The associations of Classical Athens

Nicholas Jones's book examines the associations of Athens during the classical democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Village communities, cultic groups, brotherhoods, sacerdotal families, philosophical schools, and other organizations are studied collectively under Aristotle's umbrella concept of "community," or koinonia.

All such "communities," argues Jones, acquired their distinctive characteristics in response to certain key features of the contemporary democratic governmentegalitarian ideology, direct rule, minority citizen participation, and the statutory exclusion of non-citizens. Thus elite social clubs provided a haven for beleaguered aristocrats; the phylai, often referred to as "tribes," evolved a mechanism for representing their special interests before the city government; an alternative territorially defined village afforded an associational life for the disfranchised; and in various groups we witness the beginnings of the inclusion of women, foreigners, and even slaves.

No association, it turns out, can be fully understood except in terms of its relation to the central government. Some confirmation of the model is elicited from the design of the Cretan City in Plato's Laws, a utopian policy arguably reflecting the arrangements of the author's own Athens. Jones's book closes with a classification of the various associational "responses" and weighs the possibility that the classical Athens it reconstructs was the work of the democracy's founder, Kleisthenes.