the social world of most cities must have been much more intimate still.
Thus, "Community" and "society," which for us tend to be faceless abstractions, were for most Greeks far more immediate and personal. Whether some individual, especially of the upper classes, opted for the popular or aristocratic side in a conflict, for example, was less a matter of class analysis in the abstract than of weighing the mutual obligations toward one's immediate family and toward the larger community, most of whose members would be known by sight or even by name.
It is in this form, not directly related to stasis, that we find the issue of personal duty versus community obligation confronted in Sophocles' Antigone. Antigone's brother, Polyneices, had died an outlaw and rebel in an attack against Thebes, and the ruler of Thebes, Kreon, forbids his burial according to the traditional rites. Antigone violates this directive, and is duly brought forth to be condemned. In her defense she declares that she is obeying a higher law:
The laws [the gods] have made for m
...