Athens, 403 BC: A Choral History

Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard join me in the Lesche to discuss their study of the restoration of democracy in Athens in 403 BC, in which they examine the Athenian civil war through the prism of chorality. A translation of their 2020 book Athènes 403: une histoire chorale (Flammarion, Paris) has just appeared in an English translation by Lorna Coing with the title Athens, 403 BC: A Democracy in Crisis? (Cambridge University Press).

Ancient sources

• Aristophanes, Frogs
• Aristotle, Politics Book 3
• Fragments of poetry by Critias (accessible in Brill’s New Jacoby: 338a; see also this Oxford bibliography)
• IG II2 10, Honors for foriegners who had supported the democracy against the Thirty (401/0). Online here
• Xenophon, Hellenica, esp. 2.4.20-22 (speech of Cleocritus)

Also mentioned

• Anderson, Greg (2018) The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History. Oxford University Press.
• Keesling, Catherine M. (2012) "Syeris, Diakonos of the Priestess Lysimache on the Athenian Acropolis (IG II2 3464)," Hesperia 81: 467-505.
• Loraux, N. (1997) La cité divisée : l'oubli dans la mémoire d'Athènes. Payot: Paris. Translated by Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort as The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Zone/Princeton University Press 2002/2006.

About our guests

Vincent Azoulay is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is a former member of the Institut Universitaire de France and the current director of the international bilingual journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. He has been awarded several prizes, including the Prix du Sénat du Livre d'Histoire (2011). He is the author of several books already translated into English: Pericles of Athens (2014), The Tyrant-Slayers of Ancient Athens (2017) and Xenophon and the Graces of Power (2018).

Paulin Ismard is Professor of Ancient History at Aix-Marseille University. His work focuses on the history of democracy in antiquity and the history of slavery in a comparative perspective. His publications include L'événement Socrate (Flammarion, 2013), Democracy’s Slaves (Harvard, 2017), La cité et ses esclaves. Institution, fictions, expériences (Seuil, 2019), Le miroir d'Œdipe (Seuil 2023), and, with Vincent Azoulay, Athens, 403 BC. A Democracy in Crisis? (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

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