Democracy A Life
Democracy A Life
Democracy A Life
Democracy
Democracy
ALife
Paul Cartledge
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Paul Cartledge2016
135798642
Printed by Sheridan, USA
To Josh Ober in friendship and with admiration
And to the memory of Freeborn John Lilburne (b. c. 1615, d. 1657)
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Contents
List of Illustrations xi
List of Maps xiii
Preface xv
Acknowledgements
xxi
Timeline xxiii
ACTI 9
Chapter1 Sources, Ancient and Modern 13
Chapter2 The Emergence of the Polis, Politics, and
the Political:Modern and Contemporary
Appropriations of DemocracyII 35
ACTII 47
Chapter3 The Emergence of Greek Democracy
I:Archaic Greece 49
Chapter4 The Emergence of Greek Democracy
II:Athens 508/7 61
Chapter5 The Emergence of Greek Democracy
III:Athens 507451/0 77
Chapter6 Greek Democratic Theory? 91
Chapter7 Athenian Democracy in Practice c.450335 105
vii
Contents
ACTIV 229
Chapter 14 Hellenistic Democracy? Democracy in
Deficit c. 32386 bce
231
Chapter 15 The Roman Republic: A Sort of
Democracy?
247
Chapter16 Democracy Denied:The Roman and Early
Byzantine Empires 265
Chapter17 Democracy Eclipsed:Late Antiquity,
the European Middle Ages,
and the Renaissance 275
ACTV 281
Chapter18 Democracy Revived:England
in the Seventeenth Century and France
in the Late Eighteenth and Early
Nineteenth Centuries 283
Chapter19 Democracy Reinvented:The United States
in the Late Eighteenth and
Early Nineteenth Centuries and
Tocquevilles America 293
viii
Contents
ix
S
List ofIllustrations
xi
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List ofMaps
xiii
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Preface
xv
Preface
xvi
Preface
xvii
Preface
Modern democracy as such would not be our subject, but the resumption,
really reinvention, of democracy (so called) in the nineteenth century, espe-
cially in the United States (Chapter 19) and the United Kingdom (Chapter 20),
certainly would be; so that we would end on a paradox, one that I still find quite
baffling, actually. Until the first half of the nineteenth century the dominant
tradition of Western political thought both in and since Antiquity had been
anti-democratic, opposed, specifically, to the more radical species of democ-
racy theorized by Aristotle in the Politics. That long tradition has been and is
still today being actively undermined, although it is as yet far from being over-
thrown, by various shapes and forms of direct democracy advocates, including
those who point to thetechnicalcapacity of new information technology to
realise the global democratic village. Against them, however, looms the spectre
of a globalized political world order dominated by a country and state-form,
the Peoples Republic of China, entirely lacking in any sort of Western-style
democratic tradition whatsoever. Back to the future? It might well turn out to
be just a pious wish (epilogue).
That prospectus was quite closely adhered to in the lectures, although they
differed in detail and sometimes more than just in detail year on year, as they
were always given ex tempore fromextensivenotes (supplied to students as
handouts) rather than delivered as pre-conceived scripts. It has been likewise
adopted as the guiding scheme for this book, as the chapter citations above are
meant to indicate.
If Imay end this preface on a rather personal note, Iwill relate how at a dinner
with colleagues in Cambridge in about 1981, early in the Thatcher years, Iwas
shocked to be told by a now deceased, extremely eminent professor of ancient
and modern philosophy that for him democracy was, as it were, bunk. To be
fair, Ihad no illusions myself about what Idismissed as bourgeois democracy,
but Idid think there was still a good deal of life yet in the old dog of democracy
that the Greeks had (as Istill believe) invented:democracy as the rule of the
masses, the political empowerment of the poor, on the basis of some work-
able definitions of freedom and equality. That at any rate in principle seemed
much better than what it had replacedrule either of the unelected and non-
responsible one (whether a hereditary monarch as at Cyrene in north Africa
or a usurping tyrant as on the eastern Aegean islandstate of Samos), or of the
possibly elected but certainly not responsible (to the people) few (whether a
xviii
Preface
xix
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Acknowledgements
I owe huge thanks, once again, to the Oxford University Press and
especially its NewYork editor, Stefan Vranka, and his able assistant Sarah
Pirovitz; to former colleague Gareth Stedman Jones and current colleague
David Runciman, for delivering lectures early on in the course on early mod-
ern, modern, and contemporary understandings of democracy, roughly from
Robespierre to Noam Chomsky; to all those colleagues who have supervised
(taught) the course in whole or in part to either Classics or History under-
graduates or both, especially Robin Osborne, Paul Millett, Tom Hooper, and
Carol Atack; to friends and colleagues who most generously read drafts and
offered comments, including above all Carol Atack, Richard Cohen, Edith Hall,
and Tom Hooper; to Lex Paulson for revivifying democratic enthusiasms; and
last but not least to the one hundred or so students (several of them auditing)
who attended them and provided me with invaluable feedback and a constant
realitycheck.
I dedicate the book to two persons:one long dead but not forgottenat least
not by meJohn Lilburne, guiding spirit of the English Levellers; the other
my longstanding friend and colleague Josh Ober, now Constantine Mitsotakis
Professor at Stanford University, formerly Magie Professor of Ancient History
at Princeton, whoas we learn from an unusually revealing, indeed revelatory
online interviewhas been working on a general theory of democracy, from a
political-scientific standpoint informed by a political-historical approach (see
www.artoftheory.com/josiah-ober-the-art-of-theory-interview/).
xxi
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Timeline
ArchaicAge
c. 700 Poems of Homer and Hesiod; introduction of hoplite fighting
c. 650600 Law on office-holding inscribed at Dreros,Crete
621/0 Dracons laws inscribed atAthens
594/3 Solons laws atAthens
550 Achaemenid Persian empire founded by Cyrus (II the Great)
546 Cyrus defeats Croesus ofLydia
545 (to 510) Tyranny at Athens of Peisistratus and son Hippias
508/7 Cleisthenes introduces Democratic reforms atAthens
505 Spartas Peloponnesian Leagueformed
ClassicalAge
499 (to 494) Ionian Revolt:rebellion against Persia of Ionian Greeks
and other Greek and non-Greek subjects
490 Battle of Marathon:Athens and Plataea defeat Persian invaders
480 (to 479) Second Persian invasion, under Xerxes, defeated:Salamis 480,
Plataea479
480 Battle of Himera:Sicilian Greeks under Gelon
defeat Carthaginians
478 (to 404) Athens founds anti-Persian DelianLeague
xxiii
Timeline
xxiv
Timeline
HellenisticAge
301 Battle of Ipsus; death of Antigonus I, founder of Antigonid
dynasty of Macedon
300 Zeno of Citium (Cyprus) founds Stoic school atAthens
283 Death of Ptolemy I, founder of Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt and
of Museum and Library at new capital, Alexandria
281 Seleucus I, founder of Seleucid dynasty of Asia, assassinated;
Achaean League refounded
263 Eumenes Isucceeds Philetaerus as ruler of kingdom
of Pergamum
244 (to 241) Agis IV king atSparta
238 (to 227) War of Attalus Iof Pergamum for mastery of AsiaMinor
235 (to 222) Cleomenes III king atSparta
224 (to 222) Antigonus III invades Peloponnese, founds HellenicLeague
223 (to 187) Antiochus III succeeds SeleucusIII
222 Battle of Sellasia:Antigonus III defeatsSparta
221 (to 179) Philip V succeeds AntigonusIII
215 Alliance of Philip V and Hannibal of Carthage
211 Alliance between Aetolia and Rome:First Macedonian War
(to 205); Rome sacks Syracuse
200 (to 197) Second MacedonianWar
196 Rome declares Greecefree
194 Rome evacuatesGreece
192 (to 188) Syrian War of Rome against AntiochusIII
xxv
Timeline
Early RomanEmpire
27 (to ce 14)Octavian/Augustus reigns as First Roman Emperor ce
ce 6667 Roman Emperor Nero tours Greece, wins at Olympics
117138 Reign of philhellenic Emperor Hadrian
xxvi
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Democracy
Prologue
Lost in Translation? Modern and Contemporary
Appropriations of DemocracyI
For every person who knows how Athenians voted in the Assembly, there are hundreds
who are aware that it was they who gave a name to what we pride ourselves onasa
uniquely legitimate form of government. (Ryan2012)
No constitution has ever given more weight to the decisions of the ordinary man than
did the Athenian. (Forrest 1966:16)
1
Prologue
myself argue for. Or what if one were to claim, as is sometimes done by lib-
eral interpreters of the term, that democracy was not a uniquely ancient Greek
invention in any sense except, relatively trivially, the purely etymological? That
is a position that I shall be firmly arguing against in this opening chapter.
Whatever view one takes of these positions, the dissonance or even con-
tradiction in applied political terminology undoubtedly does raise the not
unimportant question of why exactly it isand how it has come aboutthat
we (and not only Anglophones, of course) today gaily use as a loan-word a
term that in its original Greek context or contexts bore quite such a radically
opposed signification. That question becomes even more interesting, and prob-
lematic, if we track back a couple of centuriesto a time before democracy
had become widely considered okay, let alone an obligatory positive good;
to a period when it was used by its many diehard opponents in a sense not
all that remote from the interpretation given it by its original ancient Greek,
especially Athenian, opponents:namely, mob rule, the tyranny of the major-
ity. That too is a question that Ishall be addressing and attempting to answer,
but only in the last partAct Vof this book. Here, in Act I, Ishall content
myself with exploring some of the major, salient, and most pressing points
of difference between democracy (really, democracies) ancient and modern,
taking modern to have begun by the time ofand to have been immeasur-
ably boosted byan influential lecture delivered in Paris in 1819 by the Swiss
liberal Benjamin Constant. But first let me deal with the case recently mounted
collectively by scholars grouped under the editorship of the Australian schol-
ars Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwella case that has its congeners in
recent writings of the Indian economist Amartya Sen and the British social
anthropologist JackGoody.
What these writers and thinkers mostly share in common is a desire to
dethrone or at least devalue what they take to be the standard, that is Western
or Eurocentric, line in the history of democracy:an approach, an attitude, that
is for them at once too narrowly defined and insufficiently complex as well as
being viciously ethno-or culture-centric. No doubt there are defensible politi-
cal (as opposed to academic) reasons for wanting to hold and advocate such a
revisionist position. But they go much further. They posit an alternative secret
history of democracy, which in their view shows both that it was developing
in the Middle East, India, and China before classical Athens and that it clung
2
Prologue
on during the (European) Dark Ages in Islamic states, Iceland, and Venice;
that it was often part of pre-colonial tribal life in Africa, North America, and
Australia; and that it has since developed in unexpected ways through the
grass-roots activities of Muslims, feminists, and technophiles. Those are several
steps too far, Ifeel, although it is just the first part of that multiple claim that
Iwish to contest and refute here:that ancient Greece or specifically classical
Athens did not pioneer democracy. As the philosophers say, that all depends
on what is meant by democracy.
The ancient Greek root word is a portmanteau term, a combination of demos
and kratos. There is referential ambiguity in the first of those two words: for
demos here could mean either people very broadlyas in Abraham Lincoln
at Gettysburgs government of the People, by the People, for the People, that is,
some notion of self-government by or in the name of a politically defined group
as a whole. Or it could mean demos in the sectarian, class sense of the majority
of poor citizenshowever precisely that majority might be identified, and of
course in ancient Greece there was never any serious doubt that the citizens
in question were always free adult males. This ambiguity of the word demos
was explored and exploited by major Greek writers and analysts, Aristotle not
least. There was also ambiguity of reference in the second constituent member,
kratos: unambiguously the word meant power or control, being derived ety-
mologically from the Greek verb meaning to grip or to grasp; but what was
it that the demos was supposed to be grasping or gripping, having within or
under its powerwas it the organs of state governance, or was it the minor-
ity of citizens who were not poor, the few (oligoi, likewise variously defined
sociologically, or both)? I shall return to that in a later chapter. However,
despite those acknowledged ambiguities, one thing was not in dispute or open
to argument about ancient Greek demokratia: whether you loved it or hated it,
it denoted and connoted power, or, more precisely, political power (the deri-
vation of political from Greek polis will require separate exegesis later on).
Isakhan and Stockwell and at least the great majority of those scholars whose
work they edit do not share that precise ancient Greek focalization and concen-
tration on power. Instead they talk, rather airily as it seems to me, about public
argument or deliberation or reasoning, involving some notion of equality of
participation, perhaps, but not the collective decision-making by the majority
voting of voters who are deemed in political principle and measured in practice
3
Prologue
as being exactly equalone citizen (in ancient Greek terms), one vote, with
everyone counting for one and no one for more than one; nor the exercise of
executive power by popularly and collectively delegated and responsible offi-
cials or bodies.
Constants point was a rather different one, and spoke to what I shall call
the great divide between all ancient and all modern democracies: all ancient
ones are direct, all modern ones representative. We, the people do not rule
directly but choose others to rule forthat is, instead of as well as on behalf
ofus. (Lincolns invocation of government by the People is from this point
of view formally misleading, if not actually false.) In antiquity, by contrast, the
Athenians (meaning, the duly and legally registered citizens acting as the polis
of the Athenians) or whichever other polis one might choose to consider ruled
themselves, in person, directly, as well as for themselves. More precisely, as
Aristotle put it in the Politics, to which we shall return in Chapter 1, they ruled
and were ruled in turn. It is indicative of the participatoriness of ancient Greek
politics that it was never Athens that decided or did this or that but always
the Athenians; Athens was solely a term of geographical reference. I shall
argue, moreover, that for these political purposes Athensand a fortiori all the
other Greek poleis, most of which had much smaller citizen-bodieswere very
strictly speaking face-to-face societies.
But what exercised Constant most was what he took to be a key difference of
socio-psychological orientation and evaluation as between all ancient societies
and all modern ones when examined from the point of view of their respective
conceptions and practices of liberty. Whereas ancient societies were heavily or
exclusively preoccupied with and predisposed towards public political forms of
freedom, whether freedom from internal or external interference or the free-
dom to intervene and be effective politically in the public sphere, modern soci-
eties according to Constants hypothesis privileged wholly or predominantly
forms of freedom that could be enjoyed or exercised in the privatethat is the
non-or even anti-politicalsphere. The distinction and opposition between
these two ideal types were somewhat smudged by Constants understandably
less than totally correct understanding of the way classical, democratic Athens
had in fact functionedit was not after all until 1891, seventy-two years later,
that the so-called Constitution of the Athenians attributed to Aristotle was pub-
lished, commendably soon after its discovery on papyrus in Egypt. But the
4
Prologue
heuristic principle has proved a remarkably fertile one, rightly so, and this is
one of the reasons why my study will not explore the details of the develop-
ment of modern democracies in a historical way much beyond the middle of
the nineteenth century.
I am, however, very interested, methodologically, in the quite extraordinary
outpouring of research as well as agitational literature on the subject of democ-
racy in the contemporary early twenty-first century, globalised world, in the
spreador attempted enforced spreadof what passes for democracy today.
Especially gripping is the work of those scholars who believe that there is some-
thing in ancient democracy (by which is normally understood some version
of ancient Athenian democracy) still worth retrieving, recuperating, perhaps
even reapplying suitably modified and adapted to actually existing contempo-
rary and likely future political conditions. On 24 September 2009 the New York
Review of Books carried a double-page advertising spread paid for by the Johns
Hopkins University Press, in which no fewer than six of the books advertised
had either democracy or democratization in their title. The year before that,
the then-professor of politics at my own university noted in his inaugural lec-
ture that On any historical assessment, the achievement of some form of lim-
ited democracy in so many countries today is an extraordinary one (Gamble
2009: 32). The more recent so-called Arab Spring gave further life to that notion
on a regional scale, though without much in the way of comfortingly posi-
tive results to back it up thus far. There have also been numerous experiments
with types of democratic decision-making within existing democracies (such
as Finland) or at least major efforts at promoting the notion of greater popular
political involvement at the grass roots, if only through such talking shops of
deliberative democracy as Power 2010, an initiative with which James Fishkin
has been notably connected. Finally, for present purposes, and most imme-
diately relevant to my own intellectual project, there has been a determined
effort among some activist scholars to retrieve and promote what they take to
be ancient Greek democratic virtues in order to counteract a widespread and
growing perception that contemporary democracy, especially perhaps in those
countries where something reasonably called democracy has been in exist-
ence the longest, is being diminished, managed, or hollowed out. In almost
all these variously utopian or pragmatic scenarios the role of the Internet or
more broadly electronic, digitised social media is hotly debated, both for and
5
Prologue
against. Is the net merely or very dangerously but a delusion, if one is seeking
somehow to liberate or empower the world?
I shall return to these issues and questions right at the end of this book.
I want to conclude this opening chapter by engaging more closely with just
one exposition of the sort of approach and point of view that I do find help-
fully challenging, and one of the sort that I do not. As an instance of the for-
mer I take Martin Breaughs Lexprience plbienne. Une histoire discontinue
de la libert politique, a four-hundred-page tome that first appeared in 2007.
Breaugh focuses his research on the theory and practice of emancipatory
politics and radical democracy, and for the sake of demonstrating the validity
of that approach historically he selects a series of key episodes in which the
people (or plebeians; Breaugh consciously borrows Roman Republican polit-
ical vocabulary) by means of concerted revolt have passed or rather projected
themselves from a sub-political status to achieve political agency and express
an alternative form of political power. Interestingly, Breaugh does not select
an episode from ancient Greek history, though he might well have chosen the
very primal scene of democracy in ancient Athens in 508/7at least as that has
been interpreted by one influential stream of thought. But what he does get
right, it seems to me, is to focus squarely on the achievement and exercise of
political power, albeit in antinomian forms. As one commentator on Breaughs
book has nicely put it, Those who follow the Occupy or the Aboriginal Idle No
More movements will obtain fresh insight and exhilaration from Breaughs
account of these spontaneous struggles for dignity. There is of course a huge
danger in taking this stance of committing a vicious presentism, or anachro-
nism, but it is an approach that ancient Greek radical democrats would surely
have found highly congenial.
The challenge thrown down by Amartya Sen, the brilliant Indian Nobel lau-
reate (for development economics), is of a very different kind: since at least the
late 1990s he has contended that democracy is not a quintessentially Western
idea, an immaculate Western conception. His argument has some eight strands
or props. He argues, first, that ancient Greece (by which clearly is meant ancient
Athens above all) is not unique, even among ancient civilisations, in giving
importance to public discussion and public reasoning; second, that to speak
of democracy as an exclusively or peculiarly Western phenomenon is both
to indulge in an element of racist thinking and to underplay the intellectual
6
Prologue
links binding ancient Greeks to ancient Egyptians, Iranians, and Indians; third,
that other ancient peoples beside the Greeks, such as the Jains of ancient India,
were egalitarians; fourth, that the ancient Greeks democratic experience had
little or no impact in the contemporary ancient equivalents of what became
France, Germany, and Britain in Europe but had great impact on participa-
tory governance in post-Alexander Greater Iran, Bactria (Afghanistan), and
India in Asia; fifth, that although democracys impact in antiquity was always
localized, thanks to the role of the Italian mediaeval city-republics and their
ultimately global impact, the story of ancient democracy is still relevant to that
of democracy on the global scale; sixth, that when in 19471948 India became
the worlds largest democracy (a status it still enjoys), it disproved practically
the theoretical notion current until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment of
Montesquieu and Rousseau that democracy could only ever be a local system;
seventh, that Indian democratic thinking, as embodied in its modern multi-
party constitution, embraced both Western and local Indian historic experi-
ences of democracy, the latter being instantiated by the Buddhism of emperor
Ashoka in the third century bce and by the heterodoxy and pluralism of
Mughal emperor Akbar in the 1590s (according to the bce/ce chronography),
both of which tolerant regimes promoted open public discussion; and finally,
eighth, that the large intellectual heritages of China, Japan, East and South
Asia, andespeciallyIndia as regards the ideal of public reasoning and the
practice of associative reasoning have been neglected. It is only fair to add
that Sen, though obviously pro-democracy on some plane, nevertheless admits
that the inherent qualities, and especially the informational role, of democratic
institutions have not adequately addressed let alone prevented conspicuous
deprivations, or guaranteed the rights of minorities.
I may well have failed to do equal justice to all eight of these strands or props
of argument, or have placed them in the wrong order of Sens own evaluative
hierarchy. But although I must of course instantly agree with him that there
is some inherent, essential connection between democracy and publicity and
equality of discussion and reasoning about public political goals (the Greeks
themselves, as we shall see, explicitly made just such a claim for their own
democracy or democracies), what Sens argument seems conspicuously to omit
or come to terms with adequately is precisely the power of Greek demokratia,
the democratic power of decision and control, whether over the central organs
7
Prologue
8
S IS
Map1.1
Greece and theAegean. From Pomeroy, Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (1998).
1.
Sources, Ancient andModern
13
ActI
14
Sources, Ancient andModern
works, most of which (the exoteric works) were apparently designed to reach
out to a public beyond the confines of the Lyceum. But of those 500 the only
thirty or so to have survived more or less intact to our day are all works for
internal, in-school consumption, being therefore so-called esoteric works. Of
these, one has a special place in any history of ancient Greek democracy:the
tract that is usually referred to as the Politics. Here, however, lies another
trap for the unwary. Politics is the conventional English translation of Greek
politika, which may or may not have been the title that Aristotle himself gave
to a treatise essentially worked up by his students from lecture notes. Whether
he did give it that title or not, what he would have meant by it is not what
we understand by politics but matters concerning the polis; and by polis he
would have understood not any political entity or state-form in general but one
very specific state-form in particular, the polis of the ancient Greeks. This to my
mind is best rendered in English as citizen-state (rather than the more usual
city-state). Poleis (plural) were not necessarily or indeed often highly urban-
ised affairs, and Greeks spoke of these political entities as (say) the Athenians,
not Athens, since they took the view that men are the polis, meaning by men
adult male full citizens. Moreover, Aristotle himself had a very particular and
personal intellectual take on the Greek polis, which he understood as a natural,
organic entity representing and embodying the end-fulfilment (telos, whence
teleology) of all political entities or states as such. And since like all Greek
political thinkers and theorists, Aristotle did not separate off and insulate ethi-
cal judgment from cold scientific analysis, for him the polis was an ethical
entity, indeed the sole kind of political community within which the truly good
life for social man could be fully achieved. That is what is meant by his decep-
tively familiar definition of man (humankind) as a political animal.
For us, however, it is possible to dissociate to some extent the overarch-
ing philosophical armature from the more descriptive, empirical matter con-
tained within the Politics, which is after all constantly referring back to and
often firmly grounded upon a database offor its timeunusually carefully
and thoroughly researched political information regarding a significant pro-
portion of the then-existing poleis in the wider Greek world:some 150 out of
the 1,000 or so in all, which extended from todays southeast Spain to modern
Georgia at the far eastern end of the Black Sea. That database of over 150 Greek
constitutions (politeiai in Greek, but the Greeks conception of what counted
15
ActI
as constitutional was far broader than our own; see further Chapter 2) was
gathered by students of the Lyceum and somehow collated there, and some-
how circulated more widely. It is typical of the vagaries of our extant evidence
that the sole surviving example of this dataset should be the Politeia of the
Athenians, and that it should not have survived quite complete. That sole sur-
vivor, written on papyrus and preserved by the dryness of the Egyptian desert,
turned up at the end of the nineteenth century; it was very promptly published,
and at a stroke transformed our understanding of at least one ancient Greek
democracy. Or rather it brought a renewed awareness of the fact that ancient
Athens was not one single, uniform democracy but had over the course of
almost two centuries experienced at least two moments or forms of democracy,
thanks to its undergoing what the author of the Constitution of the Athenians
labelled transformations.
I use the neutral locution the author advisedly. Debate and dispute per-
sist, rightly in my view, over the extent to which the attribution of the work
to Aristotle himself in person can be sustained. Probably the majority schol-
arly view today is that although the work is Aristotelian, it is not Aristotles,
or at least not entirely so. Pseudo-Aristotle looks and sounds a bit harsh,
but ?Aristotle seems a perfectly fair way of referring to the works author
(or authors). Formally speaking, to oversimplify a bit, it is a game of
two halves: first comes a chronologically ordered section tracing the
transformationsthirteen identified in allthrough which the city (politi-
cal entity) of Athens progressed from at least semi-mythical kingship through
aristocracy and timocracy (wealth-related oligarchy) and tyranny (unconstitu-
tional one-man autocracy, not necessarily tyrannical in the modern sense) to
various shades and forms of democracy, interrupted quite briefly by civil war
and bouts of extreme oligarchy (collective dictatorship, junta-rule); the second
half consists of a more or less systematic exposition of the democracys chief
institutions and their functioning as they currently operated at the time of the
works compilation, let us say in the later 330s and early320s.
By using the combined evidence of Politics and Ath. Pol., it is possible to
obtain a really quite full and detailed picture of what ancient Greek demo-
cratic politics and at least one democratic polity were chiefly like, and what
they were about, in the third quarter of the fourth century bce. It is at any
rate a happy coincidence, and perhaps much more than that, that the bulk of
16
Sources, Ancient andModern
17
ActI
Figure1.1
Law of Eucrates, 336bce
At a moment of great crisis in 336 bce the Athenian democracy passed a Law against Tyranny. The
words of the law, directed emphatically against the ancient, originally pre-democratic Areopagus
council, were reinforced visually by an image of the goddess Demokratia shown supporting the People
of Athens, itself represented as an elderly citizen. akg-images / John Hios akg-images / John Hios
possibility. As for the poor, they were all the rest of the citizen body, the non-
rich, a far too broad grouping, of course, although he was forced by the facts to
concede that some poor citizens were much less poor than others and indeed
that some might better be labelled middling, that is, in between the (clearly)
rich and the (clearly) poor; and that at the bottom end it might be necessary to
separate off the destitute and beggarly, those who possessed virtually nothing,
from the merelypoor.
If that sounds like a proto-Marxist class analysis of Greek politics, well, that
is pretty much what Karl Marx himself thought it was and one of the main
reasons why he labelled Aristotle a giant thinker. For us, I think, one of its
greatest services is that it does full justice to the kratos part of demokratia, the
grip or grasp element. What was it that the demos had in its grasp or power?
Obviously, at one level, the things (literally) or affairs of state, the public
organs of self-governance. But at another leveland especially when demos
18
Sources, Ancient andModern
was given its full, class-related value of masses or the poorit was the few
elite citizens, the oligoi, over whom the demos was exerting its power. That, for
Aristotle as an ideologically driven moral-political theorist, was not a cause for
celebration. Indeed, Aristotle was second to none in deploring the sectarian,
self-promoting versions of democracy in which the empowered poor major-
ity of citizens acted in their own selfishly exclusive interests, as they perceived
them, at the expense of the unity, harmony, and general well-being of the polity
as awhole.
If there was one thing that Aristotle was peculiarly sensitive to in the lived
actualityas opposed to the ideal conceptionof many if not most of the
Greek poleis of his own day and earlier, it was their unfortunate propensity
to degenerate into civil strife, including all too often and easily outright civil
war. Already in the later fifth century Herodotus (Histories 8.3.1) had stated
his view that civil war within a kindred people is as much worse than a united
war against a foreign enemy as war is worse than peace, but he was concerned
with strife within the Greek people as a whole or between two or more Greek
poleis rather than within a single polis. Aristotle, however, following in the
footsteps of Thucydides and his brilliant analysis of the civil war that afflicted
the island-state of Corcyra in 427, gave that judgment an intra-state application
and a sociologically sophisticated underpinning; indeed, he devoted a whole
book out of the eight-book Politics to identifying causes of civil strife and war
and suggesting both preventative and curative solutions to the disease. And
though he did not believe, as some non-or anti-democrats did, that democ-
racies were by their very nature more prone to suffer from or generate civil
strife than were oligarchies, it is necessary to repeat that Aristotle was not an
ideological democrat himself. For democracy, according to the classificatory
system adopted in Book 3 of the Politics, is a deformed or corrupted mode of
governance. It may be the case that just as a feast to which many contribute
is superior to one furnished by a single individual, so a multitude is a better
judge of many things than any one man (Pol. 1286a). This was an ancient ver-
sion of the wisdom of crowds nostrum. But rule of the poor was by definition
sectarian rule and therefore, since most poor citizens were ill-educated, likely
to be at best inefficient. Rather, for Aristotleadvocating as always the golden
mean in all thingsthe city most likely to succeed pragmatically was the one
in which the middling citizens held the political balance between the extremes
19
ActI
of rich and poor with their diametrically opposed self-interests, although even
such a city would still be operating at a level well below the optimal Aristotelian
philosophical ideal.
In short, a careful reading of the Politics provides most of the necessary
toolkit for analysing and understanding not just Athenian democracy (or
rather democracies) but democracy in the late classical Greek world as a whole.
And although we lack and always will lack the required substantiating evidence
in detail, we must take the full measure of his observation that in his day most
poleis enjoyed (or suffered) one or other version or variant of either democ-
racy or oligarchy. There were, in other words, lots of other Greek democracies
besides Athens, and most of them, it would probably be fair to suppose, were a
good deal less extremely democratic too. It is only on this relatively secure basis
of later fourth-century bce evidence that it is at all justified for us to proceed
backwards to try to guess what democracy might have been like in its earlier
incarnations, whether in Athens or elsewhere. That does not of course mean
that it is legitimate to assert that what was the case in say 330 must have been
the case in 430. To try to determine the latter, we must move from literary to
contemporary, documentary evidence.
It was once famously argued in a joint article by the comparative social
anthropologist Jack Goody and the literary scholar Ian Watt (1962/1963) that
the ancient Greeks alphabetic script was inherently democratic. By that they
meant in the first place that the simplicity of the worlds first fully phonetic
alphabetic script potentially enabled even a child of five or six to have access
to information of the kind relevant to the running of such a system of popular
self-governance. They also implied, however, that there might be some neces-
sary connection between the development and possession of such an alpha-
betic script and the fact that it was the Greeks, that is the Athenians, who first
invented democracy. Now, it is true that democratic systems of self-government
were in part dependent upon the use of alphabetic literacy, which required the
mastery of only between twenty-four and twenty-eight graphic symbolsas
opposed to the 200 or so signs plus ideograms of the Greek Linear B syllabary
employed by the palace scribes of the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean kingdoms,
or to the 3,000 or so characters that are said to be required for the posses-
sion of basic literacy within any Chinese system of writing. Yetalthough the
administrative organs of many Greek cities were fully literate, only about half of
20
Sources, Ancient andModern
21
ActI
had suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of King Philip II, his son Alexander
(later the Great), and the Macedonians on the battlefield at Chaeroneia in
Boeotia. There was a real possibility, and a genuine fear, that Macedon might
do to Athens what it had done to other rebel or recalcitrant Greek states
that is, impose a pro-Macedonian tyrant. It was to that possibility and fear that
Eucrates law was a response.
Here is a selection from the published document, which was unearthed in
the 1930s in the excavations of the American School of Classical Studies in the
ancient Athenian Agora (civic centre):
The text was not expected to deliver its message by itself; this is a mem-
ber of the class of document reliefs, and above the text is a relief sculpture
depicting a standing female figure in the act of crowning a seated, middle-
aged to elderly male figure. There can be little doubt that these two repre-
sent personifications of democracy, understood as a goddess and a member
of the official pantheon of deities to which the Athenians collectively paid
religious cult, and the people (demos). The act of crowning originated in
the sphere of athletic contests; a crown of sacred olive leaves, for example,
was the prize for victory at the Olympic Games. But under the democracy
at Athens, itself also a hugely competitive arena, the practice grew up of
awarding golden crowns to citizens deemed to have performed some signal
public service. The award was symbolic, in that the honorand did not actu-
ally receive the crown, which found its way into the state treasury of Athena
22
Sources, Ancient andModern
on the Acropolis. So well known was the practice that in the same year 336
a proposed award to Athens foremost orator and democratic champion
Demosthenes was the occasion for major public bloodletting between the
leading politicians of the day (see Chapter 10 for an account of the political
trial of the accused proposer Ctesiphon). Viewers of this document relief,
in other words, were to understand that the Demos itself rather than any
particular member of it was being rewarded and honoured by its very own
patron goddess simply for being thata democratic People. The very con-
tinued existence of the democracy was thus being deemed a cause for public
and eminently visible self-congratulation.
In a sense Eucrates was doing nothing very remarkable. The democracys
myth of origin, its founding charter, was the myth of the Tyrannicides (see
Chapter 3). Tendentious or false as history, this was extremely powerful as
23
ActI
ideology. Democracy at Athens, in other words, was from one point of view
identified precisely and fundamentally as anti-tyranny. But, apart from articu-
lating the threat of the democracys being overthrown and replaced by a pos-
sible tyrant ruler, Eucrates text also goes on to make clear from where, more
specifically, it was feared that such anti-democratic counter-revolution might
emergethat is, from which political organ of state: namely, the Council
that took its title from the place below the Acropolis where it sat, the Hill of
Ares (God of War). Of all Athens democratic organs, the Areopagus was the
least democratic: it had been founded well before the democracy had even
been dreamed of, and originated as an organ of political domination by the
wealthy, aristocratic elite. Only members of certain families were eligible for
election to the qualifying office of Archon, from retiring holders of which the
Areopagus was automatically recruited, and the 300 or so Areopagites then
served for lifein contravention of the normal republican and democratic
principle of rotation. From 508/7 and the reforms of Cleisthenes on, that prin-
ciple had been embodied in the newpopular, non-aristocraticCouncil
of 500 recruited on non-gentilicial lines and soon also by the democratic
method of the lottery. If the Areopagus was allowed to continue in existence,
that was in deference to or in veneration of ancient tradition, and did not
preclude institutional innovation: in the 480s recruitment to the Archonship
was thrown open to the democratic procedure of the lottery, and in 462/1 the
reforms of Ephialtes removed from the Areopagus its last remaining vestiges
of independent political power or initiative, reducing it to a lawcourt charged
with judging only certain non-political types of case. Every so often there were
moves initiated by conservatives to try to restore to it some of its imagined
or real past power, and the post-Chaeronea crisis seems to have been one of
those occasions. In 336 it was nevertheless a pretty soft target, however much
nostalgic conservatives willing to co-operate with autocratic Macedon in dis-
mantling the democracy might have wished it otherwise. Eucrates, in other
words, may very well have been playing to the gallery rather than articulating
a genuine concern.
The foreign affairs of the Athenian democracy as they stood in (probably)
the mid-fifth century bce may be illuminated by a document found in Athens
but since lost; all that now survives of it is a copy of a copy. Astandard mod-
ern sourcebook (Fornara 1983) prints two alternative English translations,
24
Sources, Ancient andModern
Among the Erythraeans lots shall be drawn for a Boule of 120 men.The
man allotted to the office shall undergo scrutiny in the ErythraeanBoule.
No one shall be allowed to serve as a member of the Boule who isunder
thirty years of age. Prosecution shall lie against those found guilty, andthey
shall not be members of the Boule for the space of four years. The allotment
shall be carried out and the establishment of the Boule effected forthe
present by the Episkopoi and the Phrourarch, in future by the Bouleand
the Phrourarch. Each future member of the Boule at Erythrae shall,before
he enters the Boule, take an oath to Zeus and Apollo and Demeter, calling
down destruction upon himself if he swears falsely and destructionupon
his children. The oath shall be sworn over burning sacrifices...
By what right, or through what power, was the Assembly of the Athenians
justified in seeking to impose, or enabled to impose, such a set of regulations
upon another Greek polis, even though one of that institutions cardinal ideo-
logical features was that it should enjoy freedom and autonomy from just such
external intervention and imposition? The answer, in short, is that Erythrae on
the coast of Ionia (in western Turkey today) was an ally of Athens, a member
of the so-called Delian League, that is, the offensive and defensive alliance that
Athens had taken the initiative in forming in the winter of 478/7 in the wake
of the Greek allies defeat of the grand Persian invasion of mainland Greece
in 480479. The League had three main objectives: revenge and reparation
for the material and spiritual damage inflicted by the invading Persians; the
immediate liberation of those Greek cities which still remained subjects of the
Persian Empire; and the permanent liberation of all Greek cities threatened
with loss of their liberty as long as that empire existed. The longer answer is
that from very early on after the foundation of the alliance in 478/7 the place of
Athens within a supposedly equal alliance had noticeably gravitated from that
25
ActI
I shall not rebel from the People of the Athenians or from the alliesofthe
Athenians . . . Nor shall Ireceive back any of the exiles . . . Of thosewho
fled to the Medes . . . Ishall not banish those who remain in Erythrae
without the assent of the Athenians and the People . . . If someoneis
caught betraying the city of the Erythraeans to the tyrants, he shallwith
impunity be put to death...
26
Sources, Ancient andModern
454. But it does raise the question (to which we shall return in Chapter9) of
the extent to which the Athenians deliberately and purposefully used or abused
their power and prerogatives under the terms of their anti-Persian alliance in
order to promote the extension of democratic government within the citizen-
states of the eastern Mediterranean Greek world. Can democracy indeed be
imposed?a question for our times, no doubt, as well as theirs.
From the national Imove on to the local level, that of the administrative
unit known as the deme (from demos, the same word as demos=people, but
here meaning village, parish, ward); and to illustrate the way Athenian demes
operated, Ihave selected a magnificent marble stele, its inscribed text largely
intact, from the important deme of Thoricus in southeast Attica. Thoricus
owed its importance not least to its proximity to the silver-bearing lead mines
in the region, which were worked by the labour of many thousands of slaves
privately owned by some of Athens richest citizens. It was from the silver ore of
the Laurium district that the Athenian state minted the often strikingly beauti-
ful coins that Ishall be discussing in the next section.
The Thoricus stele itself stands about a metre and a third high and is
inscribed on both its front and its two lateral faces. It has had a chequered mod-
ern history. Though its existence seems to have been known to an American
classical scholar in or around 1960, it was first brought to public scholarly
attention only in 1975 by the doyen of Attic (Athenian) epigraphical studies,
Eugene Vanderpool. Four years later, however, it was whisked from its Greek
homeland to the Golden West, bought by the fabulously well-endowed Getty
Museum in Malibu, California. Just over thirty years later, happily enough, the
Getty decided to return it to Greece, to the care of the Epigraphical Museum in
Athens, an adjunct of the National Archaeological Museum, where its return
was properly celebrated and trumpeted in 2011. For this locally produced and
oriented stele is a gem of the classical Athenian democracya brilliant system
of self-governance that imaginatively combined the local with the national, and
indeed based the latter on the former. To become and to function as Athenian
citizens, relevant adult males had to be inscribed on the citizen register of their
local deme. Only then might they participate in national affairs. But member-
ship of a deme was not merely a formal qualification for full active citizen-
ship: the deme was also where one practised being a citizen, in the twofold
sense of practised. Not only did demes have national functions to perform,
27
ActI
but citizens might also try their hands in local government at the sort of
decision-making and administration that they would be required to perform at
national level too. Besides being exceptionally lively forms of local government,
demes might also offer a rich social life too. Thoricus, for example, possessed a
rather fine theatre.
Demes functioned democratically not least in the sphere that we describe
as religion. The text of the Thoricus stele is in fact a month-by-month calen-
dar of religious sacrifices. It lists what sacrifices of which animals and in what
amounts must be offered up on which days of which month to which god or
heroforty-two of them in all, including the local eponymous hero Thoricus,
as well as Helen, Heracles, and many more. The date of the stele is reckoned
somewhere between 440 and 420, a period of huge upheaval in the fortunes
of the Athenian democratic state, running from the revolt of one of its most
important allies, the island-state of Samos, to the end of the first phase of the
great Atheno-Peloponnesian War fought between alliances headed by Athens
and Sparta respectively. We shall return of course to those huge struggles in
another place, but here it is the religious dimension to which I wish to give
pride ofplace.
The Regulations for Erythrae stele discussed above contained the following
clause:The oath shall be sworn over burning sacrifices. Such animal blood-
sacrifices, burnt upon an altar within a sacred enclosure often adjacent to a
temple, were of the essence of all ancient Greeks religious experience. This was
the chief way in which they communicated with and acknowledged the supe-
rior power of the divine or superhuman beings they worshipped. The organisa-
tion and management of a whole years such sacrifices were therefore among
the very most important duties of each demes demarchos (roughly mayor,
as that Greek word is used today). National festivals toothe Panathenaea
or the Great (also known as City) Dionysia, for conspicuous examples (see
Chapter8)comported animal blood-sacrifice as a key moment of the com-
munal identity they implemented and reinforced. But the more humdrum sac-
rifices conducted at the local level, such as those prescribed by the Thoricus
calendar for the Rural Dionysia, for instance, will have served equally to regu-
late the ordinary Athenian citizens sense of himself as an Athenian, and to
order his place within the universe overseen by the pantheon of deities to
which the Athenians communally subscribed.
28
Sources, Ancient andModern
29
ActI
name of the Spartans headed the list of allies inscribed on the bronze coils of
the so-called Serpent Column (remains of which are now to be seen in the
ancient hippodrome of Byzantine Constantinople, modern Istanbul). But it
seems that the Athenians were never entirely happy to concede priority to the
Spartans for the Greek victory over Persia, not even in the case of the Plataea
battle. The Acharnae stele of the 330s, therefore, was just the latest thrust in an
ongoing campaign of Athenian self-promotion, which at that date would have
had the particular extra point of appealing to the sensitivities and interests of
the Athenians Macedonian overlords.
For, after winning Chaeronea, Philip of Macedon had in 338/7 been appointed
by the Greek alliance he formed and dominated as supreme commander of a
panhellenic campaign to invade Persia and liberate the Greeks of Asia from
Persian control. The Spartans had in 338/7 refused to join the alliance that had
voted for the Persian campaign, despite having their home territory invaded by
Philip. They had thereby excluded themselves also from sharing in a panhellenic
enterprise that was being promoted ideologically by Philip as an act of revenge
for the damage both material and spiritual that the Persians had inflicted on
Greece in 480 and 479. (In 334 Philips son and successor Alexander sought to
reinforce the point when he made a victory dedication at Athens, upon the very
Parthenon, in the name of himself and all the Greeks except the Spartans.) It
was this alienation and isolation of the Spartans that the Athenians, Ibelieve,
were seeking to capitalize upon by the inclusion of the Plataea Oath text in
the Acharnae stele. The Athenians, it implied, were the true saviours of Greece
from the Persians in 479 and genuinely loyal allies of the Macedonians in the
330s. By linking the Plataea Oath to the Ephebic Oath, moreover, the drafters
of the document were also conveying the message that the Athenian youth of
the 330s, in order to prove themselves true patriots, should seek to emulate the
towering achievements of their heroic ancestors of 479. That the Plataea Oath
wasarguablyspurious in whole or in part was beside thepoint.
Without leaving epigraphy behind entirely we may turn next to numismat-
ics, the study of coinage, which is a peculiarly rich source for the history of the
Athenian democracy and its foreign relations in the fifth century bce. Coins
by themselves are often datable fairly precisely, by means of hoard associations,
stylistic development, findspots, and so forth. A standard mid-fifth-century
Athenian silver owl represents what was then the most extensively produced
30
Sources, Ancient andModern
and widely distributed issues of the entire Greek world. The imagery of
Athenas symbolic owl associated with an image of the goddesss crowned head
and spray of her familiar plant, the olive, had been combined on Athens official
silver coinage since the last quarter of the sixth century, when Athens was ruled
by the tyrant Hippias. Such owl coins then performed a number of functions
payments to mercenaries, payments for court fees, fines, or taxes; and they
might also be used in high-value commerce. But from the second quarter of the
fifth century onwards these intrinsically valuable coins came also to assume the
new symbolic function of an imperialist token, since allies of Athens typically
paid their cash tribute in such specie, and examples were symbolically paraded
in the theatre by allied representatives as part of the opening ceremonies of the
annual Great Dionysia play-festival. The Athenian Assembly, conscious of the
coinages fundamental economic and political importance, periodically issued
legally enforceable regulations regarding its production andusage.
Either in the 440s or more likely the late 420s to early 410s, the so-called
Standards Decree prescribed throughout Athens alliance the common usage of
certain specified weights and measures of capacityand forbade the usage of
any other silver coinage than the official Athenian issues. (The coining by other
cities of metals other than silver, such as electrum, was not formally outlawed,
and these remained legal tender within the alliance.) Whatever economic
advantages this measure broughtand there is no doubt but that it would
have eased the task of the Athenian imperial officials responsible for collecting,
storing, and accounting for the money tribute the Athenians demanded of the
great majority of their 150 to 200 alliesa major function of this prohibition
was to emphasise the Athenian-ness of the anti-Persian alliance. That it may
also have generated resistance is one possible inference from the fact that the
Assembly found it necessary to pass, on the proposal of one Cleinias, a decree
regarding tribute-collection. Like the Standards Decree, the Cleinias Decree is
of disputed date. But whenever they were passed, what is strikingly noticeable
in both decrees is their hardline tone: these are not measures passed for an
alliance of equals, but an imposition by an imperially minded suzerain on its
subordinates.
Iconography is also the keynote of my penultimate class of evidence for the
history of ancient Greek democracy and specifically democracy at Athens.
Greeks and especially the democratic Athenians went in for public sculpture
31
ActI
both freestanding and architectural in a huge way. It helped of course that they
had readily accessible major sources of particularly fine workable marble on
nearby Mount Pentelicum and elsewhere in Attica, and a slave labour force to
quarry, transport, and in part work it. The Parthenon, the huge and elaborate
marble temple of Athena Parthenos built on the Acropolis between 447 and
432, iswhen read from a political point of viewa massive ideological state-
ment with the most powerful implications. Not for nothing did Pericles make
sure to have himself appointed one of the projects overseers. But for the pur-
poses of this immediate discussion Ifix rather on a pair of freestanding statues,
representing the so-called Tyrannicides, which were made not of marble but of
the copper alloy usually referred to as bronze. By the end of the sixth century
and throughout the fifth bronze was the medium of choice for the most strik-
ingly innovative and individualistic freestanding sculptures.
I refer to the Tyrannicides as so-called because, as the sceptical historian
Thucydides would protest a century later, in around 514 the Athenian aristo-
crats and lovers Harmodius and Aristogeiton had not killed the ruling tyrant
Hippias but only his younger brother Hipparchus, and they had done so
not in the name of any grand political ideal, but in pursuit of a sordid inter-
aristocratic familial quarrel. For the vast majority of Athenians, however, most
of the time Harmodius and Aristogeiton were nevertheless celebrated as demo-
cratic heroes, champions of democracy. Indeed, as mentioned, their action was
taken to be the foundation or charter myth of the democracy itself, democracy
itself as a system of self-rule being essentially perceived and projected as anti-
tyranny. Aristocratic drinking songs (skolia) soon after the event had celebrated
the pair as having been responsible for introducing isonomia to the Athenians,
meaning perhaps something like restoring to them the rule of law as opposed
to arbitrary dictatorship. Following the Cleisthenic reforms of 508/7, however,
isonomia was appropriated as a peculiarly democratic slogan standing for
equality of status and respect under the laws, and the aristocratic pair were also
appropriated and re-imagined in order to serve new, popular and democratic
ends. Thus when the Persian emperor Xerxes chose in 480 to loot the original
sculptural pair fashioned by the Athenian Antenor in around 505 and remove
them to his capital of Susa, this was taken as a heinous affront to Athens civic
and democratic pride, and a replacement pair was commissioned from sculp-
tors Critius and Nesiotes and erected in c.477 in the central civic Agora of the
32
Sources, Ancient andModern
city, the most powerfully symbolic public space after the Acropolis. For a very
long time indeed (until the 390s) they were the only mortals to receive such
hallowed treatmenthere.
Finally, taking it as a source in a different sense, and bearing in mind ear-
lier remarks about the element of creative fiction present in all historiography,
Iconclude with a brief look at one of the very best books of the past quarter
century not just on ancient Greek democracy but on democracy as such:Athens
on Trial:The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought by Jennifer Tolbert
Roberts (Roberts 1994). The key lies in the subtitle. We are all democrats now, it
might plausibly be claimedwhether we are social democrats, Christian dem-
ocrats, subjects of a peoples democracy, and so on and so forth. But although
in the Greek world as a whole between say 450 and 300 bce a good number
out of the 1,000 or so Greek poleis had experienced some form of demokratia,
so labelled, the tradition of thought about politics that started with the age of
Herodotus was resolutely and overwhelmingly anti-democratic. Of the articu-
late and extant witnesses to that political world the number who can with any
confidence be called ideologically pro-democratic can be counted on the fin-
gers of only one hand:Herodotus himself, perhaps, Pericles as represented by
the famous funeral speech attributed to him in Thucydides History, Protagoras
the drafter of democratic laws for the new city of Thouria, Democritus the
atomist, Demosthenes the ideologically driven practical politician and from
around 300 bce until approximately ce 1850 hardly anyone was so again. Why
not? The answer must differ according to period and place, but Roberts book
offers helpful answers, not least by herself attempting to reconstruct ancient
democratic theory as a consciously anti-elite, class-driven mode of political
thought (see further Chapter 6). She shows too in detail how, and to what
extent, anti-democratic thinking and practice prevailed from Socrates and the
Socratics (Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle), through the time of Republican Rome
in the last centuries bce (represented in historiography by the Greek Polybius),
right down until the eighteenth or nineteenth century of ourera.
However, besides documenting anti-democratic thinking, she also faults
Athenian democrats for excluding women from the political process. The
Greeks did inevitably recognise that women were half the human race, but
almost no Greek male conceded that they possessed the natural potential for
full and equal political empowerment. The conceptual underpinnings of such
33
ActI
34
2.
The Emergence ofthe Polis,
Politics, and thePolitical
Modern and Contemporary Appropriations
of DemocracyII
35
ActI
Finally, but very much not least, the venerable Cambridge social anthropolo-
gist Jack Goody launched (also in 2007: esp. 4960) a ferocious tirade against
the legacy of Moses Finley (191286), who apart from writing Politics in the
Ancient World (1983) also edited a volume on The Greek Legacy, which he sub-
titled A New Appraisal, and in which he himself wrote on ancient Greek politics
(1981). The title of Goodys work says it all: The Theft of HistoryFinley and
others, in other words, have in Goodys jaundiced view conspired to deprive
other, non-western cultures of the credit for pathbreaking cultural achieve-
mentssuch as democracywhich they erroneously attribute uniquely or
preferentially to the ancient Greeks. Coming from one who was the co-author
of a study on literacy that was not unhappy to link the ancient Greeks develop-
ment of alphabetic literacy causally to their pioneering achievement of democ-
racy, this is quite an about-face. But is it justified?
Against this revisionism there stands a tradition of scholarship on ancient
Greek political history going back to George Grote in the second quarter of
the nineteenth century, which holds that ancient Greeks did pioneer politics
and democracy and, moreover, that what they created may still offer useful
examples for contemporary would-be democratic reformers. The names of
besides Finley, aboveMogens Herman Hansen (in Europe) and Josiah Ober
(in the United States) spring at once to mind as contemporary exponents and
upholders of this tradition, which requires constant critical analysisitself
a legacy of ancient Greek ways of thinkingbut can be defended. It is from
ancient Greece that a very great deal of contemporary political vocabulary is
derivedmonarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny, among others, and
of course politics itself:linguistically European in origin, of course, but not
by reason of that necessarily also Eurocentric in contemporary usage, which
far exceeds the bounds of Europe on any definition. Nor is the establish-
ment of this historical fact in itself a cause, letalone an excuse, for Western
triumphalism.
So, it is crucial first to define what one understands by politics. And here
as in the case of democracyI propose to operate with a strong definition:
the taking of collective decisions in public on matters both operational-
pragmatic and ideological-conceptual of crucial, central importance to the
decision-taking collectivity as such, following an agreed process of open
debate among the decision-takers who for the sake of this argument will be
36
The Emergence of the Polis/Politics/the Political
called empowered citizens, that is, have the executive power to enforce those
decisions.
Citizens as it happens comes to us from Latin not Greek, via the exception-
ally powerful tradition of Roman civil law: that is, the law governing cives, citi-
zens, originally of the Roman Republic (res publica, the thing of the People,
50927 bce), then of the Roman Empire (established by the first emperor,
Augustus, who ruled from 27 bce to ce 14; see further Chapters 1516). The
Greek word that we translate as citizens is politai, literally polis-people, in the
masculine gender. Full, active, participatory citizens in ancient Greece were all
by definition adult males. The feminine form of politai did exist, politides, since
in certain Greek communities such as democratic Athens women were consid-
ered the non-active half of the citizen body or politeuma, and thus indispensa-
ble at least for passing on passively the potentiality for acquiring citizenship by
hereditary descent to their sons. But nowhere in ancient Hellas were women
granted active political privileges, let alone equal political privileges with their
menfolk. What is this polis from which so much ultimately is derived?
Exhaustive research for over a decade by Hansen and his colleagues and
associates within the Copenhagen Polis Project funded by the Royal Danish
Academy yielded a string of admirable collective works on various aspects of
various Greek poleis, together with an encyclopaedic volume devoted to all the
then known poleis identifiable anywhere in the Greek world between 600 and
300 bce, some 1,000 of them in all. The chief lineaments of the Greek polis as
such are therefore rather well understood by now, and what is knownoften
far too littleabout the many individual Greek poleis is at any rate far more
easily accessible than ever before. Two main senses of the word polis may there-
fore be distinguished:first, polis as a physical entity, the central settlement and
location of the most important political activity conducted by a polis in the
second sense, that is, of a political community constituted by its politai-citizens.
The former sense is found as early as the Homeric poems (perhaps put together
c.700650 bce in their monumental form), but the latter sense does not appear
until towards the second half of the seventh century, for example in an inscribed
text from the small polis of Dreros in eastern Crete (see further below).
Some debate still surrounds the question of how best to translate polis into
English. The standard older translation city-state runs up against the two
difficulties that many, if not most, poleis could hardly be described as ever
37
ActI
being genuinely urban and that many, if not most, lacked certain essential defin-
ing characteristics of what political scientists or political sociologists would
be comfortable describing as states. The former difficulty is the more easily
addressed: by substituting citizen- for city-state, one both captures the ancient
Greek notion that its citizens were the polis, a notion reflected in the ancient
political terminology, which did not speak of Athens or Sparta doing this or
that but always of the Athenians or the Spartans, and sheds the unwanted
anachronistic associations of city. The problem of state remains, however, but
so long as one thinks of an entity that has political functions rather than of an
entity with full-blown State (capital S) institutions (bureaucracy, civil service,
government, standing army, etc.), it will serve its purpose adequately.
However, the process whereby the citizen-state emergedthe rise of the
polisis hard to grasp, given the available sources. A combination of archae-
ology (the physical remains of central places and their associated religious
sanctuaries and cemeteries, together with visual images on artefacts such as
painted pots), contemporary written sources including poetry (e.g., the iam-
bics of Archilochus of Paros and Thasos, the elegiacs of Tyrtaeus of Sparta, or
the lyrics of Alcaeus of Mytilene), and epigraphy (e.g., the Dreros inscription
just mentioned) strongly suggests that the process of polis-formation in the
Aegean and coastal Asia Minor heartlands extended over a longish period of
perhaps a century, going on faster or more slowly depending on the region. It
indicates further that that process both led to and was assisted by the establish-
ment of new overseas settlements of Greeks striking out from those heartlands
at first for the central Mediterranean (south Italy and Sicily) and then eventu-
ally, by 550 bce, settling around both the Mediterranean and the Black Seas.
Platos humorous simile like ants or frogs around a pond nicely conveys the
littoral nature of this pattern of dispersal. Colonization, on the other hand,
once the standard term, radically distorts its political nature. For most of these
new colonial settlements were poleis in the strong political sense of citizen-state
from the word go. That is to say, no less than their mother-cities (metro-poleis)
they asserted their freedom and autonomy, their independence, as an essential
condition of polis-hood.
There is another, possibly even more controversial reason for not translating
the ancient Greek polis as city-state. The conceptual category city-state is actu-
ally quite widely distributed and applicable in human history. Mogens Hansen
38
The Emergence of the Polis/Politics/the Political
and collaborators have identified getting on forty of what they call city-state
cultures, including, for example, Singapore today. But in my view the utility of
the concept is not so much to draw attention to what these different cultures
have in common as to bring out and emphasise what characteristics they do not
share. One way of bringing out the peculiar qualities of the ancient Greek polis
is to trace briefly the trajectory of the word polis and the thing or things it can
signify, from the poems of Homer onwards.
Is there a polis in Homer? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, the polis
word is used there (alternatively spelled ptolis), but no, the polis in the full
political sense of citizen-state is not present. The latter institution may be
hinted at or implied, but it doesnt operate as such in the poems, for very
good institutional reasons: there are no citizens properly so called in either
the Iliad or the Odyssey, and, although there are assemblies describedboth
on the battlefield at Troy and back home on Ithacathere are no properly
empowered decision-making assemblies or indeed any body that could func-
tion as such. The nearest that the poems come perhaps to depicting the sort
of actual political community that might have existed in the time of Homer,
that is at the time the poems were achieving their monumental form in the
decades around 700 bce, is to be found in Iliad Book 18: that is, in the lengthy
description of the artwork decorating the outer face of the magical shield fash-
ioned for heroic Achilles by lame craftsman-god Hephaestus at the request of
Achilles divine mother Thetis. Somehow or otherbut this is epic fantasia
not sober realismHephaestus had crafted thereon depictions of not just one
but two cities: one a city at peace, the other a city at war. But even the city
at peace is not a city without bloodshed: the scene portrayed is one of elite
judges who have been summoned to arbitrate over the claims to compensa-
tion lodged by the family of a murdered man. Nevertheless, the dispensing of
public justice in place of the rough private justice of the lex talionis (an eye
for an eye) was indeed a cardinal feature of the lawfully embodied early polis.
However, in Homer it is revealing that the most patriotic hero on display is not
a Greek but Hector, crown prince of Troy. Famously it is he who utters the stir-
ring sentiment one omen is best: to fight in defence of the fatherland (12.243).
Even if this may be interpreted as expressing a sort of incipient patriotism, it
is the patris (fatherland) not the polis of Troy that is the object of his patriotic
devotion.
39
ActI
The real Greek diaspora of the eighth and seventh centuries bce also has its
counterpart in Homer, but in the Odyssey rather than the Iliad, which in other
ways too is the more modern of the two poems. The island of Scherie inhabited
by the Phaeacians, which lay within striking distance of Odysseus own island-
kingdom of Ithaca, was later taken to be the island of Kerkyra (Corfu). This had
in fact been founded from Corinth as an apoikia, a home away from home or
overseas polis foundation, traditionally in the third quarter of the eighth cen-
tury. In the Odyssey, however, it was no less a kingdomif a rather benevolent
autocracythan any other of the heroes domains, and if King Alcinous ably
assisted by his queen Arete dispensed a form of regal justice, he did so purely
informally, on his own terms, unfettered by civic constraints. But as the poet is
careful to remind his listeners, on Scherie we are in never-never land:the ships
of the seafaring Phaeacians travel to their destinations under their own steam
as it were, without the need for merely human intervention. There is little or
nothing of the real political world of the early polis to be detectedhere.
The prominent theme of mortal justice is taken up again, and greatly devel-
oped, by another poet contemporary with the period that saw the crystallization
of the monumental Homeric poems. But with this crucial difference:whereas
not even the ancient Greeks were quite clear who, or even how many, Homer
was, they were left in no doubt by the poet himself that Hesiod was a unique
individual set within a veristic and very specific political context. The putative
scenario of his long, hexameter (epic metre) poem titled Works and Days is
briefly as follows: Hesiods Ascra, a village later established as a subordinate
settlement within the polis of Thespiae in Boeotia, is ruled by non-responsible,
greedy, antisocial kings (basileis)not monarchs, as Homers Agamemnon or
Odysseus are supposed to be, but petty local aristocrats; a court of these kings
has ruled against Hesiod and in favour of his allegedly feckless brother Perses
in the matter of their immigrant fathers disputed land-inheritance. Hesiod gets
his own back, symbolically, in the poem by showing up Perses as a mere tool
of the immoral bribe-swallowing rulers (WD 389). For Hesiod, at any rate,
the current generation of mankindthe fifth and so far the worst in an ever-
degenerating sequenceis the Iron Generation, which is portrayed as a bad
time to be living through, though still not quite as bad as a possible future one
in which there will be no true justice or true respect left. But why then does he
represent himself as having no other concrete political remedy to appeal to or
40
The Emergence of the Polis/Politics/the Political
to apply, and powerless therefore before the basileis of Ascra? And how were
his listeners meant to interpret his fable of the hawk that has caught a helpless
nightingale and contemptuously taunts her that it would be folly to resist (WD
20212):does the hawk stand for the kings, and the nightingale for poor help-
less Hesiod? Or does the hawk rather stand for supreme Olympian god Zeus,
and the nightingale for the kings, who are being assured metaphorically by
Hesiod that Zeus inexorable justice will catch up with them fatally in theend?
At any rate, Hesiod was apparently not materially destitute. His competence
in composing versesnot only the Works and Days but also the influential
Theogony, a sort of Greek Genesisargues otherwise. So too does his ideal pre-
scription, ostensibly addressed to Perses, of a life of constant hard, agricultural
toil, but one that is to be alleviated nevertheless by the enforced assistance of a
slave underling (dms). He may not be the semi-aristocrat he has been taken to
be, but he is probably a more than merely middling peasant farmer. The source
of his political powerlessness may therefore arguably have lain in the failure of
Ascra thus far to have developed militarily in the direction that, according at
least to one peculiarly acute later commentator, might have given power to his
elbow. More precisely, Thespiae in about 700 bce probably did not yet possess
a significant force of the type of heavy-armed infantrymen known from their
shield (hoplon) as hoplites. It is a modern hypothesis that the emergence of
warfare between massed phalanxes of hoplites, however exactly that occurred,
played a key role in transforming the nature of politics in a number of the most
important early Greek states. This hypothesis is, however, already sketched
retrospectively by Aristotle in his Politics (1297b1528), where he outlines a
politico-military schema of historical evolution from an aristocratic mode of
government employing cavalry as its principal arm to a mode of governance
dominated by the next-wealthiest segment of society who fight now as hop-
lites or heavy infantrymen. What is particularly tantalising is Aristotles further
statement that these early hoplitocracies were called democracies.
As we shall see, there was indeed one early Greek polis, namely Sparta, in
which the linkage between political recognition of the kratos of the demos and
the development of full hoplite phalanx warfare was seamlessly tight, and it
may be that Aristotle had no other city in mind or no other empirical basis
for his general claim beyond that one. However, the process may perhaps also
be illustrated by the early history of another central Greek polis, Megara, not
41
ActI
far from Thespiae and next door to Athens, as reflected through the elegiac
poems of Theognis (c. 550). Later sources talk of some sort of social upheaval,
possibly even political revolution, taking place in the early sixth century at
Megara. There is also talk, presumably not unconnected, of a Megarian tyrant
called Theagenes, who would have flourished in the 630s and 620s, and who
was the father-in-law of Athenian aristocrat Cylon (to whom we shall return).
Theagenes, according to Aristotle (Pol. 1305a245), slaughtered the flocks of the
rich. Not, be it noted, the flocks of the nobles (as would have been appropri-
ate at Ascra), but of the economic elite, who were not necessarily all well-born
(eugeneis). There is at least a hint here of a class approach, of the autocratic,
monarchic tyrants emerging as a champion of the ordinary, non-wealthy peo-
ple (demos) against the wealthy few (oligoi). If so, the factor that could have
made the difference, at least in some of the thirty or so cities where tyrants
are attested in the seventh and sixth centuries bce, is the development of hop-
lite armies. Tyrants, it must be added, did not necessarily rule tyrannically;
what distinguished their rule was that they seized or held sole power outside
any existing legal framework. One polis that never experienced a tyrant in this
sense was Sparta, and it may well be that its early constitutional development
was framed precisely to avoid that unwelcome contingency.
It is ultimately to Aristotle in a lost work on the Polity of the Spartans
(Lakedaimonion politeia), one of the 158 that he and his Lyceum students com-
piled (see previous chapter), that we owe our knowledge of a prose document
known as the Great Rhetra, the Magna Carta of ancient Sparta. This famous
text, so labelled to distinguish it from a number of lesser rhetrai or enactments,
is preserved in a Life of the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus written many centu-
ries later (c. 100 ce) by Plutarch, who derived it directly from the Aristotelian
work. Actually, as Plutarch virtually concedes from the outset of the so-called
biography, his Lycurgus was an at least semi-legendary figure, one to whom the
Spartans themselves paid religious cult as either a hero or a god. Over time,
he came to be regarded as the Spartan lawgiver, to whom all sorts of disparate
ordinances of different dates became attached. (A somewhat similar mytholo-
gizing process affected the tradition on the Athenian Solon, although he was
quite certainly historical:see Chapter3.) Yet even apart from Lycurgus alleged
authorship, the Great Rhetra remains a huge puzzle and of uncertain prov-
enance and authenticity. Formally, it is presented by Plutarch as an oracular
42
The Emergence of the Polis/Politics/the Political
utterance of Apollo of Delphi, a god to whom the Spartans were indeed espe-
cially attached; and being exceptionally pious, they were quite likely to have
wished to place their political arrangements under the sign and protection
of the Olympian god to whom all their major annual religious festivals were
devoted. The terms of the Rhetrapoetic in expression, and not transparent
in meaningalso favour the notion that this was a religious document with
practical political application.
However, the language used radically complicates interpretation. There is
mention of tribes (presumably the three pseudo-kinship tribes common to
Dorian cities) and obes (residential districts). There is mention of the kings
in the plural and a Gerousia (Senate) of thirty including the (two) kings. Then
comes a clause, imperfectly preserved in Plutarchs Greek text, which seems
to mention kratos and damos (the Doric form of demos) together. What is not
at all clear is what relationship is intended or presupposed between the tribes
and obes, on the one hand, and the kings, Gerousia and damos, on the other.
The damos is said to mark the feast of Apollo, or alternatively to hold assembly,
season in season out, but it is no more clear what relationship is to subsist
between the Gerousia and the damos, especially when a final clause adds that
in case the damos speaks crookedly the Gerousia shall be setters aside (of their
wishes or decision). Moreover, besides its lack of transparent clarity of expres-
sion, the text as presented omits what at any rate was later to become the chief
executive office of the city, the Ephorate, an office to which all members of the
damos were eligible for election. For the moment, however, Ifocus solely on
that conjunction of damos and kratos, easily the earliest such conjunction on
record anywhere in early Greece. Whatever precise meaning is to be attributed
to either term, letalone to their use in conjunction, it is unthinkable that any
polis would have hit upon such a formulation before the evolution of hoplite
warfare. It is not therefore merely coincidental that Sparta was, if not actually
the first, at any rate one of the very first hoplite polities. War and politics, as
often in Greece, went hand in glove, and more so in Sparta than anywhereelse.
It would be very wrong, though, to treat the Great Rhetra (even if genu-
ine and accurately preserved) as enshrining the very first example of ancient
Greek democracy. In fact, Sparta never became a democracy, for reasons to
which we shall return elsewhere. What Sparta may plausibly be claimed to
have pioneered, rather, is a strong notion of citizenshipand Ithink its not
43
ActI
an accident that the earliest attested usage of politai in all Greek literature is
in a poem of the mid-seventh century bce Spartan warrior-poet Tyrtaeus
(P.Oxy. 3316). Later, these citizens were referred to collectively as homoioi:not
equals, as that is often mistranslated, but people who were same (homos)-ish,
alike in one or more but not all respects. Socially and economically, blatant
inequalities existed among them and indeed were exacerbated over time,
but politically all Spartiates (the formal title for full citizens, another word
that occurs first in Tyrtaeus) were equal members of the legally empowered
damos. Sparta too, at least as the patriotic Tyrtaeus represented it, was one
of the earliest Greek poleis to achieve a major goal of them all, namely euno-
mia. By this term was understood not so much the enactment and enforce-
ment of good laws (nomoi) but rather the happy condition of lawfulness or
law-abidingness, whereby citizens knew their place and obeyed the laws and
law-enforcers.
But for what is possibly the earliest documented use of the term polis in its
strong political sense we must look not to any major Greek town or city but
to little Dreros in eastern Crete. In an inscribed text from the Agora of Dreros
that is datable to the second half of the seventh century there appears for the
first time the formula it pleased the polis. Who exactly constituted the polis
in this sense is not specified, but what it pleased them to do clearly is:namely,
to place fixed-term conditions on the tenure of the top political office of kos-
mos (literally orderer). Given the very early date, we are surely dealing here
with a narrowly restricted, probably elective oligarchy of the wealthiest and
most honoured citizens, a group not unlike the basileis of Ascra perhaps. But
what distinguishes their situation most obviously from that of Hesiod are the
very formality and publicity of the document; indeed it seems to have been a
peculiarly Cretan political characteristic to wish to display written legislative
enactments in public spaces from an early period, and that may be a function
of the fact that there were so many poleis competing with each other in such a
relatively restrictedspace.
To conclude, Ireturn to the mainland and to Theognis of Megara. Not all the
verses attributed to him are certainly his, but those addressed to one Cyrnus
appear authentic. Their author is confident that the polis should consist of its
active political element of the free, landowning, arms-bearing citizens who
44
The Emergence of the Polis/Politics/the Political
enact the laws in their assemblies. But, clearly aristocratic in his social outlook
at least, he resents most bitterly intermarriage or rather miscegenation between
members of the old aristocracy and those whom he calls the socially worthless,
nouveaux riches:
45
S IIS
Map3.1
Greek Colonization. From Pomeroy, Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (1998).
3.
The Emergence ofGreek
DemocracyI
ArchaicGreece
49
ActII
and loss of basic craft skillshas been called into question: was it not pre-
cisely during these supposedly dark centuries that a metals technology based
on the working of the more plentifully distributed and more practically effec-
tive material of iron superseded the usage of bronze for key cutting-edge tools
and weapons that had given the Bronze Age its name? True, but it has to be said
that at any rate in one of the most important regions of the former Mycenaean
age, Laconia in the southeast Peloponnese (where historical Sparta was to rise
to greatness from c. 750 on), there is little or no reason as yet to doubt the
aptness of the label DarkAge.
The thinking behind the narrowest definition of the Archaic Age is that
before 700 all is still pretty much mist and myth and prehistory (or at most
protohistory), since there are either no or insufficient written texts on which
to base a properly historical account; and that at the lower end at least certain
parts of the Greek world had already by 500 taken steps marking a definitive
break out of Archaism and into Classicism. Of those steps the one that features
most prominently in most accounts is the emergence of democracyan early
and inchoate form of democracy, to be more exactat Athens. That, however,
is controversial in several ways, chiefly because, even though the earliest and
best ancient Greek historian does retrospectively so label it (Herodotus 6.131),
by no means all historians accept that the politeia that had emerged at Athens
by around 500 really was a democracy. On the other hand, there are some
many fewerhistorians who wish to apply democracy to an even earlier phase
of Athenian constitutional development, as far back as c.600bce.
We shall return more than once to the issue of the proper classification of the
Athenian polity in the latter half of the (ex hypothesi) Archaic period. The key
point here is methodological. In retrospect, one may specify the necessary and
sufficient conditions for the emergence of something labelled democracy, but
what one may not legitimately claim is that democracy of some sort had to hap-
pen sooner or later, letalone happen how and where and why it actually did.
Anachronistic, teleological thinking must at all costs be avoided, even though
it has some ancient authority in the thinking behind the work attributed to
Aristotle that is known for short as the Ath. Pol. (Athenaion Politeia). For my
present purposes it is not necessary to draw a hard and fast line between an
Archaic and a Classical Greece, but it is necessary to expunge any modern
anachronistic notions that may attach unconsciously to the formerterm.
50
The Emergence of Greek DemocracyI
This was, rather, an age of experiment, and more precisely it was an age
that saw radical, even revolutionary thought-experiments which had a direct
relationship toand Iwould argue impact uponthe world of practical poli-
tics. Already in Homer, indeed, in the conspicuously ill-favoured shape of the
agitator Thersites, there are signs of plebeian, anti-aristocratic thinking, even
perhaps political thought. What might be called, a touch anachronistically,
the demagogic rabble-rousing of Thersites provokesfrom the irate mouth of
King Odysseusthe remarkable abstract noun polukoirani, literally many-
kingness (Iliad 2.204). That state, declares Odysseus, is not at all a good thing,
either morally or pragmaticallythis is supposed to be the tenth year of a
monumental siege, after all; and to it he opposes, not aristocracy or aristo-
cratic oligarchy nor any other theoretically articulated mode of rule, but the
traditional monarchic sovereignty embodied in the person of generalissimo
Agamemnon. However, not content with abstract phrase-making, Odysseus
also concretely thwacks Thersites with Agamemnons divinely bestowed sceptre
of kingly authority. Thersites is deeply pained both physically and emotionally,
whereupon the mass of assembled Achaeans (Greeks) laugh out loud atand
thereby aggravatehis very public humiliation. The message for Homers orig-
inal readers and auditors was surely unambiguous: do not even think about
questioning the political status quo, which is literally god-given, ordained ulti-
mately of the greatest, best, and most powerful divine overlord, supreme father
Zeus himself. But the very fact that it was spelled out in this way likely hints
at a subtextual anxiety, at an at least vague sense of popular discomfort with
or even resistance to the rule of those who are both in Homer and later also
in Hesiod called kings (basileis). Later, when monarchical sentiment was at a
lower ebb, these elites liked to call themselves the fine (or beautiful) and good
(kaloikagathoi). For the ancient Greeks, good looks were the outward and vis-
ible sign of an inward, spiritual, or rather socio-political superiority.
More indications of a deep current of non-or even anti-aristocratic political
thinking in Archaic Greece have been plausibly detected in the works of a num-
ber of post-Homeric elegiac or lyric poets of the seventh and sixth centuries.
To these middling poet-citizensin other words, men situated both socio-
logically and ideologically between the basileis and aristocrats and the ordinary
members of the demoshas been attributed the espousal of a strong princi-
ple of equality, an egalitarianism which in its turn can be seen as eventually
51
ActII
undergirding the democratic turn of the late sixth and early fifth centuries. But
long before that, probably the best illustration of this middling sort of politi-
cal thinking are the poems and the reforms they subserved of the Athenian
lawgiver Solon. Poemsand reforms: for although he both advocated and tried
to justify his reforms through his verses, nevertheless the two have to be kept
conceptually and interpretatively separate. On the one hand, his extant verses,
many preserved through the Ath. Pol., are the sole authentic and contempo-
rary evidence for the reforms. On the other hand, at various times since their
passage, and not least during the upheavals of the end of the fifth century and
the renewed internal contestations of the latter part of the fourth century bce,
Solon was invoked as a talisman by different, sometimes violently opposed
tendenciessome on the left, as it were, claiming him as a democratic pioneer,
others further to the right as a more moderate reformer. As a result, not only
why he proposed the reforms he did, but even what exactly his reforms were,
became matters for dispute.
Some aspects of his work are, however, tolerably clear. In around 600 bce
Athens was racked by deep and acute crisis, both economic and social, and
therefore in our terms also political or moral-political. In 594/3 (probably)
Solon was appointed by the then political establishment of the Athenian polis as
an extraordinary Archon or Arch-Mediator (diallaktes). On the economic side,
Solon foreshadowed or echoed another politically minded elegist, Theognis of
Megara (see Chapter 2), in seeing money and wealth as the root of all, including
political evil. On the political side, he praises orderliness (one of his poems has
the very Spartansee belowtitle Eunomia), and warns against the possibil-
ity of Athens falling under a tyranny, even claiming that he had been urged to
make himself tyrant but had refused to do so on principle.
Solon represented himself instead as a moderate, the advocate of a middle
way between two extremes. Yet the nature of such of his reforms as are tolerably
documented and established makes it clear that the political struggle he was
arbitrating was not twofold but tripartite:between, on the one hand, the old
Eupatrid (scions of good fathers) aristocracy and the less-or non-nobly born
nouveaux riches (hoplites and above), and, on the other, between those two
groups, broadly the rich, and the more or less impoverished masses (demos).
Solon claims optimistically to have given to each of the contending groups what
52
The Emergence of Greek DemocracyI
they deserved (not necessarily what they demanded or expected):to the old
aristocracy retention of at least some of the privileges and offices that the right
of birth allegedly justified, including all the major public priesthoods and (for
women of certain families) priestesshoods; to the new rich access via election
to the top offices, including the annual Archonship, and so to membership of
the original aristocratic Areopagus council that was composed automatically of
ex-Archons, and possibly alsobut the evidence for this is controversialto a
new Council of Four Hundred; to the mass of the poor citizens (newly defined,
see below) access to an Assembly (Heliaea) which functioned as a court of appeal
against the judgements ofstill, inevitably, mainlyaristocratic officials.
The latter measureand in a sense the whole political packagewas prem-
ised upon a fairly radical and fundamental economic reform known for short
as the Seisachtheia (Shaking-off of Burdens). This comprised the abolition of
existing debts and, for the future, outlawry of debt-bondage; it was thenceforth
illegal for a citizen to contract a debt on the security of his own person, so
that should he fail to repay the principal or the interest demanded he could
not legally be made a bondsman by his creditor. Thus was instantiated noth-
ing less than a new definition of civic-political freedom, encapsulating a new,
more inclusive and sharper definition of citizenship. The overall significance
of the reforms was indeed partly symbolic. Solons new laws were inscribed
publicly in the Agora, on durable wooden tablets, making the point that gov-
ernance was no longer a secret process to be kept locked within the breasts of
innately privileged aristocratic individuals beyond the reach of the laws. But
their significance was also practical, especially as far as the new Heliaea was
concernedand it may well have been in the Heliaea that the counting of indi-
vidual votes was introduced for first time.
The significance of this innovation cannot be overestimated. It implied the
equation one citizen = one vote, whether the citizen was rich or poor, noble
or commoner. That probably helps to explain why retrospectively, and anach-
ronistically, the author of the Ath. Pol. (see Chapter 9) included the privilege
of appeal to the Heliaea as one of the three most demotic of Solons meas-
ures. The other two were, first, the ban, already mentioned, on the securing of
loans on the person (which indeed drew a sharp legal line between the citizen
and the slave) and, second, the legal empowerment of anyone who wished to
53
ActII
54
The Emergence of Greek DemocracyI
Let him appeal to the Boule [Council] of the People. On the thirdday
after the Hebdomadaea [the seventh day of a month, dedicatedtothe
Ionians chief god Apollo] that Boule shall assemble which is the Peoples,
[which] can inflict fines, and which consists of fifty men from a tribe...
For this is the earliest certain extant reference to a Council that is explic-
itly called of the People, and that may therefore be properly labelled popular,
although precisely who counted as the People we cannot unfortunately say.
It would be to go too far to argue that the very existence of this Chiot popu-
lar Council alongsidepresumablya non-popular (i.e., a traditional aristo-
cratic) Council corroborates the authenticity of the alleged Solonian Council
of Four Hundred. But at the least it shows the forward march of another citys
demosbesides those of (in their very different ways) Sparta and Athensin
the sixth-century bce Archaic Age.
Other possible cases of the advance of a demos to political incorporation
and significant empowerment during the sixth century include Heraclea
on the Black Sea (a Megarian foundation), Megara itself, Eretria and Chalcis on
Euboea, Mytilene on Lesbos, Cyrene in north Africa, Lipara (off Sicily), Naxos,
and Ambracia in northwest Greece. These have all been carefully investigated
if perhaps over-optimistically assessed by Birgalias (2009a), who advocates the
application to them of the analytical category of isonomia. For him this is a
type of regime to be located somewhere between a superseded aristocracy or
tyranny and a full-blown or at least unambiguous democracy, and represents a
compromise between the elite notables and the citizen masses (in a numerical
sense) leading to the transformation of a social into a political majority.
Isonomia thus would have represented a definite advance on Spartas and Solons
eunomia, which meant good order or lawfulness. Certainly, it became a buzz
word in Athens in the latter part of the sixth century, and will be scrutinised as
such later in this book. But unfortunately it is not attested concretely in the very
poor and usually much later sources for any of these other Archaic poleisto
which Birgalias adds the early fifth-century (and so post-Cleisthenic) cases of
Argos and Elis. Much less moderate and even less persuasive is the view of Eric
Robinson (2011) that by c. 550 there existed a number of demokratiai. This
seems to me to be quite literally a terminological inexactitude. It is time to
return to post-Solonian Athens.
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Solon had allegedly warned the Athenians against tyranny, and that was
easily construed with hindsight as a warning very specifically and personally
against the tyrannical ambition of one Peisistratus, a Eupatrid (see above) aris-
tocrat boasting a line of descent going all the way back to a Homeric hero.
But actually, if we may believe the conflicting and conflicted accounts that
made their way down to Herodotus and some even later writers, Peisistratus
road to supreme power was rocky and winding, and it was not before 545 that
he achieved anything like a stable rule, and then only after a major military
showdown involving heavy use of foreign mercenaries paid in the newfangled
medium of silvercoin.
One technique of rule-consolidation that Peisistratus seems to have employed
to great effectand perhaps needed to employwas the promotion or inven-
tion of great unifying national or ethnic religious festivals. The Panathenaea
or all-Athens festival devoted to the citys patron goddess Athena was organ-
ized (or rather reorganized) according to the traditional dating in 566, thus well
before Peisistratuss first seizure of power (c. 560?) on anybodys chronology.
The motivation behind it was, moreover, not peculiarly Athenian but rather
pan-Hellenic, all-Greek: that is, it represented Athens not entirely successful
attempt to respond to the very recent linkage of the long-established Olympic
Games festival with three other Gamesthe Pythian in honour of Apollo at
Delphi, the Isthmian in honour of Poseidon at Corinth, and the Nemean in
honour of Zeus at Nemeainto a four-yearly cycle or circuit of crown ath-
letic festivals (the sole material reward for victory being a symbolic crown or
wreath). The Panathenaea, even when celebrated every fourth year with especial
magnificencewith games and contests of various kinds open to all comers,
not just Athenian citizensnever quite managed to elevate itself into the top,
genuinely pan-Hellenic league, and offered material value-prizes from the start.
However, it was apparently during the period of Peisistratuss tyranny that
the next most prestigiousand also importantly international in its appeal
religious festival was inaugurated:the annual Great or City Dionysia, in honour
of the shape-shifting god who was thought to delight especially in the perfor-
mance of plays. Initially, these involved only one actor-producer and a chorus
of singer-dancers, but here were planted the seeds of that flowering of tragic
and subsequently comic drama that vitally informed Athenss democratic
culture in the fifth and fourth centuries (see Chapter8).
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The Emergence of Greek DemocracyI
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also that they had been in exile throughout the tyrannythat is, from at least
c. 545 until 510. Not so! That same surviving fragment of the Archon list also
shows a Miltiades holding the eponymous Archonship in 524/3 and Hippiass
son Peisistratus doing so in 522/1: in other words, after a decent interval the
tyranny reasserted its prior claim over the leading members of the main rival
families.
It was under Hippias too that Athenss first properly civic silver coinage was
struck, known for short as the owl coinage after the iconic device of its patron
goddesss familiar totem (the little owl). The silver used, extracted from lead by
cupellation, was drawn from Athenss own slave-worked mines at Laureum.
Apart from serving as a national status symbol, the coinage, which was
struck in large denominations, was useful mainly for making exceptionally
big payments or for the storage of exceptionally large amounts of wealth. It is
not impossible, however, that it had a role to play in one of Hippias grandest
national projects that did not actually achieve fruition in his reignor indeed
for over six centuries thereafter:an ultra-grand temple dedicated to Olympian
Zeus. This failure should not perhaps be accounted a major setback. But within
little more than a decade the Peisistratid political structure had begun to crack
irreparably.
With the coolness of hindsight it is possible to credit the Peisistratid family
tyranny with making a decisive or at least facilitating contribution to the next,
Cleisthenic step on Athensand Greecesdemocratic road. However, the
Athenians themselves, collectively, chose to see things rather differently, attrib-
uting a massive and fundamental ideological meaning to an act that may not
actually have had either the significance or the consequences that they imputed
to it retrospectively. Such is historyor the myth of history, or history as myth.
Anyhow, in about 514 Hippias younger brother and coadjutant Hipparchus
was murderedand it was this public assassination by the erotically connected
couple Harmodius and Aristogeiton that the newly democratic Athenian state
chose to look back upon as its founding, authorising moment. Actually, as the
sobersided and not wildly democratic historian Thucydides observed, in a
deflating digression (6.5459), Hipparchus was not the tyrant, so that this was
no act of tyrannicide, and the motivation of the assassins, so far from being
ideologically liberationist letalone democratic, was instead sordidly personal.
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The Emergence of Greek DemocracyI
To rub Attic salt in the wound, Thucydides also pointed out that the Athenians
did not in the end liberate themselves from the Peisistratid tyranny, but had to
have the job done for them by the Spartans.
On this point he was for once in agreement with Herodotus, who preserves
a very full and unambiguously clear account of the facts of the case, even
if he does leave the exact nature of the Spartans motivation for interven-
tion considerably unclear. Herodotus was sure that the exiled Alcmaeonids
had bribed the oracular priestess at Delphi known as the Pythia to respond
to any and every official enquiry of the Spartans that they must free the
Athenians from the tyranny of Hippiasbut was himself puzzled as to
why the Spartans should have been willing to obey the injunction and
so overthrow a family dynasty to which they were supposedly tied by the
near-sacred bond of ritualised guest-f riendship. At all events, in 510 King
Cleomenes I, who had earlier advised the Boeotian city of the Plataeans to
ally themselves with Athens allegedly in order to set them permanently at
loggerheads with the much more important Boeotian city of Thebes, inter-
vened personally in Athens and ended the tyranny. Hippias fled Athens
and sought refuge with another Greek tyrant, at Lampsacus:only Lampsacus
on the Asiatic side of the Hellespont (Dardanelles) and its tyrant were vas-
sals of the Persian empiremore seeds were thus sown here, in this case
of future Graeco-Persian conflict on the grandest scale, from Marathon to
Plataea and beyond.
The occupying Spartans or perhaps more particularly Cleomenes
subsequent gross diplomatic error was to try to dictate what sort of post-
tyranny regime Athens should have, and in particular to try to impose the rule
of another Athenian as tyrant, and a subservient, pro-Spartan tyrant into the
bargain. That move, however, was considered to constitute a flagrant breach
of Athens freedom (eleutheria) and independence (autonomia) as a polis.
The unintended and undesired resultafter a sharp bout of stasis or civil dis-
cord in 508/7was the enactment of the reform bill attributed to the lead-
ing Alcmaeonid Cleisthenes. That really wasor so Ishall argue in the next
chapterthe founding moment of democracy at Athens, indeed in all Hellas.
And the world. But if it was founded under any one label or slogan, that would
have been isonomia, not demokratia.
59
Map4.1
Attica. From Pomeroy, Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (1998).
4.
The Emergence ofGreek
DemocracyII
Athens508/7
B y the end of the sixth century bce (in round figures by 500), the mid-
dling political thinking discussed in the previous chapter and exempli-
fied most notably and practically by Solon at Athens had been trumped and
superseded by something far more radicalnothing less than an intellectual
revolution. So at any rate, argued the brilliant social historian of early Greek
myth and thought, Jean-Pierre Vernant. It will be argued here that not only was
this alleged revolution a fact, but that it also played a direct role in the political
revolution instantiated at Athens in the package of reforms enacted in 508/7
and ascribed en bloc to the quite exceptional aristocrat Cleisthenes.
To summarise Vernants case very briefly:he detected in the Archaic Greek
world the emergence or rather a breakthrough by 500 of a new mode of think-
ing, which had two aspects. It was, first, a rational mode of thinking in the
sense that when attempting for the first time to explain the non-human natural
world of nature (the Greek phusis means literally a process of growth) and the
ordered and orderly universe (kosmos), it explicitly denied or held in suspen-
sion the power of the gods and goddesses to explain or even affect both of
those. Thales of Miletus (floruit c.600585) was apparently the ultimate pro-
genitor of this line of approach, to which he may perhaps have applied the term
historiaenquiry or research. Probably the most famous result of this type of
thinking was his speculationor rather stipulation (there was no way that he
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62
The Emergence of Greek DemocracyII
example, travelled as far west as Sicily, where he speculated upon the mean-
ing of the marine fossils he saw embedded deep down in the stone quarries
of Syracuse. Or else they had concentrated on the thoughtworld of myth as
that was applied to, or freely invented, supernatural powers. But around 500
bce a change of direction towards human affairs is signalled by the pioneer-
ing work of Hecataeus, who like Thalesno mere coincidence, surelyhailed
from Miletus. Hecataeus composed and somehow published either one or two
works: Genealogies and Journey Around the World (Periodos Gs). In a pro-
grammatic preface he set out his stall:The tales (muthoi) told by the Greeks are
manyand ridiculous. Reference to the Greeks seems to imply some standard
of comparison with non-Greeks. At all events, if he had any hope of corrobo-
rating his claim to be performing a world circuit, he will have had to encoun-
ter non-Greek barbarians in the eastern Mediterranean, who in some cases
lived cheek-by-jowl, if not actually among or even together with, Greeks. One
such case was the Dorian Greek settlement of Halicarnassus in Caria, home
to the first Greek intellectual who we know for certain boasted of practising
historia:Herodotus. It can be no coincidence, either, that Herodotus did not just
report Hecataeus priority but also measured his own achievement against
and of course above: Greeks were famously agonisticthat of the Milesian.
One good way of appreciating Herodotus achievement would be to observe
that his Histories married the scientific speculation of Thales to the humanistic
rationalist rejection of myth by Hecataeus in order not merely to expound and
to celebrate, but also to understand and to explain the single most momentous
human process of his age, the Graeco-Persian Wars (see further Chapter5).
Vernants contribution to our understanding of late Archaic Greek political
thinking and practical politics is far from exhausted by his intellectual revolu-
tion concept. Hetogether with his Paris colleague Pierre Vidal-Naquetalso
applied himself to explicating the role of myth in another sixth-century cul-
tural breakthrough, the invention of tragic drama. We have already seen that
in order to foster and shore up his rule, tyrant Peisistratus had actively patron-
ised a number of national religious festivalsamong them the annual Great
or City Dionysia. Conceivably, the new genre of drama pioneered there alleg-
edly by Thespis (hence thespian) in the 530s would have evolved for purely
artistic reasons to do with the coincidental development of the combined arts
of music-making, choreography, and poesy, and would have done so with no
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The Emergence of Greek DemocracyII
other than one without the Peisistratid tyranny. Was hehad he becomea
principled believer in freedom from non-or extra-constitutional government,
or even something more positively radical and popular, even populist? Or was
he also an ambitious politico intent on regaining the sort of power an aristocrat
such as he might have felt was hisdue?
The latter, certainly, is the impression Herodotus wants to give; and presuma-
bly that was the story that his aristocratic (including Alcmaeonid) sources spun
to him. Herodotus after all was self-confessedly obliged to tell what was said,
what his sources told him, no more and no less (7.152.3); and conventional aris-
tocrats might not have wished to be reminded or to reveal to an outsider that it
was a black sheep of their own flock who had gone over to the dark, democratic
side. Anyhow, after the overthrow of the Peisistratids in 510 (by the Spartans,
to repeat), Herodotus Cleisthenes engaged in what is represented as being at
first nothing more elevated than a head-to-head struggle for honour and power
with rival aristocrat Isagorasthereby embroiling Athens in the sort of stasis
(civil strife, even civil war) that Herodotus himself deplored (8.3). Their forces
were evenly matched, indeed so much so that each felt obliged to turn for extra
support to highly unconventional sources. But whereas Isagoras looked outside
to Sparta and King Cleomenes to bolster him (and possibly also secure for him
a tyrants throne), thereby incurring the conjoined enmity of patriots and anti-
tyrants, Cleisthenes turned inwardsto the Athenian demos, a demos that in
Herodotus ambiguous words (5.66) had been formerly despised (either by all
leading political actors, or possibly just by Cleisthenes).
This demotic turn is cloaked by Herodotus (or by his aristocratic sources)
in what at first seems thoroughly conventional language. For he says that
Cleisthenes added the demos to his hetairia, in effect treating all ordinary, non-
elite Athenian citizens as if they were his hetairoian elite term for aristocratic
bosom buddies. Yet in the circumstances that language is paradoxical and met-
aphorical, for that was a truly maverick, opportunist move or manoeuvre; and,
however egalitarian, it was by no means wholly honourable. But it worked; it
did the trick. It put Cleisthenes in a position eventually to carry through the
reforms that Herodotus succinctly summarised as introducing the tribes and
the democracy for the Athenians (6.131). But did he? What did Herodotus mean
by introducing the tribes, and was it in truth democracy that Cleisthenes (also
or thereby) introduced?
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The evidence being what it is, extreme caution is in order, even when stat-
ing what Cleisthenes did, let alone why and with what effect. Lets take our
lead from Herodotus and start with those tribes, since clearly they were
somehow at the heart of the matter. Tribes translates Greek phulai, but that
should not conjure up visions of what ethnographers and social anthropolo-
gists understand by tribal societies: that is, non-western, pre-political soci-
eties lacking any elaborate mechanisms of communal decision-making and
organised socially in real or artificially constructed (classificatory) kinship
groupings. Early historical Greece was, I have argued, pre-political, in the
sense of pre-polis, and, if Homer may be relied upon, possessed phulai. But
already these early historical tribes were no longer natural, wholly kin-based
groupings; and, as for the three Dorian tribes of, say, the polis of Sparta at the
time of Tyrtaeus (c. 650 bce: see Chapter 3), the very name of one of them,
Pamphuloi or all- tribespeople, betrays its artificially made- up character.
All Ionian Greeks, such as those of Miletus or Athens, liked to imagine that
they were ultimately descended from a common male ancestor, Ion, and
most of them celebrated their common identity by annually celebrating the
Apatouria festival (as most Dorians celebrated their Dorian-ness through the
religious festival of the Carneia in honour of Apollo.) But this was not celebra-
tion of a genuine kinship, but rather of a pseudo-kinship, and there were social
groupings politically more important than the four Ionian tribes at Athens.
These were known as gene (akin to our genetic), and, however precisely these
religio-
political corporations were constituted (they too proclaimed their
pseudo-kinship basis), it seems highly likely that it was through membership
in these that Athenians gained admission to citizenship. Almost certainly, too,
they were controlled either by members of the old aristocracy or of the new,
birth or wealth aristocracy. If therefore a political reformer wished to alter the
very basis of Athenian citizenship, he would have had to dismantle or bypass
the existing tribal structure, and that, we may safely infer, is what Herodotus
meant when he stated bluntly that Cleisthenes introduced (or established) the
tribes for the Athenians.
In practice, Cleisthenesor more likely Cleisthenes and his team of expert
advisersfor all-important purposes of self-government, replaced the existing
Ionian pseudo-kinship tribes with new, locally based tribes. The new basis of
citizenship was made enrolment in a deme: confusingly, the same word demos
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The Emergence of Greek DemocracyII
as in People here meant village or ward. Eventually there were 139 or 140
demes, which were grouped into thirty trittyes (thirdings), which in turn were
distributed, ten apiece, among the three broad sub-regions into which the ter-
ritory of Attica was now divided for political including military purposes: the
city, the inland region, and the coast. Out of the thirty trittyes were formed the
ten new political tribes, by the expedient of combining one trittys from each
region, thus: 1 city + 1 inland + 1 coast trittyes = 1 tribe. Some demes grew
sufficiently urbanized to resemble mini-Athens-es, but mostlike those of
the plain of Marathonremained composed of farmlands dispersed over the
plain, which might here and there have been grouped into a small settlement
consisting of a few houses, perhaps of related families (Steinhauer 2009: 85).
There was no doubt plenty of scope for argument and disagreementover
exactly where the boundary of a deme lay, or which trittys should go with
which others to form a tribe, or (not least) to which deme a citizen should
attach himself at the initial (and thereafter hereditary, set-in-stone) allocation.
Figure4.1
Ostraca
Inscribed potsherds (ostraka in Greek), such as these examples directed at Aristides and Themistocles
in the 480s, served as ballots in the controversial democratic procedure of ostracism. Gianni Dagli
Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
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The deme engendered immense loyalty: when under duress from Spartan
invasions in and after 431 Athenian rural dwellers were forced albeit briefly to
abandon their homes and take up temporary residence in the city of Athens,
they were put out at having to abandon what was to them their own little polis
(Thuc. 2.1516). Engendering loyalty in the new and far more artificial regional
tribes was rather more difficult. In order to endow them with something
approaching a quasi-family identity, each was named after a legendary tribal
hero, to whom religious worship was paid at regular tribal gatherings. Other
expedients included organising the hoplite army by tribal regiments, recruiting
decision-making or advisory political bodies and composing boards of officials
on the basis of equality of tribal representation, and seating citizens or compet-
ing with choruses in the theatre by tribes. But there was no questioning the
radical novelty of the whole scheme as such, whichso far as our hopelessly
limited evidence allows such an inferencewas up and running within a toler-
ably short space oftime.
We should like to know a great deal more about how exactly the initial lists
of citizens were drawn up, since this was done at deme level, and for this among
many other reasons, both practical and symbolic, it was the deme that was
the ultimate basis of the entire superstructure. What bolsters the inference of
swift efficiency in implementation is the fact that, as we shall see in the next
chapter, one of the things that most forcibly struck outside observers about
post-Cleisthenic Athens was how much more militarily successful it quite sud-
denly became. Each new tribe was to elect one new-style General; and the new
annual boards of ten elective Generals thus formed were firmly in place at least
from 501 bce. Yet they somehow coexisted alongside the old-style, annual office
of War Archon: a touch of conservatism, if not political reaction, in deference
perhaps to the old guard. Indeed, right up the Battle of Marathon in 490 at
least, the latter was technically in overall command of any Athenian land army.
Each new tribe, as noted, had to contribute one regiment of hoplites to the
army; there was no significant Athenian navy until the 480s, and the Athenian
cavalry force was still, and would generally continue to be, feeble and largely
symbolic. Depending on fellow tribesmen for ones life was well calculated to
foster genuine mutuality.
Each new tribe was also required to provide one-tenth of the members of a
brand-new Council. The very existence of an earlier, Solonian Council (of Four
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The Emergence of Greek DemocracyII
Hundred) is in dispute, let alone what its powers and responsibilities might
have been. The Cleisthenic Council of 500 was unambiguously slated from the
word go to be the steering committee of the newly re-empowered Assembly,
the Ecclesia, in order to help it perform its primary function, which was to take
final decisions on policy. The Ecclesia was so called because its constituents
on any one occasion of its meeting were called out, summoned by a trum-
peter or herald or some other means to a designated meeting place. Under
the Solonian dispensation that place of meeting had been the Agora, but from
508/7 onwards it became the nearby hill lying in the shadow of the Acropolis
and known as the Pnyx (from a Greek word meaning squeeze tight together).
Athenians attending an Assembly meeting here squeezed together by sitting or
squatting down, each citizen occupying on average roughly half a square metre.
It is estimated that in 508/7 and indeed until well into the fourth century no
more than 6,000 Athenians could be accommodated reasonably comfortably
in the space available. But that number was judged to be a sufficiently repre-
sentativeboth quantitatively and quantitatively speakingproportion of the
entire citizen body; that, if we may believe Herodotus (5.97) probably over-
generous round figure estimate, was of the order of 30,000 in 500 bce, when
Aristagoras tyrant of Miletus came to make his plea for military aid.
We shall return shortly (Chapter 5) to the nature of his business. To wrap
up our account of the Cleisthenic package, we must discuss a number of legal
matters that vitally affected the status and behaviour of citizens under the new
democratic dispensation. For, in accordance with Aristotles democracy-lean-
ing definition (Politics 1275), the citizen was he who was entitled to an actively
participatory share in both office-holding and in the passing of legal judgments;
and all the new Athenian citizenssome of whom were of foreign birth, oth-
ers freed ex-slaveswere formally entitled to a participatory share in both. On
socio-economic grounds, however, we may safely imagine that only relatively
few would have been in a position, let alone keen, to put themselves forward
for election to the Archonship, the Generalship, or any of the major financial
offices such as Treasurers of Athena. Indeed, specific legal restrictions on eligi-
bility remained in place until well into the fifth century. On the jurisdictional
side, too, Cleisthenes had left untouched the existence and privileges of the
old aristocratic council of the Areopagus, not least that of the impeachment
of officials for high crimes and misdemeanours, thereby leaving unresolved an
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issue that was to move to centre stage four decades later (Chapter 5). But he
had also left alone the Solonian Heliaea appeal court, so that it was presumably
through this key popular institution that ordinary Athenians could activate
their privilege of legal judgment by means of the casting and counting of their
equal votes.
Such judicial votes were delivered secretly. Originally, perhaps, this was done
using a pebble, psephos, whence by transference psephos came to mean a vote
(and hence too our psephology). But in the fifth century the medium in use
was no longer of stone but bronzeto which we shall return in connection
with the next major revamp of the exercise of power (kratos) by the Athenian
demos. Votes in the Ecclesia, however, were open, and delivered by show of
righthands, hence the name kheirotonia, extension of hands; normally too
they were told or guesstimated rather than individually counted, both for rea-
sons of time-saving and because normally opinions would not be all that closely
divided. Nevertheless, each public vote did potentially risk division in the sense
of divisiveness, and even, at worst, stasiscivil dissension or outright civil con-
flict. That was also an essential consideration in the matter of one final, highly
controversial legal measure attributed to Cleisthenes:ostracism (ostrakismos).
The very procedure was remarkable enough in itself, although its precise
details are not entirely agreed among our sources, all of whom were writing
very much later than the period in which ostracism was actually put into oper-
ation (intermittently between 488 and 416). At a stated moment in each civil
year the Assembly was asked whether it wished to conduct an ostracism. If
the vote were positive, plans were made for the voting to take place on a given
day later in that same civil year, thereby allowing for a possible cooling-off
(or perhaps hotting up) of the feelings that had led to the initial positive vote.
Votes were cast in the shape of ostraka, potsherds, inscribed (either scratched
or painted) with the name of the one citizen whom the voter wished to see for-
mally exiled from Athens and Attica for a period of ten years; though he would
not be deprived of his citizen status or his ownership of property, but rather of
the physical possibility of exercising his citizenship or managing his property
in person for the duration of his exile. (If, proverbially, a week is a long time
in politics, ten years must count as an eternity.) On the appointed day, voters
would rock up in the Agora and present to an official teller their inscribed bal-
lot, whether it was they who had actually inscribed it or not.
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For some voters were of course illiterate; this gave rise, inevitably, to the fable
of a peasant countryman unfamiliar with city politics who innocently and igno-
rantly asked the famous Aristides to write Aristides on a potsherd. But why
him? asked the famously just Aristidesbecause Im sick of hearing him called
the just, replied the mindless ignoramus. Others took the opportunity to spoil
their ballot by voting to ostracize, for example, starvation, and yet others
not only literate but wittyenhanced theirs by adding a little message such as
Aristides, Datis brother (an accusation of medism, being soft on the Persians,
which was literally correct for once, since Datis was in fact a Mede not a Persian)
or May Kimon go awayand take Elpinike with him! (a none-too-subtle
implication of incest between this brother and sister). For the ostracism proce-
dure to be valid, there had either to be a minimum of 6,000 votes cast against
any one candidate, ormuch more likelythere had to be a minimum of
6,000 proper ostraka cast in all, and the winnerthat is the loserwas he
against whom the plurality of those 6,000-plus valid votes was directed.
Whatever might be said about the equity of this procedureAristotle for
one ranted against its monstrous injustice, though he was not an Athenian
citizen, and in his day it was a dead letterit was certainly, formally speaking,
thoroughly democratic in the later accepted strong sense of that term:that is, it
involved the demos passing judgment collectively and on an exactly equal basis
on its would-be leaders and advisers (whether they were holding any office at
the time or not). Socially, it carries the further, highly interesting implication
that at least a good percentage of those 6,000 minimum voters would be liter-
ate, or literate enough; that is, even though they might not be able to write a
name themselves, they might reasonably be expected to be able to recognise the
letters written or painted (the Greek for to write could also mean to paint) for
them on a potsherd. Alphabetic literacy of the ancient Greek type was not in
itself necessarily democratic (cf. Chapter2), but it was entirely compatible with
being given a specifically democratic expression, as here. However, the proce-
dure was also open to non-or even anti-democratic abuse, in one of two main
ways. Acache of 190 ostraka has been excavated in the Athenian Agora, each
one bearing the name Themistokles and written in only a small numbernot
190of different hands. This looks very much like a set of ostraka pre-prepared
by his opponents for distribution to willing or gullible voters on the day, as part
of an orchestrated campaign to fix the vote. Whether they were actually used
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or not, Themistocles was indeed ostracisedbut not until the end of the 470s,
whereas this cache had been designed for use in the 480s, when Themistocles
had survived a whole series of ostracisms prompted or at least overshadowed
by the burning issue of how Athens should respond to the post-Marathon
Persian threat.
The ostracism procedure as such also survived that 480s series, even though
it had led to very serious inconvenience: some of Athens likeliest military
commanders were actually in ostracised exile when the Persians under Xerxes
did arrive, in massive military force, in 480. Sensibly, the Assembly of the
Athenians voted to override these earlier judgements and recalled them all,
not least Aristideswho on the strength of his achievements in 480 and 479
was to go on to play a leading role in post-Persian War Athenian policymaking.
However, in 416 political chicanery over the conduct of one ostracism did not
just have catastrophic consequences in the immediate term but effectively put
an end for good to the institutions practical application. The leading candidates
of the day were the more conservative Nicias and the more adventurous (and
self-regarding) Alcibiades; the issue was not only or primarily personal but
rather the future conduct of a war against Sparta and the Peloponnesians that
technically, legally, was in suspension. (A peace agreement had been sworn in
421, which indeed bore the very name of Nicias, its principal Athenian negotia-
tor and advocate; but Alcibiades was bidding to renew the fighting by reopen-
ing the western, Sicilian theatre.) Yet the plurality of ostraka was cast against
a third, far less significant but still prominent figure, Hyperbolus. The follow-
ing year the decision was taken by the Assembly to mount a simply massive
expedition to Sicily, which ended in total failure at a stupendous cost in lives,
equipment, and communal morale. A chastened demos never again actually
voted to hold an ostrakophoria, although not even the cautious revision of the
statute books undertaken between 410 and 399 (Chapter 9) formally revoked
and expunged the procedure.
That was no doubt due to an exaggeratedly conservative reverence for what
was called optimistically the ancestral constitution or constitution of the
fathers. One of the potential fathers was Cleisthenes, and, according to the
Ath. Pol. (22) and other more reliable sources, it was Cleisthenes who had intro-
duced ostracism. That would fit well with the general pro-democratic tenor of
his reforms, since at this time it would have been the one quasi-legal means
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demos in the Assembly. Josiah Ober inferred from Herodotus account the occur-
rence of some sort of popular uprising, which he saw as directed chiefly against
outside Spartan intervention and its aim of re-imposing a foreign-backed tyr-
anny; of this already populist, anti-tyrannical uprising, he argued, Cleisthenes
and his immediate supporters seized brilliant advantage to push through their
well-considered reforms. This to me assumes a rather too high level of develop-
ment of popular political consciousness, although it undoubtedly did not harm
Cleisthenes cause that he could appeal to patriotic sentiment in his support.
The French scholars Pierre Lvque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet contrived to write
a whole book around the reform of Cleisthenes, in which they laid particular
stress on what they took to be its theoretical underpinnings in terms of spatial
organization, and especially its application of a version of decimalization. For
Gregory Anderson, however, Cleisthenes was an opportunist, though less per-
sonally/familially motivated than Lewis and his chief achievement was some-
how to persuade (or fool?) ordinary Athenians into believing that his reforms
were less innovatory than restorationist, taking Athens back to a good old pre-
tyrannical golden age, while at the same time through them he was construct-
ing an imagined political community of solidarity and equality for an actually
heterogeneous and newly empowered demos.
The scholarly tendency according to which Cleisthenes reforms did not
usher in democracy properly so called, but rather something on the cusp of it,
is brilliantly represented by Kurt Raaflaub. For him, it is not merely accidental
or coincidental that the term demokratia is not attested until (probably) the
420s, although it may have been in existence a couple of decades earlier. This
is because in his view it was not until after the further reforms proposed in the
late 460s by Ephialtes, with Pericles as his junior adjutant, that Athens actually
achieved a system of governance that could rightly be so labelled. Against that
tendency, however, it can be argued both that there are positive indications
that the term demokratia had already been coined before Ephialtes made his
proposals (the personal name Demokrates from the 470s, a poetic periphrasis
of Aeschylus in his Suppliant Women tragedy, datable plausibly to 463), and that
what those Ephialtic reforms did was institute a fuller, more developed, more
demotic democracy than the democracy whichas even Herodotus (6.131) had
had to concedeCleisthenes introduced for the Athenians.
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5.
The Emergence ofGreek
DemocracyIII
Athens 507451/0
A number of key events between 508/7 and the next major bout of
reforms of 462/1 can be pointed to as reinforcing or enhancing, though
not always straightforwardly, the democratic thrust of the Cleisthenic pack-
age deal. To begin with, it seems that the Assembly got very wrong Athens
diplomatic relations with the Persian empire. Its former tyrant Hippias had fled
to Lampsacus, a place of safety within the Persian imperial ambit, and Persia
liked to operate control of its far Western Asiatic, Greek-speaking possessions
through a small handful of pro-Persian local Greek tyrants, such as the tyrant of
Lampsacus. Yet in 507 so anxious were the Athenians about a renewed Spartan
intervention, and so desperate for outside support, that envoys of theirs actu-
ally gave over the token earth and water that symbolised submission to Persia
in return, presumably, for a promise of Persian financial aid. That mistake, if
that is what it was, was at once overridden by the Assembly, one of the first
decisions that the new democratic Assembly steered by the new Council of 500
had to make. Viewed unsympathetically by a non-or anti-democratic observer,
however, this episode of trial and error could easily be seen as illustrating the
stereotypical fickleness of the ignorant, stupid, and feckless masses. That at any
rate was exactly how another major foreign policy decision of the Assembly
taken towards Persia half a dozen years later was viewed by Herodotus, as we
shallsee.
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But if the early Assembly did not cover itself with glory, the early post-
Cleisthenic army did, twice over. In 506, at the particularly insistent urging of
that same King Cleomenes Iwho had got himself into such a tangle at Athens
in 508, a large Spartan/Peloponnesian expedition was mounted against Athens.
With what objective? Surely it can have been none other than politically moti-
vated, to overthrow the Cleisthenic regime; a century or so later Thucydides
(1.19) could generalise from a wealth of past evidence that the Spartans in their
foreign policy always supported oligarchiesmeaning not only existing oli-
garchies but also ones that they helped to impose by force. (The one gigantic
exception to that rule occurred at Athens in 403, after the end of the war that
Thucydides had set himself to narrate and explain.)
In practice, the expedition got no further than the western borders of
Attica before it broke up in high dudgeon and amid fatal dissensions both
between Sparta and one of its major allies, and between the two Spartan
kings. Emboldened by that failure, the Athenians struck two further blows
against hostile neighboursChalcis on the adjoining island of Euboea, and
the Boeotian federal state led by Thebes. The Athenians themselves naturally
enough made a great song and dance of these unaccustomed hoplite victo-
ries; less predictable was the paean of praise they provoked in the by no means
always eulogistic Herodotus. For to him they demonstrated the ineffable supe-
riority, at least for military purposes, of what he called exact equality of free
public speech (isegoria, echoing isonomia, isokratia). Herodotus took that to
connote also metaphorically a twofold freedom: freedom from tyranny and
freedom to fight for themselves, for their own freely chosen ideals, rather than
under external compulsion. He clearly, if anachronistically, had in mind also
the comparable energising spirit that the democratic Athenians would show a
decade and a half lateron the battlefield of Marathon in 490, if not also on
the sea at Salamis in480.
Offshore to the east of Attica ran the very large island of Euboea, and to its
south lay the tiny islet of Salamis. The Athenians now sent out settlers to both,
but whereas those who became Euboean effectively surrendered their Athenian
citizen privileges, those who went to live on Salamis were incorporated within
the deme system, as Salaminioi. Relatively small in scale, these early population
exports anticipated the far larger wave of Aegean-world Athenian emigration
that was to mark the middle decades of the fifth century. As yet, it is highly
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The Emergence of Greek DemocracyIII
unlikely that many, if indeed any, Athenians could seriously have entertained
imperial ambitions, though the more farsighted of them might already have
been concerned to secure extra supplies of grain, in the form of bread wheat,
from the northern shore of the Black Sea (Ukraine and south Russia today).
Nonetheless, that did not stop a majority from deciding in 500 to respond posi-
tively to a request from Aristagoras, the then tyrant of Miletus, for military aid,
including manpower, in support of those Greeks of Asia who wished to revolt
from the Persian Empire.
Herodotuswith the benefit of hindsight, laced perhaps by some anti-Ionian
prejudicepoured withering scorn on this benighted decision:the beginning
of many evils as he saw it not just for the Asiatic Greeks but for all Hellasthe
Greek worldmore generally. One can see what he meant. Aristagoras was an
unstable and unreliable figure, and what is usually if misleadingly referred to
as the Ionian Revolt of 499494 bce did turn out in the end to be an abject
failure. But the Athenians, notwithstanding their grief at the Persians destruc-
tion of Miletus in 494, did not suffer any direct material loss from that catastro-
phe and in 493 felt bold enough to lend support to a different kind of uprising
much nearer to home, a proto-democratic putsch on the neighbouring island of
Aegina. That too, however, was a failure, more significant for its intent and ambi-
tion than for its outcome. As for the Persians, after imposing a new imperial
settlement in the West of their empire that affected the non-Greeks of Cyprus
as well as the Greeks of Cyprus and Asia Minor, they set their minds to gaining
control of much of the Aegean and to devastating Eretria on Euboea (which had
also sent aid to fellow Greeks of Asia in 499)before punishing Athens.
Eretria was destroyed, and its surviving population enslaved and transported
far to the east, but against the Athenians and their sole allies from Boeotian
Plataea the expedition came famously to grief on the plain of Marathon in
eastern Atticaa further triumphant corroboration of hoplite democracy.
Herodotus reports that of the 9,000 Athenians a mere 192 (precisely) lost their
lives, as against the rounded figure of 6,400 on the Persian side; he gives no
figures for the Plataeans, whose very participation indeed tended to be sup-
pressed at least by Athenian sources. Those 192 were permitted to be buried on
the battlefield, an unusual honour, and were thereafter officially celebrated as
heroesthat is, were paid the religious worship accorded to mortal men whose
feats entitled them to more than merely human post-mortem veneration.
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Figure5.1
Persepolis tributerelief
Persepolis (in Persian Parsa), in southern Iran today, was the chief ceremonial capital of the
Achaemenid Persian Empire. The monumental entrance stairway to the Apadana (audience chamber)
represented visually the Persians imperial reach through ethnically differentiated images of tribute-
bearing subjects. pbk, Berlin/ Art Resource, NY
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The Emergence of Greek DemocracyIII
Persian-dominated region. Miltiades was found guilty, and fined hugely, a debt
his son Cimon discharged manfully following his fathers painfuldeath.
There followed the first completed ostracism in 487of a relative of the
tyrant family whose senior member, Hippias, was in Persian exile. In 488 or
487 too the Archonship, the top annual executive office after the Generalship,
was significantly made sortitive (filled partly by lot), and thus opened up to less
notable Athenians than before. Further ostracisms followed, as Athens found
itself at war with neighbouring Aegina while simultaneously having to decide
on its policy towards Persiaa choice between sullen defeatism and outright
opposition. In 483/2 the die was cast: the Athenian Assembly was persuaded
by Themistocles, ostracism survivor and rampant democratic champion, to
vote to spend a huge windfall from the state-owned silver mines not on a mass
handout but on building an entire new fleet of triremesostensibly for imme-
diate use against Aegina, but the exceptionally far-sighted Themistocles had a
greater object in his longer-term sights. These three-banked oared warships
were a kind of maritime guided missile (see Chapter 8, Figure 8.2). But they
also bore important political and class implications: each was powered by 170
economically unprivileged citizen-sailors, who had to be somehow trained,
fed, and materially rewarded or compensated. By 480, when the time came,
the brand-new Athenian fleet was sufficiently large and efficient to contem-
plate taking on the mighty Persian navy (of mainly Phoenician and Greek
warships).
In that year Darius son and successor Xerxes finally, after some four years
of preparation, personally launched his amphibious attack from western Asia
Minor by way of the Hellespont. The land army suffered a serious hold-up and
losses at Thermopylae, thanks chiefly to the Spartans (who were the overall
leaders of such allied Greek resistance as could be mounted), but ploughed
on relentlessly to Athens, which it unceremoniously sacked, not excluding the
sanctuaries of the gods and heroes in the Agora and on the Acropolis. Things
went very differently at sea. Afirst inconclusive engagement was fought off the
island of Euboea, at Artemisium, in which the Persians again suffered serious
losses. But off Salamis, in a narrow strait into which Xerxes had rashly been
lured, the Greek allies led by Athens won a famous victory, equal in military
significance to that at Marathon. But the political implications of the two for
Athens were significantly different. Salamis marked the tipping point in the
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composition of the citys armed forces from being an essentially amateur force
of moderately rich farmer-hoplites to being predominantly a semi-professional
fleet of sailors drawn from the swelling ranks of the Athenian poor. The title of
the Athenian chief executive office remained General, but in practice Generals
on active service were more often admirals of the fleet, none more so than
Cimon. From the winter of 478/7 on, the Athenians through the offensive
defensive alliance they formed on the sacred island of Delos (hence the entirely
modern term Delian League) pursued three objectives:those of liberating any
remaining Greeks still under Persian subjection, taking revenge and repara-
tions for Persian sacrilege and material damage, and trying to ensure the per-
manent freedom of all Greeks from the tentacles of the admittedly still very
dangerous and threatening Persian Empire. The success the pursuit of them
brought corroborated the growing equation of demos with the navy and
probably by 470the coinage of the very term demokratia in the sense of the
rule of the poor masses.
Culture, moreover, reinforced politics, as it had done under tyrant
Peisistratus, but now in a democratic, explicitly anti-tyrannical way. I have
mentioned already the official cult of the so-called Tyrannicides:Harmodius
and Aristogeiton were unquestionably the first purely human beings (as dis-
tinct from the ten Eponymous tribal Heroes) to be accorded the accolade of
having statues representing them erected at public expense in the Agoraand
indeed they were the last to be so honoured for over a century. So keenly did
the Athenians resent the theft of the original pair by Persian king Xerxes in 480
that one of their first official acts after the Persian threat had been beaten back
was to commission in 477 a handsome, bronze replacement. It is the latter that
gave rise to copies of varying size and in various media of this literally iconic
duo (Figure 5.2). No less germane to the growth of democracy than these static
visual representations of its adopted founding heroes were the dramatic repre-
sentations staged from about 500 in the newly built Theatre of Dionysus; from
486 on these included comedies in addition to the tragedies and satyr dramas.
Aeschylus extant tragedy Persians of 472, one of a group financed by
Pericles (performing an official liturgy as chorgos), is the standout produc-
tion. Exceptionally, its scenario was drawn from the near present, the Battle of
Salamis and its aftermath at the Persian capital of Susa; normally, tragedians
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Figure5.2
Athenian Tyrannicides:Roman copies in marble of bronze originals
Harmodius and Aristogeiton (d. c. 513 bce) were not in fact tyrannicides, since they killed the tyrant
Hippias younger brother not the tyrant himself, nor were they democrats, but they were transformed
into icons of liberty and democracy and were the first humans to have named statues (of bronze)
erected in their honour in the Athenian Agora. Album / Art Resource, N
drew their material from myth and legend, and not necessarily Athenian myth
and legend, of yore. Conventions were honoured by not actually mentioning
Themistocles, the prime architect of the Salamis victory, by name. But no one
in the audience would have been in any doubt that one of the plays surely
intended political effects was to associate Themistocles with the freedom
and democracy that that victory had assured. Xerxes, in polar contrast, was
depicted as the oriental autocrat from central casting, and his Persian courtiers
as the very type of effeminate, servile, barbarian subjects, not manly, free, self-
governing citizens. Special emphasis was placed on the fact that Xerxes was
not subject to auditthat is, not accountable to his people in the way that all
Athenian officials, even the highest and mightiest, were accountable, through
the Council, to the Athenian People. Whatever the Athenian audience made of
this hymn to democracy and civic-republican freedom, however, it did not save
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Figure5.3
Pericles
Pericles (c. 493429 bce) was born into the highest Athenian aristocracy, but threw in his lot with the
common Athenian citizen and championed democracy during a long and mostly successful career both
on and off the battlefield. Album / Art Resource, N
Themistocles from being ostracised, probably in 471 or 470. For him by then,
and for some time previously, it was not Persia that was Athens bogeyman, but
rather Sparta. When he embarked on his obligatory ten-year exile, he chose,
with heavy symbolism, to spend it initially in Argos, perennial Peloponnesian
rival and enemy of Sparta.
I spoke just now of the Persians as a hymn to democracy, but that word was
not, and probably could not comfortably have been, actually used in the play.
Even if already coined by then, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb, being
far too glaringly modernist in tone. But Aeschylus was in his way glaringly
modernist, and less than a decade later, probably in 463, he produced another
of his extant plays, the Suppliant Women, in which the issue of how a monarch
should properly rule was placed centre stage. The monarch in question this
time was Greek, not Persian, and a ruler from way back in mythical time, but
the city he ruled was Argos, which was a bit of a hint, and the manner in which
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But in 487, soon after Marathon, as noted, the Archonship had been thrown
open to the lot (no longer filled solely by election), and from 457 eligibility for
the office was opened to the hoplite status group of citizens and thus ceased to
be the exclusive preserve of the old Eupatrid families or even of the Athenian
plutocracy. What, then, was Ephialtes beef? It seems that, negatively speak-
ing, he had three main quarrels with the status quo: first, that major political
trials (impeachment, for instance) were in its power, at least as a court of first
instance, although there is also evidence that impeachment trials were held
in the Assembly; second, and more vaguely, that it was the Areopagus that
still was the ultimate source of legality in the Athenian polis by virtue (or as
he saw it, vice) of its guardianship of the laws, possibly including under that
title the supervision and audit of officials, although the evidence here is not
only as usual much later but also likely tainted by anachronism; and, third, he
seems to have accused either individual members or the body as such of being
corrupt.
To put that more bluntly and pragmatically: the Areopagus, while acting
ostensibly on principle as a supreme court, might reasonably have been thought
to be operating in practice in a disproportionately anti-democratic sense, con-
victing democratic leaders and Generals or acquitting non-or less democratic
leaders and Generals. In any case, what Ephialtes formally claimed to be doing
was stripping the Areopagus only of its acquired or additional powersthe
implication being that these powers were somehow not authorised by either
the Solonian or the Cleisthenic dispensation; and reducing it to a court with
still important but far more restricted and primarily religious responsibilities
(unintentional homicide, for instance, or tampering with sacred olive trees
belonging to the community).
The positive side of the Ephialtic reforms is by far the more important.
Suchlegal powers as were lost by the Areopagus were transferred to the Heliaea
founded by Solon, now re-empowered and also known as the Dikasteria or
(Peoples) jury courts. These were courts of first instance, not only of appeal,
presided over in a purely supervisory sense by one or other of the Board of nine
Archons, and staffed by jurors who were also judges. Court sessions were held
on between 150 and 200days each year, and the jurors assignedby lotto
any one court were drawn from the annual panel of 6,000 citizens who had
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put their names forward and also been selected by lot. Thanks to a proposal
of Pericles in the 450sand this is his one indisputable contribution to the
new Ephialtic dispensationall such judge-jurors were paid a small per diem
for performing judge-and-jury service. Jurors tended on average to be on the
poorer and older side and could be satirised by Aristophanes in 422 (the Wasps)
as being venomously keen to bring in a guilty verdict, especially in cases where
the penalty involved afine.
Public pay was possibly also introduced around this same time as compen-
sation for the exercise of certain military functions and for the holding of cer-
tain officesfor instance, membership of the Council of 500. Such political
pay became for democrats a badge of honour as well as a practical necesssity
for many poorer citizens. It was seen as due recognition of the kratos of the
demos, almost what their kratos was for, and democratic citizens were proud
to be buried with their bronze jurors token. Contrariwise, for their oligarchic
opponents the dispensing of public political pay was a badge of shame, a black
mark of the greed and laziness of the feckless masses that also enabled them to
exercise kratos over them, the natural rulers, and so a stigma to be removed at
the earliest feasible opportunity (which did not arise until411).
We have met Pericles three times already as son of an Alcmaeonid
mother related to Cleisthenes and of the Xanthippus who had tangled publicly
with Miltiades after Marathon (then been ostracised but recalled to co-lead
the united Greek naval effort against the Persians in 479); as impresario for
Aeschylus in 472; and as supporter of Ephialtes in 462/1 and, after the latters
death, guardian and consolidator of the thrust of his reforms in the 450s. Since
he later became so famous, or notorious, thanks not least to the comic poets
and to the historian Thucydides, it is salutary to reflect that in the 450s, when
he was still only in his late thirties and early forties, Pericles was a politician on
the make, a honey-voiced and silver-tongued demagogue as well asor rather
thana statesmanlike demagogos. That, Isuggest, is the true context and spirit
in which to try to understand the most radical measure of his entire thirty-year
career:the Citizenship Law of451.
According to the Cleisthenic citizenship reform of 508/7, henceforth only
those could be enrolled and inscribed as citizens who, being adult (eighteen-
plus), freeborn and legitimate, had a citizen for a father. The latter, normally,
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would then be responsible for seeing that his acknowledged son or sons
were duly inscribed on the register of their ancestral deme. According to the
Periclean citizenship law of 451/0, however, it was no longer enough to have a
citizen father in order to qualify for becoming an Athenian citizen:one must
also have a citizen mother, and (probably) those two citizen natural parents had
also to be legally married to each other at the time of the birth. What were the
motives and aims of this new double-descent rule? The ancient sourcesnone
Figure5.4
Erechtheis tribe casualty list, 459bce
Athenians, who engaged in war on average some two years in every three during the fifth and fourth
centuries, made a fetish of commemorating their war dead, both in spoken words and in permanent
memorials on stone; here, starting with two elected Generals, are listed the dead from a single one
of Athens ten tribes, Erechtheis, in a single campaigning year (459) on Cyprus and in Egypt and
Phoenicia as well as at three sites in Greece itself. RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY
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been enhanced, with all the social implications this would carry for the multi-
ple social, political, religious, economic, and military functions of this micro-
cosm of the overall political universe. That is to say, more precisely, for each
demes specifically democratic functions:for whatever else may be said of the
Ephialtic-Periclean reforms, one thing about them is tolerably clear. They mid-
wifed a new, improved demokratia at Athens, in name now as well as in fact, at
once a kratos of the demos and of thedemes.
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6.
Greek Democratic Theory?
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Greek Democratic Theory?
to Xenophon (Ath. Pol., c.425?; see further below). But regardless of whether
Herodotus Histories appeared the earlier or not, his work is certainly the first to
preserve an example of Greek political theoryas opposed to political think-
ing or mere ideological prejudice. This comes in the remarkable form of the
so-called Persian Debate in the third book (3.8082), based as that debate is
on the theoretical intuition that all governmental systems may be assigned to
one or other of only three, jointly exhaustive categories or genera:rule by one,
rule by some, or rule by all. It thus brilliantly exemplifies one leading charac-
teristic of all Greek theoretical thought, no matter what its sphere of applica-
tion:its genius for significant analytical generalization from multiple empirical
instances. Somewhat paradoxically, at first sight, the word demokratia is not
actually used here, even by the one speaker of the three noble Persians whoas
Herodotus himself later makes plainwas actually advocating a version of it.
But a very good explanation of that absence or avoidance can be offered.
To put the debate in broad context: all ancient Greek historians from
Herodotus onwards included speeches in their works, for a variety of reasons
and with a variety of effects or purposes in view. Thucydides, however, was
exceptional for reflecting most explicitly and analytically upon the manner and
matter of his speeches from the point of view of accuracy and authenticity. But
even he could not have aimed to re-present anything resembling very closely
the actual words of the original speakers. A fortiori, Herodotus, who took a
relatively simple or even simplistic approach to the matter, mostly composed
speeches like those of his ultimate model, Homer. They were lively and dra-
matic, a good way to catch or maintain the attention of a primarily listening
audience and to highlight key moments of decision, but only secondarily were
they used to characterise the speakers or to explain the historical situation in
anydepth.
The one glaring exception to that rule, however, is precisely the Persian
Debate. Its putative authenticity (including to some extent its content) mat-
tered so greatly to Herodotus that he took the trouble later (6.43) to defend
it specifically as regards the speech that concerns us most here, the one that
he put in the mouth of Persian noble Otanes. The debates more or less imag-
ined and imaginary scenario is briefly as follows. We are in c. 522 bce, and
the Achaemenid Persian throne has been usurped and occupied by a pre-
tender, whom seven noble Persians are conspiring to overthrow. But with what
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Athenian demos does know how to further its own best interests, as it sees
themthat is, in largely materialistic terms; and he does not blame them for
doing that, since that is just exactly what one would expect of such morally
and socially low-class types. The people whom the author does blame are
thoseand he may have had Pericles specifically in mindwho step out of
and turn against their own social class to back the political interests of another,
opposedclass.
For a truly philosophical attack on the very foundations of the democratic
edifice we have to turn elsewhere, to Plato. Besides his Protagoras, he was also
the author of the Gorgias of c.380, another dialogue named for one of the most
distinguished and influential of the ancient Sophists. Gorgias hailed from
Leontinoi in eastern Sicily, visited Athens as his citys official ambassador in
427 (just about exactly the time of Platos birth), and allegedly mesmerised the
Assembly with his mazy rhetoric. That alone would have been enough to raise
Platos philosophical hackles, since he was committed on principle to coun-
tering such merely specious rhetoric with true philosophical knowledge and
understanding. And it is in the Gorgias that Plato constructs a dialogue of the
deaf between Socrates the all-wise master of the true art of politics and one
Callicles (probably a composite imagined portrait rather than a real Athenian
politician), who is targeted as a representative of the dreaded breed of Athenian
demagogues (Chapter7):politicians as bogeymen, a species conjured up long
since by Aristophanes and Thucydides. Rather than improving the masses,
Socrates avers, even the most respected of former Athenian political leaders
(such as Themistocles) did no more than titillate and pander to the base sen-
sual appetites of their mass audiencesin that, they were no better than pastry
chefs, really.
Plato, however, for all his dislike of meretricious Sophists, disliked the demos
and democrats even more. It is in his very long work of the 370s titled in Greek
either Politeia or On Justice, but which we call after its Latin title the Republic,
that he gives fullest rein to this profound antipathy. It is not irrrelevant that the
dialogue is set in the most democratic of all Athenian districts, the port city
of Peiraeus, in the house, not of an Athenian citizen, but of a rich metic, the
father of the pro-democratic speechwriter Lysias. At the most elevated, philo-
sophical level all existing political systemsnot just democracieswere for
Plato radically and incurably defective, since the ruling element in all of them
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Greek Democratic Theory?
did not have access to the only kind of truth on which good government could
properly be based. Hence his paradoxical claimplaced once again in the
mouth of his Socratesthat only if Platonic-style philosophers came to power
in the Greek cities of the day or existing rulers became Platonic-style philos-
ophers would they cease from their present ills and enjoy good governance
(Rep. 473d). But quite apart from this paradigmatic but practically unattain-
able governing ideal, when Plato was dealing apparently with the real political
world he envisaged a hierarchy of existing regimes, all in a state of more or
less degradation or degeneracy by comparison with the perfection of the ideal
state; and democracy festered at the very bottom of the Platonic heap (Rep.
555b562a). Indeed, in states that were ruled democratically, Socrates ventures,
even the donkeys would assume airsdonkeys not being considered then any
more than now the very apogee of sensitivity and intelligence. The ideal state
of the Republic, given the non-specific speaking name of Fair, Fine or Beautiful
City (Callipolis), may have been intended as just a thought experiment, a castle
in the air. But the much more tangible and fungible ideal city contemplated in
Platos final and long meditated work, the Laws, was given both a name and a
reasonably precise location in space: Magnesia on the island of Crete. It was
also equipped with a very carefully drawn code of laws and regulationsso
codified as to rule out definitively in advance anything even remotely resem-
bling people-power for the precisely 5,040 citizens of the brand-new founda-
tion. Here, Platos final political-theoretical thoughts seem to have tended in a
strongly theological, not to say theocratic direction; the very opposite of the
place accorded the gods in the real democratic Athens within which Plato had
been raised and spent his entire very long life (see further Chapter 10).
It may be thought that Platos was a classically academic rant against a form
of self-government that systematically favoured the less intelligent (lumped
together in a standard assimilation with the poor) over elite intellectuals such
as he. But there were other theoretical or more properly intellectual arguments
(as opposed to mere snobbery or prejudice) that could be and were mounted
against democracy. One of them held, in a sort of anticipation of George
Orwells some animals are more equal than others (Animal Farm, 1945), that
some citizens are as it were more equal than others. The alleged theoretical jus-
tification for this formally paradoxical claim was the assertion that equality was
not all one single thing, but there were two kinds of equality:arithmetic and
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geometric. Under the former, comparatively crude equation all citizens were
deemed not just to count as but to be exactly, mathematically equal. That was
the democrats kind of equality. The more subtle version saw equality rather as
a matter of proportion: somefewcitizens simply were superior (in birth,
intellect, education, physical attributes, and so on) to the rest, and it was there-
fore only fair, right, and just that they be given a larger share of respect and ulti-
mately power than the majority. That was the oligarchs equality. Compromise,
or even dialogue, between adherents of the two kinds was not really possible
or indeed envisaged by the proponents of the two kinds view, the very pur-
pose of which was precisely to sabotage the strictly egalitarian notion of citizen
equality that had underlain the polis from its inception but which had now in
their jaundiced eyes been enlarged unacceptably to empower the humble poor
masses at their own expense.
The other main anti-democratic argumentative tack was to claim that democ-
racy of the Athenian type, though called demokratia, was not really democracy
at all, but rather a disguised form of tyranny: the collective and constitutional
tyranny of the masses over the elite few, not the older form of extra-constitu-
tional, one-man autocracy as exercised by say Peisistratus. A very neat example
of this variant of anti-democratic propaganda happens to survive in a collection
of musings put together by Platos contemporary Xenophon, which purports to
be the memorable thoughts and sayings of the authors (and of course Platos)
mentor Socrates, and is known usually under its Latin title of Memorabilia. In
the passage in question a cardboard cut-out Pericles in his pomp is imagined as
being in dialogue with and twitted by the much younger Alcibiades (in reality,
Pericles ward) on the meaning and function of law (nomos) in a democracy.
Unwisely, Pericles concedes to Alcibiades that anything that a ruling power
enacts may legitimately be called a nomos. What, ejaculates Alcibiades, even
when it is a tyrant who enacts measures contrary to the wishes of the subjects?
Yes, says Pericles. SoAlcibiades presses home his advantagewhen a democ-
racy (meaning the dictatorship of the proletariat), acting like a tyrant, enacts
measures contrary to the wishes of the elite few, that too is nomos? Yes, says
Periclesbut stop bothering me with these footling debating tricks that I used
to be very smart at myself, when I was your age. Ah, concludes Alcibiades, I
wish Id known you then, Pericles, when you were in your prime
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Greek Democratic Theory?
As with Herodotus Persian Debate, this dialogue may well not be Xenophons
own original composition. Pericles had died in 429, Alcibiades in 404, and
their peculiar salience as characters in a debate about democracy was probably
exhausted well before Xenophon published the Memorabilia some time in the
second quarter of the fourth century. But the issue had even then lost none of
its theoretical salience for thinkers like Xenophon and his older Athenian con-
temporaries Plato and Isocrates; the more they were impotent to do anything
practically to revise, letalone abolishwhat democrats called destroythe all
too solidly established Athenian democracy of their day, the more they resorted
to imaginary anti-democratic utopias of evasion and criticism.
More profitable by far was the line taken by Platos star student Aristotle and,
under his guidance, his schools pupils. In Chapter1 Iargue that by combining
the evidence of Aristotles Politics with that contained in the Aristotelian (but
not Aristotles) Ath. Pol., one might obtain quite a full picture of democratic
politics at Athens at least in the third quarter of the fourth century (350322).
But that by no means exhausts Aristotles exceptional utility. Whatever his own
political views may have been, and whatever one may think of whatever they
were, he is in a class of his own when it comes to doing political analysis and
political sociology from a theoretical point of viewand not just of the Athens
of his day, but in principle of all Hellas. He and his pupils at the Lyceum were
engaged in a multi-volume collective project of classification, codification, and
analysis of a whole series of Greek (and one or two non-Greek) political enti-
ties. The fruits may be partially glimpsed in the Politics, highly unsatisfactory
though this is as a composition. Like Plato, Aristotle too was a utopian thinker,
concerned to formulate some sort of ideal polity in words; but Aristotles euto-
pias were far closer to the ground than Platos outopias, and they were con-
servative and preventative in intention rather than positive and revolutionary.
For Aristotle wished to help prevent the besetting sin of the polis, namely
stasis, from breaking out, and he thought that the bestin the sense of most
practicalway to do that was to suggest ways in which imperfect (deformed)
actual polities might be improved so as to make them as stasis-proof as possible.
Aristotle was not uninterested in monarchy, including tyranny as well as, at
the other end of the spectrum, an ideal all-kingship. But he was aware that the
vast majority of Greek cities in his day enjoyed or suffered some form of repub-
lican regime, either democracy or oligarchy. Some form: for Aristotle the
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Greek Democratic Theory?
For Aristotle, being Aristotle, the political-theoretical mean was golden, and
the middling polity was the one that was both the best conceivable and the best
possible in pragmatic terms. Indeed, and rather confusingly, he actually gave to
this middling sort of polity the generic name polity. Its key features were that
it combined the best elements of democracy and oligarchy but avoided sliding
over into either of those two potentially extreme forms, because there were suf-
ficient numbers of middling citizensmiddling rich and middling poorto
hold the balance between them. If pushed, he would probably have said that
most of the middling citizens he had in mind would be wealthy enough to serve
as hoplites, thus falling into the top third or so in economic terms. However,
as usual with him, reality and realism immediately broke in, and he conceded
with regret that in the real Greek world there never or hardly ever were enough
of them to make polity a practicable goal. On the other hand, there is no doubt
at all that what lay behind his advocacy of such a middling compromise was
his fervent desire to avoid or avert the endemic civil strife or civil war that at
least since the 420s had afflicted the Greek world. If one wants to get a sense of
the flavour of political struggle that gave rise to political murders, betrayals of
cities and, at the limit, outright civil war, one need only read the bloodcurdling,
violently anti-democratic oath that the most extreme oligarchs in some cities
are reported by Aristotle to have sworn amongst themselves:And Iwill be evil-
minded to the demos and will plot whatever evil Ican againstthem.
Not that Aristotle was alone in seeking some sort of moderate, middling con-
stitutional state. The earliest expression of approval of a political-constitutional
mixture of democracy with oligarchy is actually to be found in Thucydides,
whospeaking for once explicitly in his own personspecially commended
the moderately oligarchic regime that Athens experienced between 411 and
410 after the end of the extreme counter-revolutionary oligarchy of the Four
Hundred. This he accounted as the best (either pragmatically or in principle)
that he personally had known (though he was in exile from Athens at the time),
since it represented a moderate blending, in the interests both of the few and
of the many. The many here are the demos in the sense of the poor majority of
citizens, the few are the rich elite, those who are earlier (8.64) said to believe
they deserved the greater share of power because they contributed more to
the state in terms both of resources and of personal service. But the nature
of the blend, too, was clearly of key importance for Thucydidesnot just the
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mere fact of a blend, as it was also for Aristotle, who wrote that a well-blended
oligarchy was the type of oligarchy nearest to his (ideally desired) polity.
We shall return to the concept of the mixed constitution in a later chap-
ter, on the Roman Republic (Chapter 15), where we shall see that whereas
Thucydides and Aristotle seem to have envisaged the mixture in terms of a
pudding, Polybius envisaged rather a seesaw system of checks and balances,
thereby anticipating and indeed influencing the conception of the United
States constitution.
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7.
Athenian Democracy inPractice
c.4503 35
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Athenian Democracy in Practice c.450335
this age raises is the extent to which Athens democracy changedwas the final
(as it turned out) phase of democracy at Athens also a new kind of democracy?
In short, to speak of Athenian democracy may well prove to be seriously mis-
leading, since there could have been as many as four Athenian democracies in
all:508/7462/1 (or 451/0); 462/1404; 403336; and 336322. Which happens
or perhaps does not just happento be the same number as that of the sub-
species of democracy identified by Aristotle (Chapter6).
In the third book of the Politics Aristotle defined the citizen generically as
the (free, legitimate) male polis-member who has a share in decision-making,
including passing legal judgement (krisis) and in ruling, that is office-holding
(arche), adding that practically speaking that definition applied more closely
to citizens of democracies than of oligarchies. But before an Athenian citizen
could exercise either of those powers he had first to assert and have validated
his credentials as a bona fide citizen. And that meant being entered on the
official register of citizens kept by each deme, membership of which was hered-
itary after 508/7, regardless of where one normally resided. Confirmation of
status required the attendance of sworn witnessesfamily members and fel-
low members of the pseudo-kinship associations called phratries, people who
had witnessed the parents wedding and could vouch for the legitimacy of the
offspringand inspection of the candidates genitals. The age of majority was
formally eighteen, and at least in the fourth century, when such 18-and 19-year-
olds were labelled epheboi (on the threshold of full adult maturity at 20), they
were obliged to swear a formal oath; after c.335 they could be enrolled in the
city-run military-cum-religious ephebeia, a sort of national service. This oath
is preserved on a well-cut stele of expensive Pentelic marble that was dedicated
to Ares and Athena Areia by one Dion son of Dion, Ares priest in the deme
of Acharnae. Though locally produced and erected, the stele also had national
pretensions, since together with the Oath of the Ephebes there was associated
on the stele the text of a supposed Oath of Plataea, purportedly sworn by all
Athenians immediately before the decisive battle of Plataea in 479 (see further
Chapter1, Chapter12).
Periodically, as in 445 and 347/6, the city carried out a global revision of
all deme registers. It was in the latter sweep that a client of Demosthenes
found himself unceremoniously disfranchised by the deme assembly of little
Halimous (the historian Thucydides deme), even though he had previously
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held the post of mayor (demarchos). Riskily, he challenged that local decision in
a central jury court, the huge jeopardy being that if he failed to win his appeal
he would be summarily sold into slavery as an alien who had falsely claimed
to be and acted as a citizen. But he did at least have a youngish Demosthenes
on his side as supporting advocate, and a version of the speech Demosthenes
wrote for him survives, which may suggest he was successful in his plea. At
any rate, the defence that the client adopted allows us to see on what two main
grounds his enemies had at first got him kicked off the Halimous register:his
mother had served as a wet nurse to the children of others, which was repre-
sented as evidence of her servile status, and she had sold ribbons in the mar-
ketplace, which was allegedly evidence of her metic, possibly ex-slave, status.
It was always easier to attack a man in court through hisoften inert, always
silent or silenced, never presentfemale relatives. But the defendant rejoined
robustly and to us quite plausibly that those admitted facts were evidence not of
his mothers sub-citizen status, but of the familys temporary impoverishment
due to the PeloponnesianWar.
Such a window into deme-level skulduggery is unfortunately a rarity. Far
more typical are the deme decrees preserved on stone that honour local ben-
efactors, or the stones such as that from Thoricus, which record in lavish detail
the local calendar of obligatory sacrifices to be performed month by month
in honour of a huge number of both local and national gods, goddesses, and
heroes (Chapter1). The strong impression conveyed by these documents, which
is confirmed in some cases by quite elaborate sacred and secular public archi-
tecture, is of the deme as beingor wishing to present itself asa microcosm
of the polis; indeed, in 431, according to Thucydides (2.15), rural demesmen
felt that they were being obliged to abandon nothing less than their polis when
compelled by Spartan invasion to reside only temporarily in the city of Athens.
The deme documents also help buttress the claim that it was the deme that
was the basis of the Athenian democracy. Deme officialselected or chosen
by lot, above all the mayorhad to manage the regular deme assemblies, the
deme lawcourts, the choice of members to represent the deme (and so tribe) on
the central Council of 500, the collection of any irregularly imposed property
tax, and the handling of any military call-up. Small wonder that Euxitheus,
the speaker of Demosthenes 57, had to contend with the likes of his accuser
Euboulides, since there was such potential scope for underhand graft or at least
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the exercise of influence. One might have thought that an aspiring politician
with ambitions to make a name for himself on the big stage in Athens would
hone his skills at deme level in arenas less demanding than the Assembly (up
to 6,000 citizens present) or a popular jury court, often with 500 jurors, almost
five times the size of the total citizen list of Halimous in the 340s; see further
below. But the evidence doesnt seem to back that supposition up. For ordinary
citizens, however, regular participation in routine deme politics was a school of
democratic prudence.
Total numbers of citizens fluctuated over time. No general census is recorded
before the last or penultimate decade of the fourth century, after the democracy
had been terminated and when Athens was under Macedonian overlordship
and ruled by a proxy dictator, Demetrius of Phalerum. There were allegedly
already 30,000 Athenian citizens in 500 bce, according to a tale in Herodotus
(5.97), but that round figure probably errs on the side of excess; yet even if the
true figure were, say, 20,000, still Athens would have been already between
ten and forty times larger than the modal (most frequently occurring) size of
the 1,000 or so Greek poleis attested in the fifth and fourth centuries. By 480
Athens may have put in commission as many as 200 triremes, and that would
have required a total complement of some 40,000; but not all need have been
Athenians. Those who were will have been drawn from the poorest of the four
post-Solonian census classes known as thetes (literally, labourers).
These sub-hoplites will always have been the largest single group of the
Athenian citizen population, usually constituting well over 50 per cent.
Normally social mobility in any Greek city was likely minimal, but in Athens
between c.480 and 430 thanks to the Athenian empire there developed the
greatest scope for improving ones social lot and moving upwards into the hop-
lite group (zeugitae, literally yoke-men). One fortunate individual actually
climbed further up, into the second highest census group of hippeis (cavalry).
But to be in the census of the pentakosiomedimnoi (500-bushel men), and so a
member of the top 5 per cent or so economically, one normally had to start out
seriously rich by inheritance.
Modern guesstimates of citizen growth at Athens go up as high as 60,000
by 431, though most would settle for a rather lower figure; and it has to be
remembered that at that time quite a number of Athenian citizens were per-
manently settled outside Attica, as colonists owning and working or drawing
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revenue from land that had formerly belonged to the citizens of other poleis. By
404, it is generally agreed, citizen numbers had dropped back again to 20,000
to 25,000, owing to severe war casualties both on land and at sea and to the
devastating great plague that struck in 430 and carried off thousands, includ-
ing the sexagenarian Pericles. Between 404 and 390 Athens was very seriously
impoverished overall, which both occasioned demands for a restoration of
some sort of overseas empire and triggered the introduction of pay for attend-
ance at the Assembly. Assuming a slight rise followed by a fairly steady-state
situation, one reaches a figure for 404322 of around 25,000 to 30,000. In 322,
another kind of disaster struck:the termination of the democracy by Macedon,
with the grateful assistance of local diehard anti-democrats, resulting in the
striking off of either 12,000 or 22,000 citizens (our inadequate sources differ)
from the totallist.
Cleisthenes Council (Boule) of 500 (50 from each of his 10 new tribes) was
his masterstroke (Chapter4). If the primary Assembly (below) was to be the
citys genuinely decisive body, it had to have an adequate smaller body in more
or less permanent session to act as its steering committeeboth to prepare
the business of its regular stated meetings and to see to the proper carrying
out of its decisions by the relevant officials. It was through the Council that
after the Ephialtic reforms one of the three chief democratic functions lauded
by Herodotus Otanes (3.80; Chapter6)the accountability of officials to the
peoplewas effected. Councillors were chosen by lot from all eligible demes-
men, and each of the 139 or 140 demes had its allotted quota to fill, implying
a notion of representation. Had the demes all been of the same size, or had it
been felt necessary in the interests of some notion of equality that each deme
should contribute roughly the same number of Councillors each year, then the
average figure for each deme would have been about 3.8 or between three and
four. As it actually was, at least by the time we have actual figures for the quo-
tas (not before the later fourth century, as usual), there were huge differen-
tials:between 22 per annum for the most densely populated deme, Acharnae
(which was allegedlyThucydides 2.22capable by itself of providing no fewer
than 3,000 hoplites to the Athenian hoplite force of normally some 10,000
15,000) and as few as three for little Halimous, or even fewer. Citizens moreover
were legally debarred from sitting on the Council more than twice, and those
maximum two terms of office could not be served consecutively (owing to the
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The doings of the Assembly (Ecclesia) are best attested in the age of
Demosthenes (b. 384, d. 322). It bears repeating that the details of practice
given in the Ath. Pol. as applying to the 330s and early 320s do not neces-
sarily hold for the situation even twenty years earlier, letalone for the whole
period from 508/7 on. For example, it is a quite remarkable fact that in the 330s
and early 320s four Assembly meetings were supposed to be held every civil
month; that is, 40 per annum or one roughly every nine days. Extraordinarily
demanding. But for how long had that been the case? Only, it seems, from
c. 350 on, before which only three meetings per month were stipulated. So,
how many stated Assembly meetings had there had to be in, say, the age of
Pericles? That is anyones guess, quite literally; many of us are of the view that
just one per month would not have been unthinkable. On top of which, of
course, there would have been added the extraordinary meetings called, for
instance, to face the crisis in relations with Sparta and is allies that was devel-
oping since 445 and especially after the extremely unpleasant repression of a
revolt by the oligarchically run, strategically crucial island-state of Samos in
440/39.
And what about the numbers of attendees, whether regular or occasional,
and their regional distribution in terms of their demes of origin or residence?
For the fifth centuryapart from the absurdity of Herodotus 5.97 (who on the
face of it has all the supposedly 30,000 citizens agreeing to support the Ionian
revolt)there is just the one total figure preserved, and that comes from a
deeply tainted, oligarchic source reported by Thucydides (8.72). According to
the oligarchic counter-revolutionaries of 411, not even as many as 5,000 citizens
had ever yet attended any one meeting of the Assembly. Of course, these men
had an interest in minimising the figure, both since it was their contention
that Assembly decisions had been taken only by a small and in some sense
unrepresentative proportion of the total potential citizen body, and because
they themselves were trumpeting their proposed anti-democratic reduction of
the fully empowered citizen body to a notional 5,000 citizens. But it is the case,
archaeologically speaking, that in the fifth century the area on the Pnyx hill
available for meetings attended by seated Athenians each occupying roughly
half a square metre of space would have accommodated a maximum of six
thousand. (Ostracisms, which required a quorum of 6,000 voters, were held
in the Agora.)
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In the fourth century, and especially in the 330s, it seems that the meeting
space on the Pnyx was somehow enlarged. At all events, some issues put to the
Assembly for a vote, at least in the fourth centuryfor example, voting on set-
ting in motion the law-making procedure (below) or voting honorary citizen-
ship to a Pasion (an ex-slave metic, for public services rendered) or a Paerisades
(a Thracian ruler, for hoped-for future economic benefits)required a quorum
of 6,000, or roughly 20 per cent of the normal total of 30,000, the latter at
two consecutive Assembly meetings. Given the purely physical constraints of
the Pnyx (its name appropriately derived from a verb meaning to squeeze),
attendees at an Assembly meeting must have been regarded as representing
and indeed as representative ofthe citizen body (as was the case for the
Peoples Courts, below). Any gathering of 5,000 to 6,000-plus, in other words,
might be expected to contain roughly the same mix of town-and country-
dwellers, and of people pursuing a roughly similar gamut of rural or urban
occupations. No pay for attendance was considered necessary or desirable in
the fifth century:evidence either of a greater spread of wealth or of a greater
public-spiritedness, or both, than were on offer when pay for Assembly attend-
ance was introduced in the 390s. At first, though, the sum on offer was a mere
obol (one-sixth of a drachma, the latter then a decent craftsmans daily wage),
but very soon, thanks to a competitive bidding war between rival politicians, it
had reached the same level as that paid for a days jury service, half a drachma.
It is noteworthy that Aristophanes comic satire on the powers of the Assembly
and the alleged ease with which a meeting could be packed, the Ecclesiazusae
(Women Attending the Assembly), was produced in c. 393 when Assembly
attendance was clearly a top-priority issue. (I shall be returning to consider the
status and stature of Athenian citizen women in the next chapter.) Later still,
when a distinction was drawn between the principal (not necessarily the first)
meeting of any month and the other three ordinary meetings, a bonus was paid
for attendance at the principal meeting, at which state security, the military,
and religious affairs had to be debated as matters of obligatory routine. By the
time of the Ath. Pol., pay for this particular participation had reached the dizzy
heights of a drachma and a half. It is worth noting that Athens was not the only
democracy to offer political paybut it was far and away the most generous.
The mode of delivering and counting votes seems never to have changed:
extending of the right hand (kheirotonia) was the order of each and every
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Assembly day, the numbers of votes cast being told (assessed) not counted
one by one. This was a matter not of ideologyfor that, the individual count-
ing of votes, as in the Heliaia from Solons time on (Chapter 3), was criti-
calbut of pragmatics: meetings had to be held in the hours of daylight and
business concluded within a single day. (Rain could stop play, of course.)
When the debate and initial decision over Athens punishment of revolted
Mytilene on Lesbos in 427 were reopened in the Assembly the following day,
that was a matter for surprised note and report by Thucydides. After the ini-
tial ritual purifications and prayers had been concluded and the president
for the day had announced the first item on the agenda, a crier bellowed out,
Who wishes to speak? (the word for to speak, agoreuein, being derived from
the basic word for a political assembly, agora). This was a matter of funda-
mental democratic principle: that of isegoria, the exactly equal entitlement
of each and every citizen present and in good standing (or rather sitting) to
make public political speech; an important corollary of isonomia. (On free-
dom of speech, a different but also democratic concept, see Chapters 8 and
10.) But in practice, it seems, very few citizens would get up on their hind
legs, ever. Which is one reason why professional politicians could be referred
to as orators and full-time politicians.
By no means all citizens were equally well equippedphysically or mentally
to make persuasive speeches in the Assembly or even in the quieter, smaller
environs of a Council meeting. A comic poet (Eupolis, a rival of Aristophanes)
wrote of Pericles that persuasion sat on his lips, and Peitho (Persuasion) was
worshipped as a goddess at Athens; but he was quite exceptionally talented.
Indeed, not all professional politicians were also public orators; some were what
we would call technocratsspecialising behind the scenes in complex matters
of public finance or the logistics of war or, as in the case of the arch-oligarch
Antiphon, preparing briefs for oligarchs both Athenian and non-Athenian to
help them cope with the rigours of a Council sub-committee or, more terri-
fyingly, a popular jury court. The separation between politicians and orators
mirrored that between politicians and Generals; both were to some extent
products of the same tendency towards specialisation of expertise that was a
feature of the years from the 430s on. By the mid-fourth century it would have
been extraordinary if either say the financial expert Eubulus or the all-round
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And so, last but very much not least, we come to the jurisdictional dimen-
sion of the demos kratos. I long ago lost count of the number of undergraduate
essays I read on the topic How much kratos did the demos really exercise in
the Athenian democracy? that failed even to notice or mention the existence
of the Peoples Court or popular jury courts. So let it be stated loud and clear:
the demos exercised its kratos in the courts, not only in the Assemblya pecu-
liarly democratic phenomenon, if we embrace Aristotles definition of the citi-
zen canvassed at the beginning of this chapter, and recall Ath. Pol. 41.2 (quoted
above). Hence the significance of the oath taken individually by each of those
6,000 citizens annually empanelled, by lot, at the beginning of the civil year as
potential jurors for the year to come:
I shall cast my vote in accordance with the laws and with the decrees
passed by the Assembly and by the Council but, if there is no law,in
accordance with my sense of what is most just without favour or enmity.
I shall vote only on the charge and Ishall listen impartially to prosecutors
and defendantsalike.
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some time later, thanks to Cleon, that sum had been raised by 50 per cent to 3
obols, or half a silver drachma. That may not seem a lot, but it has been calcu-
lated that it would have been adequate compensation for the time a juror had
to take away from his farm or trade or other daily occupation.
Courts sat, it has been estimated, between about 150 and 200days a year,
making attendance as a juror potentially almost a full-time occupation; on
average probably most jurors were both elderly and rather poor. This partly
explains the vitriol directed at all jurors as a breed in Aristophanes comedy
Wasps of 422: the Chorus are designated wasps because they allegedly liked
only to convict and then to sting the convicted for the heaviest possible penalty
available. But it was not only an economic but also a political disaster when
for a considerable period in the 360s court sessions had to be interrupted and
suspended for lack of available money in the public coffers to pay the jurymen.
So attached indeed were volunteer jurymen to their bronze jurors token that
relatives found it quite natural to include it among a dead kinsmans burial
goods. By extension, Athens acquired a reputation in the outside Greek world
for its exceptional litigiousnness; this was partly because in its days of greatest
imperial power between about 475 and 430 it had been able even to compel
non-Athenians to attend courts in Athens and be tried before Athenian jurors
if they were suspected of conspiring in their home cities against what most
Athenians took to be the alliances best interests. But the reputation also justly
reflected the democratic centrality of litigation and jurisdiction.
Crimes (e.g., impiety) were not carefully defined. Procedures were consid-
ered more important, and for some crimes more than one procedure was avail-
able to a potential litigant. There were no barristers; the rules of evidence both
oral and written and rules of procedure were lax. There was no notion of prec-
edent; and equity was the nearest they got to anything like strict justice. Rather
than the strict guilt or innocence of the defendant as charged, the jury often
considered whether conviction or acquittal was better for the Athenian polis
as a whole: the trial of Socrates was in this respect utterly typical. Punishments
were fitted to the criminal rather than to the crime. Some types of case, like
Socrates alleged impiety, carried no fixed penalty, opening the way after the
initial verdict of guilty for rival bids and yet a further chance for jurors to sit
in judgment on their peersand very often on their social superiors, since
most jurymen seem to have been poor and humble, whereas some defendants
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Of all the many and various kinds of writs, one in particular stands out for
its democratic political function, and this is the writ against unconstitutional
proposals. It is first attested in c. 415, and that may be no mere coincidence.
The year before had seen a failed ostracism, and that quasi-legal procedure
somewhere between a vote in the Assembly and a vote in the jury courts, with
an added ritualistic, scapegoat dimension (discussed in Chapter 4)was never
used again. Pericles had been exceptional in not being ostracised, having won
a decisive contest with Thucydides the son of Melesias in perhaps 443. His for-
mer ward, the maverick Alcibiades, also won an ostracism, that of 416, but
the result of that vote was the reverse of decisive, since the wrong candidate,
the lesser politician Hyperbolus, was ostracised rather than either himself or
Nicias. Other ways had therefore to be found for the future of deciding between
such rival high-profile politicians, and of aborting stasis, and the writ against
unconstitutional proposals neatly fitted the bill. One fourth-century politi-
cian, Aristophon, boasted that he had survived no fewer than seventy-five such
accusations, but we may legitimately feel that he did protest considerably too
muchand too many.
Oligarchs or crypto-oligarchs always hated the power over them that the
democratic court system provided to the demos. Both in 411, when a rigged
Assembly held outside the city walls in wartime voted the democracy out of
existence, and in 404, when Athens was handed over by Sparta to the untender
mercies of the Thirty (tyrants), that system of jurisdiction was at once dis-
mantled. And it has to be said that in 406following the flawed naval vic-
tory at Arginusae, with its accompanying heavy loss of poor citizen livesthe
Assembly did not cover itself in glory when it arrogated to itself the preroga-
tive of the courts to try generals for high treason, and moreover breached the
citys own rules of procedure in so doing. All eight generals who had been in
command at Arginusae were prosecuted for high treason; six of them unwisely
showed up at the ensuing Assembly meeting, which turned into a kangaroo
court and condemned them collectively to instant death, although legally they
should have each have received an individual trial before a properly convened
lawcourt. The Arginusae trial went down in infamy, especially among those of
an oligarchic tendency or temperament such as the exiled Xenophon, who was
happy to record the alleged mob-rule shout that it was monstrous if the People
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Athenian Democracy in Practice c.450335
were not to be allowed to do just whatever it pleased. That was one reason why
after 403 the Assembly was no longer permittedthat is no longer permitted
itselfto legislate. From then on a strictly legal distinction was drawn between
a decree of the Assembly and a law, that is, a legal decision of general applica-
tion and in principle permanent validity that had to be passed by a separate
body of law-makers or legislators.
However, that was actually not quite such a derogation from direct popular
power as it may at first sight seem, since the law-makers who technically passed
judgment on a proposed law by putting it as it were on trial were themselves
drawn by lot from the annual panel of 6,000 juror-judges, and such general laws
were anyway few and far between:only a few dozen are known. One is worth
mentioning specifically, though it is unusual. The Law on Tyranny of 337/6 was
both a law and an Assembly decree. That is, first the Assembly passed the text
as a decree, which was then sent for trial to the law-makers, who duly passed
it. Moreover, the courts remained a crucial political decision-making arena
right to the end of the democracy on any definition, as attested for conspicuous
instance by the Crown Affair of 330:the trial of Ctesiphon under prosecution
by Aeschines for having illegally proposed a crown of honour for Aeschines
deadly political rival Demosthenes. The published versions of the respective
prosecution speech by Aeschines and the speech Demosthenes gave as sup-
porting litigant of Ctesiphon make illuminating if not always edifying reading
(see in detail Chapter10). The result was a thumping victory for Demosthenes,
and the end of Aeschines career and indeed residence in Athens; although in
the wider context of an Athens under the thumb of a dominant Macedon per-
haps that didnt count as much more than an empty, last-gasp gesture of old-
style democratic defiance.
The one area of legal practice where the demos did not necessarily rule as
such was in the post-Ephialtic, politically shriven Areopagus. Symbolically,
this august body remained of huge importance, as its central role in Aeschylus
Eumenides of 458 attests, and there are even hints that in the third quarter of
the fourth century, as Athens reeled under the impact of superior Macedonian
power, this body of ex-Archons for life may have made some attempt to reas-
sert itself politically:its explicit mention in the Law on Tyranny is witness to
that apparent recrudescence. But by and large its role after 462/1 was purely
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8.
Athenian Democracy
Culture and Society c.450335
P oliteia, one of the root words of the ancient Greek political vocabu-
lary, seems originally to have meant citizenship, in the sense of the qualities
or attributes of being a polites. The latter term turns up first in a Spartan text
a mid-seventh-century bce elegy by Tyrtaeus partially preserved on a third-
century ce papyrus rescued from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. This some may think
entirely appropriate, as Sparta has also yielded one of the earliest documents
to spell out a version of the constitutional arrangements of any Greek polis:the
so-called Great Rhetra of arguably about the same date as the Tyrtaeus frag-
ment. That was the second, derived sense of politeia, denoting what Aristotle
called the taxis (ordering, disposition) of office-holding and other such politi-
cal institutions. The usual English translation constitution approximates this
sense. However, by his day (and possibly long before) politeia had acquired yet
a third meaning, signifying what Aristotle called the way of life and Isocrates
called the soul or animating spiritour life and soulof a polis:denoting,
that is, something above and beyond its purely formal politicalinstitutional
arrangements.
Thucydides seems to preserve an early version of this last sense when he
speaks ofor rather deploreswhat he calls the secrecy of their politeia, refer-
ring to the fact that secrecy and secretiveness were engrained in the very fabric
of the Spartans society and politics. What prompted that derogatory comment
was their neither unpredictable nor inexcusable unwillingness to divulge to
him, an Athenian enemy, exactly how many Spartans, and Spartans of which
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social classes, had perished on the battlefield of Mantineia in 418; indeed, one
might think the Spartans were well within their rights not to betray such a
sensitive war secret, especially given that shortage of citizen manpower was
already playing a crucial role in the development of Spartan society and politics
and would do so even more fatefully over the next half-century.
Thucydides elsewhere draws attention to another peculiarity of the
Spartans society and culture, which is no doubt intimately related causally to
their politeias alleged systematic secrecy: the existence of a servile body, much
larger than the citizen body, called Helots (captives), who unlike most slaves
and other unfree people in ancient Greece were themselves Greeks by birth
and culture and yet were treated by their Spartan masters as a defeated and
alien enemy within, and were moreover enslaved collectively as a subject com-
munity or people rather than individually owned, as most slaves in Greece
were. More than once, Helots rose up in politically motivated revolt, aimed
at securing not only individual freedom but alsofor the majority among
thempolitical independence and statehood as the Messenians. It was to
pre-empt this happening again that, probably some time in the mid-420s, the
Spartans carried out an exemplary cull of those 2,000 or so Helots thought to
be the most potentially subversive and rebelliousand no one could tell how
each of them was killed, adds Thucydides rather sinisterly, drawing attention
once more to Spartan secrecy, if of a more morally vicious kind. I cite this
striking episode, however, not in order to indict the Spartans of moral cruelty,
but to draw attention to the fact that every Greek polis was by Aristotelian
definition a community or commonwealth, and that the Spartan polity was
an unusually strong, close-knit, and tightly controlled example, reinforcing its
sense of unique selfhood by the most extreme othering of the Helots whom
by an annual proclamation of their chief executive officials they declared for-
mally to be enemies and thus liable to summary execution or murder.
As it happens, religion was another of those features that were common to
every Greek polis but that the Spartans took to unusual, if not unique extremes.
For all Greeks, religion was the lifeblood of their society and polity; so ubiqui-
tous indeed and so deeply embedded were what they called alternatively the
things of the gods or the divine that they had no separate, special word mean-
ing religion. Herodotus twice specially remarked upon the Spartans valuing of
the things of the gods above those of mere mortal men. But then all Greeks did
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Athenian Democracy:Culture and Society
that. What he was drawing attention to, therefore, was the Spartans exceptional
willingness to carry religiositythe absolute necessity to observe religious rit-
ual obligationsto the point even of placing their and other Greeks commu-
nities and ways of life in extreme jeopardy. For the democratic Athenians, no
less than for the non-or anti-democratic Spartans, festivals were their religions
beating heart. Three stood head and shoulders above the rest in the long run
of annual and monthly festivals by which the Athenians national and local
(deme) calendars were punctuated: the Great or City Panathenaea, the Great
or City Dionysia, and the Mysteries of Eleusis. All three were in some sense
Peisistratean; that is, the Peisistratid tyrant family (Chapter 3) had lavished
special attention upon them for propaganda purposes. But all were also given
thorough democratic makeovers, partly to disembarrass them of their tyran-
nical associations.
The Great Panathenaea, as noted in Chapter4, was revamped in 566. The
coincidence of date makes it clear that this was the Athenians local and emu-
lous response to the establishment in the 570s of a Circuit of major Panhellenic
(all-Greek) athletic games:the Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean. Like
the Olympics and the Pythian Games, it too was held on a grand scale every
four years and required the appointment of special commissioners who looked
after the very complicated financial and other arrangements. But the Athena
in honour of whose birthday the Panathenaea were staged was Athena of
the City (Polias), patron goddess of the city of Athens. Other Greeks refused
to concede to a female divinity so closely tied to one city equality of status
with the male and more universal Zeus (the Olympics and Nemean Games),
his brother Poseidon (Isthmian at Corinth), and his son Apollo (Pythian at
Delphi). The Athenians themselves grudgingly conceded as much by including
events that were open only to Athenian citizens:for instance, a kind of mas-
culine beauty contest (the Euandria) and a trireme boat race held off Sunium,
both of which were organized on a tribal basis. Moreover, in the sharpest
contrast to the crown games of the Circuit, for which only symbolic token
prizes were awarded (all the more valued and valuable for that), the prizes
at the Panathenaea were expensive, material-value prizes: specially pressed
sacred olive oil (Athenas special plant) contained within distinctively shaped
and beautifully painted transport-and-storage pots, the number awarded being
carefully calibrated in accordance with the perceived importance of the event.
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Athenian Democracy:Culture and Society
that the heifers (unmated, virgin cows) sacrificed to Athena at the end of the
procession were slaughtered and cooked on an altar that more naturally was
attached to the sacred building we know as the Erechtheum. In its most famous
form, from the 420s on, that temple included the literally iconic caryatid porch,
boldly female and highly feminine images. But within the shrine were sacred
spaces devoted not only to the eponymous Erechtheus, a legendary early king
of Athens, but also to Athena Polias and to Poseidon assimilated to Erechtheus.
Apatriotic myth imagined that Athena and Poseidon had once upon a time
been in competition for the role of patron divinity of the city, a contest won by
Athena. Housing those two jealous divinities together with Erechtheus in the
one shrine in a conspicuous spot on the Acropolis was a massive attempt at reli-
gious and political compromise, greatly to the Athenians credit. But that leaves
the Parthenon as having to perform some other, not purely religious function
or functions, which fortunately are quite easy to divine. The new, Periclean
Parthenon (Pericles served as a public official on the buildings administrative
works committee) stood for imperial Athens in relation to the outside world;
it was a sort of equivalent of St Pauls Cathedral as opposed to Westminster
Abbey, the latter being Londons equivalent of the Erechtheum.
Unlike the quadrennial Great Panathenaea, the Great or City Dionysia was
an annual festival, celebrated in early spring; it was held in honour of a politi-
cally rather interesting Dionysus, Dionysus Eleuthereus. Although that looks
like Eleutherios (liberator), which at Athens served as a cult title of Zeus (who
was granted a fine Stoa in the Agora), it actually means Dionysus from the
border town of Eleutherae. This was not incorporated as an Attic deme, and
indeed was not even Attic in origin but Boeotian, so the Athenians had some-
how grabbed Eleutherae from the Boeotians but not been able or willing to
incorporate it fully within the new democratic polis system. Yet this literally
marginal (in its geographical origin) cult of Dionysus was installed at the very
epicentre of the city of Athens on the slopes of the Acropolis, where it was
endowed with a peculiarly dramatic function and a dedicated theatre (mainly
wooden at first) from about 500bce.
This dramatic Dionysus was the god not only or more particularly of wine but
rather of metamorphosis, shape- and role-shifting in general, a function that
was symbolized externally by the masks worn by all actors and chorus members
and enacted through an extreme degree of impersonation and role-playing. All
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Figure8.1
Marriage Athenian-style, Lebes gamikos
Athenian weddings were legally speaking private affairs but had massive public consequences, in
the shape of legitimate offspring and future male citizens. They called for heavy investment in pomp
and ritual, including specially shaped painted terracotta vessels like this one, in which the specially
consecrated water for the initial bridal bath was stored. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY
players had to be male, though they often played female roles, and all of course
were human beings, though they often played gods and goddesses; all too were
Athenians, though often they played non-Athenian characters, and all were
free in their personal and civic status, though sometimes they played slaves.
Tragedies and satyr dramas had their origins well back in the sixth century,
but the Dionysia play-festival seems to have been formally reorganized around
500 bce, no doubt as a reflection of the Cleisthenic reforms. In 486 they were
joined by comedies, and all plays were staged as competitions (agones, whence
our agony), with prizes going to the winning playwrights, impresarios and
lead actors (prot-agonists). These prizes were decided by small, democrati-
cally selected juries acting in the name of all Athenians attending the plays; up
to 17,000 persons in all may have attended any one performance, though not
all would have been Athenians and, if women were allowed to attend, not all
would have been Athenian citizens of full political status.
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Athenian Democracy:Culture and Society
An ancient paradoxical aphorism held that the tragic plays, though staged
in honour of Dionysus, had nothing directly to do with him. Though true, up
to a point (Euripides Bacchae is a potent counter-example), that is beside the
real point:for tragedys democratic function, or one of its main ones, according
to a modern reading that Ifind wholly persuasive, was to question the citys
fundamental tenets and ideals. The slippery, ambiguous, and ambivalent nature
of Dionysus (deadly violence alternating with ecstatic release) made his wor-
ship an excellent medium and arena for such profound questioning without
running the ultimate risk (always lurking in the Assembly) of causing outright
revolutionary upheavals. It is of course a separate issue whether any playwright
or play or group of plays (each tragic playwright offered a set of three tragedies
followed by a satyr drama) had a particular and discernible political agenda.
Comedy played to a peculiar strength of the Athenian democracy in another
way. The Athenians had two words both of which we might translate as freedom
of speech:isegoria and parrhesia. Their semantic space overlapped, but their
core meanings were significantly different. Whereas isegoria, exact equality of
public political speech, had a particular application to speech made in a politi-
cal assembly, and could indeed serve as a synecdoche for democratic equality
and indeed democracy as such (as in Herodotus 5.78:Chapter4), parrhesia had
a broader scope and reference. This was just the kind of free speech that the
theatrical genre of comedy (komoidia:from komos, meaning a revel, and ode,
a song) could have been invented to exploit. But, as is well known, freedom of
speech has its costs as well as its benefits, and it seems that even the carnival
context and atmosphere of comedy at the Great or City Dionysia could not be
left entirely without some formal, legal restriction. Certain types of comic abuse
were at least at certain periods expressly outlawed, andat least if conservative
critics of democracy may be believedcomic playwrights were careful as a rule
not to abuse the very system of democracy as such, as opposed to its supposed
and heavily caricatured abuses (as in, e.g., Aristophanes Wasps). In its way, too,
the trial of Socrates is another powerful reminder that the Athenians placed no
absolute value on freedom of speech as a democratic virtue. Indeed, as we shall
see (Chapter10), a comic fantasy play could even be made to seem relevant
to the real-world charge of impiety brought against him. Finally, as with the
genre of tragedy, so with that of comedy there is always a question mark over
the precise political aim or impact of any play or playwright; I, for example, am
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one of those who believe that Aristophanes was a very political playwright, in
the strong sense of having and wishing to persuade his fellow citizens of a par-
ticular political agenda, but by no means do all critics agree with me onthat.
But again, as with the Great Panathenaea, it is important to remember that the
central religious function of the Dionysia was fulfilled not only or so much by
the plays but by the procession of celebrants culminating in the ritual slaughter
of bulls (as many as 240 in 333 bce) on the altar within the gods sacred precinct
that included a temple as well as the theatre. There followed a massive beef sup-
per, affording a chance both to reintegrate and renew the local community after
the winter, and, since this was a festival open to non-Athenians, both to present
the city to the outside world and to incorporate foreigners temporarily within
it. For instance, during the time of the Athenian empire of the fifth century it
was at the Great Dionysia in late March or early April that representatives of the
tributary allied cities were invited (or required?) to demonstrate their panhel-
lenic loyalty and solidarity by parading in the theatre, each one bearing a sym-
bolic talent of silver, before the actual play performances began. (I shall return
to the cultural function of the plays within the democracy in my discussion of
women in the democracy, below.)
Third, there were the Eleusinian Mysteries, held in honour of earth-mother
goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone not within the city walls of
Athens but in an Athenian deme, Eleusis (the deme of Aeschylus), not far to
the west; formally, they were under the management of two hereditary priestly
families, but, as we shall see, the central city authorities were careful to exer-
cise a very close and regular supervision of them. The Mysteries, as their name
implies, were secret rites of initiation, individual not corporate, and, unlike
the two previous festivals, were a genuinely panhellenic affair, open indeed
not just to ethnic Greeks but to anyonemale or female, free or unfreewho
commanded enough Greek language to be able to follow and engage in the
rituals. The latter promised initiates a happy afterlife, and it seems that almost
all Athenians at least would have had themselves initiated. That is one reason
why for his comedy Frogs Aristophanes chose to form the main chorus from
initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries. The play takes its name, however, from
its exceptionally comic and memorable brekekekek koaxkoaxsecondary
chorus of frogs. So relaxed were the Athenians about making fun of the gods,
in this exceptional time of festival at least, that the very god of the festival,
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Athenian Democracy:Culture and Society
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and Persephone, two goddesses, which flared up yet again in 352/1. In ancient
Greece neighbouring states often had niggling or worse boundary disputes,
and Attic neighbour was a proverbial phrase for being a very bad neighbour.
Athens, however, managed to have two more or less permanent such bound-
ary disputes, both religious. The lesser of the two concerned Oropus on the
northeastern border with Boeotia, within which lay the important oracular and
healing shrine devoted to Amphiaraus. The other affected relations with the
polis of Megara to the west and centred on a tract of land devoted to Demeter
and Persephone and labelled the Sacred Orgas; as the Athenians saw it, this
belonged to them, so that in their eyes it was not only illicit but also sacrilegious
for the Megarians to cultivate it. Bad relations with Megara, then a subordinate
ally of Sparta within the Peloponnesian League, had been one of the contribu-
tory and precipitating causes of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431,
and during that wars first phase Athens had dealt very severely with Megara
by means of biannual invasions by land, led at first by Pericles. By the late 350s,
however, Athens was considerably weakened once again by its recent defeat in
the so-called Social War (War of the Allies within the Second Athenian League)
of 357355, and it seems that Megara had taken advantage of this weakness to
remove Athenian boundary markers from the Sacred Orgas. Athens had to
respond, but this time lacked the necessary military force; instead, divine sup-
port was called in aid.
Part of a very long (over eighty lines) but not well preserved decree of the
Athenian Assembly survives, inscribed on a stele of Pentelic marble and found
at Eleusis; it testifies to the two main concerns Athens then had in this area. The
first was the precise determination of the boundaries of the Sacred Orgas; it is
noteworthy that, alongside the hereditary Eleusinian priestly officials and the
citys chief annual religious official (the King Archon), the Areopagus also was
specifically detailed to sit in judgment on the matter. The second concern was
over whether or not land currently in agricultural use should in the future be
rented out or left untilled. To determine that, however, the Athenians felt they
needed the further divine intervention and authorization of Apollo of Delphi,
and they therefore sent an embassy to consult his oracle. This procedure had
three main advantages: it could help solve issues not obviously amenable to
merely human practical reasoning; it could shift responsibility for deciding such
ticklish matters from an Athenian political body to the god; and it conferred
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Athenian Democracy:Culture and Society
upon the decision a supernatural authority that would place it beyond easy
challenge. But the Athenians went one step further, by constraining Apollos
response to an either/or question. For what they asked him, through the Pythia
(his oracular priestess), was whether they should act either according to the
instruction written on a piece of rolled-up tin wrapped in wool and placed in
a gold hydria (water jug), or on that inscribed on another identically treated
piece of tin placed in a silver hydria. The answer from Delphi was negativeit
was preferable and better that they did not cultivate the edge lands. But what a
rigmarole! At least, as it may well seem to us.
So far, by and large the discussion in this and the preceding chapter has
been confined to the male half of the Athenian citizen population. What about
the female half? Agood question, and a difficult one to answer. For Athenian
females both were and were not of the democracy. They both were fully rec-
ognized as equal and indispensable partners of the citizen men and yetalso
Figure8.2
Trireme reconstruction
The three-banked trireme warship (trieres in Greek) was the Classical Greek ship of the line, to the skilful
manoeuvring of which the Greeks owed their victory at Salamis, and the Athenians their fifth-century
empire. The 170 oarsmen were drawn from the poorest ranks of the citizenry, and their key naval role was
the perfect complement and corroboration of their political power. The Trireme Trust
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could be treated legally as little better than slaves, almost as un-persons. This
huge, seeming paradox will appear a little less strange after a reading of one
of the opening portions of the first Book of Aristotles Politics, in which he
is seeking to define what are and what are not the essential constitutive ele-
ments of the polis (any polis). In this definitional exordium he concedes that
women are necessary to the creation and perpetuation by sexual reproduc-
tion of the household (oikos), which is the basic building block of the polis.
But within each household the relationship between the male and the female
componentsspecifically the husband and the wifemust not be political,
that is, reciprocal and equal. The man must always be on top, because of
womens essential and therefore unchangeable nature. And to explain what
he understands by that, Aristotle uses an analogy:whereas the natural slave
the person who is by nature slavish (itself an eminently challengeable con-
struct)lacks altogether the ratiocinative or deliberative power of the mind,
soul, or spirit (psukhe), women (at any rate, the naturally free ones) do possess
that power, but in them, unlike in free men, it is not authoritative, that is, it
lacks executive capacity. By which he seems to mean that it regularly or even
normally tends to be overwhelmed and overridden by the emotional or appe-
titive elements of the soul, so that womens resulting behaviour is not ration-
ally determined.
Further confirmation of Aristotles negative view of womens role in politics
is forthcoming in Book 2 of the Politics. What he objected to so violently about
Spartas social and political arrangements were the power and independence
of the adult citizen women: above all, they could own property in their own
right, such that almost two-fifths of all privately held land was in their posses-
sion, and this seemed to Aristotle to be tantamount to rule by the women over
the men. To him this was a reversal of the natural orderand led, inevitably,
to disastrous practical results. Not only was half the Spartan state as it were
unregulated, since the women were allowed to abandon themselves to all sorts
of indiscipline; but also, and at a crucial moment in the citys history, when
it was under direct attack for the first time ever by an outside invasion force
(a massive Theban-led expedition in midwinter 370/69), the Spartan women
were so terrified at seeing their citys and their own lands being destroyed under
their very noses that they actually caused more harm to Spartas cause than the
enemy! By definition, they lacked the requisite quality of manly bravery.
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We may beg to doubt the literal truth of that last claim, just as his opinion of
womens essential nature may well strike us as excessively retrograde and even
grossly sexist. But we get the message:Aristotle, by formalizing and giving a
supposedly philosophical account of these womens issues, was reflecting and
representing very fairly the views of the average free Greek male citizen. That
helps to put into perspective what appears at first sight to be the quite blatantly
disempowered condition of the citizen-women of Athens, especially as com-
pared to the relative political and legal empowerment of their menfolk, even
the humblest and poorest among them. But was Athens a phallocracy as well as
a democracy? Up to apoint.
Women as citizens existed at Athens, and they were labelled politides, the
feminine form of politai; but they were not citizens in any active political sense,
precisely because they were formally debarred from almost all activity, letalone
decisive action, within the public sphere of Athenian democratic politics.
Hence their normal appellations were purely geographical:the female inhab-
itants of Attica, or the female inhabitants of the city of Athens, but not the
feminine equivalent of male Athenian citizens. The very title of Aristophanes
comedy Ecclesiazusae (Women Attending the Assembly) of c.392 bce was a
joke, intended strictly for the comic stage:for, ideally speaking, real Athenian
women were not even to be seen in public, letalone, as the plays opening sce-
nario fantastically postulated, to be seen and heard making a decisive interven-
tion in male disguise at an Assembly meeting.
Ideally speakingin actual physical fact, however, it was impossible to
keep even most adult Athenian citizen women out of sight all of the time, as
Aristotle rather ruefully had to admit. For the women of poor households,
wives whose husbands were poor, had no choice but to leave home regularly
to earn extra income or, since they could not afford to own household slaves,
to fetch water from the public fountains and other water sources. Besides,
there was also one generally recognized exception to the ideal rule of home-
concealment for females participation in religious ritual events such as
funerals and festivals (including some few that were women-only) outside the
house, and in some few cases the exercising of public religious functions as
priestesses. It was one of the little ironies in the life of the Athenian democratic
polis that one of its chief religious officials was a woman, the high priestess of
Athena Poliasand not just any woman, but a woman drawn always from one
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Athenian Democracy:Culture and Society
but if the wife performed it satisfactorily, and if the offspring were male, then
she achieved what only sheas an Athenian citizen wifecould achieve after
the passage of the restrictive, double-descent citizenship law of 451/0:the crea-
tion of a potential new citizen. The paramount need for an Athenian citizen
husband to establish the legitimacy of especially his male children explains
the publicity carefully accorded to the wedding ritual, the introduction of a
new wife to the husbands phratry (a social, pseudo-kinship association), and,
finally, the huge song and dance made about the birth of a son. The more wit-
nesses the merrier.
Indeed, if the husband were poor, the production of a male child by and
through his (anonymous) wife was the most important thing he could do,
physically, for the state community as a whole; with the exception of serving
with his body on a trireme warship, which has been well dubbed a school of
democracy (see further on the Peiraeus below). He will not therefore have been
so concerned about the successful implementation of the Eponymous Archons
opening pledge on entering office to preserve intact the property-relations of
the citizens throughout his term. On the other hand, he will have had to toler-
ate the indignity and shame of seeing his wife having to go out of the home to
raise extra funds either by, for instance, serving as a wet nurse to another citi-
zens child or by selling ribbons in the marketplace (the scenario suffered by the
impoverished family of the speaker in Demosthenes speech 57; see Chapter7).
It is often wrongly believed that ancient Greek wives were kept in some sort
of deliberate purdah or at least seclusion, since thatideologicallywas the
public ideal. But that ideal was realizable only by the families of the well-to-do.
Ordinary poor Athenian women had no choice but to leave the maritalhome.
Aristotle was by no means the only member of the Greek social elite to
regret this unavoidable social phenomenon on moralsocial grounds. But he
was probably almost in a class by himself in the rigorist, sexist way in which
he defined the nature of women on analogy to that of natural slaves. On the
other hand, the very fact that Aristotle was so desperately keen to justify, philo-
sophically, the holding and exploitation of slaves within the polis is a massive
clue to their actual and perceived indispensability. An awkward question that
has to be raised and answered is, Was Greek (and so Athenian democratic)
civilization based on slave labour? Various answers have been given, rang-
ing from the wholly negative to the wholly affirmative; my own is close to the
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extreme end of the affirmative pole. Slavesand at Athens that means deper-
sonalized, dehumanized, socially dead, and usually non-Greek chattelswere
in many key areas of society and economy found indispensable, and there-
fore constituted a basis of the Athenian democracy. Location, location, loca-
tionthe realtors mantraapplied intensely to the function and significance
of ancient slavery: it made all the difference in the world, for example, that
the silver ore extracted at Laureum was furnished by slave labourers work-
ing in literally lethal conditions, or that rich Athenians requiring a permanent
extra-familial labor force for their estates invested in the purchase of typically
barbarian, non-Greek slaves. Slaves were, moreover, good to think with, from
an Athenian citizens point of view: being an Athenian citizen meant, by defini-
tion, not being a slave.
The guesstimation of slave numbersboth absolutely or proportionallyis
a very hard game to play at any time. The figures of 400,000 slaves at Athens
(attributed to Aristotle) or 150,000 (stated by the politician Hyperides) are
either physically impossible or grossly inflated. More soberly, Thucydides
(7.278) reports, on what he clearly thought to be adequate evidence, that
between 413 and 404 more than 20,000 of the Athenians slaves ran away and
were permanently lost to the Athenian economy; a slightly later source implies
that many were corralled by the occupying Spartans at Decelea and sold on as
war booty to new Theban owners. The very richest Athenian plutocrats such
as Nicias (d. 413) might plausibly be thought to own as many as 1,000, but
fifty was considered to be a very large private holding indeed. If we postulate
that the wealthiest 400 Athenian citizens (those required regularly to perform
tax liturgies) owned on average fifty eachas did, for example, the father of
Demosthenes the politicianthat would make a starting figure of 20,000. On
top of those, let us assume that those (10,00015,000) Athenians who could
afford to equip themselves and serve as heavy-armed infantrymen owned at
least one slave apiecethat would give a further 10,000 to 15,000 slaves, and so
an absolute minimum figure of 30,000, or about one-tenth of a total population
of some 250,000 to 300,000 souls. But to these we must add the slaves owned
by metics (10,00015,000 in all), the wealthier of whom owned several, and,
taking account of the ubiquity of slaves and slavery in Athenian discourse, a
far likelier total figure is of the order of 80,000 to 100,000, representing about
one-third of the total population.
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the following year, Aristophanes staged the comedy Wasps around the highly
controversial practice of litigation in democratic Athens. It was controversial
then not so much because it wasnt generally agreed that personal disputes or
major political disagreements should be settled in a court rather than through
violence, as because critics of democracy did not like or even hated the fact
that a key part of the demos political power was exercised in and through the
Peoples jurycourts, indeed by their sitting in judgment on them and, as they
saw it, at their expense. It did not help to soften the critics views that in some
court cases justice was literally seen being done, since courts in the Agora were
open to inspection by bystanders who did not hesitate to add their quotient of
uproar and might even hope to influence the jurors decision therebytypi-
cal democratic demagoguery! The Athenians judicial practice is controversial
today, among scholars, for a rather different reason. They cannot agree whether
Athenian-style litigation promoted the rule of law, and was indeed expressly
designed for that purpose, or whether it was the continuation of feud by other,
legal means in a system of social relations operated as a zero-sum game. A test
case is the function and status of litigators known tendentiously and derogatorily
as fig-sayers (sukophantai, whence sycophants), against whom legislation was
passed in an effort to prevent vitilitigation, exploitation of the system for purely
financial gain by legalised extortion; on the other hand, one persons sycophant
could alternatively be seenin the deliberate absence of a public prosecution
serviceas someone elses public-spirited citizen selflessly prosecuting anti-
democratic malefactors on behalf of the demos and for the good of the demos.
One principal arena for such litigation was the Athenian Agora or civic
centre, where there occurred an inextricable intermingling of private and
public, political and commercial, religious and secular interests. The City Hall
(Prytaneion) was located here, as was the Tholos, where Councillors were
housed. Likewise the public mint was to be found here, as well as purely private
market stalls, and trade was transacted in both human (slave) and impersonal
goods. Aristophanes, ever alert to the day-to-day mundane realities, gave the
speaking name of Agorakritos (he who is picked out in the Agora) to the
leading character, a grossly demagogic sausage-seller, at the end of his Knights
of 424. Getting on for a century later, a particularly colourful private law-
suit preserved in the Demosthenic Corpus (no. 54) presents the prosecution
side in a case of alleged assault and battery inflicted in the Agora. Dionysius
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Athenian Democracy:Culture and Society
I, tyrant of Syracuse (reign 405367), was supposedly urged to read the plays of
Aristophanes if he wanted to gain a good idea of what the Athens of which hed
just been made an honorary citizen was like.
Penultimately, let us take a brief look at the Peiraeus. This had begun the fifth
century as only the second port of Athens (after the Phalerum roadstead), but
over its course it became almost a second city of Athens. From the standpoint
of the polis administration, it was an Athenian deme. But its population, besides
being far more diverse ethnically and culturally than that of an average deme,
far outstripped the purely citizen component numerically, and in its multiple
functions it far exceeded those of any normal coastal or maritime deme. Not
only did it possess three harbours, including commercial as well as naval, but
it acquired its own walled fortifications on top of the Long Walls that from the
450s linked it to the city of Athens eight kilometres away. Here lived what its
critics liked to dismiss as the naval mobhired metics as well as citizens
who rowed the trireme warships, or built and maintained them. It has been
argued that rowing triremes was in itself a kind of school of democracy; that
certainly might help explain the extreme antipathy towards the trireme style of
warfare expressed by Plato in the Laws. Here too were located the docks, where
were effected the absolutely key commercial transactions that brought bread-
wheat (mainly from Ukraine and the Crimea) and other vital commodities into
Athens, and through which were exported Athenian olive oil, fine pottery, and
silver. Such was its sprawling developmentan early case of urban blightthat
orthogonal master planner Hippodamus was called in from his native Miletus
(an Athenian ally) to bring some sort of order and rationality by means of egali-
tarian zoning. At the end of the fifth century, however, the very physical and
economic development of the Peiraeus had a politically explosive effect: the
men of the City was how the oligarchs were named in their civil war stand-off
of 403 with the men in the Peiraeus, a stand-off that the Peiraeus democrats
handsomely won. Truly he Peiraeus was a world apart.
The Athenian navy would never again after 404 be the force that it had
once been, though the architect-designed arsenal built in the 330s between the
Hippodamian Agora and the shipsheds was something of a wonder, and the
Athenians regularly had up to 400 triremes on the stocks. They continued to be
paid for through publicprivate partnership: a combination of public funds for
their construction (overseen by the Council) and private funds raised through
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the liturgy system of taxation for their maintenance and for the payment of
citizen and foreign crews. But commercially the fourth-century Peiraeus went
from strength to strength, becoming the major port for the entire eastern
Mediterranean. The conservative Athenian rhetorician Isocrates hailed it in a
pamphlet of c. 380 as a deliberate invention by the Athenians for the good of
mankind. Demosthenes so-called counter-indictment speeches (nos. 3238),
named for the procedure used in these commercial lawsuits, brilliantly illus-
trate both the cosmopolitanism and the complexity of traders and trading
in and through the Peiraeus in the third quarter of the fourth century. The
Athenians, sometimes lambasted for their lack of commercial savvy, rose mag-
nificently to the challenge by framing new laws and devising new kinds of legal
procedures and courts to facilitate and indeed promote this kind of activity,
most of the protagonists of which were not citizens but metics, transient for-
eigners, or indeed slaves.
Finally, and aptly enough, we address deathor rather the Athenians demo-
cratic attitudes to death and disposal of the dead. Avery striking rise in the
number of Athenians accorded formal rites of burial in the later eighth century
is thought to mark the beginning of that egalitarian attitude to the disposal
of the dead, which may be said to be a characteristic of the Athenians demo-
cratic spirit and democratic institutions of the fifth and fourth century. Being
a citizen in life entitled one to decent treatment at and after ones death. The
public funeral ceremony and funeral oration, introduced probably in the 460s
for the citys war dead, represented the apogee of public commemoration of
dead citizens as heroes. The tribal casualty lists of war victims that began to be
inscribed about the same time were a further instance of the states taking over
from the deceaseds family the function of public celebration and commemora-
tion. Already under Solon, formal legal measures had been taken to curb excess
of expense and publicity indulged in by wealthy families seeking to make a
political point through their notionally private and familial obsequies. That
same egalitarian movement was reinforced under the democracy by the cessa-
tion of the aristocratic-plutocratic practice of commissioning hugely expensive
grave markers in the form of lifesized painted-marble statues (naked for males,
clothed for females), and indeed between about 500 and 430 any very lavish
grave markers of any sort. But from about 430, perhaps because of the avail-
ability of expert masons working on the Acropolis programme, the erection of
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Athenian Democracy:Culture and Society
superior markers in marble resumed, and even the democracy could not fore-
close the erection of a monument such as the lavishly carved marble relief stele
set up in the citys principal central cemetery, the Cerameicus, for the twenty-
year-old cavalryman Dexileos, who was killed fighting against the Spartans at
Corinth in 394/3; but the family did feel obliged most unusually to specify the
honorands age in order to remove any possible imputation or suspicion that
he might have been in any way mixed up on the oligarchic side in the all too
recent civil war of404/3.
A last word for the slaves: probably most of themand certainly most of
those who died in the silver mineswere disposed of casually, and so have left
no trace of their existence in either town or country. But there were exceptions;
there are always exceptions. Favoured household slaves, both male and female,
might earn a placeand even an honourable mentionin the grave plots of
Athenian citizens. One Atotas, originally from Paphlagonia in Asia Minor,
earned for himself a laudatory funerary epigram (dated between about 350 and
330)that celebrated not only his royal descent and heroic great-heartedness,
but also his skill at mining.
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Map9.1
AthenianEmpire. From Pomeroy, Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (1998).
9.
Greek Democracy inCredit
and CrisisI
The Fifth Century
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last, by which he meant the most extreme or the most developed, and to which
he assigned the Athens of his own day. The vast majority of Greek democracies,
in other words, were more or less moderate, or at any rate more moderateless
democratic, more oligarchicthan the best documented democracy of them
all, Athens. Yet the democracy of Athens was not only the best documented; it
was also an outlier, far removed from any Greek norm, and not to be confused
withsuch.
It is probably safe to say that at least in the first half of the fourth century,
there were several hundred Greek democracies or democratic poleis, but all
we have by way of evidence to corroborate that crude approximation is the
general statement of Aristotle that in his day most of the then-existent Greek
poleis were some version of either democracies or oligarchies. The number of
the 1,000 or so poleis of which we may state for certain or at least with great
assurance that they were at some time within the fifth or fourth century some
form of demokratia is unfortunately very much smaller. Quite recently, Eric
Robinson has looked beyond Athens to identify those political entitiesboth
individual poleis and federated poleisthat experienced what he calls some-
what vaguely popular government and has come up with a total figure of
something over fifty, the chief of those being Athens, Argos, Corinth, and
Syracuse. Ihave already criticised (Chapter4) what Iconsider to be his unac-
ceptably loose application of demokratia to pre-550 poleis; in my view, there
was no kratos exercised by any demos anywhere until at Athens in 508/7. On
the other hand, Ientirely welcome and share his critique of Athenocentrism
directed against the too widespread view that Athens was the one and only
true democracy (2011:21922), and his two books are marvellous reference
points for exploring the (admittedly jejune) evidence for early extra-Athenian
democracy. Ishall return to the maximum extension of Classical democracy
in the Greek world in the fourth century, and to its acute crises in that century
(Chapter 11); here I shall confine discussion to those phenomena within the
fifth centuryan arbitrary cut-off date, but one that happens to coincide rather
neatly with one of Greek democracys major crises, the tragic Athenian events
of 404/3 and their aftermath.
Athens was a democracy from 508/7, an intensified democracy from 462/1;
between those dates, Athens in the wake of the loyalist Greeks victory over
the Persians established in 478/7 a brand-new, multi-state naval alliance
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that moderns call the Delian League (since it was on the sacred Cycladic
isle of Delos that the founding oaths of alliance were sworn, and there too
that the alliances original headquarters was established). Technically it was a
hegemonic symmachy: an offensive and defensive alliance in which all allies
were allied to the leader, Athens, but not necessarily with each other. Athens
took the lead in establishing the alliance and laying down terms of mem-
bershipfor this reason it might quite usefully be considered as ATO, the
Aegean Treaty Organization. The alliances three explicit aims and objectives
were the exaction of revenge and reparation on the Persians for the damage
caused in 490 and 480/79; the liberation of any Greeks still subject to Persian
domination; and the permanent freedom of all Greeks from Persian control,
for so long as the Persian Empire should exist and constitute a threat to Greek
liberty. Athens was in 478/7 a democracy; the vast majority of the (eventu-
ally) 150 to 200 member allies were not, not then or ever. However, some
including some of the most importanteither were already democracies in
478/7 or became such after 478/7, and in at least one case the Athenians so
impinged upon a member states freedom in the sense of right to political
self-determination as either to impose or at least to support a democratic
constitution.
There is no doubt therefore that the Delian League alliance, which very soon
was converted into an instrument of Athenian external power-politicsan
empire, if a minor examplewas a factor in the extension of democracy in
the Greek world in the fifth century. How significant a factor was it? And how
conscious or deliberate was the role of Athens in this regard? Aristotle interest-
ingly does not say that Athens went around establishing democracies but rather
that they used to put down oligarchies, whereas Sparta contrariwise habitually
overthrew democracies everywhere. On the documentary sideand there very
clearly is a direct connection between Athenian democracy and the Athenian
epigraphic habitthe decree regulating relations between Athens and its sub-
ordinate ally Erythrae in Ionia, probably in the later 450s (Chapter1), is unam-
biguous: had it not been for Athenian power and interventionism, which at
least officially was in line with one of the alliances major, anti-Persian objec-
tives, Erythrae would not have become a democracy then and in that way. But
can one generalise? Relations with Samos in 440/39 might usefully serve as a
testcase.
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Athenian citizenship; and reciprocally vice versa for any Athenian citizens who
wished to relocate permanently to Samos. From the fourth century onwards,
and into the Hellenistic era, isopolity between formally independent poleis
became a far more frequent phenomenon, but in 405 it was practically confined
to cities of the same ethnicity that were members of federal poleis such as that
of the Boeotians.
Of course, the pact between Athens and Samos was concluded in extremis
and may well have had more of a symbolic than a pragmatic motivation and
effect, but it does by its singularity point up the fact that the extension of
Athenian citizenship was not normally a technique of empire, in the sharp-
est possible contrast to the Roman empire, for which the extension of Roman
citizenship to allies and subjects regularly was. Well did the Roman Emperor
Claudius contrast Athenian with Roman practice in this key regard, and explain
the relative brevity of Athens empire precisely in theseterms.
Another useful test case of Athens imperially motivated extension of
democracy is the revolt of Mytilene and its suppression in 427, but here we
must remember that by then Athens and its alliance had been been at war with
Sparta and its alliance for four very tough years. Moreover, if Thucydides is to
be believed, it was precisely from 427 that ideologically driven interventions
on both warring sides became noticeably more frequent, indeed endemic:oli-
garchs, whether ruling or not, appealed to Sparta (which always on principle
made a point of supporting oligarchies elsewhere; Thuc. 1.19), democrats vice
versa to Athens. In 427 Mytilene, one of the five poleis on Lesbos (like Samos,
an offshore east Aegean island), was ruled by an oligarchy, as indeed were three
of the other fourthe one democratic exception being Methymna. Already in
428, during the celebration of the Olympic Games, the Mytilenaean oligarchs
had actively solicited Spartan intervention. In 427, with a Spartan fleet nearby,
they had gone into open revolt, supported by the other three Lesbian oligar-
chies, whereas democratic Methymna stayed loyal to Athens and the alliance.
Athens, together with those allies who could still provide ships and marines,
blockaded Mytilene, in which crisis exacerbated by food shortage the oligarchs
took the decision to supply hoplite weapons to the normally un-armed demos.
No sooner had they received them, however, than they turned them on the
Mytilenaean oligarchs. But was this because of the poor citizen masses under-
lying pro-Athenian democratic ideology, an instance of what a speaker in the
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Athenian assembly later that year was to claim to be the prevailing attitude of
sympathy among the lower classes of the empire and alliance? Or was it due
more simply to hunger, to the desire to end the siege as soon as possible? To
conclude, as far as the behaviour and attitude of imperial Athens go, the safest
answer to the question of its promotion and extension of democracy abroad
within its alliance seems to be that of Roger Brock (2009:161):It did not do so
consistently, nor with a consistent ideological commitment.
After Athens, the best attested cases of Classical democracy are Argos,
Corinth, and Syracuse. Discussion of Argos and Corinth I shall defer to
Chapter11, not least because in 392 they entered into an isopolity agreement
on democratic lines like that between Athens and Samos in 405, except that,
rather than having a long space of sea between them, the territories of the two
poleis were physically contiguous. But it should be recorded here that it was
not the least important feature of Argos history in the fifth century that some
time after 494 it became a democracy and as such allied more than once with
democratic Athens against its hereditary enemy, pro-oligarchic Sparta. It is
unfortunate that the only diplomatic treaty involving Argos in the fifth century
of which the terms are preserved is between oligarchic Argos and Sparta in417.
For Syracuse, however, the evidence relating to its fifth-century political
vicissitudes is distinguished precisely by Syracuses revolutionary political
transformation from governance by a powerful tyrant dynasty to its experience
of a democratic interlude between 466 and 405. It was thus as a democracy
that Syracuse resisted the democratic Athenians ultimately disastrous attempt
to subjugate it and perhaps all Greek Sicily between 415 and 413, prompting
Thucydides to attribute Syracuses successful resistance in significant part to
its democratic constitution. Ancient democracies did fight each other. As at
Athens, democracy at Syracuse succeeded the overthrow of a tyrant dynasty,
but unlike the Peisistratids the Syracusan Deinomenids (Gelon, Hieron, and
Thrasybulus) did not only rule the single polis of Syracusethe largest polis
in Sicily, founded from Corinth in about 730but also possessed a sort of
mini-empire in southeast Sicily and beyond. So it was not just the Syracusans
who overthrew the tyrant Thrasybulus 466, but the Syracusans helped by
allies from cities all over Greek Sicily including Acragas, Himera, Gela, and
Selinous. Syracuse, moreover, was one of those Greek colonial citiesanother
was Heracleia on the Black Seathat had managed to secure an unfree,
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serf-like native (Sicel) labour force with a distinctive collective name (Cillyrii
or Callicyrii), and significant numbers of these too aided the tyrants over-
throw, perhaps in the (no doubt disappointed) hope of better treatment under
a democracy.
Moses Finley, in his general history of pre-mediaeval Sicily, rightly made the
point that the polis as such seems not to have become as rooted an institution
in Greek Sicily as it was in Old Greece. He pointed to the regular recurrence
of property confiscations and mass exilings of political opponents, taken even
to the point of transfers of population that recall the practices of other, much
more recent tyrannies. Sicilian tyrants, moreover, not only had employed very
large foreign mercenary forces, but were in the habit of granting them citi-
zenship; the local historian Diodorus (admittedly writing some four centuries
later) reported that even after the tyrannys overthrow there remained some
7,000 of them still in Syracuse, who were summarily deprived of citizenship
and expelled. The little evidence we have for the form and workings of democ-
racy in Syracuse prompted Finley to suggest that the government almost
looked like the Athenian; the Syracusans even practised a form of ostracism.
However, the council and officials were elected, not chosen by lot, there was
no pay for public political service, and from a passage in Aristotles Politics it
would appear that it was only after the defeat of Athens in 413 that Syracuse
experienced the transition to a form of democracy even remotely resembling
that of their defeated enemies:what Aristotle says is that in 412 the demos hav-
ing been the cause of the victory in the war against the Athenians made a revo-
lutionary transformation from politeia to demokratia. Politeia, in Aristotles
special terminology, was a mixed regime inclining to democracy, not a form of
democracy itself.
That would at any rate explain the influential, leading-statesman role of the
aristocrat Hermocrates in and after 424 bce; and, in order further to explain
why Syracuse had not progressed as far as Athens down the democratic road,
one might perhaps invoke fear of the Sicelsnot only of the free, unsubju-
gated natives of the interior but more particularly of the unfree Cillyrii or
Callicyrii (above); this will probably have been greater than the Athenians
fear of their own large but heterogeneous and polyglot body of mostly pri-
vately owned chattel slaves. Successful resistance to Athens assault between
415 and 413 damped down internal stasis in Syracuse, although the Athenian
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alliance; the experience of Erythrae within this new diplomatic framework has
already been alluded to earlier in this chapter and discussed in Chapter1.
The situation of Naxos, the largest of the Cycladic islands, is every bit as
interesting. Again, our source is Herodotus, and the initial scenario he depicts
relates to the immediate preliminaries to the outbreak of the so-called Ionian
Revolt. The Naxians who currently hold the city were the mass of the people.
As typically would happen in class warfare of this sort, the masses had not only
taken over the reins of power, but ejected a number of those who had previ-
ously held them. Herodotus refers to the latter as fat cats (in Tom Hollands
new translationthe Greek literally calls them the thick); these are the largest
property owners, the rich few. As was to happen all too frequently later in the
fifth century, these fat cats looked to Persia to restore them to their homeland
and to power, and so they appealed to the most influential among their ritu-
alised guest-friends, Aristagoras, the deputy tyrant of Ionian Miletus, because
he happened to be on good terms with Artaphernes, the local Persian satrap
of Lydia based at Sardis. The Persian expedition engineered by Aristagoras,
however, proved a fiasco, and it was not apparently until 490 that a Persian
fleet under Datis and the same Artaphernesen route to punishing Eretria and
Athens for having supported the Ionian Revoltexacted a delayed revenge.
The Naxian masses (or significant numbers of them) fled to the mountain-
ous interior of the island, but the Persians enslaved those of them whom they
caught and torched both religious shrines and the town. What Herodotus does
not add is that they also no doubt replaced the democracy with a compliant
oligarchy of the richest and most pro-Persian Naxians, and that presumably
remained the case until 478/7 when the island-city was enrolled as a founding
member of the Athenians new anti-Persian alliance, the Delian League, con-
tributing ships and crews to allied anti-Persian expeditions.
Even if no regime change was then involved, the Naxian ruling elite must
at least have been required overtly to soften their pro-Persian stance. Within
a decade, however, Naxos was the first ally to stage an open revolt from the
Leaguewhich the Athenians felt they had to suppress with exemplary sever-
ity. Not only were the Naxians required to surrender their ships and pull
down their walls but they were also, in Thucydides formulation, enslaved
contrary to established usage. Enslaved is clearly being used metaphorically
here, meaning deprived of full political autonomy and independence; but to
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most conspicuously in and after 404 at Athens and in cities of its former empire
such as Samos. Spartas preferred foreign policy objective was to surround itself
and its vulnerable Helot base with a cordon sanitaire of cities that were its allies,
and reliably allied because they were under the control of well-disposed oligar-
chies. Members of these subordinate regimes would be connected personally
to leading Spartans, not least the two kings, through ties of ritual friendship. It
therefore took exceptional circumstances for an allied Peloponnesian League
city to achieve letalone maintain democracy, as Mantinea and Elisdid.
Mantinea was one of the two biggest and most powerful cities of Arcadia, the
upland region immediately adjoining Spartas Laconia to the north and there-
fore potentially controlling Spartas egress towards its principal Peloponnesian
enemy, Argos. As was often the case in such situations, Mantinea was frequently
at loggerheads with the other major Arcadian city, Tegea, whichtherefore
was typically far more loyal to Sparta; this was so partly due to its greater prox-
imity but also and not least because Sparta, after a disastrous failed attempt
to helotize it in the 550s, treated Tegea with exceptional respect. Conversely,
Mantinea had the support and example of relatively nearby Argos in its turn
to democracy. Elis, for its part, though not a major city in its own right, con-
trolled and managed the holy site of Olympia and the Olympic Games, giving
it enormous prestige throughout the Hellenic world; Sparta was keen to take
advantage of this religious prestige, and its citizens were notably prominent
and successful competitors in the Games. Normally, therefore, Sparta was very
reluctant to intervene in internal Elean affairs. What sort of a democracy either
Mantinea or Elis had cannot be ascertained, but one assumes that in both cases
it would have been relatively moderate.
From the Peloponnese we move west to the region called by the ancients
Great Greece (Megale Hellas, Magna Graecia), comprising southern Italy from
the bay of Naples southwards. As its very name betraysoriginally Neapolis,
New PolisNaples was one of the many cities, such as Syracuse, founded dur-
ing the early-historical first wave of Greek permanent overseas settlement
(c. 750550). Ancient Taras, in the heel of Italy (Roman Tarentum, mod-
ern Tarantowhence the tarantella) was another, but it was near-unique in
being a foundation from Sparta, which practised, indeed largely invented itself
through, the internal colonization of its own home territories of Laconia and
Messenia rather than exporting surplus population abroad. Taras, together
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with its nearby predecessor Satyrium, was Spartas one true colony, but instead
of aping the political institutions of its metropolis experienced a far more nor-
mal and progressive political trajectory. True, there is a mention of a late-sixth-
century Tarentine figure described as a king, but then Cyrene too, a sort of
granddaughter city of Spartas via Thera (Santorini today), had kings who were
compatible with a republican constitution. (In about 550 bce, in response to a
request from Cyrene, founded c.630 bce, an elite Mantinean called Demonax
had been sent out by his city to act as a political arbitrator at a time of trou-
bles. Demonaxs diplomatic solution was not to abolish Cyrenes kingship but
to limit its powers to certain religious prerogatives, reminiscent of a Spartan
kings or the king Archons at Athens, and to reassign the rest to the people.)
As for Aristophilidas and the Tarentine kingship, by the second quarter of the
fifth century Taras had evolved into the sort of mixed constitutiona moderate
oligarchy inclining to democracythat Aristotle labelled polity.
However, what interested Aristotle most about Taras polity was its trans-
formation into a democracy, probably in the circumstances sketched by the
first-century bce Sicilian annalistic historian Diodorus under the year 473/2.
Amajor all-out war had broken out between the Tarentines and the Iapygians,
the local native- Italic people with whom relations were typically hostile.
The Iapygians reportedly mustered a huge force of 20,000, against which
the Tarentines linked forces with the Greeks of Rhegium (Reggio Calabria
in the toe of Italy). But they suffered a massive defeat in which, according to
Aristotle, many notables lost their lives. Notables was a cant euphemism for
the rich and powerful, so Aristotle was probably implying that in his view it
was this disproportionate loss of life among the elite of Taras that tipped the
balance towards full democracy.
Not far away from Taras, a new-style overseas settlement was founded in the
instep of Italy under Athenian auspices in 444/3:Thouria, alternatively known
as Thurii. This was not the first settlement abroad to be composed of Greeks
from more than one city or indeed ethnic grouping of Greeks; Cyrene again
offers a precedent. But it was apparently without precedent in being founded
with a ready-made code of laws that were democratic; they had been drawn up
by Protagoras (Chapter6). It is tempting to see this as a classic case of ideological
imperialism on the part of the Athenians, seeking to export political power and
influence through the establishment of a tame democracy in a commercially
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and strategically sensitive area; but that was not at all how things panned out
in practice. Aristotle tells a sorry tale of multiple political upheavals, often with
unintended consequences for regime change (from aristocracy to democracy,
and from democracy to dunasteia or collective tyranny). The fact that a politi-
cal exile from Sparta with no known track record of democratic adherence
(Clearidas, adviser of King Pleistoanax) was given not just asylum but citizen-
ship at Thouria in the 440s gives pause; another political exile to benefit from
Thourian generosity was the historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus.
Finally, there is the ambiguous case of Camarina, a Sicilian colony of
Syracuse founded c.600. Amid-fifth century bce cache (archive seems too
grand) of 143 folded lead tablets inscribed with names of citizens together with
their phratries has been found here near the temple of Athena. They were at
first interpreted optimistically as either jury allotment-tokens or records of
payment for assembly attendance, and so as evidence of Athenian-style democ-
racy, whether directly borrowed from Athens or not; but actually they are more
likely to have had a military function, or perhaps they recorded contributions
to a public fund or allocations of land or citizenship. From this evidence alone,
at any rate, one could not infer the nature of Camarinas politeia, although the
very fact of the recording of citizens names in writing may suggest a certain
opennness of governmental practice. However, from Thucydides account of a
debate at Camarina in 415 conducted in face of the Athenians massive Sicilian
expedition, it has been inferred that Camarina did by then have a democratic
constitution. For his representation of the speech by the Athenian ambassador
Euphemus accords very well with the sort of profile he gives to his Athenian
speakers in Assembly debates such as that over Mytilene, and Euphemus audi-
ence does seem to be an open, decision-making citizen assembly.
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two lengthy wars interrupted by a longish interval of uneasy peace. Also open
to question is the nature of Thucydides own political views: on the one hand,
he was a huge admirer of Pericles, and Pericles was undoubtedly a convinced
ideological democrat; on the other hand, Thucydides makes a number of
decidedly unflattering references to the way mobs make political decisions,
casts Cleonthe leading Athenian politician after Periclesas a mere rabble-
rousing demagogue, and states that the Athenians were best governed (enjoyed
the best form of governance?) in his time during the non-democratic, mod-
erately oligarchic regime known for short as the Five Thousand (Chapter 7).
That is no ringing endorsement of the regime of radical democracy over which
Pericles presided as first man.
Thucydides, moreover, was hardly unbiased. He had personally experienced
the fickle wrath (as he would have seen it) of the demos, as coached by the
abhorred Cleon, when he was exiled for committing a rather major military
blunder that was by no means entirely his own fault. And yet as a contemporary
observer and political commentator he is in a class by himself, placed there
not least by his searing analyses of two major bouts of civil waron Corcyra
(Corfu) in 427 and at Athens in 411/10 (further below). No more objective than
he, and no more of an ideological democrat, was Aristotle, yet two central
books (5 and 6) of his Politics addressing how civil war arises in poleis, and
suggesting how it may be either forestalled or least allowed for and healed, are
a master class in political sociology. Civil war could be rendered in ancient
Greek as stasis within a single tribe. But stasis by itself would do just as well,
and it served Thucydides and Aristotle particularly well, as we shall see. Today
we use ancient Greek stasis as a loan word in English, but we use it very differ-
ently, to mean a steady state, a standing-still. For the ancient Greeks stasis in the
political sense was a process of taking a stand, of standing apart together with
ones own side against a rival or enemy grouping, and it was the very opposite
of static in its often bloody application.
Athens democracy was for the greater part of two centuries (508/7322)
quite exceptionally stable. This was despite the more or less constant presence
of a potential fifth-column of diehard oligarchs, who scored great successes in
411/10 and 404/3 but were much less successful thereafter, if no less virulent
in their hatred of democracy as a system; they would have agreed with the
opinion attributed to Alcibiades that democracy was acknowledged lunacy.
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The record of Athenian democratic stability is all the more remarkable in that
the very mode of decision-making and governance by mass meeting with open
majority voting risked the flowing over of divided emotions and tensions into
violence at least once a month in the fifth century, and several times a month in
the fourth. Tension, however, was the norm, and private dissensions between
leading politicians and rivals for the ear and support of the masses were the
inevitable cost of the democratic decision-making mode, and all the more
acute in the absence of any sort of organised party-system. Allegiances were
personal, and the personal at Athens was very political. Indeed, Thucydides
ascribed Athens defeat in the Peloponnesian War in significant measure pre-
cisely to such dissensions, which in his view fatally damaged the effective oper-
ation of policies decided by the Athenian Assembly.
One such personal difference set Pericles against Cimon, another Pericles
against Thucydides son of Melesias. From the ostracism procedure of 443,
which saw the removal of the latter, down to 430, Pericles was apparently
elected General representing his tribe every year. He thus was in a position
to dominate the making of Athens foreign policy at a time when Athens had
become the major imperial power of the eastern Mediterranean. This position
it owed significantly to the feats on the sea of Pericles former rival, Cimon,
who had himself been ostracised in 461. Between 477 and 457 Athens had
established an anti-Persian naval empire in the Aegean, incorporating its old
rival Aegina and major islands such as Thasos, Lesbos, Chios, and Samos; from
457 it also, less wisely, sought to obtain and hold a land-empire, especially in
neighbouring Boeotia. But 454 had brought a major setback in Egypt, and in
446/5 retrenchment was marked by the conclusion of a notionally thirty-year
truce with Sparta and its allies; in fact, it lasted only fourteen.
Depending on ones view of Spartas behaviour and aims and of the over-
all strategic situation in Aegean Greece, Pericles pushed Sparta into declaring
war on the Athenian alliance in 432/1, either by pursuing a relentless policy of
aggression or by not being prepared to compromise on contested territorial
claims. Thucydides was probably under thirty in 431, but even in his maturity
he remained a huge admirer of Pericles, regarding him as Athens first man
and believing to the end that Pericles had always advocated the most prudent
and foresighted policies for Athens, including the correct strategy for overcom-
ing Sparta. Others disagreed, and with reason: Pericles largely passive strategy
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in fact laid the Athenians open to severe loss of morale, and it is unarguable
that he gravely underestimated the cost of the war, especially at sea. The fore-
most critic of Pericles just before and in the early years of the war was Cleon,
a new politician in the sense that he was from a non-aristocratic background,
and from a family that had made its money in trade (a slave-worked tannery).
Cleon advocated an aggressive foreign policy, and urged that Athens should
take the hardest possible line on any allied disaffection or revolt such as that of
the Mytilenaeans in 428/7. However, Thucydides savage portrait of Cleon as a
rabble-rousing, self-interested demagogue, which is echoed in Aristophanes
caricatural comedy Knights of 424, should not be taken at face value. Pericles
was every bit as much of a demagogue as Cleon, and Thucydides at least was
grossly inconsistent in praising Pericles for his sage policies while at the same
time blaming the demos for taking against and indeed sacking Pericles when
the policies he advocated were not working.
Probably at about the same time as Knights was staged, another Athenian
intellectual composed the savage indictment of the democracy that has come
down to us as Pseudo-Xenophons Athenaion Politeia, otherwise known as the
Old Oligarch (Chapter 1). The anonymous authors age is immaterial. The inter-
est of this pamphlet in the present context is that although its author devoutly
desired the overthrow of the democracy and its replacement by oligarchy, he
drops not even the merest hint that such a consummation mightone day, let
alone any time soonbe realised. Rather the opposite: although the author
hates democracy and democrats and does not hesitate to say so, he grudgingly
concedes that the demos knows how to promote and secure what it takes to be
its own best interests, selfish and morally debased as these are. The situation in
Corcyra (ancient Greek Kerkura), allied to Athens since 433, was considerably
more volatile.
Among the precipitating causes of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War
what Thucydides (1.23) called the grounds for complaint and differences
between the two sideswas the Corcyra affair. This was shorthand for a com-
plex piece of diplomacy in the mid-to later 430s involving principally Corcyra,
its metropolis Corinth, Corinths alliance-leader Sparta, and Athens. On appeal
from democratically governed Corcyra against alleged overbearing interfer-
ence by Corinth, the Athenians agreed to conclude an alliance with Corcyra.
It had to be a purely defensive alliance, so as not to be seen to contravene the
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terms of the Truce concluded with Sparta in 446/5. But in the naval war that
broke out between Corinth and Corcyra in 433 a small squadron of Athenian
warships engaged on the Corcyraean side, and the Corinthians brought this
minor clash to Sparta as one of their grounds for complaint, sufficient in their
view to justify Spartas deciding to declare war on Athens. As indeed happened
in 432/1. Four years later, Corinth returned certain Corcyraean prisoners of war
to their homeland, but with the express aim of getting them to make a political
revolution and then break Corcyras alliance with Athens.
That, says Thucydides, was the beginning of the stasis on Corcyra, which
he takes great pains to analyse for two main reasons:first, because it was the
first such outbreak of revolutionary civil war during the Great War, and, sec-
ond, because it was sufficiently representative of stasis as a generic type for his
analysis to be paradigmatic for all the rest. Throughout his account Thucydides
emphasises the passions that were indulged on both the democratic and the
oligarchic sides. Lust for political power arising from greed and ambition was
the main cause of such evils as sons killing their fathers or the gross violation
of religious sanctuary. Much of the intellectual interest of the passage, however,
turns on Thucydides deconstruction and unmasking of a series of (so to speak)
party political slogans. Words and phrases that normally bore one unambigu-
ous meaning were perverted for propagandistic purposes so as to mean almost
the exact opposite, and Thucydides regarded such linguistic perversion as dis-
astrous for Hellenic values and self-respect.
One sloganistic phrase has a peculiar significance from the point of view of
democratic ideology: isonomia politike. As we have seen (Chapter 6), isonomia
was for Herodotus Persian debater Otanes the fairest of names; the addition
of politike in the Thucydides passage draws attention to the fact that the word
could be used with a non-political (for example, a medical) sense. In both the
Herodotus and the Thucydides passages the association of isonomia is with
democracy, though formally equality under the laws could be associated no
less with oligarchy. Thucydides point, however, is that this was a mere demo-
cratic slogan, not to be mistaken for a genuine aspiration. Really what the dem-
ocrats spouting it were seeking were prizes for themselves and ascendancy over
their opponents, not the best interests of the polis as a whole. Thucydides is,
however, even-handed in his critical analysis. The Corcyrean oligarchs were in
his view making a no less specious profession of their desire for self-restrained
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(e.g., rations for hoplites). However, as regards the conduct of the war, it was
shambolic, partly because the regime was so narrowly focused, giving rise
to envy and fear among more moderate anti-democrats, and partly because,
despite the odds being so stacked against them, the Athenian fleet was never-
theless managing to achieve considerable success against the Spartans at sea.
Moreover, the Four Hundreds attempt to spread oligarchic revolution through-
out the allied cities of the empire, while themselves retaining power at Athens
and conducting the war on behalf of the alliance against Sparta and Persia,
backfired horribly. Oligarchic revolutions did indeed take place on a significant
scale in the cities of the empire; Thucydides describes this ironically as their
receiving moderation. But the new oligarchies in the allied cities saw no reason
to continue to bend the knee to Athens and opted for autonomy and independ-
ence (and cessation of tribute payments) instead. When the Four Hundred saw
that they were about to be overthrown from within, so determined were they to
cling to power that they were even prepared to sell out Athens to Sparta, as long
as Sparta would guarantee them continued power as a puppet oligarchy (8.90).
Small wonder, then, that this was not the regime under which Thucydides con-
sidered Athens to have been best governed in his time. That accolade went
rather to the regime that after some four months supplanted it. This is usually
nicknamed the Five Thousand, though actually, since it was based on a limita-
tion of full active political rights to the hoplites and above, excluding the thetes
(the fourth census group, comprising the poor majority of citizens), it should
really be known as the Nine Thousand (or so).
This new regime ruled for about eight months. There is some room for dis-
pute as to whether it was a moderate oligarchythat is, represented the actual
implementation of what had merely been a phoney promise by the desper-
ate Four Hundredor a moderate democracy, in which, although all citizens
retained formal decision-making rights in the Assembly and the courts, only
hoplites and above were eligible for office. My own strong inclination is towards
the former view, not least because the non-democrat Thucydides so strongly
endorsed it. Pronouncing the earliest known version of a mixed constitution
theory of governance, he approved it, he said, because it represented a moderate
mixture in the interests of both the few (rich, mostly oligarchs) and the many
(poor, mostly democrats), by which Itake him to have meant that the regime,
in a Solonian sort of way (Chapter3), accorded to those two groups what they
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kangaroo court. The sorry tale is toldin a very slanted version and with con-
siderable retrospective gleeby the normally pro-Spartan and pro-oligarchic
Athenian exile Xenophon. The most telling moment in his account is when
shouts from the floor of the Pnyx to the effect that It would be monstrous if the
demos were not to be permitted to do whatever it pleasesregardless of the
lawslead to the fateful verdict on the Generals.
What was to become of the Athenian democracy in the ungentle hands of
the Spartans as represented by the fanatically pro-oligarchic Lysander? In short,
it was abruptly terminated and replaced by an equally ungenteel junta of just
thirty ultra-oligarchs, led by Critias. The evidence is to be found in the jejune
and biased narrative of Xenophon, backed up by the also anti-democratic
Ath. Pol., and countered only by a speech written by the distinguished, pro-
democratic metic and speechwriter Lysias in his own behalf, since he was
attacking one of those members of the post-404 regime who had had his own
brother murdered. It was such greed-motivated butchery that gave the new
regime its nickname of the Thirty Tyrants. They were a dunasteia or collective
tyranny, since they lacked constitutional legitimacy and ruled without refer-
ence to law properly so called. They had been imposed on the Athenians at the
point of Lysanders spear, and their vicious rule was propped up by a garrison
supplied by Spartafrom specially liberated members of its Helot underclass.
The Thirty Tyrants aristocratic leader was a relative of Plato on his mothers
side, and, like Plato, a political theorist with an even more pro-Spartan bent
than his kinsman. Critias wrote two accounts of the politeia of the Spartans,
one in prose, one in verse. It is not inconceivable that he had it in mind some-
how to remodel Athens on Spartan lines: at any rate, the number 30 corre-
sponded precisely to that of Spartas senior governing body, the Gerousia, and
there is mention by Lysias of Ephors, a markedly Spartan term of political art.
Theramenes again played a double role in this ultra-oligarchic regimeuntil
he was executed by decision of the so-called Council on Critias orders. But
it was less such internal dissension than the decision of Sparta to cease sup-
porting the Thirty in face of mounting internal and external opposition that
paved the way for its overthrow. Adecisive battle took place in the Peiraeus
between the men of the City (the 3,000 or so citizens of the new oligarchic
polis of Athens) and the men in the Peiraeus, the diehard democrats, which
the latter won, killing Critias in the process. Aleading role was played in the
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peace agreement by the eirenic Spartan king Pausanias, son of the Pleistoanax
who had negotiated the peace with Athens of 421. Democracy was restored yet
again, after the passage of about ayear.
This restoration, however, unlike that of 410, occurred in peacetime, and,
thanks to Pausanias very special kind of non-intervention, it was brought about
in circumstances that allowed the Athenians to think forward, try to learn from
past mistakes, and thus prevent the recurrence of a further anti-democratic
transformation. For Pausanias had compelled the Athenians to swear a mighty
oath of amnestyliterally, not-remembering. Excluded from its terms were
the surviving members of the Thirty and their creatures in the police body
known as the Eleven and the Board of Ten (including another relative of Plato,
Charmides) that had ruled Peiraeus on their behalf. For all other Athenian
citizensand especially of course those who had more or less actively sup-
ported one or other kind of oligarchy between 411 and 403there was to be an
official forgetting of their past anti-democratic crimes:no politically motivated
allegiance or activity entered into before 403 could now be legally or legitimately
used as basis for a court action against an individual. This was probably the first
general amnesty in recorded human history. But of course it was far from being
a purely idealistic arrangement. Failure to comply with the amnestys terms
would bring the Spartans crashing back down on Athenians heads. Likewise to
Spartas advantagePausanias was no soggy liberalwas its insistence on the
recognition or at least non-suppression by the restored democracy of the ultra-
oligarchic statelet of Eleusis, to which some of the men of the City who had
survived the decisive battle in the Peiraeus had fled. Thus did Sparta effect the
political break-up of the Athenian polis, reversing the original unification that
was attributed to founder-hero Theseus and celebrated in the annual festival
of the Synoikia. Imyself would also see the tomb of those Spartans who had
died in the fighting around Athens in 403 as part of the Pausanias deal:it was
prominently located at a junction in the state cemetery of Cerameicus, and at
least the Spartans whose names were honorifically inscribed on the outside of
the tomb were to be remembered favourably by the Athenians.
Among those who had signed up as one of the 3,000 citizens of the new,
Thirty-directed oligarchic polis of Athens was Socrates. Athens had survived its
crisis as a democracy, but Socrates crisis was yet to come. He had not joined the
democratic Resistance in 403, although he had not been an active supporter of
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Greek Democracy in Credit and CrisisI
the Thirty, either. He was thus initially one of those to benefit from the amnesty,
or more precisely from its observance. All the extant sources, oligarchs to a
man, are agreed, rather to their astonishment, that the restored democracy
did as a rule observe its terms faithfully. And in 401/0 the Eleusis statelet was
reabsorbed and the polis reunified. However, in 399 Socrates was put on trial.
How, by whom, why, and with what effects we shall explore in the next chapter,
together with a rather earlier trial involving the arch-oligarch of 411, Antiphon,
and the later trial of Ctesiphon, a proxy for the arch-democrat politician
Demosthenes. All three court cases throw exceptional light on the Athenians
very peculiar democratic practice.
167
Map10.1
The Athenian Agora c.400 bce. From The Agora Excavations, Camp and Mauzy (2009), redrawn by
George Chakvetadze.
10.
Athenian Democracy inCourt
The Trials of Demos, Socrates, and Ctesiphon
I n earlier chapters it has been emphasised that the Athenian demos did
not exercise its kratos only in the Assembly but alsoand with equal author-
ityin what by 460 had come to be called the Dikasteria or Peoples Courts.
This was the newer term for what had been known since Solons day (Chapter
3) as the Heliaea, a term linked etymologically to a Greek word for assembly or
gathering. Aristotle famously defined the citizen of a polis as the one who has a
share in judgement, krisis, and rule or office, arche, making it clear that judge-
ment included the passing of legal, courtroom judgements. The author of the
Aristotelian Ath. Pol. anachronistically but tellingly wrote that when the demos
gains control of the courts, it gains control of the constitution (politeia).
Consistently, the democratic Athenians rendered jurisdiction as demo-
cratic as it could possibly be (Chapter7). Jurymen were chosen by lot, most
of them were drawn from the demos in the sociological sense of the poor
masses, and payment for service in the jury courts was among the first kinds
of political pay to be introduced, on the proposal of Pericles in the 450s. There
were no professional barristers formally in action in court, and there were no
judges in the modern sense of career expertsjurymen were also at the same
time judges, and there was no public prosecutor (or public prosecution ser-
vice):all prosecutors in non-personal cases were volunteers. Legal procedure
was more important than the letter of the law, equity more important than
observing the niceties of strict legal rules of evidence and precedent, and
offences were typically not precisely defined. In short, jurisdiction in demo-
cratic Athens was amateur (in both senses) and attuned as far as possible to
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Figure10.1
Kleroterion fragment
Greek democrats believed that the lottery was the proper way to select citizens for key public functions;
in this case, the lottery machine served to choose dicasts (juror-judges) for the Athenian Peoples Court.
Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
the everyday life experience and notions of the average citizen. In major
political trialsin a sense all trials were political, of coursethe overriding
consideration for a juror was not necessarily the guilt or innocence of the
defendant as charged, but rather what verdict and (where relevant) punish-
ment would most likely further Athens best interests as a democraticpolis.
A key pathway therefore into not only the institutional mechanisms of the
Athenians democratic decision-making but also their democratic mindset is
provided by the extant evidence for court cases between the late fifth and late
fourth century. Some 150 lawcourt speeches survive, and these take us closer
than do any mere narrative references to the actuality of what went on in a
court. Yet these speeches usually represent only one side of a case, and do
not necessarily correspond exactly to what the litigants actually said in court
but rather convey the version of what was actually said that the speechwriter
wished a wider audience or readership to hear or read. In the three trials that
Ive selected here for illustrative purposes the evidence is in the first two cases
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Athenian Democracy inCourt
Figure10.2
Water clock fragment
Greek democrats were fervent believers in strict equality; here the (reconstructed) water clock
metered out exactly equal amounts of time to rival litigants. Getty Images: Dea/ G. Nimatallah
even worse than this, if Imay put it that way:for the trial of the prominent
Athenian citizen called Demos we have just a few fragments remaining from
what was clearly a major lawcourt speech by one of the foremost speechwrit-
ers of the day, and for the trial of Socrates we are reliant mainly on two ver-
sions of his defence speech (the English Apology renders the Greek apologia).
These were composed not by a speechwriter, letalone by Socrates himself (who
wrote hardly anything for publication and possibly did not even deliver a for-
mal defence speech of any kind at the trial), but by two philosophically minded
followers of his, each of whom had his owndifferentagenda. In the third
and final case, the trial of Ctesiphon, we do almost uniquely have written ver-
sions of speeches delivered on both sides, although not a version of the formal
defendants speech.
It is my contention that the implications of these trials are so fundamental
and central to the understanding of the fifth-and fourth-century democracy
(or democracies) that the vagaries and deficiencies of the evidence are worth
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struggling against. Each in its different way arose from a crisis of the Athenian
democracy: the first two from the crisis experienced in the last fifteen years
or so of the fifth century, involving a major military defeat, the third from the
crisis occasioned by the catastrophic military defeat of 338. The cases, finally,
throw broad beams of light upon Athenian high society and foreign policy,
upon Athenian religious politics, and upon the dynamics of the rivalry for the
ear and favour of the demos between leading politicians, for whom the current
phrase was the orators and politically active. What follows is a rather stream-
lined account ofeach.
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Athenian Democracy inCourt
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the accusation that Demos was somehow, if not an outright Persian sympa-
thiser (medizer), unduly constrained in his political activity by his family
connection to the Persian royal house. Whatever the outcome of the trial (Id
guess Demos was found not guilty), Demos reappears still diplomatically
active deep into the 390s.
The date of the speech and trial is, as mentioned, unknown, but it has of
course to have been held not later than 411, the year of Antiphons execution.
Apossible context in or around 415 or 414 is suggested by the following cir-
cumstances:around 415/4 Athens was actively supporting the rebel satrap of
Lydia against his master the Great King; at the same time there was a general
witchhunt being conducted at Athens, prompted by two religious scandals
(mutilation of sacred images of Hermes in 415, and private profanations of
the Eleusinian Mysteries); and in 414 Aristophanes had performed his memo-
rably colourful, escapist comedy Birds. On this reconstruction Erasistratus
looks to have been taking a high demagogic line against Demos, playing the
pro-democratic volunteer prosecutor on behalf of the Athenian polis, and
yet a decade or so later this same Erasistratus was, hypothetically, an ultra-
oligarchic member of the Thirty. Such a volte-face would have been neither
unprecedented nor entirely surprising. Peisander too had started out as a
democratic ultra before becoming a leading light of the Four Hundred. And
perhaps what started Erasistratus on his anti-democratic road, ironically
enough, was his failure in this high-profile court case, in which his oppo-
nents brilliant defence consultant was a shadowy backroom politician of
consistently oligarchicviews.
In short, the trial of Demos throws all sorts of unusual sidelights on the
Athenian democratic process in the later fifth century bce. Aristophanes had
as it were put Demos on trial comically in his Knights of 424: Demos as a
character is made to look rather slow and foolishif well-intentionedby his
uppity and borderline crooked slave politicians. But the real trial of a politi-
cian with the given name Demos, a man from the top social drawer advised
by the leading forensic consultant and speechwriter of the day, shows what
the real Athenian demos had to contend with if they were to carry out one of
the cardinal theoretical as well as pragmatic principles of demokratia, namely
making their leaders legally responsible as well as responsive to their per-
ceived wishes andneeds.
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Athenian Democracy inCourt
Figure10.3
Demosthenes
Demosthenes (384322 bce) was an exact coeval of Aristotle, but whereas Aristotle was not a democrat
or practical politician, Demosthenes championed democracy against Aristotles former employer and
Athens conqueror, King Philip II of Macedon. Vanni Archive/ Art Resource, NY
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Socrates was accused, before the court presided over by the king Archon, of
impiety, a potentially capital offencebut not only of that. He was also accused
of corrupting the youth of Athens. The jurors were, as always, a random selection
chosen by lot from the total panel for that year of six thousand. Their number,
501, was a usual sizetoo big to be easily bribable, but big enough to constitute a
grouping whose opinions were reflective of the body politic as a whole. Above all,
it was an amateur jury, not necessarily able to specify precisely what the principal
charge of impiety denoted or connoted, but knowing an impious citizen when
they saw one. They probably all of them would at least have heard of Socrates
before his trial, and many of them could have seen him in action philosophising
in or around the Agora. Given the jurys likely age profile, quite a few would have
been old enough to have seen Clouds twenty-four years earlier or even to have
fought with him at the siege of Potidaea between 432 and 429. Socrates himself,
born in 469, was seventy in 399. All of them too would have known or soon been
told that in 404/3 he had been enrolled as a citizen under the oligarchic regime of
the Thirty, and that among his pupils and followers had been the late Alcibiades,
convicted for impiety in 414, and the late Critias, capo of the Thirty.
To return to the charge sheet in more detail, Socrates was accused, first, of
not duly recognising the gods and goddesses whom the polis of the Athenians
officially recognised and worshipped, and of introducing other new divinities.
To which accusation of impiety was added the second, moral-political charge
that he had subverted and corrupted (literally destroyed) the youth of Athens.
The chief prosecutora volunteer, since this was not a charge involving per-
sonal or familial damagewas a relatively unknown and not politically promi-
nent poet called Meletus. But one of his two supporting prosecution speakers
was Anytus, a very prominent politician indeed; he had played a conspicuous
role in the restoration of democracy in 403, and it may have been he who was
particularly responsible for adding the charge of corruption to that of impiety.
The other supporting speaker, Lycon, is as unknown as Meletus, which sug-
gests that these two prosecutors may have represented themselves as Athenian
everymen deeply offended by Socrates alleged irreligion. The latter, they will
surely have argued, had so offended the gods as to alienate their goodwill from
the people and city of Athens: hence the plague of 430, the public and private
impieties of 415, the utter defeat by Sparta in 404, and the horrors of civil war
in 403, all signs of divine enmity in the eyes of ordinary believing Athenians.
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The legal procedure employed was a public writ alleging impiety. Impiety
would not have been defined by statute, and anyhow Athenian religion was not
a matter of doctrine and dogma but rather of customary values and above all
conventional behaviour; that meant especially participation in collective public
worship at, for example, the Great Dionysia and Panathenaea festivals (Chapter
8). Hence the verb used for not duly recognising (nomizein) the citys gods and
goddesses has the same etymological root as nomos in both its sense of law
and its sense of customary practice. Xenophons Socrates protests vigorously
that he had participated adequately and conventionally enough in such rituals,
but Platos Socrates in the Apology and elsewhere in Platos works suggests that
even if his overt religious practice had been conventional, the spirit in which
hed conducted it was not at all conventional. Besides, there was the matter of
Socrates own personal little supernatural power (daimonion), which he not
only did not disavow but seems to have been rather proud of. For he claimed
that this inner voice, a sort of hotline to the divine, only ever told him when
not to do something. But that would have done nothing to reassure the jury of
his religious normality or to combat his popular image, relentlessly exploited
by Aristophanes, as a batty old fellow with some very odd and potentially very
dangerous religious ideas. Ordinarily, perhaps, that wouldnt have mattered all
that muchbut when the gods seemed to have turned against Athens so vio-
lently, any unconventional religious attitudes might well have been taken as
jeopardising the entire community and therefore in need of official and public
purgation.
Likewise any unconventional religious behaviour, such as the alleged intro-
duction of other new divinities. There was nothing in itself impious in intro-
ducing new divinitiesso long as the introduction was done publicly and
officially through the proper democratic channels, by the demos itself; for
then the divinities in question (Asclepius, Bendis, Pan, etc., all fifth-century
additions) would, despite their varied origins and natures, all end up in the
recognised Athenian pantheon, and so long as the divinities were commonly
recognised divine beings or powers. But for Socrates to introduce by himself
his own private divinities for his personal, not communal, benefit: that, even
if it was not necessarily illegal, contravened Athenian democratic custom and
convention. Other here means the other of two, polar opposite categories of
divinities, the good and the bad: Socrates were of course badantisocial at
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best, positively harmful to the citizen community at worst. Greeks had more
than one word for new; Meletus choice of kaina, brand-new, carried the con-
notation of dangerously newfangled. Since Athenian religion overall was an
ancestral affair, characterised by tradition and conformity, such novelty was by
definition a bad thing. Finally, there are the divinities (daimonia): by using the
plural, the prosecutors wanted not just to refer to Socrates inner voice but to
draw a contrast between the host of gods and goddesses that the city officially
recognised and worshipped, the theoi, and the inferior demons that allegedly
were Socrates preferred religious currency.
To me that adds up to a very powerful religious indictment, even if the pros-
ecution were not obliged to spell out precisely how it counted as impiety, and
it explains why the religious charge comes first and is the more fully elabo-
rated. Many scholars, however, believe that the second chargecorrupting the
youthwas as it were the real one, but that it could not be spelled out because
it would have violated the terms of the Amnesty sworn in 403 (Chapter 9).
Undoubtedly, by the youth the prosecution (especially Anytus?) had in mind
very specifically two Athenian youths whom Socrates had somehow men-
tored:Critias (born about ten years after Socrates) and Alcibiades (born about
450). Each of them had flagrantly pro-Spartan and anti-democratic track
records; Alcibiades, moreover, had actually been convicted of sacrilege, and
Critias was debited with composing inflammatory, anti-conventional reli-
gious drama. And some fifty-five years later, in 345 bce, the leading politician
Aeschines bluntly stated in a major political trial speech: You put to death
Socrates the Sophist who taught Alcibiades and Critias. But instead of this
being the real charge, Iwould suggest rather that it was added on, to convince
those jurymen who may not have been entirely clear what impiety was or how
precisely Socrates was guilty of it, but were quite clear that Socrates had been
complicit with traitors and enemies of the democracy.
Finally, there is the issue of the penalty imposed. Since this was technically
a lawsuit without an automatic, fixed penalty, the jury was required to vote
twice, first on guilty or not guilty, and second (after further arguments or
pleas by prosecution and defence) on the penalty. Voting was done by secret
ballotjurors placed one of two bronze ballots (one for guilty, the other for
not guilty) in a receptacle in such a way that it could not be seen which of the
two had been deposited. It turned out that more of the 501 jurors voted for the
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death penalty demanded inevitably by the prosecution than had voted Socrates
guilty in the first place: a possible breakdown for the first round is 281 versus
220, since it was said that just 30 votes going the other way would have given
Socrates a majority for acquittal, and then 321 to 180 for the second round.
What had gone so wrong for Socrates? His claim that, so far from being guilty
as charged and therefore a public menace, he was in fact a public benefactor,
indeed a kind of public hero who deserved to be honoured in something like
the manner and style in which victors in the Olympic games were honoured
(free meals in the City Hall, reserved seats at the theatre, etc.), will not have
endeared him to some of the jurors; to others the size of the fine that he eventu-
ally did volunteer to payhalf a talentwill not have seemed either adequate,
given that he had very rich friends such as Crito, or proportionate to his mon-
strous crimes.
All the same, Socrates did not absolutely have to die. I put it that way
because probably the vast majority of non-specialist observers of the trial and
its outcome, following Platos lead, see Socrates enforced death as a major and
indelible blot on Athenian democracys record. For example, for the British
nineteenth-century philosopher and campaigner J.S. Mill, who was otherwise
normally prepared to defend the democracy against its anti-democratic crit-
ics, it represented one of his greatest bugbears, the tyranny of the majority, in
unforgivable action. For I.F. Stone, the twentieth-century contrarian and activ-
ist, the Athenian democratic jurys crime was to have broken the democracys
own basic principle of freedom of political speech. To them Irejoin that the
fact of the trial and the manner of its proceeding were both entirely democratic
(there was no such principle as Stone posited), and entirely just, according to
the Athenians democratic notions of religion, politics, and justicewhich are
not ours, and that, as regards the death of Socrates (self-administered; techni-
cally, he was not executed, as he is usually said to have been), it need not have
happenedif, as Ibelieve many convicting jurors will have expected would be
the case, Socrates had gone into permanent exile with the help of his devoted
and very wealthy friends. The devoted Plato in his Crito dialogue makes his
Socrates argue that the very laws of Athens required him not to so flee, but
few if any of the jurors would have seen Socrates as quite such an unquestion-
ingly obedient servant of Athens democratic laws. If therefore Socrates was a
martyr to freedom of religious thought and political action, he was very much
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a voluntary martyr. And the Athenian demos, as represented by the jury at the
trial of Socrates, should be found not guilty of undemocratic activities.
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trial of Ctesiphon on that charge was postponed and not reactivated until 330,
following the crushing of Spartan king Agis IIIs rebellion against Alexander
the Greats Macedon (from which Athens had wisely stayed aloof). Ctesiphon
was the official defendant in the trial, but he in effect handed his defence over
to Demosthenes, acting in the capacity of supporting advocate. So powerful
and so effective was Demosthenes crown oration (a lavish version of which
he published, as, less understandably, Aeschines had published a version of his
prosecution speech) that Aeschines failed to win even one-fifth of the jurors
votes.
All such prosecutions were high-stakes, high-risk political manoeuvres. But
for Aeschines this defeat was so complete and so final that, his career in shreds
and tatters, he went into permanent exile, first on Rhodes and then on Samos,
both islands very far from Athens. The Greeks had a rather gloomy proverbial
saying look to the end: this meant that so long as you ended your career, or
your life, well, then your career and life would be adjudged both retrospectively
and prospectively to have been a success. If the reverse occurred, however, then
the reverse view operatedregardless of how many or how great were the ear-
lier successes one might have achieved. Aeschines certainly had achieved great
successes. Not least of them was his successful prosecution in 345 of another
supporter of Demosthenes, Timarchus, which he followed up in 343 with a
successful defence against Demosthenes prosecution of him for malfeasance
during a diplomatic mission to Philip in 346 on which they had served as fellow
ambassadors. But in 330 the jury deemed otherwiseindeed, resoundingly so.
Aeschines, as noted, did not even achieve a certain required minimum (one-
fifth) of the votes, and therefore had to pay a large finefinancial injury heaped
upon political insult.
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11.
Greek Democracy inCredit
and CrisisII
The Golden Age of Greek Democracy (c. 375350)
and Its Critics
I open this act of our democratic drama with a couple of seeming para-
doxes. First, the golden age of ancient Greek democracy that I have in mind
is not the age of Pericles or any other portion of the fifth century bce, before the
temporary termination of Athens democracy and empire in 404. It falls rather
in the second quarter (more or less) of the succeeding fourth century. This
centuryan accidental product of the bce/ce system of chronography devised
in the sixth centuryis often viewed erroneously as a time of decline from a
supposed fifth-century peak. In fact, although it did undoubtedly witness the
general and near-universal suppression and supersession of democracy in the
Greek world by one or other form of monarchy, that was not before democracy
had genuinely peaked. Second paradox: Sparta, the city that refused to coun-
tenance at home what counted for the ancient Greeks as demokratia and that
dedicated itself abroad to supporting oligarchies and forestalling or eliminating
democracies, nevertheless as its power waned provoked and fostered its spread,
including in important Greek cities that had hitherto managed to get by with-
out benefit of democracy.
In this chapter we shall attempt both to do justice to Spartas own unique,
alternative political system and to chart the rise of democracy as a global phe-
nomenon of the fourth-century Greek world. But first it is well to recall that
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Figure.11.1
Model of Athenian Acropolisc.400
The High City of Athens had been the political and religious centre of the region since time immemorial,
but in the fifth century, following the Persian sack (480 and 479 bce), it was rebuilt, reconfigured, and
embellished to an extraordinary degree. Through the monumental entrance way (Propylaea) the visitor
was confronted by a plethora of statuary and minor shrines, above which towered the great Parthenon
and Erechtheum temples, both dedicated to the citys patron Athena. With permission of the Royal
Ontario Museum ROM.
within the period to be covered here there was born and grew to maturity one
of the great innovating intellectual geniuses of the ancientor indeed any
world, a giant thinker, as one of his most devoted followers (Karl Marx) aptly
called him:Aristotle, son of Nicomachus of Stageira (or Stagirus) in northern
Greece (384322). In about 335 Aristotle founded at Athens his philosophi-
cal school known to us as the Lyceum, and it was exclusively for students of
this school that the work that we call the Politics was produced. Later scholars
divided the work as a whole into eight books, but it is a mark of its rawness and
the occasional inconsistency due to its origin in lecture notes that the ordering
of the books is disputed. Mine follows the majorityview.
Book 1: what is the (nature of the) polis, and who are its necessary con-
stituents. Book 2: ideal poleis, whether actual (e.g., Sparta) or imagined
(e.g., Platos Republic), that had been proposed as models but which Aristotle
finds variously flawed. Book 3: what is a citizen? Aristotles own definition of
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the polites, the adult, free male polis member or citizen, as he who actively
shares and participates in judgment, including legal judgment, and ruling,
was by his own admission better suited to defining the citizen of a democracy
than of an oligarchy. Book 4: still very theoretical, setting out typologies of
regimes. Democracy was not itself one single thing; rather, it could be further
analysed into sub-species, of which the Athenian democracy of his day was
taken to be one of the few to represent the last or most extreme version. Books
5 and 6: the mainly empirical books, either somehow based on or related to the
158 Politeiai compiled by him and his students, of which only the Athenaion
Politeia (Ath. Pol.) survives as such. Book 5 focuses on how staseis (political
revolutions or other major disturbances) arise and how they may be avoided;
Book 6 looks at the varieties of democracy and oligarchy, again with an eye to
how they may best be conserved and preserved. Books 7 and 8: an incomplete
sketch of Aristotles own ideal utopia, to which we shall return at the end of
this chapter.
Most golden-age Greek democracies were less extreme, more moderate,
than the Athenian. Sparta, on the other hand, was not a democracy at all, in
the accepted political-constitutional sense; but what exactly it was posed a real
problem of classification. Aristotles account in Book 2 well reflects the diffi-
culty that ancient analysts had in assigning Sparta to any one defined consti-
tutional form. The explanation for that lies in Spartas achievement of a stable
constitutional form very early on, perhaps earlier indeed than any other Greek
city, and thus well before democracy had been invented either as an institu-
tional practice or as an analytical category. Since the Spartan polity seemed to
possess monarchical (or at least kingly), oligarchical-aristocratic and demo-
cratic features, one vaguely respectable escape route touted by Aristotle among
others was to dub its politeia mixed. Most commentators, however, saw it as
some form of aristocracy or oligarchy. Xenophon was alone in speaking of it
as a kingship. Those who were prepared to bite the bullet and call it a democ-
racy significantly did not do so on grounds of the citys strictly political, deci-
sion-making institutions, but because of two cardinal social institutions: the
common, compulsory, and centrally imposed upbringing, successful passage
through which was a requirement for attaining citizenship; and the com-
mon dining-messes, membership of which was a requirement for gaining and
retaining citizenship status.
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The case of Mantinea was rather different, and rather more difficult for Sparta.
It was a city of Arcadia, but traditionally it was at odds with the other major city
of that region, Tegea in the far south (which typically had maintained cordial
relations with Sparta since the mid-sixth century); uncomfortably for Sparta,
it was located much nearer to Argos. During and after the Peloponnesian War,
Mantinea had been a less than enthusiastic ally of Sparta, despiteor because
ofa separate thirty-year treaty concluded in 417. Presumably the Spartans had
sought to tie down the Mantineans by treaty in the wake of their victory over
the Athenians at the battle of Mantinea the previous year, so as to pre-empt
the kind of insolence and insubordination they had suffered from Elis in 420.
A further complicating factor was the residence in Mantinea since 395 of the
exiled Spartan king Pausanias.
Spartas legal system was in many ways rather unpolished; as mentioned,
there was no popular judiciary, and the chief judicial magistrates were also the
states chief executive officers, the Ephors, who exercised legal judgment with-
out the constraint either of written laws or of formal legal precedent. When
sitting in judgment upon a king, they sat together with the other twenty-nine
members of the Gerousia, forming a supreme constitutional court of sorts. In
403 that supreme court had acquitted Pausanias of the charge, levelled by his
fellow king Agis, of un-Spartan activities:for being in effect soft not just on
the Athenian democrats in the Peiraeus but even on democracy as such, since
he had overseen the democratic restoration at Athens in the teeth of Spartan
opposition from above all the fanatically pro-oligarchic Lysander. In 395 sup-
porters of the late Agis and of Lysander, including pre-eminently Agesilaus
(whose vote would have had to be delivered by a proxy, since he was away
campaigning in Asia at the time), saw their chance to wreak their revenge at
last upon Pausanias, and he was put on trial again, on exactly the same charge
as in 403Spartas legal system countenanced double jeopardy in such cases of
alleged high crimes and misdemeanours. This time he was found guilty and,
rather than have him executed (which would have raised delicate religious
issues, since Spartan kings were to a degree sacrosanct), the Spartans banished
him sine die (as indeed they had banished his father, Pleistoanax, half a century
before in 445). Pausanias decision to spend his exile at Mantinea was not with-
out political calculation, although whether it was influenced by any ideological
sympathy for democracyas opposed to principled respect for the genuine
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The size of the democratic citizen body of Phleious was a doubly relevant
argument. Spartas own citizen body was by this time reduced to only about
2,500 to 3,000. But for Agesilaus it was not the size of Phleious citizen body
that most motivated him but the fact that it was a disloyal democracy. He
therefore gave every support and comfort to the handful of exiled oligarchs,
encouraging them to behave as much as possible like Spartans in order to win
the besieging Spartans respecta tactic that proved by no means wholly suc-
cessful. In another work of Xenophon, his posthumous encomium of the king
known simply as the Agesilaus, this irredentist, politically retrograde attitude
of Agesilaus is given a wholly positive, moralistic spin:regardless of its political
dubiety, it was for his eulogist a classic example of Agesilaus virtue of love for
his close political comrades. That paid practical political dividends in the form
of the passionate loyalty shown thereafter to Sparta by oligarchic Phleious. In
particular, the city was especially energetic in the 370s in supporting Sparta
against democratic Thebes, and remained unswervingly loyal even after the
disaster of Leuctra in 371 and the dissolution of the Peloponnesian League in
the mid-360s. For that conspicuous loyalty, it earned Xenophons highest praise.
So we come to focus on Thebes, the major player in mainland Greek politics
after 404 along with (and often locked in a fateful triangle with) Sparta and
Athens. Thebes had been allied to Sparta since the late sixth century, and, as the
leading city of the oligarchic Boeotian federal state (formed in 447 following
the liberation of Boeotia from Athenian control), it remained loyaljustto
Sparta throughout the Peloponnesian War. But in 404 Thebes claimed to be
exceptionally annoyed that Sparta had not physically annihilated Athens, and
in 403, though still oligarchic, it had supported the restoration of democracy at
Athens, precisely so that Sparta could no longer use a tamed oligarchic Athens
as a catspaw against itself. In 395, when still oligarchic, Thebes and the Boeotians
finally did revolt from Sparta to join a quadruple alliance with Athens, Argos,
and Corinth. In 386, therefore, it was a principal target of Spartas vengeful
resentment, and a principal motive for Spartas conclusion of and swearing to
the terms of the Kings Peace was to keep Thebes in what Agesilausallegedly
a Thebes-haterin what he considered its proper, subordinate place.
The peaces autonomy clause ostensibly guaranteed to all cities freedom from
external interference or control, but it was more than once breached by Sparta,
and most blatantly of all in the case of Thebes in 382. Sparta then imposed
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including Thebes and its renewed ally Athens, on the battlefield of Chaeronea
in Boeotia in 338, Philip took a leaf out of Spartas book: he terminated the
Thebans democracy, replaced it with an oligarchy, and installed a garrison to
guarantee the new order. When nevertheless Thebes rose up in revolt against
Philips son and successor Alexander III, that was considered a step too far, and
in 335 Alexander ordered to be done to Thebes what Thebans had wanted done
to Athens in 404: physical annihilation.
Little or nothing of that unhappy demarche could have been predicted in
the newly democratised Thebes of 378. Indeed, in that year Thebes was so
gung-ho and on such good terms with Athens that it consented to join, as
one of six founder members, a new and fundamentally anti-Spartan alli-
ance headed up by Athens, the Second Athenian League, even though it was
a basically maritime organisation. Alongside those two stood the island-city
of Rhodes (founded only at the end of the fifth century), Byzantium (later
Constantinople), Methymna (one of the five cities of Lesbos, already dem-
ocratic and uniquely loyal to Athens back in 427), and Chios, another east
Aegean island-city. Boeotia does have a coastline (including Aulis of Homeric
fame), but inland Thebes was hardly less landlubbing than inland Sparta. The
other five founder allies were significantly naval, and all were democracies.
Rhodes, largely because of its strategic location, was the site of fierce ideologi-
cal internal battles and political reversals both at the end of the Peloponnesian
War and in the early fourth century. Of Byzantiums internal politics little is
known, but its strategic situation at the mouth of the Bosporus made it a vital
asset to Athens and a key prize in the struggle for Mediterranean supremacy
between Athens and Sparta. Methymna had been a democracy already in the
later fifth century, when as noted it alone had stood aloof from the revolt of 427
against Athens of the other four Lesbian cities led by then oligarchic Mytilene.
But Chios, like Thebes, had never been a democracy until the early fourth cen-
tury; indeed, Thucydides had singled it out for praise as a city that conducted
its oligarchy with exemplary sober moderation (8.56, 9, 14, esp. 24), and it
was as a ship-contributing oligarchy that it had revolted from Athens alliance
in 411, thereby contributing significantly to Athens naval embarrassment in
the eastern Aegean. Yet when it first made alliance again with Athens, in 384
the year after the break-up of Mantinea, at a time when Sparta was blatantly
exploiting its position within the framework of the Kings Peace to drive its
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priority. In 357355, finally, major defections from Athens were led by two other
founder members, Chios and Byzantium, who received important financial as
well as moral support from a Carian governor in Persian service (Mausolus of
Halicarnassus). The resulting Social (allied) War was an emphatic defeat for
Athensand the end of Athens ability to advocate let alone enforce its wishes
through naval power. By 355, too, Athens had not only Mausolus to contend
with in Asia, but a nearer and more deadly adversary in Europeone that not
only succeeded in gaining control of Amphipolis for himself but also threatened
Athens very lifeline of imported grain from the Black Sea. That enemy was the
former Theban hostage Philip II of Macedon, and it was his kingdom that was to
decide the fate not just of Athens power abroad, but (as we shall see in Chapter
14) of its very democracy at home.
Finally, there is Argos, the next most important democracy in mainland
Greece after Athens. It had become a democracy early in the fifth century and
remained such, with periodic oligarchic interruptions, thereafter. Because it
was always anti-Spartan, it was always potentially open to alliance with fellow
democratic Athens, and the two cities duly became allied first in the late 460s,
a critical moment in the history of Athens democracy. In his Oresteia trilogy
of 458 the patriotic tragedian Aeschylus significantly transferred the seat of
King Agamemnon from the traditional Mycenae to Argosin part but only
in part, because in hard contemporary reality Argos had physically destroyed
little Mycenae in the early 460s. During the Peloponnesian War (broadly inter-
preted to include the interim period of phony peace from 421 to 414) Argos
experienced some switching between democratic and oligarchic regimes but
remained solidly democratic in the fourth century, when, as noted above, it
joined with Athens in a quadruple alliance against Sparta in 395. Defeat of
Argos by Sparta in the Corinthian War did not lead to the termination of its
democracyas was the case for Corinthbut Sparta did put an end in 386 to
the remarkable political union (isopolity) of Argos with Corinth. As is usu-
ally the case with all Greek internal politics, very little is known in detail of the
workings of the Argive democracy between the early fifth and the early fourth
century. But quite recently a major archaeological discovery has thrown a flood
of new light on at least one aspect of them: public finance.
A hoard of some 150 inscribed bronze tablets has been unearthed, almost
all of them official records of the political-cum-religious organizations dealing
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with sacred funds of Hera (the citys patron goddess) and Athena (to whom the
state treasury was devoted). This is a veritable treasure trove of financial trans-
actions:rents, leases, sales of confiscated property, interest paid out on loans,
spoils of war, fines and penalties of many sorts, proceeds from the sale of hides
of public sacrificial victims, even bribes from Persians (to support anti-Spartan
activity). Expenditures were made on war, on the Heraea (Heras annual festi-
val, including athletic games), on the manufacture of cult objects, on construc-
tion works on Heras temple and the hippodrome (a horse race course), on
roads, on expenses for cults, on the salaries of workmen, andnot leaston
the inscribing of the records. Many of the sums are very large:for example, one
of 217,373 silver drachmas (c. 720 skilled man-years of pay), or unworked gold
weighing 700 drachmas (on the Euboic standard); there is possibly record even
of gold dust. Most officials served only a six-month term, to ensure observance
of the democratic principle of rotation of office and prevent undue access to
such temptingly large sums. Democratic too, in ideology, were the inscription
of the records on non-perishable materials and their public display.
However, democratic Argos, like democratic Corcyra in 427, also exemplifies
to an unfortunate degree the downside of Greek-style politics: in-your-face,
black-white, zero-sum. In 370 there occurred the notorious clubbing to death
of some 1,200 to 1,500 oligarchs by democratic thugs (Diodorus 15.58). That
was exactly the sort of fanatical, extremist behaviour that the moderate non-
democrat Aristotle would deplore in his Politics and offer sage advice on how
best to avoid or pre-empt. It was also just the sort of behaviour that led dedicated
opponents of Greek democracy to conjure up imagined ideal polities that were
as far removed from the actualities of democracyas they perceived themas
they could possibly be. One such dedicated opponent stands head and shoul-
ders above all other political theorists, not least in this regard:Plato of Athens
(c. 428347). Bitter personal experience, both as a relative of leading figures
in the regime of the Thirty and as a devoted disciple of Socrates (Chapter10),
seems to have led to his decision to withdraw more or less completely from
active, public participation in the politics of his native Athens, which for all but
one or two of his eighty-odd years was governed democratically.
This is not necessarily, however, the same as saying that Plato abandoned
all political ambition, and there is indeed a case for arguing that he aimed
through the pupils he educated at his Academy (named after its location within
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202
12.
Athenian Democracy atWork
inthe Age ofLycurgus
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dozen or so years the recovery of Athens economic, political, and even spir-
itual fortunes. But was the revived Lycurgan democracy a different kind of
Athenian democracy? If so, it would have been Athens third or fourth, and not
necessarily its last (see Chapter14).
The restored democracy of 403 took a long time to regain an internal politi-
cal equilibrium before it attempted once more to throw its (much reduced)
weight around in the Aegean sphere. The trial of Socrates in 399 (Chapter
10) well illustrates the kinds of enduring tensions that the civil strife of 404/
3 engendered. In the mid-390s through ex-general Conon Persian funds were
channelled to Athens rather than Sparta to finance the rebuilding of Athens
city walls and those of the Peiraeus, and in the late 390s the first green shoots of
a naval resurgence under the leadership of civil war hero Thrasyboulus became
evident. But as in 405/4 so again in 387/6 the Spartans, thanks to renewed
Persian financial support, achieved naval control of the Hellespont and so a
stranglehold on Athens jugular. It was through the Hellespont waterway that
the literally vital bread wheat flowed to Athens annually from the grainlands of
todays south Russia, Crimea, and Ukraine. Athens, along with its other three
main allies (Argos, Corinth, the Boeotians), soon found itself forced to submit
to the terms of the Kings Peace. But the treaty might just as well have been
named after Spartan king Agesilaus II (r. c. 400359), since it was he who most
energetically applied his interpretation of the peace terms throughout main-
land Greece in what he took to be Spartas best interests.
It was against this domineering, expansionist, imperialist Sparta of Agesilaus
that in 378 Athens founded a new multi-state Greek military and political
alliance, the Second Athenian League. This proved an instant hit, and by 375
the League could count some seventy-five adherents and some notable naval
successes. It even managed to include among its founders a newly democra-
tized Thebes, which in turn led a newly democratized and militarily enhanced
Boeotian federal state. In 371, however, Thebes crushed Sparta and its allies at the
Battle of Leuctra; and although that spelled the beginning of the end of Sparta as
a great power, the Thebans emergence also so frightened Athens that it actually
allied itself again with Sparta. Not that landlubbing Sparta could ever have been
much use as an ally to the Athenians in what from 368 became their obsessively
overriding foreign policy objective. This was to recover by sea Amphipolis in
northern Greece, a strategically located and materially well endowed city that
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by grabbing hold of Amphipolis. As ever, his timing was superb. For in that
same year there broke out within the decaying remnant of the Second Athenian
League a revolt known as the Social (that is, allied) War; this was led by demo-
cratic Chios (a founder-member of the League) and Byzantium, and was cru-
cially aided by Maussolus of Caria, a Persian local governor who had adopted
the mainly Greek city of Halicarnassus as his new capital. Athens defeat in the
Social War in 355 ended its claims to be a great navalor indeed any kind
of power. Failure at sea provoked both Isocrates conservative political tract
known as the Areopagiticus (Chapter11) and Xenophons rather radical pam-
phlet titled Poroi, devoted to ways and means of increasing public revenues.
The Athenian democracy was in a rather parlous condition.
This was hardly the most auspicious moment for the thirty- year-
old
Demosthenes to make his political debut, but it is not at all surprising that he
should have done so under the wing of a conservative, managerial technocrat
such as Euboulus, who was more concerned about restoring and conserving
Athens public finances than promoting or pursuing any particularly demo-
cratic agenda. Demosthenes, however, increasingly took issue with his mentor
over what he considered the paramount need for Athens to take on Philip in his
own northern backyard, rather than wait and watch as he spread his tentacles
and complaisant oligarchies or even tyranniesever further south. It was in
352 that Demosthenes appears to have experienced an ideological quasi-
conversion and moved sharply to the left, and it was over Demosthenes policy
of appropriating the Theoric (religious festival) Fund for military purposes that
he broke decisively with Euboulus. Not long afterwards an image of the person-
ified Demos began to be depicted on Athenian document reliefs, a sign both of
increased professionalism and of the democracys growing self-consciousness.
Thereafter Demosthenes persistently argued to a not always suitably respon-
sive Athenian public that the ascendancy of Philip over mainland Greece and
in particular Athens would mean the end of Athens democracy. For Philip
was much more likely, in the manner of so many ancient autocrats and impe-
rial powers, to favour oligarchy or even tyranny over any form of democracy,
however moderate, in the states subjected to his rule. In general, indeed, he
didbut not, as it turned out, at Athens. Demosthenes championed equally
democracy at home and a vigorous anti-Philip policy abroad. Matters came to a
head first in 349/8 over the defence of Olynthus, leader of a revived Chalcidian
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central Greek coalition. The resounding Macedonian victory left Philip master
of all mainland Greece and with his eyes now turned to the east, firmly set on
Persian conquest.
Symbolically, Philip dispatched his eighteen-year-old son and heir apparent
Alexander with an honour guard to accompany home the ashes of the Athenian
dead. This was the only time that Alexander would visit the city where his for-
mer tutor Aristotle would soon establish his own institute for advanced learn-
ing. But it was by no means the last time that Alexander would have important
political dealings with Athens. Possibly for purely pragmatic reasons (divide
and rule), but possibly also partly for sentimental ones, Philip did not in fact
as Demosthenes had long been predictingwreak political havoc on Athens
by terminating its democracy and imposing a Macedonian garrison. But that is
exactly what he did do to Thebes. On the other hand, Athens was no less subor-
dinate or even subject to Philip under the terms of the global post-Chaeronea
settlement. All mainland Greece for the first and almost the last time in ancient
Greek history was unified politically within the framework of what is known as
the League of Corinth (from the location of the oath-swearing).
The League was an offensive and defensive military alliance, with Philip as
its appointed leader; and the first decision of the Leagues Greek delegates
was to declare war on Persia and make Philip the prospective commander-
in-chief of a Hellenic military force for the invasion, conquest, and occupa-
tion of at least some part of the Persian empires Asiatic domains. Combined
with this traditional military instrument was a peace optimistically dubbed
common, in the sense that all Greek cities were deemed by fiat to be a party to
it whether or not they actually swore the relevant oaths, and bound thereby to
observe non-aggression amongst themselves. However, unlike under the terms
of the first such common peace, the Kings Peace or Peace of Antalcidas, there
was no pretence made by Philip that it was intended to guarantee any sort of
autonomy. Greek cities were forbidden to engage in internal civil war and for-
bidden specifically to cancel debts, redistribute land, or free slaves for political
purposesall these prohibitions being gross violations of autonomy as that
had conventionally been understood, even if in practice honoured too often
only in the breach.
Over the next fifteen or so years the Athenian democracy experienced
first crisis and then renewal, followed by renewed crisisand finally disaster.
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Athenian Democracy at Work in the Age of Lycurgus
Although Athens did not in fact suffer Philips direct and directly reaction-
ary political interference in the manner Demosthenes had predicted, most
Athenians nevertheless feared that it would or could. That explains the passage
in early summer 336 of a law (not merely a decree of the Assembly, but a law
ratified under the special procedure of legislation introduced after 403/2) on
tyranny (Chapter1). This was a classic democratic move, ideologically speak-
ing, in the sense that the founding myth of the original democracy of 508/7
was that of the (two) Tyrannicides. Democrats, insofar as they embraced any
particular theory of democracy, liked to represent democracy as the antithesis
of tyranny, just as conversely anti-democrats were prone to represent democ-
racy as either itself a form of tyranny (of the masses or mob) or a political form
peculiarly liable to give rise to one-man tyranny. But the law of 337/6 served a
further cardinal ideological purpose and function, which was to smack down
the political pretensions of the Areopagus council. Akey part of the second
wave of democratic reform promoted by Ephialtes in the late 460s had been the
stripping of the oldest and most august Athenian council of any real power. But
one plausible reading of the anti-tyranny law would suggest that perhaps since
346 and certainly since 338 this body of ex-officials had been undergoing some
sort of political renaissance. Possibly, as in the wake of the Sicilian disaster of
413, conservative voices were being heard to the effect that in the parlous politi-
cal circumstances major affairs of state should be entrusted once more to the
reliable management of the experienced ex-Archons who were life-members of
the Areopagus, rather than to the ephemeral unwisdom of the Assembly and
Peoples lawcourts.
Enter Lycurgus, born c.390 into the aristocratic patriline of the Boutadae,
who had taken to styling themselves Eteoboutadae, or genuine descendants of
the patriarch Boutas. The Boutadae family had given their name to the deme
into which they were hereditarily inscribed from 508/7. It was also their pecu-
liar privilege to supply the lifetime holders of two exceptionally important
priestly offices, one male, one female:those of Poseidon Erechtheus and Athena
Polias. This was in apparent contradiction of the egalitarian, anti-aristocratic
spirit of much democratic legislation regarding citizen privileges, but corre-
sponded to the conservatism that dominated traditional religious observance.
If Lycurgus did indeed attend Platos Academy as a youth, it would not have
been utterly extraordinary if he had turned out to be at most a lukewarm
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210
Athenian Democracy at Work in the Age of Lycurgus
issues that by law had to be discussed at what had since some time after 350
become designated the principal Assembly meeting out of the four stated meet-
ings held each civic month (forty meetings minimum altogether per annum).
For attendance at every principal meeting a premium fee of 1.5 drachmas
instead of the regular 1 drachma was paid to attenders, which presumably
ensured a higher turnout than the average, and in particular guaranteed the
attendance of the 6,000 at two consecutive meetings that counted as the quo-
rum for the passage of a law such as that on tyranny discussedabove.
The grain supply was overwhelmingly conducted by non-Athenian and not
necessarily Greek traders, and financed by Athenian, resident alien, or even
slave bankers. To facilitate the supply, a variety of measures were passed com-
pelling traders legally resident in Athens to import grain first to Peiraeus. On
the other side, new judicial and courtroom procedures were introduced to
speed up the resolution of any commercial lawsuits involving traders or finan-
ciers, and special officials were appointed to operate in the Peiraeus both to
ensure that the legally imposed import-export taxes and harbour dues were
paid and to forestall or mediate any such potentially litigated conflicts before
they became subject to time-consuming and expensive courtroom manoeu-
vres. Since Athenslike many Greek cities of the eastern Mediterranean
seems to have suffered more than one severe grain shortage during Lycurgus
terms of office, it is clear that not even this financial wizard could simply wave
a magic wand to counter a combination of natural harvest failures and human
profiteering or tax avoidance. One modern scholar has even spoken of a
hidden economy, a black economy that Lycurgus was powerless to overcome.
Sometimes, therefore, the Athenians, so far from acting coercively, went
above and beyond the strictly necessary minimum of encouragement to for-
eign non-residents by permitting the establishment of permanent non-Greek
religious cults on Athenian soilagain, predictably, within the Peiraeus, which
functioned both as a regular Athenian deme and as an international emporium,
indeed the largest such centre in the entire Mediterranean. Thus Phoenicians
from Citium on Cyprus were in 333/2 expressly permitted a sacred cult-space
to worship their goddess Aphrodite (Astarte) on exactly the same terms as had
previously been granted to Egyptians desiring to worship their goddess Isis.
Individual foreignersthat is, foreigners with sufficient disposable income
were also encouraged to make voluntary contributions to help increase Athens
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public income, and depending on ones point of view relieve the burden on
state finances. In return, they might be offered honour, that is symbolic public
esteem, or indeed honours, including even honorary Athenian citizenship.
Under the heading of what Ive called anachronistically moral re-arma
ment I place a measure not directly credited to Lycurgus, but so completely
in tune with his outlook that I am in no doubt that he was a major sup-
porter if not instigator of it. By coincidence (or not), the Athenian Lycurgus
shared a name with an even more famous Spartan Lycurgus, around
whomif indeed there was a real person there to begin withthere grew
a dense encrustation of fable and myth. But if the Spartan Lycurgus was
(very probably) not a real mortal man, the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus certainly
was, and in his one extent forensic oration Lycurgus quotes his martial elegy
extensively. The aim of that speech was a prosecution for flight from the
battlefield, for desertion and cowardicethe exact opposite of the qualities
hymned and advocated by Tyrtaeus. Exactly the same martial and patriotic
sentiment as prompted that prosecution speech animated also a measure of
paramilitary reform that was passed in 336/5. The formal institutionalization
of the Ephebeia or Ephebate, a kind of national service, was credited to one
Epicrates, but that he was a lieutenant of Lycurgus and a coadjutant of his
programme I have no doubt.
Ephebos means on the threshold of manhood, and Athenian ephebes were
18-and 19-year-olds, technically adult (having come of age at 18) but not yet fully
empowered as Athenian citizens. It is not quite clear whether all Athenian young
adults were required or at least encouraged to enrol as ephebesor perhaps rather
to be enrolled by their father or another male ascendant, or whether it was only
those whose family was of hoplite status or above who did soroughly the top one-
third or so, economically speaking did so. What is clear is that a great deal of official
energy and ideological investment was put into this new initiative. Lists of ephebes
began to be inscribed on stone or bronze and published, in the accepted democratic
mode of publicity, from the mid-330s on, in a wide variety of styles and formats. The
Aristotelian Ath. Pol., composed in the late 330s and early 320s, significantly devotes
a good deal of space to the new institution and the mode of its recruitment. At the
age of eighteen, new citizens who successfully withstood the scrutiny of the demarch
and his assistants had their names entered on the official lists of their respective
demes. The 139 or 140 demes were aggregated via the trittys system into ten tribes,
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Athenian Democracy at Work in the Age of Lycurgus
and it was the tribes which each selected three citizens aged over forty to serve
for the year as supervisors (literally orderers) of the new ephebes; but it was the
Assembly which appointed the overall director of the Ephebeia for that year.
Service in the Ephebeia extended over two years. During the first year, after
being led by their officers around the sacred precincts of Attica, ephebes were
detailed to perform guard duty in the Peiraeus. There they learned proficiency
in the use of the bow, the javelin, and the catapult while clad in armour. Asum
of money was made available for their provision from state funds, which were
managed by the superior officer. At the beginning of their second year the
emphasis shifted firmly from light-armed skirmishing to training for heavy-
infantry hoplite fighting. Afull suit of hoplite armour was provided for each
ephebe from public funds, and it was while wearing this that he swore a sol-
emn oath. Lycurgus in the Against Leocrates summarises the Ephebic Oath in a
manner that suited the case he was making:the ephebes, he says, swore not to
bring reproach on their hallowed arms and not to leave their place in the hop-
lite ranks, but to defend their native land and hand it down to their children a
better country than when they received it. Other literary sources of much later
periods give fuller versions or quote clauses not otherwise attested, but in 1932
a remarkable inscribed stele turned up at modern Menidhi (ancient, and since
so renamed, Acharnae), which combined a version of the Ephebic Oath with a
supposed Oath of Plataea (see Chapter1).
The Ephebic Oath has various points of immediate330s bce and later
cultural importance. For example, it assumes that responsibility for the defence
of the fatherland is implied in citizenship. It is a duty on a par with that of sup-
porting the laws of the land; as an Athenian citizen, one can no more be relieved
from the one than from the other. The significance of the Plataea Oath cannot
be read quite so straightforwardly off the surface of the stele as it were. For as
well as having an immediate contemporary relevance to the post-Chaeronea
crisis of the Athenian military and polity, it also has its place in a much longer-
run series of ideological conflicts between Sparta and Athens over which of the
two was really the most responsible for defeating the Persians in 480479 and
thereby freeing mainland Greece. Actually, both had won crucial victories, but
the Athenians were not satisfied with claiming Salamis; they wanted their piece
of the Spartans Plataea victory too. Hence the linkage on the Acharnae stele of
the Ephebic and Plataea Oaths: back to the future.
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214
Athenian Democracy at Work in the Age of Lycurgus
of Athens first stone theatre belongs exactly to this period c. 330; and to be
associated with that permanent monumentalisation is Lycurgus commission-
ing of official texts of all the extant tragedies of the three great classic play-
wrights of the fifth century bce, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. At a time
when tragedy was being performed from Sicily to as far east as India, the Greek
world needed to be reminded of Athens priority. But it was now a theatre of
heritage more than a theatre of vitally critical reflexivity and creativity. Back to
the future, onceagain.
Those are two particular instances of Lycurgus general concern to re-
establish major public cults and festivals on a sound financial basis and to pro-
vide for their continuation in perpetuity. The old liturgic system of financing
them was, as mentioned, still in operation, and there was nothing new by then
in a winning impresario erecting a prominent choregic monument. But the
particular splendour and durability of that commissioned by Lysicrates, which
is still very visible in Athens even today, must be somehow connected with the
urgency of the Lycurgan theatre programme and its efforts to ensure that trag-
edy be recognised as uniquely, autochthonously Athenian (Hanink 2014:194).
The increasing emphasis on private donation, already noticed above, could no
doubt be explained or explained away as due to the exigencies of the economic
crisis, but it will likely also have had a somewhat negative symbolic effect on the
self-perception of the demos. Its not purely coincidental, Ibelieve, that in the
320s and 310s the instances of public inscriptions recording commendations
and rewards of individuals for their services to deme or tribe multiply. The
language used for the grounds of the awardsmoral excellence and desire
for honourwas carefully non-commercial and non-mercenary, but the bot-
tom line was strictly financial. The next step on the road to disengaging or
diminishing democratic political control over the public deployment of private
wealth is spelled out presciently by Aristotle:linking of the payment of litur-
gies to office-holding, and this move is explicitly characterised as oligarchic. It
became the characteristic method of financing public projects in the succeed-
ing Hellenistic era (Chapter14).
That move was not, however, taken by Athens under Lycurgus, whose profile
remained correctly democratic. Indeed, in 331 or 330 Lycurgus undertook a
thoroughly democratic prosecution of Leocrates (see above). Following the
Chaeronea debacle Leocrates had been in self-imposed exile on the island of
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Rhodes and at Megara for seven or eight years, but had judged the interval suf-
ficient to permit him to return to his native land in peace if not with honour
and, when prosecuted, for the judges to take a lenient view of his less than
glorious battlefield behaviour. That judgment proved correct, but only just: he
was acquitted, but by only one vote, leaving Lycurgus the moral victor. Our
final estimate of Lycurgus importance and effectiveness is complicated, but the
moral-political balance is surely more in the black than red. On the question
whether Athens under his management became a qualitatively different sort of
democracy, or just less democratic, my answer would again, on balance, favour
the latter reading.
Shortly thereafter, another, far more major political trial took place, the trial
of Ctesiphon in the matter of the crown (dealt with already in Chapter 10).
The principal objectand beneficiaryof that trial was not Ctesiphon but
Demosthenes, and Demosthenes total triumph over Aeschines in court that
day left him free to enjoy for a further half-dozen years the respect bordering
on adulation that his democratic defiance of autocratic Macedon commanded.
It was Macedon, however, that was in a position to call the shots, and Athens
external powerlessness was only aggravated by the series of quite severe prob-
lems over its grain supply in the early320s.
The end of Athenian democracy in its Demosthenic or Lycurgan form came
all too soon. It was precipitated in 324, the year before Lycurgus died, by the
Harpalus Affair. Since Chaeroneia, Athens had not dared, even though some
Athenians had wished, to confront the military might of Macedon directly. In
331 or 330, most notably, Athens had stayed conspicuously aloof from a revolt
led by Agis III, the failure of which was probably foredoomed in any case but
was rendered virtually certain by Athens absence. Rather than engage oth-
ers militarily abroad, Athenians preferred to engage each other politically at
homeon the same Macedonian issue, but over a much broader canvas. But
in 324 Harpalus, a boyhood friend of Alexander and ex-treasurer of his vast
empire, defected to Athens with the enormous sum of 5,000 talentsquite
enough to give those who favoured direct anti-Macedonian military action
the edge in policy determination. However, these anti-Macedonian stalwarts
soon fell out amongst themselves, reminding us of Thucydides harsh judg-
ment (2.65) on the successors of Pericles for pursuing private feuds to the
detriment of Athens best interests. Thus Hyperides, a long-time supporter
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Athenian Democracy at Work in the Age of Lycurgus
217
Map13.1
HellenisticWorld. From Pomeroy, Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (1998).
13.
The Strange Death ofClassical
Greek Democracy
A Retrospect
219
ActIII
Figure13.1
Alexander the Great as Pharaoh
Alexander III of Macedon (356323 bce), posthumously termed the Great, both conquered the Persian
Empire and went to great pains to have himself recognised as the legitimate successor of the Achaemenid
sovereigns. Hence in Egypt he became Pharaoh and had himself depicted as such, as here on the Great
Temple of Amun at Luxor, standing before the Egyptian god Min. Print Collector, Getty Images
220
The Strange Death of Classical Greek Democracy
No one, however, disputes that in 411 and again in 404 democracy of whatever
sort was terminated at Athens, on the first occasion through internal revolu-
tion, and on the second through external, Persian-financed Spartan compul-
sion. But was the half-century of Athenian demokratia of 462/1 to 411 itself an
uncomplicated, uniform thing? Afamous passage of Thucydides, admittedly
a far from non-partisan observer, even casts doubt on the propriety or accu-
racy of applying demokratia to the period of the ascendancy of Pericles. What
really counted in practical terms, he seems to be claiming, was not the formal
kratos of the demos, but the rule of Athens first man, Pericles. And that was so
even though he puts the very term demokratia into the mouth of his Pericles in
the funeral oration. Besides, not even the arche of Pericles was for Thucydides
the best mode of governance Athens experienced during his own lifetime.
That accolade he bestowed instead upon the regime of the Five Thousand,
which for eight months in 411/10 succeeded the narrow oligarchy of the Four
Hundred:for that regime in his view constituted a moderate blending in the
interests both of the Few and of the Many. Thucydides, in other words, was
no ideological democrat, predictably enough, but he was no dyed-in-the-wool
oligarch either; in fact, he is the earliest exponent on record of a mixed consti-
tution theory. In that respect he anticipated the further refinements made by
Aristotle (Chapter11) and later by Polybius (Chapter15).
Thucydides had personal reasons for seeing democracy, and Pericles, as he
did. But even before the counter-revolution of 411, there is at least one major
indication that the Ephialtic-Periclean democracy was under strain and under-
going significant modification. From 431 Athens was engaged on and off for
twenty-seven years, a whole generation, in the near-equivalent of a world war
with Sparta and its allies. Such were the divisions of personality and policy
among the leading Athenian politicians that for the first time since 443 the
supposedly air-clearing device of ostracism was once again called into play
by the Athenian Assembly, probably in 416. But on this occasion it failed to
have the desired effect: neither of the two main protagonists was ostracised,
and in the same year that Athens embarked on its disastrous Sicilian adven-
ture, 415, a new form of judicial procedure is first attested (though it may have
been introduced and practised before then):the writ alleging an unconstitu-
tional proposal. This proved not only to be innovative judicially, but also to
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offer scope for a new mode of intestine political warfare between the leading
democratic politicians.
As a writ, this new procedure was public, not private; it was the kind that
anyone who wishedany citizen, whether holding an office or notmight
bring. In practice, as surely by design, it was only certain Athenians who
would even contemplate bringing such a suit against others of the same stripe:
that is, members of the small, informal group known later as the orators and
politicians, or more abusively as demagoguesin other words, professional
politicians. These were citizens who had the nous, the leisure, and the wealth
to devote themselves to politics, to stand up and be counted, and, given the
nature of Athenian democratic politics, to above all step up regularly to the
speakers platform on the Pnyx to advocate or oppose a particular policy line,
or launch a prosecution of a major political rival. The introduction of this
new, political lawsuit among other things satisfied a felt need for a legal means
of preventing the Assembly from taking any policy decision irrevocably. The
best way of achieving that goal, it was thought, was to be able to review an
Assembly decision (taken by a majority vote of the 5,000 or 6,000 or more
attendees) in a peoples jury court (staffed normally by 501 jurors).
For the principals this was an extremely high-stakes, high-risk kind of
action; how high-risk is amply shown by the experience of Aeschines in 330
(Chapter10). But how embedded in normal democratic practice it had soon
become is demonstrated by the way that in 411 the 400 oligarchs instantly
suspended it, as an essential ingredient of their anti-democratic, counter-
revolutionary platform; and in 404 the ultra-oligarchic Thirty abolished it.
Further corroboration comes from the anecdotal evidence that one Aristophon
was prosecuted under this procedure no fewer than seventy-five times, and yet
never once successfully. The restored, post-403 democracy clearly felt that it
could not do without the writ against unconstitutional proposals, even though
other changes were introduced that tended in the same direction of controlling
the actual amount of the Assemblys kratos.
After the turbulent, bloodstained, and deeply divisive oligarchic interludes,
the Athenians decisively re-embraced democracy in 403. They represented it,
quite unhistorically, as their ancestral constitution and ascribed its foundation
no less erroneously to Solon, if not to mythical king Theseus. According to the
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The Strange Death of Classical Greek Democracy
author of the Aristotelian Athenain Politeia, writing in the earlier 320s, with
the restoration of democracy in 403/2 the Athenian constitution underwent
the last of its eleven transformations. That is arguable (in both senses). But
what should one make of that authors further claim that the polity thereaf-
ter continued increasing the power of the masses? Let us begin by rehearsing
some of the indisputable differences between fifth-and fourth-century democ-
racy, apart from the increased frequency of resort to the writ against uncon-
stitutional proposals and the total eschewal of the ostracism procedure. These
include the re-codification of Athens laws, a process initiated in 410, after a
restoration of democracy, but completed only in 399 (after another democratic
restoration); a formal distinction drawn between a law and a decree, so that
after 403 the Assembly as such no longer legislated; the introduction in the
390s of a payment for Assembly attendance; and an increase in the number of
stated meetings of the Assembly each civil month from perhaps as few as one
per month to, by 350, four per month. Are these changes significant, and, if so,
how (and to what extent)?
A maximalist modern view of the law versus decree separation and dis-
tinction coupled with the completed codification holds that it was only after
399 that rule of lawas opposed to kratos of demoswas established. But
this is to commit anachronism. The laws had always ruled Athenians, but it
had always been Athenians who made their laws and who, because laws by
definition are general, interpreted and applied themdemocratically, with
interruptions, after 508/7. It has also been argued that after 403 Athens passed
from a regime of popular sovereignty to one of the Sovereignty of the Law.
But sovereignty is also a dangerously anachronistic notion, and drawing a
distinction between the immediate sovereignty wielded by the Assembly and
the ultimate sovereignty that resided with the Peoples dikasteria does not
help. Just as there was no modern notion of the separation of powers in the
Classical Athenian democratic polis, and no Supreme Court, so sovereignty is
a concept best reserved for post-ancient States. The demos ruled, exercising
its unique kratos, in the fourth century bce no less than in the fifth; it just did
so differently.
But suppose one were to apply a quantitative as opposed to qualitative
criterion to the argument, then one would have to award the victory to
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the fourth-century democracy. The Athenian citizen body after 400 bce,
even if we go with the higher figure of 31,000 rather than 22,000 in 322/1,
was appreciably smaller than it had been in the fifth century, when at its
height in c. 430 it may have numbered as many as between 50,000 and
60,000. Yet in the fourth century that smaller body had tolegally was
obligated tofield a quorum of 6,000 at two successive Assembly meet-
ings, in order, for example, to begin the process of enacting a Law or to
confer the privilege of citizenship. The introduction of Assembly pay in
the 390s, therefore, modest though it was, may be construed not only as
a form of disguised poor relief but also as a necessary incentive to per-
suade ordinary citizens to attend. Aristophanes satirical comedy of c.392/1,
Women Attending the Assembly, confirms the current interest in the matter,
and by 350 citizens were being invited to an Assembly meeting every nine
days or so. And attend they did, in numbersor so one is bound to infer
from the archaeologically established fact that in the 330s or 320s under the
Lycurgan dispensation (Chapter12) the seating area of the Pnyx assembly
space was significantly enlarged.
A smaller citizen body after the ravages of the Peloponnesian War meant
also a smaller pool from which to draw members of the Council of 500, whose
service was restricted to a maximum of two annualand not consecutive
terms per fully adult lifetime (thirty years old and above). Most Athenians
will have had to serve on the Council in the fourth century simply in order to
fill the set deme and tribal quotas. There were no such temporal restrictions
imposed on the holding of other offices, most of which were sortitive, and one
can well imagine that the formal property restriction imposed on the hold-
ing of the Archonship (thetes remained formally barred) was often or even
normally relaxed. Nor was there any temporal or status restriction on recruit-
ment to the panel of 6,000 citizens selected annually by lot to serve as jurors.
The restriction in that case affected rather the supply of publicly funded cash
due to them as both an honorific token of public esteem and a material civic
benefit.
In that quantitative sense, then, one might perhaps want to agree with the
Ath. Pol. writer that the power of the masses was, on the whole, increasing after
403. But there are one or two telling signs that within that period of seventy or
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The Strange Death of Classical Greek Democracy
so years, and especially during the Lycurgan era, the democracy was changing
significantly in its spirit:that it was becoming more managed or managerial,
more top-down, less spontaneously co-operative and egalitarian. One issue
was the Athenian equivalent of a guns before butter debate:should any sur-
plus of public funds, if there should happen to be one, go towards swelling
the Military Fund or the Festival Fund? Another issue was more generic:to
the extent that the Athenians understood or wished to understand the notion
of a state budget, how should the apportionment be managed, or, more to
the point, by whom? Twice the demos leaned sharply towards increasing indi-
vidual executive responsibility by appointing through election the equivalent
of a chief finance ministerEuboulus in the 350s and 340s, Lycurgus in the
330s and 320s. But even so they in no way sacrificed the fundamental demo-
cratic principle that all elected (and sortitive) officials were responsible to the
People, either directly through the Assembly and Courts or indirectly through
the regular audit carried out in the demos name by the Council of 500. On
the other hand, the creation of a new elective office of water commissioner
that was neither financial nor military, and the weakening of the old compul-
sory liturgy system in favour of the voluntary method of private donation for
the raising of large sums of public money from private wealthy individuals at
short notice, were both signs of the times and in retrospect pointers to a non-
democratic future.
To conclude this chapter, Iwiden the angle of vision from democratic Athens
to democracy in the Hellenic world generally, andeven more widelyto
the condition of the Greek polis as such on the threshold (as we with 20:20
hindsight can see clearly) of losing its prized independence to a small hand-
ful of mega- state, multi- state territorial monarchies in the new post-
Classical, Hellenisticepoch. Democracy, as mentioned, expanded its reach
in the fourth century, but more could also mean worseor at least no better.
Probably one of the reasons why Thucydides favoured a mixed constitution
at Athens, and certainly the overriding reason for Aristotles promoting it as
the best practicable kind of polity, was that it offered some sort of solution to
or even a preventative of the worst kind of political stasisoutright civil war.
Over twelve months between 404 and 403 the Athenian Thirty are reckoned to
have murdered some 1,200 to 1,500 citizens and metics. In 370 the democrats
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of Argos clubbed to death in a very much shorter space of time roughly the
same number of their oligarchic opponents. Although both those cases are
extreme instances, theres no denying that lower-level stasisinvolving at best
threats if not the actual execution of redistribution of land and cancellations
of debts, and sometimes also the freeing of slaves for the purpose of fomenting
or prosecuting civil warwas more or less endemic in the Greek polis-world,
to such an extent that one of Philip of Macedons first moves upon attaining
the mastery of the Aegean was to outlaw such measures in the cities he now
held in subjection.
But did such a scenario amount to the crisis of the Greek city, a formulation
that once attained currency especially in the Soviet-dominated East Germany
of the 1970s? Alexander the Great, when he literally laid the foundations for
Alexandria in Egypt in 332, certainly believed not only that the Greek city was
not in crisis but also that it had a future, though not a democratic one. He
would have rejected with contumely the modern notion that for ideological as
well as economic and political reasons it was merely an evolutionary dead-end.
If it was indeed dying, it had an awful lot of dying leftinit.
Rather more fruitfully interesting, Isuggest, is the way in which the ques-
tion of a possible fourth- century failure has been posed and framed by
A.N.W. Saunders. He canvassed five ways in which the fourth century (itself
of course an artificial chronographic construct) might be considered to have
failed:(i)political, in the literal sense:it was individual poleis or alliances of
them that failed militarily against the non-polis kingdom of Macedon; (ii)
ethnic, in the sense that Greeks failed to achieve Hellenic unity, despite rising
economic prosperity; (iii) social, because the better-off citizens failed either
to maintain or to extend democracy; (iv) cultural, because continued reliance
on slave labour precluded scientific innovation; and finally (v)psychological,
inasmuch as the clinging to the past represented a failure ofnerve.
One can query the precise formulation in each case; for example, Hellenistic
civilisation (to be discussed in the next chapter) was no less dependent on slave
labour but yet it generated massive scientific innovation, at any rate on the
theoretical plane; and Hellenic unitywith the one giant and only partial
exception of 480479was always an aspiration rather than a practical reality.
But at least the third type of alleged failure (social) does bear directly on the
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The Strange Death of Classical Greek Democracy
problematic of this book, and poses a challenge to any simplistic paean to the
Greeks democratic achievement. Even so, taking the long-run view, Iremain
more favourably impressed by the latter achievement than otherwise, and com-
fort myself with the parting thought that the giant thinker of the age, Aristotle,
ended up by offering a definition of active citizenship and a pragmatic version
of an ideal mixed constitution that were at least democratically inflected and
inclined.
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S IVS
14.
Hellenistic Democracy?
Democracy in Deficit c.32386bce
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Hellenistic Democracy?
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Hellenistic Democracy?
Figure14.1
Tyche, Romanbronze
Fortune (or Chance) was worshipped as a goddess in ancient Greece, by individuals as well as by cities,
and never more fervently or widely than during the politically unstable Hellenistic epoch
(c. 32330 bce). Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY
eager to deprive cities of democracy. The latter was nearer the mark and the
monarchic norm. Earlier, in 313/2, there was talk of a restoration of democracy
at Miletus by Antigonus the One-Eyed, one of Alexanders premier generals
and ultimate progenitor of the Antigonid dynasty. But this is to be interpreted
in exactly the same way as his old sovereigns general proclamation of democ-
racies in the same region in 334: it was merely a manoeuvre to confound his
enemy, who in this case happened to be another Macedonian dynast, and a
convenient buzzword, to go with the oft-proclaimed slogan of the freedom
of Greeks. Nevertheless, Miletus (together with Didyma) is one of four exam-
ples of Hellenistic democracies offered in a book with the subtitle Freedom,
Independence and Political Procedures in Some East Greek States; the other
three are Ionian Iasus, Calymna in Caria, and the offshore island-city of Cos.
What exactly, then, does that democracy amount to? Was it anything more
than the absence of direct rule by a monarch, as for example at the city of
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Chersonesus in Crimea in 155 bcea city that had earlier had some form of
democratic constitution?
In the late fifth and early fourth centuries Miletus had had a democratic
constitution modelled after that of Athens, involving demes and tribes. After
experiencing bouts of tyranny in the late fourth century and again in 259/
8, it is said (by Carlsson) to have had its freedom, autonomyand democ-
racyrestored. A number of inscribed decrees of the Hellenistic period are
extant, which probably represent two temporally and politically distinct
decision-making procedures. Down to the 280s, named individuals propose
decrees, mainly regarding domestic matters, the enactment formula of which
mentions the Council and the People (in Assembly). From the 280s officials
called Epistatai (presidents, overseers) regularly propose decrees of which the
enactment formula mentions only the People, though that may be because
the Epistatai are a committee of the Council. But who became members
of the Council, and how? And how much independence, let alone initiative,
did the People really have? Two points seem decisive against the notion that
this was democracy in any late fifth-or early fourth-century sense. First,
where the mode of appointment of officials is known, it is election (not the
quintessentially democratic lottery), and the eponymous official bore the
alternative, suspiciously undemocratic title of wreath-bearer, the regular title
of an official sponsoring a festival liturgy in Hellenistic Greece, and arbitrator,
one who is given sole power to resolve conflicts. Second, there is no evidence
in any decree of a genuine amendment, which suggests there was little or no
actual discussion in the Assembly. If that counted as democracy for the citi-
zens who composed the demos, it seems a very restricted exercise of kratos at
home, and it seems that as regards the determination of foreign policy, the
best and most that could be hoped for was to keep on good terms with the real
power-brokers, the kings.
However, there is a promising case of genuine democratic sentiment still
existing in the old sense into the third century at Ionian Erythrae. Some
time after 300, perhaps as late as 280, the Council and the Demos passed two
decrees, which they had inscribed on stone, reaffirming theby implica-
tion democraticprinciple of anti-oligarchic tyrant-slaying. The key phrase
runsthus:
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Hellenistic Democracy?
Since the oligarchs removed the sword from the . . . statue of Philitesthe
tyrant-slayer . . . be it resolved by the People . . . that the statue be restored
as it was before...
A second decree inscribed on the same marble stele then deals with how
the maintenance should be paid for, and especially how the crowns should be
financedwe remember how important crowns were in the Athenian democ-
racy from the crown case pitting Demosthenes against Aeschines (Chapter 10).
It has rightly been observed by John Ma that this was the public enactment of
democratic values of accountability and transparency, in contrast to the oli-
garchical secrecy. It was alsoand this is Mas major themean example of
the deliberate creation of social memory, reaffirming (democratic) identity in
the present and passing it on to the future. All the same, it seems to me a big
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stretch from there to Teegardens claim that such anti-tyranny measures helped
make viable a democratic revolution in Asia Minor ushered in by Alexander
the Great. Rather, Erythrae seems to be the proverbial rule-proving, demo-
cratic exception.
Moving south from Erythrae we come to the island and city of Rhodes, one
of the very few able to do more than pay lip service to their autonomy and
independence from Hellenistic kings and (later) even from the Romans. The
Rhodians described their constitution as a democracy. Yet as the Greek geogra-
pher and historian Strabo wrote towards the end of the first century bce:The
Rhodians care for the common people (demos), although they do not live under
a democracy; they wish nonetheless to maintain the goodwill of the mass of the
poor. So who was right? A good case has been made for a non-democratic
mode of rule by a (ruthless, opportunistic) naval aristocracy involved in trade,
who kept the demos out of power but yet were willing to share with it some of
the spoils of trade and piracy.
In mainland Greece the big new political development was the rise of federal
States with continental ambitions. The two largest were the Achaean League,
a new foundation of the early third century, and the Aetolian, an older body
attested at least since the late fifth or early fourth century but newly galvanised.
The logic behind their instigation was simple:the need for units larger than
individual, atomised poleis to resist the potential for unwelcome intervention
by their imperial overlords in Macedon. The principle of ethnic homogeneity
was the same that underlay the much earlier federal states of the Boeotians
(from the late sixth century) and the Arcadians (intermittently from the early
fifth century, Sparta permitting). But the coming of democracy to such federal
states was a phenomenon only of the fourth century, most notably in Boeotia
(from 378:Chapter11). Jakob Larsen, the great expert of an earlier generation
on ancient Greek federalism, spoke of democracy as well as representation in
Hellenistic federalism, but at least as far as the two largest and most important
federations were concerned that seems mightily over-optimistic, at best a case
of looseusage.
The major source on these two federal states, as indeed on all Hellenistic
Greek history from 220 to 145, is the Greek Polybius (born c.210200, died
c.120). He came from from Megalopolis in Arcadia, a city that was founded
in 368 as an anti-Spartan bulwark and served as the capital of the then
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Hellenistic Democracy?
Arcadian federal state. The remains of its simply huge theatre, the largest in
the Peloponnese, which hosted federal gatherings, are still impressive to this
day. Polybius is also the prime witness to one key aspect of the subject of our
next chapter, so further detailed discussion of him and his political views will
be deferred until then. But to prolong the suspense no further, it can safely be
said that he was no democratin any Aristotelian sense. One egregious exam-
ple of his general historiographical principle that it is permissible to exempt
patriotism from the general requirement of objectivity and impartiality con-
cerns the Achaean League, of which his native Megalopolis was a key mem-
ber:No political system can be found anywhere in the world which favours
more the principles of equality, freedom of speech and true democracy than
that of the Achaeans. It is not merely coincidental that the birth and growth
of the Achaean League federal state, control of which was safely in the hands
of wealthy or aristocratic landowning elites such as Polybius, coincided with a
growing economic immiseration of the poor citizen masses and a consequent
loss by the elite of those poor masses goodwill. The late-third-century Cynic
poet Cercidas, who moralised against the increasingly uneven distribution of
wealth, did not just happen to be a citizen of Megalopolis.
So great indeed was the distress of poor citizens in the Peloponnese gener-
ally that in the third quarter of the third century they found a most unlikely
championor at least a powerful political personality willing and able to exploit
that distress for his own political ends. Sparta had ceased to be a great power,
or indeed any sort of power, in the 360s; the loss of over half its polis territory
with the liberation of the Messenian Helots and the foundation of Messene
reduced it for over a century to the lowly status of a mere Peloponnesian squab-
bler. Part of Spartas problem, already signalled as such in an abortive internal
coup of about 400 bce (the conspiracy of Cinadon) was the gross and growing
inequality between rich and poor Spartans. But it was not until 244 bce that
the poor and dispossessedand often declassedSpartans found a leader who
not only wished to but was seemingly in a position to do something to rectify
their grievances. That leader was Eurypontid King Agis IV, who came to the
throne in 244 and announced what elsewhere in the Greek world would have
counted as a radical programme of economic transformation:a combination
of a cancellation of all debts with a redistribution of private landed property.
Had it been implemented, it would have amounted to a political revolution. But
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although he made some headway with the former, and written deeds recording
debts were symbolically burned, his touch in foreign affairs was less adroit, and
in 241 he was assassinated.
However, Cleomenes III, a king from the other (Agiad) royal house, married
Agis doughty widow Agiatis, and with her support and that of her wealthy
family he carried on in 235 where the reformist Agis had been compelled to
leave off; indeed, he advanced for some considerable distance beyond that. Not
only were further debts cancelled, but some land was redistributedand not
only to poor Spartans but also to non-Spartans, including both Perieoeci and
mercenaries and even ex-Helots. It should be noted, though, that the 6,000
Laconian Helots Cleomenes liberated had to buy their freedom, and that they
were liberated chiefly to bulk up Spartas new-model, Macedonian-style army.
Nevertheless, the nature and scale of the reforms justify our talking of a Spartan
revolution, even if it was in no sense a democraticone.
All the same, Cleomenes posture frightened in particular the leaders of the
Achaean League. That, together with Cleomenes savaging of Megalopolis in
223, unfortunately presaged the Leagues eventual revenge on Sparta, which was
exacted during the first half of the second century. First, the internal reforms
were annulled, and then a tamed Sparta was itself incorporated as a subordi-
nate League member, spelling the end of its long cherished autonomy and inde-
pendence, after the passage of some 800years. That is not to mention the role of
Nabis, self-styled king of Sparta but actually more of a tyrant, who between 207
and 192 tried both to reanimate Cleomenes reforms at home and to contend
with both the major Greek Leagues and with the nascent power in mainland
Greece of Rome. That he failed ultimately both at home and abroad was no real
disgraceor surprise, even if he left his mark on Sparta socio-economically by
liberating most of the remaining Helots.
However, although Cleomenes may be held to have accomplished a social
and economic revolution at Sparta, he cannot be said to have accomplished
also a political revolution that might conceivably be described as in any way
democratic: the initiative had come from the top, and Cleomenes renewed
and reshaped Spartan citizenry were in no wise empowered democratically.
Moreover, by placing his brother on the Eurypontid throne and thereby abol-
ishing the dyarchy that had on the whole served Sparta very well for those
eight centuries, Cleomenes had turned himself into something much more
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Hellenistic Democracy?
like a Hellenistic dynast. His dealings with Ptolemy III support that reading,
and it was perhaps not wholly inappropriate that in 219 he died, not in his
bed in Sparta nor on a foreign battlefield, but in a street brawl in Alexandria.
He had fled there for refuge following Spartas terminal defeat in battle in 222,
at Sellasia, just north of Sparta, a humiliating loss inflicted by the suzerain of
Greece, Antigonus IIIDoson.
Finally, we turn to consider the state of Athens following the enforced ter-
mination of the Lycurgan democracy by the Macedonian superpower in 322/1
(Chapter 12). The work of Peter Rhodes, an excellent scholar of Athens in
particular and of Greek political institutions more generally, seems to me to
illustrate very well the difficulties and doubts surrounding this issue. On one
hand, Rhodes thinks the term democracy can be applied to post-322/1 Athens,
as in his heading Democracy Restored, 287, which refers to a revolt against
Macedon led by Callias (to whom we shall return below). On the other hand,
in a later article Rhodes properly lays down a more stringent criterion:a true
democracy not only has a paper democratic structure but functions demo-
cratically, that is, with a significant degree of participation by the demos at
all levels. Yet in the conclusion to that same article he seems to backtrack and
on the whole stresses continuity over discontinuity, even while conceding that
Hellenistic Athens was perceptibly different from Classical both in the greater
passivity of the Assembly and in the larger participation by rich citizens.
Arguments and evidence can be brought in favour of several positions and
shades of interpretation. Take for example the final four years or so of the
immensely long career of Phocion, born in 402 bce and elected general no
fewer than forty-five times. (Plutarch thought him worthy of a Life.) Between
the termination of the democracy and imposition of a Macedonian garrison
in 322/1 and his official condemnation to death in 318, he was the virtual ruler
of subjected Athens and conducted relations with Macedon in what he took to
be the Athenians best interests. Without question he acted as Macedons agent
with great moderation and personal honesty, but he nevertheless did act as
Macedons agent, and thus suffered doubly both from a change of personnel at
the helm of Macedons affairs and from the deep resentment that his far from
totally democratic outlook and apparent complicity with Macedon aroused
among ordinary Athenians. He was forced to take the hemlock, and so died the
death of an earlier philosopher.
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of Phalerons primacy; the liberation of Athens from the latter in 307; and the
erection in the Agora of a statue to the great democrat of yore, Demosthenes, in
280/79. And then there is the alliance that Athens concluded, in some despera-
tion, to fight the so-called Chremonidean War together with a toothless Sparta
under King Areus between 268/7 and 265/4. According to the (Callias) decree,
this was decided upon by the Demos, but there is no mention of the old demo-
cratic formula by the Council and Demos. This seems to me to bespeak at least
the near-terminal atrophying of the old genuinely democratic institutions.
So I move on rapidly to what may perhaps be considered the ancient
Athenians last act of political revolution:their defiance not of any Greek dynast
but of imperialist Rome, between 88 and 86 bce. The sourcesnon-Athenian,
pro-Roman, by no means democraticare of course deeply unsatisfactory.
So we have to be wary when we find the two most prominent anti-Roman
leadersAristion and Athenionboth labelled as tyrants. However, it is pos-
sible that their revolution consisted in rebelling against not only the lack of
freedom imposed by Rome but also the sort of non-or anti-democratic consti-
tution that the Romans consistently favoured and promoted throughout their
empire (Chapter15). In any event, the Athenians rebellion was quite quickly
crushed, and savagely so, by the Roman noble Lucius Cornelius Sulla surnamed
Felix (Lucky); just five years later Sulla had himself appointed as Dictator of
Rome and thereby sealed the fate of the free Roman Republichowever pre-
cisely that should be understood in constitutional terms (the subject of our
next chapter).
To conclude: the life of democracy in the Hellenistic period presents much
scope for interpretative confusion. Although the polis-form as such retained
its legitimacy and vitality, the constitutional trend in political actuality was
firmly towards various shades of oligarchy. But for agit-prop and self-reassur-
ance reasons, demokratia came to be used standardly in the Hellenistic Greek
poleis both new and old as a slogan both for republicthat is, not monarchy or
tyranny (see further Chapter 15)and independence (from the relevant great
power or powers). The new emphasis here, promoted by the empowered oli-
garchic rulers, was on demos as People, not demos as the mass of the poor citi-
zens, and on independence from direct foreign rule. That is what is meant (and
all that can be meant) by talking of free Hellenistic Greek poleis. Overall, the
condition of this Hellenistic mode of democracy was one of some durability, no
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Hellenistic Democracy?
doubt, but far more one of decline from an earlier, full-blooded political mode.
Hellenistic demokratia, lacking to a greater or lesser degree the key qualitative
defining elements of freedom, both internal and external, and political, civic
equality, simply could not have been anything much like demokratia even in
the most moderate of the variant forms identified by Aristotle in his Politics
as recently as the later 330s or early 320s. Any usage of the term demokratia in
such a historical context must necessarily have involved some devaluation, if
not actual degradation, of that words original force and meaning.
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15.
The Roman Republic
A Sort of Democracy?
I n this chapter Ishall be examining, first, the ancient Greek view (as
expressed by the contemporary historian Polybius) that Romes Republican
constitution in the Middle Republican era (287133 bce) was a mixed polity,
including a strong component of democracy. In the second part Ishall assess
the modern view (associated especially with F.Millar) that both in the Middle
and in the Late Republic (13327 bce) the Roman Republic was a kind of
democracy.
Our English word republic is derived from the Latin respublica, itself a com-
pound of two words:res (thing) and publica (of or belonging to the Populus,
People); crudely translated, they mean the Peoples thing. By People was
understood the entirety of the Roman citizen population who were entered
on the lists held by the most senior elected officials called Censors. In military
terms, they were a combination of those citizens who possessed a certain mini-
mum of property and were therefore liable for compulsory service, and those
who owned or possessed less than that stipulated minimum. There were five
levels of property-owning citizens, quantitatively graded; probably already by
200 bce they were outnumbered by the propertyless. How those gradations
were cashed out in political practice will be explored below (esp. the second
part of this chapter on the Millar Thesis).
As in English, so in Latin, republic connoted in essence a political system
characterised by the absence of a monarch; or, in the case of Romes Republic,
the conscious rejection and subsequent scrupulous avoidance of a king (rex).
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Roman Republic:ASort of Democracy?
the biggest possible historical questions: why, and how, had Rome managed
this unique feat of imperial growth? What was it about Rome that had made
it possible, or even inevitable? And he gave a quintessentially Greekthat is,
political-constitutionalanswer, as we shallsee.
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was reached quite early on, with his stunning victory over Romes legions at
Cannae in 216. Further successes followed, but the initiative passed to Rome,
which took the fight from Italy first to Spain and then to Carthages own North
African backyard, where Scipio (later dubbed Africanus) routed Hannibal at
Zama in202.
Such was the impact of Cannae on the consciousness of Polybius that he
took Romes recovery from that catastrophic defeat as the starting point of his
universal history, for two main reasons. First, it was from the nadir of 216 that
the Roman Republic in its Middle phase rose to conquer and by 146 rule the
whole known world; that is, much of the central and eastern Mediterranean.
Second, although Polybius was careful not to claim that he was the first to
attempt to write a universal history, he did claim that he had written the first
truly universal history. For, from 217 onwards, the affairs of Italy and Africa had
become intertwined with those of Greece and Asia, and that intertwining
was coupled withindeed crucially effected throughRomes rise to universal
domination. But what factor or factors had most enabled Rome so to rise and
conquer? Its politeia, was Polybius emphatic answer. We shall return to analyse
this conception in some detail, after concluding a brief resume of his extraor-
dinary life andtimes.
Polybius was born around 200 bce, perhaps even as early as 210, to Lycortas.
Romes interest in and intervention in mainland Greek affairs went back by
then some two to three decades, but the stakes were raised during the Second
Punic War by Philip V of Macedons decision in 215 to ally with Romes enemy
Hannibal of Carthage. By 200 the threat of Hannibal had been expunged, so
the Senate, Romes elected governing body, decided to overthrow Philip, which
they achieved through winning the Second Macedonian War, in which the
Achaean League of Polybius father allied itself opportunistically to Rome. In
196, in the person of ex-consul Titus Quinctius Flamininus, Romefollowing
Hellenistic Greek power- political precedent proclaimed the freedom of
Greece. By which was meant freedom for Greeks from any (other) Greek
dynast such as the king of Macedon, but very much less than total freedom
from any outside power whatsoever. This was not in any sense an act or even
gesture of philhellenism. Actually, Rome took it upon itself to become the arbi-
ter of Greek freedom and within a mere couple of generations to destroy any
genuine Greek political freedom utterly, and forgood.
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Roman Republic:ASort of Democracy?
Between 195 and 192 Rome and its Achaean League allies next set about over-
throwing Nabis, who had ruled Sparta since 207 as a tyrant but called himself
king and who, somewhat like Cleomenes III, was causing considerable disrup-
tion and nuisance (to major property owners) by his socio-economic interven-
tions elsewhere in the Peloponnese, especially at Argos. The death of Nabis
meant also the end of Spartas control of Laconia and indeed the effective end of
old Sparta, both externally (with the loss of all remaining vestiges of independ-
ence) and internally (with the end of what remained of the famously Spartan
socio-economic and cultural-educational regime). The Achaean League, within
which Sparta was forcibly enrolled, was the main immediate gainer, but its
influence proved transitory, and nine years later Philopoemen of Megalopolis,
the strong man of the League, died without leaving any comparably effective
successor. Polybius later eulogy of Philopoemen was also a kind of memorial
of the League itself. In 181, still only twenty or little more, Polybius himself was
chosen as an ambassador of the League to the Ptolemaic king, but did not actu-
ally visit Alexandria.
In 172 war broke out once more between Rome and Macedon, this time
under King Perseus. Again, predictably enough, Rome emerged victorious
from this Third Macedonian War, in the course of which Polybius held high
office as the Achaean Leagues Cavalry Commander in 170169. In retrospect,
however, Rome felt that the Leagues support had been less wholehearted or
effective than it ought to have been, and prospectively took the view that the
Leagues continued existence might constitute a threat to its domination of the
Greek peninsula south of Macedon. Thus it was that in 167 Polybius found him-
self included among the 1,000 high-ranking Achaeans forcibly transported as
hostages to Rome and Italy. Polybius, however, fell on his feet, in that he was
entrusted to the supervision of the Younger Scipio (b. 185) and, being some
fifteen to twenty years his senior, became his spiritual mentor. As he had for
Philopoemen, Polybius delivered a powerful posthumous eulogy for Scipio.
But much water had flowed under several bridges between 167 and Scipios
demise in129.
Finally, in 150, Polybius was officially permitted to return home to
Megalopolis. But was that all there was to ita simple release? Or was there
a covert condition, one that Polybius was quite content to fulfil, namely to act
as Romes agent in what would prove the exceptionally contentious political
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Polybius had begun to compose his History as an exile and hostage in Italy
and Rome after 167, intending that to be its terminal date. But in light of the
momentous events of 146/5 he decided to continue his massive work that far,
even though in his own words those two added decades were a period of con-
fusion and upheavalan ominous phrase recalling Xenophons concluding
comment in the Hellenica upon the state of Greece in 362 bce. The prolonga-
tion, it need hardly be added, also enabled Polybius to give what he considered
to be a fitting account of his part in the fashioning of the new, and emphatically
not democratic, order.
Nothing subsequently in Polybius life could possibly equal the thrills and
spills of 167145. In about 140 he travelled to Egypt, Syria, and Cilicia in south-
west Turkey. In 133, aged by then 70 or so, he was once again present at the sack
of a major enemy city (his enemy now as well as Romes), Numantia in Spain,
thereby putting into practice his historiographical nostrum that the historian
must ideally be an eyewitness of historic events. In 129 the death of the Younger
Scipio removed Polybius principal connection to the inner Roman Republican
political elite. Within a decade, he himself died, after a fall from ahorse.
Of the forty original books of Polybius History only the first five have sur-
vived more or less complete, together with most of Book 6, which focuses
on Romes politeia. What is left of Books 7 through 40 are just fragments, a
polite term for more or less accurate quotations by later writers, few of whom
shared either Polybius historiographical ambitions or his critical intelligence.
Of the fragmentary portion the most interesting, historiographically speaking,
is Book 12, an exercise in how to writeand how not to writehistory. This
was directed chiefly against the Sicilian Timaeus of Tauromenium, who was
targeted not least for his gall in attempting universal history, but also against
Phylarchus of Athens:his crimes were partly formal-stylistic (he indulged in
an inappropriately tragic style of history-writing) and partly ideological (he
was far too partial towards Sparta for Polybius Achaean tastes). How then, in
Polybius view, should history be written? One must get the facts, including the
facts of impactful speeches, correct and report them accuratelyin this, he was
heir to Thucydides. But true history properly so called is about causation and
causalityin that he was heir ultimately to Herodotus as well as Thucydides,
although he engaged more explicitly and philosophically than either with dif-
ferent causal concepts. Like Thucydides again, he believed the historian was
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in the business of prediction, for the benefit of present and future statesmen.
Polybius therefore wrote what he called pragmatic (or transactional) history,
a history of praxeis (deeds) composed for practical purposes and avoiding
mere entertainment. Once more, Thucydides rather than Herodotus was his
masterhere.
The other historiographical quirk of Polybiusbesides the patriotic con-
cession noted abovewas a firm belief in the efficacy of something he called
rather confusingly chance or fortune (tyche). The confusion arises partly
because Tyche was widely worshipped in Hellenistic Greece as a personified
goddess, and in some cities as a patron goddess almost on a par with Athena
Polias of Classical Athens. This development reflected the troubled times, in
which citizens of Greek poleis increasingly felt not only that they were pawns in
some larger, inter-dynastic political game being played out over their heads on
a regional scale, but also that they were ever less in command of their own per-
sonal as well as political destinies. Polybius, however, used tyche both to mean
chance or fortune in the sense of sheer, random caprice (the Thucydidean usage)
and to refer to a higher, overarching Providencewhich somehow ordained
what had to happen by an inner necessity, human or divine. Hence, for example,
he explicitly stated that the rise of Rome was not due to mere chance.
To understand Polybius take on the Roman Middle Republican consti-
tution, all Book 6 is relevant, but the chapters specifically devoted to Rome
are 1118 and 4357. The key to explaining Romes survival and rise lay for
Polybius, as noted above, in its politeia; or rather in Polybius understanding of
the Romans politeia, which was no doubt heavily influenced by the Younger
Scipio and his cronies. For it was at its best and most perfect form in c.216
(the date of the Romans catastrophic defeat at Cannae). Its perfected excel-
lence was a mixture of elements of monarchy, oligarchy and aristocracy, and
democracy. The monarchic element was represented by the consuls, although
there were two of them at any one time and their power was restricted, at
least at home within the city of Rome, by the Senate as well as by the offices
collegiality (cf. the Spartan dual kingship). The aristocratic element was the
Senate, Senators being deemed best in terms of their wealth as well as their
birth. The democratic element was represented by the Roman People, Populus
Romanusin Greek, the demos. The whole was deemed to be fairly and suit-
ably ordered, that is, in a state of equilibrium.
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Roman Republic:ASort of Democracy?
The notion of mixture was not in itself original to Polybius. Thucydides had
applied an early version of it to the regime of the 5,000 oligarchs at Athens in
411/10. But Thucydides had envisaged it as involving only two elements: the
mutually exclusive and antagonistic groups of the few (rich) and the many
(poor) citizens, and his mixture is best understood metaphorically as being of
the pudding kind. That is, when those two ingredients were combined, they
constituted a qualitatively new political entity. Aristotle had drawn likewise
on a formally similar pudding version of the mixed constitution, especially in
his presentation of his best workable form of polity, which he called politeia
(Chapter 11). And in this he seems to have been followed by Dicaearchus of
Messana in his lost Tripolitikos, who like Aristotle looked to Sparta for exem-
plification. But Polybius usage is, as we shall see, better understood rather in
terms of a seesaw or checks and balances model, and that is certainly how it
was taken by the American Founding Fathers when drawing inspiration for
their own constitution.
The major interpretative issues are these:first, did Polybius correctly iden-
tify the three main constitutional elements or forces at work in the Roman
Republican polity, and their mutual relation? Second, even supposing that he
did, was the resultant of those forces actually best understood in terms of a
more or less harmonious mixture, or was it rather the case that one or other of
the three so dominated the others as to give the constitution its characteristic
shape and tone? It has been argued that Polybius take on the Roman politeia
was original to him, and original because he applied Greek categories of analy-
sis and classification. That may be so, but that does not of itself guarantee either
its accuracy or its point. It could equally be argued that Polybius got Romes
constitution seriously wrong precisely because he tried to apply Greek catego-
ries to alien Roman institutions. To which Iwould add that whether he got it
right or not, Polybius motives and influences were personal and ideological as
well as disinterestedly intellectual.
The particular focus of our interest must be on the third, supposedly demo-
cratic component. That there was an essential popular dimension to Roman
Republican self-governance and decision-making there can be no doubt. The
Roman Republic, like democratic Athens, represented itself to itself ideologi-
cally as anti-tyranny and as naturally opposed especially to any political actors
who called themselves or could be tarred with the label of kings. Astandard
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conservative ploy directed against a radical or even just reformist Roman poli-
tician, such as Spurius Maelius, was to accuse him of aiming for kingship. That
mythological imaginary at least looks popular, even demotic. So too it was offi-
cially and formally the Roman People who passed laws, elected officials, and
declared war or peace. From 287 bce on (the start date of the Middle Republic),
the Council of the Plebs, representing the overwhelming majority of citizens,
could also pass laws binding on all citizens, patricians as well as plebeians, and
the fundamental citizens right of appeal against an officials action was to a
Peoples jurycourt.
However, against that demotic complexion and ideology of the Roman
Republic must be set a whole raft of counter-indications. The short acronymic
formula for the Roman Republican state was SPQR (Senatus Populus Que
Romanus); Senate and Roman People in that order, not PRSQ, Roman People
and Senate. The Senate, which consisted of all current magistrates above the
level of quaestor and ex-magistrates in good moral and economic standing
(eligibility was based upon a very high property qualification), had effective
initiative and control in matters of public finance and foreign policy. The board
of ten Tribunes of the Plebs, who were elected only by plebeian voters, were
not technically magistrates (and so not Senators), and not at all the functional
equivalent of Greek demagogoi. After 287, they were typically not radical anti-
Senate populist politicians but ambitious plebeians on the first rung of the gov-
ernmental ladder that would eventually lead, they hoped, to membership of an
increasingly conservative and reactionary Senate. Tribunes had a veto on all
legislation, but custom and precedent demanded that any legislative proposal
be vetted in advance by the Senate, and key Senatorial players could even use
one Tribune to veto another Tribune, as was done in an attempt to block the
too radical reforms of Tiberius Gracchus in 133. The popular tribunals and law-
courts were in practice all staffed by the rich few citizens; they were not Peoples
courts staffed by allotted jurors of generally low economic means and humble
social status, as in democratic Athens.
All magistrates and the Tribunes were elected; there was no place for the
democratic machinery of the lot in the Roman electoral system. Moreover, vot-
ing both in elections to the highest magistracies and in legislation and treaty-
making was conducted by group vote; in other words, there was no doctrine or
practice in Republican Rome of the democratic one citizen, one vote formula,
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Roman Republic:ASort of Democracy?
and the group vote method systematically favoured the rich few. Indeed, the
very principle of the assembly that elected the top magistrates (censors, consuls,
and praetors) was timocraticthat is, voting eligibility and power depended
on ones property qualification, something fundamentally anti-democratic in
democratic Greek eyes. Any Roman politicians who entertained some notion
of introducing genuinely democratic (Greek) ideas into the Roman Republics
governanceone thinks especially of the Tribune Gaius Gracchus, brother
of Tiberius, in 123 and 122 bcetended to be bumped off: illegally, of course,
although their murders were legitimated retrospectively by a Senate-domi-
nated court. In its foreign relations, it is hugely telling that in its dealings with
old Greece, Rome always supported oligarchies, rather as the Spartans had
done, and despised the masses and their political ambitions. Romes foreign
policy both before and after Polybius day systematically favoured the rich few
against the poor many in the Greek cities.
In other words, not only does the Greek term demos (in any of its senses) not
correspond to Latin Populus, but Polybius also rather grossly overestimated
the force and power of the Roman Populusin relation, in particular, to the
Senate. For the Roman Republic to qualify as any sort of demokratia, in any
sense other than that of not-monarchy, there were simply too many checks
and balances on the initiative and power of ordinary citizens, and far too much
power in the hands of what the first-century bce Roman historian Sallust called
the the few potentates.
Polybius did not, however, examine Romes politeia solely or simply on its
own internal political terms. He also compared it to a variety of foreign consti-
tutions, both actual and ideal, always to the advantage of Rome, and in terms
that reveal his own anti-democratic prejudices: to Thebes and Athens (6.434:
neither of those was any good, because there the masses take all decisions
according to their random impulses); to Crete (6.467), Platos Republic (6.47),
Sparta (6.4850), and Carthage (6.512). Such comparisons led Polybius into
dwelling more on the superiority of Rome (6.526), a position that he summa-
rised at 6.57. Moreover, he applied a further, cultural criterion, judging the true
form and quality of all polities on the basis of two basic elements, customs
and laws (47.1). It was in accordance with this criterion that he opined that the
sphere in which the Roman commonwealth seems to me to show its superior-
ity most decisively is in that of religious belief , since it is superstition which
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holds the Roman state together. By that he meant that the Roman governing
elite exploited religious awe in order to keep the massesalways fickle, filled
with lawless desires, unreasoning anger and violent passionsin subjection.
So, the cat is out of the bag: the alleged superiority of Romes politeia,
according to Polybius, did not onlyor mainlyreside in its superior gov-
ernmental process. It is therefore telling, too, that Polybius is the earliest
writer on record to introduce into political discussion the derogatory term
okhlokratiamobocracy, mob rule. Not even Thucydides or Plato had gone so
far. Thucydides, it is true, had spoken no less derogatorily of the naval crowd
or mob among the Athenian citizen body, and Plato in the Laws had made his
surrogate Athenian interlocutor sneer at spectator-ocracythe power of the
theatre crowd; not even they, however, had derided Athenian demokratia as
mere mobrule.
Polybius, in short, grossly misprised and overestimated the popular element
in Romes politeia. And a further objection to his mixed constitution analysis
may be levelled on the more general ground that no version of mixed constitu-
tion theory could offer a plausible analysis or explanation of how the Republic
actually operated. That seems to have been the view of Roman historian and
leading Senator Tacitus, writing under the Roman imperial system of the early
second century ce. In his persona as a historian of his own and earlier post-
Republican times he was ostensibly critical of the domination of one man,
since it denied to the Senate the freedom that had been its characteristic fea-
ture under the old Republic. But had he thought that the Republic had been a
mixed constitution, he would surely not have rubbished that notion as he did:
as a system more easily praised than realised, and, even if realised, incapable
of lasting. Nevertheless, in the longer run Polybius view did achieve great suc-
cess. Renaissance and later scholars also saw Rome either as a democracy or
as a mixed constitution. But should we agree with them? Or was it rather an
aristocratic-oligarchic republic with important popular elements, if more so in
ideology than in practice?
The MillarThesis
From 146 and more especially 133 bce that Republic was placed, for reasons
that lie beyond our concerns here, under increasingly intolerable strain, sig-
nalled by one major outbreak of civil war in the 80s, before it collapsed amid
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Roman Republic:ASort of Democracy?
another, even greater and more prolonged bout in the 40s and 30s. So unstable
indeed was the Late Republic that one distinguished modern analyst refused
even to dignify its proceedings with the title of politics. That is surely to go too
far at one extreme. But what are we to make of another distinguished modern
scholar, who has been conspicuously persistent in taking a line on the Middle
and Late Republican constitution almost diametrically the opposite of mine?
Polybius was right the Roman Republic exhibited strongly democratic char-
acteristics, which became more predominant over the last century or more of
its existence as a Republic, according to Fergus Millar. And there are others
who, without going so far as to claim that the Roman Republic was a democ-
racy in the classical Greek sense of demokratia, follow Millars lead in empha-
sising much more the democratic aspects of the Republic, since the power of
the people (or People) underpinned the political process. It is necessary there-
fore to re-examine the question from this modern, not only from an ancient,
point ofview.
If his views may be shortly summarised, Millar has advanced the following
four major arguments in favour of his democracy thesis: (i) rules for acquir-
ing and maintaining citizenship status at Rome were inclusive; even ex-slave
citizens (if duly manumitted by Roman citizen masters) had the public voting
rights as well as private (legal) rights of citizens; (ii) there was no property-
qualification for votinga democratic feature, according to Aristotle in his
discussion of the Greek polis; moreover, the secret ballot was introduced in
the later second century bce, an advance on typical Greek procedure; (iii)
Greek-style democracy or government by mass meeting was at best an exer-
cise in competitive rhetoric, at its worst mere demagoguerya point criti-
cized by Aristotle, whereas the Roman system of decision-making avoided
the latter, and produced master rhetorician Cicero into the bargain; and (iv)
the Roman Populus really did possess potentia (the most general Latin term
for power, equivalent to Greek dunamis). It took the final decisions on peace
and war, it elected to the highest as well as the lowest magistracies, it passed
laws.
Against those arguments and claims I would offer the following counter-
arguments and counter-claims, which in my submission are both individually
and collectively what Protagoras would have called knockdown arguments.
Some of them apply no less forcefully to Millars case than to Polybius (above).
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much against the interests of the poor majority of citizens, both economically
and politically.
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Roman Republic:ASort of Democracy?
civil war that brought the Republic crashing down. It is telling that no
Roman Thucydides stepped forward to describe or analyse this classic
case of stasis.
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DemocracyDenied
The Roman and Early Byzantine Empires
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commonwealth. In his own very long lifetime (63 bcece 14)he was mostly
known as Caesar, and it is one of historys little ironies that Caesar modulated
into Kaiser and Czar, since Augustus wished be thought of as anything but
that. Ironic too that his adoptive father had once punnedbecause a relative
bore the surname Rexthat he was not Rex (king) but Caesar:it was pre-
cisely because he was thought to be aiming at becoming a king that he was
assassinated where and by whom hewas.
That fatal error Augustus strove more or less subtly to avoid, employing sev-
eral different ruses. Whenever he attended the Senate, for example, he wore a
breastplate. He made a huge song and dance about being the saviour of the old
Republic and restorer of the old, Republican order, and emphatically not the
instigator of any newfangled, un-or anti-Republican regimeas an acknowl-
edged monarchy, however constitutional or mild, would inevitably have been
seen to be. Although he willingly adopted the title Imperator, from which our
emperor is directly derived, by it Augustus intended to signal that he was the
holder of Republican imperium (power), especially military, a power legiti-
mately conferred by the Senate and Roman People only on two ranks of mag-
istrates:in ascending orderpraetors and consuls. Augustus chose to rule the
Roman world not as an emperor but as a kind of Republican super-consul, both
within and outside Urbs Roma, the capital city ofRome.
The other most important constituency for his overall rule besides the army
were the plebeian citizen masses of Rome, the plebs Romana. So important
indeed were they that in 23 bce Augustus assumed, for life, a kind of power
from which his status as a patrician ought legally to have debarred him:the
power of a tribune of the plebs. This provided him with certain symbolic ben-
efits, partly mythological, partly mundanely pragmatic, including personal
inviolability. To the plebs of Rome he doled out lavishly what the later satirist
Juvenal contemptuously labelled bread and circuses:a subsidised grain dole
and fancy chariot races. But Augustus largesse was far from limited to them.
Besides the occasional cash donatives, he also permanently improved the basic
housing of the poor, and backed that up with a rudimentary fire brigade and
police force. However, as a later imperial functionary tellingly observed, grain
and entertainments did not only feed and amuse the Roman people, they also
controlled (literally held) them; or, to put it in another way, they were far from
a welfare program.
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he who had ushered in the blessings of peace, and he who had in some sense
restored the Republic. But in what sense, precisely? Like the apt pupil schooled
in Roman rhetoric that he was, he leaves the climax for the very end of the
document, in the two key chapters34 and35.
To interpret these properly, we would be well advised to compare and con-
trast the much later biography of Augustus, written in the reign of Hadrian, by
Suetonius, who as an imperial bureaucratic functionary had access to original
documents no longer extant. Suetonius as it were took Augustus life and career
for his doctoral research subject and, distanced in both time and political
space, could afford to draw back the veil of Augustan propaganda to reveal the
less cosy truth beneath. In the Res Gestae Augustus paints himself as the ulti-
mate patriot and constitutional conservative, who as merely the first citizen
(Princeps) had in 28 bce transferred the Republic from his power (potestas) to
the arbitrium (see below) of the SPQR, had never held any greater power than
any colleague in any one office, and had been granted in 2 bce the honorific
title of father of the fatherland by decree of the Senate.
The meaning of potestas is unambiguous enough, since Augustus did in 28
bce hold supreme de facto power both in Rome and throughout the empire,
although the legal basis of that power was deeply questionable in strictly
Republican terms. But what was meant by the weasel word arbitrium? Its literal
sense is something like free disposition and thus the power of decision, and
presumably the wily Augustus aimed to suggest thereby that the SPQR formula
once again meant what it had done before Julius Caesars assumption of the
title of Dictator Perpetuus in 44, and the ensuing civil wars of 43 to 31 bce, had
rendered it null and void. But actually, as Suetonius acutely observed, Augustus
had merely thought about genuinely restoring the Republic in some authenti-
cally traditional sense, on two occasionsbut had decided against doing so
both times. Moreover, towards the end of the biography Suetonius blows the
lid off the whole Augustan fabrication, exposing the real source of power in
this supposedly restored Republic. For this in fact lay not with the Roman
People nor even the reconstituted Senate but with Augustus and his chancery,
which was managed not by Senators but by his own personally appointed
and directly responsible staff, chiefly his own ex-slave freedmen. These pow-
erbrokers, merely first-generation Roman citizens, were as far removed from
being Senators as was remotely thinkable then, and yet it was they who knew,
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Republican collegiality, but, if so, it was never going to be workable, and one of
the first acts of Tiberius (in fact) reign was the murder of his adopted brother.
Taking Augustus career since 28 bce all in all, I believe that Edward Gibbon
was quite correct to label Augustus a subtle tyrant. In reaching that judgment
Gibbon was hugely influenced by his reading of the imperial historian Tacitus,
whose Histories and Annals between them originally covered the years ce 14 to
96. His sly take on Augustus tribunician power has already been noticed, but
no less acute was his imagined scenario of Augustus state funeral right at the
start of the Annals (1.910). As they looked upon the pyre of the late emperor,
who was about to be formally deified, allegedly prudent men argued the toss
for and against the merits and demerits of his reign. Tacitus places the negative
arguments second, for emphasis, and they are expressed both at greater length
and more memorably than the positive arguments. Above all, his prudent crit-
ics rip holes in Augustus faade, exposing his ruthless opportunism and ambi-
tion and dwelling on the many deaths that he had directly or indirectly caused
and about which Augustus himself was so carefully silent in the Res Gestae.
One of these negative criticisms is particularly telling: he had brought peace to
the Roman world, certainly, after the horrendous bloodletting of the civil wars;
the peace he brought, however, was itself also bloody. The civil wars might
have ended in 31 bce, but foreign wars had not, nor had political assassinations.
Tacitus of course wrote with 20:20 hindsight. Five decades and eight reigns
after that of Augustus, the true legal nature of the so-called Principate was
finally enshrined in permanent public record in the Law on the Imperium of
Vespasian. For after performing sterling military service for the Empire in
among other places Britannia (made into a province by Claudius in ce 43),
Titus Flavius Vespasianus, to give him his full name, was chosen by his loyal
troops as Emperor of Rome. But he had to fight for the position. More pre-
cisely, he triumphed, as the fourth and last in the Year of the Four Emperors
(ce 69), in the civil wars following upon the suicide of Emperor Nero in ce 68.
Vespasian reigned until 79, and he managed to found a dynasty of sorts known
as Flavian, after his middle name. But of Vespasians two sons and successors,
Titus (7981) and Domitian (8196), the latter proved a tyrant, and his reign
gave to the Principate as a whole the bad name that Tacitus has made immortal.
The civil wars of 6869 had given the Principate a nasty jolt. Apublic gesture
reconfirming the imperial power was required. The law passed on the Imperium
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of Vespasian spells outas Augustus could not or would not have donewhat
had in fact been the case since 27 bce:He shall have the power to transact
and do whatever things divine, human, public and private he deems to serve the
advantage and the overriding interest of the statejust as Augustus, Tiberius
and Claudius had. Tacitus was not fooled. Vespasian was no less of an absolutist
ruler than his son Domitian, regardless of any cloak of supposed legality. Even
Tacitus, however, was not immune from mythmaking. He himself became con-
sul in the year after Domitians assassination, probably already so nominated
by none other than Domitian. To cover his tracks, he blithely heralded the
short and not particularly sweet reign of the elderly Senator Nerva (9698)
as the dawn of yet another golden era:the first ever uniting of the Principate
with freedom, as a Roman Senator understood that. Suetonius, who wrote his
biographical series of Twelve Caesars after Tacitus, began it with Julius Caesar
and ended, like Tacitus, with Domitian. But unlike Tacitus, Suetonius avoided
the overoptimistic, post-Domitianic gloss. Freedom was by now nothing but
a name and shadow.
A contemporary of the brilliant Latin writers Tacitus and Suetonius was
the equally brilliant and even more polymathic Greek intellectual Plutarch
(Ploutarkhos, or ruler in wealth, in Greek), who lived from about 46 to 120. His
Latin name, since he was also a Roman citizen, was Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus,
and he bestrode the Greek and the Roman intellectual worlds alike. He is best
known today, thanks partly to Shakespeare, as the writer of biographies, includ-
ing most famously a series of parallel lives of great Greeks and Romans. In the
preface to his pairing of Alexander the Great with Julius Caesar he took time
out to emphasise that he was not a historian, as that term was by then under-
stood in the Hellenistic-Roman world:I write lives, not histories. His principal
intellectual preoccupation was a philosophically informed moral didacticism,
and that programmatic declaration exempted him from having to try to do
anything like justice to the political and military achievements of his subjects.
Although he was ferociously learned and read absolutely everything available,
including big narrative histories, what really interested him were anecdotes
that revealed something special or unique about the chosen subjects moral
character.
It is possible, of course, to read the Lives against the grain, as it were, in order
to elicit information not otherwise preserved about the political deeds of, say,
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Pericles (Chapter 7). But more rewarding for our immediate purposes is an
essay of c.ce 100, the title of which may be translated alternatively as Precepts
for Statecraft or Advice on Public Life. This belongs to the other main branch of
Plutarchs voluminous corpus, his so-called Moralia (Moral Essays). It is writ-
ten as a warning to ambitious young Greek would-be politicians, instructing
them as to how they should best comport themselves in the political conditions
of the high Roman imperial era. The message that comes across loud and clear
is that politics, as it had once been understood in a free Greek polis before the
conquests of Alexander the Great and of Rome, was now a dead letter. The
word polis was indeed still in current use, but any polis that found itself within
a province of the mainly Greek-speaking eastern Roman empire wasnot to
put a fine point on itactually under the heel (Plutarch says military boot)
of a proconsul:that is, of a Senatorial governor such as Tacitus, who rose to
occupy the top provincial post of governor of Asia with the rank of proconsul
(instead of/functionally equivalent in power to a consul). An expert on the
period and region has sagely commented:The concreteness of his advice
shows Plutarch to be concerned with real issues. An abundance of material,
literary and documentary, shows the aptness of his advice to his owntime.
Plutarch is generally reckoned an ornament of the literary movement known
as the Second Sophistic. (The First had been the era of the fifth-to fourth-
century bce Sophists, including the democrat Protagoras, against whom Plato
had railed; see Chapter6.) Adepts of this movement liked to peddle their wares
in the form of public display lectures and declamations, or essays that they
circulated among like-minded would-be intellectuals. Conspicuous among
these was the Greek orator and propagandist Aelius Aristeides (117c.180),
who graced the Antonine age. The ages outstanding literary output has been
well summarised as follows:The philosopher Epictetus. The historians Arrian
and Appian. The Greek novels of Longus and Achilles Tatius. The travel narra-
tive of Pausanias. The satirist Lucian. A number of performing sophists, includ-
ing Aelius Aristides, Favorinus and Polemo. The Christian authors Justin and
Clement. The philosophical meditations of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The
medical writings of Galen.
Aelius came from Mysia (in northwest Turkey today) and developed
an extremely intimate connection with the Roman imperial court, initially
through sharing a tutor with future emperor Marcus Aurelius. There was no
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newbut all equally powerlessRoman citizens, who had acquired their citi-
zen status merely by the wave of an imperialhand.
In 324 Emperor and Christian convert Constantine founded a New Rome,
at Constantinople, formerly known as Byzantium. The dominant language of
Constantinople and the Byzantine empire, formerly the east Roman Empire,
was Greek, but the Byzantines (as we call them) were proud to refer to them-
selves as Romans. It remains to trace the ultimate downwards trajectory of
democracy in imperial Roman and early Byzantine discourse and ideology, that
is, the degeneration of both the institution and the word democracy beyond
even the seeming nadir reached by Aelius Aristides. In 325/6 Eusebius, Bishop
of Caesarea and competent documentary historian of early post-Constantinian
Christianity, composed a panegyric on Constantine. In this work of piety he
contrasted monarchy (mon-archia), which for him was a good thing, with the
dreaded poly-archia, or rule of the Many:the latter, since it fails to make or
duly recognise proper discriminations of rank, descends inevitably and inexo-
rably into anarchy and civil strife. Finally, ultimately, in the reign of Byzantine
Emperor Justinian (527565), the author of a Chronographia (c. 550)used and
abused the term demokratia to mean riot, mob violence, insurrection:that is,
exactly what it could not have meant in the fifth-to fourth-century bce Greek
world of its origins.
Justinian is justly remembered and celebrated for the codification of Roman
jurisprudence that he set in train under the overall supervision of Tribonian.
Within that codification is to be found a maxim of the late second-to early
third-century Roman jurist Ulpian, which rather nicely encapsulates the mes-
sage of this rather doleful chapter in democracys life: What the Princeps
(Emperor) decides has the full force of (a) Law. The contrast with the way
in which these things were managed in, say, the Athenian democracy, could
hardly have been starker, at least from a pro-democratic point of view. There
the demos had exercised its barely fettered kratos in the legal as in all other
spheres: that is, they ruled themselves and they directly exercised kratos by
taking democratic, simple-majority decisions in Assembly and Lawcourts, and
by implementing them no less democratically. Sic transit gloria mundi antiqui.
274
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Democracy Eclipsed
Late Antiquity, the European Middle Ages,
and the Renaissance
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the true founder of Christianity, went even further by confounding the spir-
itual and the political domains in his implied injunction that the powers that
be are ordained ofGod.
Nevertheless, during these centuries prior to Renaissance humanism the
nascent concept of the state and a notion of sovereignty resting on a general
will or popular consent begin to provide a way back in for some idea of proto-
democracy, although it would be democracy of a very non-ancient Greekkind.
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The Magna Carta that was very reluctantly sworn by King John with his
barons in 1215 and reissued, substantially revised, in 1225 under Henry III, owes
its fame in part to the fact of its unique survival; not dissimilar charters were
issued in Germany, Sicily, and France in the thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries, but these have not survived. In even larger part, it owes its clat to
its echoings in the United States Bill of Rights. Yet it is in fact both textually
and contextually problematic, and in order properly to appreciate it, subse-
quent mythical overlays and readaptations for quite other purposes than those
originally intended have to be stripped away. It was, for example, cited anach-
ronistically by Sir Edward Coke (died 1634) as enshrining Englands ancient
constitution and the English peoples immemorial right to freedom, claims
which were not unconnected to the great political upheaval that followed in
the 1640s (Chapter18). Three of its sixty-three original clauses are still legally
valid, of which the most famous articulates the principle of habeas corpus:No
free man [in the somewhat free translation offered by the British Library] shall
be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or
exiled nor will we [the royal we] proceed with force against him except
by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. But this state-
ment of principle was buried deep in Magna Carta and was given no par-
ticular prominence in 1215. The real legacy of the document as a whole is that
it established the crucial principle that the law was a power in its own right to
which the king, like his people, was subject and thus limited the kings author-
ity. True enoughas a statement of principle; but laws are general and have
to be interpreted, as Aristotle insisted; and the ancient Greeks, especially the
democrats among them, were well aware that is only when the people exercises
its political power in and through the lawcourts that it may be said truly torule.
A similar limitation of regal absolute power was claimed by the eight earls
and thirty-one barons of Scotland who collectively put their name to a docu-
ment addressed, in Latin, to Pope John XXII. Sometimes called a Declaration
of Independence, it was in practical terms a response to the excommunication
first of Robert the Bruce, then of the people of Scotland as a whole. What the
signatories declared on the sixth day of April 1320 at the monastery of Arbroath
rested chiefly on their refusal for so long as there shall but one hundred of us
remain alive to consent to subject ourselves to the dominion of the English.
They were thus imploring one sovereign to throw his weight into the scales
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against another. Again, a principle was at stake, but it was not even a strictly
popular, letalone a democraticone.
The Renaissance
The fourteenth-to sixteenth-century European Renaissance (as Jules Michelet
and Jacob Burckhardt, both nineteenth-century historians, respectively bap-
tized and framed it) was in significant part a rediscovery, recuperation, or
reinvention of Graeco-Roman Antiquity, including its pagan gods and god-
desses. The discovery of metal movable-type printing was quickly dedicated
to the cause, famously for instance by Aldus Manutius in Venice from the end
of the fifteenth century. But the Renaissance movement was more especially a
rediscovery of ancient Rome than of ancient Greece, and that applies particu-
larly in the political sphere. An early, literally graphic example is Ambrogio
Lorenzettis fresco cycle of 13381339 commissioned by the Council of Nine that
governed the Tuscan city-state of Siena. Originally regarded as an allegory on
the virtues of peace set against the vices of war, it is now usually referred to as
the Allegory of Good and Bad Government.
By 1500 Latin was no longer anyones mother tongue, but it was the scholarly
lingua franca, and that could not but reinforce the attention devoted to Roman
rather than ancient Greek history and politics. Renaissance and later scholars
who saw Rome as a democracy were concerned with the issue of sovereignty;
that is, they recognized that the People formally possessed it, or alternatively,
if they saw it as a mixed constitution, that was because they were concerned
rather with governance in practice, or how much power the People did actu-
ally wield. Anything much like the democratic polis of the fifth or fourth cen-
turies bce had to wait to be recuperated until the eighteenth century, and only
rather late in that century atthat.
At the end of the fifteenth century, and also in Tuscany, a remarkable linguis-
tic revolution may be detected in Florence: Republic (used as a paraphrase
for democracy) came to be understood in the sense of popular government.
This linguistic turn is exemplified most strongly by the writings of Machiavelli.
Besides his far better known Il Principe of 1513, which was a tract for enlight-
ened autocracy at best, in 1519 Machiavelli also published Discourses on Livys
First Decade; that is, the opening ten books of his Ab urbe condita (From
the Foundation of the City of Rome), which describe the period of the kings
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(753509 bce) and the early Republican era. Machiavellis choice of author and
polity speaks worlds:nothing Greek or democratic (in a Greek sense) to worry
about there. Moreover, although he was not uninterested in the ancient Greek
world, especially through his reading of Polybius, and praises Sparta en passant
for the longevity and alleged stability of its constitution, Machiavelli was pre-
occupied less with constitutional niceties than with the thoroughly aristocratic
notion of virt and with civic greatness, which he associated with liberty. One
scholar has spoken optimistically of Machiavellian democracy, but he also
comments more soberly and accurately that Machiavelli suggests that the best
one can hope for from a republic or democracy is an alternation between
rule and being ruled among citizens. However, for an ancient Greek political
commentator, that would be a defining condition of a polis, not specifically of
any version of a democraticone.
Civic humanism of the type illuminated by Machiavelli flourished intellec-
tually in a broadly Roman Republicannot Greektradition. For instance,
the great sixteenth-century Dutch scholar Joost Lips (Justus Lipsius) wrote his
Politica, a tract on civil doctrine, in six books (1589), in the tradition of Roman
Stoicism. He was a great admirer of the sceptical, disabused, non-religious
and ostensibly republican (anti-Principate) Tacitus, as also was Machiavelli.
Indeed, when Machiavelli was placed on the Papal Index of censored works,
coded references to Tacitus could be substituted for mentions of Machiavelli,
an intellectual tendency so prevalent that it has come to be dignified with
the sobriquet of tacitism. Such reappraisal of religious and secular thinking
through the examination of the literary bases of theology and philosophy
counts as humanism. Its civic dimension took the form of a revival of the old
idea of Roman citizens rights and privileges, but it would be a long time before
that notion would issue eventually in the French Revolutionary Declaration of
the Rights of Manand Citizen (Chapter18).
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18.
Democracy Revived
England in the Seventeenth Century and
France in the Late Eighteenth and Early
Nineteenth Centuries
283
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going back to the late Renaissance in mainland Europe (Chapter 17) on which
contenders could draw. But the debates that took place within the New Model
Army, with Cromwell himself in the chair, in St Marys Church Putney (by the
banks of the river Thames) in October and November 1647 were something
quite new, and indeed unrepeated. It is one of the unanticipated blessings of
the anti-elite political tradition of this country that a tachygraphic record of the
debates survived in an Oxford college archive to be transcribed and published
only in the nineteenth century.
The Putney Debates are also known as the Levellers Debates, since that was
the derogatory tag attached (by their opponents) to those in favour both of a
republic and of some widening of the franchise. Their leader John Lilburne
understandably preferred Agitators. Whatever exactly they stood for, they
stood well to the left of the mainstream of the New Model Army, though also to
the right of Gerrard Winstanleys Diggers, who far more radically favoured the
Figure18.1
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell (15991658), the man who would be king, was a republican of a sort, but vehemently
opposed the radical proto-democratic republicanism of the English Levellers, over whose Putney
Debates (1647) he presided. RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY
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which drew attention to the least democratic of all the Athenian democracys
institutions (Chapter12). And his post-Restoration manifesto The Ready and
Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1666) was prompted more by his
familiarity with Roman classical authors, especially the historian Sallust, a cli-
ent of Julius Caesar, than by any sympathy for Euripides democratic Athenian
republic.
No less fierce and in their way impressive were the opponents of the abortive
republican experiment, and none more so than Thomas Hobbes (15881679).
His first published work (1628) was a translation of Thucydides History, the
first done into English directly from the Greek rather than via a Latin transla-
tion. One of his last was an autobiography composed in Latin hexameter verse
(1672), in which he made bold to claim that it was Thucydides who had taught
him how superior was the rule of one wise man to that of the ignorant, undis-
ciplined mass. Yet despiteor because ofhis knowledge of the ancient lan-
guages, he averred in his major work of political philosophy, Leviathan (1651),
that there never was any thing so deerly bought as the learning of the Greek
and Latine tongues:for by reading these texts men from their childhood have
gotten a habit (under a false shew of Liberty) of favouring tumults, and of licen-
tious controlling the actions of their soveraigns; and again of controlling these
controllers, with the effusion of so much blood.
By such men Hobbes meant of course Milton and his despised, pro-
republican kind. It is therefore somewhat ironic that some modern scholars
have detected proto-democratic leanings even in Hobbes, or at any rate argued
that in another of his works, the De Cive (On the Citizen, 1642; English trans-
lation, 1651), Hobbes envisaged the state as having a democratic foundation
in popular consent, which hadif only for practical reasonsto be overrid-
den in favour of monarchic autocracy. But most of us prefer still to regard
Hobbes as firmly authoritarian, indeed the first to put forward the needs of a
State sovereign quite so vigorously, and as allotting to such a sovereign a cen-
tral, commanding role for which the People were deemed by him to be totally
unqualified. The Athenian democratic practice of ostracism predictably drew
hisire.
The Restoration of 1660 had terminated Englands brief flirtation with a kind
of republicanism, but the civil war continued on the ideological plane, if with
diminishing vigour. The Glorious Revolution of 1688actually not a revolution
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Figure18.2
Maximilien Robespierre
Maximilien Robespierre (17581794) encapsulated the indeterminate fervour at the heart of the French
Revolution; not afraid to lop the heads of the ancien regime both metaphorically and literally,
he was afraid of the newfangled democracy that revolutionaries further on the left than he were starting
to advocate. Scala/ Art Resource, NY
288
Democracy Revived
surprisingly, since the gulfs in practice and scholarship were simply too great
he did not have a good historical understanding of Athenian democracy. At
any rate, when he spoke approvingly of the good democracies of Athens and
Rome, it was the timocratic-aristocratic Athens of Solon rather than the truly
democratic Athens of Pericles that he had in mind. Nor, arguably, did he prop-
erly understand the peculiar (in both senses) British constitution. But from the
perspective of his legacy and impact, what matters is that he identified as its key
point of distinction and driving motor the checks and balances implied by the
supposed separation of powers (legislative, executive, and judicial) of the post-
1688 governmental settlement, not whether or not he correctly so identified
them. That discovery is to be distinguished both from the two main versions
of the ancient mixed constitution theory (i.e., pudding, seesaw; Chapter15)
and from modern mixed constitution theorising. It was to bear spectacular
if indirect fruit in the post-Revolutionary constitution of the United States of
America.
Far more sympathetic to something resembling an ancient Greek notion of
popular governance was the Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His posing of
the question of human equality, and his trumpeting of the sovereign impor-
tance to public decision-making of something he called the General Will, were
both somehow proto-democratic. Yet in the great eighteenth-century quarrel
between the respective merits of Athens and Sparta as models to be imitated,
he firmly preferred the supposedly self-denying, communally oriented Sparta
to the luxuriously self-indulgent democratic Athens. This preference may have
something to do with his otherwise puzzling notion that citizens of his ideal
state must be forced to befree.
In some ways Rousseaus comrade in arms, in others his sworn enemy,
Franois-Marie Arouet, alias Voltaire, launched a parallel intellectual crusade
both against the entrenched ideological power of the Catholic Churchunder
the slogan crasez linfme! (crush the infamous!)and against the tempo-
ral power of the absolutist French monarchy. Strongly in favour of individual
liberty of thought and, contra Rousseau, firmly on the side of luxury, Voltaire
not unnaturally opted for Athens against Sparta, though for cultural, not politi-
cal, reasons. It has to be added, however, that, unlike Montesquieu and other
French Enlightenment luminaries, Voltaire was not much interested in looking
to antiquity for political inspiration at all. In the quarrel of the Ancients and
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Democracy Revived
revolutionaries who, though initially forming just the minority left wing and
divided amongst themselves, did nevertheless briefly dominate France at
the height of the Revolution in the winter of 17911792. All were inspired by
Rousseau, and they looked back, some more than others, to Greece as well as
to Rome for revolutionary inspiration. For example, a February 1794 Report of
the Committee of Public Safety on Principles of Political Morality linked the
promotion of active, participatory citizenship with democracy itself, claiming
democratic or republican:these two words are synonymous. But, as is too well
known, the Revolution devoured its own children.
First, Danton and Desmoulins were executed at the behest of Robespierre;
then Robespierre himself, accused of tyranny in 1794, was executed. The left-
wing struggle was carried on by the splendidly named Gracchus Babeuf and his
1796 Conspiracy of the Equals:though his forename is Roman, he attempted to
introduce what could be made to look like, and conceivably was intended to be,
genuine, Greek-style political-civic equality. This notion, however, was found
too threatening even by his left-wing comrades, since Greek democracys major
sin (according to its ancient as to its modern critics) was precisely that of treat-
ing unequals equally. In any case, all movement towards civic-political equal-
ity, whether on an ancient or a modern model, was soon terminated by the
rise to autocratic power of Napoleon Bonaparte. His bewildered contempt for
the magnificent history painting of the Battle of Thermopylae accomplished
in c.1814 by the neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David, his chief court painter, is a
powerful commentary on Napoleons conception both of the classical tradition
and of his place in world history. The emperor simply could not understand
why David had lavished so much time and effort on depicting so heroically a
bunch of losers such as the Spartan king Leonidas and his doomed300.
In one of the most elegant short studies of the changing meanings and
modes of democracy, John Dunn has pertinently asked:Why has the word
democracy changed so sharply in meaning from the days of Babeuf to those
of Tony Blair? One key part of the answer is to be found in a lecture titled Of
the Liberty of the Ancients compared to that of the Moderns delivered in Paris
in 1819 by the Swiss liberal and pro-Revolution thinker and writer Benjamin
Constant. Like Montesquieu, Constant was far from getting all his facts about
the ancient Athenian democracy right, and, like many then and since, he
took Athens, virtually his only comparandum, to stand in for ancient. But his
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292
19.
Democracy Reinvented
The United States in the Late Eighteenth
and Early Nineteenth Centuries and
Tocquevilles America
The UnitedStates
It has been contended by an American scholar that to the US Founders, and to
the French aristocrats Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville, the intellectual
heritage of ancient Greece was as important as, or even more important than,
that of ancient Rome. Actually, few of the US Founders knew well, let alone
were decisively influenced by, ancient Greek history or historians and political
thinkers. At least, not in any positive way. What little they did knowmainly
from Thucydides (as read by Hobbes, Chapter 18) and Plutarch (Chapter 16)
confirmed their instinctive or learned preference for Roman Republican order.
And this was a preference, moreover, thanks to their reading of the ubiqui-
tous Tully (Cicero), for an order of a Middle Republican rather than a Late
Republican sort (Chapter 15). This also explains, for example, why Washington,
DC, is blessed with a Capitol Hill and the US constitution with a Senate, and
not with an Acropolis or Boule.
Among the leading ideologues of the American Revolution were the three
authors of the Federalist Papers: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and
John Jay. Madisons Federalist 10 (1787), following on Hamiltons no.9, deliv-
ered a broadside against what he was pleased to deride as faction. Adopting an
almost early Byzantine notion of ancient Greek direct democracy as riot and
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Figure19.1
Thomas Jefferson
The third president of the United States, and a learned classicist, Thomas Jefferson (17431826) was the
chief author of the Declaration of Independence, but he was able to reconcile his advocacy of liberty
with his own continuing slave ownership and, like almost all the Founding Fathers, had little time for
ancient Greek-style direct democracy. Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
mob rule by the ignorant and fickle over their betters, and employing a classi-
cally Roman rhetorical trope, Madison opined that even had every Athenian
citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
The practical inference for him, so far as the future of American governance
was concerned, was that the people in their collective capacity must be rig-
orously excluded from any active or direct share in it. Popular sovereignty
might have lip service paid to it, as a theoretical abstraction, but it should go
no further than that towards practical realisation. It would be very interesting
to know what ordinary Foundersthose who fought for the Revolution espe-
cially between 1774 and 1776thought about such elitist views, but as usual the
thoughts of the common people are not reported reliably, if atall.
The US Founders were especially keen on John Lockes treatment of prop-
erty ownership as a right (cf. Chapter 18). Hence Thomas Jeffersons famous
reference in the Declaration of Independence that he largely composed to
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Democracy Reinvented
the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The last
of those rights was understood as inseparable from the ownership of real
property, whichcontradictorily, one might have thoughtdid not exclude
property in humans, in which the Virginian Jefferson himself generously
indulged. Moreover, these rights were severally and collectively interpreted
as trumping any version of the ideal of human equality. Jeffersons favour-
ite ancient historian, not altogether surprisingly for a dedicated opponent of
the allegedly tyrannical George III, was Tacitusa critic, as he read him, of
the absolutist monarchy of the Roman Principate, but of course no democrat
(Chapter16).
Yet at least the ancient Greek-derived word democratic was put back on the
political agenda, if in a profoundly non-or even anti-ancient Greek sense. This
was demonstrated most vividly in 1791, when Jefferson in combination with
Madison made bold to found a new political party and to call it the Democratic-
Republican Party. (I well remember my sense of surprise when I first learned
this fact, as the distinction and indeed opposition of a Democratic party and a
Republican party had been drummed into my conscious and subconscious mind
from the moment I became at all aware of American politics.) Of course, the
nature, functions, and manifestoes of those parties have shifted, sometimes vio-
lently, over the more than two centuries since then, and there is now a quite wide-
spread sense abroad that because of their limits and failures they have outlived
their usefulness. But the main point to emphasise here is that, not just organisa-
tionally but ideologically too, parties as such are antithetical to any ancient Greek
notion of citizenship: that is, citizenship in the active, participatory sense, enjoy-
ing both the legal and the pragmatic capacity to exercise an automatically pre-
scribed share in ruling and in passing judgment. The modern party has several
actual or potential functions in a modern political system: it may hold a group of
people together as a distinct part of a larger and irreducibly divided configuration
that it helps to define; it may have a quasi-military capacity for deliberate action
or intervention, and an ability to win over dominant (though never complete)
portions of a larger body of opinion. But the modern political party also flies in
the face of the ancient, individualistic if not voluntarist, conception of demo-
cratic entitlement, empowerment, and participatory rule.
The foundation and formation of the Democratic Party in something like
its modern incarnation are credited either to the seventh president, Andrew
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Tocquevilles America
One of the earliest positive uses of the word democracy (in its French form)
headlines a two-volume work by a declassed French aristocrat, Alexis de
Tocqueville (born Paris 1805, died Cannes 1859); his crowded curriculum vitae
included experience of and reflection upon the revolution of 1848, and service
in 1849 as foreign minister to Louis Bonaparte, the future Napoleon III (and
subject of Marxs Eighteenth Brumaire; Chapter18). Tocquevilles Democracy in
America (18351840) was based on the nine-month journey he undertook in
1831 and 1832 in the company of Gustave de Beaumont. Their task was to study
and report home on the US penal system; among many other challenging
adventures, they witnessed chattel slavery in Baltimore and were shipwrecked
on the Ohio River. But the journeys principal outcome was this landmark
publication, a unique book both in the field of political commentary and in
the history of modern America. It has been extensively studied in anglophone
scholarship, and translated into English more than once. It fully deserves rein-
vestigation and reappraisal in a life of democracy.
Tocqueville was notoriously slippery on what exactly he meant by democ-
racy, understanding it loosely as comporting above all the largest possible
amount of liberty accorded to each citizen, rich or poor, powerful or hum-
ble, and in that sense an equal liberty. For by (political) equality he meant the
absence of aristocratic hereditary political rights, an absence that he himself
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298
20.
DemocracyTamed
Nineteenth-Century Great Britain
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Figure.20.1
ThomasPaine
Thomas Paine (17371809) a man of humble English origins, uniquely played leading roles, theoretical
as well as practical, in both the American and the French Revolutions. A convinced republican, he was
as firmly opposed to direct democracy as he was to monarchical tyranny, and no less fervently in favour
of representative government. The Art Archives at Art Resource, NY
300
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however, and clearly with a sense of relief, Grote had withdrawn from what
Edward Gibbon, a historian-parliamentarian predecessor, had called a school
of civil prudence, and taken up once again his bookish historical studies. For
his History of Greece, eventually published in twelve volumes (18461856), had
been begun as early 1822, when he was not yet thirty.
To place the History in the wider context of British historiography of ancient
Greece, Grotes not altogether distinguished predecessors included John Gillies,
Oliver Goldsmith, William Mitford (below), E.Bulwer Lytton, and, most seri-
ously, Connop Thirlwall. Grote was a pioneer of ancient historiography in
purely technical terms; he set new standards not least by his respect for the law
of evidence. In his own day this prompted a furious riposte from one Richard
Shilleto: in a thirty-page pamphlet titled Thucydides or Grote (published in
London in 1851)he accused Grote of the grossest hubris in setting himself up as
an authority above even Thucydides. This in turn provoked a more measured
response, not from Grote himself but from his brotherJohn.
However, Grote was also, and from our standpoint most importantly, a
pioneer in the re-evaluation of ancient Athens as a democracy. Not least in
this respect, Grotes History was a more than satisfactory rejoinder to William
Mitfords four-volume Tory version of ancient Greek history (17961820).
Grote, for example, did not shrink from defending the institution of ostracism
that had attracted such ire from Aristotle onwards. He also spoke up in defence
of the Athenians treatment of their leaders. As a specialist in ancient philoso-
phy, he devoted a whole long chapter (67) to a defence of the Sophists against
their principal critic (or calumniator), Plato; this was also an integral part of
his very nineteenth-century linkage of democracy with intellectual progress, to
which he allied also a defence of the necessity of rhetoric as a means to enable
ordinary people to make up their minds and thereby give their genuine consent
to political decisions.
Chapter 67 of the History, moreover, follows immediately after Grotes
description of the death in 404 bce of Alcibiades, one of the two most promi-
nent Atheniansthe other being Platos relative Critiaswhom as youths
Socrates could allegedly have corrupted (Chapter10). And it is placed imme-
diately before the chapter (68) that is devoted precisely to Sokrates. Ever keen
to defend the Athenian People against charges of corruption, Grote ends that
chapter with a series of extenuations of the Athenians guilty verdict and death
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and promotion of individuality. That essay was the proximate ancestor of Isaiah
Berlins theories of negative and positive liberty (Chapter18).
For well over a century Mills version of democracyGreek-inflected but
not Greek-infected, if I may so put itprevailed, as the only viable model on
offer within the context and increasingly globalised presence of liberal, repre-
sentative, parliamentary democracy. Or, as Winston Churchill famously put it
in the House of Commons on 11 November 1947 (Armistice Day):
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in thisworld
of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.Indeed
it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government exceptfor
all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
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Epilogue
Democracy Now: Retrospect and Prospects
Pessimism
In the year 2000, 120 out of the 192 members of United Nations were labelled
as democracies. But so what, if under that classification Yemen was counted as
a democracy? And how much did it mean when just one of those 192, China,
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Epilogue
accounted for one-quarter of the human race? Despite the states official title
being the Chinese Peoples Democratic Republic, there seems not to be much
democracy of any description to be found there. As Mr Cheng Jin, the official
in charge of elections to local peoples congresses, rather nicely put it in 2011:
There are 1.3 billion people in China. If they all expressed their opinions, who
would we listen to?
Arguably, democracy Beijing-style amounts to or is based essentially upon
bribes and threatsthough there is nothing unique to China about this. And
that is not to mention the multiple uses of torture (walling, close confinement,
water dousing, waterboarding, and rectal hydration, among other disgusting
and degrading practices) used supposedly in defence of freedom and democ-
racy by Western democracies, whether in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, or
The Maze in Northern Ireland. In short, at best democracy may well today
merely occupy the space filled in classical Latin by res publica; that is, it identi-
fies every legitimate form of government from Parliament to peshmergas but
hardly washes its face as a meaningful, let alone pinpointedly accurate clas-
sificatory label.
At all events, democracy in stable governmental regimes on both sides of
the Atlantic and elsewhere firmly means representative democracy and liberal
(anti-Big State) democracy: that is, anything but pure, ancient Greek-style
democracy. We, the People in any mass-popular sense are kept well away from
any direct access tolet alone the regular daily exercise ofgovernmental
power. When the former Greek Prime Minister George M.Papandreou sud-
denly mooted the possibility of holding a referendum on a package of eurozone
conditions for a financial bailout in 2011, he was widely greeted with aston-
ishment at what seemed, and surely proved, a mere political manoeuvre and
empty threat.
This is far from being entirely surprising. There is no direct institutional
legacy of Athenian or any other ancient direct democracy to any modern form
of democracy, and those moderns who wish to take it as a model of inspira-
tion are usually, inevitably, very selective in what borrowings they recommend
(e.g., lottery only, or use of new-communications technology to simulate
face-to-face decision-making, and further examples, below). Some more full-
blooded notion of direct, active, participatory democracy is often desiderated,
but those who call for it often also dwell either on the democracy we have lost
306
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Optimism
However, if that sort of standpoint had been the only one viably on offer, this
book would have been neither conceived nor undertaken. On the optimistic
side of the fence there are reputable modern historians of ancient Greece who
variously argue either that there are, if not continuities, at least relevant compa-
rabilities between ancient (Greek) and modern (parliamentary, representative)
democracies; or that regardless of the objectively determinable and unarguable
differences between them, indeed because of those differences, ancient Greek
democracies can still teach us something practically useful today. I discuss
just three such historians:the late Moses Finley (American-British), Mogens
Herman Hansen (Danish), and Josiah Ober (American), whose views may in
all cases be traced ultimately back to those of George Grote (Chapter20).
Moses Finley was a victim of 1950s McCarthyite witchhunting and anti-
intellectual repression; for him a conception of democracy mattered a very
great deal. It was therefore by no means a surprise that he should have cho-
sen as the theme of the lectures he gave in 1972at Rutgers, the university
from which he had been dismissed two decades earlierdemocracy ancient
and modern. (The first published version of the three lectures appeared under
307
Epilogue
that title in 1973; a second, much enlarged edition appeared in 1985.) The lec-
tures can be read in many different waysand that applies even more to the
second edition, which included complementary essays. But whatever else they
may have been, or intended as, they constituted a powerful tirade against the
apathy theory of democracy that Finley rightly perceived as the dominant
trend current in the 1950s and beyond. A special target was Joseph Schumpeter,
who, although he had advocated a minimalist, accountability model, had also
rejected the classical theory of democracy that postulated the superiority of
decisions made collectively by the non-elite many rather than by an elite few
(Chapter 3). Interpreting democracy instead in terms of results, not principles,
he predicted that by means of a democratic process capitalism would come to
be replaced by socialism.
Against Schumpeter and likeminded others Finley called in aid Grote and
J. S. Mill (Chapter 20), counterposing with them the achievements of the
Athenian Many. Admittedly, they had made mistakes, not the least of them
being to tolerate in their midst an unrelenting, unreconciled anti-democratic
minority. The latter not only twice overthrew Athens democratic system of
self-governance, with a lot of help from foreign Greek and non-Greek friends
and supporters, but were also ultimately responsible for the anti-democratic
tradition in Western thought. But then again, as another modern defender
of the Athenian masses against their detractors has correctly remarked, No
constitution has ever given more weight to the decisions of the ordinary man
than did the Athenian. Today, presumably, Finley would be turning his guns on
technocrats, international bankers, and other unelected experts, along the lines
of his devastating rejoinder to Platos intellectualist, anti-democratic plea for
government by specialists:
308
Epilogue
the ancient Athenian polity had ever been governed according to the norms
of demokratia, but whether or not, from our modern perspectives on democ-
racy, ancient Athens would significantly qualify as such. His answer was firmly
positive, since it wasand ishis view that in the fundamental respect of its
ideas of liberty Athens drew the line between public and private not so very
differently from the way that line is drawn by liberal democracies today:that
is, allowing considerable scope to individual and familial privacy and freedom
from central social or political demands. In this he has been powerfully sup-
ported by those who believe it is helpful to apply concepts such as justice-as-
fairness and political liberalism to interpret ancient Athenian democracy, and
who argue that the Athenians took their public political obligations ever more
seriously precisely in order to safeguard individual as well as collective liberty.
Imyself happen not to believe that ancient and modern can be so readily com-
pared, or indeed identified, in this key regard, since I am far less confident
than Hansen that there was an entity called the state against which the liberty
or freedom of an individual Athenian citizen needed to be safeguarded. But
Irespect the seriousness with which the comparison is drawnand welcome
the enlightenment that can ensue from such a comparativist exercise.
Still more enlightening, in my view, is the work of the scholar to whom
I have chosen to dedicate this book. Also in 1989, not coincidentally, Josiah
Ober published his prizewinning monograph Mass and Elite in Classical
Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People. Democratic Athens,
he there argued, not only was by ancient standards an exceptionally large and
complex society and polity but might also be best seen as a shining exception
to Michels Iron Law. In that same year he published a still eminently readable
review article on the nature of Athenian democracy, a topic to which he has
reverted many times since. But the shifts in his emphasis over the years are
telling:from history to political science, and from primarily seeking to under-
stand the ancient Athenian democracy on its own terms to extracting from that
understanding positive guidance towards improving ourown.
His broad overall message is that although ancient democracy was very
unlike modern democracy both structurally and in its history, we can nev-
ertheless learn from the ancients how to revise and reform modern democ-
racy (defined as collective self-government that is at once stably effective and
limited) by incorporating the sorts of insights highlighted in Herodotus 3.80
309
Epilogue
(the accountability of leaders, from the Persian Debate). Or, more generally,
we may come to appreciate better that democratic knowledgethat is, the
kind gained and disseminated through democratic structures of initiative and
accountabilityis more efficient than other kinds, not least because it con-
duces to some beneficially utilitarian view of what politics should be ultimately
about. Iretain my doubts as to the viability or feasibility of treating the ancient
Athenian democratic polis as if it were some sort of soulful corporation, but
harbour none as to the wisdom of the notion that ancientand modern
oligarchs should not be allowed the last word on the merits and demerits of
Athenian-style democracy.
But arguably even the modernising approach of Ober does not go nearly
far enough. A key challenge both theoretical and practical is to globalize
democracyor democratize globalization. Some might of course say this is
putting the cart before the horse:can we even begin to think in global terms
before we have radicalized local (national) democracy? If we cant make even
the economically defined eurozone work politically, what hope is there for
making democracy work globally? This is a fair enough objection, but modern
technology does offer the possibility of some radical version of teledemocracy:
the forced marriage of new digital and informational technology with ancient
democratic practice. This probably also ought to be founded upon an interna-
tional Bill of Digital Rights. And of course it must be not merely accompanied
by but also premised upon a fundamental rethink about the quality of twenty-
first-century politics and its appropriately amended mindset.
Such a rethink has indeed been undertaken fruitfully in principle by a
Danish academic, Marcus Schmidt (1993), and his scheme has been given a
seal of approval by fellow-Dane Mogens Hansen, precisely because it combines
all the five most prominent aspects of Athenian democracy: direct popular
vote on all major issues, sortition, rotation, political pay, and co-operation
between professional policymakers in parliament and amateur decision-mak-
ers on an electronic panel. What was pure theory in that case has since been
partly translated into actuality in Iceland. Citizens were invited to help redraft
the national constitution, with some apparent success: 523 candidates stood for
election to a constitutional assembly consisting of up to 31 members. A more
modest proposal involves reintroducing the ancient Greek democratic notion
of the lottery, either for the filling of offices, or at least for the allocation of local
310
Epilogue
Conclusion
Yet for all those signs and wonders, and multiple glimmerings of neo-
democratic hopes, even Ihave to confess defeat in the present and immediately
foreseeable future, on three main counts.
First, political or civic rights or privileges are now often seen as secondary
to, and indeed as opposed to, human rights. In my own university there exists
a Centre of Governance and Human Rights, which aims to bring together rel-
evant specialists to think critically and innovatively about pressing govern-
ance and human rights issues throughout the world, with a special focus on
Africa. But the ancient Greeks certainly did not invent, and would not feel at
all comfortable with, any notion of universal human rightseven if we were
to grant them some understanding of rights in the first place. This is a very
recent, post-Enlightenment invention. One very interesting test case of the rel-
evance of modern human rights conceptions as applied to practical democratic
politics is the contentious issue of Prisoners Right to Vote within the European
Union. As reported in the London Times Law Report of 12 June 2012, the Grand
Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has argued that the rights
guaranteed by article 3 of Protocol Iwere crucial to establishing and maintain-
ing the foundations of an effective and meaningful democracy governed by the
rule of law. Yet the right to vote was not deemed to be an absolute and indefea-
sible right, so that the removal of a prisoners right to vote was not a violation
of his human rights provided that such a penalty had not been imposed auto-
matically and indiscriminately. That is a judgment on which the present British
Government is keen to rely, whereas out-and-out human rights democrats see
deprivation of the right to vote as a species of unfreedom.
Second, dearly as Iwould like to end this brief life of democracy on a har-
monious note, far more closely in tune with our malodious times (if Imay be
permitted that pun), as it seems to me, is a chilling volume titled They Cant
Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy. The book is chill-
ing not because of the laudable intention signalled in its subtitle, but because
its title reflects the political actuality of a profoundly non-or anti-democratic
311
Epilogue
world and ageas seen from a modern as well as an ancient Greek viewpoint.
It deploys five contemporary case studiesfrom Greece, Spain, the United
States, Argentina, and Venezuela, respectivelyand uses, indeed transcribes,
vox pop observations in order to illustrate its theme and message. In the second,
prefatory chapter, there is a section titled Historical References, where a reas-
suringly accurate account is given of some of the basic concepts of [ancient]
Athenian democracy. This is done to show both that the similarities between
many principles of ancient Athenian democracy and the democratic practices
of the new global movements are evident (my emphases), and yet that current
democratic practice has betrayed the ancient ideals. To that end the authors
quote from a work of 1996 titled Radical Democracy:
Hear, hear. Back to the future. But there is a third, possibly clinching rea-
son for pessimism. Probably the single biggest difference that has been made
in the twenty-first century to any discussion of the relevance or otherwise of
ancient Greek democracy and politics to modern democracy is the post-9/11
re-injection of religion into a debate that is now global: political arguments
based on transcendental, non-empirical sources are widely proclaimed in both
East and West. In this regard, we are alas going backwards. Under the terms and
conditions of the outcome of the American Revolution, religion had been on
principlethough admittedly not in practice (see de Tocqueville)excluded
or at least separated off from and opposed to politics. There had been a compa-
rable secularisation as a consequence of the French Revolution, and freedom
of religious thought and practice has come to be seen as a cardinal principle
of all Western liberal democracies. That is no longer by any means the case in
lived actuality.
Against those like myself who wish for a fuller expression of the concept of
democracy itself , we must constantly remind ourselves that there exist others
who, though themselves brought up within a western liberal-democratic tradi-
tion, feel absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for its ideals, however etiolated
312
Epilogue
those may now seem to some of us. Thus, for example, Mehdi Hassan, a late
British jihadi, tweeted in November 2012 as follows:
Since then Daesh (also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Islamic State) has perpetrated
numerous atrocities in the name of that same body of moral and religious law,
against both human beings and their treasured, irreplaceable cultural artefacts.
In ancient Greece they had managed these things very differently. Socrates
had been tried and convicted for impiety, true, but religion as such did not
obstruct but rather was seen as complementary to the elaboration of norms of
active, participatory, egalitarian, democratic citizenship. What price, now, the
eternal vigilance upon which our too-fragile democratic liberties all depend?
313
S
Notes and References
Prologue
Books on the ancient Athenian democracy are not in short supply; among those Ihave found
most helpful are Jones 1957; Hansen 1999; Ober 1989a, 1996, 1998, 2008a; Sinclair 1988; Osborne2010.
One useful attempt to place the Athenian democracy in a comparative ancientmodern perspec-
tive is Held 1996; for further conversations on ancient democracy and modern ideology, see Ober
& Hedrick eds. 1996; Rhodes 2003a; Hansen 2005. Marcaccini 2012 is an inventive discussion of
how democratic Athens became transformed within nineteenth-and twentieth-century socialist dis-
course into a bold and suggestive revolutionary paradigm.
Chapter1
Ancient Sources and Sourcebooks
The Cambridge University Press Translated Documents series includes Fornara 1983, Harding
1985, and Burstein 1985, but the texts expertly translated and annotated therein are not all strictly
documentary. For 403 to 323 bce, see Rhodes & Osborne 2003. On the ideas and realities of democ-
racy, Rodewald 1975; Asmonti 2014. On early Greek political thought from Homer to Aristotle, see
Gagarin & Woodruff 1995. On social values in Classical Athens:Fisher 1976. The urban archaeology
of Athens is well covered by Camp 1986, 1990. Kagan ed. 1966 (e.g., Section IX on Periclean Athens
Was It Democratic?, Section XI The Unpopularity of the Athenian Empire, and XII Demosthenes
vs Philip of Macedon), Robinson ed. 2004, and Samons ed. 1998 all contain both ancient sources in
translation and modernwork.
Aristotle
Politics:useful translations include T.A. Sinclair, rev. T.J. Saunders (Penguin Classics, 1981); and
E. Barker, rev. R. F. Stalley (Oxford Worlds Classics, 1995); cf. Cartledge 2009b. On the legacy of
ancient politics more generally, Vlassopoulos 2009a; Vlassopoulos 2007b, by repositioning the polis
within an interlinked history of the wider Mediterranean and Near Eastern world, has also argued for
a major paradigm shift in the way ancient historians should conceive and treat ancient Greek political
thought and practice.
Constitution of the Athenians or Ath. Pol.: trans. P. Rhodes, Penguin Classics 1984; on its date,
purpose, authorship, relationship to Politics, and value, see Rhodes 1981/1993. Further on Aristotle as
315
Notes and References
witness to and critic of democracy:Ober 1998; Ste. Croix 2004; as political sociologist of the polis in
general, not just the democratic polis:Ste. Croix 1981:6980.
Aristotle as antiquary and researcher:Huxley1979.
Aristotle on poverty and wealth (penia kai ploutos):esp. Politics 1279b16ff, esp.1279b3480a3, with
Ste. Croix 1981:6980 at 723. Aristotle and Marx:Ste. Croix 1981:556, 74,7780.
Civil strife or war (stasis):Lintott 1982; Gehrke 1985; Hansen 2004; Gray 2015; cf. Funke1980.
Literacy levels:Harris 1989 argues a low percentage of functional literates; contra:Missiou 2011;
cf. Harvey 1965,1966.
Eucrates decree, 336 bce:Rhodes & Osborne 2003:no.79; the relief at the top shows a symbolic
representation of Demokratia (by then worshipped as a goddess) crowning a representation of the
People of Athens; further Blanshard 2004a; Teegarden 2012, 2013,2014.
Erythrae regulations, ?453/2: Fornara 1983: no. 71 (offers two different translations, based on rival
restorations and interpretations of the damaged stone); Samons 1998: 1223. On Athenian imperial
officials, etc., see Osborne 2000; for interpretations, esp. Ste. Croix 1954 (repr. in Low ed. 2008); Ste.
Croix 1972.
Thoricus stele: Daux 1983; Athenian religion: Mikalson 1987; Parker 1996, 2006.
Oath of Plataea stele from Acharnae:Cartledge2013.
Standards decree, ?420s:Fornara 1983:no.97, Samons 1998:1257. This is often referred to as the
Coinage Decree, but it also concerns weights and measures, so Standards is more correct. Discussions
include Starr 1970; Figueira1998.
Owl coinage:an example is depicted on the cover of Samons1998.
Cleinias [tribute-collection] Decree, ?440s, ?420s: Fornara 1983: no. 98; Samons 1998: 1279;
Ramou-Chapsiadi2009.
Tyrannicides group: on our evidence for it, and for the twin statues characteristic poses as rep-
resented in later, marble copies, see Webb 1997, www.brynmawr.edu/archaeology/guesswho/webb.
html; cf. Anderson 2003: 198206; 2007; Azoulay 2014. Tyrannicide narrative: Thucydides 6.5359:
Thomas 1989.
On official Athenian (democratic and public) art generally, see Castriota 1992; on democracy,
imperialism, and the arts, Raaflaub & Boedeker eds. 1998; on especially the Parthenon and its politi-
cal implications, Meiggs 1963; Connelly 2014. Also Neer2002.
Roberts 1994:good rev. by E.Robinson, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 95.02.08.
Rarity of ideological democrats:Maloy2013.
Chapter2
Goody on alphabetic literacy as democratic:Goody & Watt 1962/1963.
Copenhagen Polis Project: Hansen & Nielsen eds. 2004; cf. Hansen 2006.
Polis as state? in favour: Hansen 2002; against: Berent 2004 (stateless political community).
Rise of polis:Snodgrass 1980; Starr1986.
City-state cultures:see an excellent review of Hansen ed. 2002 and 2004 by K-J. Hlkeskamp, Bryn
Mawr Classical Review 2004.04.03.
Polis in Homer? Cartledge 2009:ch.3.
Hectors patriotism:Greenhalgh1972.
Hesiod Works and Days: translations include G. Most (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge,
MA,2006).
Hesiod as semi-aristocrat:Starr1986.
On Theognis:Figueira & Nagy eds. 1985; on oligarchy:Ostwald 2000a; Winters 2011:72ff.
Hoplites and their rise:Kagan & Viggiano eds. 2013 encapsulates the main controversies.
316
Notes and References
Chapter3
Ath. Pol.:Wallace in Raaflaub, Ober, Wallace etal. 2007; Hansen 2010a gives too much credence
to, e.g., Robinson2001.
Age of experiment:subtitle of Snodgrass 1980. Age of tyranny:de Oliveira Gomes2007.
Strong principle of equality:Morris 1996. But see also Cartledge2009a.
Solon in Ath. Pol.:chs 512 are devoted to Solon; see esp. the poem later titled Eunomia, Ath. Pol.
12; S.is mentioned also at 2.2, 3.5, 13.1, 14.1, 22.1, 28.2, 29.3, 35.2, 41.2, and 47.1. Freeman 1926 is still
worth reading; more recently on his politics of exhortation, see Irwin 2005; R.Wallace in Raaflaub,
Ober, & Wallace 2007 (S.as a genuine founder of democracy); Lewis 2008 (on S.as a moral-political
philosopher along similar lines to Aristotle); Poddighe 2014 (S.in Aristotle, Ath.Pol.).
Solon as fourth-century talisman:Moss 1979, repr. in translation in Rhodes ed. 2004. On the
problem of what were, or were not, his reforms:Hansen 1999:2889.
Post-Solonian conception of Athenian citizenship:Manville1990.
Significance and possible origins of the counting of votes:Larsen 1949. On the majority-decision
principle, comparatively:Flaig ed.2013.
Chios stele:Fornara 1983:no.19.
The late Nikos Birgalias 2009 on isonomia: ch. 1 isonomia = the transformation of social into
political majority, a compromise between elite and the masses; ch. 2 Isonomia and Herodotus dis-
cusses how isonomia evolved into democracy at Athens between 479 and 462; ch. 3 From Aristocracy
to Isonomia offers six cases falling between 600 and 470:Chios, Heraclea Pontice, Eretria, Elis before
470, and Argos 494470; there is a significant enlargement of the Assembly of citizens, who may now
be elected to ruling positions; ch. 4 From Tyranny to Isonomia cites four cases:Cyrene, Megara,
Erythrae, and Ambracia; ch. 5 Isonomia: Ambiguous Casesfour in number: Lipara 58070,
Mytilene after 580 to 525, Chalcis 506446, and Naxos 506500.
Robinsonsunsustainableview of the appearance of several demokratiai by 550 (2011:21922;
cf. Robinson 1997)is explicitly opposed by him to the misguidedly Athenocentric view that Athens
was the one and only true democracy.
Sources on Peisistratus include Herodotus 1.5964; 5.625, 901, 935; 6.35ff, 39, 103, 1089,
121, 123; 7.6.3; Thucydides 1.20; 2.15.5; 3.104.1 (Delos); Ath. Pol. 1319; Aristotle Politics 1310b311a8;
1313b1829; 1315b212; 2934; 1314a2515b10; and Plutarch Solon 8; 13; 2932. Modern work includes
Andrewes 1956; Boersma 1970 (buildings); Shapiro 1989; Thomas 1989:ch. 5; and McGlew1993.
Cleisthenes as eponymous Archon 525/4: Fornara 1983: no. 23 (a list of eponymous Archons span-
ning 527/6 to 522/1, inscribed about a century later, but there is no reason to doubt its accuracy).
Tyrannicides and their myth:Azoulay 2014. For popular tyranny, see Morgan ed. 2003; for the
democratic struggle against tyranny, see Teegarden2014.
Chapter4
Vernants intellectual revolution: Vernant 1982; 1985; cf. Snell 1953; Lloyd 1979; Seaford 2004;
Cartledge2009b.
Xenophanes:Gagarin & Woodruff1995.
317
Notes and References
Sources for Cleisthenes include:Herodotus 5.66, 67.1, 6970, 723; 6.131.1; Ath. Pol. 13.5, 2022,
29.3; Arist. Politics 1275b347, 1319b1927.
Cleisthenes demotic turn, or manoeuvre:Camassa2000.
Significance of the given name Demokrates:Hansen1986.
The deme as the basis of the Athenian democracy:Hopper 1957; cf. in great detail Whitehead
1986; Paga 2010 (deme theatres).
Ostracism:Fornara 1983:no 41; other translated ancient texts:see www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/ostra-
cis.html; procedure:Ath. Pol. 43.5; Plutarch Aristeides 7.Among modern discussions, see esp. Lang
1990; Ste. Croix 2004; Forsdyke2005.
Literacy in the Athenian democracy:Goody & Watt 1962/1963; Harvey 1966; Harris 1989; Pbarthe
2006; Lagogianni-Georgakarakou & Buraselis eds. 2009; Missiou2011.
Modern interpretations of Cleisthenes include: Lewis 1963 (family fiddles); Andrewes 1977;
Cartledge 1996 (equality), 2007; Ober 1996; Lvque & Vidal-Naquet 1964/1996 (in the later edition
they resiled from attributing as many reforms as possible to Cleisthenes personally); Anderson 2003;
Ste. Croix 2004; Hammer 2005 (an example of plebiscitary politics); K.Raaflaub in Raaflaub, Ober,
& Wallace 2007. See generally Osborne 2009b:ch. 9; and Azoulay & Ismard eds.2011.
Chapter5
On all cultural-political aspects of Aeschylus Persians, Hall 1989; on Greek cultural responses
more generally, Bridges etal. eds.2007.
Reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles:Ath. Pol. 2528, with Rhodes 1981/1993; Raaflaub etal.2007.
Political pay for jury service:Markle 1985/2004 (but there was no pay for Assembly attendance
until the 390s). The timing of the introduction of other forms of public political pay is uncertain, but
not later than 411:Thucydides 8.69.4, with Rhodes 1981/1993:304,6912.
Pericles Citizenship Law:Patterson 1981; Blok2009.
Autochthony myth:Loraux 1993; Sebillotte Cuchet 2006:ch. 9; Blok 2009:1504.
Chapter6
Soviet communism:Eden & Cedar Paul (1920) optimistically labelled the post-Bolshevik revolu-
tionary regime an ergatocracy, explaining that as usual in modern English, the coiner of a neologism
must have recourse to the rich and expressive language of the Greeks; their book was published,
ironically, by the Plebs [Latin!] League established in1908.
Ideology of ancient imperialism:Idisagree rather strongly here with Finley 1973/1985; cf. Robinson
2001; Ma etal. eds.2009.
Absence of democratic theory:an extreme exponent of this view is Davies2003.
On ancient Greek political thought:Raaflaub ed. 1993; Schuller ed. 1998; Rowe & Schofield eds.
2000; Balot 2006; Balot ed. 2009; Cartledge 2009b (in practice); Salkever ed.2009.
Aristotle on theoria as the highest form of virtue:Nicomachean Ethics book10.
A.H.M. Jones The Athenian Democracy and Its Critics (1953) is repr. in Jones 1957:ch.III.
Scholars postulating the existence of ancient democratic theory include:Ober 1996, 1998; Raaflaub
1989b; Roberts1994.
Herodotus Persian Debate:Cartledge 2009a. Accountability:Roberts 1982; Landauer2012.
Herodotus as a political writer: Thompson 1996.
Thucydides on (his) speeches: 1.22; cf. Connor 1984. On the post-Renaissance reception of
Thucydides:Harloe & Morley eds.2012.
318
Notes and References
Isonomia: Vlastos 1953, 1964; Cartledge 1996; Rausch 1999; Lombardini 2013. On intellectualist
equality arguments, see Platos version of Protagoras democratic theorisingbelow.
Sortition, lottery:Taylor 2007a; Birgalias2009b.
Platos version of Protagoras democratic theorising: Protag. 319b324c; and for an explica-
tion of Protagoras democratic theory, insofar as that can be recovered, see Farrar 1988; cf. Hall
2010:17881; Denyer 2013. Plato against the Sophists:Grote 18461856:ch. 67. On Plato as a political
dissenter:Ober1998.
All ancient Greek political philosophy as a response to democracy: Farrar 1992: ch. 2; see also
Brock 1991, Ober 1998; Cartledge 2009a: ch. 6. On the Western political tradition as predominantly
anti-democratic: Roberts 1994.
Oratorical defences of democracy:Demosthenes 20.106, 21.67, 24.59, 76, 39.1011; Aeschines 1.4,
3.6; Lycurgus1.4.
Thucydides Athenagoras of Syracuse, 414 bce:6.39.
Epitaphios or Funeral Oration:Loraux1986.
Lysias speech 2 is his Funeral Oration; he participated at great personal risk in the democratic
liberation and restoration of 403, and his pro-democratic sentiment (2.1819) was doubtless entirely
genuine.
Old Oligarch (a sobriquet conferred by Gilbert Murray) is a familiar label for Pseudo-Xenophon
Ath. Pol.: Osborne 2004, with review by J. J. Sullivan, BMCR 2005.07.79; J. Marr & Rhodes 2008;
another trans. by G.Bowersock (Loeb Classical Library Xenophon Vol. VII:Scripta Minora, 1968).
The author was certainly an oligarch, but far from certainly aged; his thread of argument is unpicked
by Cartledge 2009a:Appendix 1.The reference to blameworthy class traitors is at2.20.
Two kinds of equality:Harvey 1965,1966.
Xenophons anti-democratic dialogue:Memorabilia 1.2.406; cf. Ste. Croix 1981:41415, Cartledge
2009a:967. On tyranny as anti-democracy:Morgan ed.2003.
Utopianism:Cartledge 1996b. Eu-topia=place of well-faring. Ou-topia=no-place. Thomas More
coined utopia in 1516 to represent chiefly the latter.
Aristotles political thought:most Greek polities of his day either a version of democracy or a ver-
sion of oligarchy:Pol. 1296a224. Four species each of the respective genera demokratia and oligar-
chia:Pol. 1291b3192a38, 1292a39b10, 1292b293a34, 1318b619b32; cf. also Rhodes 1981/1993:1112;
Ste. Croix 1981:6981; Lintott 1992, 2000; Ober 1998; Hansen 2010a. Last democracy:Pol. 1292a28ff.
Democracy=rule of poor, oligarchy=rule of rich:Pol. 1279b89, 1281b82a, 129193a. Aristotles
middling polity:Pol. 1296a378; his well-blended oligarchy:Pol. 1320b20.
Stasis in the Greek world since the 420s:Thucydides 3.82. Violent anti-democratic oath:Aristotle
Pol. 1310a8, with Ste. Croix 1981:81.
Thucydides moderate blending:8.97.2.
Chapter7
General summations of the Athenian democracy: Jones 1957: ch. I; Gomme 1962; Forrest
1966:ch.1.
Age of Pericles:Azoulay 2014 is a salutary corrective; see also Ferrario2014.
Difference between pre-and post-403 democracy and democracies:Rhodes 1980; Hansen1990b.
Age of Demosthenes:e.g., Hansen1987.
Aristotles definition of the citizen: Pol. 1275, at 1275a324. Recent (controversial) discussion:
Woods2014.
319
Notes and References
Deme-residence:such evidence as there is suggests that though there inevitably was some internal
movement out of ones hereditarily ascribed deme, yet there was also a high degree of continuity of
residence:Osborne 1985; cf. Taylor2007b.
Inspection of genitals:Davidson2006.
Age of majority:Golden1979.
Oath of the Ephebes:Blok 2009:15960; Cartledge 2013; Kellogg2013.
Speech on appeal against disfranchisement:Demosthenes 57. Another case of skulduggery is the
foolhardy surety Meixidemus of Myrrhinous:Osborne 1985; Osborne 2010:185.
Deme decrees for benefactors:e.g., IG ii.2 1175=Fisher 1976:1567; IG ii.2 1187=Fisher 1976:1578.
The deme as the basis of the Athenian democracy: (the title of) Hopper 1957; cf. Whitehead
1985 (but note 31326:few major politicians seem to have cut their teeth in their demes); Jones 1999:
chs 24; and for citizenship matters, Manville1990.
Size of Greek city populations:Hansen & Nielsen eds. 2004; Hansen 1985. Athenian heavy loss of
life in late fifth and early fourth century:Strauss 1987:7086.
On all matters to do with the Council of 500: Rhodes 1972, repr. 1985; cf. Taylor 2007a (sociology
of the lot).
Accountability:Roberts 1982; cf. Ostwald 2000b. Divided power:Pasquino2010.
Honorary citizenship votes:Vlassopoulos 2013:116.
Assembly: Hansen 1987; cf. Hansen 1983 and 1989; Ruz 1997: 52538 (list of known propos-
ers of decrees, amendments); Saxenhouse 2006:ch. 7 (Thucydides). Assembly pay (and jury pay):
Markle1985.
Political pay outside Athens:Ste. Croix1975.
Peitho (persuasion) as goddess:Buxton1982.
Cleon as a new politician:Connor1971.
Athenian demagogues:Finley 1962, 1985; with Lane2012.
Jurisdictional power of the demos: Cartledge, Millett & Todd eds. 1990; Todd 1993; Blanshard
2004. Legal change: Schwartzenberg 2004, 2007.
Heliastic or dicastic Oath: Christ 1998; Lanni 2006. Agora lawcourts: Boegehold 1995. Dicasts
bronze tokens (pinakia): Kroll 1967 (Athenian system exported to Sinope, Thasos, Epeirus, and
Halieis).
Thucydides on Antiphons treason defence speech:8.68. On his own exile:5.25.
Athenian legal procedure:Todd1993.
Sycophants:Harvey 1990; Darbo-Peschanski2007.
Arginusae trial:Xenophon Hellenica 1.7 (a monstrously one-sided account).
Areopagus:on all aspects, see Wallace1989.
Chapter8
Tyrtaeus reference to polieteon (citizens in genitive plural): P.Oxy. XLVII.3316, ed. M. Haslam
(Oxford,1980).
Politeia as taxis in Aristotle:Pol. 1278b811, 1289a15, cf. 1274b26, 1289b27.
Great Rhetra:the literature is huge; e.g., Cartledge 1980/2001.
The secrecy of its politeia:Thucydides 5.68.2. This is the subtitle of Michell 1952. An important
if opaque Spartan social institution was the Krypteia or secret service ritual:Cartledge Der Neue
Paulys.v.
Spartan oliganthropia:Cartledge 1979/2002:26372.
320
Notes and References
Spartans and Helots, according to Thucydides: 4.80 (interpretations of the ambiguous Greek text
differ: does he mean to say that, so far as relations with the Helots were concerned, the Spartans
overriding priority was security? Or, more broadly, that the Spartans overriding priority was security
against the Helots?). On all aspects of Helot life: Cartledge 2011.
Othering:Cartledge2002.
Unusual piety and religiosity of the Spartans:Herodotus 5.63, 9.7; cf. Richer2010.
Athenian religious festivals:Parker 1996,2006.
Panathenaea:Neils ed. 1992, Neils 1994; Wohl 1996. Meaning of the Parthenon frieze:Connelly
2014. As good a short account as any of the Parthenons political implications:Meiggs 1963; cf. Fehr
2011. On the Periclean building programme as a whole:Azoulay2014.
Dionysia:Cartledge 1985. Democratic function of plays:Goldhill 1986; cf. Winkler & Zeitlin eds.
1990; Cartledge 1997a; Cartledge 1990 (Aristophanes); Pritchard 2004 (dithyrambs); Villacque 2008;
Boedeker & Raaflaub eds. 2009; Burian 2011 (tragedy). Contra:Rhodes 2003b, 2011a. Afascinating
modern riff on the ancients tragic understanding of democratic politics:Johnston2015.
Regulations for Eleusis, ?422/1:Fornara 1983:no.140; cf. Gagn2009.
Sacred Orgas decree of the Assembly:Rhodes & Osborne 2003:no.58.
Aristotles woman, and on Spartan women and wives:Cartledge 1981/2001.
For Athens as not only a (masculine) democracy but also a phallocracy, see Keuls 1985/1993.
Women and religion:Jones 2008; cf. Jameson 1997/2004.
Property rights of Athenian women:Ste. Croix 1970. Index entry:Harrison1968.
Wealthy Athenian families:Davies 1971, 1981. Domestic space at Athens:Nevett 1999, 2010. Family
life:Katz 1998. Women and democracy:Jameson 1997/2004.
Trireme service as a school of democracy:Strauss1996.
Slavery as a or the basis of Greek civilization:Finley 1959/1981; cf. Wood 1988 (one of the foun-
dations of Athenian democracy); Garlan 1988; Bradley & Cartledge eds. 2011. Slaves good to think
with:Cartledge 1993. Laureum mines:Nicias allegedly hired out 1,000 of his slaves to contractors for
this literally servilework.
Public slaves:Ismard 2015. Xenophon in his pamphlet on revenues (Poroi, 355 bce) advocated the
purchase of large numbers of slaves directly by the Athenian community to work the silver mines.
Slavery, freedom, and citizenship:Vlassopoulos 2009a. Advocate of extreme blurring of the status
distinction between citizen and slave in the economic sphere:Cohen 2000. On status at Athens gen-
erally, Kamen 2013. On the Athenian extra-institutional public sphere:Gottesman2014.
Nicomachus:see Lysias Speech 30. Old Oligarch:Ps.-Xenophon Ath. Pol. 1.1012.
Athenian litigiousness:Cohen 1995 (feud by other means); Christ 1998; contra Herman 2006:199
201. Rule of law:Lanni 2007. Generally Todd 1993; cf. Cartledge etal. eds. 1990. Lawcourts:Boegehold
etal.1995.
Sycophancy:Harvey 1990; Darbo-Peschanski2007.
Athenian Agora:Camp 1986, 1990; Millett 1998; Vlassopoulos 2007a. An excellent series of Agora
picture books is published by members of the American School of Classical Studies Agora excava-
tions team (excavating in the Agora since 1931). See also Ehrenberg 1962 for a sociology of Athenian
Old Comedy (Aristophanes and his peers).
Peiraeus:Garland 1987/2001; as a deme:Whitehead 1985:3946. Trireme service:Strauss 1996.
On the architectural development of Peiraeus: Wycherley 1978. A world apart: von Reden 1995.
Isocrates on the Peiraeus: 4 (Panegyricus) 42; cf. Old Oligarch 2.7; Thucydides 2.38.2 (Periclean
Funeral Speech); Hermippus fr. 63 Kassel-Austin (from Phormophoroi, Basket-bearers). Maritime
traders:Reed2003.
321
Notes and References
Death: Humphreys 1993; Patterson ed. 2006. Eighth-century burial egalitarianism: Snodgrass
1977. Public civic funeral ritual:Loraux 1986; cf. Pritchard ed.2010.
Dexileos monument:Low 2002, cf. 2010; Ferrario 2014:17981.
Atotas epitaph:Bradley & Cartledge eds. 2011:132. Funerary commemorations in general:Ferrario
2014 (honours for a slave:p.211). Epitaphs and citizenship:Meyer1993.
Chapter9
Ober 2011 compares the 508/7 Cleisthenic democracy with the 320s Athenian democracy of the
Aristotelian Ath. Pol.; cf. Azoulay & Ismard eds. 2011. Raaflaub etal. (including Cartledge) 2007 argue
the toss over when the Athenian politeia first became a demokratia properly so called.
Democracies beyond Athens:Robinson 2011; cf. ONeil1995.
Delian League:Osborne 2000; Low ed. 2008; Ma etal. eds.2009.
Athenian fifth-century support for democracy elsewhere:Old Oligarch 1.14, 16, 3.11, Thucydides
1.115, 3.27, 47 (Diodotus speech), 8.24, 38), both fifth-century; Lysias 2.56; Isocrates 4.1046, 12.68;
and Aristotle Pol. 1307b235).
Athenian epigraphic habit:Hedrick1999.
Samos 440/39:on balance Ibelieve that Athens did impose a democracy in 439:Cartledge1982.
Athens-Samos isopolity agreement, 405:Osborne 2000:no.183 (passed 405, inscribed 403/2).
Claudius speech in Senate on comparative citizenship practices, in ce 46:Tacitus Annals11.24.
Ideologically motivated interventions:Thuc. 3.82.1.
Sparta and oligarchy:Thuc.1.19.
Athenian speaker (Diodotus) alleges that the allied masses support Athens:Thuc.3.47.
Brocks line:2009:161; also that of Ostwald 1993; contra Ste. Croix 1954/1972; Hunt 2010:90. For
the inscriptional evidence, including the Erythrae decree, see Lewis 1984/1997.
Argos-Sparta treaty, 417:Thuc. 5.77,79.
Syracuse, fifth-century politics:Herodotus 7.155; Thuc. 6.3441, 723; Diodorus 11.68.56, 11.86.387.6,
13.91.396.4; Aristotle Pol. 1302b, 1304a; democratic interlude:Finley 1979; see also Berger 1992; ONeil
1995; Robinson ed. 2004: ch. 3 (Popular politics in fifth-century Syracuse); Camassa 2007b (the
tormented political life of fifth-century Syracuse). Likeness of Syracuse to Athens:Finley 1979:61.
Post-413 transition:Pol. 1304a289.
Ancient democracies fighting each other:Robinson2001.
Herodotus on Naxos:5.30, 6.96. Thucydides on Naxos:1.98.
Mantineia as a democracy:Thucydides 5.29, 47, backed up by inscriptional evidence; the evidence
for Elis early democracy is likewise epigraphic.
Peloponnesian League:Ste. Croix 1972:10124; Cartledge 1987/2000:24273; Funke & Luraghi
eds.2009.
Aristophilidas as king of Taras: Herodotus 3.136. Demonax of Mantinea legislates for
Cyrene:Herodotus4.161.
Transformation of Taras into a democracy:Aristotle Politics 1303a36; cf. Diodorus11.52.
Foundation of Thouria/Thurii: Diodorus 12.11; cf. Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers
9.8.50 (Protagoras). Regime change at Thouria:Aristotle Politics1307.
Camarina lead tablets: Cordano 1992; but see Shipley 2005: 400 n. 143. Camarina debate,
415:Thucydides 6.7588; cf. Calabrese 2008:192212.
Thucydides on Pericles:2.65; on the 5,000:8.97. On all matters Thucydidean, see Connor 1984;
Hornblowers Commentary 199720042008. Probably the best translation is that of J. Mynott
(Cambridge,2013).
322
Notes and References
Civil strife within the tribe (stasis emphulios):Herodotus 8.3.1; on the phenomenon of stasis, see
Lintott 1982; Finley 1983; Gehrke 1985; Loraux 1997/2002; Gray2015.
Acknowledged lunacy:Thucydides 6.89 (but Alcibiades was supposedly addressing the Spartans
in 414, and as an acknowledged traitor). Assembly decision-making as threatening stasis: Loraux
1997/2002.
Thucydides on idiai diaphorai:2.65.
On all aspects of the origins and strategy of the Peloponnesian War:Ste. Croix 1972; on all aspects
of Pericles career and reputation:Azoulay2014.
On Cleon as a new politician:Connor 1971; as a demagogue:Finley 1962/1985.
Thucydides on the Corcyra affair:1.2455; on the Corcyra stasis, 427:3.7184.
Reaction of the Athenian masses to the Sicilian disaster:Thuc. 8.1.1; their greed and ignorance:6.24.
Allied cities receiving sophrosune:Thucydides 8.64.5. Attempted sell-out by the 400:8.90. Athens
best governed under the 5,000:8.97.2.
The 411 counter-revolution: Andrewes in Gomme 1981 (on Thuc. 8.4597); Rhodes 1981/1993;
Raaflaub 1992 (ideological fallout); Grigoriadou 2009; Shear 2011:1969.
Revision of democratic memory post-410:Shear 2011:71. Revision of the laws under Nicomachus
commission:Todd1996.
Xenophon on the Arginusae affair:Hellenica1.7.
Lysias (a metic of Syracusan origin) Speech 20:Piovan2011.
The Thirty Tyrants: Krentz 1982; Piovan 2010 (Xenophon); cf. Bultrighini 1999 (Critias); Shear
2011: 16687. Execution of Theramenes: Xenophon Hell. 2.3.1536; cf. Ath. Pol. 28, 34.3 (taking a
Theramenist line).
The Amnesty, 403:Wolpert 2002; Carawan2013.
Chapter10
Aristotles citizen:Politics 1275a223. Demos controls courts:Ath. Pol.9.
Democratic jurisdiction at Athens: Cartledge, Millett & Todd eds. 1990. Further bibliography at
endnotes to Chapter 7.
Mass and elite engagement:Ober1989a.
On Antiphon the politician as identical with the Sophist of that name:Gagarin 2002; on the pea-
fowl trial:Cartledge1990b.
Peisander:Thucydides Book 8, passim, with A.Andrewes in Gomme1981.
Terms of indictment of Socrates:Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers2.40.
Discussion of Socrates trial with full bibliography:Cartledge 2009a:ch. 6; add Ismard2013.
Aeschines retrospect on the conviction of Socrates:Against Timarchus, sec.173.
J. S.Mill:Urbinati2002.
I. S.Izzy Stone:1988.
Graphe paranomon:Hansen1999.
On the Crown Speech of Demosthenes (no. 18), see the commentary of Yunis 2001, together
with his translation 2005. Still the best modern account of Demosthenes career, to my mind, is G.T.
Griffiths contribution to Hammond & Griffith 1979. On Aeschines politics, see Harris1995.
Chapter11
On Aristotle as a researcher:Huxley 1979; on how Aristotles thought relates to the practicalities
of polis-life, Cartledge2009b.
323
Notes and References
Chapter12
Overall assessment of Lycurgus career:Humphreys 1985; Wirth 1997; on his family and property,
Davies 1971, s.v. On Lycurgan Athens:Rhodes 2010a; Azoulay & Ismard eds.2011.
Timeline 480307 bce:Scott 2010:26988.
Liturgies at Athens:Davies 1967; cf.1971.
Result of Battle of Mantinea, 362:Xenophon Hellenica 7.5.27.
The personified Demos of the 350s: Lawton 1995: ch. 2 (interprets the appearance of Demos
shortly before 350 and its frequent use thereafter, and of a figure of the Boule likewise, as a sign of the
increased professionalism and self-consciousness of the democracy; Athena was no longer consid-
ered an adequate figurehead).
324
Notes and References
Revision of citizen-rolls (diapsephisis) at Athens, 346/5: Harding 1985: no. 85; Demosthenes
speech57.
On the international context (age of Alexander): Mitchel 1965; Moss 1973: 80101; Bosworth
1988:20415; Habicht 1997:635; Faraguna 2003; Hunt2010.
League of Corinth:G.T. Griffith in Hammond & Griffith1979.
Law on Tyranny, 336:Harding 1985:no.101; Rhodes & Osborne 2004:no.79; Blanshard 2004;
Teegarden2014.
On Lycurgus as a conscientious student of Platos political philosophy:Allen2010.
On Lycurgus and Athenian public finance:Burke 1985. Athens grain supply (Ath. Pol. ch. 51): Garnsey
1988. Problems of the early 320s:Harding 1985:no.116; Rhodes & Osborne 2003:no.96 (Cyrene provides
free grain 331324).
Hidden economy:Engen 2011; cf. Engen2010.
Phoenicians and Egyptians permitted to worship respectively Astarte and Isis: Rhodes & Osborne
2003: no. 91.
Voluntary contributions:Rhodes & Osborne 2003:no.94.
On the Against Leocrates:Allen 2000; Whitehead 2006. The citation of Tyrtaeus is at section21.
Ephebeia, lists:Ath. Pol. 42; Harding 1985:no.109.
Ephebic Oath: Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 76. Later sources: Plutarch Alcibiades 15.7; Pollux
Onomasticon 8.105; cf. Kellogg2013.
Acharnae stele:Cartledge 2013 (see also Chapter1).
Little Panathenaea reorganization:Rhodes & Osborne 2003:no.81.
Gift of Eudemus of Plataea:Rhodes & Osborne 2003:no.94.
On Lycurgus and Attic tragic drama:Plutarch Mor. 841d; with Hanink 2014, e.g., ch. 3 (Site of
change, site of memory:the Lycurgan Theatre of Dionysus); on Lycurgus and religion more generally:
Parker 1996:24255; Mikalson 1998:1145.
Public awards for private donations:IG ii.2 1147 (a tribal award for the financing of plays); IG ii.2
1187 (the deme Eleusis awards Dercylus of Hagnous, a general, a crown worth 500 drachmas for fund-
ing the education of boys from a deme not his own but where perhaps he resided).
Linking payment of liturgies to office-holding:Arist. Politics 1321a3142; with Ste. Croix 1981:3056.
Harpalus affair:Badian 1961; www.pothos.org/content/index.php?page=harpalus.
Hellenic War against Antipater:Ferguson1911.
Revolt of Agis III:Badian 1967; Ste. Croix 1972:3768; countered by Badian 1994; see also Cartledge
in Cartledge & Spawforth2002.
Number of Athenian citizens struck off in 321:Diodorus 18.18.5 (22,000); Plutarch Phocion 28.7
(12,000); with Hansen 1985 (who favours Diodorus prior total of 31,000).
Chapter13
In favour of a qualitative, post-403 break:Hansen 1989c; see also Hansen 1983:ch. 13; cf. chs 1112;
1999:ch. 13. Judicious review:Rhodes1980.
Choice between completion and decline:Eder ed.1995.
The debate on when Athens first became a demokratia:Raaflaub etal. (including Cartledge)2007.
Pericles as first man:Thuc. 2.65; demokratia used by Pericles in the Funeral Oration:Thuc. 2.37.
Thucydides on the Five Thousand:8.97.2.
Graphe paranomon:Todd 1993. Aristophon:Aeschines 3.194, with Whitehead1986.
Eleventh metabole:Ath. Pol.41.
325
Notes and References
Chapter14
A.H.M. Jones on the later Roman Empire: 1964b; on Athenian democracy: 1957. Quotation in
text:Jones 1963/1974.
Jones on the Hellenistic age:1964a; cf. Cartledge1997b.
Successor kingdoms:Romm 2011; Waterfield2011.
Droysen:Momigliano 1970; Nippel2008b.
Rehabilitation of the post-classical Greek cities:P.Rhodes ZSS 129 (2012) 67682, at 682, reviewing
Carlsson 2010; cf. Gauthier 1984; Dmitriev 2005:Part I; Frhlich & Mller eds. 2005; Mann & Scholz
eds. 2011; Giannokopoulos2012.
Alexander establishes a democracy at Ephesus:Arrian Anabasis1.17.
Proclamation of democracies:Arrian Anab.1.18.
Chios rescript, ?332:Austin 2006:no 6; Rhodes & Osborne 2003:no.84.
Restoration of Tegean exiles, ?324:Harding 1985:no.124.
Lysimacheia democracy:Burstein 1985:no.22, line 8.Seleucids eager to deprive cities of democracy,
278 bce: Memnon ap. Burstein 1985: no. 16 (sec.11, line 4) and n.5. Restoration of democracy at
Miletus, 313:Burstein 1985:no.25.4. Hellenistic Delphi a (moderate) democracy:Gauthier 2011:ch. 16;
cf. chs1415.
Freedom of the Greeks slogan:Austin 2006:nos. 32, 169, 170; cf. Dmitriev2011.
Freedom, Independence and Political Procedures in Some East Greek States:Carlsson2010.
Chersonesus, 155 bce:Burstein 1985:no.77 (treaty between Chersonesus and King Pharnaces Iof
Pontus), line 24. Earlier democracy:Hind 1998:1502.
Erythrae pro-tyrannicide decrees: SIG ed. 3, 284; with Ma 2009 (quotation from p. 250); and
Teegarden 2014:ch.5.
Strabo on Rhodes:Geography 14.2.5=Austin 2006:no.110. Naval aristocracy:Gabrielsen 1997; see
further ONeil 1981; Berthold 1984; Wiemer 2002 (but note the negative review of A.Moreno BMCR
2003.10.17); and cf. Fraser 1977 (funerary monuments illustrating a dense interethnic culturalmix).
Achaean League:Polybius History 2.378=Austin 2006:no.67; 4.26=Austin 2006:no.2; 22.710,
20=Austin 2006:no.240b; 23.5, 28.3, 29.235; Livy 31.25, 32.1923, 38.30; Plutarch Aratus 24; Austin
2006:no.157.
Aetolian League:Polybius 2.3, 20.910, 21.13, Livy 35.345,45.28.
Larsen on federalism: 1955, 1968; on federal democracy: Larsen 1945. But see Beck & Funke eds.
2015.
326
Notes and References
Chapter15
On the Roman Republican constitution: Lintott 1999; North 2006. On Roman constitutional
thought from the Late Republic onward:Straumann2015
Polybius patriotic concession:16.14.6ff. For bibliography on Polybius, see also Chapter14. There is
a very good Oxford Worlds Classics translation by R.Waterfield, with an introduction by B.McGing,
author of Polybius,2010.
Not the first universal historian: 5.33.2; but, thanks to symploke (1.4.11), his was the first truly
Universal History:3.32.
Freedom of the Greeks declaration:Dmitriev2011.
Eulogy of Philopoemen: Polyb. 10.21.124.7; eulogy of Scipio: 10.23; with Champion 2004;
Sommer2013.
Disorder and disturbance:Polyb. 3.4.13; cf. Xenophon Hellenica 7.5.27.
Polybius on how to write history:esp.12.25. Pragmatic history:12.9.12.
Rise of Rome not due to mere chance:1.63.
The pudding and seesaw metaphors:Walbank 1969 (review of Aalders 1968); cf. Nippel 1980;
Hansen2010a.
Polybius and Greek categories of political analysis:Sommer 2013; cf. Welwei2002.
Provocatio:Livy 1.26, 2.8, Cicero de re publica2.31.
Tribunes of the plebs:cf. Livy 2.323.
Group voting in the Comitia Centuriata and Concilium Plebis:Staveley1972.
327
Notes and References
Rome favours oligarchies in the Greek cities:Briscoe 1967/1974; Ste. Croix 1981:App. IV; on the
coming of Rome generally, Gruen1986.
Polybius on deisidaimonia:6.56; on okhlokratia:6.4.6,57.9.
Thucydides on nautikos okhlos:8.72. Plato on theatrokratia:Laws701a.
Tacitus on mixed constitution theory in general:Annals 4.323.
Millar quotation:Millar 2002a:180. See also Millar 1984a, 1986, 1989,1995.
Support for Millar:Walbank 1995:222; Yakobson1999.
On the democracy debate:North 1990, 2002, cf. 2009; Jehne ed. 1995; Mouritsen 2001:esp.144
8; Tatum 2009; Hlkeskamp 2010, 2011; Hurlet 2012. Hammer ed. 2014 appeared too late for my
consideration.
Aristotle on the proper size of a polis:Pol. 7.4, 1326a378.
Greek demagogues:Finley 1985; Mann 2007; Lane 2012. See also Chapter7.
Ciceros liber populus or populus:de re p. 1.429, 53, 55, 69; cf. 668the latter is a partial para-
phrase of Plato Rep. 562aff; civitas popularis:1.42; with Ste. Croix 1981:322. See also Marshall 1997;
Nicolet ed. 1983; Kharkhordin2010.
Roman mob: Brunt 1966/1974: esp. 7680. Roman assemblies and violence: David 2013; cf.
Vanderbroeck 1987; Osborne 2009a: 11418.
Roman living conditions:Yavetz 1958/1969.
Chapter16
Josephus on the Roman Republic as a demokratia:Ant. Jud. 19.162,187.
Devaluation of demokratia:Ste. Croix 1981:323.
Julius Caesar:Stevenson 2014; cf. Weinstock1971.
Rudimentary fire brigade and police force:Yavetz 1958/1969.
Held: Fronto, Princ. Hist. 210 H.; far from a welfare program: Brennan 1990/2000: 48.
Gaulish princes dedication:Ehrenberg-Jones 1976:no.166 (9/8bc).
Tacitus:Syme 1958; Woodman ed. 2010 (includes Cartledge Gibbons Tacitus); for a comparison
of Tacitus to Montesquieu, cf. Hammer 2009:esp.ch.4.
Tacitus on Augustus tribunician power:Annals3.24.
Res Gestae:Cooley2009.
Augustus twice thought about restoring the Republic:Suetonius Aug. 28. Augustus actually con-
trolled the entire Empire:Aug.101.
Suetonius on the grant of the Father of the Fatherland (pater patriae) title:Aug.58.2.
Gibbon on Augustus:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol. I(1776).
Lex de imperio Vespasiani:Lewis & Reinhold 1990:1113.
Tacitus on the uniting of the Principate with libertas under Nerva:Agricolach.3.
Plutarch and history: Pelling 2002. Plutarchs Precepts for Statecraft: Jones 1971: 114; cf. Cartledge
2009b: ch. 10.
Literary output of the Antonine age:Whitmarsh 2004:250 (my italics).
Aelius Aristides, To Rome:Ste. Croix 1981:323 with 615 n.54, 386; Harris ed.2009.
Claudius on admission of Gauls to the Senate, 47/8:Tacitus Annals 11.2325.
Constitutio Antoniniana:Sherwin-White1973.
Downwards trajectory of democracy in the early Byzantine Empire: Ste. Croix 1981: 300326,
esp.3213, 326, with Appendix IV (518537);
Demokratia as riot: John Malalas Chronographia Book 18; cf. Watts 2010 (focused on the
Alexandria riot of485).
328
Notes and References
Chapter17
General:Skinner 1992; Wood 2008ch.4.
render unto Caesar:Matthew 22.1522, Mark 12.1317, Luke 20.2026.
powers that be:Paul Romans 13.16.
Eleventh-century rebound:Jones1997.
democracy talk anachronistic:Skinner 1992:59.
Dante on Aristotle:Inferno,4.31.
Emergence of city-states: Athens & Rome, Florence & Venice compared: Molho, Raaflaub &
Emlen eds. 1991; Davidson 1981 (Venice). Wood 2008:195 (contrasts with Greek polis); cf. Burns ed.
1988:index s.v. Democracy, in mixed constitution; see also People/populus.
No parallel in the age of the poleis:Runciman 2009:199.
Ptolemy of Lucca:Blythe 1997 (period of the populo, Intro., p.10). Marsilius of Padua:Skinner
1978:I.4965; Nederman 1995; Garnett2006.
Magna Carta:Holt 1992. buried deep:Breay 2007:8.Magna Carta Project blog:http://magnac-
artaresearch.blogspot.co.uk.
Declaration of Arbroath: McDonald-Lewis 2009 (but democracy in her subtitle is grossly
anachronistic).
Renaissance:Aston 1996; Goody2009.
Ambrogio Lorenzettis Buon Governo frescoes:Skinner1999.
Latin no longer a mother tongue:Sanson 2011:32.
Sovereignty:Nippel 2008a; reviewed by B.Straumann Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2008.10.31; cf.
Straumann2015.
Machiavellian democracy: McCormick 2011: 204 n.11 On Machiavellis realism, see Maloy
2013:16870, and on comparison with Aristotle:Pasquino 2009; Maloy 2013:103.
Renaissance civic humanism:Peltonen 1995; Hankins ed. 2004. On republicanism ancient and
(or as opposed to) modern:Koenigsberger ed. 1988; Nippel 1988; Rahe 1992; Nippel 1994. Not a Greek
tradition, pace Nelson2004.
Lipsius Politica:streich 1989; Brooke2012.
Tacitism:Cartledge2010.
Citizens rights:Brett2003.
Chapter18
English Revolution:Hill 1991. Surprises:Morgan 1988:306.
English civil wars and Oliver Cromwell: Worden 2009, 2012; Rollison 2010. Naval dimension:
Scott 2011.
Civic humanism tradition of republican discourse, 15701640:Peltonen1995.
Putney Debates (also known as Levellers Debates): Sharp ed. 1998; Robertson ed. 2007;
Mortimer 2015. Caryl Churchills 1976 play, Light Shining on Buckinghamshire (re-staged in 2015,
to coincide with Magna Cartas eight-hundredth anniversary), re-uses original dialogue from the
Debates. Wootton 1992:75 calls the Levellers nearly democrats.
Diggers; and works of Winstanley:Corns etal. eds.2010.
Rainborough:quoted Ste. Croix 1981:441.
Harrington:Rawson 1969/1991:192.
Milton and Nedham:Worden 2007. See also Scott 2011:ch.4.
Macaulay on Milton:quoted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica vol. 7, 1959, s.v. democracy p.181; cf.
Hammond 2014. Milton and republicanism:Armitage etal. eds.1995.
329
Notes and References
Quotation from Hobbes Autobiography (my translation): see Ste. Croix 1972: 2528. See also
Skinner 1978, 2008; Berent 1996; Nelson ed. 2008; Hoekstra2012.
Hobbes Leviathan: quotation is from p. 150 of R. Tucks 1996 Cambridge edition; pp. 2678 of the
Penguin edition by C. B. Macpherson; but the first properly critical edition is that of Noel Malcolm
(Oxford, 2012); Hobbes published an abbreviated Latin version, c.1668.
Hobbes as proto-democrat:Tuck2006.
Hobbes sovereign:Skinner2008.
On the 1688 revolution as introducing a new kind of state:Pincus2009.
Montesquieu on Athens:Azoulay 2014:178; cf. Nelson2004.
Lockes Two Treatises: ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, 1988); cf. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
locke-political/.
On Lockes passive consent:Dunn1969.
Montesquieu on the separation of powers:Rahe2009.
Modern mixed constitution theory:Hansen2010.
Rousseau on Athens versus Sparta:Cartledge 1999b; MacGregor Morris 2004; Shklar2006.
Voltaire in general:Davidson 2012; on luxury:Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) s.v. luxe.
Iosipos Moisiodax:Kitromilides 2006:51.
On the French Revolution and historiography:Vidal-Naquet 1995:ch. 5; Hartog 2003:18595. On
the French Revolution and Antiquity in general:Parker 1937; Moss 1989; Hartog 1993; cf. Nippel
2005:2649. On democracy and the French Revolution:B.Fontana in Dunn ed. 1992:ch. 7; Vidal-
Naquet 1995:ch. 4 (with N.Loraux). On the changing significance, connotations and associations of
democracy in France, America, Britain, and Ireland between 1750 and 1850:Innes & Philp eds.2013.
Condorcet:Garlan2000.
Cornelius de Pauws Philosophical Researches on the Greeks (Paris, 1788):Roberts 1994:1713;
cf. Moss 1979/2004.
Democratic Enlightenment and Spinoza:Israel 2011 (1152 pages); 2014 (870 pages). Contra: Furet
1981.
Chevalier Jaucourts entry s.v. Dmocratie in the Encyclopdie:Lough ed. 1971:280.
Committee of Public Safety Report, February 1794:quoted in Dunn 2005:116.
Robespierre:Scurr 2006; McPhee 2012. Terror:Wahnich2012.
Saint-Just:Williams 1991/1995.
Babeuf s manifesto:Courtois etal. eds.2012.
Leonidas at Thermopylae by J-L. David:Rawson 1969/1991:facing286.
Dunns pertinent question:2005:150.
Constants lecture (intended as a preface to a larger work), 1819:Fontamara ed. 1988; cf. Rosenblatt
ed.2009.
Isaiah Berlins two concepts:1958.
Volney:1811.
Marx and Aristotle:Chapter2, above. Marx and world literature:Prawer 1976. Marxs influence on
subsequent conceptualisations of Athenian democracy:Marcaccini2012.
Chapter19
American scholar:Nelson 2004. The Founders and the Classics:Reinhold ed. 1984; Richard 1994;
Nippel 2005:2604.
Roman Republic in the American Revolution:Sellers2014.
330
Notes and References
Federalist papers:ed. J.R. Pole (Indianapolis, 2005); see also Wootton ed.2003.
online:http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fedpapers.html.
Declaration of Independence: Allen 2014; for the Constitution eventually arrived at and
cruciallywritten down, see Bodenhamer2012.
For a chronicle of waning Enlightenment and waxing democracy, see Wood 2009. The word
democracy 17891799:Palmer 1953; cf. Palmer 19591964/2014; Cotlar 2013; Dupuis-Dri2013.
Parties have outlived their usefulness?:Guldi & Armitage 2014:4.
Ancient Greek democracy and slavery:Finley 1959/1981; Cartledge1993.
Tocqueville in general:Brogan 2007; Wolin 2001; Mansfield 2010; Ryan 2012:ch. 20; Jaume 2013;
Runciman 2013:ch. 1; cf. Holmes2009.
Tocquevilles US journey:Pierson 1938; Zunz ed. 2011; and Peter Careys 2010 novel, Parrot and
Olivier in America.
Democracy in America:1-volume translation, ed. H.Mansfield and D.Winthrop (Chicago, 2000;
repr. Folio Society, London, 2002); see also Bevan 2003. On democracy:Manent2007.
Tocquevilles failure to discuss Congress: criticized by, e.g., Brogan 2007. Failure to get
America:G.Wills, NewYork Review of Books, 29 April2004.
Lincoln at Gettysburg:Wills1992.
Chapter20
E. P.Thompson on Paines Age of Reason:1968:1067.
Paine and social democracy:Stedman Jones2004.
Paine as advocate of representative democracy: Philp 2011; cf. 1989. On representative
government:Manin1997.
Grotes History of Greece:see Grote 2000 (a selection only on Athens from Solon down to 403
bce), with new introduction by Cartledge; on Grotes oeuvre more generally, see Demetriou ed.2014.
Paine in debate with Sieys:Sieys2003.
Background to Grote:Ceserani2011.
Great Reform Act of 1832: Brock 1973. Philosophical Radicals: Thomas 1979. Popular conten-
tion:Tilly 1995. Debate over democracy:Demetriou 1996/2011.
On Grote and reactions to him:Demetriou 1996/2011; ed. 2003:vols 12 (includes John Grotes
response to Richard Shilleto); Turner 1981:187234.
On Grotes historiography:Momigliano 1952/1994. On his re-evaluation of the ancient Athenian
democracy:Roberts 1994:23351; Demetriou1999.
On Bulwer Lyttons incomplete Athens. Its Rise and Fall (1837), see O.Murrays introduction to
Lytton2004.
On Thirlwall (2 vols, 183544, 2nd edn 184552), see P. Liddels 2007 selection (with a useful
Appendix, 23553, comparing and contrasting him with Grote).
Grotes Chapter67 is hailed by Momigliano 1952/1994:20 as his major discovery in the field of
Greek thought.
Mills reviews of Grote are reprinted in Mill 1978. On Mill and antiquity, see Irwin 1998; and
Urbinati 2002, with her reply to critics in BMCR 2003.06.51. On Mill and representation: Harlow
1985; cf. Rosen 1983 (Bentham).
Mills remark on the Athenian Many is aptly quoted by Finley 1962/1985; cf. Cartledge 2013.
Ancient Athenian democracy as a model:Euben etal. eds. 1994. Historical perspective on recep-
tion of the Athenian democracy from 1750 to 1990:Hansen 1992; cf. Dunn2003.
331
Notes and References
Epilogue
Get Real:Glaser 2012:203.
Cheng Jin:the London Times, 12 November 2011; cf. Bell2015.
We, the people:Wood1995.
Our relation to ancient Greek democracy:Hansen 2005; Wagner 2013:63.
Swiss Landsgemeinde:Hansen 1983:20729; Fossedal2001.
Iron Law of Oligarchy:Michels 1915 (translated into French,2015).
Nature of Athenian democracy:Ober1989b.
The democracy weve lost:Dunn 1993; Skocpol 2003; Ringen 2007; Wolin 2008; Mair 2009; Badiou
2012; Zarka ed. 2012. The myth of ancient Athenian democracy:Haarmann2013.
On Finleys Democracy Ancient and Modern:Cartledge2013.
The anti-democratic tradition in Western thought:Roberts1994.
Decisions of the ordinary man:Forrest 1966:16; cf. Woodruff2005.
Finleys rejoinder to Plato:1977:87.
Hansen 1989a. Supported by esp. Liddel 2007 (focused on Athens between 355 and 317bce).
Can we learn from ancient Athenian democracy? Ober 1989; with Kallet-Marx 1994; Ober 2009;
cf. Manville & Ober 2003. Democratic knowledge:Ober2008a.
Globalization of democracy:Archibugi 2004, 2008, Archibugi etal.2011.
International Petition of Digital Rights:this has been called for in a petition addressed to the UN
by 562 writers who believe The basic pillar of democracy is the inviolable integrity of the individual,
signed 10 December 2013 (International Human Rights Day) www.change.org/petitions/a-stand-for-
democracy-in-the-digital-age-3. Cf. D-CENT, a Europe-wide project creating privacy-aware tools
and applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment. Together with the citizens and
developers, we are creating a decentralised social networking platform for large-scale collabora-
tion and decision-making builds on Europes latest experiments in direct democracy in Finland,
Iceland and Spain.
Danish academic: Marcus Schmidts Direkte Demokrati I DanmarkOm indfrelse af et elekt-
ronisk andetkammer(1993); cf. Hansen 2005:545.
Iceland constitutional experiment: Landemore 2015; cf. Aitamurto 2012 (crowdsourcing in
Finland).
Lottery:Barnett & Carty 1998; cf. www.imprint.co.uk/books/sortition.html.
Advocates of revived democracy:Barber 1984/2004; Euben etal. 1994; Fishkin2009.
No rights talk in ancient Greece:Ostwald 1996/2004.
They cant represent us: Sitrin & Azellini 2014; cf. Ogien & Laugier 2015. Quotation from
Lummins1996.
Impact of 9/11:Vlassopoulos 2009:esp.144; cf. Buruma2009.
Fuller expression:Gulder & Armitage 2014:756:A longer history of international government
can even demonstrate that alternatives exist to our own political system, alternatives that might in
turn offer a fuller expression of the concept of democracy itself . On that note, see further:Dunn
2014 (we must be prepared to break democracys spell); Meckstroth 2015 (struggles for democratic
change have a history).
332
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361
S
Index
363
Index
Alexander III the Great (Cont) Archons, 53. See also EponymousArchon
at Battle of Chaeronea,207 eligibility for electionas,24
conquest of Persian empire,237 list of,58,64
crushing of rebellion of Agis III,181 opening to the lot,81,86
death,217 presiding trials,117
division of empire of,234 property restriction,224
foundation of Alexandria,226 Solon appointed as extraordinary,52
as Pharaoh,220 Areopagitica (Milton),2856
support of democracy,2334 Areopagiticus (Isocrates), 202,206
Thebes revolt against, 196,233 Areopagus,24,53
victory dedication at Athens, 30,208 jurisdictional role,132
Ambracia, 55,317 Law of Eucrates and,18,22
American Revolution, ideological inspiration reforms of Ephialtes, 856,209
of,2878 religious role,131
amnesty, oath of,166 symbolic importance,121
Amphipolis, 197,2045 untouched by Cleisthenes,69,85
Cleon general at,115 Areus of Sparta,244
taken over by Philip II of Macedon, 198,206 Arginusae, battle of,120
Anderson, Gregory,74 Arginusae trial,120
Andrewes, Antony,734 Argos, 55, 154,155
Annals (Tacitus),270 alliances
Antalcidas, 190,191 with Athens,198
Antalcidas, Peace of. See Kings Peace (Peace of with Corinth, 189,190
Antalcidas)(386) Quadruple alliance,189
Antenor,32 Classical democracy in,150
anti-democratic thinking in ancient world,33 destruction of Mycenae,324
Antigonids,234 isopolity with Corinth, 150,198
Antigonus III Doson,241 ostracismin,73
Antigonus the One-Eyed,235 public finance,1989
worship as god,243 violence of democrats in,2256
Antipater, 217,242 Aristagoras of Miletus
Antiphon, 114,202 Athenian military aid to,69,79
anti-democracyof,92 Naxos and,153
execution,174 Aristion,244
prosecution of Demos,119 Aristogeiton, 32, 58,82,83
rule of 400 and,162 Aristophanes. See also
speechwriter of Erasistratus,173 Clouds; Ecclesiazusae; Knights;Wasps
trial of,167 Acharnians,29
anti-tyrant or pro-tyrant slaying legislation,237 Birds,174
Anytus, 176,178 on Cleon,115
Apatouria festival,66 on judges,87
Apology of Socrates (Plato),175 on litigation in Athens,13940
Apology of Socrates (Xenophon),175 Lysistrata,136
Aquinas, Thomas,277 as political playwright,130
Arab Spring,5 on Socrates,176
arbitrium, meaning of,268 Aristophilidas,156
archaic, use of term,49 Aristophon, 120,222
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Byzantium(city) of Cleisthenes,878
leader of Social War,206 law of double-descent (Periclean law), 8890,137
Second Athenian League, 196,198 of Solon,53
rolls
Callias, 241,243 in deme,66
Calymna,235 revision of,207
Camarina,157 validation of credentials,107
Cannae, battle of (216), 249,250 citizens, Roman,260
Caracalla (Roman Emperor),273 in Empire,2734
Carthage levels of property-owning,247
annihilation,252 in Republic,259
compared to Rome by Polybius,257 citizens, Spartan,43
Roman wars with (See PunicWars) Citizenship Law (451), 87, 8890,137
Catholic Church,289 citizen-state as translation for polis,15,38
Cato the Elder,252 City Dionysia festival. See Great Dionysia
Cercidas,239 festival
Chaeronea, battle of (338), 106, 196,2078 City Panathenaea. See Great Panathenaea
armed service as resultof,29 city-state as translation of polis,379
emergence of Lycurgus,203 city-states
Chalcis,55,78 between c.1000 and 1500,2767
Chartists,301 challenge to notion of god-given hereditary
Cheng Jin,306 monarchy,2767
Chersonesus,236 civic humanism,280
Chinese Peoples Democratic Republic,306 civic religion, Lycurgus and,21415
Chios civil war. See stasis
Alexander and,233 Clearidas,157
in Athens anti-Persian naval empire,159 Cleinias Decree,31
innovation in governance,545 Cleisthenes. See also reforms of Cleisthenes
leader of Social War,206 as Archon,57
in Second Athenian League, 1967,324 modern interpretations,318
defection,198 ostracism attributed to, 70,723
Chremonidean War,244 Cleomenes Iof Sparta,78
Christians, first labelling of,232 ending the tyranny in Athens,59
Churchill, Winston,304 Cleomenes III of Sparta,240
Cicero, 259,262 Cleon,115
Cimon Aristophanes on,119
admiral of the fleet,82 critical of Pericles,160
dissension with Pericles,159 prosecution of Thucydides,119
son of Miltiades,80,81 Thucydides on, 158,160
citizens, Athenian,37 Clouds (Aristophanes)
according to Aristotle,69 on Athenians as litigious,139
definition in Politics,107 on Socrates,175
imposition of minimum wealth qualification, coinage as evidence in history of the Athenian
217,242 democracy,301
as jurors,117 Coinage Decree. See StandardsDecree
number of,224 Coke, Edward,278
reforms colonization, map of Greek,48
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