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Challenging the modern assumption that ancient Athens is best understood as a "polis", Edward Cohen recasts our understanding of Athenian political and social life. Cohen demonstrates that ancient sources referred to Athens not only as a "polis", but also as a "nation" ("ethnos"), and that Athens did encompass the characteristics now used to identify a "nation". He argues that in Athens economic, religious, sexual, and social dimensions were no less significant that political and juridical considerations, and accordingly rejects prevailing scholarship's equation of Athens with it male citizen body. Cohen shows that the categories of "citizen" and "noncitizen" were much more fluid than is often assumed, and that some noncitizens exercised considerable power. He explores such subjects as economic importance of businesswomen and wealthy slaves; the authority exercised by enslaved public functionaries; the practical egalitarianism of erotic relations and the broad and meaningful protections against sexual abuse of both free persons and slaves, and espeically of children; and the wide involvement of all sectors of the population in significant religious and local activities. All this emerges from the use of fresh legal, economic, and archaeological evidence and analysis that reveal the social complexity of Athens.