"'Kosmos' is the word the ancient Greeks used for human social order. It has therefore a special application to the Greeks' peculiar social and political unit of communal life that they called the 'polis'. Of the many hundreds of such units in classical Greece (c. 500-300 BCE) the best documented and the most complex was democratic Athens. The purpose of this collective volume, which is based closely on a seminar series held in the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge, is to re-evaluate the foundations of classical Athens' by-and-large highly successful experiment in communal social existence. Topics addressed include religion and ritualisation, political friendship and enmity, gender and sexuality, sports and litigation, and economic and symbolic exchange. The book aims to make a major contribution, theoretical as well as empirical, towards understanding how the social order of community life may be sustained and enhanced, a subject currently of primary interest to a wide range of disciplines - history, sociology, political theory, and cultural anthropology - as well as to classics and ancient history"--P. [4] of cover.