Gossip and the Politics of Reputation in Classical Athens

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CLASSICISTS HAVE DEVOTED but scant attention to the phenomenon of gossip.1 This is a pity, for gossip has much to tell about the society that produced it. Or this is the view of anthropologists of small communities who have made gossip a serious study. There is one proposition especially that dominates their discussions: gossip is not a gratuitous of expression but one with its own rules, both socially and culturally determined (Gluckman 308-314; du Boulay 205). As a cultural form (Spacks 15), gossip is expressive of the norms, values, and ideology of a given community and of