in the Peripatetic summary (κοινωνικός, “communal,” and φιλάλληλος, “mutually loving”), to capture the theory of human natural sociability associated with the Peripatetics, which he rejected in favor of individual self-sufficiency.Footnote ⁷⁸

In the Prienian decree, as in that of Mylasa, the concept of συναναστροφή (“shared life”) evokes a broad sense of social interdependence and intertwining lives, of the kind which might equally be found in any voluntary association for trade or cult. The verb συναναστρέφεσθαι was, as noted above, already used in later third-century BCE decrees of Delphi. In those cases, however, it referred to the interactions of a foreigner (granted proxeny in the decree) with Delphian citizensFootnote ⁷⁹: in other words, the loose interactions to be expected between those who were not fellow citizens or even residents of the same polis. It is striking that, in the later Hellenistic period, such loose sociability was expected at Priene and Mylasa even in relations between fellow citizens of the same polis.

Did Changing Ideas Reflect a Changing Civic Reality?

It is important to ask whether these changes in language and ideas in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, especially from the mid-second century BCE onwards, represented a response to changes in civic life in practice. From one perspective, the new ways of talking about civic life could be seen as a novel means of conceptualizing old practices, a primarily ideological realignment which went together with a partial reduction in the suspicion of inequality and differentiation among citizens so prevalent in Classical Athenian ideology and philosophy. However, it is also possible to point to changing practices on the ground, and to argue that these new conceptualizations both responded to and helped foster these shifts.

Several developments in civic life after c. 150 BCE were not easily reconciled with the traditional self-image of the polis, before then widespread in the Greek world, as a relatively closed body of citizens focused on their home community and its common good, who shared a single, unambiguous status of citizenship (politeia) and governed themselves in accordance with a constitution (also politeia). As some aspects of power passed upwards to the Roman administration, the traditional practices of egalitarian interaction among citizens, centered on political institutions which encouraged power-sharing and rigorous scrutiny of decisions, lost some of their dominance of civic life. This was partly the result of the increased prominence of another, also longstanding dimension of civic life, focused on mainly voluntary forms of social, cultural, and religious interaction rather than an obligatory dynamic of “ruling and being ruled.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Citizens (and others) could engage in these alternative forms of interaction within centralized civic contexts, especially markets and festivals and the educational program of the gymnasium, though those all also had more formal and official dimensions, supervised by civic magistrates. These interactions were, however, perhaps most concentrated within more specialized educational groupings and voluntary associations, which could be based on conviviality, a particular religious cult (including early Christianity), or the pursuit of shared economic or professional interests.Footnote ⁸¹ As observed above, such associations had always been a key part of polis society. Nonetheless, the number of surviving inscriptions produced by them increases significantly in the Hellenistic and especially Roman periods.Footnote ⁸² This no doubt partly reflects changing epigraphic habits. However, recent research has strengthened the view that it also reveals associations’ increased prominence in civic life, as a complement, straddling the public/private divide, to traditional public civic institutions. As one study of Phrygia in Asia Minor has shown, associations’ rising importance was partly due to Roman influence, including the model of local groups of Romans in Greek cities, which played a semi-public role as well as serving the business interests and sociability of this particular constituency.Footnote ⁸³

All these increasingly prominent forms and contexts of interaction were important mediators of civic power and trust,Footnote ⁸⁴ but they were less directly and unremittingly focused on the political values of the common good, justice, and collective autonomy (though those values remained paramount in other situations). Instead, they gave more scope to individual self-interest, as well as to solidarity based on charity, hospitality, or social status. To put this broad argument in spatial terms, the civic assembly and council, the centers of political debate and collective deliberation, ceded some of their prominence in civic life to the commercial agora, civic temples, gymnasium, schools, the places where associations met and worshipped, and citizens’ houses.

It should be stressed that this change was a matter of degree: voluntary sociocultural, educational, and religious interaction had been important earlier, and narrowly political interaction remained crucial into the Roman period. It is obviously difficult to demonstrate or prove a subtle shift in emphasis, but some concrete signs can be mentioned. As in Heraclides Creticus’ third-century BCE travel narrative, the festivals, entertainment, and opportunities for education and socializing a Greek city could offer, rather than its constitution or laws, often became the main attraction and talking point for outsiders—not only for Romans keen to emphasize that they savored the intellectual companionship of Greek civic elites,Footnote ⁸⁵ but also for mobile Greeks themselves.Footnote ⁸⁶ Strabo, in his account of the great Greek cities of the eastern Roman Empire, frequently foregrounded the cultural and intellectual figures they had produced.Footnote ⁸⁷ Even the self-image of polis insiders was changing in the same direction. Plutarch, an active local citizen in his home polis in central Greece, gave a disparaging account of orators who continued to engage in demagoguery by evoking Marathon and Classical military feats; in the first and second centuries CE, the really relevant exempla from Classical Athens were those showing gentle civility and generous forgetting of political rivalries or interests, or of strict justice, out of consideration for others, such as the amnesty of 403 BCE.Footnote ⁸⁸ A similar inflection is also visible within official civic rhetoric itself. From the later Hellenistic period, cities’ honorific decrees in praise of benefactors often foregrounded their hospitality and other voluntary contributions, especially to education and festivals, partly at the expense of their more utilitarian involvement in war, diplomacy, and public finance, though those traditional civic contributions also remained prominent.Footnote ⁸⁹

The broad shifts discussed here expanded the opportunities for non-citizens, including even resident foreigners and visitors, to play a central role in civic life, however temporary. This was an expansion of earlier Hellenistic trends towards more meaningful interaction between those who were not fellow citizens of the same polis, especially in the context of sympoliteiai and federal systems,Footnote ⁹⁰ as well as voluntary associations, which increasingly enabled mingling between citizens and foreigners. Moreover, from the later Hellenistic period, it became quite common for some individuals to hold multiple polis citizenships in different places.Footnote ⁹¹ Even the status of polis citizenship (politeia) could increasingly be parceled, in specific cases, into separate entitlements, which made it possible to confer something like partial citizenship on outsiders.Footnote ⁹²

On the basis of the evidence surveyed in this section, it is a reasonable hypothesis that the new conceptualizations of social life within the polis discussed here were provoked partly by the shifting location of power from the mid-second century BCE onwards, but especially by the increased prominence of interactions which did not easily fit traditional conceptions of either political or private life. This would mirror how, in the modern world, the challenge of grappling with new forms of interaction has likewise stimulated intense reflection about, and reconceptualization of, the political and the social.Footnote ⁹³ In both cases, the public sphere of political debate proved robust enough to subject new forms of interaction to intense scrutiny.

Reasserting Political Life in its Breadth and Variety

In the most pessimistic interpretation, the practical and ideological changes discussed so far amounted to “depoliticization” after c. 150 BCE, or even “post-politics.”Footnote ⁹⁴ According to advocates of this declinist approach, the new style of civic life, often more informal, cultural, and cosmopolitan, gave members of wealthy civic elites new opportunities to exercise power and patronage through avenues, such as offering lavish hospitality for all citizens in their homes, which lay outside traditional civic checks and balances, geared towards equality and justice. Instead of scrutiny and praise according to criteria identical for all citizens, wealthy benefactors received extravagant city honors, couched in ever-more abstract ethical praise for their generosity.Footnote ⁹⁵ This interpretation of later Hellenistic developments shares many similarities with Arendt’s picture of the conquest of the political by the social in the modern world: that is, the displacement of free collective action by citizens, aimed at the common good, in favor of more instrumental and individualistic forms of interaction, aimed at mere survival.Footnote ⁹⁶ More recent theorists have developed Arendt’s critique of modernity, positing the supersession of free, agonistic political debate about the common good by an ethics of charitable philanthropy, or “politics in the register of morality.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Yet, as current research continues to uncover the power dynamics of the Greek cities in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, it suggests a much more mixed and complex picture than this pessimistic reading: the changes outlined above were entwined in subtle ways with a robust political framework of enduring power-sharing and equality, and even democracy and political conflict.Footnote ⁹⁸ This calls into question any straightforward developmental picture, and raises fresh questions about the balance of political life and other spheres. Crucially, later Hellenistic and early Imperial-era Greeks were already themselves engaged in reflections similar to those of modern historians of the Hellenistic and Roman poleis, asking what place was left for politics and politeia in the changed world in which they lived. Although some accepted or embraced the partial displacement of politics by social life, others found creative ways to reassert the role of truly political life in their cities, and to navigate its interaction with the burgeoning social sphere. This is the subject of the rest of this paper; in the final section below, ancient reflections on these issues will be brought back to bear on the modern scholarly debate.

Among those who insisted on the persistence of politics, some simply preserved old ways of thinking, including the straightforward public/private dichotomy, which remained very widespread in both inscriptions and literary texts. For example, Hierocles, a Greek Stoic of the second century CE, sought to describe in systematic terms the concentric circles of people with which an individual should gradually recognize his or her affinity by a process of oikeiōsis (“appropriation” or “familiarization”), ending with the whole of humanity. In his list, Hierocles skipped straight from the private circles of the self and different degrees of kin to the public, institutionalized circles of fellow members of the same deme or phylē (two formal subdivisions of a polis), and then to members of the same polis. This left no space for an intermediate circle of informal social and economic relationships between the family and the civic sphere.Footnote ⁹⁹

Meanwhile, other Greek citizens and thinkers of the later Hellenistic and early Roman periods did make changes to the old framework, but in ways that enabled them to accommodate the new force of social life without exiling politics from the city. One tendency developed the attempts of Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates to expand the notion of politeia, giving an ever more prominent place to extra-institutional interactions and customs, with the result that it resembled the modern idea of le politique (the political). Scholars have tended to see this inclusive approach as the dominant one in the Hellenistic world,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ preparing the way for more metaphorical conceptions of politeia in the Roman Empire and Late Antiquity, when the term could denote the structure of the world, the cosmos, or a monastic community, or even the general “culture” or “life” of a holy man depicted in hagiography.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Already in the first century BCE, the related term politikos, moving away from its original sense of “political,” could be used to express a very general sense of civilization or civility.Footnote ¹⁰²

It is not easy to find explicit endorsements of this very broad conception of politeia in inscribed decrees. It was, however, at least implicit in many later Hellenistic examples, which, as noted above, gave increasing prominence—and thus political scrutiny—to benefactors’ civic life beyond formal institutions, including their family relations and broader sociability.Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, some decrees which explicitly described benefactors as engaging in political life (πολιτευόμενος) focused strongly on their cultural contributions, especially to the gymnasium.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A broad, multifaceted conception of politeia can also be detected in decrees that use concise formulae to portray a citizen “engaging in political life in every way” (πάντα τρόπον πολιτευόμενος)Footnote ¹⁰⁵ or “in all other respects” (ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις πᾶσιν).Footnote ¹⁰⁶

This broader conception was also expressed more systematically in literary texts, especially of the Imperial period. Plutarch invokes it in his On Whether an Old Man Should Participate in Politics, stating that politeia is not a limited period of office but a lifelong political engagement. His broad conception of political life here ranges very widely across the collective activities of the community, but also across the full range of virtues: the true political agent must exercise not only the obviously political virtues, such as love of the polis, but also show himself to be community-minded (κοινωνικός) and humane (φιλάνθρωπος)—virtues well-suited to more informal, social interactions with a wide spectrum of people.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Plutarch’s incorporation of humanity (φιλανθρωπία) into the heart of political virtue may partly take its cue from Xenophon and Isocrates, but he resists their urge to use the term, combined with a broad, loose view of politeia, to blur the boundaries between civic leadership and monarchical or aristocratic paternalismFootnote ¹⁰⁸: for Plutarch here, φιλανθρωπία remains within the bounds of the civic, which it also serves to reinforce. True political activity, which must emulate Socrates as much as Pericles, strives to recolonize the social sphere for the political ends of justice and the common good.

Plutarch had an obvious interest in this particular work in emphasizing the extra-institutional aspects of politics: these were the avenues open for old men to contribute to political life outside regular magistracies, now held by younger compatriots. However, his approach here chimes with hints elsewhere in his oeuvre.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This way of thinking also finds occasional explicit parallels in inscribed decrees of the Imperial period. The strongest occurs in an honorific inscription set up by the inhabitants (katoikountes) of a Lydian settlement, who did not possess full polis status. According to this decree, the benefactor was honored on the grounds of being a good man and “engaging in political life in a decent and humane way in private towards each individual and in common towards all” (κα[ὶ ἰδίᾳ] πρὸς ἕνα ἕκαστον κα[ὶ κοιν]ῇ πρὸς πάντας πολε[ιτευ]όμενον ἐπε[ικ]ῶς κα[ὶ φιλ]ανθρώπως).Footnote ¹¹⁰ Elevation of extra-institutional interaction to the status of participation in politeia might have been particularly attractive to a sub-polis community like this, without the full range of civic institutions, but the members of such a settlement would also have had an interest in remaining faithful to the norms of wider civic rhetoric and thinking. Like Plutarch, this community coopted humanity (and decency) as political virtues, even when exercised in informal one-to-one interaction.

Politics and Social Life as Complementary Spheres

Crucially for the argument of this paper, the more inclusive conception of politeia, subsuming the social, itself had a significant rival, until now less studied. Other decrees reasserted a fairly narrow, institutionalized conception of politeia, closer to modern notions of la politique (politics). This is well attested, for example, in the epigraphy of the cities of the Hellenistic and Imperial Lycian League, in southwestern Asia Minor, where the participle πολιτευόμενος commonly refers to the narrow realm of institutions, whether it denotes possessing the legal status of citizenship or participating in formal political institutions.Footnote ¹¹¹ Similarly, a mid-second-century BCE decree honoring Apollonios, a citizen of the Ionian polis of Metropolis, marks off political involvement as a distinct stage in his life, on which he embarked after completing his youthful education and travel: “returning from his stay abroad he progressed into a political career” (ἐκ τε τῆς ἀποδημίας παραγενόμενος προῆλθεν ἐπὶ τὸ πολιτεύεσθαι).Footnote ¹¹² This use of the verb πολιτεύεσθαι must correspond to active involvement in institutionalized politics.

Significantly, a few decrees in this category innovatively combined this narrow understanding of politeia with a new, richer conceptualization of extra-institutional interactions, envisioning a social realm, with its own dynamics and norms, as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, politics. The number of relevant texts is small, but the contrast with standard forms of thinking and expression makes them stand out. A striking example is the late first- or second-century CE posthumous decree of Kaunos, in southwestern Asia Minor, for the citizen Agreophon. Despite his young age, Agreophon, who belonged to a distinguished family of magistrates, had already fulfilled many leading civic roles: stephanēphoros, gymnasiarch, agonothete, and liturgist, as well as dekaprōtos (one of the leading men of the polis, with corresponding financial obligations). His early death provoked widespread public mourning, and the decree grants him a public funeral and sums up the virtues of the young man’s life:

Politeia is here no all-encompassing category demanding the full range of virtues. Rather, it represents one dimension of Agreophon’s wider life (βίος), presumably his formal office-holding and other participation in civic government,Footnote ¹¹⁴ a usage first documented in 1925 by Adolf Wilhelm.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In that sphere, Agreophon is said to have shown the appropriate virtue of justice (δικαιοσύνη), as well as the related virtue of integrity in discharging formal public duties or “trusts” (he was ἁγνὸς καὶ περὶ τὰς δημοσίας πίστεις). However, he is also presented as having engaged in a wide range of other types of interaction with his fellow citizens, social and familial rather than political. In each case he demonstrated the appropriate virtues, often more sentimental than those of justice or purity: he showed respect (αἰδώς) towards his elders; he was affectionate (φιλόστοργος) towards people of all age groups; he was pious (εὐσεβής) and affectionate (φιλόστοργος again) towards his relations; he was inimitable (ἀμείμητος) towards his friends; and, interestingly, he showed decency (ἐπιείκεια) and humanity (φιλανθρωπία), here clearly a hierarchical virtue, towards his slaves. Significantly, Agreophon’s interactions beyond politeia were not limited to life within the household, but also included much less restricted relationships, not only with “friends,” but also with elders and those of “every age” in general. In other words, his social relations ranged as, if not more, widely than his political ones, but they had a different nature.

This Kaunian decree thus expresses a sophisticated conception of civic life, in which different spheres of interaction and different virtues support one another, rather than fusing into an amorphous whole of generic politeia, as in Plutarch. In particular, the gentler virtues of family and social life balance the sterner, incorruptible virtues of formal political life. Interestingly, another Imperial-era honorary decree of Kaunos also juxtaposes these different virtues, though without dividing them up between different spheres of civic life. The second-century CE decree for Quintus Vedius Capito, son of Publius, inscribed on a large family monument erected by his son, concludes by praising him for “engaging in political life as a magistrate in a dignified, virtuous, just, and humane way, towards the whole people in a beneficial manner, and, in personal dealings with individuals, not giving ground for complaint” (καὶ ἄρχοντα πολειτευόμενον σεμνῶς καὶ ἐναρέτως καὶ δικαίως καὶ φιλανθρώπως τῷ τε παντὶ δήμῳ συνφερόντως καὶ τοῖς κατ’ ἄνδρα vacat ἀπροσκόπως).Footnote ¹¹⁶ This latter decree is in some respects closer to Plutarch’s approach, in that it integrates informal interactions and humane virtue under the overarching notion of political activity (πολειτευόμενον). At the same time, the addition of the word ἄρχοντα, meaning “as a magistrate,” suggests a desire, as in the decree honoring Agreophon, to define a specific realm of institutionalized politics, which in this case can itself accommodate informal, humane interaction. It is, however, also conceivable that the word ἄρχοντα belongs with the previous part of the sentence, not quoted here; in that case, the final lines would be very close to Plutarch’s sentiment, expressing a global conception of political engagement cutting across different activities and virtues.

A closer parallel to the Agreophon decree can be found in another posthumous decree, later Hellenistic or early Imperial, from Synnada in Phrygia. Honoring the deceased youth Philonides, it states that his grandfather had shown good faith and incorruptibility in office (τὴν ἐν ταῖς ἀρχαῖ[ς] πίστιν τε καὶ καθα[ριότητα]), combined with sincerity and humanity towards, not merely his own associates, but each and every citizen (τὴν πρὸς ἕνα καὶ ἕκαστον [τῶν] πολιτῶν γνησιότητά τε καὶ φιλανθρωπίαν).Footnote ¹¹⁷ These comprehensive but informal interactions with his fellow citizens once again evoke a social sphere between public and private. This desirable balance between robust political life and gentle, humane social life was also praised by the historian and rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus (first century BCE–first century CE). In his account of Rome’s origins, Dionysius described how Herakles brought civilized interaction to the world, putting down tyrannies and overbearing cities and establishing “lawful monarchies, well-ordered political systems, and humane and sociable modes of life” (νομίμους βασιλείας καὶ σωφρονικὰ πολιτεύματα καὶ βίων ἔθη φιλάνθρωπα καὶ κοινοπαθῆ).Footnote ¹¹⁸

Some decrees even used abstract vocabulary (comparable to Dionysius’ βίων ἔθη, or “modes of life”) explicitly to identify social life as a distinct sphere, alongside politics. A later Hellenistic decree of Priene for the citizen Moschion gives the following description in its opening lines:

Towards the end of this extract, the Prienians insist on the still-vibrant political dimension of their civic community, describing themselves as (active) fellow citizens (οἱ συμπολιτευόμενοι, literally “those engaging in political life together”). It was a traditional, narrow, institutional conception of politeia which they had in mind: the “fellow citizens,” together with “the residents” (οἱ κατοικοῦντες), had provided evidence of their appreciation for Moschion’s good deeds, presumably earlier honorific decrees passed through a process of institutionalized decision-making. This political conceptualization contrasts strongly with the description of the civic community in the contemporary decree for Moschion’s brother Athenopolis, discussed earlier in this article, as “those conducting their lives together” (οἱ συναναστρεφόμενοι). The different individuals who proposed the decrees honoring each of the brothers thus made distinct choices: in the Moschion decree it was the Prienians’ nature as a self-governing community that was foregrounded, while the decree for Athenopolis presented them as an interdependent social group profiting from a benefactor’s largesse. This confirms that there was no simple consensus at the local level; rival meaningful ideological options could exist within a single polis.

Crucially, however, rather than ignoring the extra-political dimension of the Prienians’ community emphasized in the Athenopolis decree, or relegating it to the realm of the private (ἴδιον), the drafter of the Moschion decree identified sociable interaction outside politics as one of several different spheres of polis life. If the highly plausible restoration of this inscription is correct, the decree praises Moschion for acting rightly, or “in a manner pleasing to the gods” (ὁ[σ]ίως), towards his parents and “those living together with him in close relations and intimacy” (τοὺ[ς συμ]β[ι]οῦντας ἐν οἰκ[ε]ιότηιτι καὶ χρήσ̣ει), as well as towards the rest of the citizens. The probable reference to συμβιοῦντες, “those living together with him,” acknowledges that Moschion engaged in collective interactions and relations of interdependence outside politics (compare Athenopolis’ συναναστρεφόμενοι, or “those conducting their lives together with him”). These would have included his interactions with other kin besides his parents (perhaps the main implication of οἰκ[ε]ιότηιτι), but also with non-relations with whom he enjoyed special bonds (probably the main implication of χρήσ̣ει). The latter may have included fellow members of voluntary associations, which in other contexts could themselves be described as symbiōseis (“communities of shared life”) or koina (“public things”).Footnote ¹²⁰

These relationships of συμβίωσις (“living together”) were depicted in this decree as the second of three concentric circles of relationships lacking a narrowly political, institutionalized dimension: the inner circle comprised Moschion’s relations with his parents and the outer one his extra-political relations with “the rest of the citizens.” This analysis in terms of concentric spheres extending out from each individual was also a feature of contemporary late Hellenistic Stoic and Peripatetic attempts to grapple with the complexity of informal interpersonal relationships.Footnote ¹²¹ As in the decrees from Kaunos and Synnada considered above, the different dimensions of Moschion’s civic activity required distinct, calibrated virtues. As well as piety towards the gods, he exercised different virtues in social relations with family, associates, and fellow citizens, on the one hand, and in formal political interaction, on the other. He acted “rightly” or “in a manner pleasing to the gods” (ὁσίως) in social relations, but relations with his country (πατρίς), and thus with fellow citizens specifically in their political capacity, demanded the more directly political virtues of justice (δικαιοσύνη) and love of glory (φιλοδοξία).

There is an interesting overlap here with the ideas and phrasing of the near-contemporary Epicurean Philodemus (first century BCE). In his defense of Epicurus against charges of subversive atheism, Philodemus claims that the latter had not been condemned by the Athenians for his doctrines and activities, as was notoriously the case with other philosophers. On the contrary, he knew how to defend himself, “together with those who truly shared his life” (ἅμα τοῖς γνη[σί]ως συνβιώσασι[ν α]ὐτῶι), presumably fellow members of the Epicurean Garden. The very fact that Epicurus was relatively unknown in Athens showed that he, like his “fellow school members” ([τ]οὺς συνσχολ̣[άζ]οντας [αὐτῶ]ι), was not considered harmful to his fellow citizens (τῶν συνπολε[ι]τ̣[ευ]ομένων).Footnote ¹²² As in the Moschion decree, there is an implicit contrast between Epicurus’ warm relations with those “sharing [his] life” and more impersonal relations with the polis as a political community. Philodemus’ distinction between political life and the life of a community for shared education also chimes with an earlier decree from Asia Minor (early second century BCE), in which the young men (neoi) of Xanthos in Lycia distinguished between their gymnasiarch’s contributions to the gymnasium and his activities in the political sphere (ἐν τῶι πολιτεύματι).Footnote ¹²³

One final, later example is interesting to study in detail. A long posthumous Imperial-era decree from Olbia on the north coast of the Black Sea, honoring the citizen Karzoazos, explores in depth the relationship between political engagement and wider life (βίος), which can be fused into συμβίωσις (“living together”).Footnote ¹²⁴ In the introduction to the decree, the Olbiopolitans praise Karzoazos as “a man who has followed finely the path of political engagement and aspired to an unimpeachable life” (ἄνδρα καλῶς ἐπιβεβηκότα τοῖς τῆς πολειτείας ἴχνεσι καὶ ζηλώσαντα βίον ἀλοιδόρητον, ll. 3–5). The precise components of both his political engagement (πολειτεία) and his irreproachable life (βίος ἀλοιδόρητος) are spelled out in the substance of the decree. He responded as an enthusiastic, willing liturgist to civic crises. Whenever his country (patris) called on him, he became an example to the young, “imitating the life of those who engage in politics excellently” (μειμούμενο[ς] τῶν ἄριστα πολειτευομένων τὸν βίον, ll. 12–14). This is followed immediately by an account of his formal political activities as magistrate and ambassador. Significantly, he is said to have shown the specific, appropriate political virtues of energy and reliability in service, behaving “with good faith,” “strenuously,” and “unhesitatingly” (πιστῶς, πονικῶς, ἀόκνως, l. 15).

The decree then turns to the other dimension of Karzoazos’ activities appropriate for civic scrutiny, his interactions with every single individual (ἐν ταῖς πρὸς ἕνα ἕκαστον ὑπαντήσεσι, ll. 19–20). In a standard decree these would be summed up as his “private” or “individual” (ἰδίαι) relations, as if to dispel any suspicion of parapolitical collective activities that might shade into factionalism. Here, however, there is no mention of the “private” (ἴδιον); what is stressed is the broad reach and collective character of Karzoazos’ interactions beyond formal politics. He showed “humanity” (φιλανθρωπία) and “love of foreigners” (φιλοξενία) towards outsiders, reflecting a spirit of kinship (συνγενικὸν πάθος, ll. 21–23). Towards individual citizens in need he showed the traditional civic solidarity expressed by “good will” (εὔνοια), more fraternal than the slightly diffuse “humanity” suitable for foreigners. The precise phrasing here is particularly significant for my argument: he showed good will “if any of his fellow citizens mixed with him either on the pretext of business or through the shared habit of mutual association” (πολειτῶν δὲ εἴ τις αὐτῷ συνέμειξεν ἢ κατὰ συναλλαγῆς ἀφορμὴν ἢ κατὰ συμβιώσεως συνήθειαν, ll. 23–25). The later Hellenistic coinage συμβίωσις, to refer to social relations, again stands out. The concatenation of four compounds with συν- (the prefix indicating joint action) emphasizes that these informal interactions constituted no atomistic, individualistic realm, but a genuinely social one.

Oligarchy or More Complex Self-Understanding?

In order to explain these distinctive decrees’ sharp division between politeia and social life, the most economical account might seem to be a shift towards oligarchy. In this reading, the implication would be that by this period significant decision-making, especially interaction with the Roman authorities, lay mainly with those, the recipients of honorific decrees, who qualified for the burden and opportunity of expensive embassies, magistracies, and liturgies. While they engaged in politeia, ordinary citizens and other city residents were left, as in the Mylasan decree for Ouliades, with the more everyday world of social interaction and sociability: συναναστροφή or συμβίωσις. The later Hellenistic decree of Colophon in Ionia for Polemaios even explicitly states that his leadership of an embassy allowed the rest of the citizens to focus, unburdened, on their “private affairs” (ἐπὶ τῶν ἰδίων).Footnote ¹²⁵ This general approach might also seem to have released the often unequal day-to-day relations of the agora or associations from political scrutiny and projects of redistribution; as part of the “social,” they now lay outside politics.

The “oligarchy” hypothesis cannot, however, fully account for the division made by some decrees between politeia and social life: in most cities, ordinary citizens, outside the liturgical elite, could still participate in formal, institutionalized politics, especially in the assembly. This was already evident in the reference to the confirmed approbation of Moschion’s “fellow active citizens” (συμπολιτευόμενοι) at Priene. The late Hellenistic endurance of assembly politicsFootnote ¹²⁶ was sustained into the Imperial period: the vibrancy of the Imperial-era poleis’ assembly life, especially in Asia Minor, has been demonstrated by recent studies which show the political ekklēsia (assembly) as a living model and foil for the Christian ekklēsia (church).Footnote ¹²⁷

Since participation in political institutions did remain open to many citizens, the division between narrow politeia and social life must have been often less about marking off politics as an elite prerogative than about defining two structural dimensions of civic life which divided any citizen’s civic engagement in two. This is also the impression created by the most systematic, abstract reflections on this theme by contemporary intellectuals. Strabo sometimes draws on this conceptual scheme when analyzing the collective life of the different communities and ethnic groups he surveys in his Geography. He argues in separate passages that education in certain types of edifying myth and communal dining at specified times (something he finds missing in Indian culture), strengthen “both social and political life” (τὸ κοινωνικὸν καὶ τὸ πολιτικὸν τοῦ βίου σχῆμα or τὸν κοινωνικὸν καὶ τὸν πολιτικὸν βίον).Footnote ¹²⁸ He thus held that collective education and commensality, both aimed at the broad population, could help to forge a collective life (βίος) for all, with two parts worth distinguishing under different names: κοινωνικός (which here, because it is used to define a sphere of communal life, can be translated as “social” in the sense that I am proposing in this article) and πολιτικός (“political”).

Strabo certainly did have his own conception of political action and thought, as the realm of power and rule, centered on “the needs of rulers” and clearly distinct from more general social relations.Footnote ¹²⁹ His conception of politics, which I plan to study in more detail elsewhere, is perhaps the closest equivalent in the Hellenistic or Roman-era Greek world to the reaction of theorists such as Chantal Mouffe and Jean-Luc Nancy to modern, more consensual notions of le politique (the political). Inspired partly by Carl Schmitt, they, like Strabo, insist that political life, to be truly worthy of the name, must be distinguished by agonistic assertion of power.Footnote ¹³⁰ This separate evidence for Strabo’s narrow understanding of truly political life shows that he was not using the terms κοινωνικός and πολιτικός as near synonyms in the discussions of education and commensality cited above, but as part of a fine-grained vision of civic life.

The author of the summary of Peripatetic ethics recorded in Stobaeus discussed above brings further theoretical elaboration to the division. He claims that people desire material and bodily goods (that is, beneficial things deriving from the outside world or the body) partly because they are beneficial “for both the political and the social life, and also for the theoretical life” of an individual (πρός τε τὸν πολιτικὸν καὶ τὸν κοινωνικὸν βίον καὶ δὴ καὶ πρὸς τὸν θεωρητικόν), for life is measured in political, social, and theoretical actions (ταῖς πολιτικαῖς καὶ ταῖς κοινωνικαῖς πράξεσι καὶ ταῖς θεωρητικαῖς). Virtue is not self-regarding, but social and political (ἀλλὰ κοινωνικὴν καὶ πολιτικήν).Footnote ¹³¹ The concluding chapters of the summary, which cover specifically political questions and are based on Aristotle’s Politics, make clear that in this case too the author understood politics as a circumscribed realm, open to all citizens. The “social” here should once again be seen as a complement to, rather than a near synonym of, the “political.”Footnote ¹³²

It is important to emphasize that the later Hellenistic Peripatetics were here revising Aristotle’s views. As noted above, Aristotle insisted that the many “communities” of a polis, with their particular aims, were subordinate to the overarching “political community,” with its focus on the good life in the round. The passages quoted here suggest that, by contrast, his successors elevated the world of sociability and associations to an independent realm, worthy of its own place in the foundations of their ethical theory: they retained Aristotle’s fundamental categories of the political and theoretical lives of an individual, but added the social (κοινωνικός) life as a third, equally essential category.Footnote ¹³³

The later Hellenistic Peripatetics doubtless rethought the categories of human life partly in order to take into account Hellenistic associations’ increasingly cosmopolitan nature, cutting across traditional citizen-outsider divisions; burgeoning κοινωνίαι (“associations”) were less clearly subordinate to the polis of citizens as a single overarching κοινωνία than in Aristotle’s day.Footnote ¹³⁴ Interestingly, the word κοινωνικός already had a close connection with formal voluntary associations in fourth-century BCE Athenian texts, including Aristotle’s corpus.Footnote ¹³⁵

At the same time, the Peripatetics who addressed these topics were also in dialogue with their contemporary rivals, the Stoics. In his On Duties, probably drawing heavily on the late Hellenistic Stoic Panaetius, Cicero lists among the things shared by fellow citizens, not only physical infrastructure and legal and political entitlements and institutions, but also what sounds like a social sphere: “habitual bonds and ties of sociability and business and dealings contracted by many with many” (consuetudines praeterea et familiaritates multisque cum multis res rationesque contractae).Footnote ¹³⁶

The Shifting Boundaries of the Social and Political

Some Greek citizens and thinkers thus found imaginative ways in the later Hellenistic and early Roman eras to resist the tendencies studied in the first half of this paper, by insisting on the persistence of local politics, while also harnessing the newly prominent social sphere. One approach to these philosophical and ideological questions—and the strategy so far emphasized in modern scholarship—was to develop attempts made in the fourth century BCE to expand politeia to incorporate, and tame, the social sphere. The resulting broad conception of politeia was an effective response to a quandary faced by many Roman poleis: how to compensate with new areas of political engagement for those now ceded to higher authorities, or made otiose by the spread of peace.

The other approach, experimented with more extensively in civic epigraphy, was to insist on a narrower conception of politeia.Footnote ¹³⁷ This less-studied strategy also served particular needs of the Greek cities. The major shifts taking place in the later Hellenistic and early Roman periods created new motivations for citizens of poleis such as Kaunos or Priene to draw a sharp distinction between politeia and social life. If outsiders had come to accuse these cities of losing political vitality, or citizens themselves harbored doubts, it would have been a bold response to define very clearly a circumscribed realm of institutionalized politics—of magistracies and embassies, but also council and assembly—that remained distinct and undiluted by the mass of more general social interaction.

This narrower conception of politeia was in some striking cases innovatively accompanied by a newly rich conceptualization of the third space of polis life, only roughly sketched in earlier periods: this was the world, with its own distinct dynamics and virtues, which was described with new or previously very rare terms for “shared life” (συναναστροφή, συμβίωσις), or new usages of terms such as κοινὸς βίος, τὸ κοινωνικόν, or κοινωνικὸς βίος. It is not always easy to tell exactly what activities these abstract terms were meant to denote in practice. They tended to pick out styles of collective interaction (gentle, informal, but still wide-ranging) and accompanying virtues more directly than specific activities. Nonetheless, they probably often referred to a mixture of longstanding practices which had recently gained greater prominence in civic life vis-à-vis traditional politics: practices such as voluntary commensality and religious worship, educational activities, commercial exchange, and informal conversations in the agora, which previously had to be classified as either public or private. Simultaneously, these terms also captured new forms of interaction, such as those connected with increasingly cosmopolitan associations or the expanded role of the gymnasium and philosophical or rhetorical schools. Individual, small-scale symbiōseis (“communities of shared life,” or “associations”) contributed to the composite symbiōsis of the whole polis.

The different ancient sociologies of the Hellenistic and Roman poleis studied here can help to develop modern scholarly debates about alleged “depoliticization.” That certain contemporaries saw the social sphere as colonizing the traditional place of politics lends a degree of support to the depoliticization narrative. Yet the contrasting means of reasserting the place of local politics also suggest different ways to resist the charge of depoliticization. Most modern scholars who have insisted forcefully on the continued vitality of politics in the Hellenistic and Roman polis have done so by emphasizing continuities in institutions and practices with the Classical polis, at least before c. 150 BCE.Footnote ¹³⁸ The much broader ancient approach to politeia would however support the opposite argument: the Hellenistic and Roman poleis had a very vibrant political life, not because they imitated Classical Athens, but precisely because they found new avenues for their own brand of politics, more cultured, thoughtful, and cosmopolitan. According to this view, it is necessary to move beyond old-fashioned conceptions of power and politics, which see 337 or 146 BCE as watersheds of depoliticization because the Greek polis was supposedly emasculated by a loss of military clout. In their place must come a much more subtle understanding of political power and engagement.

This would in turn mean that the rise of peaceful culture, education (paideia), and voluntary associations at the core of Greek civic life did not snuff out politics. Rather, it created better conditions for all residents of Greek cities, including women and outsiders, to exercise more profound power and leadership. They could guide and encourage one another, through dialogue, towards the virtue, wisdom, and mutual understanding necessary for justice, solidarity, stability, and meaningful debate. These were goals in pursuit of which traditional war, along with formalized “love of honor” (philotimia) and competition for control of money and soldiers, had often been more distractions than aids. From this perspective, “Socratic citizenship” built on questioning, coaxing, dialogue, and encouragement, when practiced across all the complex interactions of Hellenistic and Roman-era polis life, as in Plutarch’s ideal, represented a richer brand of political engagement than the patrolling of citizen exclusivity and constant military mobilization of the Classical polis.

If neither of the alternatives sketched so far—simply stressing or denying “depoliticization”—is entirely convincing in itself, the other ancient approach to the scope of political and social life discussed here, which sharply distinguished between them, suggests a possible middle way between the two extremes, also applicable to other societies in which traditional political activities and equalities appear to be marginalized. It may be more promising to seek to define and understand more precisely each of the varied, interlocking spheres and communities of Hellenistic and early Roman-era Greek civic life, and to investigate how politics in the strict sense related to predominantly social, economic, cultural, and religious interaction.Footnote ¹³⁹

Even if the polis was no longer the habitat of “political animals” focused predominantly on institutionalized political activity, narrowly defined politics was not necessarily always overshadowed or diluted by other spheres of communal life. Defended and practiced in the right way, formal politics could hold its own within the wider civic ecology as one among several indispensable ways of sustaining civic life. For example, it could play the role of asserting and protecting rigorous, impersonal standards of justice, incorruptibility, and public service. This was an indispensable counterweight to the social sphere’s equally necessary norms of compassionate concern for individuals or prudential pursuit of individual self-interest; norms that could, if unchecked, threaten the cohesion of the polis. In the other direction, gentle social and cultural interaction, in festivals, agora, or the gymnasium, could smooth over still vibrant political rivalries and build civic harmony—creating a better foundation for strenuous, conflictual politics itself. Seen in this way, civic political life was not withering away in the Hellenistic and early Roman polis, on a long road towards being supplanted by religious structures in Late Antiquity. Rather, it was finding its particular niche, and the distinctive contribution it could make to complex city dynamics. Any effective model of the early Roman-era polis must give full weight both to enduring traditional politics (and conflict) and to new forms of civic interaction, but also to their complex interrelationship.

The ancient differentiation of politics and social life considered here also represents a little-studied chapter in the history of debates about la politique (politics), le politique (the political), and “the social.” The Hellenistic and early Roman-era evidence shows that it was possible within the resources of the Greek language to imagine a social sphere, which tends to confirm that the Classical Athenians made a conscious choice to deny its existence, not least because they associated it with inequality or division. Hellenistic and Roman-era Greeks who moved away from the Athenian model, in theory and in practice, foreshadowed later ways of thinking, quite distinct but also overlapping in complex ways with these ancient ones.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ These include ideas of a “social sphere” or “civil society” distinct from formal politics, usually thought to be an invention of the Enlightenment or Hegel.Footnote ¹⁴¹ They also include the influential line of thought, later articulated by Niccolò Machiavelli and Max Weber,Footnote ¹⁴² that gentle, sentimental virtues of kindness, compassion, or philanthropy can be counterproductive in political contexts; politics is its own Beruf, or “vocation,” with specific skills and virtues, distinct from general morality.Footnote ¹⁴³ By the same token, obsessive focus on political values of justice and the common good in all contexts may not be the best way to sustain peaceful, harmonious communities. Rather, the different styles of interaction must balance each other in a productive tension.

This article has sought to present a detailed example of how a Rosanvallon-style history of political ideas, drawing on the widest range of available evidence, from seemingly banal inscriptions to the most abstract political philosophy, can yield a revised picture of ancient political thinking and its links with modern debates. The influential modern picture of the Greek polis with which I started, championed by Arendt and others, relies on a few canonical authors and captures only part of the rich Greek civic tradition of reflection about political and private life, and the space between them. The evidence discussed in this article suggests that there was, in fact, a different, less dismissive Greek approach to that intermediate space, which gained new force and clarity from the later Hellenistic period onwards.

It cannot be entirely coincidental that the application of a method close to Rosanvallon’s yields a parallel result: in the same way as his incorporation of more pragmatic texts, such as legal submissions, and a wider range of thinkers, such as trade unionists, reveals greater openness than commonly assumed to the intermediate “third sphere” in modern France,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ so too more attention to inscriptions and lesser-studied cities reveals more explicit ancient sensitivity to the ambiguous border zone between political and private life than the standard picture of the Greek polis allows. This basic parallel holds even though the differences between the two contexts are profound, and indeed just as revealing as their similarities: the ancient thinkers and citizens studied here never framed their exploration of this intermediate zone in terms of the promotion of liberty and democracy, for example.

I would not go so far as to posit an intrinsic connection between method and findings; indeed, applying the same approach to Classical Athens tends to confirm rather than undermine the standard picture. Nonetheless, Rosanvallon’s proposed marriage of the “history of ideas” with “social history”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ brings into relief the complexity and diversity of representations of interpersonal bonds, perhaps especially in societies—such as ancient Greece or post-1789 France—where political thinkers and agents were faced with the challenge of tailoring abstract, demanding ideals of citizenship to a complex, plural, and changing social reality. In both the ancient Greek and French contexts, one response to this challenge has been to reject dominant assumptions by declaring social life beyond politics to be a vital component of a flourishing polis, rather than its antithesis.