Chapter Four
It could almost be said that political theorizing was invented to show that democracy, the rule of men by themselves, necessarily turns into rule by the mob.
—J. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti
MORE A POLITICIAN than a philosopher, Isocrates did not show in his orations much understanding of either politics or philosophy, and the task of properly condemning Athenian democracy was left to his more insightful contemporaries Plato and Aristotle. Like intellectuals in the twentieth century, Plato and Aristotle wrestled with the question of how it could make sense to divide political power equally when people seem so clearly unequal in their capacity to make political decisions—when some are too shortsighted, too selfish, or too ignorant to decide prudently. Unlike their modern counterparts, Plato and Aristotle were not constrained in their thinking by living in a world that taught the equality of all humans as a self-evident constitutional, ethical, and spiritual principle. They bequeathed to posterity a large body of writings in which the weaknesses of Athenian government were inset into an imposing theoretical framework, and of this theoretical construct the natural inequality of individuals formed an important building block. Plato and Aristotle both recur to the fourth-century topos of the two different kinds of equality to support their attack on democracy’s pretensions to equity. Measured against the various ideal poleis of Plato’s Republic and Laws and of Aristotle’s Politics, Athenian democracy was found to violate the natural hierarchy inherent in human associations. Because of this violation of nature, it was deemed both unstable and unjust.1
EQUALITY OR JUSTICE?
In the project of lending the sanctity of weighty philosophical argument to the anti-Athenian position, some ground had already been broken by Socrates. Determining the beliefs of the historical Socrates poses serious methodological difficulties, of course, since Socrates, in keeping with his lifelong posture as an intellectual tease, left no writings. (One cannot but wonder whether he would have persisted in his elusive stance had he known what would be put in his mouth in the dialogues Plato so kindly supplied to fill the vacuum.) It seems reasonable to accept the view of the majority of Platonic scholars that the earliest of Plato’s dialogues—the Apology, Crito, Protagoras, and Gorgias, for example—reflect the thinking of Socrates, whereas in the later dialogues written long after Socrates’ execution, such as the Republic and the Statesman, Plato uses Socrates primarily as a mouthpiece for his own opinions. What Plato portrays Socrates as saying in the early dialogues is less hostile to Athenian democracy than what he depicts him as saying in the later dialogues in which he appears and in The Laws, a late dialogue in which he is absent, and so it is possible that Socrates was less hostile to Athenian government than was Plato.2 But the evidence of the dialogues is ambiguous, as is the evidence provided by Socrates’ own biography.
Although Socrates does not praise Athenian democracy directly in these dialogues, the paramount importance he ascribes there to unfettered inquiry suggests that in some respects he looked favorably on the government and way of life of Athens, the one state that employed as a synonym of its government parrhesia, freedom of speech; Socrates says openly in Gorgias (461E) that there was more freedom of speech in Athens than anywhere else in Greece. (Socrates’ subsequent fate, of course, endows this observation with heavy irony, but the irony depends for its force on the premise that Socrates and his audience do believe the truth of what he says.) The very notion of Socratic wisdom, that is, the wisdom of recognizing one’s own ignorance, is at odds with Plato’s suggestion in the Republic that there exists an absolute truth to which one may not only aspire but indeed attain: surely the unending dialogue that Socrates advocates in the Apology and Gorgias is incompatible with the life of public service that the already-perfected Guardians of Plato’s Republic must live.3 Though the Crito may have a hidden agenda of defending Socrates’ patriotism and/or the failure of his friends to spirit him out of prison, still the portrait of Socrates’ relationship to Athens there is remarkably warm.4 The alienation from Athens that is so evident in the Republic is lacking in the early dialogues, and nowhere in these dialogues does Socrates state or imply that he has in mind a form of government better than democracy. Despite his manifest distress at the way democracy substituted rule by an ignorant majority for rule by intellectuals, he does not take the occasion of these dialogues to propose helpful criteria whereby the wise minority might be isolated. Although Socrates was critical of the Athenian state on many counts, his focus on its shortcomings can be explained easily enough by his Athenian citizenship and Athenian audience, and it seems likely that he would have directed his criticism toward the government of whatever polis he lived in.
The details of Socrates’ life have been adduced as evidence for his political beliefs both by those who see him as a supporter of the democracy and by those who consider him more sympathetic to the oligarchs. His close association with the democratic partisan Chaerephon and the admiration the orator Lysias retained for him after his death have suggested to some that thoughtful people who knew him well did not find his views antidemocratic, something that would have amounted in his day to nothing less than treason. The fact that he never left the city can be also be cited as evidence of his sympathy with the democracy. On the other hand, his proud reminder in the Apology that he was unwilling to obey the Thirty when they commanded him to arrest Leon of Salamis implies that he was someone to whom the Thirty felt comfortable giving orders in the first place, and his decision to remain in Athens during the tyranny carries similar implications. We must ask, moreover, how it could be that a prodemocratic Socrates would be executed by a democracy known to be mild (at least to private citizens) but not by an oligarchy known to be murderous.5
The truth is that the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues exhibited a personality that many have found engaging and endearing, particularly those whose introduction to him came as a result of reading the Apology in youth, and that Socrates’ perceived charm has combined with his defense of intellectual inquiry to persuade egalitarian twentieth-century readers that nobody who manifests Socrates’ humble posture and champions free speech could possibly oppose democracy. Those who themselves oppose democracy have been similarly convinced that no-one as insightful as Socrates could possibly fail to see its patent inadequacy, and much that passes for scholarship on Socrates is actually a series of position papers on democracy. (I except, of course, thinkers who have not succumbed to his charms.)
Regardless of the opinions of the historical Socrates, the criticisms of democracy in general and Athenian democracy in particular that were placed in his mouth by Plato (and, for that matter, by another of his students, Xenophon) have been enshrined in the anti-Athenian tradition. These certainly include the underlying premise of both early and late Platonic dialogues—that most people are ignorant and have incorrect perceptions about right and wrong. Thus for example in the Crito Socrates seeks to persuade Crito that public opinion should not be a factor in his decision about whether to escape from prison, since the public is ignorant and its judgments therefore do not command respect (46B–48A). In Protagoras, Socrates cleverly manipulates Protagoras’ premise that political capacity is a kind of techne to highlight the specialization necessary for making sound political “products”; where Protagoras had maintained that this aptitude was diffused throughout the population, Socrates stressed the element of specialization implied by techne in a way that looked ahead to the structure of the state in the Republic, and in his scheme the very smiths and shoemakers whose technai are put forward by Protagoras as models for the politike techne wind up excluded from decision making. It is in Protagoras that Plato lays the foundations for the antidemocratic argument that would run through his middle and late dialogues. Though the Socrates of the early dialogues does not suggest that rich people are any less likely to be ignorant and incompetent than poor people, still Socrates has understandably been cited as a legitimizing ancestor of antidemocratic theory by virtue of his low esteem for the intellect of the average citizen.
One of the central premises of the Gorgias, moreover, seems to imply a grave indictment of the Athenian democracy of the fifth century.6 In this dialogue, evidently composed in the 390s, the sophist Gorgias tries to convince Socrates of the value of rhetoric as a tool of political persuasion. To counter his argument, Socrates points out the uselessness of persuasion in the absence of the knowledge of what is good, and in so doing calls into question the democratic system whereby power concentrated itself in the hands of the persuasive rather than in those of the wise. Socrates uses the value of rhetoric in a public assembly to undermine the wisdom of the assembly itself: by inquiring whether a doctor or a rhetorician would be a more effective speaker on the topic of medicine, he is able to extract the answer that the rhetorician will be more effective than an expert only if the audience itself is ignorant. Rhetoric, then, is an effective device only in persuading ignorant people (459A–B).
In addition, the Socrates of the Gorgias attacks the Athenian democracy specifically in alleging that Athens’s most renowned leaders, Pericles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Themistocles, had failed to improve the citizens; indeed, he claims that Pericles made them worse. Claiming to have heard that “Pericles has made the Athenians idle, cowardly, loquacious, and greedy” by initiating the system of state payment for state service, he goes on to argue that Pericles’ success as a trainer of men is belied by the Athenians’ impeachment of him toward the end of his career. Would a herdsman in charge of donkeys or horses or oxen be considered a good trainer if the creatures of whom he had charge became more ungovernable rather than less so, he asks? And yet Pericles, Cimon, Themistocles, and Miltiades all met similar fates at the hands of the demos they had been charged with improving (515D–516E). In a system based on rhetorical persuasion in open assembly, popular acclaim will attend on the man who tells the people what they wish to hear rather than what truly benefits them. The harm this phenomenon does to the city is as great as the harm that would be done to the body if the true mistresses of health, that is, gymnastics and medicine, were to be shoved aside and replaced with a baker’s fine loaves, the cook’s tasty dishes, and the vintner’s wine (518–19). Underlying the attack on the rhetorician’s so-called art is a premise that, although not necessarily antidemocratic in theory, certainly worked to undermine the central dynamic of Athenian government, which made policy on the basis of the public’s response to orators in the assembly. Athenian government and society, Socrates argued, was grounded in verbal exercises (both in persuading and in being persuaded) by the intellectually incompetent. In its condemnation of the desultory and superficial educational practices of the Athenians, Gorgias looks ahead to Plato’s longer Republic and Laws.
But in reality, much in the Gorgias suggests that Socrates saw some merit in the democratic system. For the repeated contention that politicians on whom the demos turns are thereby shown up ipso facto as failed statesmen works to shift the burden here from the demos to its leaders. To attack individual politicians is not necessarily to attack their constituency or the system to which they owed their authority. Though at first glance his reasoning may seem circular, in fact it is astute of Socrates to observe that statesmen who end up in disgrace have by definition failed in their mission of improving their fellow-citizens and hence are genuinely deserving of censure, and this observation certainly calls into question the traditional view of the ingratitude of the demos. Socrates’ arrogant challenger Callicles, moreover, refers to Socrates as a demegoros, a democratic/demagogic orator (482C, 494D) and complains that Socrates is always talking about cobblers and fullers, cooks and doctors. These allegations certainly cast Socrates as the upholder of the democratic ethos. Like other Platonic dialogues, the Gorgias raises the question of the relationship between democracy and tyranny, but the answers it presents are manifold. The rhetorician who is allegedly part and parcel of the democratic system is agreed by Socrates and his interlocutors to be similar to a tyrant in the power he holds. The more the others rejoice in the freedom of restraint that the rhetorician shares with the tyrant, the more Socrates the demegoros seeks to show up the men with whom he is speaking as in truth antidemocratic in their preference for oratorical tyranny over an open exploration of issues with a thoughtful and responsive demos capable of thinking for itself.7
It may be significant, too, that Socrates chooses the Persians rather than the Athenians as his example of the pitfalls of imperialism. And Socrates fails conspicuously to cast Athens’s difficulties in the construct of decline dear to his antidemocratic contemporaries as it has been dear to their most recent successors. In fact, he examines the behavior of the democracy chiefly, if not entirely, during the period before Pericles’ death. These departures from conventional anti-Athenian wisdom, combined with Socrates’ refusal to join Thucydides in championing Athens’s martyred politicians, suggest that the attitude to Athenian government manifested in this presumably antidemocratic early dialogue is complex.
These subtleties, however, have not been incorporated into the tradition about Plato, Socrates, and Athenian democracy, and when the sentiments voiced in Plato’s later dialogues and in the Memorabilia and Oeconomicus of Xenophon were grafted onto the antidemocratic strand in the early Platonic dialogues, the implications for Athens seemed devastating. Throughout the works of both writers there runs an authoritarian strand that led both the dogmatic ideologue and the seasoned military man to believe that mankind divides itself naturally into rulers and ruled—a belief that Plato’s student Aristotle was to share. The concept of class, moreover, was an integral part of the thinking of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle alike. This stratification, by and large lacking in the early “Socratic” dialogues of Plato, tends inevitably in an antidemocratic direction, stressing as it does the differences among people where democratic theory emphasized what was held in common. A few key passages have traditionally been cited from Xenophon to buttress the notion of the antidemocratic Socrates, but Xenophon, whose intelligence could not rival that of either Plato or Socrates, is not a reliable source for Socrates’ opinions, and in any event these passages pale in contrast with the thoroughgoing attack on democracy in Plato’s Republic, Statesman, and Laws.
The Laws is Plato’s longest dialogue. In it Plato seeks to establish a constitution that will stand midway between monarchy and democracy, taking as his point of departure the premise that an “Athenian stranger” is conversing with a Spartan and a Cretan concerning the best constitution for the new Greek city of “Magnesia” that is supposedly being founded on Crete.8 Criticisms of Athens in specific are apparent at several junctures. Plato’s references to the moral depravity of naval states are frequent and pointed. As book 4 opens, the Athenian stranger inquires how far from the sea the new city will be located. Upon being told that it will lie some eighty stades (nine or ten miles) from the shore, he inquires whether it has harbors. To the response that indeed the harbors are excellent, he exclaims, “Dear me! How unfortunate!” (704A–C) and goes on to express concern about the luxury and corruption that are liable to slip in through the port. Such a situation, he concludes, by promoting “foreign merchandise and retail trading,” renders the city “faithless and loveless, not to itself only but to the rest of the world as well”; still, one must make the best of things (704–5A). It is good, the stranger remarks, that Magnesia is self-sufficient and will not be located directly on the coast, since a coastal city would need not the constitution he is proposing but rather “a mighty saviour and divine lawgivers, if, with such a character, it was to avoid having a variety of luxurious and depraved habits” (704D). (Aristotle was to express a similar concern at Politics 7.6.) The cutting references to Athens are unmistakable.
The Athenian stranger goes on to discuss Athens directly in lamenting its conversion to a naval power when sailors are notoriously cowardly (in comparison with “staunch footsoldiers”) and always ready to retreat to their ships to escape danger (706B–C). He also cites that stalwart sailor Odysseus as a source for the bad character of marines, quoting his lines to Agamemnon in book 14 of the Iliad to the effect that the Achaeans, if their ships are drawn down to the sea, will withdraw from the heat of battle and take to the water (706D–E), and he goes on to complain that “states dependent upon navies for their power give honours, as rewards for their safety, to a section of their forces that is not the finest; for they owe their safety to the arts of the pilot, the captain, and the rower—men of all kinds and not too respectable—so that it would be impossible to assign the honours to each of them rightly” (707A–B). Plato advances here three separate theses: that some parts of society are more respectable (spoudaios) than others; that men who serve in the navy are less respectable than men who serve in the infantry; and that it is more difficult to distinguish the proper recipients of awards in naval engagements than in land engagements. The stranger moves quickly to ask Cleinias the Cretan whether a state unable to determine the proper recipients of honors can be properly regulated, and Cleinias, perhaps more overwhelmed than convinced, agrees that this would be nearly impossible but reminds the Athenian that it was the naval engagement at Salamis that saved Greece during the Persian wars—at least, he adds guardedly, that is what we Cretans say (707B).
After conceding that this is what most Greeks and Persians believe, the Athenian nonetheless puts forward an alternate theory. Along with Megillus the Spartan—whom he co-opts into his belief system in passing—he affirms that it was “the land battle of Marathon which began the salvation of Greece, and that of Plataea which completed it”; and, he adds, “we affirm also that, whereas these battles made the Greeks better, the sea-fights made them worse,” presumably in the way he has described, by exalting a disreputable segment of society and by introducing luxury and corruption (707C). Besides, he goes on, our present object is not “mere safety and existence … but rather the gaining of all possible goodness and the keeping of it throughout life” (707D). Surely it is reaching to brush aside deliverance from Persian despotism as one of those little things that are ultimately extrinsic to the search for the good life. Altogether the passage is remarkable for its condemnation of naval power and its class-based disparagement of the men who served in the navy—the men who formed the bulk of the Athenian citizenry and of the Athenian assembly. The complaint that naval power makes a state “faithless and loveless, not to itself alone, but to the rest of the world as well” seems also to condemn Athens’s foreign policy. Withal, the attack on naval orientation constitutes a serious indictment of the Athenian social, political, and economic structure.9
That some people are more respectable than others is axiomatic to Plato’s hierarchical view of the world, and it is no wonder the Athenian stranger sees a basic structural weakness in a system that has no sensible plan for distinguishing the more meritorious from the less so. Rehearsing the fourth-century topos of the two equalities (already adumbrated in Gorgias 508 and elaborated in the orations of Isocrates), he proclaims that in Magnesia “the selection of officials will form a mean between a monarchic constitution and a democratic; and midway between these our constitution should always stand.” For, he goes on, stressing the differences among individuals,
slaves will never be friends with masters, nor bad men with good, even when they occupy equal positions—for when equality is given to unequal things, the result will be unequal…. For there are two kinds of equality. The one of these any State or lawgiver is competent to apply in the assignment of honours … by simply employing the lot to give even results in the distributions; but the truest and best form of equality is not an easy thing for everyone to discern. It is in the judgment of Zeus. (756E–57B)
The facile sort of equality, in other words, such as one finds in a democracy, is an ordinary human phenomenon, but “proportional equality” reflects the mind of God. (This view of divinity and equality makes a striking contrast with that of the eighteenth-century Americans who would proclaim in 1776 the self-evident nature of the truth that all men were created equal and endowed by God with inalienable rights.) Plato’s proportional equality “dispenses more to the greater and less to the smaller, giving due measure to each according to nature; and with regard to honours also, by granting the greater to those that are greater in goodness, and the less to those of the opposite character in respect of goodness and education, it assigns in proportion what is fitting to each.” It is this equality, he explains, at which the founders of his new state will aim—not at “the advantage of a few tyrants, or of one, or of some form of democracy, but justice always; and this consists in what we have just stated, namely, the natural equality given on each occasion to things unequal.” Democracy, in other words, is classed with tyranny and oligarchy in their shared opposition to justice. Nonetheless, he goes on, sortition should be used from time to time in selecting officials “on account of the discontent of the masses,” on which occasions one must pray to God and Luck for the lot to be guided toward justice. “Thus is it,” he concludes, “that necessity compels us to employ both forms of equality; but that form, which needs good luck, we should employ as seldom as possible” (757C–58A). It is only self-preservation in the face of discontent from below, in other words, that impels Plato to co-opt a democratic procedure into the government of his ideal polis. To be sure, a variety of details are adapted from Athenian practice to suit Magnesian needs. The democratically elected examiners, for example, who help call officials to account, recall the Athenians’ own euthynoi, and the assembly of citizens is divided up into committees that sit separately during different portions of the year as did the Athenian boule. The assembly is limited, however, to those who have borne arms; the council itself is chosen in an elaborate multitiered system that makes class distinctions; the assembly and council deal only with a limited agenda, and the guardians of the laws and other high officials appear to be immune from accountability. The fundamental principles of the Magnesian system remain hierarchical and antiegalitarian, and Plato’s indictment of the Athenian naval state here is severe and uncompromising.
Plato expresses a still more authoritarian view of the role of law in The Statesman, another late dialogue. There he casts the rule of law as a second-best solution to the problem of sovereignty, one that is to be deployed only in the absence of an all-knowing philosopher-ruler. The possibilities of the reign of law, Plato maintains here, are limited and fail to consider the possibility that an exceptional individual would make a wiser government than inflexible laws. Like medical treatment, he claims, a regimen should change in accordance with changes in circumstance. Surely no one would expect a doctor to continue ministering to a patient in the same way despite perceptible alterations in the patient’s condition. These sentiments stand at the polar opposite of those voiced by Socrates in the Crito, where the philosopher sought to justify his martyrdom on the grounds that no man, however wise, may set his judgment in opposition to the laws—but they continue the theme of the true statesman as a wise doctor that formed the capstone of the Gorgias, in which Socrates set himself up as the sole wise physician competent to minister to sick Athens. It is Socrates the governing sage rather than Socrates the law-abiding citizen who lives on in this late dialogue.
Although the Laws and the Statesman show different faces of the antidemocratic Plato, Plato’s position may best be understood through the discussions that fill the Republic.10 Plato’s call for a philosopher-king to rule over the less enlightened is well known, as is his second-best solution: the creation of a ruling caste of Guardians, superior in wisdom to the rest, backed up by Auxiliaries who will fight in defense of the state. The Guardians will be both born and bred; intermarriage is used to keep within the fixed group the supreme wisdom that the Guardians will acquire through a carefully designed educational program that has as its culminating experience the perception of the ideal form of the good. There is no point, accordingly, in proffering a watered-down version of this instruction to the masses, since true knowledge is an all-or-nothing proposition to which few intellects may aspire, and strict adherence to the rules of nature, Plato argues, demands that each human “animal” do that for which he or she has the most natural aptitude. Discarding conventional sex roles, he claims that the relegation of females to the traditional tasks of household management fails to maximize their potential for serving the polis. Though he agrees with the bulk of his contemporaries that in most respects the average female is markedly inferior to the average male, he suggests the possibility that an individual bright female might make a better ruler than an individual untalented male. Taking a lesson from the world of the four-footed, Plato points out that often female dogs watch and female horses pull as efficiently as males (451–57). To ensure the continuity of the class structure, each class will mate only within its own ranks, and any unexpected genetic accidents wherein the offspring seem more compatible with another class will be transferred accordingly.11 To make this structure palatable to the citizens, Plato suggests that a myth be developed concerning the derivation of each class from a different metal. The earth, the citizens will be told, was the common mother of them all, but with this earth gold was mixed to produce guardians, silver to produce auxiliaries, and iron and brass to produce the others (414C).
To this ideal state Plato contrasts some of the shoddy excuses for governments current in his own day—tyranny, oligarchy, democracy, and timocracy. (It is not clear to me just what he means by timocracy—“government by those with most time, or honor”—for he acknowledges that striving for honor through virtue is significantly different from seeking honor through riches, and his timocratic state seems to incorporate both elements. The Spartan system may be intended as a model, or it may not.) Though he is unsparing in his criticism of all these forms of government, his attack on democracy is particularly vehement and seems to go beyond what was absolutely required by the framework of his argument. Plato’s vivid account of the progressive degeneration of constitutions has had a powerful impact on Western thinkers. Arguing that a flaw in the conduct of his ideal government would lead to timocracy, and that timocracy gives way to oligarchy, oligarchy to democracy, and democracy to tyranny, Plato maintains that a concomitant decline is perceptible at the individual level. Indeed, he argues, these constitutional revolutions are the product of the individual devolution that takes place when the timocratic man produces an oligarchic son, the oligarchic man a democratic son, and the democratic man a tyrannical son. (Explaining how the timocratic man accidentally arises in his ideal state is a tricky proposition, but Plato manages to carry it off.) Democracy, Plato maintains, rises from the ashes of oligarchy, since the precarious condition of a state that makes money the sole criterion of merit will inevitably lead sooner or later to civil war. When the poor are victorious in this conflict, they “kill some of the opposite party, banish others, and grant the rest an equal share in civil rights and government, officials being usually appointed by lot” (557A).12 Under this type of regime, Plato says, no one has to submit to authority if he does not wish to, no one need fight when his fellow-citizens are at war, and anyone when the fancy strikes him may hold office or sit on juries, even if he has no legal right to do so. The lackadaisical laissez-faire policy of democracy goes so far as to permit condemned or exiled criminals blithely to walk the streets, while “no one takes any more notice than he would of a spirit that walked invisible” (558A). A democracy tramples under foot all the fine principles we have laid down for the training of leaders in founding our commonwealth, Plato complains, and “with a magnificent indifference to the sort of life a man has led before he enters politics, will promote to honor anyone who merely calls himself the people’s friend.” “Magnificent indeed,” Adeimantus replies ironically, and is happy to agree with Socrates in terming democracy “an agreeable form of anarchy with plenty of variety and an equality of a peculiar kind for equals and unequals alike” (558C). As each form of government is typified in Plato’s scheme by a certain kind of individual, Plato details the indulgence that will characterize the democratic man. Such a man’s life, he concludes, “is subject to no order or restraint, and he has no wish to change an existence which he calls pleasant, free, and happy” (561D).
“That well describes the life of one whose motto is liberty and equality,” Adeimantus chimes in.
Plato then provides a convoluted argument to explain how such a government will give way to tyranny. Tyranny will arise, he contends, as a result of the party strife that will come of the democratic anarchy wherein parents fail to set examples and provide discipline for children. Under these circumstances, children fail to respect their parents; a parallel disintegration overtakes relations between pupil and teacher, old and young; slaves of both sexes are quite as free as their masters; freedom and equality characterize interactions between men and women; and even animals fail to defer to humans, as horses and donkeys feel entitled to walk down the street with all the dignity of citizens (563C). This excess of liberty, Plato explains, will lead to despotism, for “the truth is that, in the constitution of society, quite as much as in the weather or in plants and animals, any excess brings about an equally violent reaction” (564A). The plunder of the rich by the poor, he explains in rather more detail, foments party strife that ends in the masses elevating their champion to a position of absolute power.
Plato’s determination to cast his views about the best state in a broad theoretical framework makes it unclear whether he is describing here what ought naturally to happen in the tidiest of universes or what has actually happened in Greek history, but it is plain at any rate that his analysis is gravely vitiated if in fact the course of history has already proven him wrong. For this reason it is difficult to understand what genre Plato thinks he is writing in, as a great deal of what he says is plainly inapplicable to the most well known democracy of his day, his native city of Athens.13 Although his complaint about the fine line that has come to distinguish slaves from free citizens echoes the analogous complaint of the Old Oligarch, his allegations that proper sex distinctions have been blurred is peculiar, both from the standpoint of everything we know about Athenian society, in which both law and custom prescribed very different lives for the two sexes, and in view of his own radical prescription for women guardians in his ideal state.14 Altogether the passage is outlandish, and it is astonishing that so many scholars have been happy to take it at face value. What on earth can Plato have been thinking in suggesting that citizens of democracies did not have to fight when their cities were at war or concur when their cities made peace? As to condemned criminals freely roaming the streets, Plato knew better than anyone that Socrates was no longer on the loose at the time the Republic was composed. Nor was the alleged natural slide into tyranny a feature of Athenian life, where the democracy had known a relatively stable existence for several generations despite two short-lived oligarchic coups. One begins to wonder whether perhaps Plato was thinking of Syracuse, or even of the insurrection of Cinadon or the insubordination of Lysander at Sparta, but this line of inquiry seems unproductive in view of the extreme difficulty of catching Plato’s tone in a passage in which he goes so far as to suggest that even the animals act uppity under a democratic constitution.15
Plato had begun the dialogue by posing the question “what is justice?” and proposing that justice in the state might better be understood by extrapolation from justice in the individual. Having demonstrated that an individual is just when all parts of the soul are in harmony, he extends this argument to suggest that the state is justly constituted when all elements are in harmony and that this harmony can arise only when individuals are classed in categories according to their natural aptitudes. Plato’s commitment to the concept of ideal forms, moreover, dictates that there should by definition be only one ideal state. It will be timeless, changeless, and beyond criticism. The poets, he says (before expelling them from his ideal state), have erred in portraying the gods as adopting from time to time the guise of mortals; for a god by its very nature is perfect and could not voluntarily exchange its perfection for a lesser condition. Similarly any growth or development on the part of his ideal state is a contradiction in terms. (He is hard put to explain how the degeneration to timocracy could arise, and he resorts to an unpersuasive explanation about careless mistakes in the mating of the guardians.) The openness and fluidity of democracy, consequently, is as far as any government can go in demonstrating its degeneracy. It is in this context that Plato presents his attack on the government of his own state, channeling his condemnation into a high-flown theoretical argument with a questionable basis in historical fact.16 Inevitably, history is antithetical to his worldview, in which human events function only as distraction from the vision of that frozen reality in which, by definition, nothing good could ever “happen.”17
The genesis of Plato’s thinking about democracy is not clear. His political development is outlined in the famous Seventh Letter, one in a series of epistles that scholars have traditionally ascribed to him. The letter corresponds in all particulars to just what would be expected from a knowledge of Greek history and the Platonic dialogues, and it smacks of a literary exercise in response to a homework assignment, as if the author had sat himself down diligently to compile a list of salient points and reconstructed what such a letter must have contained. But although the bundle is too neatly tied for my taste, the development it traces may well be real.18 Regardless of the genuineness of the letter, historically speaking Plato’s aversion to Athenian democracy probably arose from his observation of it in action and was intensified by the execution of Socrates, which bereft him while still in his twenties of an adored mentor. Whatever its origins, the indictment of democracy that appears in Plato’s dialogues both early and late was to become an integral part of the antidemocratic tradition and was to be cited by later writers as evidence of the insufficiency both of Athenian government in particular and of democracy in general.19 In this tradition, Plato’s forceful attacks on oligarchy were generally ignored. From this point of view it matters little to what degree Plato’s attack on democracy was aimed at his native city; what is important is that it was subsequently perceived as a firsthand eyewitness indictment of Athenian democracy on the part of one of the most brilliant minds in history. Although it is likely that alienation from the real city of Athens played a large role in the genesis of Plato’s antidemocratic position, in the Republic these sentiments are cast in an elaborate theoretical framework that seeks to endow them with a timeless relevance. In Plato’s construct, the inadequacy of democracy arises from its failure to recognize the differences among individuals and to utilize these differences dynamically by carefully channeling people into the métier in which their skills will enable them to make the greatest contribution to the state. Democracy, Plato believed, by acting as if the politike techne were diffused (in accordance with the myth of Protagoras) throughout the community, fails to maximize the potential of each individual, for in fact the politike techne is confined to a small minority, and it is an inefficient use of manpower (or, as he maintains, personpower) to siphon off the energies of good cobblers and fullers into government while simultaneously wasting the talents of gifted leaders by diverting their energy into cobbling or fulling. As we have seen, the predictable failure of democracy is described at some length in Plato’s account of the progressive degeneration of constitutions. In this section of his work, in other words, Plato seeks to test his thesis that specialization is the key to a successful social and political structure, but his constructs do not correspond to the events of Greek history, and his attempt to provide historical validation for his dislike of all existing constitutions is not successful.
Its failure suggests that the origins of his thesis must be sought not simply in the immediate historical background of classical governments but also in his worldview as a whole (to which the history of Greece inevitably contributed in ways that would be difficult to isolate and define). It is easy to see how Plato’s beliefs about epistemology and education would lead him to an antidemocratic position, for his vision of wisdom as absolute and therefore attainable only by a small fraction of humanity carries with it a vehement rejection of the Protagorean worldview in which all people share, albeit unequally, in the politike techne. The authoritarian nature of Plato’s uncompromising truth leads in the same direction. Ironically, despite the presentation of his ideas in dialogue form, Plato rejects the dialectical method of education in his ideal state, in which pupils will be insulated from dialectic until the age of thirty. The continuing dialogue of open debate to which proponents of democracy pointed so proudly held no attraction for Plato; indeed, his own “dialogues” are authoritarian in nature, organized as they are around the desire of the leader to achieve a consensus approving his own thesis (a phenomenon that will be painfully familiar to both students and teachers today). Plato, plainly, knew at the outset where each dialogue was slated to come to rest, and instead of offering a forum for an open-ended search for meaning, the dialogues afford an opportunity artistically to manipulate Socrates’ interlocutors into highlighting the ultimate resolution in Platonic “truth.”
With this authoritarian element went the persistent drive to impose order on chaos—a drive that is so unrelenting as to invite psychoanalytic explanation, along with Plato’s portrayal of constitutional change as a form of Oedipal rebellion. Aversion to change plays a large role in Plato’s thinking and is used in book 10 of the Republic to justify the expulsion of poets from the ideal state on the grounds that the art they produce entails a transfiguration of ultimate reality that is, by definition, a decline, a falling off; providing wheels within wheels, Plato compounds this argument by alleging that the gods themselves appear degenerate in the writings of the poets because the very stories of divine metamorphoses recounted by the poets portray the gods “changing” their appearance, which no god would do, because change in a perfect being must by definition entail decline. Against this background, Plato’s complaint that the existing constitutions of Greece all contain within them the seeds of a revolution that will spark a metamorphosis into another constitution must be seen as representing not only a political opinion but a larger worldview in which truth is perceived as absolute, monolithic, and static. In this universe there can be by definition no history, for history involves growth and change, and for Plato the change of something that is good must entail degeneration. Although Plato’s metaphysics bring with them a rejection of all existing forms of government, posited as these governments are on misperceptions of truth that by definition are unreal and therefore decaying already at their inception, they carry the most severe implications for democracy, of which, as Cleon so bitterly complained over the question of Mytilene, change and flexibility are integral parts. Plato’s expulsion of the poets from his ideal state must also be seen in the context of the important role played in the education of Athenian citizens by attendance at tragedies. It was tragic drama that afforded Athenians an opportunity to ponder and debate many of the same issues that arose in Plato’s dialogues, and it is curious whether Plato wished to expel the poets precisely because he knew the kind of issues that tragedies stirred up in the minds of citizens or because he failed to grasp tragedy’s educative power.
The natural diversity that for Pericles had made Athens into a vital, throbbing entity served Plato’s state rather as a means of assigning each individual to his or her proper station on the great assembly line of the polis. Relegating to lesser classes the varying talents that produce material goods, Plato frees his guardians from the demands of diversity and endows them with the leisure to become a united front of enlightenment. Although he sees artisans as possessed of a variety of different skills, the politike techne appears to him as unvariegated and homogeneous. If a carpenter and a cobbler were to exchange trades, Plato complains, the result would be poor carpenting and cobbling, and the same will happen if a cobbler or other artisan seeks to change roles with a ruler or to add the ruler’s function onto his or her own (Republic 434A–C). Among the individual crafts, in other words, important distinctions exist, but the politike techne is indivisible. Where democratic theorists had seen diversity as the strength of the democratic polis, Plato’s ideal state draws its strength rather from the uniformity of vision in its ruling class.
But if Plato’s opposition to democracy must be traced in part to his intellectual authoritarianism, it must also be viewed in the context of class prejudice. Despite Plato’s determination to lend an air of abstraction to his work and to cast his wisdom as universal and absolute, knowing no bounds in time or space, his writings nonetheless make plain that he was distinctively a Greek aristocrat who shared numerous traditional convictions with the bulk of his class. These convictions included blithe acceptance of slavery; an inability to see a political structure larger than the polis; a preoccupation with physical beauty (pace the high-minded idealism of the Symposium); a strong belief in heredity; and a disdain for manual labor that sometimes extended to contempt for any form of earning a living and for all those whom circumstances compelled to support themselves. The last two of these bear directly on Plato’s view of democracy, though it is not clear precisely what relation they bear to each other. Beside Plato’s insistence that children in his ideal state who are accidentally born into the wrong class will be transferred into the proper station, we must place his conviction that such accidents will be rare, for his careful plan for eugenic intra-class breeding makes clear the expectation that as a rule guardian parents will produce babies who are guardian material, and others will not. Above and beyond the factor of heredity, moreover, Plato stresses the debilitating nature of hard work of a nonintellectual variety. In book 5 of the Republic, Plato attacks the sophists by complaining that such men address themselves to the multitude, and “the multitude can never be philosophical. Accordingly it is bound to disapprove of all who pursue wisdom; and so also, of course, are those individuals who associate with the mob and set their hearts on pleasing it” (493E). When men like this corrupt noble natures, he argues, then philosophy, like a maiden deserted by her nearest kin and bereft of her natural protectors, is open to debasement by the unworthy. For, Plato writes (in a passage as jarring to twentieth-century admirers of Greek ideals as the Thersites episode in the Iliad), in such cases some “poor creature who has proved his cleverness in some mechanical craft, sees here an opening for a pretentious display of high-sounding words and is glad to break out of the prison of his paltry trade and take sanctuary in the shrine of philosophy,” a pursuit that even in its present debased form
still enjoys a higher prestige, enough to attract a multitude of stunted natures, whose souls a life of drudgery has warped and maimed no less surely than their sedentary crafts have disfigured their bodies. For all the world they are like some little bald-headed tinker, who, having come into some money, has just got out of prison, had a good wash at the baths, and dressed himself up in a new coat as a bridegroom, ready to marry his master’s daughter, who has been left poor and friendless. Could the issue of such a match ever be anything but pitiful base-born creatures? (495D–E)
I quote the passage at such length because it has so frequently been passed over by modern readers. The contempt Plato shows for craftsmen here is particularly striking in view of the frequent comparison he makes between God and a craftsman, in particular in the Timaeus. Liberated from many of the conventional beliefs of his day such as the hopeless inadequacy of women and the improving effects of reading Homer, Plato was molded by other conventional beliefs, and in his writings he relies on a common disdain for the working man that enables his audience to share his frame of reference and makes possible a scathing analogy such as that of the pathetic tinker whose bald pate so wrenchingly evokes that of Thersites, with his elongated head adorned by its pitiful tuft of wool.
KEEPING OUT THE BANAUSOI
Plato’s contemporaries Xenophon and Aristotle shared this fundamental belief in the corrosive nature of what the Greeks called “banausic” labor (literally, work done over a furnace). Xenophon was an oligarchic partisan in 403 and an admirer of kingship and Sparta (though not, as we have seen, of Critias).20 In his Socratic dialogue the Oeconomicus, a free composition not generally thought to represent the views of Socrates, he has Socrates say: “we have agreed with our states in rejecting those arts that are called ‘banausic’ because they seem to ruin both the body and the mind, and we have said that an invasion by the enemy would show the wisdom of this if the farmers and artisans were compelled to sit apart and vote separately whether to defend the country or withdraw from the open country and protect the fortresses.” In these cases, he predicts, the farmers would vote to defend the land while the craftsmen would vote “for not fighting but rather sitting still, as they have been brought up to do, and not exert themselves or take any risk,” and he concludes that husbandry is the best of all occupations for a kalos kagathos, for it is liable to endow the body with “the greatest measure of strength and beauty, and to leave to the mind the most leisure for attending to the interests of one’s friends and city.” The agricultural life, he maintains, has been esteemed so highly because it seems to produce citizens who are the most loyal to the community (Oeconomicus 6. 5–11).
In the hands of Xenophon, then, the antibanausic prejudice focuses on the arts and on the city and carries within it a snipe at the Periclean war strategy that entailed confining the population of Attica within the city walls—a strategy praised by Thucydides, who saw the ultimate Athenian defeat as in part the consequence of departure from that strategy. Xenophon for his part applauds the old-fashioned values of the landed aristocracy while denigrating the efficacy and patriotism of the Athenian democratic system and of Pericles himself. Character, Xenophon maintains, is built by closeness to the land, and in the opposition between the noble countryside and the wicked city, the superior virtue of country-dwellers to that of city-dwellers, he stands toward the beginning of a long Western tradition, articulating with some care the views that had been evident since the days when the Greek landed aristocracy had been compelled against its will to share the reins of government with the new aristocracy of trade wealth.
Squarely within the aristocratic tradition, Aristotle shared Xenophon’s contempt for craftsmen and traders and preferred a rural commonwealth to an urban one, but his reasons were strikingly different from Xenophon’s.21 Where Xenophon had seen farmers as superior in wisdom and virtue to city-dwellers, Aristotle argues rather that country people make better citizens because of that benign apathy that discourages them from attending assemblies and meddling in politics.22 Nonfarming elements of the populace, he complains,
which form the basis of the other varieties of democracy, are almost without exception of a much poorer stamp. They lead a poor sort of life: and none of the occupations followed by a populace which consists of mechanics, shop-keepers, and day labourers, leaves any room for excellence. Revolving round the market-place and the city centre, people of this class generally find it easy to attend the sessions of the popular assembly—unlike the farmers who, scattered through the country-side, neither meet so often nor feel so much the need for society of this sort. (Politics 1319a [6.4.12–13])23
A republic of farmers, on the other hand, will be far superior to one of city-dwellers, for the farmers will not gum up the works by exercising their legal rights. Farmers, he says,
not having any great amount of property, are busily occupied; and they have thus no time for attending the assembly. Not possessing the necessities of life, they stick to their work, and do not covet what does not belong to them; indeed they find more pleasure in work than they do in politics and government…. Any craving which the masses may feel for position and power will be satisfied if they are given the right of electing magistrates and calling them to account. (1318b [6.4.2–4])
Maintaining that neither happiness nor wisdom can be maintained except through a life of leisured contemplation, Aristotle insists that the citizens of an ideal state “must have a supply of property” to ensure sufficient leisure for goodness and political activity, and it is to be “these persons who are citizens—they, and they only. The class of mechanics has no share in the state; nor has any other class which is not a ‘producer’ of goodness” (1329a [7.9.7]). Nor in the best of all possible worlds should farmers be citizens, since a leisure anathema to farming is necessary both for the pursuit of political activity and for growth in goodness; but at least farmers are less likely to exercise what rights they may possess under the law (1328b–29a [7.9.4]). Aware that democracy in Greece is a fact of life, Aristotle seeks to exercise damage control by defusing it as far as possible: if the masses absolutely must have the franchise, let them at least exercise it as rarely as possible. Thus the “virtue” that he ascribes to rustic citizens is the virtue not of greater wisdom but rather of greater indifference.24 Though his conception of what it means to be a citizen was undoubtedly shaped by the development of the ideals of citizenship current in democratic Athens, he comes to very different conclusions about citizenship from those espoused by the Athenian democrats.
The son of the court physician of Philip of Macedon, Aristotle had received some training in biology from his father, and he had also been trained by Plato himself at the Academy, where he studied for twenty years, beginning in 367 when he was seventeen. Whereas Plato sought to reduce every crux to its lowest common denominator, as befitted a mathematician, Aristotle, as befitted a natural scientist, embraced complexity as the inescapable condition of life. A splitter where Plato had been a lumper, Aristotle was impatient of simplistic answers to social and political questions. He was also impatient of the single-minded laconism of his day. Sharing Plato’s glum realization voiced late in his life (in the Laws) that Spartans were better trained for war than for peace, he also expresses concern over the inevitable disaffection among the helots, the hereditary nature of the monarchy, and the failure of Lycurgan institutions to maintain proper control over women, who he says have been an increasing source of disorder and decline in the state (1269b–70a [2.9.3–15]).25 It is important to observe that he attributes the corruption he alleges has taken place among the ephors to the fact that the office is open even to the poor, and such men are notoriously susceptible to bribery. The ephors’ importance, moreover, is so great that the kings have been forced to court their favor, moving the government from aristocracy toward democracy. But though Aristotle scoffed at the rapturous idealization of the Spartan state, still he has high words of praise for the system as a whole. A truly prudent constitution, he asserts, lies in a mixture of democratic and oligarchic principles, and “it is a good criterion of a proper mixture of democracy and oligarchy that a mixed constitution should be able to be described indifferently as either. When this can be said, it must obviously be due to the excellence of the mixture…. The constitution of Sparta is an example” (1294b [4.9.6–7]).
To the mixture of oligarchy and democracy Aristotle gives the name politeia, and he puts forward this winning combination as the ideal government. Non-Greeks have been hard put to discover an appropriate translation for politeia. A frequent solution is “constitutional government,” a tendentious phrase that imputes unconstitutionality to all other states. Perhaps the best rendering is simply, as some have had it, “polity.” This state will be organized along principles of proportional equality, in which Aristotle shared the belief of Isocrates and Plato.26 Aristotle isolates three common forms of government in Greece: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. All three of these systems he condemns as not being directed to the common interest. At several junctures he attacks democracy by aligning it with tyranny. Both tyrannies and democracies, he complains, “encourage feminine influence in the family, in the hope that wives will tell tales of their husbands; and for a similar reason they are both indulgent to slaves. Slaves and women are not likely to plot against tyrants: indeed, as they prosper under them, they are bound to favour their rule—as they will also favour democracies, where the people likes to play the sovereign as much as any tyrant” (1313b [5.11.11]). In an extreme democracy, moreover, popular decrees are sovereign rather than the law, and the government “becomes analogous to the tyrannical form of single-person government. Both show a similar temper; both behave like despots to the better class of citizens; the decrees of the one are like the edicts of the other” (1292a [4.4.27–28]).27 Oligarchy and democracy, on the other hand, share the common fate of not being able to find enough qualified citizens to govern: democracy produces large numbers of citizens active in politics, but they lack political wisdom; oligarchy finds too few citizens who possess both good birth and merit (1301b–2a [5.1.14]). The proof of this, Aristotle claims, is that neither democracies nor oligarchies long endure. He recommends, therefore, a combination of the two. In Aristotle’s ideal state, a moderate-sized body of citizens will share in the course of their lives the duties of soldier (in youth), ruler (in midlife), and priest (in later life). Other duties necessary to the life of the polis such as farming and the production of wares will be relegated to males about whose civic status Aristotle is not consistent. Generally he describes them as partially enfranchised, that is, having the right to vote but not to hold office, but at other times he expresses the wish that these lesser people be excluded even from the ranks of citizens, as in the long discussion in book 3 about whether mechanics may be citizens, wherein he concludes that “the best form of state will not make the mechanic a citizen,” and “in states where mechanics are admitted to citizenship we shall have to say that the citizen excellence of which we have spoken cannot be attained by every citizen … but can only be achieved by those who are free from menial duties” (1278a [3.5.3]). The “freedom” of which Aristotle speaks was crucial in the thinking of all nonslave Greek males of his day. Many—though plainly not all—associated working for someone else (what we could today call having a job) with being a slave. Slaves had no options in their lives, and Aristotle was not alone in asking how people who had no choice in how they spent their time could possibly exercise deliberative capacity in matters affecting the whole state. Although for democrats the distinction between slaves and free men nonetheless loomed large, the opponents of democracy questioned whether the laboring poor were entitled to the perquisites of a freedom they did not seem to possess in any discernible way.
Aristotle’s ideal polis, consequently, is self-sufficient only if one takes into account the labor of the majority of inhabitants who are excluded from full citizen rights, perhaps from any citizen rights at all.28 Quick to identify democracy as the government of the poor majority over the rich minority, Aristotle still considers that he has incorporated the democratic principle into a state that disfranchises nearly all its inhabitants, operating on the Spartan principle that equality among citizens injects an element of democracy into government however exclusive the requirements of citizenship may be. These restrictions obtain in his ideal state despite his well-known departure from Plato in defending the notion that a mass of people who are individually unwise may surpass the wisdom of the few best men “collectively and as a body, although not individually” just as pot-luck dinners may excel those hosted by a single individual. It is for this reason, he maintains, that “the Many are also better judges of music and the writings of poets: some appreciate one part, some another, and all together appreciate all” (ibid., 1281b [3.11.2–3]). (It is unclear how he expects the many to develop these critical faculties, since in book 8 he advocates two different kinds of mousike [the Greek equivalent of both literature and music], a challenging one for educable [i.e., not poor] people and a merely entertaining one for audiences “of the baser sort” [ibid., 1342a (8.7.7)].)29 A large body, moreover, is less vulnerable to corruption. Though he contends that excluding large numbers of inhabitants from office can spark insurrection, he seeks a compromise similar to that of Solon, who conceded to the masses a share in electing magistrates and calling them to account but certainly not the right of holding office.
Aristotle’s departure from Plato in the matter of collective wisdom is unquestionably radical. He is inconsistent, however, in applying this liberal philosophy to his political system, for he is unable to make up his mind about the civic rights of tradesmen, artisans, and even farmers. Much can be learned about Aristotle’s view of the individuals who make up a community from his remarks concerning consensus in the Ethics, which he conceived as the prelude to the longer Politics, as well as his opening remarks in the Politics on the hierarchic nature of society, in which free rules over slave, and male over female. In a remarkable passage in the Ethics he praises the concord that exists among the epieikeis but discounts the possibility of such agreement among the phauloi. (Predictably, phaulos is one of the many pejorative Greek words like kakos with a complex of meanings embracing both material poverty and moral worthlessness.) The passage is worth citing at length:
Now this conception of concord is realized among good men [epieikeis], for such are in harmony both with themselves and with one another, having pretty much the same ground to stand upon. For the wishes of good men have a permanent character, and do not ebb and flow like the tides; moreover, they are directed to what is both just and expedient, and it is ends of that nature which they are at one in seeking. But bad men [phauloi] are incapable of achieving anything more than a trifling degree of concord as of friendship, since they invariably want more than their share in such advantages as may be going, while at the same time they shirk as much as they can of the trouble and expense of public service. And, while each hopes to secure these advantages for himself, he keeps a critical eye on his neighbour to prevent him from getting them. And in fact, unless they do watch one another, the public interest is sacrificed. (9.6.3–4)30
The belief that men can readily be divided into epieikeis and phauloi—civilized folk and riffraff, gentlemen and slobs—is of course hopelessly at odds with the democratic worldview that sees the citizenry made up of a wide spectrum of individuals, some better at one thing, some better at another. In a world in which the epieikeis could meaningfully be distinguished from the phauloi, democracy might well be a bad idea. And this was the mind-set of Aristotle, who, like Plato, believed it was possible to tell who was who and to allot privilege accordingly.
. . . . .
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were all molded by the Athenian democracy in which they lived. From it they derived, and with it they shared, a strong sense that the happiness of the individual was to be located in the just state. The Socrates of the Apology (24E) is in complete agreement with his accusers that it is the business of the laws of the city to make the citizens good; this principle would undergird all Plato’s writing on government. It was a belief that Athenians shared with other Greek thinkers and was the source of much ancient admiration for Sparta, whose system was believed to inculcate virtue in citizens. The notion voiced by Pericles that the man who has no interest in politics has no place in Athens (Thucydides 2.41) echoes again and again throughout the work of Aristotle, who would become famous for proclaiming that man was a political animal—a creature whose nature it is to live in a polis. Many of the criticisms they offered of Athenian democracy, moreover, were plainly intended to include other Greek polities as well: the concern the philosophers shared for turning people to thoughts of justice rather than honor, to government for peace as well as for war, to the cultivation of the inner person as well as (or more than) the quest for glory—all these appeals were addressed to citizens of democracies and oligarchies alike. For all this, however, the indictment the philosophers crafted of the Athenian democracy was potent. Aristotle, who opened his Politics by laying out the basic hierarchies of society, shared with Plato a view of the world that asks the question “Who shall rule?”—a point of departure that presupposes the division of inhabitants into rulers and ruled. To what extent either man derived his authoritarian stance from his perceptions of the most conspicuous democracy of his day it is impossible to know, but whatever the interplay between formulated theory and observed practice, both men cast their opposition to the democracy of the Athenians primarily in the form of theoretical constructs. Despite the interest in tragedy manifested in his famous Poetics, Aristotle did not explore in the Politics the educative value of either tragedy or other forms of civic life associated with the Athenians, and Plato ignored the obvious parallels between the dialogues of tragedy and those he wrote for pedagogical purposes. Though Aristotle was less squeamish than Plato in referring to the history of the Greek city-states, still he devotes very little space to the actual sins of the Athenians.31 Indeed, classical Greek literature fails strikingly to show how a different constitution would have made better policy in Athens. The weaknesses of the antidemocratic position, however, did not prevent it from gaining new strength in the centuries that followed when classical Athenian democracy passed into history to become the subject matter for backward glances (through a glass and often very darkly) and the grist for many an ideological mill.