Two Forms of the Common in Ancient Greece

Abstract

Abstracts This paper argues that there were two fundamental conceptions of the “common” in Archaic Greece. This distinction is worth teasing from contemporary practices of distribution, such as the division of bounty between warriors after a military expedition. Within this context we can observe a difference between the “common” that is not distributed—the part that a community sets aside before portioning out individual shares—and the “common” that results from the way in which individual parts are distributed: for instance, a division according to equal measures gives individuals the sense of belonging to a sharing community. Identifying these two forms as “exclusive commons” and “inclusive commons,” the article provides an analysis of their properties. It also outlines the consequences of the fact that the ancient Greeks came to apply this distributive schema to the polis itself and to conceive its political structure as the result of a global distribution of goods and prerogatives. The duality outlined here should thus be understood as one of the core structuring principles of ancient Greek political practice and thought.