Annotation: In 403 BC, a short but bloody period in the history of Ancient Athens came to its finale: an army of exiled democrats finally manged to put an end to the oligarchic rule of the “thirty tyrants”. The victors could have demanded revenge. Instead, the citizens of Athens resolved to forget and – likely for the first time in history – called for amnesty. The warring parties vowed not to remember “past misfortunes” and to forget about the civil conflict (stasis) and the atrocities that came along with it. But is it possible to permanently erase stasis from memory and turn the page? What if the conscious act of political amnesia triggers a process analogous to Freud's repression? Nicole Loraux scrupulously studies the traces of this process, drawing on a wide arsenal of ancient sources and modern analytical tools. Her Athens lives, fights and mourns, but – most importantly – continues to preserve the memory of those past events that Athenian citizens long ago agreed to forget. Nicole Loraux (1943 – 2003) was an anthropologist and historian of Ancient Greece. She taught as a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.