Chapter Three
In every country the aristocracy is contrasted to the democracy, there being in the best people the least licentiousness and iniquity, but the keenest eye for morals; in the people on the other hand we find a very high degree of ignorance, disorder, and vileness; for poverty more and more leads them in the direction of bad morals, thus also the absence of education and in the case of some persons the ignorance which is due to the want of money.
—The anonymous fifth-century author of the Constitution of the Athenians
DEMOCRACY MIGHT be isonomia to its champions, but to its enemies it was a perversion of justice, an exploitative class government rationalized by a misunderstanding of the essence of equality. To such thinkers, Athens’s diplomatic setbacks appeared to be the natural outgrowth of her democratic system, and by the time the Greek city-states lost their autonomy on the field of Chaeronea in 338, an elaborate multipronged attack had been mounted on the Athenians and their democracy. There is no need to reconstruct this attack as one reconstructs democratic theory, from snatches here and there. Rather, it is splashed unsparingly over the corpus of Greek literature.
THE CLAIMS OF CLASS
The nature of the attack on Athens varies according to the speaker or writer, but it is important to remember within what frame of reference Athens’s critics operated. A theoretician like Plato might dream of a state basking in the beatific autocracy of a man wise beyond ordinary mortals, but few Greeks would have advocated monarchy or tyranny as the best government for classical Athens; it was to defend Hellenism against the horrors of Eastern despotism that the Greeks had united in battle against the Persians. Though the neat oppositions of Pericles’ funeral oration were not always before people’s minds, still the essential question for most contemporaries once the Persian threat had receded was how Athenian democracy compared not to monarchy or to tyranny but rather to oligarchy. Except for the members of Athens’s own empire, within which Athens favored governments similar to her own, most Greek city-states outside Athens were generally governed by some sort of oligarchy. For most Greek thinkers, the alternative to democracy was an aristocracy of either birth or wealth, or some combination of the two. The first complaints against the democracy, consequently, were generally posited on the thesis that people who could boast wealthy or famous ancestors made better citizens—that is, better political decision-makers—than those who could not.
Demokratia was a form of government in which the kratos, power, belonged to the demos, people, and throughout Greek history the same ambiguities surrounded the word demos as surround its modern counterparts in European languages today. Skilled democratic rhetoricians like Pericles made a point of taking the demos that was sovereign in Athenian democracy to include every voter, no matter how poor—or how rich. To the enemies of democracy, however, it was clear, first, that demokratia meant the despotic rule of poor people over rich people, and, second, that rich people made better policy than poor people. In the eyes of Greek antidemocrats, it was not simply a matter of coincidence that majority rule entailed the dominance of poor over rich. This, they thought, was no accident. Rather in democracy they saw a calculated and tyrannical form of class government.
The notion of social class is not, of course, a phenomenon unique to ancient Greece, but, to make use of an appropriately class-oriented phrase, it had in Greece a long pedigree.1 It first appears as a belief that people from a small number of families were in some way better than people from all other families; in the course of time it is refined to include the possibility that the acquisition of wealth may possibly—but need not necessarily—entitle people from outside the charmed circle to a share in the political pie. Perhaps the first recorded instance of class-consciousness in Greek literature is in the Iliad of Homer. Twentieth-century egalitarians are sometimes shocked by Homer’s portrait of Thersites, the one commoner of whom we get a glimpse in the intensely aristocratic Iliad. To Homer’s audience, Thersites was not simply poor and ugly and worthless; he was poor and therefore predictably ugly and worthless. The picture Homer paints is vivid: Thersites is lame, stooped, and sports a straggly clump of wool on top of his pointed head. When Thersites dares speak up in the assembly, he attacks Agamemnon on precisely the grounds Achilles had used earlier. But what is suitable for Achilles is not deemed fitting for Thersites. Homer stresses repeatedly that Thersites’ character and behavior violate the laws of order that keep people in their place. He is ametroepes, of speech that does not know when to stop; the words in his head are akosma, without any organization. The concept of kosmos, order, appears again in the next line: Thersites wrangles with princes ou kata kosmon, in violation of custom and order. When Odysseus beats Thersites so severely that a welt rises up on his neck and a tear wells up in his eye, the army has a good laugh:
Sorry though the men were they laughed over him happily,
and thus they would speak to each other, each looking at the man next him:
“Come now: Odysseus has done excellent things by thousands,
bringing forward good counsels and ordering armed encounters;
but now this is far the best thing he ever has accomplished
among the Argives, to keep this thrower of words, this braggart,
out of assembly. Never again will his proud heart stir him
up, to wrangle with the princes in words of revilement.”
(2.270–77)2
These are the words of the plethys, the multitude. Of course the men in the army who make up this multitude are not particularly rich or beautiful themselves, but their sense of their place is so strong that they side with Odysseus in restoring the natural social order rather than with Thersites in challenging it. Such is the confrontation Homer chose to recount before the wealthy patrons who supported his artistic endeavors.
A slightly later poet gives us a fuller picture of Greek class-consciousness. The seventh and sixth centuries constituted a period of enormous ferment in Greece, as the traditional aristocracies of birth that were seen ruling in the Homeric poems found themselves struggling to maintain their power in the face of a variety of pressures. Chief among these pressures was the demand of the growing trade aristocracy of wealth for a say in government. With the growth of population, the opening up of commerce, the development of coinage, colonial expansion, and the rise of hoplite warfare came the growth of a new social class whose money was often earned rather than inherited and was more likely to come from trade than from land. One way in which the aristocracy of birth reacted to the demands of this class was by asserting that there existed a special quality in people from certain families that simply could not be developed by any others. This concept of gnome plays an important role in the poems of Theognis of Megara, whose class had been ousted by the weaving dynasty of one Theagenes. Writing in the sixth century, Theognis reacted with horror to the phenomenon of social mobility, for in his view certain qualities simply could not be attained; they had to be inborn. “Oh, Kyrnos,” he sighs to the young lover to whom all his poetry was dedicated, “this polis is still a polis, but its people are different, people who formerly knew no laws, no settled way of doing things, but wore down goatskins until they were ragged and pastured themselves outside the city like deer. But now these people are [considered] good, son of Polypaus, and those who were once noble are now held to be worthless. Who can bear to look upon this state of affairs?” (53–58). There is irony in Theognis’s contention that the erstwhile riffraff are now the agathoi, the good, for Theognis does not believe that political virtue can be taught or learned. He explains elsewhere that the nobly born, that is, those who are born into families in which political power has been concentrated for some generations, can lose their gnome, their natural inborn virtue and wisdom, through fraternizing with people from families who have not belonged to this charmed circle: “If you mingle with the base (kakoi) you will lose what wisdom you already have,” he warns (35–36)—but the basely born can never gain it. “No one,” he says, “has ever found out a way to make a fool wise or a base man (kakos) noble (esthlos) … you will never make the bad man good by teaching” (430–31, 437–38). Theognis, then, believed in confining political power to an elite consisting of members of certain families who possessed special qualities nonexistent in others. Outside these families, such qualities could not be found even in embryo, to be fostered by the sensitive teacher whom Socrates was to compare to a midwife. One might gamble away one’s privileged position in the charmed circle through imprudent associations with people outside it, but the inverse process was impossible.
A large amount of Greek lyric poetry is associated with the name of Theognis, and it is curious that scholars are in doubt whether to attribute various fragments to him or to the Athenian lawgiver Solon, Theognis’s approximate contemporary though older than the Megarian by a generation or so. The nature of Solon’s reforms at Athens makes clear that Solon could not have shared Theognis’s belief that the social order was fixed for all time by a biological law that denied the rudiments of wisdom to all but a select few. Both his reforms and his poetry, however, demonstrate that Solon shared Theognis’s view that people fell naturally into classes. In a famous passage Solon wrote: “I gave the demos such privilege as is sufficient to them, neither adding nor taking away; and as for those who had power and were admired for their wealth, I also provided that they should not suffer undue wrong. I stood with a stout shield thrown over both parties, not allowing either one to prevail unjustly over the other” (cited in Plutarch, Solon 18.4, and [Aristotle], The Constitution of the Athenians, 12). In Latin terminology, he means demos qua plebs, not demos qua populus, and these lines suggest that Solon viewed the demos as a lobby like any other special interest group, entitled to just so much power and no more. They make it difficult to cast him as a democrat for two reasons. The fact that Solon places limits on the proper sphere of the demos—and sees himself as a hero for doing so—makes it difficult to cast him as a democrat. To be sure, Solon paved the way for fifth- and fourth-century democracy by his replacement of birth with wealth as a determinant of political power and by his creation of the popular courts, and after his death he was acclaimed as an ideological ancestor by more than one Athenian political party. In reality, however, Solon is about as much a democrat as Plato was a Christian—that is, Solon was no democrat.3
The differences between Theognis’s views about social mobility and those of Solon should not obscure the fact that both men considered it axiomatic that there existed such a thing as class and that some classes had a greater claim on political power than did other classes. The theory of Athenian democracy sought to negate the concept of class. In practice, men from a small number of respected families continued throughout the history of the democracy to be accorded what might seem to modern egalitarians to be a disproportionate amount of power and prestige; and at times the poor majority rode roughshod over the rich minority. Nonetheless, such phenomena played no part in democratic theory—at least not as it was publicly articulated. As Pericles had put it in the Thucydidean funeral oration, in Athens it was axiosis, merit, that alone caused some people to be accorded more public honors than others. In the Periclean scheme of things, democracy meant that the polis was to be a joint responsibility and shared delight for all citizens from all classes. The Solonic concept of the demos as a lobby, however, reappears in the first detailed attack on the Athenian democracy that has come down to us—the essay on the Athenian constitution by the man known to English-speakers as the Old Oligarch. Just where the name originated is not certain, though it is first remembered on the lips of the British classicist Gilbert Murray. It seems less confusing than the other name often given the author of the pamphlet, pseudo-Xenophon (based on the long-standing misapprehension that Xenophon was the author of the work), and it will be a convenient label for our purposes; no slight to old age is implied in my use of the epithet, though I suspect some may have been intended in its original adoption.
The fact that we do not know the name of the author of the pamphlet is a minor problem. Somewhat greater difficulties are created by other areas of ignorance. Although most scholars have seen the work as a sincere attack on democracy, others have contended that the author was neither old nor an oligarch and have viewed the work rather as a somewhat squawky exercise in intellectual exhibitionism. Close scholarly examination, moreover, has revealed that the author was certainly not an Athenian citizen and yet definitely a citizen of Athens, and that the work itself was composed neither before the outbreak of hostilities with Sparta in 431 nor, to be sure, during or after the war. Nonetheless, the essay indubitably exists, and it is the first extant account of democracy as the calculated suppression of one class by another.4
According to the Old Oligarch, the Athenian democratic naval empire is a carefully calibrated, well-integrated system, though he finds the intrinsic democratic premise unacceptable: “Indeed as to the constitution of the Athenians my opinion is that I do not at all approve of their having chosen this form of constitution because by making this choice they have given the advantage to the vulgar people (poneroi) at the expense of the good (chrestoi). This is the reason for my disapproval, but what I want to point out is that now that they have adopted this view they in an excellent way back up this form of constitution and manage the other matters, which the other Hellenes think done wrongly by them” (1.1).5 This last contention appears to refer to the Athenian empire. The Old Oligarch sees the navy, the empire, and the democracy as interconnected. Because it is the poor who man the ships, he argues, it is in some sense dikaion, “just,” that they should have the most political power; and the revenues from the empire policed by that very navy serve to pay the demos for its participation in politics, as, for example, on juries (1.2, 16).
Like Pericles, in other words, the Old Oligarch views the Athenian polis as a unified whole held together by its democratic constitution, and the opening paragraphs of his essay promise a sociopolitical analysis of the various interlocking parts of the democratic network far more sophisticated than Pericles had provided in his patriotic portrait of his polis. This promise is not fulfilled in its entirety. The author’s principal purpose appears to be to reiterate his thesis that the demos is at constant war with the chrestoi, the noble, and that the Athenian demos makes a point of making life miserable for the upper classes both at home and abroad in the empire. He does a better job in showing how this works abroad than in showing how it works in Athens itself. In allied cities, the author maintains, the Athenians make false accusations against the chrestoi, disfranchise them, take their money away, expel them, and kill them (1.l4). In addition, he claims, the demos consolidates its position in the empire by forcing allies to come to Athens for legal proceedings. This practice not only has the advantage of the immediate revenues that accrue from customs duties and from the profits of local innkeepers and other merchants but also sees to it that the allies must pay court not simply to isolated magistrates but to the demos as a whole. In this way, moreover, the Athenians are enabled to side regularly with the demos and against the aristocrats, something prudence might otherwise deter them from doing so far from home.
Whether the facts the author reports are true is difficult to determine, but his line of argument, at all events, is clear and easy to follow. Just how the oppression of the chrestoi is carried out in Athens itself is less plain. The author complains that the Athenians nemousi (assign, distribute) more to the poneroi (base) and penetes (the poor in the sense of the working classes) than they do to the chrestoi, but he offers no explanation of how this is accomplished (1.4), and in fact the prominent politicians of the Peloponnesian War era generally belonged to reasonably well-to-do families. In trying to explain how clever it is of the Athenians to make sure that the poneroi dominate politics, he writes:
Now one might say that the right thing would be that they did not allow all to speak on an equal footing, nor to have a seat in the council, but only the cleverest and the best. But on this point, too, they have determined on the perfectly right thing by also allowing the vulgar people to speak. For if … the aristocracy (chrestoi) were allowed to speak and took part in the debate, it would be good for them and their peers, but not to the proletarians. But now that any vulgar person (poneros) who wants to may step forward and speak, he will just express that which is good to him and his equals. (1.6–7)
What is striking about this passage is not simply the illogical conclusion that because all may speak, therefore some (e.g., the chrestoi) may not, but the assumption that the chrestoi, given the chance of which the author claims they are deprived, would in turn govern in their sole interest. (The notion that if all may speak then some [the chrestoi] may not is sufficiently peculiar that the twentieth-century scholar Hartvig Frisch, whose translation I have used here, amended his rendition to read “For if [only] the aristocracy were allowed to speak.” I have removed the bracketed word in my own text in order to highlight the illogic of the original.) Be all this as it may, it is plain that the author views democracy as the oppression of the more deserving people, who are well-to-do, by the less deserving, who are poor. Everywhere, he explains, the aristocracy (beltistoi) are characterized by the minimum of licentiousness and iniquity and a maximum of sensitivity to what is good, whereas “in the people on the other hand we find a very high degree of ignorance, disorder, and vileness; for poverty more and more leads them in the direction of bad morals, thus also the absence of education and in the case of some persons the ignorance which is due to the want of money” (1.5). This, to the best of my knowledge, is the first recorded explanation in Western literature of the commonly held belief that poor people make bad citizens: poverty makes people desperate and therefore blunts their judgment, and lack of money sometimes leads to lack of education and knowledge.6
Around the same time the Old Oligarch was writing, an attack of a very different nature was being threaded through the strands of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. Deeply influenced by the new principles of scientific study, Thucydides sought to apply the science of medicine to the art of writing history and thereby to lay bare the workings of historical processes. Convinced as he was that “human nature being what it is, events similar to these are likely to happen again in the future” (1.22.4), he approached his work with a curious blend of clinical detachment and missionary zeal. Tremendous anguish and ambivalence underlie Thucydides’ writing. The principal process under scrutiny in his History is the progressive decay of his native polis. War is well known to be a stern teacher, and to it Thucydides attributes much of what he perceived as Athens’s progressive hardening into a tyrant city that knew no law beyond its own ambition. But he also ascribes Athens’s ultimate loss of the war to the inadequacies of the post-Periclean government. In understanding the genesis of Thucydides’ view of the Athenians’ conduct of their government, we are hampered by not knowing how literally to receive his claim that he wrote up each year as it happened. It seems likely that some revision took place as time passed and that parts of the text reflect the perspective gained as the war progressed; it is certainly true that Thucydides’ narrative ends in 411, though he did not die until around 400.7 The question is of enormous importance to determining to what degree Thucydides’ views were molded by the outcome of the war, and the answer seems to be that they were profoundly shaped by what he knew about the war’s progress. This uncertainty, however, need not affect our perception of what his views were. Although he nowhere states baldly that democracy is ipso facto a bad thing, he blames both individual leaders and the Athenian demos for ruling badly after Pericles’ death, though we do not know whether, for example, his discussion of Pericles’ impeachment in 430 suggests that his low esteem for the Athenian demos preceded the death of his hero or was projected backward in the full bitterness of post-Periclean hindsight.
The long Peloponnesian War was rife with high drama. The plague at Athens, the scandal that erupted when it was reported that the mystery religion at Eleusis had been parodied by know-it-all intellectuals (Alcibiades, perhaps), the wholesale desecration of the images of Hermes outside Athenian homes just as the fleet was about to sail for Sicily, the Athenians’ annihilation of the people of Melos for refusing to aid them in fighting Sparta—all this it fell to Thucydides to integrate into his history. The war also gave rise to several impeachments, including that of Thucydides himself when he served as general in northern Greece and failed to prevent the key stronghold of Amphipolis from falling into Spartan hands. In every impeachment he discusses, Thucydides sides with the accused strategoi and against the Athenian demos, which he portrays consistently as irrational, unreasonable and easily swayed by emotion. When Pericles was returned to office after his deposition in 430, Thucydides writes that the people had changed their minds “as the homilos (mob, throng) is fond of doing” (2.65.4); when several years later the demos impeached three generals who had failed to obtain a satisfactory settlement with Athens’s Sicilian allies, Thucydides wrote that his fellow citizens at that time “expected to be disappointed in nothing and believed that regardless of the strength of their forces, they could achieve equally what was easy and what was difficult” (4.65.4). Thucydides’ own narrative suggests that real policy issues were at stake in the impeachment of Pericles and that the generals in Sicily had done at best a mediocre job, but his editorial remarks take none of this into consideration.
Low esteem for the Athenian assembly is also evident in the debate between Nicias and Cleon concerning military operations at Pylos. Thucydides echoes the language he himself had used of Pericles’ impeachment in writing that the assembly encouraged the upstart Cleon in his attack on the seasoned general “as the ochlos (mob) is fond of doing” (4.28.3). Most striking of all is his indictment of post-Periclean Athens, in which Pericles’ successors “were prepared to entrust even the administration to the whims of the demos, as a result of which many blunders were committed, as is to be expected in a great city possessing an empire” (2.65.10–11). Thucydides attributed the loss of the war in part to the unwisdom of the demos and its post-Periclean leaders. The question remains to what cause Thucydides attributed this unwisdom.
For the mind of the average person Thucydides had little respect. In his discussion of historical methodology and the reliability of sources in book 1, he complains bitterly that ordinary people accept hearsay from one another uncritically and have little interest in establishing the truth (1.20.1, 3). His stress on the gnome of both Pericles and Themistocles suggests that this is the quality he seeks in a statesman, and his assertion that it was Pericles’ high reputation, integrity, and gnome that made it possible for him freely to restrain the demos, leading it rather than being led by it, implies that his ideal statesman needed a special kind of intellect that most people (the people in the assembly and the politicians who succeeded Pericles) did not have. His inclusion of Themistocles among the possessors of gnome, however, makes clear that he does not connect gnome with membership in a narrow group of families. This is noteworthy in view of the fact that Thucydides came himself from the aristocratic Philaid family, to which had belonged not only Pericles’ conservative rival Thucydides, the son of Melesias, but also Cimon and his father, Miltiades, Themistocles’ great rival. It is clear that Thucydides had emancipated himself from the philosophy in which he must have been raised sufficiently to bestow on Pericles the consistent praise that he did, stressing in his assessment of Pericles not only that he led Athens wisely during the prewar period but that his plan for winning the war was prognous, full of foresight, and that the loss of the war was to be traced to the Athenians’ departure from his guidelines, which called for an essentially defensive policy (2.65.5–9). That these lines are themselves defensive and seek to answer charges brought against Pericles concerning the war seems inescapable, and it is likely that those who leveled these charges included members of Thucydides’ own family. But though he was neither an anti-Periclean conservative nor a hidebound Theognidian oligarch, Thucydides’ estimate of the capacity of the average voter and of the average statesman appears to have been low, and his praise of Pericles also implies a fierce condemnation both of other political leaders and of the Athenian assembly. His contention that Pericles owed his influence to the fact that he was incorruptible, honest, and did not resort to flattery or seek power by dishonest means carries with it the suggestion that Thucydides considered corruption, flattery, and dishonesty to be common attributes of Athenian politicians, and his portrait of Pericles’ relationship to the populace is dramatically demeaning to the demos: Pericles, Thucydides writes, “led the multitude [plethos] rather than being led by it…. Whenever he saw the people were unjustifiably confident and arrogant, he would cow them into fear with his words; on the other hand, when he saw them unreasonably afraid, he would turn them back to hopefulness once more. And so it happened that Athens, though in name a democracy, was coming to be governed in fact by its first citizen” (2.65.8–9). The high marks that Pericles received from Thucydides, in other words, were posited on the low marks the historian accorded to the Athenian demos, which he portrays as highly emotional and extremely malleable, and to other Athenian politicians, whom he depicts as unscrupulous and self-seeking. According to Thucydides, Pericles alone among Athens’s war leaders turned this malleability to the advantage of the state; his successors sought only to exploit it for their own ends.
How Thucydides explained the inadequacy of the ordinary run of Athenians, or how he imagined it could be changed, is unclear. It is true that he has words of high praise for the oligarchy of the Five Thousand that succeeded the Four Hundred in 411: it was then, he writes, “that the Athenians appear to have enjoyed the best government that they ever did, at least in my time, for a moderate blending was effected between the few and the many” (8.97.2). Thucydides also describes Antiphon, a well-known oligarch and one of the leaders of the antidemocratic coup, as “one of the best men in my day in Athens” (8.68.1). What made the Five Thousand better decision-makers than the entire demos gathered together in the assembly? Wealth? Birth? Education? Coincidence? Thucydides does not say, but any notion that he saw the traditional criteria of riches or illustrious descent as fair barometers of gnome is undermined by his admiration for Themistocles and by his decision to include Pericles’ stirring paean to democracy in his account of the war—and at considerable length. Indeed, the funeral oration, by which Thucydides extols Pericles even as Pericles is extolling Athens, makes a statement about the kind of estimable leader the democracy at its best might produce. Probably, too, some approbation of democracy was intended in the nasty speech Thucydides puts in the mouth of Cleon in book 3: even if Thucydides has reproduced Cleon’s actual words, which is certainly possible, his decision to highlight the speech in such a position of prominence was plainly a matter of choice. Berating the Athenians for their vacillation in the matter of punishing the Mytileneans, who had rebelled from the empire, Cleon delivers a searing indictment of the Athenians’ enthusiasm for both discussion and mercy (3.37–41). The empire, he maintains, is a tyranny, and the Athenians, if they wish to hold on to it, had better learn the ruthless decisiveness of tyrants. Cleon’s attack on the virtue of deliberation and debate is so unpleasant that it is hard not to believe that his enemy Thucydides sought, by associating the vulgar Cleon with this swipe at the democratic ethos, to suggest some merit in the system and to identify it with the constructive use of intellect and language.
In the end, we are forced to abandon any search for Thucydides’ politics. It is not clear that Thucydides indeed devoted a great deal of thought to constitutional questions; for him, good policy was made by good leaders, and though it may disappoint us, it need not surprise us that in his History he did not confront the question of which constitution was most likely to produce such leaders. But his repeated indictment of the volatile Athenian demos was to play a large role in molding the opinion of later thinkers, and Thucydides is also the first source for the notion that Athens declined steadily after Pericles’ death—that her post-Periclean leaders were made of sorry stuff, and that the demos itself became progressively coarser and more callous under the strains of war. Though Thucydides appreciated the intelligence of Alcibiades and the integrity of Nicias, he was keenly sensible of the injuries done to Athens by these blue-blooded politicians; though he is often cited as a primary source for the destruction of Athens by rabble-rousing demagogues from the lower classes, in fact he implicates myopic and self-interested aristocrats like Nicias and Alcibiades in the process just as well. Thucydides’ History may be profitably compared with the essay of the Old Oligarch, for Thucydides seems to mirror his contemporary’s position nicely. The Old Oligarch proclaimed that though he did not like democracy he had to admit that the Athenians did a fine job of it; Thucydides suggests that although he is not necessarily opposed to democracy he is certainly appalled at the use the Athenians made of it.8 Thucydides may also be compared with another contemporary who speaks to us only through the mouth of Plato. Socrates shared Thucydides’ contempt for hoi polloi, and he is equally guilty of teasing us unmercifully in his refusal to assume a consistent posture on the question of just what enables people to rise out of the multitude and distinguish themselves.
Conservative Athenian politicians of the fifth century who opposed the march of democracy were for the most part circumspect in voicing their reservations. Cimon was ostracized for his pains, and a generation later his kinsman Thucydides, the son of Melesias (also a relative of the historian), met the same fate after he sought to undermine the position of Pericles by attacks on his use of tribute from the allies to adorn Athens’s acropolis, or, in the words used by Plutarch several centuries later, to deck Athena out “like a harlot” (Pericles 12.2). The lesson was not lost on Athenian aristocrats, and little is known about antidemocratic sentiment in Athens before the stresses of the Peloponnesian war offered a convenient forum to oligarchs. It was not until the debacle in Sicily had caused Athenian voters to question the efficacy of their form of government that it became common for conservatives publicly to advocate the limitation of the franchise. One speech, however, has been preserved in the corpus of fifth-century literature that offers an ominous harbinger of the bloody civil wars ahead. This speech was given not in the Athenian assembly but rather in the Spartan, and its speaker was Alcibiades. Though the dizzying heights of sophistry the speaker attains may have been amplified somewhat in Thucydides’ rendering, the fact that the speech was given, like Pericles’ funeral oration, in a public forum suggests that its outlines, at least, are historical.
The speech, which contains Alcibiades’ famous dismissal of Athenian democracy as homologoumene anoia, or “acknowledged folly,” (6.89.6), was delivered on the occasion of Alcibiades’ first public appearance at Sparta after his defection from Athens, and though its ostensible purpose was to induce the Spartans to send military aid to Sicily, Alcibiades felt constrained to preface his exhortation with some explanatory remarks about his own history. If this speech is a fair index of his customary lines of argument, it is no wonder some Athenians were incensed against the eccentric philosopher who was credited with teaching him how to reason. Though Thucydides is the last of the Greek historians to be charged with undue mirth (or even due mirth), it is difficult to believe that he was oblivious to the ironies underlying this speech, ironies grim or hilarious depending on one’s state of mind, and in part the speech plainly serves to further the historian’s character sketch of the wily manipulator. Beginning with allegations that his strong anti-Spartan stand at home was sparked by Spartan slights to his personal honor and was, furthermore, not at all what it seemed, Alcibiades proceeds to a convoluted explanation of his position on democracy. The argument runs something like this:
1. Those of you who harbor resentment against me because I have been inclined toward the demos are offended for no reason.
2. My family, you see, has always fought against tyrants, and people who oppose tyrants are called democrats.
3. Anyhow, given that the government in Athens is democratic, we have to put up with it, don’t we?
4. Despite the prevailing license (akolasia), we have tried to steer a moderate course.
5. But it is hard to struggle against others, both in earlier times and today, who led the masses into base ways, and it is these individuals who have driven me out.
6. We, however, considering ourselves (unlike others) to be the leaders of the people as a whole, thought we ought to preserve the form of government under which the state had prospered most, even though the connection between the prosperity and the democracy be merely coincidental.
7. Naturally all Athenians of sense have realized how silly democracy is; but that is nothing new, and it seemed unwise to change our form of government when you were about to attack us.
Even passing over the continuation of Alcibiades’ speech in which he explains how his defection does not make him a traitor, there is much food for thought here, for several of the themes upon which he touches adumbrate the concerns that were to be articulated by the opponents of democracy during the years that followed. That Alcibiades and his family have only been considered democrats because democracy, a debated good, is the logical opposite of tyranny, an agreed evil, is an ingenious turning of the tables on the democrats who, as we have seen in chapter 2, set up the opposition in the first place. Alcibiades, moreover, co-opts the democratic theory of Pericles to buttress his own antidemocratic position, arguing that his own political group (friends, family, whatever—it is always “we” and not “I”) are the truly civic-minded citizens who represent the whole people while their opponents stand only for one particular faction. This, of course, is an unusual variation on the democratic theme; it is now the antidemocrats who stand for the whole people and the democrats who constitute a lobby. Finally, the opposition of moderation to akolasia, license, became a common topos in antidemocratic circles. Alcibiades’ speech in many ways stands as a blueprint for the rhetorical strategy of the moderates of the late fifth and the fourth centuries who, while demanding a de iure restriction of the franchise and a de facto limit on participation in government by eliminating state pay for public service, maintained that they were the real democrats of Athens, and that the government of Solon and of Cleisthenes was in fact the true democracy that had been perverted by subsequent corrupters (such as Ephialtes and Pericles).
The use of this argument shortly after the defection of Alcibiades and the defeat of Athens’s expedition to Sicily is attested in the monograph on the Constitution of Athens that was unearthed late in the nineteenth century and is probably connected with the project Aristotle undertook at his school, the Lyceum, to write up the constitutions of 158 city-states; whether the author was Aristotle himself or one of his students is uncertain. Although Thucydides depicts the democrats of 411 using the word patrioi nomoi (ancestral laws) (8.76.6) to describe the democracy of their own lifetime and that of their parents, the author of the Athenaion Politeia (henceforth AP) records that when Pythodoros proposed the initial resolution establishing the oligarchy, “Cleitophon moved an amendment … that the commissioners elected should also search out the ancestral laws (patrioi nomoi) laid down by Cleisthenes when he was establishing the democracy, in order that they might decide on the best course to advise after hearing these laws also, on the ground that the constitution of Cleisthenes was not popular (demotiken) but similar to that of Solon” (29.3). Not a well-known figure today, Cleitophon was apparently an associate of the celebrated moderate Theramenes. The moderates of 411, then, sought to arrogate to themselves traditional democratic watchwords; to set themselves up as the ideological heirs of Cleisthenes; and to associate Cleisthenes and Solon in a single policy, turning Cleisthenes back to face the archaic past rather than the radical future. So far from opening the door to the full-fledged democracy of the fifth century, Cleisthenes is portrayed in moderate mythology as setting the capstone on Solon’s class-based constitution.
The call for searching out the laws of Cleisthenes suggests strongly that no one knew precisely what they were; certainly the heated debate that has continued to modern times about whether or not Cleisthenes instituted ostracism lends support to this view.9 The author of the Athenaion Politeia has a penchant for isolating different “constitutions,” and he maintains that the Athenian government has moved through precisely eleven of these “constitutional” changes; but identifying the eleven cataracts over which Athenian democracy flowed has not been easy, and the contention of AP that there was such a thing as a Cleisthenic constitution is dubious. The actions of the oligarchs of 411, however, make clear what this constitution was perceived to be: it was government based both on limiting the franchise to those who met a basic property requirement and on eliminating state pay for civic service. This constitution, in other words, disfranchised the poor sailors who manned the fleets, and it prevented all the poor, as well as many from the middle class, from participating in government by serving on juries and on the boule.
The Cleisthenic constitution was never located; the oligarchic government of 411 was overthrown by a movement initiating in the Athenian fleet moored off Samos; and the democrats sought to reclaim the “ancestral” constitution for themselves, charging that the oligarchs had erred in abolishing the patrioi nomoi. It was they, the democrats claimed, who would preserve the ancestral laws and would try to compel the oligarchs to do so as well (8.76.6). The debate over the claim to the ancestral constitution, however, lived on, and it was reawakened in the months of the bloody civil strife in 404/3 when Athenian democrats (and moderates) lay at the mercy of the pro-Spartan “Thirty Tyrants.” Both AP and the first-century historian Diodorus of Sicily claim that the peace treaty with Sparta included a clause mandating that the Athenians should be governed according to the patrios politeia, but the context does not make clear whether the phrase was being used in the democratic or moderate/oligarchic sense, and none of the other sources that list the conditions of peace includes this clause.10 AP lists Cleitophon as a member of the party that was aiming at the ancestral constitution and Theramenes as its leader (34.3). The importance of the call for the return to the ancestral constitution is suggested by the assertion of AP that at first the Thirty
were moderate toward the citizens and pretended to be administering the ancestral form of constitution, and they removed from the Areopagus the laws of Ephialtes and Archestratus [probably an associate of Ephialtes] about the Areopagites, and also such of the ordinances of Solon as were of doubtful purport, and abolished the sovereignty vested in the jurymen, claiming to be rectifying the constitution and removing its uncertainties…. But when they got a firmer hold on the state, they kept their hands off none of the citizens, but put to death those of outstanding wealth or birth or reputation … and by the end of a brief interval of time they had made away with no less than fifteen hundred. (35)
That the Thirty should have “pretended” to be preserving the ancestral constitution underlines the ambiguity that had come to surround these charged words. It is also quite plain that the democrats as well as the moderates claimed that their program embodied the ancestral constitution. Xenophon, Thucydides’ younger contemporary who took up the history of Greece where Thucydides had left it, reports that the democrats when they returned to power were exhorted by Thrasybulus to live according to the ancient laws (Hellenica 2.4.42), and the orator Andocides has included in one of his speeches a decree introduced just after the restoration of the democracy that includes a call for a return to the ancestral laws of Solon and Draco; the democratic context of the speech suggests that the name of Solon was invoked to mean not only “the way things used to be” (in the case of moderates) but alternatively (in the case of democrats) “the way things have always been.”
Ancient historians are understandably pained by the loss of their guide Thucydides, whose narrative breaks off in the middle of a sentence, after the coup of 411 but before that of 403; but internal politics was not Thucydides’ greatest interest, and though his successor Xenophon lacked his analytical mind, Xenophon in some ways tells us more about Athenian politics. It is in the pages of Xenophon that a memorable debate is preserved between the extremist Critias and the moderate Theramenes, whom Critias was in the process of putting to death. Even if Xenophon’s account departs considerably from the actual words spoken, it may afford some view into the minds of the camps that opposed each other at this awful hour. Because the confrontation is between a moderate and an oligarch, no specific reference is made to the ancestral constitution—an omission that confirms the suspicion that the squabble over the constitution was limited to the conflict between democrats and moderates. By the different ways in which the two men voice their dislike of democracy, Xenophon illustrates the opposition between shameless self-interest and overt Spartan partisanship on the one hand and, on the other, the desperate balancing act by which Theramenes seeks to distract his audience both from those elements in his thinking that were oligarchic and from those that were democratic.
His efforts to straddle both the popular and the oligarchic camps had earned for Theramenes the nickname “buskin,” that is, a shoe that would fit either foot, but the notorious equivocator ended his life in a brief blaze of glory. His admirer Xenophon enjoys telling how Theramenes’ vociferous objections to the many bloody executions of the Thirty had frightened Critias into broadening his political base by enrolling three thousand additional citizens to share in the government. Theramenes, however, was in no way placated, but rather continued to rail against the Thirty, ridiculing the idea that the number of worthy citizens in Athens was precisely three thousand, no more and no less (2.3.19); was it in any way likely, he argued, that this exact number should account for all the good citizens, those sometimes called the kaloi kagathoi (a common aristocratic expression for their own kind meaning “the beautiful and good” but often tendentiously translated as something like “the party of stout men and true”)? When the Thirty then took their new procedure as a redoubled license to murder anyone not on the roll of three thousand, Theramenes redoubled his opposition, and the Thirty plotted to kill him. It is in the meeting that then took place in the Athenian boule that Xenophon sets the following dialogue between Theramenes and Critias—a meeting at which young men with daggers had been stationed by the Thirty.
“Members of the boule,” Critias begins, “if anyone among you thinks that more people than is fitting are being put to death, let that person reflect that where governments are changed this always happens.” In Athens, he goes on to explain with chilling sophistry, a new oligarchic government is bound to have the most enemies, both because of its size and because the demos has been bred up in freedom for the longest time. “Now we,” he continues, “believing that for men like us and you democracy is a grievous form of government, and knowing that the demos would never become friendly to our saviors the Spartans, while the best men (beltistoi), would always be faithful to them, are establishing the present government with Spartan approval” (2.3.24–25). Critias then proceeds to an attack on Theramenes’ chameleon-like history and adds as a further justification of the Thirty that in putting Theramenes to death they would only be following the model of the most highly esteemed constitution in Greece, that of Sparta. “The constitution of the Spartans,” Critias proclaims, “is, we know, thought to be the best of all constitutions.” In Sparta, he asks, if one of the ephors, instead of yielding to the majority, should instead undertake to find fault with the government and to oppose what was being done, “don’t you suppose that the entire city would join with the ephors in deeming him worthy of the severest punishment?” (2.3.34).
Critias, in other words, states openly that his objection to democracy is that it is grievous (chalepen) for men like him and that it is anti-Spartan, and he seeks to justify the execution of Theramenes by the model of the Spartan ephorate. (This choice of a model is noteworthy not only for its overt suggestion that Athens should be more like Sparta but for its dubious claim that Spartan ephors would be punished for resisting the majority of their four colleagues.) Theramenes in response defends some of his past conduct and seeks to turn the tables on Critias by suggesting that Critias’s ignorance of his true history has arisen because “when these events took place, Critias was establishing a democracy in Thessaly along with Prometheus, and arming the serfs against their masters. Would that none of the things that he was doing there should come about here,” he adds (2.3.37). Defending his moderation, he proclaims that he is “forever at war with those who do not think there could be a good democracy until the slaves and those who would sell the state for lack of a drachma should share in the government.” On the other hand, he is “forever opposed to those who do not think that a good oligarchy could be established until the state is brought to the point of being ruled absolutely by a few.” But, he continues, “to direct the government in concert with those who have the means to be of service, whether with horses or with shields—this plan I regarded as best in former days and I do not think any differently now.” May he be put to death, he adds, if Critias can discover any instance where he joined hands with demagogoi or tyrannikoi to deprive people of their citizenship (2.3.48–49).
Theramenes, then, seeks to confuse the issue by accusing Critias himself of democratic agitation in Thessaly, and he seeks as well to condemn the democratic position by suggesting that democrats believe in a government of slaves and desperate men, the underlying assumption being that the indigent are therefore by implication treacherous. His own moderate position is portrayed in such a way as to appear beyond exception. In stressing what he does believe in—a government of those who can afford to serve with either horses or shields—Theramenes tries to distract attention from his rejection of both the oligarchic program of rule by a few and the democratic program of universal franchise for citizens (a program he has tried to make appear ridiculous by his suggestions that democrats seek to enfranchise slaves and that the poor people they are seeking to enfranchise are ipso facto corrupt). Seeing that the boule were inclined toward Theramenes, Critias reminded the assemblage that the Thirty still had power of life and death over those not included on the roll of Three Thousand, and, striking Theramenes’ name from the list, he condemned him to death. He then handed Theramenes over to the executioners, explaining to them that he had been condemned “according to the law.” As Theramenes was led away through the market place, he continued to cry out against the wrong that was being done, and Xenophon reports that when Satyrus the executioner warned him that he would suffer if he did not keep quiet he inquired whether he would not suffer just as well if he did. He tells, too, how Theramenes toasted Critias’s health with the last of his hemlock. (2.3.55–56).
In fact, Theramenes’ seemingly innocent proclamation that he supported a government by those who made up the cavalry and infantry constituted a treacherous turning back of the clock by democratic standards. The strongest arm of the Athenian military was, of course, the fleet, landless and indigent members of which had held the franchise for nearly a century and had been enabled to participate fully in Athenian government since the introduction of state pay for state service (i.e., as jurors or in the boule) in the time of Pericles. What Theramenes is really saying here is that he supports disfranchisement of the poor. By pairing demagogues with tyrants, he sets off an eddying series of reverberations looking back to allegations against Pericles and ahead to anxious eighteenth-century historians of Greece. In his use of the word demagogos, moreover, Theramenes sets himself squarely in the antidemocratic camp; potentially tendentious under any circumstances, the word was especially charged at a time when the leaders of the demos were defending law and order against a bloody sequence of judicial murders. It is no surprise to hear Critias complain (2.3.27) that Theramenes was always the first one to interpose difficulties when he and his crew wanted to put some demagogue out of the way (ekpodon, literally, out from underfoot); it is somewhat more interesting to hear Theramenes anxiously asserting his opposition to demagogoi and tyrannikoi alike. Critias had acknowledged openly his own class-oriented view of government, stating baldly that he opposed democracy because it is bad for “men like him”; Theramenes sought to dissociate himself from those who would govern in the interests of a single group (the tyrant and his friends on the one hand and the demos on the other), but he also places himself in the camp of those who construed democracy as the tyranny of one class over another.
THE ANCESTRAL CONSTITUTION
By the end of the Peloponnesian War, then, assorted Athenian malcontents of various stamps had gone on record maintaining that their democracy was an oppressive class government, conducted foreign policy badly, was irrational and emotional in its treatment of its leaders, gave power to the dregs of society, and was in sum an “acknowledged folly.” In addition, the theory was advanced that at some point prior to the end of the war the democracy had fallen away from its true self as realized by Solon and/or Cleisthenes and that only a restoration of “real” democracy could begin to solve the problems of the day, whatever they might be. The exact juncture at which the “debasement” of Athenian democracy began was a topic of heated debate, but the conviction that there had been a falling off from the good old days was frequently voiced—even in comedy, as the chorus of Aristophanes’ Ekklesiazousai (Congress-women) laments the passing of the good old days when nobody requested payment for public service (304ff.). In an amusing and appropriately laconic speech that purports to have been given in the Spartan assembly, the ephor Sthenelaidas (speaking in the pages of Thucydides) had brusquely summarized the speech of the Athenian ambassadors and dismissed the claim to Spartan goodwill based on Athenian service to Greece during the Persian Wars. If the Athenians’ account of their past services is accurate, he points out, then it reflects so much the worse on their bad behavior in recent years, for, he says, they deserve double the punishment for having gone from good to bad (1.86.1). Though the rationale behind it was somewhat different, the notion that the Athenians had indeed gone from good to bad became entrenched in contemporary Greek literature and has been widely believed throughout Western history.
AP itself, composed probably in the 320s with the aid of a variety of sources, is representative of the inconsistency of fourth-century thinking about the decline of Athens. At 27.4, AP reports the allegation of “some critics” that the juries deteriorated as soon as Pericles began the system of state pay for jury service “because ordinary persons always took more care than the respectable (epieikeis) to draw lots for the job.” AP is not alone among authors who cannot seem to decide whether Pericles marked the end of the good times or the beginning of the bad; Pericles is missing from his list of Athens’s best politicians, a list that includes Nicias and Thucydides, the son of Melesias, who he says were not only kaloi kagathoi but also servants of the whole state (28.5). After Pericles’ death, AP goes on, the demos began choosing as leader someone who was not in good repute with the epieikeis (reasonable people? presumably also affluent people), a marked change from previous practice. Listing the various men who had held the leadership of the people and of the wealthy, he lists Cleon as Pericles’ successor and names Nicias as the new leader of the others. Cleon, he reports, “is thought to have done the most to corrupt the people by his impetuous outbursts, and was the first person to use bawling and abuse on the platform, and to gird up his cloak before making a public speech” (28.5). He goes on to criticize those who raised payment for public service, and maintains that “from Cleon onward the leadership of the People was handed on in an unbroken line by the men most willing to play a bold part and to gratify the many with an eye to immediate popularity” (28.4).
AP, then, believed that a decline in the quality of Athenian government set in either during Pericles’ lifetime or immediately upon his death. Generally an enthusiastic supporter of democracy, even the orator Demosthenes nonetheless alleges a decline in statesmanship at some point after Pericles’ death, complaining that Aristides and Pericles have given way to orators who say to the people, “What would you like? What shall I propose? How can I oblige you?” (Olynthiacs 3.22). But it is in the copious orations of Isocrates, delivered over a span of a lifetime that lasted nearly a century, that the theme of a sad falling-off from better days is wrought to its highest pitch.11 In his early speech the Panegyricus, written to exhort his fellow Athenians to take up the Greek man’s burden and unite with the other Hellenes in a campaign against Asia, Isocrates goes on at some length comparing the self-interest, avarice, and recklessness of his contemporaries with the selfless patriotism of the men who raised the generation that defeated the Persians.12 Citizens of earlier times competed with one another only in vying to serve the state, and he insists that even the secret societies, the gentlemen’s clubs known as hetaireiai (which had since become hotbeds of oligarchy), were for the benefit of the many.13 In his oration On the Peace, written some thirty years later, he complains that it was the Athenians’ quest for naval empire that brought an end to the happy demokratia of their ancestors.14 People will see, he claims, how much better it would be to leave off this quest if they will contrast Athens before and after she acquired this power. The politeia of Athens at the time of the Persian Wars was better than Athens in later times in the same degree that Aristides and Themistocles and Miltiades were better men than Hyperbolus and Cleophon, the democratic politicians of the later Peloponnesian War, and than the current leaders of the demos (75). The Athenians in an earlier time deserved the goodwill of all Athens’s allies, whereas during the Peloponnesian War they stooped to pad their navy with mercenaries with whose aid they expelled the beltistoi from their various cities and confiscated their property (79). The inferior leadership of recent generations has been responsible for two oligarchic revolutions, whereas in the old days it remained unshaken and unchanged for many years (122). Pericles he places in a middle position; he took over the state, he claims, when it was “less prudent than it had been before it obtained the supremacy,” but still governed it tolerably well, sought no personal fortune, and left only a small estate; to him one must contrast contemporary politicians, and so on and so forth (126–31).15
The same themes reappear in his Areopagiticus, written around the same time. Composed, in other words, at a time when Athens had just fought a costly war against her rebelling allies, the speech, as its title suggests, blamed Athens’s misfortunes on her abandonment of the ancestral constitution and curtailment of the powers of the Areopagus. The earlier democracy, he argued, appreciated the principle of true, that is, proportional equality, by which each held power in proportion to his deserts, a principle the later democracy abandoned (21); and the result of this was that the ancient Athenians had a more democratic (demotikoteros) way of choosing magistrates: for, he maintains, under a lottery system such as the one currently in force, there is danger that oligarchic partisans may end up in office, whereas by a system of appointment, the people would have the power to choose those who were most attached to the constitution (23). The rich, he goes on to suggest, will use their offices more honorably than poor men who would be tempted to use it to enrich themselves.
Isocrates goes on to stress the moral element in the early democracy, which, he maintains, saw to it that people acted with propriety and justice in their daily lives, “for when people have laid sound foundations for the conduct of the whole state it follows that in the details of their lives they must reflect the character of their government” (28). Not only were the ancestors morally upright, they were religious: they worshiped the gods properly, discouraged foreign cults, and maintained religious traditions, with the result that divine favor endowed the land with unstinting fertility (30). It is particularly in connection with morality and piety that Isocrates is concerned about the men who led on the youth to gamble and patronize “flute girls” by breaking the power of the Areopagus, which had kept a particularly watchful eye on the character of young and old (37–50). In ancient times, Isocrates contends, there was no need of all the many laws that clogged the Athens of his day, for the moral tone of the Areopagite government obviated any need for elaborate legislation; the Areopagus, he explains, believed that “where there is a multiplicity of specific laws, it is a sign that the state is badly governed” (40). True patriots, he complains, are accused of being oligarchic; but nothing could be farther from the truth. He himself is an enemy of oligarchy and a friend to democracy. What he admires about the Spartans is the democratic element in their government, for it is this, he claims, that explains why the Spartans are “the best governed people in the world” (61).16
Decades later, three years before his death, Isocrates in his Panathenaicus lambasted the Spartans of the fifth and fourth centuries at some length. He still praised Lycurgus, however, and maintained that he had imitated Athens in framing the mixed constitution of Sparta and had deliberately conferred upon the elders there the same power which he knew that the Council of the Areopagus enjoyed in Athens (153). He also asserts that the Spartans had no skill in warfare before they learned it by copying the Athenians. Where in his speech On the Peace he had attacked the Athenians for their first expansionism during the fifth century, here at the close of his life he balances the attack on Sparta with a defense of the Athenians’ fifth century imperialism that can only be called bizarre. Responding to the evidently common criticisms of Athens for the tribute she had imposed on members of the Delian League, he argues that the members themselves had wished the alliance in order to preserve their own democracies; and furthermore, he goes on, as to the cities that were laid waste by the Athenians and the Spartans, “a matter for which certain men reproach the Athenians alone—we shall show that things much more reprehensible were done by those whom these men are never weary of extolling.” For, he says, while the Spartans made war on important states such as the home of glorious Agamemnon, who waged war with our hereditary foes in Asia, “it happened that we offended against islets so small and insignificant that many of the Hellenes do not even know of their existence” (70).
This last observation is quite remarkable.
Isocrates’ position on the wisdom of Athens’s fifth century imperialism was not consistent throughout his long life; while in his speech On the Peace he attributes the decline of Athens to her first strivings for naval empire, in the Panathenaicus of his old age he defends the first empire even by resorting to the protest that hardly anyone had so much as heard the name of Melos. Nor is it possible to detect an unwavering position as regards Sparta. But Isocrates’ view of the democratic government in which he and his father had been raised is unchanging. The reforms of Ephialtes, he believed, had destroyed good government. Before the reforms, leaders and followers alike had been patriots of good character; few laws were necessary because of the watchful eye the august body of the Areopagus maintained over the morals of citizens. Even the weather was better in the old days, when the gods who looked after such things were treated with respect.
Isocrates takes great pains to dissociate himself from oligarchy and from philolaconism. Whenever possible, he co-opts democratic rhetoric and ideology in defense of his program for curtailing democracy. His frequent call for the accountability of magistrates—a key element in democratic ideology—may be sincere, but fourth-century sophistry at its most advanced state is evident in his attack on the use of the lot as opening up the door to oligarchic partisans who might slip by unnoticed and his corresponding praise of the system of appointment for being “more democratic,” and his claim that Sparta owed her success to the democratic elements Lycurgus copied from Athens is striking. An enemy of the fully realized democratic system, Isocrates spared no effort in casting himself as the true democrat, upholder of the hallowed principle of proportional equality (though, interestingly, he does not use the expression patrios politeia anywhere in his writings).17 The Athenians did not respond to his many speeches the way Isocrates wanted them to; they were not inclined to mobilize for a massive anti-Persian campaign, and still less were they inclined to turn back the constitutional clock. Apparently the ancestral constitution was an idea whose time had come and gone.
Though Isocrates advocates what amounts to barring the poor from holding office and from participating regularly in the judicial system, he does not fully explain why this is necessary or how the program he proposes will solve Athens’s problems. His line of argument in maintaining that democracy has hurt Athens is unclear. Although he sees Athens as more successful in her foreign policy during the Persian Wars than she was later on after the reforms of Ephialtes, he does not show how these reforms contributed to this development, and though he maintains that the Athenians’ desire for “the empire of the sea … is what plunged us into our present state of disorder and overthrew that democratic government under which our ancestors lived and were the happiest of the Hellenes” (On the Peace, 64), the connection between this desire and the constitutional changes of the fifth century is not articulated. (Though a case can be—and has been—made between the Athenians’ dependence on the navy and the need fully to enfranchise the indigent rowers, Isocrates fails to make it.) It is uncertain, moreover, how he sees the depravity of contemporary politicians—as the product of the moral decline he is so given to decrying or as the outgrowth of the enfranchisement of the poor. On the whole his laments add up to a rather meandering and unpersuasive post hoc ergo propter hoc argument. His speeches do not really explain how the chrestoi made better magistrates and citizens than the poneroi, and the allegation of moral decline serves here, as so often, to throw a monkey wrench into any intelligible causal analysis. Many post-Periclean statesmen, moreover, came from well-to-do families—Nicias most certainly, and without a doubt the uncouth Cleon, whose father owned a thriving tannery; Solon would certainly have had to allow a Cleon to hold office. On two counts, however, Isocrates’ argumentation is clear: wealth in magistrates is a good predictor of integrity, while poverty lays them open to corruptibility—and no oligarchic revolutions troubled Athens before the reforms of Ephialtes.
. . . . .
The copious writings in which Isocrates wrestled with the problems confronting his native city demonstrate the close connection between the success of Athens’s foreign policy and the popularity of her democratic form of government. The debacle in Sicily, the loss of the Peloponnesian War, and the decrease in prestige Athens experienced during the fourth century drew down new accusations against the democracy on top of those that had always lurked beneath the surface of fifth-century literature. The repercussions of Athens’s military and diplomatic setbacks for the esteem in which her government was held were dramatic and unmistakable. The allegations made against Athens were sweeping and included not only politics but religion and morality as well, and the purported decline of Athens as she fell sadly away from what had been best in her heritage would play an important role in Western thinking about classical democracy.