I think that I’m going to bring back the random fact(s) of the day (or every couple of days, or…you get the idea) from the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed.), in which I flip the book open to a page and reproduce an entry that is brief enough that I don’t mind typing it out. I’m hoping that it will be an easy way to learn new things or re-learn old ones. Today’s entry is demos:
The Greek word means originally ‘district, land’, hence particularly (in Attica and elsewhere) the villages or demes (demoi, plural of demos) which were the main units of country settlement. From ‘the place where the people live’ the word comes to mean ‘the people’, as in compounds like demo-kratia, ‘people-power’ or ‘democracy’; demos sometimes means ‘the sovereign people’, sometimes ‘the common people’. Demos personified was glorified with a cult (Athens) and frequently depicted (male, youthful, or bearded) in Athens and other poleis: LIMC 3/1 (1986), 375-82.