Classical motives

There is therefore little which is original contained in these pages. I have given a more or less complete proof of Murre’s result in §4, so as to make the comparison between the different decompositions in 5.3. Also included is a proof (3.5) of the unsurprising fact that the category of motives constructed using rational equivalence of cycles is in general not an abelian category. Otherwise proofs have been sketched or omitted.