A study of civil war, amnesty, and political forgetting in ancient Athens by one of the most original classicists of the twentieth century. Nicole Loraux takes as her subject the events of 403 BCE, when the oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty fell and the restored democracy resolved not to prosecute the crimes committed during it. Athenians swore an oath not to recall past misfortunes, an act of legislated amnesia that historians have generally treated as a triumph of civic reconciliation. Loraux argues the opposite: that this forgetting was not the healing of a wound but the founding gesture of a politics that could not acknowledge its own conflicted nature. Through meticulous readings of tragedy, oratory, and the vocabulary of Greek political life, she examines stasis, the word for civil strife, and shows how Athenian thought treated internal division as something monstrous and unspeakable, a family quarrel that threatened the fiction of the city as a unified body. Her analysis of terms for division and voting reveals conflict lodged in the very language of consensus. Loraux writes in a register that is at once philological and psychoanalytic, attentive to what a culture represses in order to speak of itself as one. The book has become a touchstone for thinking about transitional justice, truth commissions, and the question of whether democracies can survive telling themselves the truth about their own violence.