A City Founded on Oblivion and Memory: Mythical, Political, and Legal Perspectives on the Restoration of Athenian Democracy in 403 BC

This paper explores the paradoxical interplay between memory and oblivion in ancient Greek thought and its political and legal actualisation in the aftermath of Athens’ civil strife in 403 BC. Drawing on mythological, philosophical, and ritual sources, the study interrogates the cultural construction of forgetting as a performative and regenerative act. Far from being mere erasure, oblivion emerges as a strategic tool of political reconciliation and legal re-foundation, culminating in the Athenian amnesty of 403 BC. Through a multidisciplinary lens, the paper examines how the Amnesty functioned not only as a legal prohibition on recalling past wrongs, but also as a foundational gesture intertwining selective memory with deliberate forgetting. The republication of laws, alongside the sacred, political and legal enforcement of the ban on μνησικακεῖν, reveals a complex model of civic rebirth premised on a dynamic balance between memory and oblivion, a model that offers enduring insights into transitional justice and collective identity formation.