Politics begins with ...

Glen Newey ‘Limits of Civility’ [LRB 17 March 2011] precedes an account of ‘Uruk [springing] from the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia, its walls founded, according to legend, by Gilgamesh’ with this snappy apothegm: ‘politics begins with walls, and death.’ Nice, but too neat. Might we not equally want to say: ‘politics begins with gateways, and life’ …?