Chapter Thirteen
Nothing new can be said about an acknowledged folly.
—Alcibiades, speaking in the pages of Thucydides
No book can ever be finished.
—Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
SPARTA HAS FALLEN, and fallen hard. The thud was most audible in France, where Rousseau and many of the revolutionaries had sought so conspicuously to revive Spartan virtues in the modern world. French textbooks of the later nineteenth century such as those of Dussieux, Ducou-dray, and Bachelet regularly attacked the Spartans for their militarism, their indifference to intellectual life, and their exploitation of the helots.1 Like Fustel de Coulanges, Dussieux censured Rousseau for seeing equality in what was in reality an aristocracy built on slavery.2 Revulsion from Sparta did not in all cases imply enthusiasm for Athens; Dussieux and Bachelet were often critical of the Athenian state, and Fustel de Coulanges echoed Constant in his conviction that Athenian liberty was not what the admirers of antiquity had made it seem. As in the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the strictures of French thinkers of the nineteenth on the presumed virtues of the Spartans fostered a more generous view of Athens in many quarters, and when in the twentieth-century totalitarian states arose in Europe and Asia that seemed in many respects to evoke the Spartan ethos, the Athenians came to be valued even more highly than had been the case in Victorian Britain.
The exaltation of Athens over Sparta has been particularly dramatic in the English-speaking world. For severity, few can match the Englishman Ronald Latham, who in his 1946 book In Quest of Civilization pictured the Spartiates as “warrior ants of a human ant-hill, finding in their joyless isolation a stern and disciplined joy.”3 For humor, the palm should probably be awarded to the American journalist Elmer Davis, who in 1926 appealed for the defeat of prohibition in the United States by decrying the Spartan example of cloistered virtue. Lining up Lycurgus with Lenin, Mussolini, Carrie Nation, and the Ku Klux Klan, Davis insisted that whereas Athens was the great and glorious producer of culture, the “paradise of prohibition” in the Peloponnese was a place where “a helot had no more rights … than a conservative in Russia or a pedestrian in the United States.”4 Invidious comparisons have continued to abound in all decades and on both sides of the Atlantic.5 In the second volume of the massive Story of Civilization he produced in conjunction with his wife Ariel, the American Will Durant offered a typical twentieth-century anglophone opposition between the “selfishness, coldness, and cruelty of the Spartan character” and the civilization of the Athenians, “broad in scope and yet intense in action, open to every new idea and eager for intercourse with the world.”6
It is hard to predict what future happenings might restore Sparta to its pristine glory. Only time will show whether the collapse of the Soviet system will discredit Socialist and Communist dreams once and for all or will work in an opposite way to remove the aura of terror associated with such projects in Western minds and open the way to a more sympathetic view of noncapitalist economic institutions. But though the about-face in valuation of both Sparta and Athens during the middle decades of the nineteenth century was dramatic and undeniable, nonetheless many scholars have continued to press the traditional charges against the Athenian democracy. Allegations of instability, fickleness, irrationality, and ingratitude have persisted in some quarters; many continue to blame democracy for both the loss of the Peloponnesian War and the Macedonian conquest. At the same time, the changing political orientation that had played an important part in the shifting of the balance between Athens and Sparta led to redoubled accusations of hypocrisy in the Athenians’ supposed egalitarianism. And though the development of representative democracy has in some respects enhanced the reputation of Athens by making popular government respectable, it has also afforded citizens of the modern era a vantage point from which to look down their noses at the Athenians, who knew no system more complex than referendum and plebiscite; who never developed—so it is said—a representative system; who, it was argued, knew nothing of checks and balances, and whose most brilliant political theorists could imagine no civic universe broader than the city-state.
In France the familiar allegations not only persisted but were deployed in the interests of anti-Semitism; in response, Jewish outrage lined up the Athenian oligarchs with the Vichy government. Through rightists associated with the agenda of Action Française, the French backlash against the revolution and its aftermath was carried straight from the organization’s hero Fustel de Coulanges into the twentieth century; Charles Maurras, who founded the movement in 1899, died only in 1952. (There is no reason, of course, to believe that Fustel would have endorsed Maurras’s agenda.7) In 1909 the literary critic Pierre Lasserre published a pamphlet denouncing the enthusiastic account of the Athenian democracy that had been given by the historian Alfred Croiset, and the booklet’s introduction was provided by none other than Maurras.8 There he attacked in one breath what he termed the morbus democraticus in both ancient Athens and the modern world, complaining, to be sure, of America, but most of all of his beloved France, whose difficulties he blamed on democracy and its attendant “metics.” Customarily an entirely neutral and descriptive term, the word “metic” in Maurras’s hands was used to designate unwelcome interlopers and specifically Jews.9 Maurras, who supported the Vichy government, was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment for collaboration with the Germans. A predictable reaction followed. The twentieth-century French Marxist Bertrand Hemmerdinger has labeled Maurras an Athenian oligarch arrived twenty-three centuries late; the parallel struck earlier Frenchmen as well, and in 1942 Jules Isaac took the occasion of the puppet government at Vichy to resurrect discussion of the collapse of Athens. Writing like a good patriot under the pseudonym “Julius,” Isaac published a little book entitled Les Oligarques. Essai d’histoire partiale. Aimed at the Vichy government, the book identified the fall of Athens as the work of similar sympathizers with the enemy, laying blame for the loss of the Peloponnesian War squarely at the door of pro-Spartan Athenians.
A lively anti-Athenian tradition also persisted in Germany, where Grote’s work had received decidedly mixed reviews. The liberal leader Johann Jacoby made extracts from Grote for purposes of political propaganda, and the scholar Hermann Müller-Strübing, then living in Grote’s own London, wrote a lengthy work defending him against his German critics; but critics there were, from the distinguished historian Eduard Meyer, who discounted much of Grote’s work as hopelessly partisan, to the quasi-Marxist Robert von Pöhl-mann, who found Grote’s view of the unity of the Athenian democracy sadly out of keeping with the historical reality of class struggle and sought to provide a wider historical context identifying the failings of democracy not only in classical Athens but in modern Europe and America as well.10 Where Macaulay had embraced the Athenians’ democracy while recoiling from their empire, the great German philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff rejected the democracy but advocated the empire as a good model for Germany.11
Admiration for imperial monarchies also fostered in many German thinkers a respect for Philip that often worked to undermine any incipient enthusiasm for Athenian democracy. (Often, but not always; Adolph Holm wrote warmly of the Athenian system but championed Philip as well.) Already during the eighteenth century Frederick of Prussia had been proudly compared to Philip—a man later described by the famous German historian Karl Julius Beloch as the greatest monarch ever to grace a throne. (Beloch is often viewed as a disciple of Grote who looked warmly on Athens. This is simply not true.) The comparison may actually have begun with the Scottish monarchist and historian of Greece John Gillies, who published in 1789 his View of the Reign of Frederick II of Prussia with a Parallel between That Prince and Philip II of Macedon. Whatever the origins of the analogy, Philip became a Prussian hero, and the adulation of the Macedonian king brought in its train a concomitant contempt for the pathetic political network he so mercifully put out of its misery. Droysen, the former pupil of Hegel who became a renowned scholar in his own right, found Philip heroic and forward-thinking, Demosthenes piteous and deluded.12 Beloch identified Demosthenes’ aggressive stance as the principal cause of the defeat at Chaeronea; the most savage attack on Demosthenes appeared in Drerup’s 1917 book Aus einer alten Advokatenrepublik (Demosthenes und seine Zeit). Rather as Mitford had credited the misdeeds of the French revolutionaries with making the excesses of the Athenian democrats credible for the first time, so Drerup in his preface credited the contemporary world war “into which half the world was plunged by the rancor and lies of Paris and London lawyer-politicians” with tearing the mask from the face of that chauvinistic demagogue Demosthenes, who, he contends, “now is shown to be the worthy forerunner and soulmate of Asquith and Lloyd George, of Poincaré and Briand, of Venizelos and Jonescu, not to mention the classic Land of Broken Faith.”13 Examples could be multiplied at length; instances of this kind of thinking during the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century have been collected by John Knipfing in an article published in the American Historical Review in 1921.14
Within Nazi Germany, political developments of the twentieth century tended to reinforce identification with Sparta. Otto Strasser, an early Nazi party activist who later broke with Hitler, recalled the Führer’s expressing his hope that all other nations would become “helots” for the German warrior caste.15 The Nazi regime exhorted Teutonic youths to identify with the Spartans, and beginning during World War II, Simonides’ epitaph for the dead at Thermopylae attained, in the words of Roderick Watt of the University of Glasgow, “the status of a leitmotif and literary commonplace”; in an article in the Modern Language Review for 1985, Watt argues that liberal use was made of the Simonides epitaph in Nazi propaganda in order to cast the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 as a successful sacrificial holding action much like that of Leonidas and his men, who gave their lives, so Greek tradition had it, to buy time for the coordinated amphibious forces marshaled against the invading Persian hordes. (Schiller’s 1795 poem “Der Spaziergang” was the most popular German translation of the famous epitaph O xein, angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti teide keimetha tois keinon rhemasi peithomenoi [“O stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here obedient to their commands”]). In Watt’s view, the use of the Thermopylae motif was “an attempt to rationalize a military blunder and then to glorify it as such a heroic defeat as to be almost a moral victory.”16
Outside Nazi circles, however, the rise of totalitarian ideologies in the twentieth century has served to enhance Athens’s reputation considerably. The identification of Germany with Macedon had done little good to the reputation of either state in non-Teutonic circles—in Britain, Demosthenes remained a hero and his works were employed for training in civics—and Nazi militarism and eugenics gave a bad name to Athens’s other enemy, the Spartans. Whereas many in Hitler’s camp sought to identify Germany with Sparta, Germany’s enemies, picking up on the analogy, tended to ally themselves with Athens instead. In France, Jules Isaac blamed pro-Spartan sympathizers for the loss of the Peloponnesian War, and in Britain one of the most dramatic defenses of the Athenian ethos came from the pen of Sir Karl Popper. A native of Austria, Popper was driven by his experience of Nazi totalitarianism to formulate one of the most savage attacks ever mounted against what he called “the Spell of Plato.”17 In the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper marshaled a formidable intellectual arsenal in an impassioned and deeply felt plea to his readers to abandon the traditional reverence for Plato and see him for the ruthless totalitarian he believed him to be. Popper’s bold book, which presented the Athenian democracy in a favorable light, won him many friends and many enemies, and it remains the focus of lively controversy.18
On the whole, American and English thinkers—along with refugees from Hitler’s Europe—have taken pride in identifying themselves with Athenian cultivation against German militarism. When the time came to seek classical analogies for the phenomenon of Nazism, they were by and large prepared to line up the Third Reich with both the Spartans and the Macedonians. In the United States, for example, Mars Westington of Hanover College in Indiana gave an address to the Classical Association of the Midwest and South in which no effort was spared in pointing up potential analogies between the militarism, eugenics and all-around evil of the Nazis with that of the Spartans.19 Westington’s analogy between the krypteia and the Gestapo was paralleled in Britain by the schoolmaster Cyril E. Robinson (who also proclaimed in his postwar history of Greece that though historical parallels were dangerous, still “Hitler leaps to the eye” in Philip).20 Despite the frequency with which English-speaking writers decried Nazism, however, when Americans decided to become classical scholars, it was still to the Germans that they went for both education and inspiration—not quite as uniformly as in the nineteenth century, but with considerable frequency nonetheless. The earliest American classicists like Edward Everett and George Bancroft had traveled dutifully to Göttingen to import its scholarly wares to their intellectually underdeveloped homeland, and the phenomenon continued throughout the century. Ironically, between the wars Jewish classicists often saw a better chance of doing successful graduate work in Germany than in the United States. The thought of Germany cast a powerful spell on the work of American academics, and though it encouraged at least the posturings of sober Wissenschaftlichkeit, it also could foster an anti-Athenian political orientation. Thus for example William Kelly Prentice of Princeton, who dedicated his 1940 book The Ancient Greeks to Eduard Meyer, was comfortable with easy references to the “vanity and greed of the masses” and of “the common man” in Athens—as elsewhere. Prentice had a very low opinion indeed of the ordinary Athenian citizen, writing that the triumph of democracy at Athens “meant the unrestricted power of the largest class of voters, the most thoughtless, the most bigoted, and the most irresponsible.”21 In his portrait of the corruption of selfish citizens by equally selfish politicians he cites the distinguished philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, another German (still more famous than Meyer) who, though he saw the Athenian empire as a good model for that of Germany, had little use for Athenian democracy.22 Numerous footnotes to Meyer’s works dot Prentice’s text. The frequency with which Nazis were lined up pejoratively with both the militaristic eugenics of Sparta and the imperialism of Macedon did not prevent postwar Americans from retaining considerable admiration for German scholarship. German classicists are still prized commodities in the American job market, and though proficiency in both French and German is usually required of graduate students in ancient history in the United States, study abroad is far more likely to take place in Göttingen or Munich or Berlin than anywhere in France.23
Though Popper’s attack on what he perceived as Plato’s totalitarianism met with mixed reviews, the new willingness to reject the value systems of classical authors has not extended to all quarters.24 One ancient author has remained remarkably immune from criticism. It is one thing to mount defenses against the elitism of the affable Plutarch, his vision skewed by the Roman glasses through which he saw classical Athens, or Xenophon the squire, with his embarrassing Spartan sympathies; it is apparently quite another to call into question the wisdom of the historian’s historian—the son of Olorus, whose piercing eye is still accorded a reverence long since withdrawn from his fellows.25 It is extremely difficult to find any printed text that speaks less than glowingly of Thucydides—Thucydides, of whom his translator Thomas Hobbes boasted that he never digressed “to read a lecture, moral or political, upon his own text, nor enter into men’s hearts further than the acts themselves evidently guide him.”26 One generation after another, moreover, has been convinced he was speaking about their age above all past ages. John Adams wrote to his wife in 1777 that he sometimes felt inclined to write the history of the American revolution in imitation of Thucydides, since he saw “a striking Resemblance, in several particulars, between the Peloponnesian and the American War.” (The parallel he had identified had to do with the causes of the wars; British jealousy of American power, he believed, caused the latter war as Spartan jealousy of the Athenians had caused the former.)27 At the same time, the Abbé Mably observed that while reading Thucydides he perceived among the passions of the Greeks “the portraiture of those which agitate the present states of Europe, and which will cast us into wretched servitude, as they enslaved the Grecian Republics, if, at some future period, another Philip of Macedon should rise against us.”28 Withal, Thucydides’ wisdom is considered to stand confirmed by the unfolding of history; did not his analysis of the civil war on Corcyra look ahead with chilling accuracy to the violence of the French revolutionaries? Mitford saw in Thucydides’ account of Athenian imperialism a clear parallel to French expansionism, while his contemporary in France Pierre-Charles Lévesque reported in the preface to his 1795 translation of Thucydides that a distinguished English member of Parliament claimed there was no question with which he was compelled to deal in debate on which Thucydides did not afford guidance. Thomas Arnold in his edition of Thucydides contended that the era of the Peloponnesian War belonged more properly to modern than to ancient history, and the distinguished Johns Hopkins classicist Basil Gildersleeve, the founder of the American classical profession, composed a famous essay on the American Civil War published in 1897 and entitled “A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.”29 To many twentieth-century thinkers Thucydides has appeared to warn against violating the neutrality of Belgium and committing American troops to either Vietnam or the Persian Gulf.
It is difficult to find anyone who will question the magnificence of Thucydides’ work for accuracy, integrity, and import. To be sure, occasional voices of protest have been raised—most conspicuously by Mabel Lang of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and by her pupil Virginia Hunter of York University in Ontario.30 In North America, women scholars are overrepresented among Thucydides’ few serious detractors. The Marxist Margaret Wason has labeled Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War “a record of trivialities unworthy of the dignity of history” and his political judgment “ruined by extreme bias.”31 Such departures from orthodoxy, however, have not been received graciously by the scholarly establishment—in part, perhaps, because they have so often come from women, whose challenges in the areas of warfare and diplomacy may seem easy for men to discount; although the percentage of female classicists and historians has increased dramatically during the second half of the twentieth century, female scholars almost never choose to write about Athenian military and political history, which remain largely a male preserve. Altogether, the reputation of Thucydides remains untarnished, and his judgments about the Athenian assembly retain their authority in academe.
Journalists of the twentieth century (almost invariably male) have taken particular delight in the opportunity Thucydides affords them for combining hardheaded political analysis with a measure of erudition. The Thucydides of American journalists has not in general been perceived as an enemy of democratic Athenian government, for journalists find it unthinkable that their hero could truly have disliked democracy; rather they view him as a voice crying out against the errors democracy is particularly prone to make—errors he surely must have wanted democracies to avoid so that they might live in a world made safe for democracy. Thucydides’ popularity, however, has led many enthusiasts of democracy to judge Athens harshly where foreign policy is concerned. The use American journalists throughout the century have made of Thucydidean material has reflected a basic identification of Athenian with American democracy but has shown too a marked fear that the Americans might, by errors in foreign policy, go the way of the Athenians in not conducting their (fundamentally laudable) government quite well enough. Norman Cousins in the Saturday Review during the 1940s and Robert Campbell in Life magazine in the 1950s decried the sins of imperialism. In 1941, echoing his contributing editor Elmer Davis, Cousins labeled Thucydides “Required Reading” for those who want to know “why it was that Athens lost [the Peloponnesian War] and democracy died,” whereas Campbell’s Cold War piece “How a Democracy Died.” was decked out with ominous line drawings of Greeks doing one another dirt and contended that Americans could learn much from discovering how an earlier democracy had destroyed itself.32 At times, this concern has been extended to domestic policy as well. Thus for example Gerald Johnson writing in the New Republic in 1961 identified Cleon with Joseph McCarthy and the impeachment of Alcibiades as the work of a House Committee on un-Athenian activities.33
Coming from American journalists, dire warnings about the perils threatening the United States always take as their point of departure the axiom that the system is eminently worth fighting for. Though academics are generally less facile in their judgments and less sentimental in their attachments, it remains true that particularly among English-speaking scholars, the last quarter of the twentieth century has on the whole been kind to the Athenians. This orientation arises in part from uncritical assumptions that continue to connect democracy with liberalism and the open society; in part it can be traced to an entirely opposite phenomenon: the growing influence of relativist anthropological perspectives that encourage scholars to measure societies in terms of the way in which they sought to fulfill their goals rather than focusing on the merits of the goals themselves. In part it is probably due to a still-increasing sensitivity to the biases of the primary sources. Among scholars whose particular interests do not lie in slavery or gender relations, a puzzling rise in the popularity of the Athenian system has been evident since 1980. To be sure, a number of well-known scholars who think well of Greek democracy produced important work earlier. Sir Moses Finley gave the lectures that issued in his Democracy Ancient and Modern in the United States in 1972. There he argued that under its democratic constitution “Athens managed for nearly two hundred years to be the most prosperous, most powerful, most peaceful internally, and culturally by far the richest state in all the Greek world. The system,” he concluded, “worked, insofar as that is a useful judgment about any form of government.”34 Prosperous, powerful, culturally rich—these things had often been said about Athens; but it was a new intellectual universe that credited the Athenians with internal peacefulness. The rise in the valuation of Athens, however, has been most dramatic since 1985. The later 1980s and early 1990s witnessed the appearance of a spate of books that take a strikingly positive view of Athenian government. Cynthia Farrar’s Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge, 1988), which seeks to recover the beginnings of democratic thought in Greece, is deeply sympathetic to the premises of the Athenian system. Farrar is also a contributor to John Dunn’s Democracy: The Unfinished Journey 508BC to AD1993 (Oxford, 1992), a collection of essays on the history of democracy imbued with admiration for the Athenian model. David Stockton’s book The Classical Athenian Democracy paints an enthusiastic picture of Athenian government (and discounts the exploitation of out-groups in a single footnote on the very last page).35 Josiah Ober’s 1989 Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens is informed by the belief that, in Ober’s words, “the Athenian example has a good deal to tell the modern world about the nature and potential of democracy as a form of social and political organization.” The Athenian democracy, Ober contends, can serve as a “tool for political analysis and action by those who are, or would be, citizens of democratic states.”36 Ober’s book received the American Philological Association’s Goodwin Award of Merit, an honor rarely accorded to a scholar under forty years of age.
While still teaching at Montana State University in the 1980s, Ober began working with Charles Hedrick (then at Buffalo, now at Santa Cruz) on a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens to commemorate the twenty-five hundredth anniversary of the “founding” of Athenian democracy by Cleisthenes. In part, of course, the significance of Cleisthenes has been put forward for strategic reasons: who could get funding to commemorate the 2,453d anniversary of the reforms of Ephialtes? In part, however, the stress on Cleisthenes derives from a late twentieth-century belief in the importance of the participatory element in Athenian democracy. In 1985, two book-length studies of the demes by British scholars appeared when no such work had been written for fully a century—Robin Osborne’s Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attica [Cambridge] and David Whitehead’s The Demes of Attika [Princeton]; in 1988 Cambridge University Press published Democracy and Participation in Athens by R. K. Sinclair of the University of Sydney. The nature of Athenian citizens’ participation in government has also been the focus of the ongoing work of the Danish scholar Mogens Herman Hansen. The commemorative events for the twenty-five hundredth anniversary included a conference in Athens in December 1992, a second conference in Washington, D.C., in April 1993 (punctuated by a memorable staging of Euripides’ Suppliants provided by the drama department of Stanford University), and an exhibit at the National Archives in Washington, which agreed to devote the June 1993 issue of its magazine Prologue to the topic of democracy. Charles Hedrick also received NEH funding on a separate project, a summer institute on Athenian democracy at the University of California at Santa Cruz given in 1992 and co-directed by his colleague J. Peter Euben. At the same time, Euben, Ober, and John Wallach of Hunter College are editing a collection of essays for Cornell University Press entitled Educating Democracy and premised on the conviction that the Athenian example has much to teach an America plagued by apathy and imperiled by the dangers of technocracy. The educative civic function of Attic tragedy has also attracted considerable attention in these last decades of the century. Two books published by Princeton, Euben’s The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (1990) and the collection of essays edited by Jack Winkler and Froma Zeitlin entitled Nothing to Do with Dionysos: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (also 1990) stress the central role of tragic drama as a forum for discussion of issues crucial to a democracy; much is revealed in the title of Justina Gregory’s Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians (Ann Arbor, 1991).
The absence of historical perspective makes it impossible to understand fully why the celebration of Athenian democracy has become so chic in the United States at the end of the millennium, and in a few years the phenomenon may have burned itself out. Recent attacks on classics as an antiquated and elitist discipline may go part way to explain the interest of American classicists in affirming the viability of the Athenian democratic model; some have connected the current advocacy of Athens with an academic reaction against the erosion of liberalism. Certainly several of Athens’s American champions are motivated in part by the desire to provide a counterweight to the alternative model of Greek politics cherished by followers of the University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss—by Allan Bloom, for example, who died as this book was going into production; because of his provocative book The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom’s name is far more familiar to the general public than is that of Strauss, whose fame is largely confined to academe. A beloved teacher and mentor, Strauss shared Plato’s belief that important ideas could be appreciated only by a small number, and he wrote an obscure prose likely to be understood only by members of his circle—a habit Bloom analyzes in the touching account he wrote of Strauss’s life and work just after Strauss’s death.37 Many American political theorists who specialize in ancient Greece are members of the Straussian school. Reaction against the Straussian perspective on Greece—a perspective that focuses on the brilliance of Plato and Aristotle—has moved a number of thinkers to bring a different Athens before the American public and to stress instead the energizing aspects of Athenian democracy and its capacity to engage large numbers in meaningful political activity. Shortly after the appearance of Bloom’s book in 1987, moreover, a direct challenge to the value of Athenian democracy was offered in the work of Yale political scientist Robert Dahl, whose highly articulate Democracy and Its Critics brought before the general public once again the notion that the participatory nature of Athenian democracy made it an impossible model for a large modern state. It is this challenge that Ober, Euben, Hedrick, and Wallach seek to meet in their current projects. (I think it would be dishonest of me not to identify my own points of involvement here: I was a speaker at both the Santa Cruz Institute [1992] and the Washington conference [1993], I authored one of the pieces in the June 1993 issue of Prologue, and I will have an essay in the Cornell collection.)
The battle has also been engaged on the fringes of the academy in the popular press. In 1991 Basic Books published The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America by Eli Sagan, a lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York who has written on a variety of topics including Freud and women. Sagan argued passionately in favor of an egalitarian and peaceful America, stressing the strengths and weaknesses of the Athenians in achieving the kind of society he would like to see in the United States and in the world. In Sagan’s view, the Athenians were good in their ability to envision a more democratic universe than their contemporaries and predecessors could conceive, but bad in their noninclusive view of the community. More attention has been paid to another popular book with a more famous author. In 1988 Little, Brown published The Trial of Socrates by the celebrated journalist and free speech activist I. F. Stone. The egalitarian Athenians, in Stone’s formulation, were speaking out for “Greek” values in standing up to Socrates, whose autocratic ethos and social snobbery were at odds with the way “Greeks” looked at the world. Stone made a lot of odd assumptions about the historical Socrates and the egalitarianism of the average Greek, but the book made quite a splash.
Stone had hoped that his study of free speech—the project that led him to the trial of Socrates—would not only help to preserve freedom of expression where it existed but also help beleaguered dissidents in the Communist world find their way to what he labeled “a liberating synthesis of Marx and Jefferson.”38 In fact the belief that egalitarianism was more fundamental to the Greek ethos than elitism also crops up in Marxist thinkers and their forerunners. Much of what Engels set out to do in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State built on the researches of the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, whose Ancient Society: or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism appeared in 1877. Morgan found himself drawn to the egalitarianism of the Iroquois, of whose gens he maintained that “liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles,” and he was convinced that it was safe to extrapolate from the experience of the Iroquois to that of all other civilizations.39 Though Morgan treated Grote’s work with respect, he disagreed with Grote’s contention that the primitive Greek government was essentially monarchical, alleging that even Grote was a victim of the phenomenon whereby modern ideas had been “moulded by writers accustomed to monarchical government and privileged classes, who were perhaps glad to appeal to the earliest known governments of the Grecian tribes for a sanction of this form of government, as at once natural, essential and primitive.” The truth, he maintains, “as it seems to an American, is precisely the reverse of Mr. Grote’s; namely, that the primitive Grecian government was essentially democratical, reposing on gentes, phratries and tribes, organized as self-governing bodies, and on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.”40 Democratic ideas, Morgan contended, had existed in Athens for years before the development of the classical democracy and needed only to rise once more to the surface to overcome the “false element” of aristocracy. It was to the high degree to which the Athenians developed their democracy that Morgan ascribed their becoming “the most intellectual and most accomplished race of men the entire human family has yet produced.”41
Similar ideas were expressed in different ways in 1975 by Robert Padgug, a classicist then at Rutgers University. In the 1960s the first issue of the journal Arethusa was published at the State University of New York at Buffalo, at that time a hotbed of avant-garde thinking of various kinds. Arethusa devoted its 1975 issue to Marxism and the classics and its 1983 issue to articles on women in the ancient world. The issue on Marxism included Padgug’s essay “Classes and Society in Classical Greece.” Padgug saw fifth- and fourth-century Athens as a restored commune created on the ruins of an earlier, purer commune. In the restored commune, reconstituted after an “aristocratic interlude,” political equality and an emphasis on civic rights replaced the earlier economic equality. Slavery and imperialism, however, were needed to enable all members of the commune to live on a minimally acceptable level and to help compensate for the relatively small amount of land available in Attica. The restored commune consequently “was in fact an artificial attempt to recreate and preserve” the equality of the earlier commune “using political means.”42 The system, Padgug maintains, worked well in the fifth century, but the precarious balance on which it depended led to its disintegration after the loss of the Peloponnesian War, for the city’s economic dependence on outsiders (slaves, metics, allies) inevitably opened the door to the fragmentation of society and the breakdown of communal values, developments that did in fact occur when the city’s material resources were significantly diminished.
Other Marxist thinkers have formulated the collapse of Athens differently. The Englishman Geoffrey de Ste. Croix of Oxford, for example, followed his own contribution to the Arethusa issue with a long book, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, published in 1981. There he broke with a long Western tradition in ascribing the selfishness that brought down antiquity not to the demos but to the elite. A certain amount can also be learned about twentieth-century Marxist views of Athens from the pages of the Marxist journal Quaderni di Storia, published at Bari. There selected passages have been reprinted (with commentary) from saints and sinners of earlier eras: Volney’s indictment of the cult of antiquity, with its condemnation of inequality and slavery, and Maurras’s anti-Semitic attack on democratic Athens as a forerunner of Jew-ridden France. No exculpation of any kind is provided for Maurras; Volney’s capacity to transcend the compulsive classicism of his heritage is ascribed by Bertrand Hemmerdinger of Paris (who was responsible for reprinting both Volney and Maurras) to the illumination provided by his experience with the class struggle during the revolution. Praising Volney for his “admirable realism,” Hemmerdinger identifies the image of happy antiquity Volney sought to expunge not only as a product of eighteenth century bourgeois myths but as the hallmark of twentieth-century mythology as well, and contends that such thinking continues to shape writing about Greece and Rome. Marx himself was torn between a conviction that classical states were dependent on slavery, which he condemned, and a dreamy nostalgia for the egalitarian ideals of Greek democracy. The inequity of slavery and the injustice of social stratification remain just as crucial to Marxist thinking about Athens as enthusiasm for the Athenians’ professed democratic ideals.43
Questions of class and class struggle also have bearing on non-Marxist twentieth-century approaches to Athenian democracy. In his enthusiastic popular book The Emergence of Greek Democracy the British classicist George Forrest has argued that the “partisan views” of the ancient sources—views he considers “more or less totally false”—have held appeal for twentieth-century scholars in part because “modern historians too have not been men of the lower-class.”44 Nobody who has read Peter Novick’s study of the American historical profession, That Noble Dream (Cambridge, 1988), or heard Joan Scott’s address at the plenary session of the American Historical Association in Cincinnati in 1988 can remain ignorant of the resounding elitism of the historical “establishment” in the United States or fail to be struck by the prestige and power enjoyed even after the Second World War by historians of overtly racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic views. It would be eminently gratifying to demonstrate a dramatic shift in the valuation of Athens with the entry into the historical profession of scholars whose backgrounds probably would have disqualified them from exercising political rights in an aristocratic government—to discover that this demographic shift has intensified general enthusiasm for the Athenian ethos while still focusing attention on the element of exclusivity. The truth, of course, is far more complex, but it is plain that not all people currently conducting scholarship on the ancient world are affluent, white Christian males; many fail to check out on all counts. An intensive examination of classical Athens appears in a powerful book driven by ideology but forged in careful scholarship, Orlando Patterson’s 1991 Freedom, the work of a black Harvard professor. Jewish scholars raised in an era of anti-Semitism account for a number of Athens’s most enthusiastic defenders, from Sir Moses Finley, possibly the most distinguished Greek historian of the twentieth century, to the Lithuanian-born Donald Kagan, the celebrated historian of the Peloponnesian War.45 To be sure, in English-speaking countries (unlike, for example, France) female historians have rarely chosen to make classical Athens the focus of their research—a fact that is quite interesting in itself, since anglophone women write regularly on Athenian art and literature and have begun to write quite a bit on Greek political theory. Still, the entry into the profession of women in significant numbers, combined with the rise of the feminist movement in the late twentieth century, has contributed to broadening perspectives on the Athenians.
On the whole a more positive valuation of Athens has been perceptible concomitant with the increasing professionalization of historical writing, and this is no coincidence. As the use of history for the moral formation of statesmen and citizens has yielded to a desire to understand the past and an increased patience with evidence that does not yield pat paradigms, so the preoccupation with uplifting exempla has abided. The school of historical writing that has regarded the past as a series of cautionary tales providing a storehouse of virtues to emulate and vices to avoid was never favorable to the Athenians; as French revolutionaries discovered, Spartans and Romans made far better heroes. There was a time when the only Athenians who really fired people’s minds were Solon, who could easily be dissociated from the radical democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries, and those martyrs to the demos Phocion and Socrates. As Vidal-Naquet has pointed out, the classical heroes of the revolution implied antiheroes.46 In Athens, sadly devoid of Tarquins and Caesars, the only antihero was the democracy itself. It was impossible to revere Lycurgus and Cato without some admiration for the ethical systems with which they were associated; it was difficult to cherish Phocion or Socrates without implicitly condemning the government that put them to death. Pericles never became a schoolboy’s role model. The Athenians’ reputation has also profited from the rise of scholarship in America, where little original thinking about the classical past was discernible prior to the twentieth century but where warm associations have congregated around the amorphous notion that is “democracy.” To be sure, the establishment of the democratic American republic encouraged some to abandon the study of classical states; Jefferson claimed that the new principle of representative democracy had made it pointless to seek guidance on government from the ancients, and de Tocqueville found the differences between America and classical antiquity so dramatic that he reacted to attempts to judge America in terms of Greece and Rome by threatening to burn his classical books. Still, the stability of the American experiment did much to neutralize the volatile democratic discourse of early modern Europe and to make democracy significantly more palatable on both sides of the Atlantic.
The new political and diplomatic problems of the past century and a half, moreover, have brought with them a host of new uses for Athenian democracy. To be sure, the rise of a substantial class of professionally trained historians and the general public’s decreased interest in the distant past has meant that Athenian government is now far more likely to be studied for its own sake than for its instantaneous applicability to contemporary dilemmas. (It has also meant the evolution of a new intellectual universe in which no one would dream of seeking knowledge about antiquity by consulting Bodin, or of citing Rollin as an authority for classical government.) A marked decrease in the degree to which direct inferences are made from ancient to modern history is noticeable around the middle of the nineteenth century. This drop becomes more striking still toward 1900 with the takeover of historical writing by academic historians who have often been more clinicians than politicians. Concerned for the survival of both their values and their paychecks, however, classical historians in the age of twentieth-century technology have come to recur rather nervously to the theme of relevance, and have felt a certain triumph—not to mention relief—in being able to draw convincing parallels between, say, the Athenian expedition to Sicily and the American expedition to Vietnam or the Persian Gulf. Thus though sober scholarly articles on the reforms of Ephialtes or the Peace of Antalcidas continue sedulously to eschew any appearance of “popularizing,” many students of the past recognize that the people who might buy their books or read them in libraries may be different from the people who subscribe to the Journal of Hellenic Studies or Symbolae Osloenses, and modern analogies may be made to illuminate, entertain, or simply seduce. These analogies can be counted on to multiply exponentially in classroom situations. They are also dear to the hearts of journalists, who so far from fleeing facile parallels are in fact likely to discuss ancient politics only when they are in a mood to point timely morals. Consequently, although a lighter touch has replaced a rather heavy-handed approach to modern analogy that most twentieth-century readers would find overbearing, the practice has survived sufficiently to give some sense of the uses to which Athenian democracy has been put by historians and politicians of the past half-century or so—to contrast England with Germany and America with the Soviet Union, to warn of the perils of McCarthyism and imperialism, to intone insistently that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
. . . . .
The American feminist Marilyn Skinner has categorized “postclassicism” as a mode of relating to antiquity marked by “its denial of the classicality of the ancient cultural product, its refusal to champion Greco-Roman ideas, institutions and artistic works as elite terrain, universally authoritative and culturally transcendent, and therefore capable of only one privileged meaning.” Instead, Skinner goes on, postclassicism subscribes to the notion “of all cultural artifacts and systems as broadly accessible ‘texts’ open to multiple and even conflicting readings.”47 It is these “conflicting readings” that have provided the subject matter for this book.
By and large, these conflicts have arisen because of differences in value systems across cultures and among assorted thinkers produced by the same or similar cultures, rather than from the discovery of new evidence that produces a “text” that is objectively “different.” In some instances, perceptions have remained constant while values have changed. Will Durant’s paean to the Athenians, for example, sounds rather as if he were drafting a personal ad on their behalf: he bills them as “tolerant, varied, complex, luxurious, innovating, skeptical, imaginative, poetical, turbulent, free….”48 Eighteenth-century intellectuals concurred that the Athenians were luxurious and turbulent, but the valence they attached to these characteristics was radically different. Durant’s description of the Athenians contained little if anything with which Madison or Montagu or Mably would have disagreed; all four men entertained similar notions of what had happened but dramatically discrepant views of what it all meant. During the nineteenth century, Engels, decrying slavery and patriarchy, condemned Athens in the strongest language, while across the Atlantic, Fitzhugh and his cohorts, seeing a very similar picture of Athens, acclaimed Athenian civilization as a legitimizing exemplar.
In other instances, however, different readers of Athenian democracy have plainly imagined different “texts” before them. For Samuel Johnson and Lord Brougham, Athenian voters were crassly ignorant. Johnson maintained that Demosthenes spoke to a people of brutes, and Brougham described Athenian citizens as “only half educated” and “wholly incapable of thinking for them-selves.”49 Brougham’s contemporaries Mahaffy and Freeman, on the other hand, contended that Athenian citizens were “more highly educated than any general public” in their own day.50 For Rollin and Mitford, the ekklesia was packed full of ignorant tradesmen; but Ferguson in 1913 would write admiringly of the high level of political expertise in an assembly in which such a large proportion of members had held public positions.51 Nineteenth-century Germans like Böckh and Burckhardt, for whom belief in the idleness of the Athenian citizenry was practically a matter of religious conviction, would have been astonished to see their twentieth-century countryman Christian Meier proclaim in 1980 that “the Attic demos was undoubtedly hardworking”; eighteenth-century Britons brought back to life would be mystified to hear Sir Kenneth Dover referring casually and in passing to the “extraordinary stability of fourth-century democracy” and contending that the apparent absence of any demand for redistribution of property suggests a fundamental consensus among the city’s economic groups.52 In 1972 Sir Moses Finley described Athens as not only the richest culturally of all the Greek states—something even the Florentines would have conceded—but also the stablest and most internally peaceful.53 Many historians of the later twentieth century agree: Josiah Ober and his collaborator Barry Strauss of Cornell, both still in college when Finley penned these words, wrote in 1990 that “Athenian political society was remarkably stable.”54 The leveling tendency of democratic culture in general and Athenian culture in particular has often been cited against it—by Hegel, for example, and by Matthew Arnold. These allegations were contested as the Victorian era drew to a close by A.H.J. Greenidge, who in his Handbook of Greek Constitutional History maintained that “if democracy be taken to imply the levelling of individual eminence, that of Athens was a failure,” for “few states have ever been more completely under the sway of great personalities.” It is oligarchy, Greenidge contended, that is “the true leveller of merit,” whereas it is “one of the oldest lessons in history that … a democracy brings with it a hero-worship generally of an extravagant kind.”55 The debate over leveling has also focused on economics. For Mitford, as for John Adams, one of the principal sins of the Athenians was their lack of respect for private property; for Engels, the Greek, and specifically the Athenian, state “sanctified the private property formerly so little valued, and declared this sanctification to be the highest purpose of all human society.”56 Mitford recurred frequently to the topos of the violence of democracy, a constant threat to the security of Athenian streets for both sexes; De Pauw, on the other hand, maintained that it was the Athenians’ success in the area of public safety that did most honor to their moral character and taste for civilization. In four hundred years in Athens, he contended, there was less violence than in twenty-four hours between London and Greenwich.57 These disagreements cannot always be ascribed to the altered perspective of a new day; Mitford and De Pauw were born only five years apart.
The different readings of the Athenian ethos are not simply matters of likes and dislikes, whether it is good or bad to have poor people hold office, whether it is useful or destructive to attach a high degree of accountability to government, whether individual ownership of land is ethical or not, whether ostracism helps or hinders statesmanship, whether slavery is acceptable sometimes or never. The Athens of Mitford is simply not the Athens of De Pauw; the Athens of Adams is not the Athens of Finley. With some minor exceptions— the discovery of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia, for example, and the development of a sounder chronology for the years leading up to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War—precious little new evidence has surfaced since antiquity that could explain the dramatic differences in the way assorted thinkers have approached Athenian democracy. Why, then, such divergent perceptions of the same phenomenon?
Hobbes, we know, fretted that the reading of classical texts promoted dangerous disrespect for authority and prompted all manner of seditious republicanism. It did not have that effect on him, however, nor on Bodin or Filmer, and I know of not a single monarch whose classical education prompted him to lay aside his crown and make De Officiis and the Parallel Lives required reading throughout the realm.58 (The study of the classics has been blamed for inculcating an extraordinarily wide range of sentiments; in his biography of Lenin, Trotsky identified the study of classics as an instrument of torture that paved the way for the acceptance of czarist ideology.59) The warm embrace in which English liberals enfolded the dead Athenians might seem to suggest that the opposite is true—that it is contemporary experience that shapes response to classical reading rather than the other way around. Were this demonstrable in an immediate and predictable way, it would be possible to see the anti-Athenian texts that sprouted in the wake of the revolutions in France and America as the clear by-products of these unsettling challenges to tradition. In fact, however, the dominant view about Athens on the eve of the revolutions was already predominantly hostile. The truth is that a complex undulation marks the interplay between life experience, the legacy of the immediate past in the form of tales told by parents and grandparents, and reading about the far away and long ago. Responses to Athenian democracy have often been determined by an intricate interaction of snobbery, recent experience, false analogy, uncritical use of sources, failure to ask hard questions, and fear. The sociology of ancient literacy and literature has rarely been taken into consideration in the evaluation of written sources for ancient history and government, nor has much scrutiny been applied to the practice (dictated by necessity) of recovering an intensely oral culture from written texts. Coming themselves from an elite, moderns writing about history have inevitably continued to play a role in the perpetuation of upper-class mythology. As David Carr has pointed out, citing Dilthey and Vico, “we are historical beings first, before we are observers of history,” and “he who studies history is the same as he who makes it.”60 Though an increasing number of twentieth-century academics come from non-elite backgrounds, writing about the classical past still remains largely the preserve of an upper crust; very few underprivileged young men decide to make Greek history their life’s work, and very few women of any social class. In his provocative Black Athena, Martin Bernal of Cornell has made a case for the role played by racism in distorting the development of Greek civilization as a whole.61 Certainly the bulk of classical scholarship has been produced by whites. It is significant that historians have so often dismissed Herodotus as a lovable raconteur while embracing Thucydides as one of their own; two of the characteristics that make Thucydides more “professional” than Herodotus are his upper-class perspective and his blind faith in his own intellectual superiority.
It would be gratifying to demonstrate decisively that journalists and moralists have experienced classical Athens very differently from professional historians. It would be nice to develop some criterion for what makes a historian a “professional.” (If making a living at history is the standard, we are all in trouble.) And it would be a great deal of fun to surprise expectation by demonstrating that in reality there is no difference at all in the way in which Athens has been perceived by Life magazine on the one hand and by Museum Helveticum on the other. Alas, none of these things is possible. In reality people whose principal focus is the past rather than the present do see things rather differently from those whose orientation to antiquity is as a storehouse of cautionary tales; they are more patient and more open-minded, less presentist and less judgmental. But no matter how much historians would like to delude themselves, these differences are frequently matters of degree rather than of kind. Monarchists and republicans, slaveholders and abolitionists, feminists and traditionalists—we all have our axes to grind, though some of us grind them more gracefully than others. The French created bourgeois Athens; the Germans made of all Greece a prelapsarian wish-fulfillment; the Victorians imagined an Athens that was the best of London and a London that was the best of Athens; twentieth-century social critics see an exclusive club founded on the denigration and exploitation of nonmembers. All this is true of scholars and journalists, researchers and romantics.
Predictably, thinking about Athenian government and society has been shaped by shifting perceptions not only about the desirability of democracy but about the nature of the beast itself. Already in 1885 Sir Henry Maine observed that there was no word “about which a denser mist of vague language, and a larger heap of loose metaphors, has collected.”62 Greek in its origins, the word has undergone a remarkable variety of transformations in meaning, ranging from mob rule to the embodiment of human dignity to anti-Communism to Communism itself. Democracy has been excoriated as the bedfellow of atheism and adulated as Christianity in action. As has been pointed out by Richard Wollheim of University College, London, the word itself is problematic when compared with words like plutocracy or theocracy: how really “can the people rule in the way in which the rich or the priests clearly can? For surely there are too many of them for it to be a practical possibility. And secondly, if the people rule, who is there left to be ruled?”63 The truth is that the semantics of democracy have dissolved into pablum. In the twentieth century, democracy is synonymous with fairness and accountability and all-around decency.64 In the conclusion to Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, John Dunn has pointed out that it is democratic ideals that today ground the legitimacy of the modern state—the very state that was invented by thinkers like Bodin and Hobbes “for the express purpose of denying that any given population, any people, had either the capacity or the right to act together for themselves.”65 Today everyone is a democrat, as Third World dictators vie with erstwhile Soviet Communists and American capitalists to demonstrate that they champion a democracy more pure and absolute than that of their neighbors. Consider the following definition of democracy: “The meaning of democracy is precisely that the people, from time to time, should be called upon to judge the achievements and acts of a government, to judge whether the program of the government is of any use or whether the men are of any use who take it upon themselves to execute that program.” Consider the author: Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s words were cited in a 1956 assemblage of glosses on democracy collected by a UNESCO ideology research team.66 Chronology prevented the UNESCO people from including the following words on democracy that issued from the mouth of Leibole Muchnik, a Miami hot-dog vendor, during the visit of Queen Elizabeth in 1991: “To me this is democracy. Over here you’ve got protesters against the Queen. Over there you’ve got people who love her. Me, I’ve got business from both.”67
Inevitably, democracy meant something different to citizens of the Italian Renaissance who were convinced it entailed constant tumult, to eighteenth-century moralists who viewed it as the erosion of virtue by decadence, to the American founders who believed it encouraged the equalization of property, and to citizens of the late twentieth century, to some of whom it apparently has come to mean freedom to sell your frankfurters to all comers. It would be too simple, however, to assume that people throughout history have made facile assumptions that the virtues or vices of what their own era perceived as democracy were the same as the strengths and weaknesses of classical Athenian government. To be sure, there are instances of such confusion. Looking back in horror at the recent history of Florence, Italian political theorists ignored vital differences between stable Athens and the volatile banking city on the Arno where class conflict stood ready to tear the state apart at any time. Another example is afforded by the assumption Macaulay ascribed to Samuel Johnson about the ignorance of the average Athenian citizen, a confusion that arose, Macaulay believed, from mistaken identification of classical Athens with Augustan Britain: in reality the world of the Athenians was so much smaller and the level of interaction among citizens so high that probably the degree of informedness of the average voter would have compared favorably to that of any voting body in Johnson’s age or today. But when John Adams said that he did not like Athenian democracy, he really meant it; he did not mean that he disliked Athens simply because of what he knew about democracy in his own era. (Actually, he could have known nothing about modern democracy, as there was none to know.) John Adams was not confused about what Athenian democracy had been because of the negative associations that had congregated around the word democracy in his own day. If Adams was confused, it was because of a long anti-Athenian tradition that was based on a genuine conviction that the Athenians had deployed a singularly unstable and unjust form of government. If he was confused, his error lay in unquestioning acceptance of traditional wisdom and traditional priorities. In his belief that Athenian democrats had violated private property, he was largely mistaken; no doubt individual defendants were sometimes wrongly convicted in court so that their property might be confiscated, but the Athenian poor never did rise up and demand redistribution of land. Despite all this, however, Adams’s plainly stated conviction that power should follow property was in reality violated by Athenian law (though not always by Athenian practice). If John Adams thought he would dislike sharing power with landless men, he was right to think he would not have wanted to live in Athens.
It is an interesting exercise to ponder whether the course of Western politics and political theory might have been different had Lysias or Demosthenes, Pericles or Sophocles bequeathed us histories of their times or treatises on political theory to place beside those of Thucydides and Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle. It is important, however, to notice the conspiracy of silence that has surrounded works favorable to the democracy such as Aristides’ speech On the Four, Drake’s History of the Last Parliament, the pertinent portions of Cato’s Letters or the Craftsman, the iconoclastic researches of De Pauw. Aristides’ oration has been available in several editions since the sixteenth century; Drake’s pamphlet wended its way into a good number of libraries; both the Craftsman and Cato’s Letters enjoyed a considerable readership not only in Europe but in the American colonies and formed an important part of the Whig heritage across the Atlantic. Readers chose, however, to embrace the generic republican ideals championed in British opposition literature while passing over the praise of Athenian accountability frequently found there. And De Pauw has never been much read. To a remarkable degree, people free to pick and choose among their sources have chosen to discount ideology that deviated from the dominant tradition.
That tradition was devoted to demonstrating the inadequacies of Athenian democracy with a passion that often bordered on obsession. Though some of the small Italian states flirted with democracy during the late Middle Ages and early in the Renaissance, the truth is that Athenian-style government had never been tried since the fourth-century B.C. When the vox populi made itself heard, it was usually in the form of the kinds of agitated uprisings that develop only when the disfranchised mobilize to vent their frustration; and even these were often not as frightening as defenders of the established order made out. The seventeenth-century Levellers, for example, had limited their demands to political equality, not economic parity; and although the more radical Diggers did indeed advocate a communistic agrarian society, there were probably fewer than a hundred of them all told, and they could not afford to threaten violence. There was some recognizable popular government among state legislatures in the American colonies and the early republic; but of Madison’s three fears—paper money, abolition of debts, and redistribution of land—only the first was realized or even attempted, and a system of tumult and intimidation never did replace the ballot. But the conviction that the demos was the beast Plato and Bodin had painted in such vivid colors died hard and still lives on today, particularly as countries such as the United States are undergoing dramatic demographic shifts that have produced masses that are multicolored in a way far more literal than either Plato or Bodin could have imagined, and the classical clichés about the monster of many heads have won a permanent place in political theory. Droysen’s observation that the evidence can only answer the questions that are put to it points up the choices that were made in the examination of Athens.68 Much can be learned from the questions that were rarely raised. What kind of civilization produces a Phidias or a Plato, an Antigone or a Parthenon? What connections can be drawn between politics and art? What prompts people to break out of the hereditary mold and institute a system of orderly elections? How did life in Athens foster a level of informedness among its citizens that made selection by lot for public office a workable plan? What value system encouraged the belief that ordinary people could make responsible decisions? Over a lifetime Plato devoted considerable energy to the question, Who shall rule? In this project he was succeeded by countless others. The more sophisticated question might be how a system could be devised in which the notion of rulers and ruled was obsolete—a question that came to be asked, of course, by Marx and his cohorts. Inevitably, the discounting of women and slaves gravely compromises the Athenian system in twentieth-century eyes, as the existence of a (male) elite in the recently deceased Soviet Union vitiated the Marxists’ claim to a classless society. Still, the notion has a potential that the tradition has chosen to discount.
By the standards of the late twentieth century, the Athenians were not very nice people. They had no concept of the brotherhood of man, much less of the siblinghood of humankind. They thought nothing of affirming their control over policy by executing a general whose only crime was that he had ceased to represent the wishes of his constituency; they sent dedicated public servants into ten-year exiles for no other reason than that they seemed a bit too big for their britches. They had no organized bodies of concerned citizens lobbying for the trampled rights of animals destined for sacrifice, of slaves marked for the mines, or of brotherless girls about to be married off to mean, boring relatives in order to keep land in the family. No Geneva convention prevented anyone from doing what he liked with Spartan prisoners of war, and no Athenian convict grew old on death row awaiting the outcome of his lawyers’ machinations on his behalf; by the time his countrymen were sorry about Socrates, he was quite thoroughly dead. But the Athenians did devise a government remarkable for its time and forge a civilization that created amazing works of art, literature, and philosophy, and neither the Athenian democratic system nor the study of history has benefited from an approach that posits the connection between democracy and military defeat while ignoring the connection between the democratic ethos and the dizzying heights of creative achievement that are both associated with classical Athens, and instead asks only where the Athenians went wrong—why they executed the victors of Arginusae, lost the war with Sparta, executed Socrates, and were conquered by Macedon. Dubious in journalists and politicians, this strategy is of no value at all to historians. Surely we can find more useful things to do with our time and energy than stealthily stalking ancient cultures, waiting for them to slip up so that we may pounce with glee and kill them all over again.
That Athenian freedom and democracy ultimate fell before Macedon is indisputable. For those who incline to the view of W. B. Gallie that history “is a species of the genus Story,” the entire story line has often been defined in terms of its ending, which came to be cast as its “direction.”69 When principles of colligation are combined with a disposition to read the past backward, a glum assessment of Athens follows naturally. (The modern celebrants of Athens tend to eschew a narrative, chronological approach.) The impulse to view history as a series of stories—with the potential to be integrated into a rich epic with subplots (“Western Civilization”?)—has shaped perceptions of Athenian democracy in immeasurable but profound ways. Solon’s advice to Croesus to count no man happy while he was still alive has been taken closely to heart by Athens’s critics, who have seen in the defeats at Aegospotami and Chaeronea clear proof of the inadequacy of the system. History has amply fulfilled Socrates’ prophecy that there would come upon the Athenians after his death critics yet sterner than he.
Where passions are deeply felt, the temptation to use the example of the Athenians’ defeats to cry out against wrong reason and warn of impending collapse has been powerful. The issues around which the battle has been engaged have varied from one era to the next. Some, I have suggested, were false issues—the issue of instability, for example. Others seem to have been engaged with peculiar intensity: it is testimony to the legitimizing value of classical examples (and perhaps to the blandishments of egalitarianism) that intellectuals drawing up blueprints for large modern nations should have felt the need to recur again and again to the difficulties of direct democracy. But the indignation of Marxist and feminist critics of the Athenian system serve as a reminder that not all readers of the “text” of classical Athens have viewed its civilization as in any sense dead. Whereas America’s founders put on the coroner’s coat and deployed all the instruments of their reason to determine the cause of the ancient republics’ demise, what many critics are crying out against is the survival into their own day of a hardy system of pernicious values that have hung on tenaciously since well before Pericles. For some of Athens’s admirers, her role as the origin of much that is distinctive about Western civilization has been cause for celebration, whether this distinction is perceived—as by Edward Freeman, for example—to lie in the development of egalitarian institutions or, as Fitzhugh believed, in the facilitation of high culture through the relegation of physical labor to a disfranchised class. For others, the ability of moderns to improve on Athenian institutions was paramount; Tom Paine rejoiced that the representative principle would enable America to outshine even Athens. Still others have been inclined to think things have gotten worse; thus Thomas Erskine May contended that there had been far more toleration in pagan Athens than in Christian Spain. The question of Christianity exercised Athens’s detractors as well; for Böckh, the advent of Christianity accounted for a supposed improvement in the moral tone of European life, while its absence explained much that had been wrong with Athens. Yet other critics have seen the Athenian democracy as the seedbed of modern vices. Where the champions of private property asked what might happen were Athenian democracy to be resurrected, Marxists, feminists, and many other social critics have come during the past century or so to suggest that in reality the unhealthy structures they perceive in Athens have been the emblematic abuses of Western civilization throughout its history. Eva Keuls speaks for a large body of the Athenians’ critics in suggesting that Athens provides us with “a kind of concave mirror in which we can see our own foibles and institutions magnified and distorted” since the dynamics she identifies in Athens still remain a problem “in modern, more subtle forms.”70
In the introduction to his book The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, the American Marxist Fredric Jameson contends that “we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions.” These sedimented habits and categories have formed the subject matter of this book. It is these habits and categories that have made possible a wide variety of interpretations of an extraordinarily vibrant civilization and a surprisingly bold experiment in government. The various elements that make up what Jameson called “the essential mystery of the cultural past” can, he argues, “recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story.”71 But not everyone has found the same unity, or the same story. I have told my own story about the hi-story of an idea; other stories could be told about the same idea using the material I included—and excluded. Philosophers of history cannot agree on whether there is such a thing as an untold story: if it is untold, some ask, how can it be a story? I hesitate consequently to speculate about the “untold stories” concerning Athens that may yet come to birth; but it is safe to say that new stories will be told in the future. Fortunately, however, I am a historian only of the past.