34th Runciman Lecture

Professor Josephine Crawley Quinn: Anarchism, Democracy, and the Greek City

Preceded by Greek Orthodox Vespers starting at 5.15pm

This lecture emerges from a larger project on anarchism and antiquity where I’m looking at the ancient Mediterranean as a site of resistance to power, authority and state-formation. I suggest that taking what James C. Scott has called an “anarchist squint” at ancient history can offer us useful new ways to think about the operation of power, domination, inequality, disobedience, mobility, and the state. While cities, for instance, are often considered a marker or symptom of states, they can also resist hierarchical, embedded power at all levels. I’m interested here in the way that Mediterranean poleis could operate as heteropoleis or ‘unruly cities’, and I’m interested in particular in the ways in which the core institutions of Athenian ‘democracy’ could work to prevent the emergence of majority rule, and how that benefited a small and peripheral maritime polity on the margins of Persian state power.

The vote of thanks will be given by Professor Catherine Morgan.

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