NEW HISTORICAL LITERATURE Democratic Violence? Prolegomena to a Cultural history of interpersonal Violence in classical Athens*

Any cultural history of interpersonal violence in classical Athens that seeks to combine all available evidence of the fourth century BCE is confronted with the fundamental openness of the sources regarding the definition of violence. In daily life, however, Athenians had to draw a line between legitimate and illegitimate behavior. For this purpose they provided public venues in which complex negotiations could take place. The comparability of law court speeches, curse tablets, and comedies lies in the ritual quality of their original contexts of performance. Above all, the orators, who always drew the boundaries of permissible conduct in their favor and to the detriment of their respective opponents, demonstrate, behind their flexible description of facts, that there was no generally accepted norm of what was tolerable and what was unbearable violence. We encounter a similar openness of meaning in the curse tablets. It is odd that the semantics of the curse formula □I bind□ is so broad that it covers an enormous range of negative intentions. Old Comedy is, as a fictional medium, always open in its polyvalence of meanings. What all three sources have in common is their performative way of negotiating legitimate violence. According to a principle of Athenian democracy, a sanctioning collective decided on a case-by-case basis about the legitimate use of violence and its meaning through a ritual - i.e., in court, the jurors, and in cursing, the gods of the underworld. © Oldenbourg.