The English translation of this important book by two leading French historians is a welcome event. Lorna Coing’s translation is, with few exceptions, fluent. The foreword by R. Osborne, at once admiring and critical, sets the scene for those more used to the conventions of anglophone historiography. The question posed by the subtitle has been asked repeatedly, often in the form ‘postwar Athens: decline or recovery?’ C. Mossé argued for decline in an influential monograph of 1962, but by the 1990s, along with other historians, she had reassessed: the age of Plato and Aristotle was reconceived as the acme of Athenian democracy, a period of institutional as well as cultural innovation, and (more recently) of economic growth. Azoulay and Ismard have no interest in resurrecting the decline narrative. But they emphasise that the immediate postwar era, in which democracy was lost to the oligarchy of ‘The Thirty’ and then recovered, was indeed a time of crisis. The social and political divisions that had been masked by the Athenian empire were starkly revealed.

Foregrounding the rifts opened by the stasis, along with attempts to disguise them through ritual and in literature, and why those attempts ultimately fail – with an acknowledged debt to the work of N. Loraux (La cité divisée: L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes [1997]) –, the authors reimagine the crisis era through what they call ‘choral history’. Rather than imposing a single narrative, they adopt the ‘absolute metaphor’ of the chorus as an ‘emic social ontology’, an approach that attends fully to plurality and contingency. This enables the authors to write social history that takes politics and events (notably stasis) seriously and to resist sociological holism. The book makes regular reference to modern French history (the Revolution, Charles de Gaulle, the antisemitic murder of Charlie Hebdo staff) and to a wide range of social theory, including work by É. Durkheim, M. Mauss, G. Deleuze and J. Habermas. While conflict rather than harmony is their primary theme, they staunchly resist Carl Schmitt’s concept of ‘the political’ as a relation of friends vs enemies and of politics as war by other means.

With reference to a wide range of primary evidence – literary, iconographic and epigraphic (defixiones as well as public and private inscriptions) – the authors identify many, often overlapping, Athenian ‘choruses’ of men and, importantly, women operative in 404/403 bce; that is, groups varying in size, composition, defined variously by ideology, policy preferences, status, labour and personal ties. The model of the chorus allows the authors to reconceive social and political relations and historical developments (although chronological narrative of the postwar era is deferred until the final chapter), while employing concepts that will be familiar to all historians. Each chorus had, for example, at any given moment, a leader (variously imagined as a coryphaeus or choregos). The authors thus attend to the motivations, intentions and choices of individuals as well as groups. They further emphasise the structured divisions within each chorus, on the model of semi-choruses, strophe and antistrophe.

The choral metaphor is intended to resist, not only over-coherent narrative and sociological holism, but also the historian’s tendency to explain the stasis era (which, they suggest, had a beginning, but no clear end point) as a binary struggle between oligarchs and democrats. They delineate choruses of right and left radicals (extreme oligarchs, led by Critias, and democrats who aimed at expanding the citizenship, led by Thrasybulus), left moderates (led by Archinus) and right moderates (exemplified by the shadowy Rhinon). Moreover, they emphasise the ‘vast chorus’ of neutrals who, while they stayed in the city rather than joining the democrats in Piraeus, had no ideological attachment to oligarchy. And there are even ‘radical neutrals’, exemplified by Socrates. They resist the tendency to reify social statuses: while not denying the relevance of the juridical categories of slave, freedman, metic and citizen, or the importance of gender roles, they seek to show that some choruses (e.g. of day labourers, bureaucrats) drew from different status groups. In some cases, it seems, interpersonal relationships and practices cut across status roles and may have outweighed formal status distinctions in the lives of individuals. And yet hierarchies remain omnipresent. While the choral metaphor sometimes seems strained (the neutrals are a motley crew), it is overall enlightening.

Choral history has little to say about issues of institutional change and foreign policy that are central to other recent histories of the postwar era. But choral history’s sociology is decidedly political, and the authors’ political sympathies lie with the committed democrats who seized the Phyle stronghold, defeated the Thirty in the Battle of Mounychia and retook the city. Much of the book is concerned, directly or indirectly, with the question of why this chorus was unable to realise its radical agenda, which by all rights should have included full citizenship for all those, metics and slaves, who fought the Thirty. The Amnesty, praised by Ps.-Aristotle (Athenaion Politeia 40.3), is seen as the work of a strategic, even cynical, coalition among left and right moderates, rather than a testament to democratic moderation. The risk of renewed large-scale violence, and thus the role of hard negotiations aimed at avoiding it, emphasised by other work on the postwar period (F. Carugati, Creating a Constitution [2019]), is not given much weight.

In the same vein, it may seem to some readers a reach to claim that Aristophanes’ ‘adherence to the oligarchic camp is hardly in doubt when we read [Frogs]’ (p. 236). And that, by referring to the trial of Cleophon in the same play, he ‘contributed, at least poetically, to the installation of the Thirty’ (p. 240). This last assumes that Frogs was reperformed in 404, but the hypothetical dating of the reperformance (assuming the play was reperformed) depends on the argument (by other Classicists) that Aristophanes was an oligarch. Likewise, the long and informative chapter centred on Lysias argues that his hatred of the oligarchs (who murdered his brother and confiscated his family’s property) has been over-emphasised. Indeed, Lysias is (albeit tentatively) surrounded by a chorus of oligarchic sympathisers. The evidence is the calculation that, of the seventeen preserved Lysianic speeches mentioning stasis, as many as ten were written for men who certainly or probably remained in the city – i.e. were at best right moderates. But the authors know that that the sample is not random (thus statistically significant), rightly noting that we possess only a tiny fraction of speeches attributed to Lysias in antiquity and, ‘worse yet’, the process of selection was ‘not based on the historical value of the speeches, but on rhetorical and legal considerations’ (p. 253). So, it seems misleading to state that only ‘one third of the sample’ (five clients, the two anti-oligarchic speeches having been set aside) fall outside the ‘[probably men of the city] category’ (p. 288), or that Lysias ‘only very rarely gave his support to those who had suffered together with him’ (p. 284), or to assert the ‘clear preference of Lysias for “those of the city”’ (p. 287). Now, it may well be that Aristophanes favoured oligarchy and Lysias chose oligarchic clients, but here choral history falls short of making a strong case.

These worries aside, this is an immensely stimulating book. Its subtle and complex redescription of Athenian social fabric invites us to rethink, not just the era of 404/403 bce, but our conceptions of how Athenian society and politics intersected. It deserves, indeed demands, close reading. Incautious readers might take up a convincing argument, failing to note that, a page or two later, the authors show how that argument fails and then cast doubts on the counterargument. This dialectical mode of writing is reminiscent of Thucydides’ complex syntax. Like Thucydides, the authors aim to educate their readers in a new mode of theoretical history, and their ambition includes but much exceeds writing history ‘as it really was’. This is a book that every student of Athenian history should engage with and will profit from.