2015
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Diego Paiaro et al., « “Muchas veces pegarías a un ateniense creyendo que era un esclavo”… (PS-X, 1, 10): espacios democráticos y relaciones de dependencia en la Atenas Clásica », Actes du Groupe de Recherches sur l’Esclavage depuis l’Antiquité, ID : 10670/1.xqxxeb
Recently, some specialists have insisted on the “ imaginary” character of the Athenian polis conceiving that social identities were fluid and that the status of the citizen was diluted and blended with other genres and statuses. Moreover, some have highlighted the existence of free spaces which brought together and indistinctly citizens, metics, foreigners, women and slaves, fading away legal and political differences. In contrast, we aim to rethink this vagueness and fluidity frequently announced by the critics of Athenian democracy that has been accepted by recent historiography as an actual fact of the democratic system. In this paper we argue that although urban life allowed the interaction and circulation in the same space of legally and politically unequal subjects, this not necessarily determined an extenuation of those differences. Then, we think that the excessive radicalism that the antidemocratic thinkers attributed to the political capacity of the Athenian demos – that pointed to the existence of a complete erosion of the legal and political distinctions – constitute a form of invective that thinks in a somehow virtual city in order to resist the changes that weakened traditional forms of aristocratic power in the polis.