summary: This paper argues that polarization pervaded the imaginary and the practice of democratic debates in classical Greece. The consensus ( homonoia ) of the assembled dēmos , often foregrounded in our sources, was the endpoint of a process shaped by polarized dissent, as suggested by the Athenian assembly's voting procedure ( diacheirotonia ) as well as Demosthenes' Prologues . For their part, tragic plays like Euripides' Orestes and Aeschylus's Suppliant Women contributed to the democratic imaginary by exploring both the challenges and the possibilities opened up by polarized dissent in the public sphere. Yet, polarization was also a distinctive marker of stasis . Several passages in Herodotus, Thucydides, and Euripides' Hecuba evince an anxiety that, under particular circumstances, the ordinary polarization of democratic debate could turn into the extraordinary fractures of civil war.
Davide Napoli (Mon,) studied this question.