Chapter Twelve

Athenians and Others

Marriage is too much like slavery not to be involved in its fate.

—George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South

ALREADY IN ANTIQUITY it was occasionally suggested that the Athenian state could have done better by those groups that stood outside the democracy—women, slaves, metics, and allies. Particularly among the sophists, several thinkers seem to have questioned the legitimacy of slavery. The haughty Callicles, speaking in Plato’s Gorgias, suggested that “natural justice” was violated by slavery; the sophist Antiphon questioned the validity of distinctions between noble and commoner, Greek and barbarian, arguing that all grew homoios, “alike,” by nature; and Gorgias’s pupil Alcidamas claimed that “God left everyone free; nature made nobody a slave.”¹ Aristotle in his defense of slavery in Politics 1.2–7 (1252a–55b) refers directly to an abolitionist movement. Herodotus in his Histories alerted the Athenians to models of gender relations different from those known in Greece; several of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides raised questions about the denigration and seclusion of women; and the appearance of Aristophanes’ Congresswomen so close to the date of composition of Plato’s Republic strongly suggests that the appropriateness of disfranchising women was a lively topic of conversation at the beginning of the fourth century. Some contemporaries also opposed Athenian imperialism. Scholars will never agree on the position the historian Thucydides took regarding the empire, but it does seem that his relative, Thucydides the son of Melesias, headed a political party that painted it as exploitive and unbecoming. Though the motive of the alleged anti-imperialists may have been simply to undermine Pericles, their plan could have had no prospects for success had not at least some Athenians had reservations about the empire. The tone of the “Old Oligarch” is always difficult to assess, but his contention (1.14) that the Athenians supported the lower classes in the subject states by disfranchising, fining, exile, and killing the chrestoi does not seem kindly meant, and he connected the empire to the Athenians’ democratic form of government in citing the utility of imperial revenue in financing state pay for state service (1.16). Tremendous amounts of ink have been spilt by twentieth-century scholars trying to determine how popular the empire was with Athens’s allies. What is certain is that it was not popular with her enemies, and the Spartans were able to allege the oppressive character of the empire as propaganda before and during the Peloponnesian War.

Increasingly during the twentieth century, writing about antiquity has come to stress the limited parameters within which the so-called democracy of the Athenians operated. This is particularly true of textbooks and other works designed for general audiences.² At times these observations amount to simple cautions, issued with or without attendant moral condemnation and allegations of hypocrisy. Some thinkers, however—chiefly those working during the last third of the century—have viewed the exclusion of these several categories of “others” as part and parcel of the Athenian system and have posited intimate connections between Athenian exclusivity and Athenian democracy. These connections are frequently accompanied by criticism of the Athenian system and sometimes by strenuous moral condemnation. In part as a result of new perspectives offered by Marxism and feminism, some critics have also placed the dynamics of Athenian democracy in the context of what they view as a long history of exploitation and abuse. While the articulation of this phenomenon represents the distinctive contribution of the twentieth century to the anti-Athenian tradition, in reality the exclusivity of the Athenians has attracted interest for hundreds of years.

IMPERIALISM AND DEMOCRACY

Whereas pacifically minded egalitarians of the twentieth century are made nervous by the juxtaposition of imperialism and democracy, earlier thinkers, who on the whole disliked democracy, saw no contradiction between the two and in fact believed that the tyranny of the mob abroad could easily have been predicted from the tyranny of the mob at home. Forceful attacks on Athenian imperialism burst forth at the end of the eighteenth century. For William Young, the problem with imperialism had lain in the encouragement it gave to luxury, but Mitford and Bisset eagerly compared the bloody expansionism of the Athenians to that of the French, and both associated it with democracy.

“Striking features in democrats,” Bisset wrote in 1798, “have been the desire of conquest, and oppressive cruelty to the conquered.” This, he maintained, was particularly noticeable in the Athenians, whose behavior in Greece, he reported, confirmed his belief that the cruelty of democracy exceeded that of “any other system of despotism”; Melos in particular showed “the moral creed of conquering democrats.” Such, he concludes, “is the ambition, the injustice, the barbarity of democracy.”³ Bisset went to great lengths to argue that the Athenians’ success against the Persians was due not to the strength of their constitution, to which friends of democracy imputed the victories at Marathon and Salamis, but rather to the “temporary departure” from democratic principles that led Athens to elevate men like Miltiades, Aristides, and Themistocles to the status of “princes.”⁴ He saw their mistreatment of their fellow Greeks, however, as a direct consequence of their form of government. Democracy, in other words, cannot account for anything Bisset admires, but it can explain what he deplores. In Bisset’s view, moreover, the frequency with which democracies undertake wars can be ascribed not only to the inherent bloodthirstiness of democrats but also to the fact that their insolence and caprice (which surpassed that of bashaws and janissaries) provoke their neighbors to wars more frequently than the actions of autocratic rulers.⁵ Similar views were put forward by Mitford, who was also fond of comparing Athenian democrats to Turkish despots.⁶ Meanwhile in France Volney saw a negative model for his country in the Athenians’ willingness to oppress allies to raise money for beautifying their city.⁷

When Grote came to displace Mitford on the shelves and English liberals joyfully recognized the ancient Athenians as their long-lost ancestors, the tide turned not only on the Athenian democracy but on the empire as well. Thenceforth the relationship between imperialism and democracy would be couched in different terms. Grote was hardly the first to place a positive construction on the empire. In 1840 Karl Ottfried Müller’s History of the Literature of Ancient Greece was published in England in the translation of George Cornewall Lewis. Müller was eager to point out that the purpose of the empire was not to minister to the wants of an elite of thousands but rather to enable the allies to share with the Athenians in the Panathenaic and Dionysiac festivals. In a footnote he maintained that there were many grounds for believing the festivals were established “expressly for the allies, who attended them in large numbers.”⁸ A.H.J. Greenidge in his 1896 Handbook of Greek Constitutional History contended that even Periclean exclusivity in matters of citizenship “was tempered by the nobler aim of asserting individual liberty by the spread of the democratic ideal, and of raising the subject classes of Athens’s subject states by freeing them from the government of restricted oligarchies.”⁹ He went on to argue that the blessings of democracy inevitably flowed over into Athens’s dependencies and cited Cleon’s complaint that a democracy could not govern an empire (Thucydides 3.37) as evidence of the Athenians’ extreme leniency with their allies.

The appearance of Grote’s work entrenched this sort of thinking about the empire, and the enthusiasm of many Britons survived not only into Victoria’s later years but into the Edwardian era and beyond. The lecture delivered by the historian John Cramb on the Boer War in May of 1900 soared to dizzying heights in comparing the imperialism of Britain with that of Athens. Claiming that the Athens of Plato and of Sophocles demonstrated the compatibility of militarism and cultivation, Cramb saw an Athenian antecedent for Britain’s transfiguration by the imperial democratic ideal of bringing “the larger freedom and the higher justice” to subject peoples. As in Periclean Athens, he maintained, “in the present conflict a democracy, at once imperial, self-governing and warlike, and actuated by the loftiest ideals, confronts the world.” Quoting apprehensively from what he called the “embittered wisdom” of Aeschylus and Sophocles, he expressed concern that a defeat in South Africa would be still more devastating to human welfare than the Athenian debacle at Syracuse.¹⁰ Cramb finished putting his lectures together for publication just before his death in 1913; Pickard-Cambridge’s Demosthenes and the Last Days of Greek Freedom was published the following year. There British imperialism was portrayed as broader in conception than that of the Athenians, but even so it was Athens that moved the author to observe that it is not “an absurd contention that the life of the individual is … ennobled by membership of an imperial nation.” As reservations about the ethics of imperialism deepened, so inevitably people began viewing the Athenian empire differently. So for example the Irish poet and Hellenist Louis MacNeice, writing in the 1930s, reflected with regret that England had been “like fifth-century Athens, able to maintain free speech and a comparatively high standard of living, but only on the basis of gagged and impoverished subject peoples.”¹¹ The progress of revulsion from imperialism can be gauged from a comparison of successive editions of J. C. Stobart’s popular The Glory That Was Greece. Writing in 1911, Stobart, a lecturer at Trinity College (Cambridge)—who fell somewhere between a conventional academic and an educated amateur—impressed the reading public with a lively cultural history decked out with numerous plates. He sternly warned his readers never to “forget the thousands of slaves whose cruel toil in mine and factory rendered this brilliant society possible at such an early stage in history.” Greek “liberty and communism,” he maintained, was essentially that of an aristocracy.¹² The march of sensitivity throughout the twentieth century is signaled by the addition that was made by a later editor. In the introduction to his 1964 edition of Stobart’s successful book, R. J. Hopper observed that since 1911 “horizons [had] widened” and “some of the views expressed in the original version rest on attitudes and values different from those of the present day.” And in fact when it came time to revise the passage in question Hopper expanded the first sentence, adding to the caveat about slavery another concerning imperialism. “We must never forget,” the sentence now reads, “the thousands of slaves whose cruel toil in mine and factory rendered this brilliant society possible at such an early stage in history, nor that it was aided by the revenues of an empire” (italics mine).¹³

As imperialist fantasies migrated from England to the United States, British pride began to give way to American squeamishness. To be sure, two World Wars inspired in both British subjects and American citizens a legitimizing identification with classical Athens. In England placards on buses during World War I displayed selections from Pericles’ funeral oration, and in America journalists and scholars vied to produce the pithiest wartime analogies.¹⁴ As time passed, a dichotomy became visible dividing scholars, who disputed the connection between democracy and empire, from journalists, who, taking a more sentimental tack, tended to assume that Athens’s imperialism constituted betrayal of democratic ideals. Some academics certainly considered the empire justified by the high level of culture it enabled the Athenians to attain at home. For the Canadian William Scott Ferguson of Harvard, the contrast between Thucydides on the one hand and Plato and Aristotle on the other pointed up the “loss of power for sustained historical thinking which Greece suffered when men of genius were no longer enriched by the experience which came through living in a state like the imperial democracy.”¹⁵ Half a century later, Tom Jones’s 1969 survey text From the Tigris to the Tiber suggested to students that though it was the Athenian navy that turned back the Persians, it was that same navy, transformed into the tool of imperial greed, that soon deprived many Greek city-states of their freedom and “subjected them to a ruthless exploitation more direct and comprehensive than any the Persians might have imposed.”¹⁶ The nineteenth-century enthusiasm for democracy-and-culture-through-empire, moreover, still lived on in North American scholars like the late Malcolm MacGregor of the University of British Columbia, whose book The Athenians and Their Empire, written for a general audience, appeared in 1987. MacGregor defended the empire, insisting that the Persian menace, so far from an Athenian public relations ploy, was all too real, and contended that “it would be folly to deny connexions among government, Empire and the culture that we associate with the Liberal Arts.” MacGregor recommends that his readers turn to Pericles’ funeral oration in order fully to grasp the culture that empire made possible.¹⁷ But MacGregor, who enjoyed his reputation as a crotchety conservative, made plain that he sensed that in the matter of the Athenian empire—as elsewhere—he was engaged in an uphill fight, reporting the “regrettable fact that since the Second World War the very words ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ have acquired unpleasant connotations.”¹⁸ Clear thinking, he contended, was inhibited by “a vulgar prejudice against Empire, which is made somehow to seem immoral.”¹⁹

Among journalists, on the other hand, the strains of life in the bipolar universe of the Cold War focused attention on the Peloponnesian War in a way that made the failures of Athens seem to cry out warnings that Americans would ignore only at their peril. In the 1950s Life magazine ran a series of articles cautioning Americans about the disasters that might attend on ignoring the lessons of the Greek past. Robert Campbell’s piece “How a Democracy Died” was designed for high drama, beginning with an account of deadly powers facing one another across the 38th parallel, only to reveal a bit later on that the author is describing fifth-century Greece and not the endangered universe of his own era. Despite its democratic pretensions, Campbell complained, Athens ultimately failed to grasp the most basic principles about the free association of states and instead substituted the rule of force for the bond of principle.²⁰ Athens, in other words, fell because of a failure to extend democratic egalitarianism and fairness beyond the home front. Similar ideas were expressed in “Hope and History,” an earnest plea for America to avoid the mistakes of her democratic predecessor penned in 1953 by Buell Gallagher, the Congregational minister who had just been appointed president of the College of the City of New York, and published in the Saturday Review.²¹ Gallagher contended that Athens had ultimately fallen because of her refusal to follow her professed democratic principles to their logical conclusions, dooming herself by her imperialism and by her refusal to extend citizenship to allies.

The war in Vietnam prompted parallels with ancient imperialism in general and the Sicilian expedition in particular among teachers, scholars, journalists, and many other Americans who had studied classical history or read Thucydides in school. The role of classical analogies in the college classroom is underlined by Walter Karp, a contributing editor to Harper’s, in a piece entitled “The Two Thousand Years’ War: Thucydides in the Cold War” that appeared in Harper’s in March 1981. Reminiscing about his college days in the early 1950s, when his Humanities 1 professor suggested that the students might get more out of Thucydides if they compared the struggle between Athens and Sparta to the recently named “Cold War,” Karp reports that analogies “fell at our feet like ripe apples,” with authoritarian Sparta evoking the Soviet Union and democratic Athens America.²² Returning to Thucydides a generation later, Karp was struck by the deepening of the parallel between fifth-century Athens and the United States of his own day, and he perceived analogies with the Athenians’ overconfidence after the Spartan surrender at Sphacteria not only in Truman’s attempt to conquer North Korea after MacArthur’s sweeping victory at Inchon but also in Kennedy’s ripeness for a war in Vietnam after his triumph in the Cuban missile crisis.

What all these articles shared in common was a conviction that the United States resembled Athens both in its democratic ethos and in its foreign policy—and that the latter was disturbing precisely because the former was so laudable. None of the authors suggests Americans would do better to emulate the Spartans, and all agree that the American way of life is worth preserving for much the same reasons as was the Athenian. The reaction of scholars, however, has been somewhat different, for increasingly during the twentieth-century people who have thought hard and unhurriedly about the ancient world have come to wonder whether the imperialism of the Athenians, far from being an embarrassing blot on an otherwise exemplary civilization, may not have been one reflection of a tendency toward exclusivity that was intimately bound up with the democratic ethos itself. Practical connections between empire and democracy had long been noticed; the empire, it has often been maintained, made democracy possible both by generating the revenues to finance state pay for state service and by fostering a level of cultural development that favored the growth of an educated citizenry. Recently, however, scholars have begun to suggest that from a psychological standpoint the egalitarianism of the Athenians was made possible only by the existence of highly visible categories of “others” to whom citizens could feel superior. These arguments are rarely made about imperialism alone; rather they tie together the empire, slavery, and the status of women.²³

THE OUTSIDERS WITHIN: SLAVES AND WOMEN IN A PATRIARCHAL DEMOCRACY

On the whole, European and American intellectuals have disliked slavery. Those who also opposed democracy found themselves in a fairly comfortable position in writing about the coexistence of the two. Hume, who frequently characterized Athenian government as a tumultuous and arbitrary despotism of the demos, looked ahead in his 1752 essay “On the Populousness of Ancient Nations” to the concerns of the postrevolutionary generation, voicing distress that many “passionate admirers of the ancients, and zealous partizans of civil liberty” are willing to endorse slavery because of their failure to see that the hardships it imposed made life far more painful in antiquity than did the most arbitrary of European governments in modern times.²⁴ The monarchist Josiah Tucker pounced with glee on Athenian slaveholding, while Mitford for his part contended that only a tenth of the inhabitants at Athens were citizens and reported astonishment at the proportion of slave to free “in a commonwealth so boastful of liberty as its darling passion.”²⁵ Recoiling from democracy because of his distrust of the poor, Mitford (at times) saw slavery as intensifying the intrinsic civic uselessness of the lower classes, arguing that the existence of slavery aggravated the ills of democracy by rupturing the customary bonds between the laboring poor on the one hand and the rich whom they served on the other; with work in the hands of slaves, he maintained, all hope of common interests between classes evaporated.²⁶

Those who have disliked slavery but admired Athens have resorted to a variety of stratagems to explain away the seeming contradiction between egalitarian professions and the ultimate in social stratification. Some argue that the Athenians did the best they could in view of the pandemic myopia of their day, while others have stressed the comparative leniency of Athenian slaveowners. It has long been a commonplace—though it may not be true—that the treatment of slaves in Athens was on the whole mild and compares favorably with that of slaves in other societies such as Rome, the American South, or the Caribbean: from Potter’s seventeenth-century Antiquities to Clarkson’s 1785 Essay on the Slavery and the Commerce of the Human Species to the writings of eager Victorians like Lowes Dickinson and the Australian professor T. G. Tucker, the supposed leniency of Athenians to their slaves has been underlined with relentless regularity.²⁷ Still others have sought to minimize the role played by slavery in Athenian civilization. The continuing controversy about the ratio of slave to free in the ancient world that has been handed down dutifully from generation to generation owes its vigor not simply to intellectual curiosity but also to the intense anxiety generated by the coexistence in antiquity of slavery and republicanism—a fortiori in the case of Athens, where the issue is not simply generic republicanism but something that called itself “demokratia”—to its Greek proponents, the shared rule of free males, but sounding to moderns much like its cognate “democracy.”²⁸

The most popular argument in defense of Athenian slavery has focused on the role it played in making possible the full florescence of Athenian culture. In the nineteenth century this argument was particularly popular in Germany and in the American South. Schiller’s friend Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in his 1792 Limits of State Action had spoken of slavery as an erroneous decision to sacrifice a segment of the human race to “an unjust and barbarous system,” a year later referred cheerfully to the important role of slavery in fostering a “liberal spirit” among the Greeks and the reign in Greece of “noble” attitudes genuinely worthy of free men.²⁹ It was the labor of slaves, von Humboldt argued, that enabled citizens to participate freely in athletics, learning, and politics. Not long afterward the Göttingen professor Arnold Heeren suggested that the cultural achievements of the Greeks would have been impossible without slavery; that these achievements had been enormously important for civilization; and that consequently “we may at least be permitted to doubt, whether they were purchased too dearly by the introduction of slavery.”³⁰ Predictably, Nietzsche gloried in proclaiming that the cultural achievements of the Greeks demonstrated the “cruel sounding truth, that slavery is of the essence of Culture.” Who, he asks, “can avoid this verdict if he honestly asks himself about the causes of the never-equalled Greek art-perfection?”³¹ The prophet of German unification Heinrich von Treitschke was marginally more delicate in his formulation, labeling the introduction of slavery as a “saving act of civilization” and arguing that “the price paid by [slaves’] suffering for the tragedies of Sophocles and Phidias’s statue of Zeus was not too high.”³² Similar ideas about ancient Greece in general and Athens in particular were put forth in the United States to justify the enslavement of Africans. These arguments, of course, differed from those put forward in Europe (except, perhaps, by Nietzsche) in that they did not consider the utility of slavery to be by any means unique to classical Athens.

As southern slavery came increasingly under attack from abolitionists, its proponents forged a variety of arguments that cast it as at worst a necessary evil and at best a positive good. For those who wished to stress the benefits slavery might confer on society, the classical example did double duty, for it could be used to demonstrate not only the role of slavery in promoting equality and liberty among citizens but also the cultural achievements that slavery facilitated. Thomas Dew, president of the College of William and Mary, maintained that slaves outnumbered citizens in the classical states, “where the spirit of liberty glowed with most intensity,” and suggested that American slavery also conduced to the spirit of both freedom and equality, since division among citizens was removed by relegating menial labor to blacks.³³ Classical slavery, moreover, fostered culture, and the peroration of Dew’s Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 was focused on the classical example, as Dew reminded his audience that the slaveholding societies of antiquity produced the achievements of Lycurgus, Demosthenes, and Cicero “without for one moment loosing the ties between master and slave.”³⁴

Dew died at forty-three, but his crusade lived on in the person of his fellow Virginian George Fitzhugh, described by the American historian Eugene Genovese as “a man who wrote too much and read too little.”³⁵ Fitzhugh took it upon himself to save the world in general and the American South in particular from what he viewed as a short-term aberration from the customary decency of humankind, to wit, the free society found in his day in Europe and the northern United States. It was slavery and serfdom, he maintained, that formed the natural condition of society; but in his own lifetime greedy capitalists had fostered the enormity of free labor for their own selfish motives. All Fitzhugh’s writing was dominated by the contrast he saw between self-involved, elitist, shortsighted abolitionists on the one hand and generous, civic-minded, positively visionary slaveholders on the other. It was to slavery, he argued, that ancient states “were indebted for their great prosperity and high civilization” and for a level of culture never equaled in later times.³⁶ As to the modern world, it was his passionate belief that American slavery saw to it that poor whites were not at “the bottom of society as at the North” but privileged persons, “like Greek and Roman citizens, with a numerous class far beneath them.”³⁷ It is not likely to be a coincidence that the heyday of neo-Hellenic architecture in the American South coincided with precisely those decades when the Greek example was put forward in reinforcing the positive good argument for slavery—the thirty years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. For it was Athens above all that provided the most dramatic evidence that slavery and culture mixed well, and the proud white columns that adorned the facades of antebellum mansions worked nicely to proclaim that the inhabitants of such edifices believed in both.³⁸

At the same time, the popular outcry against black slavery in both America and Europe prompted some to compare Athenian slavery favorably with its modern counterpart. T. G. Tucker’s Life in Ancient Athens appeared in the Handbooks of Archaeology and Antiquities series published in England and was reprinted over a dozen times. Tucker stressed the importance of distinguishing between the “mutual confidences and even affection” that developed between slaves and their owners in Athens and the mistreatment of blacks by the Simon Legrees of the American South. The only people, Tucker maintained, whose humanity to slaves exceeded that of the Athenians may have been the Jews.³⁹ (Compare the views of Cicero, who described the Jews as a people “born for slavery” [De Provinciis Consularibus 10]) The continuing mistreatment of American blacks in the twentieth century also fostered comparisons with Athens in which the ancients came out ahead. In his widely read Penguin paperback The Greeks, the Englishman H.D.F. Kitto combined the suggestion that slavery was a necessary price for the glory that was Greece with the allegation that, comparatively speaking, it was not on the whole such a disagreeable thing to be a slave at Athens. Athenian slaves, he assured his many readers, were not only happier than black slaves in the antebellum South but also possessed far more legal protection than the enfranchised American blacks of his own day. Kitto—who was also one of the best-known twentieth-century apologists for the status of women at Athens—compared the misery of slaves in the Athenian silver mines with the deaths of randomly selected Britons in auto accidents, arguing that just as Athenians exploited slave labor, so the English “kill 4,000 citizens annually on the roads because [their] present way of life could not otherwise continue.” Kitto concludes that to “understand is not necessarily to pardon, but there is no harm in trying to understand,” but he certainly seems to me to be pardoning, and rather graciously, too.⁴⁰

For every defender of Athenian slavery, there has probably been at least one detractor. Bodin was horrified by ancient slavery and devoted a chapter of his Six Books (1.5) to its condemnation and to wrangling with those who cite the antiquity of slavery as a justification for it. Some have come at the subject from more than one angle: Mitford, for example, alternately censured the Athenians for their slaveholding and expressed relief that at least the existence of slaves at Athens had seen to it that the truly impoverished were excluded from the franchise.⁴¹ The revolutions in France and America had focused a good deal of attention on the ideals of the classical republics. Americans were ambivalent about the value of Hellenic models, but many in France believed that their country could benefit from the resurrection of Athenian and Spartan institutions in their midst. In the years that followed, a new enthusiasm for Greece developed in the southern United States as the need arose for a model of “liberty-equality-and-culture-through-slavery,” but in France the opposite phenomenon was visible as Volney and Constant recoiled from what they saw as the oversimplifications of the revolutionaries.⁴² In his attack on the modern priests of the cult of antiquity, Volney maintained that slaves outnumbered free citizens at Athens by a ratio of four to one and contended that there was not one Athenian home wherein a despotism was not practiced worthy of the American colonies—or of Greek tyrants: and all this by “these make-believe democrats.” So much for the classical republicanism of the revolutionaries.⁴³ A generation later Constant would include slavery in his discussion of classical ideals of liberty and their limitations.⁴⁴ The new sensitivity to the problems posed by ancient slavery to those who wished to resurrect classical ideals was also evident in other parts of Europe. Shortly after Mitford’s death in 1827, his brother Lord Redesdale composed (for a new edition of the History of Greece) an apology for his brother’s work that was just that: in his “Short Account of the Author, and of his Pursuits in Life, With an Apology for Some Parts of his Work,” Redesdale recurred again and again to the evils of slavery ancient and modern and stressed repeatedly that his brother’s rejection of Greek democracy was based on its slaveholding. It was because of its exclusivity and the narrowness of its franchise (i.e., rather than because of any revulsion from republicanism), Redesdale insisted, that his brother had decried those who wished to resurrect Greek republican ideals in the modern world.⁴⁵ In the Holy Family of 1845, moreover, Marx and Engels contended that the colossal and fatal error of Robespierre and his cohorts had lain in their failure to understand the crucial role of slavery in ancient states; hence the erroneous belief that classical political ideals could be compatible with modern bourgeois society. “Robespierre, Saint-Just and their party fell,” they maintained,

because they confused the ancient, realistic-democratic commonweal based on real slavery with the modern spiritualistic-democratic representative state, which is based on emancipated slavery, bourgeois society. What a terrible illusion it is to have to recognise and sanction in the rights of man modern bourgeois society, the society of industry, of universal competition, of private interest freely pursuing its aims, of anarchy, of self-estranged natural and spiritual individuality, and at the same time to want afterwards to annul the manifestations of the life of this society in particular individuals and simultaneously to want to model the political head of that society in the manner of antiquity!”⁴⁶

Similar observations were made in 1895 by Gustave Le Bon in his famous monograph on crowds, where he accused the revolutionaries of anachronism in their attempt to revive the institutions and the rhetoric of the so-called free states of the classical world. “What resemblance,” he asked, “can possibly exist between the institutions of the Greeks and those designated to-day by corresponding words? A republic at that epoch was an essentially aristocratic institution, formed of a union of petty despots ruling over a crowd of slaves kept in the most absolute subjection. These communal aristocracies, based on slavery, could not have existed for a moment without it.”⁴⁷

In 1847, the year before slavery was abolished in the French colonies, Henri Wallon published his massive history of slavery in antiquity. He was able to incorporate the 1848 abolition law, for whose passing he was partially responsible, into the second edition of 1879. Wallon viewed slavery as not only immoral but antithetical to progress, a belief shared by numerous nineteenth century authors—by John Elliott Cairnes, for example, in his 1862 study The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, & Probable Designs, and by Marx. Floating on a wave of abolitionist fervor, Wallon’s polemical Histoire de l’esclavage dans l’antiquité contended that the flourishing of a thoroughgoing slave labor system was not evident until the period of Athens’s “decline” after the Peloponnesian War.⁴⁸ The reaction continued as the century wore on. In 1864 Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges published The Ancient City, which was translated into several languages and often reprinted; it is still widely read today and is available in English translation in paperback. Like Volney and Constant, Fustel was intensely exercised about the determination of the revolutionaries and some of their successors to emulate ancient ideals and their failure to understand the inadequacies of classical governments. Fustel was also convinced that slavery had been intensely harmful to the ancient state, encouraging as it did indolence on the part of citizens.

This line of thinking was by no means unique to Fustel de Coulanges. What political scientist Ellen Wood has called “The Myth of the Idle Mob”—the belief that Athenian citizens fundamentally did not work, and that the existence of a slave population encouraged bad thinking and bad living—has a long history.⁴⁹ The association of hard work with slavery, some have felt, encouraged free Athenians to despise labor in theory, while the availability of slaves enabled them to avoid it in practice. The notion that slavery freed Athenian voters from the need to work is of uncertain origin. Contemporary literature makes plain that the average Athenian actually did work for a living; the only text that would call this patent reality into question is Aristophanes’ Wasps, which suggests in a comic vein that some people chose to live on jury pay alone. Outside of this, the entire corpus of Athenian literature paints a portrait of working citizens, and if Plato and Aristotle recoiled from a state in which the franchise was entrusted to those whose minds were deadened by “banausic” labor, their revulsion only confirms the reality with which they were confronted in the world around them. Athenians were not freed from working for a living by the existence of slavery any more than plumbers or waitresses or college professors are freed from working by the existence of automobiles, washer-dryers, and computers. For several centuries, however, the peculiar conviction that slavery joined with pay for jury duty and minor public offices to free the average citizen for a life of leisure has enjoyed enormous popularity. For some, this notion has fostered a glorious image of a perfect universe in which the responsible business of living like a gentleman could be shared more or less equally among a gracious elite. Others have followed Plato and Aristotle in stressing the impossibility of intellectual development on the part of people who need to work. Still others have excoriated the idleness and technological stagnation that might result from slave-owning. Many have been determined to have it both ways, lambasting the Athenians for empowering the laboring classes while at the same time censuring classical Athens as a hotbed of state-supported indolence where government pay for civic service made possible a gracious life without “real” work.

Shortly before the revolutions in France and America, slavery became an issue in a debate between two Swiss, J.-F. Deluc of Geneva and the Bernese scientist Haller. In his correspondence with Haller, Deluc had adduced the ancient Athenians as evidence that ordinary citizens were qualified to make political decisions. When Haller countered with the contention that in fact Greek democracies often made very bad decisions, Deluc responded by underlining the differences between the slave-owning states of antiquity and modern Geneva. In Geneva, he argued, slaveless citizens needed to work for a living, unlike the ancient Athenians, who lived idly on the labor of others; hence the worst aspects of Athenian government could be avoided there.⁵⁰ In 1793, while serving in the French Convention, Lenoir-Laroche, warning against facile identifications of modern France with Athens and Rome, contended that in these states real work was left to slaves, freeing citizens to spend their lives in the business of government.⁵¹ In the monarchist Sketch of Democracy penned by Robert Bisset in 1798, Athenian citizens were portrayed as living off slaves, a phenomenon to which Bisset ascribed the prominence of idleness in the Athenian “national character.”⁵² The author of a mysterious essay published at Edinburgh in 1828 saw it as a great advantage in Athens that “menial and agricultural labour was performed by slaves,” which afforded citizens the leisure to participate in government and warfare.⁵³ Two better-known writers, Condorcet and Constant, stressed the crucial conjunction of slavery and smallness as conditions for the development of Athenian democracy, and Condorcet in the Sketch of human progress he penned while imprisoned by the Jacobins contended that slavery was essential for Greek political development because the education that was such a crucial building block of the system was practicable only in societies in which the really arduous work in crafts and agriculture was carried out by slaves.⁵⁴ Hegel also stressed the centrality of education in the Athenian system, viewing slavery as an essential condition of an “aesthetic democracy” in which citizens were required to participate in government, the celebration of festivals, and exercises in the Gymnasia. Athenian citizens, he maintained, were liberated from handicraft occupations because the work of daily life was done by slaves.⁵⁵

“Nobility” is a word that often turns up in such discussions. The German historian Arnold Heeren cited Aristotle with some frequency in his discussion of slavery, maintaining that it “served to raise the class of citizens to a sort of nobility” and praising the application that the “noblest” of the Greek slaveholders made of their leisure.⁵⁶ Later in the century the Victorian W. Warde Fowler would write of nobility and appeal to Aristotle in maintaining that it was difficult to grudge Athens its slaves since they seemed to be necessary to enable an elite to develop the glory that was Greece. The sweet reasonableness of the Athenian democracy, Fowler argued, forged a more comfortable material environment for slaves at Athens than anywhere else in the ancient world; Aristotelian ideology may well have underlain his contention that nowhere (“perhaps”) were slaves “so exclusively drawn, not from Greek, but from foreign and semi-civilized peoples.” (The latter phenomenon seems to carry for Fowler powerful moral valence of a positive kind.) And not only this; “all things considered,” Fowler wrote, “it is hard to grudge Athens her 100,000 slaves, if they really were, as I think we must believe, essential to the realisation of the ‘good life’ of the free minority which has left such an invaluable legacy to modern civilisation…. In Aristotle’s view, the raison d’être of slavery was to make a noble life possible for the master; and where the master actually lived such a life, and at the same time did his duty by his slaves, the institution might be justified.”⁵⁷

The imagined idleness of a citizen in a slaveholding state has made possible the belief that the lack of mutual dependence fostered constant tension between rich and poor at Athens. This idea may first have been articulated by Mitford. Although relieved that the phenomenon of slavery cut the very lowest element in society off from participation in politics, Mitford was nonetheless concerned that the use of slave labor on the part of the rich eliminated an essential basis of common interest between upper and lower classes. Mitford was too well read to have failed to notice that in reality the Athenian riffraff held jobs and led structured lives; he complains in fact of the low trades that characterized the men who controlled policy and praises the “high discipline” that marked the Athenian armed forces in a state “whose men were all soldiers and seamen.” But when the mood strikes him, he nonetheless laments the ways in which slavery displaced the poor from their natural place as the suppliers of goods and services to the rich.⁵⁸

Writing a generation later, Böckh stressed the pernicious interplay of slavery and state pay. For him, this deadly interaction in fact interfered with the practice of “nobility.” Slavery, he argued, fostered indolence, which in turn prompted citizens to pressure the government into supporting them, a support that took the form not only of pay but also of the division of property wantonly confiscated from the rich by demagogues. These pressures diverted Athenian resources from “noble” objects, and Böckh was forced to conclude that even among the Athenians, one of the “noblest” races of Greece, “depravity and moral corruption were prevalent throughout the whole people.”⁵⁹ He concludes that any successful government must require those who wish to participate to support themselves and must refrain strictly from remunerating state service.

Like Mitford, however, Böckh makes clear throughout his widely read book that Athenians did in fact work for a living, and states baldly that the lower classes in fact “were as much reduced to the necessity of manual labor as the poor aliens and slaves.”⁶⁰ A similar inconsistency marks the work of Böckh’s contemporary and countryman Arnold Heeren, who in his discussion of slavery contended that it created a leisured citizen “nobility” but nonetheless questioned the wisdom of Greek democratic lawgivers who failed to see that “to intrust … unlimited power to the commons, was not much less than to pave the way for the rule of the populace, if we include under that name the mass of indigent citizens.”⁶¹

Fustel’s conviction that slavery fostered an unhealthy attitude to work that in turn prompted Athenian citizens to live off the state was echoed in the history of Greek culture published by the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt a generation later in 1898. There Burckhardt caricatured the Athenians as a people who lived by graft and greed, perjury and sycophancy, confiscations and political trials. This depravity he traced in part to slavery, which deprived the majority of Athenians of the soothing effect provided by daily labor. In words very similar to Fustel’s, Burckhardt complained that the poor man learned to use his vote to get hold of the property of others, getting himself paid for participation in politics, selling his vote, decreeing liturgies and masterminding confiscations of property, which lost all its sanctity.⁶² These words evoke the arguments of Fustel: from the refusal to make an honest living, Fustel had maintained, came pressure placed upon the government to remunerate citizens for participation in state business, as well as a system that taxed the rich mercilessly, and in time the indolent poor “began to use their right of suffrage either to decree an abolition of debts, or a grand confiscation, and a general subversion.” For Fustel, then, and for Burckhardt, slavery contained within it the seeds of disaster, for it led in turn to that great bugaboo of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alike, the failure to respect “the superior principle that consecrates the right of property.”⁶³ For Burckhardt, as for Fustel, the degeneration of Athenian government into the rule of a petulant, impudent mob evoked more recent developments in France. What had been lost in the Athenians’ movement into democracy, Burckhardt believed, was nobility.

Belief in the idleness of the Athenian citizenry survives into the twentieth century. A popular government textbook of the 1920s set the ratio of slave to free at three to one and maintained that free citizens “did no disagreeable work but devoted their time to government, fine arts, and refinements of life.” The National Geographic for December 1922 assured readers that there were four slaves at Athens to every one citizen. A ratio of five or six to one was propounded to young people in Van Loon’s 1921 Story of Mankind, which portrayed citizens spending all their time and energy discussing war and peace in the assembly or viewing tragedies in the theater, while work was the exclusive province of slaves.⁶⁴ Some have rejoiced in the belief that slavery facilitated a gracious life for citizens, convinced that the cultural and political achievements of the Athenians had not been bought too dearly; others more squeamish hesitated to come down on the side of Athenian slavery but did brace themselves to raise the question whether possibly the ends might have justified the means; still others excoriated the leisure of free citizens, viewing it not as the stepping stone to pithy ideas and stately temples but rather as a breeding ground for idleness and indolence.

The notion that Athenian citizens on the whole enjoyed lives of leisure while the disagreeable aspects of existence were relegated to slaves does not fit well with the evidence, but it does suit the needs of Marxists invested in demonstrating the role of oppression in history.⁶⁵ Marx himself shared a good deal of the nostalgia for Greece evident in Schiller and Hegel. Some of his yearnings were directed at early Greece—the age of epic heroes as it emerged from the mists of myth—and, like many thinkers of the early nineteenth century in Germany and France, he located much of the appeal of ancient Greece in the impossibility of returning to the conditions that fostered its development. Why, he asks, “should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?”⁶⁶ He was also drawn, however, to the democratic state of the classical era, by which he can only mean Athens, and here his pessimism about the possibility of return was tempered by hopes of restoring egalitarian ideals. In a letter written in 1843 he wrote of his fellow Germans that “freedom, the feeling of man’s dignity, will have to be awakened again in these men. Only this feeling, which disappeared from the world with the Greeks and with Christianity vanished into the blue mist of heaven, can again transform society into a community of men to achieve their highest purposes, a democratic state.”⁶⁷ Despite this paean to the Greeks’ attachment to freedom, however, his characterization of ancient society as based on slavery in the Holy Family penned with Engels two years later was to have a profound effect on his followers.⁶⁸

Marxists of various stamps have played a crucial role in the development of thinking about Greek slavery over the past century. Despite the powerful emotions involved in debates between Marxists and anti-Marxists, and despite the many areas of disagreement among the Marxists themselves, it is to a considerable degree the Marxists who are responsible for moving the discussion of Athenian slavery from a posture of indignant moralizing to a scholarly plane. To be sure, the Marxists’ critics have accused them of exaggerating the importance of slavery in the ancient world in order to underline the prominence of economic injustice in history, while the Marxists, because of their preoccupation with the evils of social stratification, have alternately condemned slavery or welcomed it as one of the five stages in the progression toward the liberation of humanity. The principal consequence of the rise of Marxist history for Athenian slavery, however, has been a closer examination of the precise function of slavery in the Athenian state, and many of those who today identify slavery as crucial to ancient society are not Marxists at all.⁶⁹

The very different histories of antiquity by Diakov and Kovalev on the one hand and Korovkin on the other demonstrate something of the range of response to Athenian democracy in the Soviet Union.⁷⁰ The History of Antiquity assembled evidently in the 1950s under the direction of Diakov and Kovalev is aimed at the educated general reader, whereas Korovkin’s History of the Ancient World, published in 1981, appears to be designed for adolescents. The authors working under Diakov and Kovalev stress repeatedly the centrality of slavery in Athenian civilization and make clear that Athenian citizens were a minority living off the thankless toil of the enslaved masses; Pericles is billed as the protector of the slave-owning class. On the whole, “slave-owner” is the authors’ standard expression for those whom Western historians have traditionally termed “citizens.” Like Western historians, the authors suggest a contradiction between Athens’s democratic pretensions and Athenian imperialism, which they portray as designed to acquire new slaves. Although both Athenian slaveholding and the imperialism they believe it occasioned are condemned as vitiating democratic principles, however, the authors applaud these principles in their essence and show considerable enthusiasm for Athens as a “progressive” improvement over Greek aristocracies and oriental despotisms.⁷¹ The cultural and intellectual achievements of the Greeks, they argue, retain their value in the modern world and in fact influenced the founders of Marxism-Leninism.⁷²

The school text of Korovkin, which sought to call attention to the centrality of class struggle in history, contains numerous large-type headings and drawings designed to illustrate the prominence and hardships of slavery in Greece. It paints a different picture of Athens. The title of chapter 8, on the rise of the polis, is entitled “The Establishment of the Slave-Owning System and the Rise of the Greek City-States in the 8th–6th Centuries BC,” and its first section is labeled “Formation of the Athens [sic] Slave-Owning State.” The next chapter bears the title “The Development of Slavery in Greece and the Rise of Athens in the Fifth Century BC,” and within this chapter the section on Athenian government is labeled “The Athenian Slave-Owning Democracy.”⁷³ (In the section in that chapter on the influx of slaves into Greece, lip service is paid to the inclusion of women among the class of slaves, but except in the sentences that so indicate, Korovkin assumes that slaves are male.) Korovkin’s view of the relationship of slaves to slave-owners makes a radical contrast with that of Western historians. “The slaves,” he writes (making liberal use of italics, unless these were introduced by the English translator), “did everything they could to bring harm to the slave-owners: they broke the implements, injured the cattle, and sought to work as badly as they could. Often slaves attempted to escape from their masters although they knew that they would be punished harshly if caught. Not rarely they killed the most cruel slave-owners. Frequently there were uprisings of slaves. This was a class struggle—the struggle waged by the slaves against the slave-owners.”⁷⁴ In the conclusion to his book—a conclusion devoted almost entirely to the issue of slavery— Korovkin concedes that slavery made a civilization to which future generations are indebted and that it was an important step forward from the primitivism of earlier times, but in his discussion of Athens he presents it as an unmitigated evil.

In a well-known article published in 1959 entitled “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?” Sir Moses Finley, approaching the question from a somewhat Marxist standpoint, alleged a correlation between democracy and slavery both in Athens and in democratic Chios and argued more broadly that “the more advanced the Greek city-state, the more it will be found to have true slavery…. More bluntly put, the cities in which individual freedom reached its highest expression—most obviously Athens—were cities in which chattel slavery flourished.” Chattel slavery, Finley argued, played little role in pre-Greek civilizations of the ancient near east, for it was fundamentally a Greek discovery. In short, Finley concludes, one aspect of Greek history “is the advance, hand in hand, of freedom and slavery.”⁷⁵

This connection has been drawn again and again in the late twentieth century. In the survey text The World of Athens put out in Cambridge (England) by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers the authors contend that “in the final analysis it was the growth of slavery that permitted the growth of citizen freedom and democracy at Athens.”⁷⁶ The conjunction of freedom and slavery has a long pedigree. In the antebellum South of the United States, the role of black slavery in fostering white freedom formed an important part of proslavery rhetoric. At the same time similar ideas were put forward in Europe, where the essay published at Edinburgh in 1828 praised the merits of Athenian civilizaion by listing back to back in a single sentence the Athenians’ “unconquerable love of freedom” and the fact that at Athens “menial and agricultural labour was performed by slaves.”⁷⁷ The importance of the link between freedom and slavery in proslavery ideology is indicated by the titles of works on American slavery such as Edmund Morgan’s presidential address to the Organization of American Historians entitled “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox” and James Oakes’s Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York, 1990).⁷⁸ Increasingly the interdependence of freedom and slavery at Athens has formed the focus of scholarly concern, and with it the ways in which the Athenian democrats attempted to define themselves in terms of the privileges they denied to women, allies, and other outsiders. In the generation since the appearance of Finley’s article, a number of scholars working in areas such as philosophy, literary criticism, psychology, and anthropology have framed new constructs to accommodate the Athenian treatment of those who belonged to various out-groups. Many of them French or influenced by modern schools of thought that have their roots in France, these scholars have examined the ways in which the Athenian democrats’ definition of themselves was bound up with the distinctions they made between themselves and others, and have seen the Athenians’ egalitarian ethos as dependent on the domination of outsiders not simply in a practical manner (e.g., obtaining leisure for political debate or salaries with which to pay jurors and officials) but also in a fundamental ideological sense. In the construct of these thinkers, egalitarianism among Athenian citizens was made in effect psychologically bearable only by channeling aggression into the abuse of those who had been excluded from the ‘club.’⁷⁹

The most recent thinker to explore in depth the role of slavery in developing the free male Athenians’ concept of themselves is the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson. The Athenian portions of Patterson’s sweeping diachronic study Freedom (1991) are premised on the notion that it was slavery that moved rich and poor Athenians to see themselves as united in a shared enterprise, as “kinsmen, kith and kin against a world of unfree barbarians.”⁸⁰ Unlike most people who have written extensively about ancient Athens, Orlando Patterson is black. A deeply personal interest in questions of slavery and freedom moved him to write a book with a strong ideological agenda that has attracted considerable attention. Published by Basic Books, Freedom stresses the role of women in the development of the ideal of liberty and often draws connections between the condition of the female and that of the slave. Pointing to the frequency with which the heroines of Attic tragedy were also slaves, Patterson explores the imagery of slavery in Antigone and other dramas and cites with approval the words of Vidal-Naquet written ten years earlier about the linking of women and slaves in Greek thought: “In Greek myth, Greek life, and Greek drama, we find not only that ‘servile power and female power are linked’ but also that the two are linked with the strong desire for, and dangers of, personal freedom.”⁸¹

Patterson’s book is informed by a positive valuation of freedom for all people and by a dislike of both slavery and patriarchy. Ironically, however, the notion of democratic Athens as an elite culture built on the deprivations of outsiders was first developed by thinkers who saw in such a system everything to commend and nothing to condemn. One of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of proslavery thought in the American South is the relationship of George Fitzhugh’s thinking to that of Marx and of the French Socialists. Fitzhugh insisted his familiarity with contemporary European social and political thought extended only as far as reviews, and on the whole Socialism was a dirty word in his vocabulary. In many respects, however, his thought parallels that of much more educated intellectuals in Europe.⁸² What is most intriguing about Fitzhugh’s arguments is their place in the development of social and economic constructs linking slaveholding and the subjugation of women. Fitzhugh was convinced that the same sorts of seditious individuals who advocated abolition also championed the rights of women, and in this he was not entirely mistaken. In fact, a number of important nineteenth-century reformers were motivated by a double agenda that opposed not only slavery but patriarchy as well. Many of the champions of women’s rights in America such as the Grimké sisters as well as the Englishwomen Fanny Wright and Harriet Martineau were also ardent abolitionists, and their convictions were shared by men like William Lloyd Garrison. Dew in his Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature complained of women’s disposition to “embrace with eagerness even the wildest and most unjust schemes of emancipation.”⁸³

Fitzhugh’s sense that the fortunes of feminism were somehow linked to those of abolitionism not only in his own society but in the Western tradition more broadly was in fact rather astute. The connection, of course, was not universal; the feminists of Aristophanes’ Congresswomen— a work of considerable interest to Fitzhugh—make plain that their intention was not to abolish slavery but rather to exploit the institution for their own ends. Broadly speaking, however, Fitzhugh was right to see that the fabric of the society he wished to see preserved was in fact interwoven with patriarchy and hierarchy (though of course he would have identified slavery as making possible the absence of hierarchy in free society), and he was correct in believing that these concerns had been shared by a number of Greeks. Both Plato and Aristotle had made frequent linkings between women and slaves. Often, as in Aristotle’s Politics, children formed the closing part of a tricolon that joined together various out-groups who, though in many respects plainly sharing in the humanity of citizen males, nonetheless could not begin to match them in rational capacity. Elsewhere animals supply the third part of the triangle: Plato in the Laws contends that the Muses would never make the mistake of giving a feminine melody or gestures to verses designed for males or assign the rhythm of slaves to a melody and gestures of free men, and he goes on to insist that along the same lines the Muses would never combine the sounds of humans and animals in a single piece (669C). Aristotle linked women with slaves in the Poetics, arguing that “goodness can be manifest even in a slave or a woman, though the woman is perhaps an inferior creature and the slave entirely worthless” (1454a [15.20–22]), and he also expressed concern in the Politics about overindulgence toward slaves and women (1269b [2.9.7ff.]) and about the way in which laxness toward women and slaves was characteristic of democracy and opened the door to tyranny (1313b [5.11.11–12]).⁸⁴ Most European writers who condemned the Athenians for their treatment of women and their slaveholding were plainly convinced that these transgressions set the Athenians off from men of their own era who, by contrast, recoiled from slavery and treated women with respect. Some, however, saw slavery as an extreme form of social stratification, a phenomenon they could not fail to recognize in their own societies, and perceived the denigration of women as a fundamental building block of Western civilization. Though the majority of nineteenth- (and twentieth-) century Englishmen were confident that women were treated quite well enough in their own day, even in Britain dissenting voices were heard, as (on top of the complaints of John Stuart Mill) George Cox foreshadowed the savage attack mounted against the patriarchal tradition by Engels in 1884 in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. The holistic approach of Marxist scholars has combined with the schemata of structuralists to suggest important similarities between the roles played by slaves and by women in the psychology of those privileged by the franchise. The notion popular in late twentieth century America that women and persons of color are joined by common bonds forged by parallel strains is not, as some have imagined, simply a product of the trendy rhetoric of victimization and oppression; rather it has roots reaching back at least as far as the nineteenth century and in some respects much farther.

The history of attitudes toward the relationship between democracy and the status of women is similar to that of attitudes toward the relationship between democracy and slavery. Prior to the twentieth century, the relationship was viewed from a number of different angles. During the earlier part of the century, it was common to consider the perceived denigration of women at Athens as an embarrassing anomaly that in some degree vitiated the claims of the Athenians to a democratic way of life. Thus for example in 1911 the British historian of Greece Alfred Zimmern, who wrote with powerful anguish about the division of women at Athens into housewives and courtesans, saw this unfortunate fragmentation—the result of the Athenian men’s refusal to accord citizen status to the children of non-Athenian women—as a regrettable departure from liberal and democratic principles (which he considered synonymous.) “Thus,” he concluded, “did the liberal-minded democracy of Athens, by one of those odd freaks of blindness which afflict great peoples, check the progress of a powerful movement toward the consolidation of city life upon a broader and better basis.”⁸⁵ In the past quarter-century, it has become more common to view the discounting of women and the democratic ethos as intimately intertwined. Scholars of the most recent generation have provided a variety of constructs concerning the connections between the status of women in classical Athens and such -isms as urbanism, militarism, ethnocentrism, narcissism, phallocentrism, and capitalism. Current work on the connection between democracy and the way Athenian men regarded citizen women has been influenced by a new openness to confronting the sexual and romantic element in bonding among Athenian voters, who were always male. Building on the recognition of an entire sexual universe in which all participants were also voting members of the democracy, scholars such as Sir Kenneth Dover in England, Michel Foucault in France, and David Halperin in the United States have formulated new scenarios for the connection between sex and politics. But the ways in which modern thinkers have explained the dynamics of this connection owe much to a willingness to set aside the sentimental democratic platitudes of the first half of the century and carry forward the work begun by pioneers of earlier eras. In reality, the intriguing relationship between the egalitarian ethos of Athenian males and their treatment of women has been the object of debate for fully two centuries.

One important difference, of course, separates the question of the Athenians’ slaveholding from their mistreatment of women: there can be no question that Athenian society included thousands of slaves, but there has been considerable disagreement over whether Athenian women were in actuality denigrated, ignored, or abused. In fact the status of women in classical Athens has been hotly debated for some time. Scholars have disagreed deeply over whether, how, and in what degree Athenian women were accorded low status. In part, the disagreement derives from a lack of consensus both about the criteria for determining status and about the proper role of women in society. (There is no reason to believe that all or most critics of the status of women in Athens have supported the equality of the sexes. Few people in any century have done so, and among those who have, there has been little agreement about what this equality means or how it might be implemented.) Disagreements about the status of Athenian women have also been fostered by what appear to be puzzling contradictions in the evidence. Athenian prose authors paint a picture of citizen females largely confined to the women’s quarters of their homes, discouraged from the slightest individuality or initiative. Bonds between males appear to have been exceptionally close, and countless texts suggest that they were considered more significant and substantial than bonds between spouses. Because the Periclean citizenship laws of the mid–fifth century disfranchised the children of unions with non-Athenian women, Athenian men who wanted legitimate heirs—as nearly all did—were compelled to marry Athenian women in order to produce sons who would enjoy civic rights at Athens. Since citizen women received little education, however, Athenian men seeking stimulating associations often turned elsewhere for companionship and frequently consorted with non-Athenian mistresses (the so-called hetairai, or “companions,” sometimes Latinized as hetaerae) while they were married to Athenian wives; it is possible that only by such an arrangement could a man both enjoy the company of a scintillating woman and also produce fully lawful male heirs. These hetairai ranged from common-law wives to well-educated courtesans to hard-working prostitutes, and they seem to have formed an integral part of the social life of many Athenian men of the middle and upper classes. It is easy to see how uneducated, sheltered citizen wives would find it difficult to compete with cultivated citizen men and foreign women for their husbands’ attention and affection.

Other evidence, however, conveys a different impression. Attic drama regularly portrayed women as forceful and assertive. The cast of characters that paraded across the Attic stage included not only the melodramatic Clytem-nestra, Antigone, and Medea but also the spunky, resourceful citizen women of Aristophanes’ comedies. The males in Aristophanes’ plays appear henpecked, and they seem quite apprehensive about displeasing their wives. Some gravestones, moreover, suggest considerable tenderness between spouses, and it was not unheard of for husbands to boast of their marital fidelity.

These seeming contradictions have made it possible for a wide variety of theories to be put forward concerning the status of women in Athens and the relationship of this status to the democratic ethos. No author has maintained that Athenian women were able to vote, but nearly every other conceivable interpretation of the evidence has been put forward at some time. Like reservations about slavery, reservations about the status of women originated in Athens itself. We know of no Athenian male who seriously proposed the enfranchisement of Athenian females. We do know, however, that Plato advocated full participation of females in the government of his ideal state, and it is highly probable that several of the plays of Sophocles and Euripides— Antigone and The Trachiniai, for example, as well as Medea, Hippolytus, and The Trojan Women—were intended to raise questions about the limits Athenian men placed on women’s dignity and freedom. (In his own day, Euripides was evidently regarded as a misogynist, but it seems likely that this rests on a misunderstanding of his interest in women of powerful passions.) When the issue was engaged once more at the end of the eighteenth century, opinions were found to differ sharply. Criticism of Athenian exclusivity often formed part of the antidemocratic rhetorical agenda, and dislike of democracy has not prevented European thinkers from denigrating the Athenians by denying that they really enjoyed one. In this argument the disfranchisement of women is often cited, frequently by men who made no signs of wanting to share voting privileges with women in their own states. Hume, for example, who found Athenian democracy “such a tumultuary government, as we can scarce form a notion of in the present age,” also attacked Athens on the grounds that the disfranchisement of women, slaves, and metics resulted in measures being voted on by a small fraction of those who were bound to obey them.⁸⁶ Not long afterward Josiah Tucker sniped at Athenian men for disfranchising women as he had carped at them for their slaveholding, and the Scottish historian of Greece John Gillies—who had been indifferent to slavery at Athens—remarked on the “miserable degradation of women” there.⁸⁷ A few years later, Gillies’s successor Mitford insisted in his History that the status of women was exceptionally low in the Athenian democracy. Mitford ascribed this phenomenon to democracy itself. Arguing that the natural turbulence and distastefulness of life under a democratic government “made it often unsafe, or at least unpleasant for them to go abroad,” he contended that Athenian women, withdrawing indoors in fear for their lives and in order “to avoid a society which their fathers and husbands could not avoid,” soon found themselves “equally of uninstructed minds, and unformed manners.”⁸⁸ Aristocratic Greece of an earlier era, he maintained, had posed no such difficulties, and in fact the status of women had been higher in previous centuries.

Mitford’s opinion was attacked vigorously by an indignant reviewer for the Westminster who denied that it was possible for women to be less free in a responsible republic than under an unbridled monarchy, and the anonymous author of the Edinburgh essay praised the men of Athens for their fine treatment of women, ascribing it to their excellent constitution: citing the high status of (noncitizen) courtesans such as Phryne and Aspasia, the Edinburgh writer insisted that the democratic Athenians afforded proof that “wherever man has been barbarous, worthless, or depraved, it has been woman’s lot to suffer and obey,” whereas “wherever his mind has been generous and enlightened, she has assumed her proper empire, as if, scorning the dominion of the savage and the slave, she sought only to rule the hearts of the brave and the free.”⁸⁹ A very different sort of connection was posited between women and the democratic ethos by J. A. St. John in his 1842 Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece. St. John shared Mitford’s dislike for democracy, but he disagreed about the treatment of women in Athens. Suspecting that Athenian men might have been too lenient to women, he followed Aristotle in maintaining that it was a customary evil in democracy that it conferred undue influence on females. St. John does not explain the dynamics of this, but he sees the profligacy of Athenian wives and daughters as a major cause of Athens’s eventual collapse. It was by women, he claimed, that “the springs of education were poisoned” at Athens “and the seeds sown of those inordinate artificial desires which convulse and overthrow states.”⁹⁰

The twentieth-century conjunction of warmth for democracy with at least lip service to the dignity of women has produced constructs that resemble those of the more sentimental Victorians in their desire to show that women were well treated in Athens. These arguments, however, can be distinguished from earlier ones by their defensive tone, for after 1900 the notion that the democratic Athenians treated their female relations shabbily became sufficiently commonplace that thinkers who wished to speak well of the treatment of women at Athens have been compelled to wrangle with the opposing view. In the 1920s the prominent English Hellenist A. W. Gomme ransacked Victorian literature for examples demonstrating that Athenian women enjoyed every bit as much equality as women in the exemplary society of nineteenth-century Britain.⁹¹ Some years later Gomme’s tactics provided a model for the learned popularizer H.D.F. Kitto. In the same successful paperback in which he had spoken so cheerfully of Athenian slavery, Kitto cited Gomme’s essay with approval and carried his line of argument still farther. Kitto drew on the mores of his own era in suggesting that the division of women at Athens into wives and courtesans was characteristic of Western civilization and (therefore) fundamentally harmless. Even in his own society, he writes, “it is not unknown that a girl who lives alone in a small flat and takes her meals out may have a more active social life than the married woman. These hetaerae were adventuresses who had said No to the serious business of life. Of course they amused men—‘But, my dear fellow, one doesn’t marry a woman like that.’”⁹² For Gomme and for Kitto, it was sufficient to cite parallels from modern society in order to demonstrate that there was nothing fundamentally rotten in the Athenian system. This was a comfortable posture for them since they were not alienated from their own heritage. For others less approving of the status quo, the situation of women in classical Athens was tied up with the deeply problematic legacy of the Western tradition itself. Some thinkers in all eras, moreover, have been able to distance themselves from questions of right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy, and, as in the case of slavery, to ask simply how a phenomenon fits into a larger system. In the category of alienated thinkers, George Cox, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Engels questioned the broad traditions that governed Western society, while in the class of historical analysts John Pentland Mahaffy speculated about how the low status of women in classical Athens might fit in with the development of the democracy as a whole.

Kitto had introduced his discussion of the status of women at Athens by an analogy with a detective. In mystery stories, he wrote, there often comes a point at which the detective, being in possession of all the facts, sees unmistakably that they all lead to one conclusion; but since ten chapters of the book remain, the detective is troubled by a vague unease. Kitto went on to confess that he felt rather like such a detective, for he could not accept the picture of the Athenian man that was implied in the mistreatment of the Athenian woman. Something was wrong. Curious and humane, Athenian men could not have treated half their own race with indifference and contempt.⁹³ Kitto concluded that the two could not be reconciled, so he decided the notion of the denigration of women at Athens would have to be cast overboard. The Irish classicist John Pentland Mahaffy had posed the same question, but he had answered it very differently. How, he had asked, could it be that Athens, “the home of the arts and of literature … this Athens, which had thoroughly solved the problem of the extension of privileges to all citizens” had nonetheless “retrograded” where women were concerned and “if not in practice, yet certainly in theory, denied them that reasonable liberty which all the older Greek literature shows them to have possessed?”⁹⁴ The framing of the question itself suggests a historical perspective lacking in Kitto, and Mahaffy provided a historical answer. Though he shared Mill’s belief both in Athenian government and in the dignity of women, and shared too his regret that the two had not coexisted, he agreed with Mitford that the advance of democracy in fact contributed to the seclusion of women. Where he disagreed with Mitford was in the nature of the dynamics he saw at work. In this regard, Mahaffy was an important forerunner of the holistic approach to Athenian civilization that was to mature during the century that followed his death. Mahaffy isolated three strands tying Athenian civilization of the classical era to a decline in the liberty of women—the movement from the country, where a wife had a certain status as mistress of an estate, into the city; the “Asiatic jealousy” that may have been introduced through contact with Ionia; and the advance of democracy. When the aristocratic tone of life gave way before democracy, Mahaffy argued,

The result of this equality upon the position of woman is obvious…. A common man, with an actual vote, would become of more importance than an Alcmaeonid lady, who might possibly of old have swayed her ruling husband; and so with the development of political interests, gradually absorbing all the life of every Athenian, there came, in that deeply selfish society, a gradual lowering in the scale of all such elements as possessed no political power. Old age and weaker sex were pushed aside to make way for the politician—the man of action—the man who carried arms, and exercised civic rights.⁹⁵

At the same time, thinkers in Europe and America who were alienated from the values of patriarchal society began to apply historical perspectives of a somewhat different nature. Fitzhugh, of course, was alienated not from the Western tradition as a whole but from what he saw as departures in his own day from long-standing norms. Throughout history, he believed, society had been governed by a patriarchal system predicated on subordinate females and servile labor. “Marriage,” Fitzhugh wrote in Sociology for the South, “is too much like slavery not to be involved in its fate.”⁹⁶ Much of Fitzhugh’s praise for Aristotle’s worldview turned on Aristotle’s support of the patriarchal family, the topic with which the Politics had begun. Throughout his work Fitzhugh contrasted Aristotle’s views with those of Plato, who, he insisted, proposed, like the reformers Fourier, Owen, Greeley, and (of all people) Protagoras, to abolish not only slavery but indeed the family itself. In truth, Greeley opposed women’s suffrage, but Fitzhugh still included him on a list of seditious reformers who he suspects might have stolen their doctrines from Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, “a satire upon the women’s rights, and other agrarian and socialistic doctrines then prevalent in Athens.” “May not,” Fitzhugh asks in his review of a translation of the Ecclesiazusae, “Athenian corruption and effeminacy have grown out of the Greelyite isms inculcated by Plato…?”⁹⁷

Convinced that northern reformers sought to undermine the entire fabric of patriarchal society, Fitzhugh proclaimed in Cannibals All that “the family is threatened, and all men North or South who love and revere it, should be up and a-doing.”⁹⁸ (That the linkage of slavery and the subjugation of women was not limited to the South is made plain by an editorial that appeared in the New York Herald in 1852 explaining that woman had become subject to man “by her nature, her sex, just as the negro is and always will be, to the end of time, inferior to the white race, and, therefore, doomed to subjection.”⁹⁹) Further connections between slavery and the family were drawn by southern moralists who sought to counter the allegations of northern reformers that easy access to black women undermined the fidelity of slave-owning husbands. William Gilmore Simms wrote a protracted response to Harriet Martineau’s abolitionist Morals of Slavery, complaining among other things of “her wild chapter about the ‘Rights of Women,’ her groans and invectives because of their exclusion from the offices of state, the right of suffrage, the exercise of political authority.”¹⁰⁰ Simms contended that in truth sexual access to slaves functioned as a safety valve in protecting the virtue of white women as well as the integrity of white marriages. Chancellor Harper of South Carolina explained at length how the morals of white women were protected by the existence of slavery, as the well-known unchastity of black females reacted upon white women (as if by some law of physics) to produce a higher degree of virtue among southern ladies than could be found in the free society of the north.¹⁰¹ Someday, perhaps, Harper muses, England herself may be “overrun by some Northern horde—sunk into an ignoble and anarchical democracy, or subdued to the dominion of some Caesar,—demagogue and despot.” Then, he concludes, “in southern regions, there may be found many republics, triumphing in Grecian arts and civilization, and worthy of British descent and Roman institutions.” A footnote explains his meaning here: “I do not use the word democracy in the Athenian sense, but to describe the government in which the slave and his master have an equal voice in public affairs.”¹⁰² In the view of Harper, Simms, and Fitzhugh, an Athenian-style society could produce culture for citizens by creating a class of noncitizen slaves and a class of noncitizen mistresses. Male citizens would then enjoy equality of political rights and access to sexual satisfaction without having to endure hard labor or compromise the chastity of citizen women.

In his review of Grote’s History of Greece John Stuart Mill had linked slavery and the denigration of women as blots on Greek civilization, and his belief (expressed there and elsewhere) that women were inexcusably devalued in his own society is well known. It remained for later thinkers, however, to develop constructs similar to those of antebellum Americans connecting slavery and the subjugation of women. George Cox’s General History of Greece is a strange document, with its polemical digressions condemning the homosexuality of James VI.¹⁰³ Cox also vented his spleen concerning patriarchy. Pericles, he maintained, was driven to his irregular union with the hetaira Aspasia by “the working of a disease which has its root in the first principles of Aryan civilisation,—in other words, in the absolute subjection of the members of a household to the father of the family, as its priest and its king.” From this root, Cox argued, “sprang the institutions of caste and of slavery, and the subservience, if not the degradation, of women.”¹⁰⁴

The case against patriarchy was stated still more forcefully in 1884 by Engels in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, published in the light of Lewis Morgan’s work. There Engels contended that the downfall of Athens was caused not, as “lickspittle historians assert to flatter their princes,” by democracy but rather by slavery, which, he maintained, “banned the labor of free citizens.” Identifying the overthrow of mother-right as the “world historic defeat of the female sex,” moreover, he deplored in the strongest terms the consequent degradation of women to instruments for breeding, a degradation he saw as still operational in his own day.¹⁰⁵ According to Engels, the first class antagonism discernible in history was that between man and woman in monogamous marriage and the first class oppression that of the female sex by the male. Engels strenuously condemned the division of women at Athens into wives and hetairai, and in writing of his own day he maintained that “the more the old traditional hetaerism is changed in our day by capitalistic commodity production and adapted to it … the more demoralising are its effects.” This system of gender relations, he contended, “degrades the character of the entire male world.”¹⁰⁶

Like the proslavery writers of the American South, in other words, both Cox and Engels linked slavery and the subjugation of women as related aspects of patriarchy, and, like them, they considered patriarchy to be the cornerstone of Western civilization; where they differed was in the moral valence they ascribed to patriarchal institutions. The thinking of Cox and Engels contrasts markedly with scenarios that lament the mistreatment of women at Athens as an intrusion of primitive thinking into a society that had served as a forerunner of the enlightened moral universe of the modern world. For Cox and Engels, fundamental and enduring principles explained what they perceived as unhealthy dynamics between the sexes in Athens, just as such principles had explained to the proslavery men the desirability of guaranteeing the stability of the privileged order by maintaining sexual and laboring fringe groups. Similar notions underlie two important twentieth-century books on Greece written in the United States, Philip Slater’s 1968 The Glory of Hera and Eva Keuls’s The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (1985). Slater in fact derived his theory of family dynamics in Athens from those he perceived in the American middle class of his own day. The question Slater sought to answer was how Attic tragedians could have portrayed so many forceful, articulate females if Athenian women were really, as popularly believed, sequestered, poorly educated, and kept in constant subjection to husbands, fathers, and brothers. Drawing on an analogy with his own culture, Slater posited that the foreseeable rage of Athenian women was likely to have been taken out on their male infants and toddlers, whose early childhood memories then provided the materials for the dramas they wrote as adults. The consequences of Greek women’s frustrations, he maintained, was narcissism both in the mother and in the male children she raised. Slater deplored the persistence of these same dynamics in his own society, for he viewed narcissism as a grave threat to the survival of the race. For Slater, a direct line led from the suppression of women’s talents to nuclear conflagration, for in his view, in a world in which, as in Athens and America, the educated female is underemployed and her talents underutilized, the male child will be “the logical vehicle for these frustrated aspirations, as well as the logical scapegoat for her resentment,” and these dynamics go far to explain why the world of the mid–twentieth century was engaged in “constant infantilism in international relations.” Slater cited the inability of the American State Department and the North Vietnamese to agree on a site for peace talks as evidence of this infantilism and claimed that “buried beneath every Western man is a Greek—western man is nothing but Alcibiades with a bad conscience, disguised as a plumber.”¹⁰⁷

Eva Keuls of the University of Minnesota shares Slater’s belief that Athenian sexual dynamics, so far from being an obsolete product of a mentality long since passed away, are in fact part of a continuing tradition. She also agrees with Slater in viewing these dynamics as pernicious. Keuls’s Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens may well be the most forceful indictment of Athenian society ever crafted. Connecting what she perceived as the persistent denigration of females by Athenian men with “rampant saber-rattling,” Keuls expresses the wish that her book may prove useful to those “who feel that phallocracy remains a problem in modern, more subtle forms.” Classical Athens, Keuls argues, “is a kind of concave mirror in which we can see our own foibles and institutions magnified and distorted.”¹⁰⁸

Like Cox and Engels, neither Slater nor Keuls connects the unhealthy dynamic they perceive in Athens specifically with its democratic constitution. Along the same lines as these earlier thinkers, however, their work is important in this connection because of the fact that they view the denigration of women in Athens as characteristic of Western civilization rather than as an embarrassing anomaly. Engels had a profound influence on Marylin Arthur of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, who in her article entitled “Early Greece: The Origins of the Western Attitude to Women” utilized a Marxist construct and quoted Engels in her footnotes. Where the aristocracy had ensured a leisured life for itself by concentrating all economic and social privilege in its hands, Arthur argued, “the democracies of ancient Greece secured liberty for all its [sic] citizens by inventing a system of private property which required women to legitimate it and slaves to work it.” In discussing Solon’s social legislation, Arthur maintained that the reiteration of the distinction between public and private that underlay much of Solon’s legislation had important ramifications for women. For

Insofar as women continued to be associated with the private side of life alone, they now appear as a sub-species of humanity. That is to say, women had before been conceived of as an aspect of life in general; now they are seen as an aspect of man’s existence. The difference is an important one, for it means that the inferiority of women, their subservience to men, has to be explicitly recognized…. Now, the social and legal structure of the state specifically endorses and prescribes the subservience of women to men.¹⁰⁹

Other scholars have taken different tacks. In her book Sowing the Body, for example, Page duBois of the University of California at San Diego offers a new twist on Mahaffy’s argument regarding the role of the move to an urban culture in lowering the status of women at Athens. DuBois argues that because women were associated with land in a variety of persistent metaphors by virtue of their fertility and imagined passivity, the movement away from an aristocratic social hierarchy based on the amount of land one possessed also served to devalue women.¹¹⁰

A new disposition to validate the sexual element in male bonding at Athens has also played an imortant role in construing connections between sexuality and politics there. Writing in 1777, William Young expressed indignation that anyone could suppose that relations between Greek men “were ever sullied with immorality; and that mere custom, in a word, could give the most horrid and disgustful vice a preference over the dearest and most necessary instinct of nature.”¹¹¹ Two hundred years later, the Oxonian Sir Kenneth Dover wrote with his customary frankness that “it was taken for granted in the Classical period that a man was sexually attracted by a good-looking younger male, and no Greek who said he was ‘in love’ would have taken it amiss if his hearers assumed without further inquiry that he was in love with a boy and that he desired more than anything to ejaculate in or on the boy’s body.”¹¹² Along with Michel Foucault, Dover and Keuls have argued that for Athenian men homosexual bonding was an important way of participating in society— of exercising, in effect, their rights of citizenship. To play a passive role in a sexual act, Dover contends, was perhaps acceptable for a boy, who could not yet participate in the democracy, just as it was for a woman; but it was not acceptable for a man. Dover has maintained that partial limitations were placed upon acquiescence for a courted teenage boy, whose behavior was circumscribed by the fact that he would someday vote and should not therefore give in fully to his lover.¹¹³ Dover connects the excitement attached to pederastic relationships with the sense of self-worth that came from being accepted by a partner who was one’s equal in a way that no slave or woman (i.e., nonvoter) could ever be.

Dover’s analysis of sexual and political dynamics in Athens in some ways anticipated that of Foucault. Not technically a structuralist but profoundly influenced by structuralism, Foucault saw important political underpinnings in Greek sexual ethics, claiming that what an Athenian man achieved by adherence to the prevailing ethical code regarding appropriate sexual behavior was precisely the validation of his civic privileges and his right to the leadership of the polis. This line of approach enables Foucault to explain several apparent inconsistencies in Greek thinking about male sexual conduct. It throws light, for example, on the ambivalence of the sources about the need for sexual fidelity on the part of husbands. Foucault argues that there was indeed a model of a faithful husband in Athens, but that the rationales for husbandly and wifely fidelity were different, for the fidelity of a wife was occasioned by her husband’s control over her, whereas the fidelity of a husband was prompted by a man’s control over himself: it was only because a man “exercised authority and because he was expected to exhibit self-mastery in the use of this authority, that he needed to limit his sexual options…. For the husband, having sexual relations only with his wife was the most elegant way of exercising his control.”¹¹⁴ Though the day would come, Foucault writes, when the paradigm most commonly used for illustrating sexual virtue would be the chaste female, for the Greeks “a more representative model of the virtue of moderation … was that of the man, the leader [italics mine], the master who was capable of curbing his own appetite even when his power over others allowed him to indulge it as he pleased.”¹¹⁵ Foucault also believed that the marriage of sex and politics explained another inconsistency in the sources, that concerning the acceptability of male homosexual acts. For an Athenian, Foucault argued, sex was tied indissolubly to constructs of dominance and submission. Each sexual act mandated one active individual, a free and privileged person, and one passive individual ultimately lacking in dignity and independence. For the passive partner to be another male citizen was therefore problematic, for the division of sexual partners into the one who counted and the one who did not count inevitably made sex between citizen males a source of anxiety—hence, Foucault argues, the enigmatic oscillation concerning the “natural” or “unnatural” character of male romantic love.

Foucault’s central thesis concerning the marked asymmetry of Greek sexual ethics is profoundly political, for he maintains that though women in Greece—by which he clearly means Athens—were subject to strict constraints, yet this ethics was not addressed to women and did not concern their behavior but rather was an ethics “thought, written, and taught by men, and addressed to men—to free men, obviously” and was designed “to give form to their behavior.” The most political aspect of Foucault’s construct is his view of Greek sexual ethics as more prescriptive than prohibitive, more active than passive. The Greek sexual ethic, he wrote, spoke to men “concerning precisely those conducts in which they were called upon to exercise their rights, their power, their authority, and their liberty.”¹¹⁶ Though Foucault’s book The Uses of Pleasure appears at first sight to be entirely about men, then, in fact through the perspective of male homosexual bonding in Athens he has synthesized a long tradition of speculation about the connection between the exercise of political freedom and the discounting of women. Both Cox and Engels, who saw the denigration of women deeply rooted in Western civilization, had accompanied this contention with powerful condemnation of Greek homosexuality and had believed that it was fostered by the degradation of women, but it remained for twentieth-century thinkers who were not hostile to homosexual relations to conceptualize the sexual dynamics of democratic Athens in political terms.

In 1989 and 1990 Routledge published two books dealing with Greek sexuality in their series “The New Ancient World.” The Constraints of Desire was written by Jack Winkler of Stanford, a distinguished gay scholar who had received the American Philological Association’s Goodwin Award of Merit in 1988; One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love was the work of David Halperin, a gay activist who was head of the literature faculty in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at M.I.T. Drawing on the work of Dover, Keuls, and Foucault, Halperin in a chapter entitled “The Democratic Body” engaged the question of the loss of civic rights with which Athenian law punished men convicted of prostituting themselves. Why, Halperin asks, should this be? What is “more ‘private’ and less ‘civic’ than sex?” Exploring the “cultural poetics of manhood” that Athenian democratic ideology “at once took for granted and mobilized in its own support,” Halperin concludes that the inviolability of the voter’s body against both violent assault and sexual penetration was an integral part of the ethos of Athenian democracy, contending that

one of the first tasks of the radical democrats at Athens, who brought into being a form of government based (in theory at least) on universal male suffrage, was to enable every citizen to participate on equal terms in the corporate body of the community and to share in its rule. The transition to a radical democracy therefore required a series of measures designed to uphold the dignity and autonomy—the social viability in short—of every (male) citizen, whatever his economic circumstances.

Though the elimination of economic inequality was considered neither practical nor, ultimately, desirable, nonetheless Halperin argues, “a limit could be set to the political and social consequences of such inequities, a zone marked out where their influence might not extend. The body of the male citizen constituted that zone.” Similarly, Halperin contends, to violate the sanctity of a citizen’s body in nonsexual ways “was not only to insult him personally but to assault the corporate integrity of the citizen body as a whole and to offend its fiercely egalitarian spirit.”¹¹⁷ The new disposition to ground homosexual bonds in the body politic is indexed by the five-page discussion of pederasty in Paul Rahe’s Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1992), possibly the first work of scholarship to discuss classical sexuality alongside the chaster passions of Hume, Descartes, and James Madison.¹¹⁸

A slightly different perspective appears in Centaurs and Amazons, Page duBois’s study of Greek self-definition. DuBois also stressed the need of male citizens in Greek states to define themselves in contradistinction to what they were not. Early attempts to define heroism, she argued, “involved a consideration of humanness, maleness, Greekness in terms of opposition,” and in Athenian sculpture of the classical period the myth of the Amazons “became the property of the city of Athens, to be used again and again … to present a discourse on the differentiation of kinds. How are human beings different from animals? How are women different from men? How are Greeks different from barbarians?”¹¹⁹ DuBois places the concept of isonomia in a new context, stressing the meaning of isos not as “equal” but as “same” and makes it possible to see isonomia as “just”-ice for people who are “just” like us.¹²⁰ She provides, in other words, a political context for the common view that Athenian males viewed women as “other.” Similar ideas are expressed by Sarah Pomeroy of Hunter College, whose book on women in antiquity, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves brought her considerable fame when it was published in 1975. It may be suggested, Pomeroy wrote, that “after the class stratification that separated individual men according to such criteria as noble descent and wealth was eliminated, the ensuing ideal of equality among male citizens was intolerable. The will to dominate was such that they then had to separate themselves as a group and claim to be superior to all non-members: foreigners, slaves, and women.”¹²¹

. . . . .

Popular twentieth-century schools of thought such as Marxism, feminism, and structuralism have encouraged students of Athens to think in increasingly holistic terms. In this they are following in tracks laid down in previous centuries by a variety of thinkers who perceived connections between democracy and such phenomena as imperialism, slaveholding, and the denigration of women. In the eighteenth century, it was generally the opponents of egalitarianism who portrayed the Athenians as greedy expansionists or dehumanized slave-owners, and there was no consensus (as there still is not) that women were mistreated. Dissident voices, however, were heard, as reformers like Chastellux cried out for a better world. During the nineteenth-century, enthusiasm for the achievements of the Athenians combined with British involvement in their own imperialism to encourage many people writing about the ancient world to gloss over possible embarrassments; the role of imperialism and slavery in forging the glory that was Greece was often stressed, and the denigration of women indignantly denied. (Neither women nor slaves were visible in Grote’s happily imperialistic Athens.) Dissenting voices, however, grew increasingly loud. Again, antiegalitarian thinkers used ancient slavery to smear classical ideals, and social critics like Mill, Cox, and Engels saw the Athenians’ failure to apply democratic principles to the human community at large as in varying ways emblematic of underlying problems in Western civilization throughout history. Debunking the myth of Sparta, Victor Duruy cried out against those who had failed to notice that the entire system was dependent on massive slavery: no helot, no Spartiate, he shouted to the world.

Similarly holistic lines of thought continued to be pursued during the second half of the twentieth century. Despite the hopes voiced by Boston Red Sox fans that their city might, by victory in the 1986 World Series, become not only the Athens of the North but its Sparta as well, it is no longer as fashionable as once it was to yearn like the men and women of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment for a society filled with Athenian sculpture and Spartan virtue, Athenian drama and Spartan discipline; few have echoed d’Alembert’s dream of joining “the prudence of Lacedaemon to the urbanity of Athens.”¹²² Belief in the cohesive nature of society, moreover, has ultimately reinforced the preference for Athens over Sparta. Toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, the revulsion in France and elsewhere in Europe from classical slavery tended for a time to link the two city-states in infamy, and it was popularly believed that Athenian citizens, like their Spartan counterparts, were greatly outnumbered by their exploited slaves. As time passed, however, what Nicole Loraux and Pierre Vidal-Naquet have called the myth of “bourgeois Athens” took shape, and moderns began to find the city of commerce, family, ambition, and private property to be eminently more congenial than the armed camp in the Peloponnesus, with its communal living and discouragement of trade. It was not only in France that the perceived bourgeois values of the Athenians led the city of Pericles to seem more modern in its relevance than that of Lycurgus, but in the rest of Europe and in America as well. Twentieth-century concerns about the limitations of bourgeois values, however, have in turn fostered the formulation of schemata wherein the concept of “otherness” is seen as an integral part of the democratic ethos, as scholars of the later part of the century have sought to substitute a cohesive view of social psychology for the apologiae of earlier decades. Hegel had seen that communities need to define themselves in contradistinction to other communities; twentieth-century thinkers like William Connolly have developed this notion as it operates within subgroups of the same community, writing that “identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty.” What is defined as other will inevitably suffer, for “to establish an identity is to create social and conceptual space for it to be in ways that impinge on the spaces available to other possibilities.”¹²³ Precisely because of its perceived modernity, moreover, classical Athens is subjected to closer scrutiny and held to higher standards than ancient Sparta, which has come itself to be viewed as “other”: in 1979 an American classicist recovering from a stroke used her diminished vocabulary to indicate Sparta with the words “the other place” while Athens for its part was “our place.”

Not all thinkers who have wrangled with the complexities of Athenian democratic ideology have chosen to stand in judgment on the Athenian system from the standpoint of either practicality or ethics. Some, of course, have passed judgment, and loudly at that; others who have declined to do so have nonetheless provided perspectives that have facilitated the formulation of condemnatory constructs on the part of those who are inclined to make them. (A world of difference separates the denunciations of Hume and Mitford, of Slater and Keuls, from the clinical analysis of Foucault or Halperin.) On the whole the criticism directed at Athenian imperialism and slaveholding has entailed moral condemnation, but to describe the Athenian ethos as contingent upon delimiting categories of “others” is not necessarily to claim that it was wicked or that it did not work, nor does stress on the importance of homoerotic ties among Athenian voters imply resentment of the discounting of women—or even belief in it. In the egalitarian climate of the twentieth century, however, to suggest that the Athenian system was able to function only by an overriding “us/them” dichotomy is inevitably to suggest a deficiency of a serious order, and it is fair to say that the formulation of this construct in many ways represents the twentieth-century contribution to the anti-Athenian tradition.