From household gossip to public beatings, this social history explores
the many channels through which Athenian maintained public order.
Virginia Hunter draws mostly on Attic court proceedings, which allowed
for a wide range of evidence, including common rumors about a
defendant's character and testimony, obtained under torture, of slaves
against their masters. She describes Athenian "policing" as a form of
social control that took place across a range of private and public
levels. Not only does policing appear to have a collective enterprise,
but its methods were embedded in a variety of social institutions,
resulting in the blurring of the line between state and society.
Hunter's inquiry into topics such as household authority, disputes among
kin, the presence of slaves in the house, gossip in the home and
neighborhood, and forms of public punishment reveals a continuum
extending from self-regulation among kn and punititve actions enforced
by the state. Recognizing the bias of legal documents toward the
wealthy, Hunter concentrates on exposing the voices of the less powerful
and less privileged members of society, including women and slaves. In
so doing she is among the first to address systematically such important
issues as the authority of women, self-help, and corporal punishment.
Virginia J. Hunter is Professor of History at York University. She is
author of Past and Process in Herodotus and Thucydides (Princeton) and
Thucydides, the Artful Reporter (Toronto).
Originally published in 1994.
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