ABSTRACT
The “citizen” - the Greek polîtes or Latin civis-is defined as a member of the Athenian polis or Roman res publica, a form of human association allegedly unique to these ancient Mediterranean peoples and by them transmitted to “Europe” and “the West.” This claim to uniqueness can be criticized and relegated to the status of myth; even when this happens, however, the myth has a way of remaining unique as a determinant of “western” identity - no other civilization has a myth like this. Unlike the great co-ordinated societies that arose in the rivervalleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China, the polis was a small society, rather exploitatively than intimately related to its productive environment, and perhaps originally not much more than a stronghold of barbarian raiders. It could therefore focus its attention less on its presumed place in a cosmic order of growth and recurrence, and more on the heroic individualism of the relations obtaining between its human members; the origins of humanism are to that extent in barbarism. Perhaps this is why the foundation myths of the polis do not describe its separation from the great cosmic orders of Egypt or Mesopotamia, but its substitution of its own values for those of an archaic tribal society of blood feuds and kinship obligations. Solon and Kleisthenes, the legislators of Athens, substitute for an assembly of clansmen speaking as clan members on clan concerns an assembly of citizens whose members may speak on any matter concerning the polis (in Latin, on any res publica, a term which is transferred to denote the assembly and the society themselves). In the Eumenides, the last play in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, another fundamental expression of foundation myth, Orestes comes on the scene as a blood-guilty tribesman and leaves it as a free citizen capable with his equals of judging and resolving his own guilt. It is, however, uncertain whether the blood-guilt has been altogether wiped out or remains concealed at the foundations of the city - there are Roman myths that express the same ambivalence - and the story is structured in such a way that women easily symbolize the primitive culture of blood, guilt, and kinship which the males, supposedly, are trying to surpass. But the men, as heroes, continue to act out the primitive values (and to blame the women for it).
