Book Review

In a well-known essay, Oswyn Murray once suggested that scholars of different nationalities tend to imagine the Greek city-state in very different ways: "To the Germans the polis can only be described in a handbook of constitutional law; the French polis is a form of Holy Communion; the English polis is a historical accident; while the American polis combines the practices of a Mafia convention with the principles of justice and individual freedom" ("Cities of Reason," Archives européenes de sociologie 28 [1987]: 327). David Cohen's fascinating book gives us the American model writ large. His Athenians relentlessly pursue their own honor, seeking to dishonor others and meeting insults with either violence or litigation, depending on which seems most likely to produce results. Cohen sees many similarities with modern feuding Mediterranean societies like Andalusia (140) and the Sarakatsani (161), and even within the notoriously violent medieval Iceland (79-82). He pursues this argument through the evidence of fourth-century b.c. Athenian legal speeches and philosophical tracts.	1
It is an original thesis. Most ancient historians emphasize the lack of violence in Athenian culture and the Athenians' willingness to submit their disputes to communal judgment. After all, the Athenians themselves constantly said that was what they were doing. Cohen concedes that "the homicidal blood feud appears, for the most part, to have been displaced into other arenas" (84), but he goes on to argue that we should believe little or nothing that the Athenians said in legal speeches, because everyone involved in dispute resolution expected these performances to be manipulative and deceitful, and there was in any case no practical way to check the facts in a speech (106-12). Methodologically, he offers a radically constructivist argument, disconnecting the surviving texts from any underlying, prediscursive social reality; but throughout the book he nonetheless makes objectivist claims, drawing on comparative cases to suggest that Athens "really" was a feuding society.	2
Cohen relentlessly pushes the evidence for conflict, self-promotion, and struggles over honor in Athens, but he also follows the very proper historical strategy of squarely confronting the main sources that other historians have used to build up a more pacific model of Athenian society. In chapters 5 and 6 he offers extended discussions of Lysias speeches 3 and 4 and Demosthenes 21 and 54. He exposes many of the unexamined assumptions that scholars have brought to these texts and offers alternative reconstructions of the events leading up to the lawsuits, arguing that the self-effacing personas that the speakers created for themselves were just one more strategy in their endless attempts to gain an advantage over other elite Athenians. His arguments are often refreshing, but equally often tendentious; and his treatment on pp. 25-28 of Thucydides 3.81-83, the famous account of the civil war on Corcyra in 427 b.c., is even more so.	3
This is an important and stimulating book, but Cohen's arguments are one-sided. His basic methodological premises are that if we take seriously the institutions and expectations that shaped the production of the law court speeches, then we cannot accept at face value the Athenians' own protestations of their wish to avoid conflict; but we can treat comparative evidence as proxy data, establishing a model of general expectations, which inclines Cohen to set up a null hypothesis that unless there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we should assume that Athens fits the traditional Mediterranean anthropologists' model of an agonistic, honor-and-shame society. But the book would have been even more interesting if Cohen had pursued the implications of his constructivism more consistently. Once we divorce the Athenian evidence from a prediscursive baseline, comparative studies cannot reattach it. We find ourselves facing a world of competing language games, writing history without foundations, as some would put it. We can perhaps produce a fascinating new cultural history of the rhetoric of violence in Athens, but not a social history of law, community, and everyday violence.	4
The exercise would have been more revealing still if Cohen had foregrounded the Athenians' regular renunciations of violence and self-interest instead of bracketing them off. The Athenians claimed to be embarrassed at the excessive pursuit of honor (philonikia) and to be committed to an ideal of equal honor for citizens. Whatever their actual psychological states, this unusual construction of masculinity should be at center stage in any discussion. To make full sense of it Cohen would need to tackle a wider range of Athenian sources, such as fifth-century tragedy and comedy, and also to draw on more flexible anthropological frameworks. Cohen cites Michael Herzfeld's influential book The Poetics of Manhood (Princeton, 1985), dealing with sheep stealing and aggressive eghoismos on modern Crete, but avoids Herzfeld's equally well-known article "Honour and Shame: Problems in the Comparative Analysis of Moral Systems" (Man 15 [1980]: 339-51), comparing the Cretan system with the radically different sense of honor in a village on Rhodes. For the economically more secure Rhodians, self-promotion is less honorable; the strongest form of honor belongs to the man who provides for his family as a cooperative member of the community. Similarly, David Gilmore's study Aggression and Community (New Haven, 1987), dealing with social conflict and the pursuit of honor in agonistic Andalusia, features prominently in Cohen's book, but Gilmore's broader Manhood in the Making (New Haven, 1990), reviewing the variety of forms ideas of masculine honor can take, does not.	5
Law, Violence and Community is a thought-provoking study. It is polemical and often one-sided. I doubt that many historians of Greek law will accept its thesis in full, but on the other hand, nearly all will benefit from reading it.	6
Ian Morris Stanford University

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