PART ONE
Chapter Two
Some will say that a democracy is neither prudent nor fair, and that those who have property are the ones who should rule. But I say first that democracy is the name for the whole people, oligarchy of only a part of the people, and next that while the wealthy are best for guarding property, the wise give the best counsel, and the many, having heard things discussed, are the best judges; and that these groups, severally and collectively, share most equitably in a democracy.
—Athenagoras of Syracuse, speaking in the pages of Thucydides
IT MAY BE HELPFUL to begin by reviewing the history of the Athenian experiment from its beginnings in the sixth century to the Macedonian conquest of Greece. I have made an effort to offer as impartial an account as I know how, but inevitably my narrative will be shaped by my own perspectives and presuppositions.1
Ancient Athenians shared much in common with other Greeks of their day. They lived in a city-state, a polis, that confined citizenship to a narrow kinship group and engaged in frequent warfare with other city-states. Their income derived on the whole more from land than from commerce, and their economy was dependent on the labor of large numbers of unpaid slaves and women. They believed that reverence for the gods was a matter of patriotic duty and hence that religious belief was a legitimate province of public concern, but they had no canonical theological treatises, and religion was largely a matter of rituals. In these rituals the sacrifice of animals played a large part. They had a limited notion of what people today would call privacy, and the idea that the rights of the individual might take precedence over those of the community would have struck them as distinctly strange. Most of them were confident that, as Greeks, they enjoyed intellectual and moral superiority over other peoples they might encounter. The production of legitimate heirs was the primary purpose of marriage, and a considerable age gap generally divided husbands and wives. Political decisions were considered, at least by males, to be the province solely of men. Fundamentally, Athens was a community of households headed by male farmer-soldiers who made the public decisions that were to a considerable degree determined by the need to defend the community against attacks by one or more of the many similar communities that dotted the Greek landscape. In some crucial respects, however, the Athenians were atypical—in the nature of the democratic government they developed, for example, and in the extent of the power they came to wield throughout Greece. For this reason their polis has been the focus of an extraordinary amount of interest both in their own day and subsequently.
It is not surprising that such atypical Greeks as the democratic Athenians should have attracted so much attention. According to most Greeks, accidents of birth and wealth were no accident, and they correlated to a high degree with the possession of civic virtue. Despite this, the Athenians dared to replace the oligarchy that had succeeded iron age kingship throughout Greece with an increasingly radical democracy. Under this democratic regime Athens acquired a far-flung empire and produced one of the more memorable bursts of artistic activity the world has ever seen. Whereas the Spartans cast their singular form of government and way of life as the brainchild of one specific legislator, Lycurgus, Athenian tradition depicted the evolution of democracy and the democratic way of life as a gradual process extending over several centuries.2
THE EVOLUTION OF DEMOCRACY AT ATHENS
It was probably toward the beginning of the first millennium B.C. that the free inhabitants of Attica joined together as citizens of the predominant Attic polis of Athens; Greek tradition ascribed this unification to their king Theseus, a friend of Heracles (Hercules) and the slayer of the monstrous Minotaur. Some time afterward the Athenians abolished the kingship and replaced the king with three archons who served life terms. One archon was apparently chosen from the aristocratic family of the Medontids, whereas the other two were elected. At some point during the eighth century the archontate became a ten-year term, and by the middle of the seventh century the term had been cut back to one year and the number of archons increased to nine; the Medontids also lost their special privileges. By the seventh century class conflict had developed that was sufficiently serious to spark an unsuccessful attempt at tyranny by one Cylon, and around 620 Draco was appointed to quell popular unrest by formulating a written law code. The harsh legislation of Draco, later said to have been written not in ink but in blood, failed to put an end to the widespread unrest among the Athenian poor, many of whom were hopelessly in debt to the rich. The problems in Athens were intensified by the existence of a new aristocracy of wealth that had sprung up as a result of the expansion of trade, and this class challenged the traditional aristocracy for a share in the political pie.
Toward the beginning of the sixth century the aristocrat Solon was set up as an arbitrator to mediate among the various classes, particularly between the disaffected peasants and the landed aristocrats to whom they owed a portion of their produce.3 Solon’s solution to the class struggle was to establish in Athens a timocratic system dividing all Athenians into four groups depending on their income. Each group was allotted a different gradation of political privilege. By this system the archontate was available to the highest class, lower offices to the middle two classes, and membership in the assembly to all classes including the very poor fourth class, the thetes. Fine distinctions made between the middle two classes remain obscure. In addition, all four classes were eligible to serve on the new popular juries Solon created, to which citizens might appeal the verdicts of the magistrates. The poor also benefited from Solon’s cancellation of debts, a measure in which their creditors acquiesced out of relief that Solon had not sought to heal his country’s wounds by a wholesale redistribution of property. It is possible too that Solon created a council of four hundred; though this is uncertain, he did assign the role of guardianship of the laws, protector of the constitution, and supervisor of the magistrates to the Council of the Areopagus, an already existing aristocratic body of uncertain composition that was henceforth to consist of all exarchons, serving for life.
Although Solon’s system remained in force for nearly a century, it did not put an end to party strife in Athens. In 560 Peisistratus, with the help of an armed guard, established himself as tyrannos (“tyrant”) in the city, following the precedent set already in other city-states such as Corinth, Megara, and Sicyon. (Despite its modern connotations, the Greek word “tyrant” at first simply connoted a strongman who took power outside proper legal channels, and the imputation of harshness and self-interested autocracy did not attach to the word until somewhat later.) The age of Peisistratus was a prosperous one for Athens as the tyrant developed the city into a major cultural center and provided many jobs to the poor. Since Peisistratus left the machinery of the Solonic system largely in place, moreover, the era of increased stability afforded the populace considerable practice in the day-to-day routines of participation in government. As was frequently the case in Greek tyrannies, however, the good feeling Peisistratus had generated did not long outlive him, and considerable tension developed after his son Hipparchus was assassinated in 514 and his other son Hippias driven into exile in 510.
It was at this juncture that a popular reformer arose in the figure of Cleisthenes, a member of the prominent Alcmaeonid family. Cleisthenes sought to replace old tribal loyalties with a new loyalty to the state by dividing Athens into ten brand-new tribes (replacing the four old ones), each tribe divided among three units known as trittyes, each trittys in a different section of Attica. The trittyes were composed of smaller existing units known as demes, cohesive neighborhoods that had the potential to function as religious centers, administrative districts and voting wards; participation in deme affairs would serve to educate Athenians in the daily workings of democracy.4 Through the reshuffling of old tribes and the geographic fragmentation of new ones, Cleisthenes hoped to break the hold that powerful aristocratic families had exercised in their self-appointed domains. Though scholars have not failed to notice that the tribal reorganization left the Alcmaeonid sphere of influence surprisingly intact, Cleisthenes’ tribal reform did by and large advance the weakening of local aristocratic loyalties already begun by Peisistratus. In addition, Cleisthenes established a council known as the boule to prepare business for the assembly, consisting of fifty men chosen from each tribe by lot for a total of five hundred.5 Ten strategoi, or generals, were to be elected, one from each tribe. Both the position of councilor and that of general carried one-year terms, but though a man might serve on the council only twice in his life, the terms of the strategoi were renewable as long as popularity permitted. The generalship came to be so important in Athens that after the first Persian invasion in 490 the Athenians decided to use a random lot to select not only their councilors but also their archons, a clear statement that the generalship had overtaken the archontate in prestige. Generals were usually chosen from well-to-do candidates, but anyone who owned property in Attica was eligible; the archontate was officially thrown open to the third class in 457, and though it was never formally opened to the lowest class, the thetes, in practice this distinction was probably disregarded. It is likely that most Athenian voters by the time they died had held political office of some kind at least once, if not several times. Although the strategoi had the privilege of addressing the assembly before other citizens were allowed to speak, they did not themselves have the power to make decisions beyond the provisional ones that had to be made in the field, and on the whole the responsibility for decision-making lay with the ekklesia (assembly) and with the popular courts.6
After two stunning defeats (Marathon in 490 and Salamis in 480) and one victory that gained them little (Thermopylae, 480), the Persians were forced to abandon their plans to conquer Greece. The Athenians seem to have taken their success in the Persian Wars as a sign that their unconventional form of government had not incurred divine disapproval for its disregard of the traditional prerogatives of wealth and lineage. They regarded the naval victory at Salamis as decisive in ending the war, and the provocative admiral Themistocles, the architect of that victory, became a national hero—though Athenians and other Greeks enjoyed telling stories that contrasted his deviousness with the sober scrupulousness of his rival Aristides. Inevitably, the pivotal role of the Athenian navy under Themistocles in the Greek victory over Persia provoked a pronounced shift in the balance of power among the Greek city-states. Once viewed as the most powerful state in Greece, Sparta now had to share that position with Athens. A combination of good fortune and Spartan mismanagement had placed the Athenians at the head of the league of islanders and coastal states who sought protection from the Persians and, if possible, vengeance and compensation for the ravages of war in the form of booty from anti-Persian raids. Aristides was charged with assessing the amount of tribute owed by each league member. This league the Athenians gradually converted into their own empire, using military force to demand the participation of some states and prevent the secession of others. Members of the league were frequently pressured into accepting democratic governments, and citizens of allied states had to travel to Athens to have legal cases heard.
The increasing conversion of the league into an Athenian empire sparked fear and anger in the Spartans. The aristocratic strategos Cimon, son of the Persian War hero Miltiades, had advocated a strong anti-Persian, pro-Spartan stance at Athens, but in the end his policy was rejected. In addition, the central role of the Athenian navy had increased the political aspirations of the ordinary rower in the fleet (causing Themistocles to be blamed by some for catapulting Athens into democracy). The constitution of Athenian imperial power along naval lines gave special importance to sailors, a class that included many of the truly poor, and led them to believe that they were the basis of Athens’s power as much as—or more than—the heavily armed hoplite soldiers who formed the land army and who required at least enough money to furnish a shield and sword in a time when governments did not issue weapons to their conscripts. Led by the democratic and aggressive Ephialtes and his associate, Pericles, an Athenian majority seems to have voted late in the 460s to limit the power of the Council of the Areopagus, composed of former archons, and give much of its jurisdiction over to popular courts.7 These reforms were strenuously opposed by an outraged minority. A few months later in 461 the requisite number of citizens also voted to send Cimon into exile by the process known as ostracism, whereby a total of six thousand votes against any one man would send him into a nonpunitive exile for ten years. Sometimes attributed to Cleisthenes, and frequently viewed as a safeguard against another tyranny, the process was first used in the 480s as a tool in the party strife that accompanied the departure of the tyrants and the war with the Persians, as the upstart Themistocles vied with the popular Aristides. After the ostracism of Aristides, the procedure continued to be used as a party weapon until it fell into desuetude during the Peloponnesian War.8
The ostracism of Cimon brought to a head the underlying tensions between Athens and Sparta, a very different kind of polis. Although bitter civil strife appears to have plagued the Spartans early in their history, the story was current in Greece how their legendary lawgiver Lycurgus had established a political system—indeed, an entire way of life—that had endured with minor revisions for centuries. With their two kings, their five ephors (“overseers”), their council of twenty-eight elders, and their assembly of citizens (the “Equals”), the Spartans were envied by many Greeks for the notorious stability of their government and the concord among their citizens. To be sure, this concord was posited on the fact that the Spartans limited their citizenship to a tiny body of soldiers who were outnumbered about ten to one by state serfs known as helots. These helots provided all the disagreeable manual labor necessary to support the Spartiate citizens in what amounted to a perpetual armed camp. Although modern thinkers are generally alienated by the system of helotry, slavery was commonplace in Greece, and the Spartan system was much admired by contemporaries.9 Spartan sympathies were particularly common among Athenian aristocrats. Nonetheless, in the end expansionist aspirations proved dominant in Athens, and the departure of Cimon was attended by the outbreak of the so-called First Peloponnesian War, an undeclared war between Athens and Sparta that extended until a peace was signed in 446, and by the rise of Pericles, who after the murder of his associate, Ephialtes, became the leading democratic politician at Athens.10 Pericles was elected one of the ten strategoi nearly every year between the murder of Ephialtes and his own death in 429, and nobody in fifth-century Athens matched him for enduring political prestige. Under his leadership the Athenians strengthened the democratic element in their government, establishing a low state pay for service on juries and on the Council of 500 that would enable more poor people to exercise their legal right to serve, and they also intensified their hold over their allies, moving the league’s treasury from Delos to Athens for what they unpersuasively insisted was safekeeping.11 It was in part the tribute from the league that enabled the Athenians of Pericles’ day to carry out numerous building projects, the most famous of which resulted in the Parthenon.
The art forms for which the Periclean age was known included not only sculpture and architecture but also the tragic drama, already flourishing by the middle of the century but perfected during the time of Pericles’ ascendancy by his friend Sophocles and Sophocles’ slightly younger contemporary, Euripides. Tragedy provided a vital arena for examining the painful questions that beset human existence, and the dramatic format encouraged a capacity to see tricky problems from more than one side, a skill of enormous value in a democracy where citizens were called upon to make difficult decisions. Tragedy failed, however, in one crucial area; for all their efforts, Sophocles and Euripides were unable to instill in their fellow-citizens any radically new view of the human race, which the Athenians, like other Greeks, perceived as clearly divided into various binary groups—free and slave, male and female, Greek and barbarian, citizen and alien. The egalitarianism of the Athenian ethos extended only to free citizen males. Women and slaves had carefully circumscribed rights and played a part in public life primarily by facilitating the leisure of free males, and it was only under extraordinary circumstances that resident aliens might become Athenian citizens. Although their slaveholding and their exclusivity in extending the franchise to aliens were typical of ancient Greeks as a whole, the vehemence of their denial of women’s value and capacity set Athenian men somewhat apart from other Hellenes.12 Pericles himself attracted considerable attention by divorcing his Athenian wife and setting up housekeeping with a cultivated foreign woman, Aspasia, who welcomed celebrated intellectuals into their home. Throughout their history a strong elitist strain marked the thinking of the Athenians, who continued to return rich men to office with great regularity. Affluence was not without its perils, however. The wealthy were regularly assigned public burdens known as liturgies. The variety of possible liturgies reflects the vibrancy of cultural life at Athens; they included not only outfitting warships but also holding banquets and training choruses for dramatic performances. The rich were understandably ambivalent about exercising this sort of “privilege”; noblesse oblige could be very expensive.
The Athenians appear to have been willing to pay some price for their aggressiveness abroad. This price was to come in the form of a deadly war with the Spartans. What the Athenians did not foresee was a protracted conflict that lasted (with some interruptions) for twenty-seven years. Pericles died shortly after the outbreak of the war, though not before delivering the funeral oration for the war dead that stands out so dramatically from the pages of Thucydides’ history, and not before being impeached and temporarily removed from office by the disaffected populace. A member of the same distinguished family as Cleisthenes, the Alcmaeonid Pericles played, like his kinsman, the role of the democratic aristocrat in politics, subject, of course, to the will of his constituency.
Pericles had no successor of comparable stature. None of the politicians who came afterward matched him in his firm hold on the popular will, and policy seems often to have been made more by the assembly than by individual statesmen. Other changes were also evident in Athenian politics after Pericles’ death. Although positions of importance continued to be held by men from well-to-do families, these families were often part of the new aristocracy of trade wealth rather than of the old aristocracy of land wealth. In addition, preeminence in the assembly came to be accorded to eloquent, assertive men who might never have held the position of strategos, and a certain degree of specialization crept into public life, with some men distinguishing themselves in the military sphere alone and others known only for their persuasive powers in the assembly; the word demagogos (literally, leader of the people) came to be applied to popular speakers. The demagogos about whom the most is known was Cleon, a brash, outspoken politician hated by both the historian Thucydides and the comic dramatist Aristophanes.13
The Athenians and the Spartans signed a peace treaty in 421 following the death of the aggressive Cleon on the Athenian side and the successful general Brasidas on the Spartan, but the peace did not last, and it was in the course of the next stage of the war that the Athenians resolved to undertake a huge expedition to assist their Sicilian allies and consolidate Athenian power in the West. In so doing they accepted the arguments of the flamboyant young aristocrat Alcibiades, a relative of Pericles, and rejected the more cautious counsel of the conservative Nicias. The expedition ended in disaster, and soon afterward it was resolved to turn the government over to a smaller group of 400 who in time would yield place to a somewhat more broadly based group of 5000. The short-lived oligarchy was soon overthrown, however, by the democratic navy. The theater of war had shifted from Greece to Sicily to the Hellespont, and there the Athenians had some success; but the use of the rigorous Athenian system of military and political accountability ended in the execution of nearly the whole slate of generals who had been in command in the victorious battle off the Arginusae islands in 406 after which they had failed to retrieve soldiers from the cold Ionian waters (dead or live soldiers, depending on which sources are to be believed). The next major engagement against the Spartans—at Aegospotami in the Gallipoli peninsula—ended in defeat for Athens, evidently because of treachery.
The debacle at Aegospotami was decisive in ending the war. Under the auspices of Sparta, oligarchs once more took control of the Athenian government, but their rule was so bloody that even the Spartan king Pausanias was alienated, and he gave his support to the democratic resistance that overthrew the so-called Thirty Tyrants in 403.14 Following the reestablishment of the democracy in its most highly developed form—with most office-holders selected by lot and state pay reinstated for state service—the Athenians signed the first recorded amnesty in history. Its provisions prevented anyone from being tried for political misconduct prior to 403, but the democrats sometimes managed to evade the terms of the amnesty by focusing on more recent events, the most famous instance being the trial of Socrates, who had given offense by questioning both traditional and democratic values. Although it is plain that the trial was politically motivated, Socrates’ failure to insist on his right to his own beliefs underlines the degree to which the democratic Athenians shared the common Greek assumption that a certain concord—homonoia— among citizens in civic and religious matters was indispensable to the community. Democracy in Athens did not imply a principled commitment to the rights of individuals where they might seem to conflict with the needs of the state.
The end of the war also marked the end of the great age of tragedy at Athens. The war itself had become the object of several of Athens’s most memorable comedies, however, and the comic dramatist Aristophanes continued to write until his death in the 380s. Toward the end of Aristophanes’ life, philosophy came to replace drama as the vehicle for sorting out the complexities of the universe. Shortly after Socrates’ death Plato began composing dialogues in which his beloved teacher, Socrates, was generally the principal speaker, and Plato’s own pupil Aristotle was born within a year or two of Aristophanes’ death. The war had brought about a new state of affairs in Greece as a whole. In general the protracted hostilities had been bad for the economies of the city-states as well as for Greek morale, but within a decade of the Spartan victory at Aegospotami, Sparta’s old allies Corinth and Thebes had joined a resurgent Athens in waging war on their former hegemon. Although Sparta won this so-called Corinthian War, her high-handed peace time tactics alienated many Greeks, and the Athenians soon found it possible to organize another league.
Greek diplomacy becomes somewhat elusive in the fourth century, as it was an era of shifting alliances that lacked the comforting bipolarity of the fifth. Two important features of the fourth century are the failure of the Spartans to hold the loyalty of their allies and the ability of the Athenians to induce Greek states to join a new confederacy under their leadership. Although the attempts of Mausolus of Caria to spark insurrection in the confederacy were thwarted by the death that afforded his wife the occasion to build his renowned memorial, the efforts of Philip of Macedon to subdue not only Athens but all Greece met with success. Thus the political ascendancy in fourth-century Greece was passed on from Sparta to Athens, from Athens to Sparta’s old ally Thebes, from Thebes back to Athens and then finally to Macedon.
Response in Athens to the rise of Philip was mixed. The most popular general of the fourth century, Phocion, inclined in many ways toward Macedon, and in a Macedonian hegemony the orator and educator Isocrates saw an opportunity for the Athenians to join with a united Greece in a crusade against Persia. Meanwhile Demosthenes sought to alert his fellow-citizens to the Macedonian threat to Greek liberties. Demosthenes threw intense passion into his efforts to rouse the Athenians to an adequate resistance against Philip, a passion to which his orations bear painful witness. Fighting Philip would have entailed the expenditure of more energy and money than the Athenians were willing to countenance, and Athens failed dismally to rise to the Macedonian challenge. Because of this stunning failure, many Western thinkers have viewed the fourth century as a protracted period of decline that led inevitably to the collapse of the city-state system, both throughout Greece in general and in Athens in particular. Indeed, many have sought to trace the decline back into the fifth century, in some cases to the death of Pericles and in some instances to the ascendancy of Pericles himself, whose institution of state pay for state service has sometimes been seen as planting the seeds of indolence and greed.
RECOVERING THE IDEOLOGY OF THE DEMOCRACY
The halfhearted resistance the Athenians offered to Philip led to their defeat in 338 at the Battle of Chaeronea, and in 322, after Athens’s unsuccessful rebellion from Macedon, Alexander’s general Antipater dismantled the democratic constitution and imposed a Macedonian garrison. It was not only the eventual collapse of Athens, however, that gave rise to the anti-Athenian position, for the tradition of hostility to the Athenian democracy traces its origins almost to the very foundation of the democracy around the middle of the fifth century. Most Athenians, of course, were not hostile to the city’s government. Monarchy need not be popular in order to go on existing, nor tyranny, nor aristocracy, nor oligarchy; but by definition democracy cannot continue in an autonomous Greek polis unless the majority of free males of voting age are amenable to its doing so. Athenian democracy was briefly overthrown twice, first in the short-lived coup of 411 and again in 404 at the insistence of the Spartan Lysander, who established an oligarchy so distasteful that his countryman King Pausanias assisted Athenian democrats in its overthrow. Aside from these two episodes springing from the strains of a devastating war, no known attempts were made against the democracy from its establishment by Cleisthenes until the defeat of the city-states at the hands of Philip. We are forced to conclude that democracy was extremely popular among adult male citizens in Athens.
The contemporary supporters of democracy, however, have been turned by the passing of time into something of a silent majority. This phenomenon is partly explicable and partly mysterious. One might argue that the most articulate enthusiasts of democracy were more likely to be out governing than closeted in their studies cogitating: thus writing about government was left largely to the disgruntled. One could claim that the merits of popular government were self-evident—or, alternatively, that the idea of democracy was so incendiary in elite circles that its supporters thought it best to say as little about it as possible. The truth is that it is impossible to be sure why the ideology of democracy was diffused throughout the literature of drama and oratory rather than concentrated in tracts on government, and why the only dialogues in which Athenian democracy puts forward its claims directly and effectively are the modern debates that late twentieth-century thinkers have imaginatively reconstructed to fill the gap.15 The teachers known to their contemporaries and to posterity as the sophists did sometimes write about political matters, but they have left us next to nothing of their works; most of what we know comes from fragments, isolated quotations, or speeches in dialogues that their rival Plato wrote to discredit them.16 The relationship between nomos (custom, law) and physis (nature) was the object of heated controversy among the sophists, and the bearing this dialogue had on the debate concerning the best form of government must have been considerable.17 Although some scholars have sought to trace this connection, because of their desultory nature the fragmentary snatches of extant pre-Socratic writings must remain by and large a tantalizing reminder of how much has been lost.18 For all these reasons, some industry is required to determine just what the theory was behind Athenian democracy. There existed no formal democratic manifesto at Athens, no preamble to the Athenian constitution, indeed no Athenian constitution; students whose eyes light on volumes entitled The Athenian Constitution will be disappointed to find only a brief essay on the topic filed among the writings of Xenophon or a longer one classed among those of Aristotle.19 The genuine article—or articles—existed only in Athenian minds; indeed, Aristotle himself questioned whether they existed at all.
Despite the paucity of texts extolling democracy, however, enough remains to give some sense of what its supporters liked about it, and the passages in praise of democracy that have survived demonstrate that its admirers differed markedly from its critics in what they saw as the cardinal principles of the system. One of the earliest surviving passages in praise of democracy appears in the debate on government set in Persia and inserted into Herodotus’s history of the Persian Wars (3.80.1–82.5), composed probably around 435. The dramatic date of the debate is 521, when three of the noblemen who had been involved in the overthrow of the previous rule of the Magi are discussing what sort of government to put in its place. Herodotus’s repeated insistence on the reliability of the story and his defense of it against skeptics both here and later (6.131) suggest that he at least did not make it up out of whole cloth. Though many scholars have thought that the debate reveals about as much about Persian political theory as Hamlet does about Danish history, still it gives some sense of what Herodotus’s contemporaries might have had to say about the different types of government.20
All three Persian noblemen, Otanes, Megabyzus and Darius, make strong cases for the forms of government they advocate: the rule of one, the rule of a few, and the rule of the people. The admiration Herodotus manifests throughout his history for the Athenians has led many readers to suppose that he sided in the debate with Otanes, who says: “First of all the rule of the multitude has the most beautiful name of all, isonomia [perhaps best translated ‘equality before the law’ or ‘equal opportunity to participate in politics’], and secondly, it works completely differently from monarchy. Offices are assigned by lot, all the magistrates are held accountable for their actions, and all deliberations take place before the common assembly” (3.80.6). The use of the lot and the accountability of magistrates certainly seem to point to the post-Cleisthenic democracy of Athens and not to any government in existence in 521. Herodotus’s use of the word isonomia instead of the more specific demokratia has left open the door to speculation that he was not in fact discussing democracy at all, but it is difficult to imagine what else he would have been thinking of that would constitute the third form of government in the balanced set of which the other two members were monarchy and oligarchy. More decisively, later in book 6 when Herodotus once again insists that the account of the debate is historical, he vents his spleen at those who deny that Otanes advised the Persians to demokrateesthai (6.43.3). It would seem that Herodotus was absolutely discussing democracy and that what was later called demokratia was at the outset known more often by the less provocative but equally tendentious word isonomia.21
Herodotus’s enthusiasm for Athens permeates his history to such a degree that he has been taken to task for it. To the vigor of the Athenians’ form of government Herodotus attributes their resolution in fighting the Persians, and he ascribes the ultimate victory over Persia to their heroism, calling the Athenians the “saviors of Hellas” (7.139). The victory of Greece over Persia, then, is billed as a victory for democracy. Herodotus even goes so far as to insist that after the expulsion of the tyrants the Athenians became the best fighters among the Greeks, an extraordinary claim indeed in view of the fact that as much as eighty years later Pericles, in framing his strategy for the Peloponnesian War, took as axiomatic the improbability of an Athenian victory in a land battle against Sparta.
Because of the enthusiasm—some would say partisanship—Herodotus demonstrates for Athens, it seems likely that he endorsed the sentiments of Otanes, but for the intellectual history of Athenian democracy it hardly matters; what is important is that this debate offers modern readers a small window on the minds of democratic thinkers of the mid–fifth century. What Otanes has to say about democracy certainly does not condemn it surreptitiously as the words of an antidemocrat might.22 It is significant that neither Megabyzus in his advocacy of oligarchy nor Darius in his case for monarchy brands democracy as a form of class government entailing the oppression of a rich majority by a poor minority. Did this complaint date from the hurt feelings of a later period?
It is important to notice, in Otanes’ speech favoring democracy, the word aneuthynos, “unaccountable.” “What virtue is to be found in monarchy,” Otanes asks, “when the ruler can do whatever he wants and not be held to account for it?” Though at first the object of his attack might appear to be simply one-man rule, the context of Greek political life argues against this. Greek oligarchies were no more accountable than monarchies. It was only in democracies that machinery was evolving to hold officials to account, and in fact there is every reason to believe that by the middle of the fifth century hypeuthynos, “accountable,” had become a democratic catchword. Aristotle, an admirer of the Spartans, nonetheless complains of their failures to hold the ephors accountable (Politics 1271a5). The concept of accountability also appears prominently in the writings of two of Herodotus’s contemporaries, the playwright Aeschylus and the philosopher Democritus. Predictably, the contrast between accountable and unaccountable politicians is made in Aeschylus’s Persians, produced in 472. Aeschylus takes much the same approach as Herodotus to the question of the difference between Greeks and Persians, portraying the Persian nobility as well-meaning but deprived—alas—of the advantages of the Greek enlightenment. In a memorable passage, Xerxes’ mother announces to the Persian elders that her son, should he succeed, will be greatly admired, but in the event of failure cannot be held hypeuthynos polei, “accountable to the city,” for his actions (211–13). Clearly this passage was expected to drive home to the Athenian audience the horrors of the Eastern despotism they had so narrowly escaped. Similarly in Prometheus Bound, probably composed shortly before Aeschylus’s death in 456, the tyranny of Zeus is illustrated by the fact that, in Prometheus’s words, he is not hypeuthynos (324). The theme of accountability also plays a role in the corpus of Democritean fragments that have come down to us—tiny in comparison with the weighty tomes of Plato and Aristotle but vast in comparison with the snatches that remain of Democritus’s contemporaries. Secular, unsentimental, and brooking no nonsense, Democritus the atomist broke his ties with the archaic worldview of the Greek nobility as surely as he broke those with the traditional god-centeredness of scientific thought. Not surprisingly, he had no faith in the automatic virtue of office-holders, since such people have been placed in a position of power by arbitrary human customs and not by any natural superiority. It is fair, he contends, that people remember the mistakes of those who hold office rather than their successes: “For just as those who return a deposit do not deserve praise, whereas those who do not do so deserve blame and punishment, so with the official: he was not elected to make mistakes but to do things well.” The emphasis on accountability here strongly suggests that Democritus was thinking of Athenian democracy, and his endorsement of democracy as a form of government is confirmed by his statement that “poverty under a democracy is as much to be preferred to so-called prosperity under an autocracy as freedom to slavery.”23
The date of Aeschylus’s Persians is known exactly, that of the Prometheus Bound, approximately; Herodotus’s debate and Democritus’s fragments can be dated only to some time around the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War—probably, but not certainly, to the generation after Aeschylus. Although it would be presumptuous to reconstruct an entire political system to which these three men would happily give their blessing, their writings still give us some idea of the more pleasant associations that were gathering around the idea of democracy in general and Athenian democracy in particular toward the middle of the fifth century. Certainly the subordination of family and religious ties to a formal legal system that seems to be advocated in the Oresteia (produced in 458, right after the reforms of Ephialtes) suggests Aeschylus’s support of the Athenian democratic state.24 Affirmations of the value of democracy can also be found in tragedy as the century wears on. Though Sophocles in Oedipus reflects some concern about the intellectual restlessness of democratic man and Euripides frequently seems apprehensive about the moral and spiritual consequences of the sophistic acrobatics that had come to form an indispensable part of politics, both playwrights ultimately affirm the joys of democracy. It seems clear that Creon’s son Haemon speaks for the playwright in Sophocles’ Antigone (441) when he takes his autocratic father to task for discounting the will of the people, and Euripides in the Suppliants (ca. 422) includes a long and pointed dialogue between the Theban herald and Athens’s mythical king Theseus that addresses directly the opposition of democracy and one-man rule and leaves no doubt where the playwright’s sympathies lie.
The opening question of the Theban herald at Athens evokes the bewilderment Aeschylus and Herodotus ascribed to the Persians at the Athenians’ seemingly masterless government. Who, the herald asks, is the local tyrannos to whom he might announce his tidings? This question, of course, has shock value for the Athenian audience in the theater. Theseus loses no time in setting the ignorant herald straight about the way things are done at Athens:
One moment, stranger.
Your start was wrong, seeking a master here.
This city is free, and ruled by no one man.
The people reign, in annual succession.
They do not yield the power to the rich;
The poor man has an equal share in it.
(403–8)
This, of course, is nonsense as it concerns bronze age Athens, but tragedy has never observed chronological niceties. Responding to Theseus’s rebuke, the herald expresses his glee in discovering the advantage his native Thebes has over a city with such a pitiful excuse for a government—one swayed by a mob and its self-interested leaders, where decisions are made by poor people with no capacity to understand the public interest. These snide and eminently un-Athenian remarks are designed to set up the paean to democracy that follows immediately. Very well, Theseus replies angrily; as long as you have started this, let me tell you a few things about good government:
Nothing
Is worse for a city than an absolute ruler.
In earliest times, before there are common laws,
One man has power and makes the laws his own:
Equality is not yet. With written laws,
People of few resources and the rich
Both have the same recourse to justice. Now
A man of means, if badly spoken of,
Will have no better standing than the weak;
And if the lesser is in the right, he wins
Against the great.
Theseus goes on to cite the formula by which the herald opened the floor to debate in the Athenian assembly of the fifth century:
This is the call of freedom:
“What man has good advice to give the city,
And wishes to make it known?” He who responds
Gains glory; the unwilling may hold their peace.
For the city, what can be more equal than that?
A democracy, Theseus goes on, appreciates talented and valorous youth, whereas a king fears them; even the chastity of virgins is safer in democracy, and Theseus’s decision to conclude his speech by expressing alarm at what would happen to his daughters under a monarchy makes clear with what a very heavy brush indeed Euripides has chosen to paint the differences between democracy and autocracy:
Why bring up girls as gentlewomen, fit
For marriage, if tyrants may take them for their joy—
A grief to parents? I would rather die
Than see my children forced to such a union.
These are the darts I shoot at what you say.
(430–57)25
Democracy, then, is set up by Euripides as the antithesis of both brute force and the rule of wealth. Whereas the herald cites the advantages of one-man rule, Theseus stresses the advantages of democracy over oligarchy as well. His opposition of democracy on the one hand to the ravishing of virgins on the other verges on parody, and it gives us some sense of the ferocity with which Athenian democrats defended their cause.26 It reminds us too that women were viewed as recipients of the benefits of democracy rather than as active participants in the democratic system.
At about the same time that Sophocles and Euripides were composing tragedies, the sophist Protagoras of Abdera, countryman of Democritus and contemporary (perhaps down to the very year) of Herodotus, was proffering his wares in the imperial city, and in so doing he inevitably attracted the attention of Socrates. The Platonic dialogue that bears Protagoras’s name represents a thoroughgoing attack by Plato, in the name of Socrates, on the notion that sophists can educate anybody for anything.27 In reply to the inquiries of Socrates, who questions that virtue can be taught, Protagoras delivers a long speech in which he advances three related arguments in defense of the thesis that all people possess in some degree the rudiments of civic-mindedness, rudiments categorized at various points as politike techne (political wisdom, or the wisdom necessary to live in a city-state), politike arete (political excellence, or the excellence appropriate to those seeking to be useful in a city-state), dikaiosyne (justice), and sophrosyne (sobriety in judgment). These qualities Protagoras sees as originating with the senses of aidos (shame, decency) and dike (the hardest of these to translate: fairness, even-handedness, equity).
Protagoras begins his discourse with a myth. In earliest times, he claims, though Prometheus had improved the lot of humankind by stealing fire, people were still unable to live together constructively in cities on account of their lack of politike techne. Seeing this, Zeus determined to prevent the utter destruction of the species by sending Hermes to bring aidos and dike to mortals. When Hermes asked Zeus whether these should be distributed to a select few, like the arts of medicine and other technai (skills), or rather among everyone, Zeus—and this is the crucial part of the story—bade him give them to all, “for cities cannot be formed if only a few share in these skills as they do in other arts” (322D). It is for this reason, Protagoras tells Socrates, that though many people such as the citizens of Athens (the only polis he mentions by name) consider it the business of just a few to advise in certain technical matters of craftsmanship, nonetheless “when they come together to take counsel on matters in which politike arete is relevant, in which it is necessary to be guided in all respects by justice and good sense (dikaiosyne and sophrosyne), naturally they take advice from everybody, since it is held that everyone should partake of this excellence, or else that states cannot exist” (322E–23E). This myth, then, constitutes Protagoras’s first “argument,” and it is because of this distribution of the politike techne, he says, that the Athenians do right to accept political advice from anyone who is moved to give it.
Protagoras uses the next two “arguments” derived from common sense and human observation to lend credence to this myth. Second, Protagoras explains after he has set forth his myth, when a man who is inadequate in, say, flute playing or some other such skill, insists that he is in point of fact perfectly competent, people are horrified to see him so out of touch with reality, and those close to him scold him for acting crazy; but when justice is involved, the opposite is true: a man would be considered crazy for publicly confessing his injustice, for “they say that everyone should profess to be just, whether he is or not, and whoever does not make such a profession is mad; since it is held that everyone without exception must share in it in some way or other if he is really human” (323B–C). Third, Protagoras points out that lectures, reproofs, and corrective punishments normally attend on those who are found to be unjust, whereas no one in his right mind would dream of reproving anyone for his ugliness or physical infirmity; this distinction, he maintains, shows that people clearly perceive all individuals as having the power to improve their moral physiques in a way that they do not have the power to change their bodily ones. Punishment, Protagoras argues, is only exceptionally undertaken for purposes of vengeance; customarily it is to improve the character of the malefactor, for “he who undertakes to punish according to reason does not take vengeance for a past offence, since he cannot succeed in undoing what has been done; he looks rather to the future, and aims at preventing that particular individual and others who see him punished from doing wrong again” (324B). (Although Protagoras’s stress on the rehabilitative purpose of punishment is all very touching, nothing we know about Greek mores suggests that there existed any such consensus on this topic; indeed his contemporaries would probably have found the notion bizarre. Plainly the Athenians did not aim at rehabilitating the victors of Arginusae.)
Though it is advanced in defense of his educational program, Protagoras’s contention that all individuals partake in the politike techne serves additionally as one of the few theoretical arguments in favor of democracy in general and Athenian democracy in particular that survive from classical times. Indeed, Plato has Protagoras specify that his myth explains not only the teachability of virtue (since everyone by divine dispensation possesses at least a minimal aptitude for learning it) but the rationale behind Athenian democracy as well. Scholars have been understandably skeptical about the attribution of these ideas to Protagoras. Although the exact dates are uncertain, it appears that the Platonic dialogue is an account written around 395 about a speech given around 433 by a man who died around 415. Nearly everyone who had heard the speech was dead by 395. This constellation hardly affords a promising scenario for historical accuracy. The speaker in question, moreover, was diametrically opposed to Plato in his political views; and he was famous for doubting the existence of the gods. Despite all these difficulties, however, it is hard to understand why Plato would have chosen to distort Protagoras’s real ideas in this particular direction. How, in other words, would putting this myth in Protagoras’s mouth have helped Plato make Protagoras’s arguments in favor of democracy look foolish, and what were the far more cogent things Protagoras had actually said that Plato so cleverly suppressed by attaching this plausible tale to his name instead? If the myth did not originate with Protagoras, then where did it come from? All things considered, it seems to me most believable that Protagoras actually said what Plato claims he did.28
A similar problem attends on the funeral oration that Thucydides claims Pericles delivered in 430 in honor of the men who died during the first year of the Peloponnesian War (2.35–46), for it seems to me that, on balance and with reservations, Thucydides disapproved of Athenian democracy. The speech ascribed to Pericles, however, was delivered in front of thousands of listeners still alive when Thucydides was writing, and it does not conflict embarrassingly with any other beliefs associated with Pericles. For these reasons most people have found it somewhat easier to accept the reliability of Thucydides’ report about Pericles than to be confident about Plato’s concerning Protagoras.29 The funeral oration contains by far the most elaborate contemporary praise of Athenian democracy and explication of the philosophy behind it that has survived from antiquity. Though it cannot be assumed that the arguments Pericles advances were supported by all his democratic contemporaries, it is likely that Pericles chose to express sentiments that would strike responsive chords in his audience. Pericles wisely gauged that what was both most fitting and most strategic on this occasion was a paean to Athens that praised her for being the inverse of Sparta.30 This is precisely what he delivered.
Pericles addressed his speech in large part to Athenian citizens and allies whom he feared the strains of war might cause to waver in their loyalty to the Athenian way of life, as we know did actually happen not long after the outbreak of the war when some Athenian factions sought to negotiate with the Spartans. Throughout, the speech manifests a defensive tone. What is important to notice about the funeral oration is the sense it conveys of the polis as a cohesive whole in which a wise constitution provides the cornerstone for the good life in all its aspects. To the possible objection that Athens may offer a higher cultural standard while Sparta showed the world a sounder government and better soldiers, Pericles replies in effect that the arts flourish in Athens precisely because of the democracy, and that in fact the democracy produces the best soldiers. The arguments may be summarized as follows:
1. Just because we are called a democracy does not mean we make no distinctions among men of different worth; the point is that we assess worth in terms of ability, not in terms of wealth or class.
2. Although it is true that we are very generous in tolerating eccentricities in people’s private lives, in public matters we set a high standard and expect ourselves and others to revere the laws and the magistrates.
3. In military matters we do not need to keep what goes on in our city secret from our enemies, for we rely for our success not on deception but on courage. The fact that we live rich and varied lives instead of confining ourselves within a lifelong military camp does not prevent us from being the equal of the Spartans. Actually, the fact that we can hold our own against them despite their longer years devoted to training is the most solid proof of our greatness.
4. Our love of beauty does not mean we are extravagant, and the fact that we love wisdom does not make us ipso facto weak.
5. Unlike others, we think it is no shame for a man to acknowledge being poor, but we certainly do find it shameful if someone does not do his best to avoid poverty.
6. Athens is the one polis that regards the man who remains aloof from politics as useless rather than as one who minds his own business.
7. In contrast to others one could mention, we consider debate an aid to constructive action rather than a hindrance to it. We have the singular distinction of being outstanding both in action and in reflection.
8. We also differ from others in that we prefer conferring benefits to receiving them.
9. We are, in short, a model polis.
Pericles, in other words, stresses the creative, dynamic power of democracy to unite men of all classes in active participation in the government. (He also observes that the greatest glory of a woman was that she should never be spoken of for either good or evil; plainly he considered women’s participation in the polis to be of an entirely different order.) The key feature of the Periclean vision is not the technical legal opportunity offered to each male citizen to participate in government but rather the active solicitation of that participation. What he sees as the value of democracy is not primarily the absence of the injustice that labels individuals according to social class but rather the presence of a positive and vital force drawing each (male) heart and mind into both deliberation and action, a force that lends to that deliberation and action a virtue lacking under other constitutions.
The markedly defensive tone of Pericles’ speech points up the kinds of accusations that were leveled in his day against Athenian government, in part by disgruntled Athenian aristocrats themselves: that the worthy and unworthy were treated alike; that democratic “liberty” meant that people were free to live in anarchy, unconstrained by any rules of civilized intercourse; that the Athenian enthusiasm for the arts and the intellect amounted to decadence and softness—malakia, by which Greeks also meant “effeminacy” when it was applied to men—and that democratic states spend so much time discussing and debating that they are unable to act as effectively as oligarchic ones.31 In addition, Pericles uses the word demokratia only once, and I suspect that it was a word to which he did not want to draw attention.32 Though the persistence of class prejudice and rank snobbery enable modern readers to understand at some level the social biases of ancient societies, still it is virtually impossible for a citizen of the twentieth century fully to grasp the terrors that the very word democracy could once evoke.
Pericles died soon after delivering the funeral oration, and he bequeathed to his countrymen a war that they lost. Having abandoned Pericles’ defensive war strategy and undertaken various land and sea campaigns, the Athenians finally mounted their unsuccessful attack on Sicily in 415. Fifteen years after the delivery of the Periclean funeral oration another democratic orator is reported by Thucydides to have spoken in praise of democracy. Though geography allowed Thucydides more license in rendering the speech of Athenagoras of Syracuse than in reporting that of Pericles of Athens, it is noteworthy that the element of defensiveness in Pericles’ speech is carried over into that of the Syracusan. Some, Athenagoras says, “will say that a democracy is neither prudent nor fair, and that those who have property are the ones who should rule. But I say first that democracy is the name for the whole people, oligarchy of only a part of the people, and next that while the wealthy are best for guarding property, the wise give the best counsel, and the many, having heard things discussed, are the best judges; and that these groups, severally and collectively, share most equitably in a democracy” (6.39.1–2).
The Athenians’ expedition against Athenagoras’s city ended in disaster for them, and withal Athens’s conduct of the long war provided still further working matter for her critics. Twice in the late fifth century the democracy was replaced with a pro-Spartan oligarchy, though on both occasions the oligarchy was overthrown by the democrats within a matter of months. In the second instance, as we have seen, democrats and oligarchs signed an amnesty. In the fourth century everybody was careful to be a democrat of one stamp or another, and all fourth-century Athenian orators profess to be eager partisans of the democratic cause. Those who in fact had little sympathy with this cause—Isocrates, for example—were forced to cast their antidemocratic arguments in a prodemocratic mold and to maintain that they sought merely to return to the “true” democracy of Solon and Cleisthenes. Though the pressures of politics and litigation make it difficult to determine what any of the fourth-century orators believed in his heart about anything, the pitch of their rhetoric is a good gauge of what was expected to win votes in an Athenian courtroom.
The extant writings of the orators are consequently our best window on the thinking of the ordinary Athenian voter. Fourth-century rhetoric is a gold mine of democratic cliché. Some of the most striking examples are to be found in Demosthenes’ oration against Timocrates, delivered probably in the summer of 353. Timocrates had been dragged into court by Demosthenes’ associate Diodorus by the procedure known as the graphe paranomon, the indictment for bringing an unconstitutional motion. Since the Athenian legal system operated without a constitution and was not based on precedent, it was difficult for voters to determine just which laws were and were not out of order, and it was not unusual for a politician to find himself accused by graphe paranomon either by a vindictive rival or because the demos had repented passing the proposal in question and decided in retrospect that it had been a bad idea. In Timocrates’ case, it seems clear that the motion was indeed illegal and its motivation discreditable; but the circle of Timocrates and his friend Androtion had a bitter and ongoing quarrel with Diodorus and his associates.
Some friends of Timocrates, including the prominent politician Androtion, had been required to turn over to the state a large portion of a haul of booty they had seized off the coast of Egypt, which was at war with Athens’s thenally, Persia. Androtion and his associates deployed a variety of procedural maneuvers in their attempt to avoid relinquishing their spoils, and somehow Timocrates had gotten a law carried that would permit debtors to the state to remain at large for some time as long as they gave sureties for their debts. Plainly his friends were planning to run off with their considerable profits. Not surprisingly, Timocrates was indicted on a graphe paranomon, and Demosthenes, who had also composed the speech for Diodorus’s attack on Androtion on a different graphe paranomon in 355, wrote the speech for Diodorus to deliver against Timocrates.
Had there been any real evidence that Timocrates and Androtion were plotting to overthrow the government, Demosthenes would surely have adduced it in his oration. Instead, he simply suggests, repeatedly and at memorable length, that the sort of man who would propose a law at variance with standard procedure is plainly the sort of man who would overthrow democracy and establish tyranny or oligarchy. The laws that Timocrates sought to flout, Demosthenes argues, were not violent or oligarchic but rather prescribed that things be done in a generous and democratic spirit (24). The attempt to alter the laws he casts as kataluon, “subverting”—precisely the word used regularly for attempts to overthrow the government, katalusis tou demou (31). Having had the clerk read the law declaring the acts of the Thirty to be invalid, Demosthenes points out that doubtless the worst fear of the Athenians is that the state of affairs under the Thirty should ever repeat itself. If it was appropriate to overturn the acts of the Thirty, he maintains, then to allow Timocrates to change a law passed by the democracy would be tantamount to suggesting that the democratic government is no better than that of the Thirty (57–58). What, he requests the jury to ask themselves, “is the real difference between government by law (nomos) and oligarchy; and why [do] we regard those who prefer to live under laws as honest, sober-minded persons, and those who submit to oligarchical rule as cowards and slaves?” The outstanding difference, he claims, is that “under oligarchical government everybody is entitled to undo the past, and to prescribe future transactions according to his own pleasure; whereas the laws of a free state prescribe what shall be done in the future, such laws having been enacted by convincing people that they will be beneficial to those who live under them. Timocrates, however, legislating in a democratically governed city, has introduced into his law the characteristic iniquity of oligarchy; and in dealing with past transactions has presumed to claim for himself an authority higher than that of the convicting jury” (76).33 The bloodiest of the Thirty Tyrants, Critias himself, Demosthenes claims, would have framed just the same sort of statute as Timocrates (90).
In the oration against Timocrates, in other words, Demosthenes bills the self-serving ploy of some embezzlers in a tight spot as an attempt to overthrow the democracy and replace it with oligarchy in the manner of the Thirty, and he equates nomos, “law,” with demokratia, implying that all other forms of government are unlawful. And not only this: as additional fuel for his argument that the Athenians should not tolerate Timocrates’ self-indulgence, he maintains that a further reason the treasonous Timocrates went after the laws was that he had observed that everyone both in public and in private attributes Athens’s prosperity to them.
Throughout the fourth century, litigants in Athenian courts sought to suggest whenever possible that a vote against their cause was a vote against democracy and was indeed practically high treason. The fact that no Athenian speaker in his right mind would dare proclaim his opposition to democracy did not prevent Athenian audiences from having their hearts warmed by orators who introduced its praises into their speeches. Though the bipolarity of the fifth century that had informed Pericles’ funeral oration was no longer so marked, still oppositions could be made with Sparta, and in his oration Against Leptines of 354 Demosthenes compares the free speech of Athens with the lack of it in Sparta (106). Both Demosthenes in his 344 Second Philippic (25, 75–76) and Aeschines in his speech Against Timarchus in 345 (4–5) suggest that democracy alone constitutes government by law; tyranny, monarchy, and oligarchy have no part in lawful government.
In the schemata of democratic orators, then, democracy is not simply one form of government or even the best form; rather it is the only legitimate form there is. The opposition between Athenian democracy on the one hand and a world of injustice and brute force on the other is dramatically drawn by the author of the funeral oration composed probably around 390 to honor those Athenians who had fallen on the side of Corinth and her allies against Sparta. It was natural, he says, for the Athenians’ ancestors to establish a tradition of fighting on the side of justice,
for the very beginning of their life was just…. They were the first and the only people in that time to drive out the ruling classes of their state and to establish a democracy, believing the liberty of all to be the strongest bond of agreement; by sharing with each other the hopes born of their perils they had freedom of soul in their civic life, and used law for honouring the good and punishing the evil. For they deemed that it was the way of wild beasts to be held subject to one another by force, but the duty of men to delimit justice by law, to convince by reason, and to serve these two in act by submitting to the sovereignty of law and the instruction of reason.34
To be undemocratic, in other words, was to be—literally—inhuman.
. . . . .
Without a doubt a number of the Greek intellectuals whose words contribute to our understanding of the ideology of Athenian democracy were hard pressed by rhetorical and political constraints of various kinds. There is no more reason to believe that they were convinced of the truth of everything they said than there is to believe that former U.S. president George Bush really thinks being a member of the American Civil Liberties Union is tantamount to supporting Communism. But their speeches and writings make clear that a significant body of thought in classical Athens rejected the customary paradigm that a community should consist of rulers and ruled. Such a community, many thinkers argued, was no community at all. Rather, the ideal polis involved a kind of active participation on the part of the average citizen that is thoroughly alien to most modern states. Democracy today is perceived largely in negative terms; it is a kind of government in which a minority may not dictate to a majority and in which a minimum of constraints are placed on individual liberty. To have a democracy means to have no monarch, no dictator, no aristocracy, no junta. Apathy, however, is allowed—even, according to many theoreticians, encouraged for the sake of efficiency. This, however, is not the kind of harmless state described by Pericles or Protagoras. Rather, the Athenian democracy was conceived by its supporters as a dynamic entity energized by the combined commitment and capacity of all its male citizens.
Democracy was synonymous with freedom and law not only for Athenians but also for non-Athenian admirers such as Herodotus (and quite possibly the unknown author of the funeral oration of ca. 390, who may have been an alien resident in Athens such as the orator Lysias, in whose corpus the speech has been preserved). The rather tendentious word isonomia was used to suggest that democracy was the only equitable form of government. Anything else was a form of tyranny.35 Jurors in Athenian courts and voters in the Athenian assembly were smug and serene in their conviction that it was democracy that protected them from all manner of terrors lurking in the universe. Often they heard it contrasted with the autocracy of Persia and Macedon on the one hand and the militaristic oligarchy of Sparta on the other. Opposition to democracy was tied in the minds of its champions to traitorous connections with Sparta and Macedon, and particularly in the case of Sparta during the fifth century, the association between antidemocratic ideas and affection for Athens’ enemies was a real one and not drawn merely for the sake of rhetorical effect. The democratic Themistocles advocated a strong anti-Spartan stand, whereas the more conservative Cimon advocated friendship with the Spartans. At the end of the Peloponnesian War Sparta made the institution of an oligarchic government at Athens one of the conditions of peace. There is every reason to believe conservative pro-Spartans betrayed the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in 405, thus ending the Peloponnesian war. Athenians who considered the word oligarch to be synonymous with traitor were frequently not far wrong. It must be remembered, however, that the aristocratic worldview was endemic in Greek civilization, and it was the egalitarianism of the Athenians that was fundamentally eccentric. Athenian democratic rhetoric struck many Greeks as self-serving propaganda crafted for sinister ends by desperate men—men who had sold their souls by throwing in their lot with that of the coarse sailors and officious shop-keepers who thought that sheer numbers empowered them to rule not only Athens but the Aegean as well. Fully to understand the shock value of Athenian democracy it is necessary to see how deeply elitist values were ingrained in Greek society, and this will form the subject of the chapter that follows.