Samenvatting

What is the agorà? Reading the Oxford English Dictionary definition, we find written «in ancient Greece, an open space used for markets and public gatherings». This definition is arguably precise. Contemporaries might think it is a simple marketplace, but this is an insufficient definition that does not give tribute to a place of such importance. On this ground is where lawyers, magistrates and free men of Athens, exercising their rights and duties being guided by a moment of enormous consciousness, created the first form of Democracy in human history.
Agora in Classical Greek ἀγείρω (ageíro) means “gathering”. The name agora was first coined by Homer and indicates both the assembly of the free people as well as the physical setting. Only around the VI century BC, this previously abstract word transformed in a concrete place in the urbanistic scenery of the polis as an open space that served as a meeting ground for its citizens. The agora became a recognisable feature in the Ancient Greek’s life, serving as a religious, political, juridical, social, and at the last circumstance as commercial place. It served as the expression ground of every single citizen. From this moment, till our time, the abstract and conceptual sense of society transmuted in something tangible and visible, the public square. The place of people.
Many philosophers, people of culture, Saints and savants, have already described the importance of the public square and its straight connection to us, human beings, and our sense of community. From Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Foucault to Hannah Arendt analysed the society, how we interact with each other and we strive for happiness. Happiness can only be achieved together and together we stand, physically, on the squares. The two subjects of “Research for Happiness” and “Public Square” are naturally interlaced and have always been important for our societies, but why?
The reason lies in the agorà itself. Public square is the broadest adjective, surprisingly the most precise too, which I want to attribute to the Greek word. In my Thesis, I am going to analyse the birth of the public square, its evolution throughout history, and its value for society.