The Athenian Nation

by Edward Cohen

Challenging the modern assumption that ancient Athens is best understood as a polis , Edward Cohen boldly recasts our understanding of Athenian political and social life. Cohen demonstrates that ancient sources referred to Athens not only as a polis , but also as a "nation" ( ethnos ), and that Athens did encompass the characteristics now used to identify a "nation." He argues that in Athens economic, religious, sexual, and social dimensions were no less significant than political and juridical considerations, and accordingly rejects prevailing scholarship's equation of Athens with its male citizen body.


In fact, Cohen shows that the categories of "citizen" and "noncitizen" were much more fluid than is often assumed, and that some noncitizens exercised considerable power. He explores such subjects as the economic importance of businesswomen and wealthy slaves; the authority exercised by enslaved public functionaries; the practical egalitarianism of erotic relations and the broad and meaningful protections against sexual abuse of both free persons and slaves, and especially of children; the wide involvement of all sectors of the population in significant religious and local activities. All this emerges from the use of fresh legal, economic, and archaeological evidence and analysis that reveal the social complexity of Athens, and the demographic and geographic factors giving rise to personal anonymity and limiting personal contacts--leading to the creation of an "imagined community" with a mutually conceptualized identity, a unified economy, and national "myths" set in historical fabrication.

Genres: History

300 pages, Hardcover

First published May 22, 2000

About the author

Edward Cohen was a former head writer and executive producer for Mississippi Educational Television, Cohen has produced a number of documentaries on southern or Jewish subjects, including Good Mornin’ Blues with B.B. King; The Islander, starring James Best; Passover; and Hanukkah, narrated by Ed Asner, all broadcast nationally by PBS. His other documentaries include The Parchman Trials (an exposé of Mississippi’s penal farm), and The Last Confederates (the story of the little known culture of the descendants of the expatriate Confederates who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War). His documentary work has received numerous international film festival awards, as well as two CINE Golden Eagles.

More recently he wrote, produced, directed and edited The Natchez Jewish Experience for the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience. The film tells the bittersweet story of a once-thriving congregation in Natchez, Mississippi, now down to a handful of members dedicated to keeping their temple open until the last member shuts out the lights. The documentary won the Judah P. Magnes Museum Muse Award for Best Historical Documentary.

In 1999, he published The Peddler’s Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi, a memoir in which he describes growing up in the heart of the Bible Belt in the 1950s. The book was honored by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters as the winner of its nonfiction award in 2000. Cohen also was awarded the Mississippi Authors Award for Nonfiction by the Mississippi Library Association in 2000.

Today, Cohen lives with his wife and three cairn terriers in Venice, California, where he is a freelance writer and filmmaker