![]() However, before asserting the rationality of the Greek city, we should take into consideration all the implications of such a model for the development of the Greek city. Vernant’s main idea of a radical alterity of the Greek polis in comparison to the Mycenaean palaces and ancient Near East empires remains a milestone in contemporary scholarship. ![]() Emphasizing the importance of the outbreak of the Milesian thought as an intellectual sixth-century revolution, Vernant assimilated the development of the Greek city with the rise of rationality and sciences. Vernant traced how the Greek world was progressively transformed over the centuries, from the Mycenaean monarchy to the democratic polis, with the decline of the mythical thought in favor of a rational thinking. Nowhere else than in the French scholarship of the last decades has the idea of a ‘city of reason’ been so popular, beginning with Jean-Pierre Vernant’s seminal essay (1962, translated in 1982). In modern times, the polis has often been apprehended as a highly rational entity, theoretically planned in all its aspects right from its creation, as Athena leaped out from Zeus’s head fully grown and armed. 1098a ), capable of rational behavior and having the ability to make balanced choices or to carry out soundly formulated projects. 1.1253a 3), meant by nature to live in cities, but also as a creature endowed with reason ( logon echon) ( Nic. Aristotle not only considered man as a ‘political animal’ ( zôon politikon) ( Pol. ![]() Although such an idea goes back to Antiquity, the topic has been raised a good number of times in past scholarship. When considering the polis, scholars have often set rationality -or Reason- at the core of their description. The involvement of a seer in Greek politics of the sixth and fifth centuries also questions the popular notion that rational thinking had then overcome superstition and magical mediation in the rule of the Classical city. A study on Epimenides illustrates how mythography was used as a means to mediate social action and to record history in Classical Greece. In the popular traditions and historiography of the Classical period, the intervention of the Cretan seer was used to transmit propaganda, to mediate diplomatic alliance or to frame religious rituals. Epimenides appears in several key Athenian episodes of the sixth and fifth centuries, the Cylonian affair and the Great Plague, and in Peloponnesian politics. Instead of exploring the subject from a Cretan perspective of the archaic period, however, these tales can be investigated from a late archaic and Classical Athenian perspective, within a tradition of semiotic analysis, through a study of the use of historical characters that has led to the invention of traditions such as that of the Seven Sages. The story of the Cretan seer and poet Epimenides, supposed to have lived for more than 150 years between the seventh and sixth centuries, is full of fancy tales that are hard to make profit from a historical perspective. “Epimenides the Cretan: A History of Athens (6th-5th c. ![]() Citation with persistent identifier: Duplouy, Alain. ![]()
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