Abstract
The phrase hiera kai hosia is found mainly in official Athenian documentation, and also forms part of the definition of citizenship : to be a citizen means, among other things, " to take part in hiera and hosia ". Such a formula could be interpreted as the expression of the dichotomy " sacred/profane ". And, indeed, Cretan documents offer an example of a comparable conjunction by contrasting the " choses divines "(theia) and the " choses humaines "(anthrōpina). However, the previous lecture's analysis of the semantic field ofhosion suggests that this family of words has little to do with what we call profane. Moreover, to reduce " human things " to what would be " profane " is certainly reductive. Drawing on the historian Thucydides' use of the adjective hosios, this lesson takes an even more precise look at the regulatory dimension of such behaviour, at how it fits into a normative framework conceived as divine and, consequently, at its close relationship to the notion of piety. The term hiera kai hosia covers a dimension of the community that we moderns divide into social, moral, religious and even political consciousness, but which, in Greek cities, is an indissociable whole or, at the very least, is subject to intersections that invalidate any strict dichotomy of the " sacred/profane " type.
