Abstract
Classical studies have explained the birth of the polis in terms of logos and meson. Public discourse marked the advent of a new world in which persuasion replaced force. Henceforth, the effectiveness of speech would presuppose the approval of the social group, and would not require the intervention of divinities. Other works have preferred to evoke, without really explaining it, the extension of a domain no longer subject to the natural lecture of things, but to human actions. Still others envisage individuals gradually aggregating to form a civic community, or transformations in material conditions. What all these explanations have in common is that they give no place to the divine world, as if in Greek conceptions it occupied the same position in relation to the human world as it does in certain contemporary conceptions, caught up in the logic of the immanence/transcendence couple.
Yet, as Jean-Pierre Vernant recently reminded us in his opening lecture at the Collège de France, " the insertion of religion into social life, at its various levels, its links with the individual, his life and survival, do not lend themselves to a precise delimitation of the domain of religion ". A reading of the Homeric and Hesiodic poems confirms the existence of an entirely different articulation between the divine and mortal universes. It invites us to understand the transformations of the archaic Greek world differently. The poets were able to account for the emergence of a sphere in which the divine order did not form the basis of human authority, by thinking of human beings and divinities in the same way. This authority could then be the product of a collective activity - or social work - politics.
