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The Many Faces of “the People” in the Ancient World

δῆμος – populus – 民 min

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2021

By
Hans Beck  and
Griet Vankeerberghen
Edited by
Hans Beck  and
Griet Vankeerberghen
Hans Beck
Affiliation:
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
Griet Vankeerberghen
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
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Summary

Few words in the historian’s vocabulary have such a wide semantic gulf as “the people.” Add to this the vast range of different languages, cultures, and layers of time in which “the people” are invoked, and the term translates into a commonplace. The present volume reclaims some of the conceptual capacity of “the people” in history. It looks at the ancient worlds of Greece, Rome, and China through the lens of cross-cultural comparison, addressing some of the key issues that related to the notion of “the people” in the variant of each civilization. In this vein of inquiry, the book raises a set of questions: the positional question of who “the people” were, also in relation to other people; the participatory question of how groups of “the people” constituted themselves through patterns of belonging and exclusion, and how their status, or nonstatus, was charged with meaning; and the conversational question of how “the people” communicated about their group cohesion and negotiated the omnipresence of imbalances in, for instance, gender, social status, political entitlement, economic ability, or cultural expertise.

Type
Chapter
Information
Rulers and Ruled in Ancient Greece, Rome, and China , pp. 1 - 22
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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