AGORA noun (ag-er-uh)

noun
1. the place where a popular political assembly met in Ancient Greece, originally a marketplace or public square.
2. a popular political assembly.
3. the Agora, the chief marketplace of Athens, center of the city's civic life.


Quotes

In the fall of 1964, left-wing students at U.C. Berkeley demanded the right to hand out antiwar literature on Sproul Plaza, the red brick agora at the center of the campus.
--*Andrew Marantz,*"How Social-Media Trolls Turned U.C. Berkeley Into a Free-Speech Circus," The New Yorker, July 2, 2018


... it has become a commonplace among ancient historians to single out the agora as the political centre of the polis where the people met to make all important decisions or, in oligarchies and tyrannies, to rubber stamp the decisions made by the rulers.
--*"The Agora as the Political Centre of the Polis," The Polis as an Urban Centre and as a Political Community, Symposium, August 29–31, 1996



Origin

In Greek agorá originally meant “assembly,” especially of the common people, not of the ruling class. Agorá gradually developed the meanings “marketplace, the business that goes on in the marketplace, public speaking.” The Greek noun is a derivative of the verb ageÃ*rein “to gather,” from the Proto-Indo-European root ger-, gere- “to gather, collect,” source also of Latin grex “flock, herd,” with its English derivatives aggregate, egregious, and gregarious. Agora entered English in the late 16th century.