DRAWING ON Nietzsche’s Gay Science, Foucault identified truth as “undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history.” It is a very long baking process indeed that I seek to undo in this book.
For centuries Athens has enjoyed a reputation as the unrivaled artistic and intellectual center of the Greek world. Bearing in mind Pericles’ description of his city as the “school of Hellas,” many a modern metropolis has sought to exalt itself by posing as the cultural heir of the Athenians. Renaissance Florentines styled their city-state a second Athens, and Wittenberg cast itself as “Athens on the Elbe”; Edinburgh has claimed to be a new Athens; Bogotá dubs itself the Athens of Latin America; and in the United States, Boston has put itself forward as the Athens of the Northeast, Transylvania College of Kentucky has purported to be the Athens of the West, and both Atlanta and Nashville have claimed the name of Athens of the South (though only Nashville has built its own Parthenon.) To appropriate the mantle of the “school of Hellas,” however, is not to support the Athenians’ unusual form of government either as a phenomenon unique in time and place or as an example to be followed in other times and places. Throughout most of Western history, Athenian democracy per se has been in bad odor. It is important to remember this in a world in which democracy has, in the words of political scientist John Dunn, become “the moral Esperanto of the present nation-state system, the language in which all Nations are truly united.” Once democratic principles became synonymous with legitimacy in government, the democracy of the Athenians was accorded a place of great honor in the pantheon of political regimes. It should not be imagined, however, that Athenian government served as the inspiration for the democratic movement that gathered force in modern Europe and America in the age of revolution. Now regarded as a legitimizing ancestor, classical Athens was for centuries excluded from the company of respectable governments. Modern democracies, of course, are given to putting themselves forward as the Athenians’ heirs, rather like the usurpers who became emperors of Rome through military coups and then piously adopted themselves into the families of their predecessors. The reality is quite different. It would be too simple to suggest that modern democracies came into being in spite of Athenian democracy rather than because of it. In reality, much of the important political thinking of the West derived from thinkers like Plato and Aristotle who, though fundamentally opposed to Athenian democracy, were nonetheless very much its products. But prior to the age of revolution there was little in the reputation of Athenian government that was likely to inspire emulation. Rather, Athens served as a foil the better to set off the virtues of governments that accorded far less power to the untutored masses.
The hostile tradition about Athenian democracy, which has its roots in ancient Athens itself, forms the subject matter of this book. Why, I have asked, has Athenian government been the focus of so much opprobrium? If Athenian government was really not so bad, why should so many people have thought it was; and if it truly was as terrible as it has often been made out to be, why should its critics continue to devote so much time to demonstrating its weaknesses again, and again, and again? Beginning in class bias and developing into an intellectual construct with a life of its own, the anti-Athenian tradition has become a crucial building block of Western political thought. How did this tradition begin, and, once begun, how did it gather strength?
My exploration of these questions has led me to examine a large body of literature written over several centuries and in a variety of languages, and it calls for a few words on methodology. First, there is the question of primary versus secondary sources. The works of twentieth-century scholarship that I cite in the notes have plainly been designated as “references,” “authorities” of some kind with which I have interacted in a different way from the way in which I have interacted with the texts I analyze. This designation is, of course, entirely arbitrary; it may and should be discarded by any reader who investigates the origins of these modern texts. My own ability to probe the sources of people’s thinking is limited by the same factors Protagoras reputedly identified as preventing certain belief in the gods—the shortness of life and the difficulty of the subject matter. Now if I had written a book on Greek tragedy, I would have made reference to the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, and I would have made reference to the work of Karl Reinhardt and Charles Segal and Helene Foley and Froma Zeitlin, and everyone would understand that I approached these two sets of texts in very different ways. Because I am part of “everyone,” I would also understand this myself. But I have not written a book on Greek tragedy. Instead, I have written a book about how people think about Athens and, more broadly, about how they think about politics and society. When an author writes about intellectual genealogy, an ineluctable paradox cuts him or her off from all others, for if what Niccolò Machiavelli or James Madison or Benjamin Constant said about Athens needs to be placed in the context of his individual perspective, then of course my own views must be placed in the same context; and how can I cite the wisdom of Mark Hulliung on Machiavelli or Sheldon Wolin on Madison or Stephen Holmes on Constant, as if a birthdate after 1900 somehow guaranteed objectivity and omniscience—something my discussion of recent critiques of Athens in chapters 12 and 13 makes perfectly clear I do not believe? Why should I not busy myself investigating the politics of Mark Hulliung and Sheldon Wolin and Stephen Holmes and then explain their way of writing about their subjects as the product of their distinctive approach to the world?
The answer, of course, is that I cannot, because I would find myself delving into the political orientation of the Dictionary of American Scholars and the history of higher education in the twentieth century, and pretty soon it would be necessary to get a sabbatical to look into the genesis of the political opinions of people who had written books about higher education, and then … A case in point might be Frank Turner’s study of The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, a tremendously thoughtful work I have found to be of enormous assistance in my own project. Readers who find the kind of intellectual history I have traced to be intriguing will certainly want to read Turner’s book. Turner’s approach to shifting perceptions of Greece differs from mine, and in the future someone may want to write about our work, grounding these differences in fundamental philosophical disagreements. Then Turner and I, who have each set up our texts as the explicans of the explicandum that is “thinking about Greece” will in turn become someone else’s explicanda, and that is fine. We can only do our bit to extend the expanding genealogical framework; the next stage will be up to others. Should some scholar wish to suggest in a book or article that my writing about Athenian democracy is colored by my own view of the world, I will be honored to be the object of such discourse. (This promise applies to books and articles only. I make no commitment to be honored by such contentions if they appear in hostile book reviews.)
Second, there is the related question of perspective. In the preface to The Whig Interpretation of History, Herbert Butterfield lamented the tendency of many historians “to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.” The particular story I have chosen to string together traces a line of development culminating in the thinking of the age in which I live—something that would look to Butterfield suspiciously like “progress.” But this is the version of events that, having weighed and rejected alternative hypotheses, I am disposed to endorse. I considered writing a somewhat different book, one that questioned or even denied the existence of the ontological object “Athenian democracy” and refused to discriminate among more and less productive approaches to the state of the ancient Athenians. In the end, however, I determined that this amiable openness would ultimately be insincere. My conviction that ideologies of one kind or another have sometimes inhibited constructive thinking about Athens should not be taken to imply that I see myself as lacking ideology, that I believe that ideology is bad, or that I consider the writing of history to be separable from ideology. Nor do I mean to suggest that the march of civilization automatically facilitates a more thoughtful and open-minded examination of the past. In his unsettling book Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Martin Bernal has argued that a significant shift can be identified between 1815 and 1830 in the way people have viewed the contribution of Asian and African civilizations to the growth of Greece. This change, he maintains, resulted in a less accurate assessment of this contribution, one vitiated by racism. Curiously, the years he identifies as pivotal are precisely those years in which attitudes toward Athens underwent the most dramatic transformation.
Third, I would like to say a few words about the scope of this book. On the whole I have avoided examining generalizations about “the Greeks” except where it is plain to me that the Athenians specifically are intended. By the same token I have tried to focus on allegations that distinguished Athens from other ancient states; thus for example I have not examined in much depth the charges that were leveled against the Athenians for their participation in a pre-Christian worldview. I have also tried as much as possible to keep to the question of democracy—seeking, for instance, to organize my discussion of modern interpretations of Athenian gender relations around their political implications. I have not discussed responses to Athenian government in poetry and in the visual arts. Nor was I able to include more than a cursory discussion of contemporary (i.e., ancient) responses to democracy in classical drama. I have rationalized this last decision, which was a difficult one, on the grounds that the political implications of tragedy have not on the whole played much of a role in thinking about the Athenian state until fairly recently, and where comedy is concerned, the political opinions of Aristophanes are somewhat elusive. Some years after publishing his book The Victorians and Ancient Greece Richard Jenkyns published a separate book on Greek themes in Victorian art; perhaps the same fate awaits me.
Because I am largely concerned with the era during which Athens was viewed in a fundamentally hostile way, I have dealt in depth largely with the period before 1850, and I have not discussed in any detail the treatment of Athens in the academy of the twentieth century. The limits of time and space have also precluded discussions about debates over Athens among European journalists that might stand alongside my discussion of Athens in the American press. Being an American has given me fairly easy access to materials that would have been difficult to obtain for, say, France or Germany. My slowness in reading modern Greek and Russian as well as my hopeless ignorance of Asian languages also placed obvious limitations on the scope of my work. This is, perforce, very much a book on the Western tradition.
Finally, a few words on my own language: my reference to Athens and “her” government may at first appear to be a strangely sexist usage. This usage is occasioned by the tradition that forms the subject matter of this book. Despite the exclusion of women from the political decision-making process at Athens, for centuries historians have written about Athens as if it were female. In addition, people writing about the relations of the sexes regularly discuss the treatment of women by “the Athenians” as if “the Athenians” were all men. Until the twentieth century, moreover, there is virtually no evidence about what women have thought in looking back on Athenian government (though Greek drama both tragic and comic offers some tantalizing hints about what Athenian women themselves may have believed). The first text with which I deal that was clearly written by a woman (Jeanne-Marie Roland) dates from the late eighteenth century; it is only during the past half-century or so that a significant number of women have left written records of their opinions about Greek history. Because this book traces the Western tradition, therefore, it has seemed appropriate to me sometimes to refer to Athens as “she” and discuss “her” government, although I myself see no reason to believe that states have gender.
Translations from foreign languages are my own unless otherwise specified. Classical texts are cited according to the standardized format that appears in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford, 1970).
Some of the ideas expressed here were foreshadowed in journal articles published throughout the 1980s. Readers may recognize some of what I have said about British attitudes toward Athens from “Athenians on the Sceptered Isle,” Classical Journal 84 (1989): 193–205, and portions of “The Teflon Empire: Chester Starr and the Invulnerability of the Delian League,” Ancient History Bulletin 23 (1988): 9–53 reappear here and there in chapter 12. Parts of chapter 6 appeared in somewhat different form in “Florentine Perceptions of Athenian Democracy,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 15 (1987): 25–41.
This book ranges over many centuries and deals with texts in a variety of languages, and it was ten years in the making. During this decade I have acquired more debts than I can begin to reckon up. As my project has taken me farther and farther from my field of expertise, I have relied increasingly on the kindness of scholars who gave generously of their time and employed the greatest of tact in discouraging me from pursuing novel hypotheses whose charm exceeded their defensibility.
Let me begin at the beginning. The premises that inform this book began to take shape around 1970 when I had the privilege of studying at Yale College with two impressive and very different teachers, Eric Havelock and Peter Rose. I am greatly indebted to them both for alerting me to the ideological conflicts that have shaped the study of classical Athens. As a graduate student I was encouraged in my interest in Athenian government by Donald Kagan, and several years later I began work on this book while teaching at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. My colleagues in the Department of History at SMU have been a source of many different kinds of support over these years, and this book owes much to them. It is always precarious to single out individuals, but I would like most particularly to thank Daniel Orlovsky and David Weber for their advice and support during the time they each served as Department Chair; Jeremy Adams for providing continual infusions of energy and insight; Peter Onuf and Edward Countryman for helping to guide me through my investigation of the perilous period of America’s foundation; Donald Niewyk for saving me from a variety of embarrassing mistakes; James Hopkins for offering the aid and comfort of his office as Associate Dean for General Education as well as his friendship as a member of my department; James Breeden for his warmth and wit; Judy Mohraz for her unstinting generosity; Dennis Cordell for asking good questions; Luis Martin for being Luis; and Thomas Knock for a brotherly nurturing and palship of a kind I have never received elsewhere. I also owe a profound personal and professional debt to another member of the department, Kathleen Wellman. Although it is true that she has been willing to take considerable time and trouble discussing the Renaissance and the eighteenth century with me, my chief debt to her is for a sustaining and enduring friendship that has survived over the years despite syncopated leaves of absence that kept one or the other of us away from Dallas for half of the eight years we both taught at SMU.
Colleagues at other institutions whose assistance was invaluable to me are many. Dorothea Wender bears much of the credit for molding a scholar out of the unformed matter she encountered when I first came to teach at Wheaton College in 1975 full of ignorance and enthusiasm. Robert Rowland, Barry Strauss, and Susan Wiltshire provided warmth and wisdom throughout. Among those who were gracious enough to read portions of my work and offer useful suggestions I would particularly like to thank Michael Altschul, Ernst Badian, Jeffrey Barnouw, Stanley Burstein, William Calder, Anthony Molho, Martin Ostwald, Carl Richard, Richard Weigel, and most particularly Kurt Raaflaub, for whose thoughtful and detailed comments on the early chapters I am profoundly grateful. Juliet Floyd was kind enough to share with me her perspectives on Hegel. I have also profited a great deal from participation in various programs with Ward Briggs, Elaine Fantham, Josiah Ober, and Paul Rahe.
Throughout the past ten years, one friend and colleague in particular offered indispensable support as well as precious insight into the issues surrounding Athenian democracy. Just a phone call away, Donald Lateiner was an unstinting source of encouragement and advice as well as of an astonishingly rich and pertinent bibliography. He and Marianne Gabel fielded frequent despairing calls and were always ready to administer stern doses of common sense, and for this I am profoundly grateful.
My friends in the Association of Ancient Historians have always been an important part of my life, and this book owes much to their comradery of many years. I particularly wish to express my thanks to a few members of the Association who took a special interest in this project—Eugene Borza, Jack Cargill, Phyllis Culham, Walter Donlan, Frank Frost, Erich Gruen, Judith Hallett, Jerzy Linderski, Vincent Rosivach, Larry Tritle, Martha Vinson, and Allen Ward. I also benefited a great deal from comments received from colleagues on parts of this work presented not only at meetings of the Association but also at a variety of conferences throughout the United States and in Athens. I am particularly grateful to participants in the 1992 NEH Institute on Athenian Democracy at the University of California at Santa Cruz, at which Charles Hedrick was kind enough to invite me to spend a week as a visiting speaker.
Michael Hudson, Drew Harrington, Eli Sagan, Lowell Edmunds, Mogens Hansen, Daniel Tompkins and Frank Turner were all kind enough to supply me with copies of their own work, either recently completed or in progress, that were of considerable assistance to me, and my research went the faster for their cooperation. I owe a particular debt to Michael Shute, whose manuscript on Benjamin Franklin I had the privilege of reading while it was in progress. My own treatment of the reception of Athenian democracy in eighteenth century America might have proceeded along quite different lines had Mike not died during the summer of 1991 with so many conversations still unfinished.
Peter Euben and Ellen Wood not only read the manuscript for Princeton University Press and offered innumerable helpful suggestions but gave generously of their time in subsequent conversations and correspondence. My debt to them both is enormous. During the years the book was in progress Joanna Hitchcock of the Press gave much-needed encouragement with welcome regularity, and the final stages were made easier by the hard work of Lauren Oppenheim and Lauren Osborne.
This project could never have been completed within a decade without the generous assistance of the American Council of Learned Societies, which provided me with a Grant-in-Aid to conduct research in Florence in the summer of 1984, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded me a Fellowship for College Teachers for 1985–86. I am also very much indebted to Southern Methodist University for two research leaves and for summer support that enabled me to conduct research in Italy and France and to return to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I was a member in 1985. Throughout, the Institute provided a fertile and much-cherished working environment, and I think of it with enormous gratitude and affection. My time there, however, would have been lonely indeed without the warmth and hospitality provided by Christian and Freia Habicht.
Many industrious librarians furthered my research. I would particularly like to thank the kind souls in the rare book room of Princeton’s Firestone Library. I am indebted to Matthew Maltzman in Cambridge, Eva Stehle in Maryland, and Rosaria and Eric Munson in Princeton for their hospitality, which afforded me (among other things) much-needed opportunity to do library work. William Harris was gracious enough to arrange for me to use the Columbia University libraries during 1990 and 1991. I also owe much to Mark Randolph and Cathy Alton-Thomas for assistance of various kinds in preparing the final manuscript.
It would have been difficult to complete this project without the sustenance of a number of friends in Dallas, and I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Paul Crabtree, Vicki Hill, Jill Nelson, Mary Read, Martha Satz, and Bonnie Wheeler. Friends and family in other parts helped in many different ways. Chris Roberts allowed himself to be persuaded that the fate of humanity hung on the completion of this book—or so, at least, he led me to believe. Page Tolbert understood the importance of the scallion pancake in fostering the life of the mind. Ingrid and Walter Blanco providing unfailing encouragement when spirits flagged and even let me win at Trivial Pursuit now and again. Stanley Heller was always there to remind me that no book is ever perfect. My parents, Jack and Elinor Tolbert, were happy to open the ancestral home to me during my sabbatical leave in 1990–91 (though informants have suggested to me that they were even happier when I found alternative housing). In the last stages of production, the liveliness and curiosity of my students at the City College of New York was invigorating and inspirational.
The support of Robert Lejeune was indispensable in completing this book. When I first met Bob in the Hunan Balcony at 98th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, this manuscript existed in embryonic form in thirty-nine Word-Star files on thirteen disks in the operating system CP/M. The assistance he rendered me in bringing these scattered documents together went far beyond the ruthlessness with which he upgraded my computer literacy to the level of quasi-respectability. For his insights as a sociologist, his tolerance for my frenetic work habits, and his determination that I would finish this book in spite of myself, I am more grateful than I can adequately express in words.