[Usyd_Classics_Events] Reminder: USyd Classics Research Seminar Oct 13: Prof. Andy Poe

[Ben Brown]

Dear Friends of Classics and Ancient History at USyd,

We are delighted to invite you to the sixth presentation of Semester 2, 2025 in our Classics and Ancient History research seminar series.

October 13 (Mon, 12.15pm UTC+11) in the V. Gordon Childe Boardroom (Level 2, Madsen Building)
Zoom link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/83159864939

Andy Poe (Australian Catholic University)

Before the Police: On the Force of Public Slaves in Ancient Athens

Abstract
Ancient democratic Athens offers a critical framework for rethinking the concept of police. While contemporary accounts often trace crucial origins of policing to early modern slave patrols and the surveillance of fugitive slaves (Hadden, 2001), Athenian practices of “policing” through public slaves suggest an important alternative genealogy. This essay examines the labor of these public slaves in maintaining civic order as an early formation of the Western idea of police. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s “Ten Theses on Politics,” I argue that the Athenian use of public slaves exemplifies his claim that police constitute the symbolic order of the social. Reading Rancière alongside the history of Athenian public slavery, I show how such proto-police reconfigure the distribution of the sensible in ways that complicate modern assumptions about the relationship among police, slavery, and democracy. This historical alterity opens a critical perspective for reimagining the political relation between democracy and policing today.

Andy Poe is Associate Professor of Social and Political Thought at Australian Catholic University. His research interests are in democratic theory, continental philosophy, forms of protest, critiques of political violence, and debates in law and society. Andy is the author, most recently, of Political Enthusiasm: Partisan Feeling and Democracy’s Enchantments (2022/2026). His current research project, Democracy without Police, explores the philosophy of abolitionism, considering the promise and risk of police in democratic regimes. In addition to his current work at Australian Catholic University, he has taught political theory at Amherst College, the University of California, and the University of Copenhagen. Andy has held visiting positions at the Institut für Sozialforschung and the Institut für Philosophie at the Goethe University Frankfurt, the Divinity School at Harvard University, the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies at UCLA, and the Centre for Anthropological, Political, and Social Theory at the University of Copenhagen. Andy is currently an affiliated researcher with Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney.

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