Isonomia, demokratia, and enaction in Herodotus

Abstract

Following the path of Popova’s (2015) enactive approach to narrative, this inquiry focuses on two clusters of metaphors around which Herodotus organized his perceptions about isonomia and demokratia: the cognitive and the pragmatic. In-stead of highlighting differences between isonomia and demokratia, we wish to evince cumulative in-teractions between both concepts, a process that allows us to make sense of one — demokratia — through the other — isonomia. This approach is also helpful to transpose ancient meditations upon democracy to contemporary contexts not because ancient and contemporary democracies look sim-ilar, but because those meditations are constituent parts of the democracy-metaphors we currently live by, and whose roots one can see in the attributes Herodotus ascribed to it in III 80-82 and V 66-73.