Arts and humanities
> Thursday, March 27, 2025 - 2pm
Interview with Paulin Ismard, professor of Greek history, and Arnaud Macé, professor of the history of ancient philosophy, who will present their book :
La cité et le nombre. Clisthenes of Athens, arithmetic and the advent of democracy.
This book takes a fresh look at the founding act of Athenian democracy, the reform of Clisthenes. Implemented in 508/507 B.C., the reform still strikes the contemporary imagination with its sophisticated organization of community life, based on the principle of continuous mixing of the population. How such a radical transformation of civic life could have taken place without encountering major difficulties remains partly a mystery. To understand the advent of this collective work, we need to turn our attention to a traditionally neglected form of knowledge - the knowledge of numbers, as demonstrated by those who count the men on the battlefield, the sheep on the hill or the chips in the games whose clamor fills the taverns. This knowledge differs from the learned mathematical speculations traditionally attributed to a Pythagoras or a Thales. Transmitted from generation to generation through collective learning, this concrete mathematics, whose operations were mastered by a large part of the population, provided the background to Clisthenes' reform. Indeed, Clisthenes' reform consisted above all in mastering the processes of dividing and recomposing collectives - an art of tidying up and classifying things and people, attested as early as Homer's time and applied to resolving political and social crises in Greek cities.
This sheds new light on the history of democratic reason in ancient Greece.
