Introduction

Summary

The Athenian experience may 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 civil war of 404/3 BC.