ABBREVIATIONS

Chapter One

Introduction

The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.

—Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History

DURING THE LONG WAR between Athens and Sparta, the irreverent Athenian aristocrat Alcibiades defected to the enemy because of serious charges pending against him concerning various kinds of sacrilege against the state-supported religion. Once in Sparta, Thucydides maintains, Alcibiades sought acceptance by insisting that his active involvement in Athenian politics did not really suggest support of Athenian democracy, which, he contended, was an “acknowledged folly” that all sensible Athenians recognized as silly.

The accuracy of this claim cannot be proven or disproven. Alcibiades’ criteria for good sense must necessarily have been subjective, and even if we could tell who was sensible and who was not, still we could not poll the dead Athenians to find out what the sensible ones thought. What is plain, however, is that some of Alcibiades’ brightest contemporaries spoke ill of the democratic government of their native state—Thucydides, for example, Plato, and Alcibiades’ teacher Socrates—and that they were supported in this endeavor after Alcibiades’ death by a famous adoptive Athenian, Aristotle (from Stagira in northern Greece), who became Plato’s longtime pupil. Out of their reservations was born political theory—literally, “looking at the city-state.” As J. S. McClelland has recently pointed out, “It could almost be said that political theorizing was invented to show that democracy, the rule of men by themselves, necessarily turns into rule by the mob…. If there is such a thing as a western tradition of political thought,” McClelland concludes, “it begins with this profoundly anti-democratic bias.”¹ And so in fifth- and fourth-century Athens there began a strange and compelling symbiosis between the democratic body politic and the body of antidemocratic theorizing. This interplay lived on in thought long after the independent democratic city-state of Athens had ceased to exist. Parasitic on Athenian democracy, classical political theory kept it alive by its compulsive need to point up its failures again and again and again.

It is a curious phenomenon that the hostile tradition about Athenian democracy should have sprung from the written word, for in reality Athenian government was the product of a civilization that was oral in essence. Much in politics is always accomplished by politicians talking to one another, but democracy frequently entails some kind of public record of formal debate and decision, something along the lines of the American Congressional Record or the French Archives Parlementaires. For Athens this is completely lacking. Words once spoken in the assembly and the council vanished into the air, and we are left with Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ funeral oration, Demosthenes’ accounts of his own heroism, and parodies of political life such as those in Aristophanes’ Congresswomen out of which to reconstruct what was really said. An intensely verbal people, the Athenians had little interest in a literal record of sayings and doings. An underdeveloped technology discouraged regular record keeping, and lack of interest discouraged improvements in technology. No real records of government proceedings survive beyond the laws and inscriptions chiseled in stone. Even words, of course, can be cryptic. The vote to send Miltiades out to accomplish good for Athens concealed an expedition against the island of Paros, and an impending attack on the Corinthians was encoded in the vote that Corinth should be “safe.” People lie about both their intentions and their motives, and the survival of words is no guarantee that lived reality can be faithfully recaptured. But words are a beginning, and the highly impressionistic nature of the images of Athenian democracy that have come down to us has opened the door to a wide range of interpretations of Athens’s government and history.

Despite the secondhand nature of the words that have survived—the speeches “reported” in Thucydides’ history, Plato’s version of Socrates’ trial, Plutarch’s moralizing biographies written centuries after the fact—most of those who have sought to recapture the reality of Athenian political life have done so through media that are almost exclusively verbal. Only recently have archaeologists sought to clarify cruxes by seeking out and analyzing evidence of a physical nature. During the Roman republic as well as the French Revolution, in both Renaissance Italy and eighteenth-century Britain, the history of the Athenian democracy was reconstructed by reading the writings of the ancients and the accretion of early modern speculation that was itself based on these writings, as one written word upon another sought to recapture a phenomenon that was oral in its origins.

Writing about Athenian democracy began in the fifth century itself. Tragedy and comedy both were intensely concerned with the nature of the civic bond. Their messages, however, are inscribed in a way that has made the ideology of Attic playwrights singularly obscure. As in the Roman republic, moreover, surviving texts date from a comparatively late period in the state’s development, and they are rarely authored by the chief participants. We have not a word from the pen of Cleisthenes, of Themistocles, of Aristides, of Ephialtes; given the uncertainties that surround the speeches in Thucydides’ history, we may have nothing from Pericles either, or from Cleon. We have, in short, no equivalent at all of America’s federalist papers; we have no diaries of Miltiades, no correspondence between Pericles and Ephialtes in which they map strategy and grope toward ideology. The antidemocratic account of the development of Athenian government in the treatise entitled The Constitution of the Athenians sometimes attributed to Aristotle was written about a century after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, a century and a half after Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. The poetry of Solon aside, the studied verbal tradition about Athens started only after the Persian Wars and began with the tragedies of Aeschylus, followed by Herodotus’s casual asides and the debate on government he set in sixth-century Persia. One of the most popular sources from which later civilizations learned about Greek history was the biographies of Plutarch, composed half a millennium after the Peloponnesian War.

Neither Herodotus nor Thucydides deals much with theories of domestic politics, but the picture of Athenian democracy in Thucydides’ history has made a deep impression on readers. Thucydides seems to have preferred some form of broad oligarchy, and he consistently portrays the Athenian demos as unreasoning and unreasonable. He connects Athens’s loss of the Peloponnesian War with the inadequacies of her democratic system. In Pericles Thucydides saw a dramatic exception to the norms of Athenian political life; for Pericles, he writes, unlike other Athenian politicians, was able to control the multitude rather than being controlled by it, whereas his successors, “more on a par with one another, and each seeking to be foremost, ended by committing even the conduct of public affairs to the whims of the masses,” a practice that produced a predictable “host of blunders” (2.65.6). The so-called Old Oligarch (once thought to be Xenophon) depicted democracy as a tyranny of the poor over the beleaguered rich, whereas the real Xenophon was captivated by Sparta and discounted working people as a legitimate force in politics.

During the fourth century, the question of Athenian democracy came to be subsumed by larger questions of political, ethical, and educational theory and the search for the best life in the best state. Plato mocked the amateurism of the democratic system and pilloried the leaders it brought to power, and Plato’s Socrates maintained that Pericles was accused of having made the Athenians “idle, cowardly, loquacious, and greedy” by instituting state pay for state service such as jury duty (Gorgias 515E). Horrified by the execution of Socrates and pessimistic about the possibility of reforming his native state of Athens, Plato sought refuge in composing ideal constitutions for various (presumably imaginary) elitist states. In his Republic he elevated his disapproval of Athenian democracy into a broad theoretical attack on democracy in general, and his intellectual authoritarianism discouraged an open dialogue on the subject with truth as its aim. Meanwhile the other renowned fourth-century educator, Isocrates, cast soulful glances back at the so-called ancestral constitution of bygone days when political privilege was allotted on a sliding scale according to class. In his own century he longed for some overlord such as Philip of Macedon who could lead the Greeks to recover their lost pride in a glorious campaign against the Persians. In the meantime his pupil Theopompus composed a searing attack on the Athenians’ choice of leaders.

Taking up political theory where Plato had left it, Aristotle foreshadowed certain schools of twentieth-century thought in advocating apathy as the tamer of democracy. Sharing Xenophon’s conviction that the poor simply were not political material, he sought to exclude such people from the decision-making process, arguing on occasion against granting them any share in the state but at other times resting content with the expectation that indifference would deter at least the farmers from bothering themselves with the political life of the city. Only people with a modicum of property, Aristotle writes, can have the leisure that fosters the attainment of goodness, and so ideally “it must be these people and only these who are citizens” since the class of mechanics and shopkeepers lead lives that are “ignoble and inimical to goodness” (Politics 1328b–29a [7.8.2]).² Specific allegations against Athens are buried in the Politics in a theoretical attack on democracy in general, but the shortcomings of Athens in particular come to the fore in the Constitution of the Athenians composed in Aristotle’s lifetime either by Aristotle himself or by one of his pupils (based perhaps on notes taken during Aristotle’s lectures.) There Pericles’ institution of state pay for jurors is ascribed solely to his desire to compete with the personal largess of his rival, Cimon, and reference is made to the school that considered this system corrosive. The author emphasizes the decline of Athens after Pericles’ death when “a series of men who were the ones most willing to thrust themselves forward and gratify the many with an eye to immediate popularity held the leadership of the people (demagogian)” (28.4).³

Only democracy made antidemocratic theory possible. Some of this facilitation lay in principles of dialogue and antithesis; as the Yale political scientist Robert Dahl has recently pointed out, “The very notion of democracy has always provided a field day for critics.”⁴ Some lay in a shared belief in responsible citizenship and the equitable distribution of authority and privilege. Aristotle’s concept of the citizen, for example, owed a great deal to the evolution of that ideal in classical Athens. With the building blocks of political thought forged in democratic Athens, Athenian intellectuals constructed an elaborate attack on the very idea of democracy. By the time of the Macedonian conquest, all these blocks were squarely in place: Athenian democracy was a class government that constituted a tyranny of the poor over the rich. Like all tyrannies, this one was conducted according to whim rather than law. The democracy was incapable of conducting foreign policy and hence brought upon itself its grievous defeats first at the hands of Sparta and subsequently at those of Philip. The execution of Socrates was only the most prominent example of the rottenness of the Athenian jury system, which selected jurors largely from the lower classes and even went so far as to pay citizens for their time. The demos was irrational and excessive in its expectations of its leaders and thus treated them harshly and unreasonably. The Athenian system was bound to fail, posited as it was on the erroneous supposition that people of unequal merit should receive equal treatment. People who are not of comparable excellence should not be treated as if they were, and struggling workers cannot hope to attain the wisdom or objectivity accessible to men of leisure and education. A moderate sort of democracy at Athens was perhaps not such a bad thing when some appropriate class distinctions were observed, but at some point in the fifth century these distinctions ceased to be made. Pericles himself may possibly have had some merit, but his successors exploited the potential for demagogy in the rule of an uneducated assembly unfettered by legal precedent, and after his death Athenian political life became debased. Nor were the Athenians always just in their dealings with other city-states. It was no wonder they got their comeuppance at Chaeronea.

There existed an alternate and equally impressionistic tradition, one that could be extracted from the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers, from the pages of Herodotus and Demosthenes, from Sophocles and Euripides, and even from speeches reported by the antidemocratic Thucydides and Plato—Pericles’ funeral oration delivered in 430 after the first year of the Peloponnesian War, for example, and Protagoras’s defense of the democratic system. But it was not this alternate strand that European thinkers picked up and developed, but rather the hostile tradition. Under the Roman republic, Polybius discounted classical Athens as a chaotic state unworthy of serious examination, and Cicero was preoccupied with the ingratitude of the demos toward its leaders, with whose martyrdom he identified passionately. In the early empire, Valerius Maximus underlined the Athenians’ mistreatment of their great leaders and Pompeius Trogus stressed the decline of Athens in the fourth century. Livy, though he did not discuss Athens directly, did much to undermine the reputation of classical democracy in the eyes of future centuries by his disparaging treatment of the Roman plebs. Athenian government did not fare much better at the hands of Greek writers than it had at those of Latin ones. Diodorus of Sicily, who relied primarily on the fourth-century world history by Ephorus of Cyme in Asia Minor, was supportive of the Athenians in their foreign policy but extremely critical of their form of government, stressing the emotionalism and ingratitude of the demos in dealing with its leaders and applauding the murder of the democratic reformer Ephialtes. Plutarch, by far the most influential source for ancient Greek history and politics until the nineteenth century, was inclined to view Athenian politics as a series of attempts by unscrupulous demagogues and persecuted statesmen to manipulate a fickle and volatile mob. The second-century orator Aelius Aristides wrote an impassioned attack on Plato’s view of Greek democracy, but it represented such a departure from a comfortingly consistent tradition that future generations chose to disregard it.

Not surprisingly, people in the Middle Ages knew little about Athenian democracy and cared less. During the Renaissance, classical history was rediscovered, and because the Renaissance began in Italy, it sparked a certain amount of interest in the city-state as a political unit. In view of the notorious obsession of Renaissance men and women with the life of the mind, one might suppose that the school of Hellas would have captured their imaginations. In fact, however, other Renaissance preoccupations—stability, for example—proved dominant, and the writings of Machiavelli, Giannotti, and Guicciardini make clear that it was the armed camp on the Eurotas that was held up as an ideal to emulate while the city of Athena was put forward as a cautionary example to avoid.

If Italian republicans had little warmth for Athenian democracy, the great experiment received a still chillier reception from northern monarchists. In 1576 Jean Bodin published his Six Books of a Commonwealth, which was translated into English in 1606 and enjoyed enormous popularity throughout Europe. There Athens is portrayed as the prototype of the popular state, and Bodin marshals a full panoply of classical citations to demonstrate the evils of popular government. “If we shall beleeve Plato,” he begins, “wee shall find that he hath blamed a Popular estate, tearming it, A Faire where every thing is to bee sold. We have the like opinion of Aristotle, saying, That neither Popular nor Aristocraticall estate is good, using the authorities of Homer…. And the Orator Maximus Tirius holds, That a democraty is pernicious, blaming for this cause the estate of the Athenians, Syracusians, Carthagineans and Ephesians: for it is impossible (saith Seneca) that he shall please the people, that honours vertue.” “How,” Bodin asks, “can a multitude, that is to say, a Beast with many heads, without iugement, or reason, give any good councel? To aske councel of a Multitude (as they did in oldtimes in Popular Commonweals) is to seek for wisdome of a mad man.”⁵

Bodin exercised a profound influence on the British royalist Robert Filmer, who in the 1630s composed his memorable Patriarca, subtitled A DEFENCE OF THE NATURAL POWER OF THE KINGS AGAINST THE UNNATURAL LIBERTY OF THE PEOPLE. Predictably, Filmer makes use of Athens as an example of the evils of popular government, and in a pastiche gleaned from Thucydides, pseudo-Xenophon, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, and Sallust, he assails the shortsightedness and volatility of the mob, who “are not led by wisdom to judge of anything, but by violence and rashness.”⁶ Opposed to Filmer in seventeenth-century England was a whole school of classical republicans whose writings sparked the contention of Hobbes that there was scarcely anything so conducive to antimonarchic sedition as the study of classical history.⁷ Athens fared rather better in this climate, but since the cardinal question that exercised these men concerned the contest of republicanism and monarchy, their writings do not always show fine distinctions among the classical states. To the idealistic martyr Algernon Sidney, governments as diverse as Sparta, Athens, and republican Rome all afforded variations on a single theme: the wondrous excellence of the mixed constitution. James Harrington, however, took a harder look at Athens and concluded that the Athenians had sinned grievously in their aggressive foreign policy, calling it inexcusable to bring one’s allies under bondage, “by which means Athens gave occasion of the Peloponnesian War, the wound of which she died stinking.”⁸

As the eighteenth century began, the abortive attempts of the British Tories to impeach a handful of Whig ministers spawned a series of remarkable essays on accountability in government, the first of which, the Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome with the Consequences they had upon both those States, was penned by none other than Jonathan Swift. Swift’s tract set a precedent for the intensive mining of Athenian history for use in contemporary political squabbles, and he was promptly answered by several other essayists who harvested antiquity with a glee difficult for twentieth-century minds to comprehend. While some involved in the controversy repeated the accusations of fickleness and ingratitude that it had become customary to make against the Athenians, others held up the rigorous Athenian system of accountability as an exemplary prototype for modern times. Lavish use was also made of the Athenian example by the enemies who hounded Walpole in the 1720s and 1730s, as the collection known as Cato’s Letters and the journal The Craftsman cried out for the need to keep an ever-watchful eye on government expenditure. The name of Pericles was frequently brought forward, and so far from decrying the ingratitude he encountered at the hands of the demos, the opposition to Walpole saw an inspiring example for their own day in the high standards to which the Athenians held him.

Accountability, however, is only one issue in good government, and though toward the beginning of the century Athens found numerous defenders among journalists and pamphleteers, the dominant tradition in eighteenth-century England was markedly hostile, with Hume looking down his nose at the emotional Athenian mob and Montagu frantically warning his compatriots that Britain would soon go the way of Athens if she did not mend her ways. Athenian government fared slightly better in France. To be sure, most French writers of the eighteenth century took a dim view of Athens. It was in France that the first thoroughgoing history of antiquity was published by the schoolmaster Charles Rollin in 1729, preceded by an imprimatur praising Rollin’s “endeavours to improve the minds of youth.”⁹ Specifically, youthful minds were to be improved by learning that “fickleness and inconstancy were the prevailing characteristics of the Athenians” already in the fifth century, and in the fourth (as Tourreil had pointed out in his preface to his French Demosthenes), “the love of ease and pleasure had almost entirely extinguished that of glory, liberty, and independence”—a process begun by Pericles, the “first author of this degeneracy and corruption.”¹⁰ Shortly before the revolution, the Abbé Mably decried the capricious multitude of the fifth century in his Observations on Greek History and devoted his Conversations of Phocion to the degeneracy of the fourth; the Conversations stand in the tradition of a widespread cult of Phocion that was predictably hostile to the democracy that put him to death. In the 1780s the Abbé Barthélemy complained of the Athenian masses “insolently substituting their caprices for the laws” and praised Solon’s precautions against “the incongruous measures of an ignorant and mad populace.”¹¹ At the same time, however, creative thinkers like Voltaire prized the Athenian state for its patronage of the arts, its eloquence, its liberty, and its commerce, and debunked the received wisdom about the interlocking evils of luxury, decadence, and trade; and the iconoclastic Abbé Cornelius De Pauw defended the Athenians at almost every turn, even arguing that the blame for Philip’s success at Chaeronea belonged to Sparta.

Voltaire and De Pauw, however, were considerably ahead of their time in their response to Athens, and given the more customary reputation of the Athenian democracy, it is not surprising that revolutionaries in both France and America made few appeals to Athenian examples. On the whole, America’s founders considered Athens to be a negative model. The eventual collapse of all the ancient states was frequently held against them, and among the classical republics, Athens was the one that gave the most offense. Madison complained often of the “turbulence of democracy” in chaotic Athens, and John Adams saw in popular sovereignty an alarming threat to the sanctity of property, which he claimed Athenian democrats had violated. Too busy with the pressing concerns of their own situation to write about antiquity in any sustained way, eighteenth-century Americans reflected in their passing references to Athens an extraordinarily high anxiety level, and when the time came to gather for the remarkable dialogue about government that issued in the constitution, men whom the mobilization of King George’s armed forces had not been able to deter from a bloody revolution nonetheless quaked at the Halloween pictures of Athenian democracy that had been painted for them by its detractors from Plato to Rollin, and, like the Florentines, ran scurrying for stability with such haste that the life of the mind was left carelessly behind. They also failed to see the radically different picture of the Athenian democracy that had been painted in Attic tragedy, and neglected to ask what kind of a people would have the appetite for such spectacles and the capacity to understand them. While some creative intellects in France and, most particularly, Germany, were beginning to suspect a connection between Athens’s democratic constitution and her cultural achievements, the Americans, for all their supposed revolutionary mentality, followed their anglophone friends and relations in Britain in discounting the Athenian democracy as a scene of disorder and distress.

Insofar as the French appealed to classical precedents for their daring insubordination, they harked back to Sparta and to Rome. The principal Athenian identification discernible in revolutionary France was that of revolutionary heroes and would-be heroes with Athens’s most famous martyrs, Phocion and Socrates: Jeanne-Marie Roland, awaiting death in prison, proclaimed herself a victim of injustice in the school of Socrates, Aristides, and Phocion; and her companion Buzot proclaimed that their confrere Brissot had died for the liberty of his country like Phocion and Algernon Sidney. Inevitably this paradigm cast the Athenian democracy in a bad light. Some on both sides of the Atlantic sought to sever ties with the past altogether; the French cast aside their calendar to signal the beginning of a brave new world, and many Americans—Quakers, for example—questioned the utility of classical exempla on the new frontier across the sea. Still, for British thinkers in particular, the disturbing developments in France and America served to reinforce the excoriation of the Athenians.

To apprehensive Britons, it looked very much as if Athenian democracy had been resurrected across the channel in all its license and caprice, and in the antidemocratic backlash that followed the revolutions, the pamphleteer Robert Bisset, the historian William Mitford, and the dean of Bristol, Josiah Tucker, all trotted out the Athenians as sobering examples to would-be revolutionaries. The study of Greek history, in Bisset’s words, might do much to persuade Englishmen who were “deluded by democratic theories” that in truth “the happiest of all lands is THE LAND WE LIVE IN.”¹² The many volumes of Mitford’s Greek history were rife with invidious comparisons between Athens and England and punctuated by frightening parallels between Athenian and French democrats. At the same time that modern republican and democratic movements were causing alarm on the political front, however, the resurrection of the Greek aesthetic ideal in Germany was breeding a new respect for Athens. Spartan sculpture, after all, hardly afforded a promising field of study, and Winckelmann himself had identified Athens’s democratic institutions as the source of her artistic achievements. In literature, meanwhile, Hölderlin and his mentor, Schiller, waxed romantic about Athens, and Herder had much good to say of the Athenian state in his Outlines of the Philosophy of Man. When toward the beginning of the nineteenth century the notion of democracy began to appear less threatening in some quarters and the Greek independence movement fired the minds of many Western Europeans, particularly in England, there was a predictable rise in the stock of Athens, the Greek capital. Most dramatically, the growth of liberalism in Britain led to a gradual rejection of Mitford’s view of Greece at the hands of Macaulay and many men less well known. Though James Mill had placed Mitford’s History in his son’s hands, he had also cautioned that son against Mitford’s view of Greek politics, and a groundswell of liberal thinking found its voice not only in John Stuart Mill but in Mill’s friend George Grote and Grote’s friend Connop Thirlwall.

The publication of Grote’s History in ten volumes beginning in 1846 introduced a potent new strain into the study of Athenian government and society. What Grote saw as the hallmark of the Athenian state was the ability of its citizens meeting in assembly to transcend and override precisely the sorts of particularist interests that he believed stood in the way of social and political progress in Britain. Exalting Athenian democracy as the safeguard not only of liberty but, more surprisingly, of stability as well, Grote called into question such time-honored features of classical historiography as the glorification of Sparta, the contempt for the sophists, and the ridicule of the Athenian demagogues. What for centuries had been good was now bad, and what had been bad was downright heroic. The effect of Grote’s work on continental historians was enormous. This impact is attested in an amusing footnote to the second edition of the Histoire Grecque of Victor Duruy, a professor at Reims and Paris and the minister of public instruction under Napoleon III from 1863 to 1869. In this note Duruy relates that his idiosyncratic preference for Athens over Sparta in his first edition of 1851 had earned him a severe chastisement from the administration of his university on the subject of his “temerities”; but since the publication a year later of Grote’s assessment, he reports, his view has attained respectability.¹³

In Britain itself Grote’s mark could be seen not only on numerous Victorians but on many of the eminent Edwardians who followed as well. E. A. Freeman, writing shortly before 1880, was to maintain that the Athenian “mob” in fact “made one of the best governments which the world ever saw,” and in 1911 Alfred Zimmern in the footnotes to his study of The Greek Commonwealth described Periclean Athens as “the most successful example of social organization known to history.”¹⁴ Meanwhile across the Atlantic the ability of the independent American confederation to maintain itself without a king had done much for the reputation of all nonmonarchic governments, and many Americans themselves changed their tune about Athens as numerous southern landholders discovered in the glories of the acropolis hard evidence that slavery and freedom were more than compatible.

The rise of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism in the twentieth century served by and large to reinforce the new tendency to favor Athens over Sparta, as the liabilities of democratic license came to seem far less worrisome than the threat of totalitarianism. The anti-Athenian tradition, however, has continued to thrive, having had grafted onto it important new features missing in antiquity. To be sure, the time-honored strictures are often repeated; thus for example students who learn about ancient history from Tom Jones’s From the Tigris to the Tiber are taught that “democracy for the Greeks is actually synonymous with ochlocracy, or mob rule” and that Athenian democracy “ended in dismal failure.”¹⁵ Just as commonly, however, the Athenians are censured today for oppressing women, slaves, and allies, and the state that was once reproached for being too democratic is now lambasted for not having been democratic enough. Whereas Americans confronted with two world wars had been happy to identify with high-minded Athenians fighting to make the world safe for democracy, ominous echoes of the Sicilian expedition in the wars in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf focused attention on the dangers of imperialism. Meanwhile the Athenians have suffered redoubled attacks on the invasive nature of ancient Greek society as a whole, with its indifference to privacy, emphasis on glory, and preoccupation with politics above all else. More thinkers than ever before are inclined to identify slavery as the fulcrum of the Athenian system, and feminists are not alone in suggesting that so far from the devaluation of women being an anomalous blot on an otherwise exemplary society, in truth the democratic ethos was entirely dependent on the denigration of all outsiders. The poor Athenians, it seems, cannot win. Once censured as crass levelers, they now find themselves under fire as closet aristocrats.

New issues have come to the surface as well, as interest in individual Athenian authors has provoked special kinds of thinking about Athens. The painful wars of the twentieth century have drawn many journalists to reread Thucydides and to see in him a determined defender of a democracy out to destroy itself. Meanwhile the redefinition of the American academy under pressure from marginalized groups (such as women and nonwhites) has moved some more conservative thinkers to reassert the values of Plato, who saw politics as the business of an intellectual elite, and to hold up for imitation an image of ancient Greece radically different from the world of Athenian democracy—lamenting, in the words of Allan Bloom, that philosophy has been “dethroned by political and theoretical democracy.”¹⁶ Recoiling in turn from the exaltation of the Platonic worldview at the hands of Bloom and others of the Chicago School founded by Leo Strauss, others have advocated a return to the pre-Platonic roots of Greek democracy. Like their predecessors in Victorian England, many American admirers of ancient Athens wish to bring about the improvement of public education to facilitate more widespread participation in democracy. Taking a broad view of what is political, they often stress the important role of shared civic festivals (such as tragedy) as forces for both unification and instruction. Thus while in eastern Europe the Communist-Socialist alternative to liberal democracy has been crumbling, in North America academics have been squabbling over who will receive custody of the Athenians.

. . . . .

If it were clear that the Athenian democrats were guilty as charged, the vigor and longevity of the anti-Athenian tradition would occasion little interest. Belief in the Athenians’ exclusivity and the significance of this exclusivity for the lives of those who were not excluded—the citizen-voters—seem to me to be solidly grounded in the evidence. So are concerns about the consuming nature of an ethos that privileged politics above private and family concerns and inhibited the free differentiation of individuals among themselves. It is not in the least clear to me, however, that all the attacks on Athens rest on a solid base. A misplaced reverence for authority, I would argue, has shaped thinking about Athens in a double-barreled attack. First, this reverence led to denigration of government by the people; second, it promoted uncritical reading of the antidemocratic texts of classical Athens and early modern Europe.

In a little treatise once cataloged with the works of Xenophon, the fifth-century figure known to English-speaking readers as the “Old Oligarch” analyzed the Athenian democracy as a class government on the part of the demos in its own interest. Countless modern thinkers have agreed, taking demos as meaning, in Roman terms, plebs rather than populus, as the lower classes rather than as the entire citizenry. It is not obvious why this should have been so in a society like classical Athens in which all citizens, rich and poor, had the same political rights. Most have also seen the Athenian assembly as composed of ignorant, self-interested boors who were in no position to make enlightened decisions about the public good. Why these inadequacies should characterize the citizens of a bustling city-state small enough for everyone to have access to pertinent information is not clear either. In 415 the Athenian envoys to Sicily were duped by the citizens of Egesta into believing that Sicily was in fact wealthier than it was, and the envoys in turn were believed by the Athenian assembly, which voted a huge expedition to Sicily. Because the expedition ended in catastrophe, Thucydides highlights the gullibility and malleability of the ekklesia on this occasion. But despite his opposition to the Athenian assembly, which he attacks whenever possible, he is able to provide no other instance in which ignorance of the facts issued in an unwise policy decision. Nor is there any reason to be confident that the Athenians’ democratic form of government occasioned Sparta’s victory in the Peloponnesian War. It can be argued just as convincingly that it was the misconduct of Athens’s aristocrats that led to the loss of the war—the timidity of Nicias, the vacillations of Alcibiades, and the treachery of the men who evidently betrayed the fleet in the battle off Aegospotami that ended the war. The aristocratic tradition—the same one that regards the corn dole at Rome as the beginning of the end—seeks to ground the final collapse of Athens in 338 in the rise of the so-called demagogues, and to the eventual separation, allegedly pernicious, of military from civilian power—and this despite the fact that thinkers writing in this tradition have themselves been loyal citizens of states that have taken such a separation to be axiomatic.

The claim that rich men were excluded from power in Athens and financially exploited by the lower classes rests on weak evidence, as does the conviction that rich people make better citizens than poor people. So does the allegation that the loss of the Peloponnesian War should be ascribed to the Athenians’ democratic form of government and the insistence that the politicians who succeeded Pericles lacked public spirit. Facile distinctions between ochlocracy and democracy, between demagogue and statesman, have informed the study of Athenian history, and historians have on the whole showed little sensitivity to the class bias of those Greeks who had the leisure to write about politics. In addition, oddly simplistic views of historical causation and inevitability seem to have been at work convincing thinkers both ancient and modern that the roots of Athens’s two stunning defeats—at the hands of Sparta in 404 and of Philip in 338—can easily be traced to weaknesses in her political system and in fact go back over several decades. (Athenians themselves, of course, were concerned only with the first of these defeats, as little writing about democracy took place in Athens after the second.) Neither of these arguments is impregnable. Tracing the beginning of the end as historians of Athens have perceived it can be an amusing pastime. Many place it after the defeat of 404; some insist it began already during the Decelean War (the middle phase of the Peloponnesian War); for still others it began with the death of Pericles; and several have traced it to the rise of Pericles himself. Some date it to the victory over Persia in 479 or the reforms of Cleisthenes a generation before; Mitford thunders that it was the reforms of Solon—who was normally regarded as a folk hero by democrat and oligarch alike—that paved the way for the final debacle. One is reminded of the search for Tacitus’s ultimate verdict on the origins of Roman decline, a search that begins with the death of Tiberius in A.D. 37 and ends with the Twelve Tables (ca. 450 B.C.), which Tacitus pronounces the last piece of equitable legislation passed at Rome.

To some degree, the anti-Athenian tradition of the West arose naturally out of the class biases of the primary sources, and we cannot help wondering what sort of tradition would have sprung up had tracts on Athenian government been handed down from the pens of Pericles or Demosthenes or Sophocles. This, however, is not the whole story, for the dominant Western tradition about Athens became what it did through an ever-growing accretion of literature that systematically ignored dissonant texts challenging the received wisdom. For Plato, one twentieth-century scholar has written, “Democratic equality is … not a value among other values, but an attack upon all value, all order,” and for many centuries this was a common belief among people who wrote books.¹⁷ This belief hardly encouraged any open-minded examination of how the Athenians achieved what they did, and when praise of Athens was put forward by the minority who always rise above tradition, it generally fell on deaf ears. The lengthy defense of democratic ideology contained in Aelius Aristides’ oration attacking Plato’s Gorgias was greeted by a conspiracy of silence even on the part of those who cited the sentimental paean to Athens in Aristides’ Panathenaic Oration, and the same American revolutionaries who fell so eagerly upon the Whiggish republican ideals expressed in Cato’s Letters showed no interest in the defense of Athenian accountability expressed there. De Pauw’s thoughtful book on Greece was largely ignored, and no reconsideration about the causes of the disaster at Chaeronea arose from its publication.

It is probably safe to say that all scholars, whether historians or biologists or political scientists, perceive themselves as open-minded and impartial students of their subject matter. (If Tacitus can claim to have written about Tiberius sine ira et studio—“without bitterness or partiality”—then anything is possible.) When I suggest, therefore, that I bring to this enterprise an openness and objectivity lacking in some of my predecessors, no reader has any reason to place faith in my claim. It would be dishonest, however, for me to suggest that the daunting obstacles to our understanding have persuaded me that there is no ontological object, however elusive, that is Athens—to put myself forward as a curious student of the human mind who has no particular beliefs about what might constitute a better or worse view of what happened in classical Athens and what it all means. Haskell Fain has likened the situation of a historian to that of the shut-out suitor whom a garden wall separates from his beloved, frustrating him “from ever achieving an epistemological consummation with the object of his intentions.” The hapless historian, Fain observes, is reduced to using the occasional piece of trash tossed over the wall to “reconstruct what has taken place in those delightful walled gardens to which he is forever denied access.”¹⁸ Were some miracle of modern science to enable me to enter the walled garden that was classical Athens, I might be very much surprised, not to mention embarrassed, by how different it really was from what I have suggested. I do, nonetheless, have some opinions about how things were, some of which must by now be plain to readers—that the government was not unstable, that the citizens were not less knowledgeable or more irrational than the average person, and that the exclusion of outsiders was both economically and psychologically indispensable to the system.

In his book On History and Philosophers of History, William H. Dray opened a chapter on presentism by citing two conflicting views of how history must, and can, work.¹⁹ The philosopher and educator John Dewey, he reminds us, insisted that “all history is necessarily written from the standpoint of the present, and is, in an inescapable sense, the history … of that which is contemporaneously judged to be important in the present.” The historian Herbert Butterfield, however, author of The Whig Interpretation of History, roundly condemned this practice, contending that “the study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present, is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.” Approximate contemporaries, Dewey and Butterfield stand at opposite poles in their view of what history is for, but historians seeking guidance in the day-to-day practice of their craft will recognize instantly that both men are right. Therein lies a tale, and it is the fraction of this tale that touches on classical Athens that I wish to tell.

People who write about Athens by their own choice and not because they have been compelled to do so by a teacher whom they will remember grimly in adult life inevitably have some stake in this now-dead civilization. (It could even be argued that those constrained to write about the Athenians in order to receive academic degrees will develop such a stake in the course of their forced labor.) Not everyone’s stake is the same, and the nature of the stake will shape what is written. There is no innocent and value-free writing about Greece. How could there have been, when Greek men who took up their pens were heavily invested in the political universe that swirled around them? How could there be, when the very choice to do so is remarkable in men and women who live in strikingly different societies with different priorities? As Allan Nevins has observed, moreover, history, unlike the physical sciences, “is violently personal,” since “stars and molecules have no loves and hates, while men do.”²⁰ (This observation, made in 1928, would be hard to get away with today as scientists and philosophers—feminists in particular—increasingly question the imagined objectivity of physical science; but that is another story.) Thinkers of the late twentieth century are divided about contentions made by scholars such as Hayden White that even narrative is a profoundly moral phenomenon and that all the tiny decisions, conscious or otherwise, that go into shaping a narrative arise from moral concerns and make moral statements. As part of his argument, White maintains that life does not present itself in story form—that there is no beginning or ending of anything but moral judgment makes it so, and that it is only the demands of the individual narrator for closure that account for the existence of discrete “stories” in history.²¹ In this he is supported by Louis Mink, who contends that “particular narratives express their own conceptual presuppositions” and in fact cites the plots of Athenian tragedies as ways of expressing enormously important beliefs that the Athenians did not articulate elsewhere.²² Mink and White are opposed by William Dray and David Carr, who contend that life frequently presents itself in story form and that many stories do have natural beginnings and ends. The events with which history concerns itself, Carr maintains, “are already narrative in character”; historical stories “are told in being lived” as well as “lived in being told.”²³ For Dray, “It is what begins and ends, not that it begins and ends, which … makes the historian’s work the conduit of a moral vision of the past.”²⁴ To make his point, Dray contrasts the stories of the use of the stagecoach or the bow and arrow with the stories of the development of freedom and democracy. The story of Athens, plainly, is about freedom and democracy—even when the authors under examination deny that Athenians enjoyed any—and not about the stagecoach or the bow and arrow. Both schools of thought, then, would concede that writing about Athenian government was destined from the start to find itself encrusted in a buildup of moral judgments; and so it has been. These judgments are sometimes evident in nonnarrative formats, as when Plato snipes at democracy in the Republic or when Machiavelli cites Athenian exempla in the Discourses. But they can be extracted from narrative as well, and in fact thinkers whose suppositions are very different from those of Hayden White or Louis Mink have been making just such extractions—though generally at an unconscious level—from narratives about Athens, beginning with Thucydides’ “story” of how Athens declined after Pericles’ death and lost the Peloponnesian War and continuing with subsequent “stories” about the decay of the fourth century and the failure to guard against the Macedonian takeover.

Similarly the phenomenon of “colligation” identified by W. H. Walsh has played a conspicuous role in shaping what has been written—and thought—about Athens: Athenian history has often been read backward, inferring a coherent line of development when the reality may have been quite different.²⁵ Again, this is most evident in writing about the defeats at the hands of Sparta and of Philip, which historians and other students of the past have frequently used as organizing principles in telling the “stories” of the Peloponnesian War—which the Athenians nearly won—and of the fourth century, during which, it could just as well be argued, Athenian policy did not disintegrate until the decades immediately prior to the Macedonian takeover. The system that now dates events in relationship to the birth of Christ—surely an egregious example of reading history backward where ancient Greece is concerned!—has also facilitated easy distinctions between the “fifth century” and the “fourth century.” Though the watershed has some connection with an important event, the end of the Peloponnesian War, it has nonetheless been reinforced by the accident of history that divides the “story” of Athenian democracy into years that start with four and years that start with three. Some twentieth-century titles of books on the fourth century reveal the story that their authors have imagined: the English translation of a work by the French historian of Greece Claude Mossé, for example, which appeared under the title Athens in Decline. Buried even beneath these stories is the schema that sees a complete transformation of Athenian life with the death of Alexander and ignores the restoration of democracy early in the third century.

As Freud was happy to tell us, the part of the dream that the patient omits in the telling is likely to provide the clue to its meaning. What has been left out of writing about Athens itself tells a dramatic tale. In his treatise on Florentine government, Donato Giannotti explains in a sentence that he will omit discussion of the majority of the inhabitants since they lack political power: “About these, lacking as they do any degree whatever of citizenship, it is unnecessary to speak further.”²⁶ The same principle has characterized writing about Greece until the later part of the twentieth century, and it still obtains in many quarters today. It explains the joyous exaltation in the Renaissance and the eighteenth century of the repressive Spartan oligarchy as a “mixed government” whose “democratic” element was provided by the tiny minority of Spartiate warriors, and it explains the striking omission of slavery from the pivotal history of Greece penned just before the American Civil War by George Grote. (Donato Giannotti was a champion of Sparta, and Grote favored the southern states when war broke out in America.) The way in which people have written about the dynamics of the Athenian state makes resoundingly clear that for most people writing about politics has meant writing about people who exercise political power. In the preface to her book Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory, Wendy Brown tells how those who had heard of her projected feminist study of politics assumed she was planning to write about women.²⁷ That the marking out of disadvantaged groups is a crucial element in the self-definition of a ruling class seems painfully obvious, but this belief is not universally shared. An account of The Classical Athenian Democracy by David Stockton, published in 1990 by Oxford University Press, seems to include only two sentences about women; one states that women were assigned to the demes (neighborhood political units) first of their fathers and then of their husbands, and another discounts modern concern over Pericles’ dismissal of women as an anachronism.²⁸ Even among those who would not dream of disputing the value of studying Athenian women and Athenian slaves, the belief remains common that this study is discrete from the study of politics: though contemporary interest in social history has led more and more scholars to focus their research on Athenian residents who did not vote (women, slaves, the resident aliens known as “metics”), it is not unusual for those who have taken up the mission of describing the dynamics of Athenian political life to limit themselves to voters—that is, free adult males.

Colligation and the organization of discrete historical events into “stories,” criteria of relevance, and principles of selection—all this has shaped the history of writing about Athens. Viewed in this light, the Plutarchian belief that the study of history is morally improving—a belief shared by many in the era of America’s founding and still popular today—loses its grounding in the actual events of the past: if what young people have been taught as history in reality represents an accretion of values built up by many generations of unwitting interpreters, and if those interpretations are based on conscious or unconscious beliefs shaped in part by the concerns of each individual interpreter, then the improving value possessed by history is no different from the improving value of myth, poetry, and religious texts. This is not to say that the perusal of historical writing may not effect wondrous moral improvement; for all I know, it may from time to time do just that. But it is not clear in what ways its inspirational value differs from that offered by other genres.

Having said this, it is necessary for me to justify my own enterprise. Those who make the writing of history their life’s work are in no position to open their books with clever conceits that treat history as a pseudo-legitimate branch of fiction without acknowledging that a certain honor attends on efforts to reconstruct what really happened in history even if in fact those efforts do not succeed. One could fall back on Ernest Nagel’s observation that even the most prejudiced of historians stands a chance of hitting on the truth, but such extreme special pleading is not necessary.²⁹ In reality, of course, historians are constrained by different parameters from those faced by their counterparts in fiction writing. (I have written fiction, and I know the difference.) The paradox is that although there exists an infinite number of ways in which one may write about Athens, just as there is an infinite number of ways in which one can end a novel, there is also an infinite number of ways that are precluded. Many, many choices are open to me in writing about Athens, but I cannot invent a splendid sea battle in which the Athenians win the Peloponnesian War or a new Federalist paper in which Alexander Hamilton, under the pseudonym of Pericles, calls for a government in which the only arbiter of policy is an outdoor assembly of the landless poor. I can and do deny that the mismanagement that led to the Macedonian takeover of Athens had gone on for many years and arose from the decadence of democracy; I might also question the legitimacy of the notion of decadence. I can, though I do not, deny that the Macedonian takeover was a bad thing; and I could, and might, deny that Athenian democracy ended when Macedonian power brought Athenian independence to an end. But try as I may, I cannot make the combined forces of Athens and Thebes defeat the forces of Macedon at Chaeronea. However distorted the “evidence” of the past that comes down to us may be, it places limits on our own writing and even, I believe, lends a certain heroism to our enterprise.

My former teacher Jack Hexter once observed in writing about Garrett Mattingly that “not to be concerned with justice to one or many encountered in the record of the past is to diminish not their human nature but ours.”³⁰ My purpose in telling this “story of the story” about Athens is in part to do justice to what I see as the truth, to do what historians view as “setting the record straight.” I hope to acquit the Athenian democrats themselves of peculiar accusations that seem to me to have discreditable origins—class prejudice, excessive reverence for sources, preoccupation with political and moral theory at the expense of historical inquiry, facile confusion between one era and another, and unwarranted pessimism about human potential. But though the traditional accusations against the Athenians have a history of over two millennia, the project of refuting them in the late twentieth century simply in order to do justice to the dead and to the truth would hardly seem a worthwhile undertaking. Many of the traditional charges against the Athenians have fallen into desuetude, and others that still hang on have been answered forcefully by a number of scholars during the past ten or twenty years. A major part of my agenda, therefore, is to track the genealogy of the anti-Athenian tradition with an eye to understanding how it started and how it grew and changed.

Those who have engaged intensely with antiquity have imagined very different cities to which they have given the name “Athens.” For Renaissance thinkers the hallmark of Athens was its instability; for the Enlightenment, its decadence in the face of growing commerce. The French created the “bourgeois Athens” that was to be the subject of the long twentieth-century essay of Nicole Loraux and Pierre Vidal-Naquet; in the German mind, Greece as a whole became, in the words of Richard Jenkyns, “a sort of heavenly city, a shimmering fantasy on the far horizon”; the English felt free to fantasize an Athens that had snatched unity from diversity and forged the cohesive pluralistic society that seemed ever to stand just slightly beyond their own Victorian grasp; twentieth-century social critics have seen a “phallocratic” slave society.³¹ Each school claims for itself perception, not creation, but outsiders are bound to see things differently.

The recurrent fascination with the Athenian experiment is itself remarkable in view of the very different political structures that characterized the states in which subjects and citizens returned again and again to the Athenian example. There appears to be something surprisingly hardy and haunting in the Athenians’ little democracy, something that cries out for response and will not be denied. Much can be learnt from the different angles from which various thinkers throughout Western history have attacked the Athenians, who have been condemned as everything from seditious egalitarians to heartless oppressors of the downtrodden, and also from the bright flash of pro-Athenian feeling that burst forth from Victorian Britain and whose rays continue to illuminate some strands of ancient history in both Europe and America. Some have been content to bask in the glories of the school of Hellas eulogized by Pericles; others have denied even the slenderest hope of redemption to the killers of Socrates. The history of thinking about Athens has much to tell us about the vulnerability of historians to the indoctrination that is pressed upon them by intellectual constructs that take on lives of their own. The tiresome repetitiveness of much anti-Athenian rhetoric testifies to the vigor of hallowed traditions when they are not subjected to creative analysis, while the variations rung on familiar themes signal the importance of contemporary values as shapers of the imagined past. Where thinking about Athens has remained static, this uniformity bespeaks a sterility of thought that is in itself worthy of note; where it has not, changes in thinking about Athenian democracy have come almost entirely from changes in modern political thought and not from the discovery of new physical or textual evidence for its workings. The debate over Athenian democracy has touched on questions not only of historiography but also of ethics, political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, gender studies, and educational theory. It is worth examining.