PART TWO
THE ATHENIAN ETHOS embraced many opposites. The democracy that put Socrates to death was also the democracy that had facilitated his way of life and of whose restless energy he partook in the most dramatic and demonstrable way. Litigants in courtrooms (and there were many of them, for the Athenians were an extraordinarily litigious people) presented their own wealth as the badge of their integrity while adducing the affluence of their opponents as clear proof of bad character. Pericles insisted that it was merit and not class that determined a man’s position in Athens, but the claims of birth were never forgotten by those who were in a position to make them. A varied network of imagery identified democracy with tyranny not only in the minds of antidemocratic thinkers like Plato and Aristotle but also in the rhetoric of democratic politicians like Pericles and Cleon, yet playwrights as different as Aeschylus and Euripides presented democracy and tyranny as opposite poles, a position also developed by Thucydides’ Alcibiades in Sparta. Alcibiades’ sophistic speech before the Spartans shows the way in which democratic rhetoric could be turned on itself, while the democrats sought to co-opt aristocratic language as well, as Plato’s Protagoras insisted that all people of all social classes partook in the previously aristocratic virtue of aidos. Antidemocratic thinkers sought to confine political power to the chrestoi, the “useful,” a term that became ominous under the oligarchic coups of the late fifth century when conservatives sought to establish an “ancestral” government limiting the franchise to those able to make themselves “useful” to the state by providing, say, a horse; but Pericles boasted that the Athenians thought no ill of the poor but only of the achrestoi, the useless.
In a famous passage (5.92) Herodotus tells how Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent an envoy to his fellow autocrat Thrasybulus to seek advice in preserving his position. Thrasybulus, Herodotus relates, said nothing to the messenger but merely took him on a walk through the cornfields, striking off the heads of any stalks so tall that they stood out from the others. The messenger had no comprehension of the coded message, but when he reported Thrasybulus’s behavior to Periander, the Corinthian immediately understood what was being communicated to him and he set about eliminating any men who rose above the ordinary lest they prove dangerous. This tyrannical ethos was neatly mirrored in the democratic practice of ostracism, whereby excellence and energy could prove a ten-year liability. One watchword of the democracy was isegoria (equal opportunity to speak) and it boasted of its parrhesia (freedom of speech), but Anaxagoras was forced into exile because of things he said, Socrates was put to death for his teaching, and fourth-century critics of the democracy watched their language very carefully indeed, as closet oligarchs insisted that all they wanted was to restore a democracy more authentic than the one in power. Whereas writers from Herodotus through Euripides to Demosthenes billed democracy as synonymous with law and order, Xeno-phon, Plato, and Aristotle all worried about a lawless, unconstitutional tyranny of the majority. The only area in which there seems to have been consensus was the discounting of women and slaves in discussions of political theory; and even there Plato had raised some questions about the natural incapacity of females.
The many paradoxes entailed in the Athenian ethos have made possible a wide spectrum of responses to classical Athens. The chapters that follow, in both part 2 and part 3, will explore the ways in which differences in social, political, and philosophical orientations among individuals and across cultures have worked to shape conflicting perceptions of Athenian democracy, and will demonstrate the continuing vitality of the dialogue that has grown up around the questions the Athenian system inevitably posed.
Chapter Five
Since it is difficult, or rather impossible, to represent a man’s life as entirely spotless and free from blame, we should use the best chapters in it to build up the most complete picture and regard this as the true likeness.
—Plutarch, Cimon
THE ANCIENT ROMANS were unique in their relationship to the city-states of classical Greece. Although the Hellenic polis had reached its zenith well before the height of Roman expansion, still to some degree Greek and Roman civilization overlapped. Various points of contact have been alleged between the early Romans and the Greeks, and only a few generations separated the Graeci whom the Romans conquered in their Eastern wars from the Greeks who had lived in the heyday of the autonomous city-states. Although a variety of circumstances prompted the Romans to make sharp distinctions between ancient Hellenes and their contemporary descendants, Romans who saw in their own past a living heritage could hardly fail to perceive some measure of unity in Greek civilization. The reforms of Cleisthenes, after all, were dated to almost the same year as the expulsion of the Etruscan kings, and the execution of Socrates postdated the founding of the Roman republic by over a century. Rome’s victory over the forces of the Latin League came the year Greece fell before Philip. Though the rivalry of Athens and Sparta lay in the past, that past was neither remote nor mythic.1 The Romans also differed from subsequent students of Greek civilization in that their relationship with Greece was a two-way street. They had many opinions about the Greeks, but they also cared what the Greeks thought of them.2 Aware of the perceived cultural superiority of Hellas and of their enormous cultural debt to Greeks of earlier centuries, the Romans were constantly seeking to schematize the relationship between Greek and Roman civilization in a way that would place their own culture in a flattering light. For better or worse, what the Romans wrote in their efforts to define this relationship was canonized as primary source material until the nineteenth century, and as such it requires close attention.
GREECE AND ROME: THE ARTICULATION OF DIFFERENCE
The Romans knew what many Greeks thought about them—good for building bridges and highways and other tasks irrelevant to the serious aesthetic concerns of life; they were well aware that Greeks called them barbaroi. For this reason Romans were quick to denigrate contemporary Greece. Fearful of being perceived as boorish thugs and anxious about how they measured up against classical Greece, the Romans hastened to dub Greeks with whom they came into contact Graeculi, “Greeklings,” to distinguish them from their illustrious ancestors. By the second century B.C., Romans were well aware of the glory that had been Greece and were eager to ensure that the effete easterners they conquered in the Macedonian Wars should not be confused with the giants who had rubbed shoulders with the likes of Homer and Sophocles. Keenly sensible that they would never overtake classical Athens in the spheres of culture and intellect, they took particular pleasure in pointing out the weaknesses of the Athenian political system in comparison to their own. Centuries later Byron might celebrate “the Isles of Greece” as the place “where grew the arts of war and peace,” but the Romans took care to distinguish arts on the one hand from war and peace on the other, and Virgil crystallized the dichotomy in Anchises’ famous monition to Aeneas:
other peoples will, I do not doubt,
still cast their bronze to breathe with softer features,
or draw out of the marble living lines,
plead causes better, trace the ways of heaven
with wands and tell the rising constellations;
but yours will be the rulership of nations,
remember, Roman, these will be your arts:
to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer,
to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.3
Centuries before this carefully worded passage was crafted, the earliest Romans lived largely unaware of the Greeks outside Italy and Sicily and referred to the Hellenes who had colonized southern Italy and Sicily as “Graeci” because of the contingent from the small Boeotian town of Graea that had settled in the Bay of Naples in the Sybil’s haunt of Cumae; southern Italy and Sicily they dubbed “Magna Graecia,” “Greater Greece.” Though the Romans came to be convinced that the Cumaean Sybil was the true priestess of Apollo and would prophesy the destiny of Rome from her cave, this choice of a name for the Hellenes was entirely coincidental and must have struck the new “Greeks” themselves as rather amusing. Since the Hellenes, however, had yet to come up with a name embracing all the “Greeks”—the term Hellenes originally referred a single tribe—the label stuck. It is uncertain how or when the Romans first came into contact with the Greek homeland.4 Already in the sixth century, Greek vases appear in Rome. Livy wrote that Greek pirates ravaged the coast of Latium in 349 (7.25.4–5, 12–13; 7.26.11–15), and Pliny reported the allegation of the early third-century writer Clitarchus that the Romans sent an embassy to Alexander the Great.5 Religious links between Greece and Rome appear early in Roman history; the worship of Demeter at Rome (complete with Greek priestesses) is attested at least as early as the fifth century, and Apollo’s cult was established in 431. After the famine of 292, the Romans sent for the serpent of Aesculapius in Epidaurus in order to establish a cult of the healing god, and the chilling defeat at Cannae in 216 at the hands of Hannibal prompted the Romans to dispatch a delegation to Delphi to seek advice from Apollo. Rome attracted the attention of Greece by her war with Pyrrhus of Epirus, who championed the cause of southern Italy in the 270s. In 252 Aratus of Sicyon set out for Syria on a Roman ship (Plutarch, Aratus 12), and around the same time the freed slave Livius Andronicus began translating the Odyssey into Latin and adapting Greek plays for Roman audiences.
It was around this time that the image of Pistis Rhomaia, “Roman Faith,” appeared on a Locrian coin, and the association of Rome with pistis, that is, good faith in the keeping of agreements, is attested in a variety of Greek sources (some of them anti-Romans who accused Rome of insincerity in proclaiming this so-called trustworthiness to the world6). But it was another Greek, the hostage Polybius captured in the third Macedonian war in 168, who enshrined in the literature of the Republican period the topos of Roman rectitude outstripping Greek. Polybius became a great admirer of the Romans and made numerous invidious comparisons between them and the Greeks they had conquered, and in one of these instances he maintained that Romans in handling large funds adhered strictly to the oath of good faith, whereas Greeks for their part could not keep faith even when entrusted with a small amount and with numerous copyists, seals, and witnesses to keep watch over them (6.56.13–14).
If a Greek was able to contrast the probity of his fellow Hellenes so embarrassingly with that of the Romans, all the more were the Romans convinced of their own moral superiority. Already before the end of the third century the moral degeneracy of contemporary Greeks had been enshrined in the Latin language with the coining of the word pergraecari in Roman comedy; meaning “to live in a loose and lascivious manner,” the word appears in four separate comedies of Plautus.7 When the slaves in the Stichus become particularly unruly, Plautus reminds his audience that “such things are allowed in Athens” (Stichus, 446–48).
Plautus probably died the year Cato the Elder served as censor. Notorious for his conviction (genuine or affected) that Rome was falling fast and that its impending collapse was directly traceable to the horrors of Greek influence, Cato spared no venom in his attacks on his Hellenic contemporaries, whose turpitude he saw as a serious threat to Roman probity. He ascribed conspicuous consumption and sexual debauchery both homosexual and heterosexual to the undermining of Roman rectitude by Greek decadence, and he was evidently behind the expulsion of Carneades of Athens and his fellow philosophers in 155. Later in the century the orator Lucius Crassus stressed his contempt for Greek learning and Marcus Antonius claimed ignorance of Greek culture.8 Cicero, from whom we learn about these posturings, quoted his own grandfather as saying that one’s moral character degenerated in proportion as one knew Greek (De Oratore 2.265). Again Polybius provides a Greek analogue, decrying as he did Greek licentiousness as a source of corruption to the Romans in the areas of sex and conspicuous spending (31.25.4). Cato for his part made himself the master of a rhetorical mode that required the identification of clear enemies of civilization, and it would be impossible to know how much of his fulminations he really believed. In any case, however, his jeremiads served as an integral building block of a long Roman tradition in which Greece stood for the dangers of decadence.
By the last century of the republic, then, when the Romans began to have a literature of their own, the dissoluteness of contemporary Greeks had become proverbial in Latin speech and writing. At the same time, of course, Greek had become a lingua franca for intellectuals. Cato himself studied Greek, and though he was celebrated for his demand that his son’s education be taken out of the hands of a Greek schoolmaster, it is noteworthy that the education of a Cato should have been in such hands in the first place.9 The disclaimers of Crassus and Antonius were thought to be necessary in view of the time they had spent studying in Athens. Cicero was among those who studied in both Athens and Rhodes, as was his brother, his close friend and correspondent Titus Pomponius surnamed (for this reason) Atticus, and Julius Caesar. Cicero’s letters were often thick with Greek words; so were those of Augustus. Though the degeneracy of contemporary Greece had become a stock theme at Rome, moreover, the praises of Greek antiquity were often sung. Cato himself was said to have delivered an oration at Athens expressing his admiration for the virtue of the classical Athenians of yore, though Plutarch questioned whether it was correct that he actually spoke in Greek (Cato 12.4).
REPUBLICAN TOPOI
It is against this background of ambivalence and paradox that we must set Roman attitudes toward the government of classical Athens—Athens the school of Hellas but also the school of Rome. The undisputed primacy of Athens in matters of culture is attested in a variety of Cicero’s works, but it receives its first articulation in the oration Cicero delivered in 59 in defense of Flaccus, impeached for misconduct as a provincial governor. The reputation of ancient Athens is so great, Cicero proclaims there, that “the present enfeebled and shattered renown of Greece is sustained by the reputation of this city”—Athens, “where men think civilization, learning, religion, agriculture, justice and laws were born and spread thence into every land.”10
The way in which Cicero turns the praise of Athens on itself in the Pro Flacco is striking.11 In fact, the praise is inserted to assist Cicero in an elaborate scheme of character assassination directed at the Asiatic Greeks who had testified against his client. In this rhetorical scheme, Cicero defends the wholesale discrediting of the reliability of Asiatics by a pointed contrast between the good Greeks associated with the ancient city-states of Hellas proper and the bad Greeks of Asia Minor who were currently making trouble for his client by accusing him of extortion during his term as propraetor and governor of the province of Asia. Having established this dichotomy, he is happy to generalize about “Greeks”—that is, bad Greeks, who once on the witness stand forget their oaths and are only interested in trouble making and injury—and Romans: “When one of us Romans gives evidence,” he says, “what self-restraint he shows, what control over his language, what fear that he may display self-interest or ill-temper, or that he may say too little or too much! Surely,” he tells his audience, “you do not view in the same light those men to whom their oath before you is a joke, their evidence to you a game, your opinion of them a worthless nothing; who see in a shameless lie all their chances of honour, profit, influence and favour?” But he will not go on any further, he sighs, since his speech could last forever if he wanted to demonstrate “the untrustworthiness of the whole nation in giving evidence” (12).
Because he makes a special point of praising ancient Athens, moreover, Cicero places himself in a good position to attack Athenian political practice. The resolutions against Flaccus, he maintained, were not based upon considered votes or safeguarded by oaths but were rather “produced by a show of hands and the undisciplined shouting of an inflamed mob” (15), and the dangers of public meetings are in fact demonstrated by the behavior of the ancient Athenian assembly, where “untried men, totally inexperienced … would decide on harmful wars, put troublemakers in charge of public affairs and expel from the city the citizens who had served it best. If behaviour like this used to occur regularly in Athens when she outshone not just the rest of Greece but virtually the whole world,” Cicero asks indignantly, “what restraint do you think has existed in the public meetings of Phrygians and Mysians? If our own public meetings are often thrown into disorder by men of these nations, what on earth do you think happens when they are by themselves?” It is the corrosive influence of the Greeks, Cicero suggests, that is responsible for the regrettable development at Rome of contiones, public meetings, the principal object of contention in the oration (and an issue rather closer to Cicero’s heart, one suspects, than the acquittal of Flaccus). To allow decision-making power to lie in contiones, Cicero maintains, is to depart from the customs of the ancient Romans:
Oh, if only we could maintain the fine tradition and discipline that we have inherited from our ancestors! But somehow it is now slipping out of our hands. Those wisest and most upright of our men did not want power to lie in the public meetings. As for what the commons might approve or the people might order, when the meeting had been dismissed and the people distributed in their divisions by centuries and tribes into ranks, classes and age groups, when the proposers of the measure had been heard, when its text had been published well in advance and understood, then they wished the people to give their orders or their prohibitions. In Greece, on the other hand, all public business is conducted by the irresponsibility of a public meeting sitting down. And so—to pass over the modern Greece which has long since been struck down and laid low in its councils—that Greece in ancient times, once so flourishing in its wealth, dominion and glory, fell through this single evil, the excessive liberty and license of its meetings. (15–16)
Cicero’s contention that Roman assemblies were more responsible than Greek ones because Romans deliberated standing and Greeks sitting is, as far as I know, unprecedented, and his allegation that the decline of Roman assemblies is traceable to an influx of Asiatic Greeks is improbable.12 But his argument draws strength from the fulsome praise he includes in his speech of ancient Athens, mother of wisdom and the arts. Would an admirer of Athens such as Cicero malign her to his audience by fabricating weaknesses that did not exist just to score points in a debate about Roman government?
In the Pro Flacco of 59, Cicero’s allegation that the Athenian democracy expelled the citizens who had served it best gets lost in the general diatribe against popular assemblies, but when Cicero was exiled in the following year by Julius Caesar’s henchman Publius Clodius, the orator did not fail to draw the parallel between the sufferings of Athens’s unappreciated statesmen and his own misfortune. Though Pompey engineered Cicero’s return in 57, the painful episode made an understandable impression on its victim. In his speech for Sestius in 56, Cicero observed that the ingratitude of the people toward Miltiades and Aristides did not deter Themistocles from defending the state, and the later Brutus compared Themistocles and the Roman Coriolanus, both billed as great men unjustly exiled by an ungrateful people; altogether Cicero’s writings contain over thirty references to Themistocles.13 An overt comparison between his own situation and that of persecuted Athenian statesmen appears in De Republica, a dialogue on government set in 129 in which Scipio Africanus the Younger clearly speaks for Cicero. It is from Athens, Cicero maintains in the preface, that the vice of fickleness and cruelty toward eminent citizens arose and “has overflowed even into our own powerful republic.” He cites a variety of attacks on prominent Roman politicians, adding that people “now include my name also, and presumably because they think it was through my counsel and at my risk that their own peaceful life has been preserved to them, they complain even more bitterly and with greater kindness of the treatment I have received” (1.3.5–6).14
The dangers of popular government are subsequently set forth in the dialogue that forms the body of the text. Arguing in favor of mixed government, Scipio speaks very generally of the dangers inherent in the three unmixed forms of government: kingship, as in Persia under King Cyrus; aristocracy, as in the Greek city of Massilia (Marseilles) in Gaul; and democracy, as at Athens. He goes on to elaborate on the scheme of the six constitutions originated by Plato and Aristotle and their contemporaries and refined by Polybius: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy on the one hand and their degenerate forms tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy on the other.15 Beneath Cyrus, he complains, lies the tyrant Phalaris, known for roasting his victims alive in a hollow metal bull; beneath the aristocracy of Massilia lay the thirty tyrants of Athens; and at Athens, the “absolute power of the Athenian people … changed into the fury and license of a mob” (1.18.44). Phalaris, it must be borne in mind, remained the tyrant of Acragas in Sicily and made no effort to take over Persia; the thirty tyrants of Athens made no attempt on Massilia. These examples are merely theoretical. But in Scipio’s view the degeneration of the Athenian democracy was a historical fact. Although at first sight Scipio appears to be choosing concrete examples of the flaws of all three unmixed governments, in other words, his reservations about the monarchy of Persia and the aristocracy of Massilia remain on a broad and almost theoretical plane, whereas his complaints about Athens are concrete; because of weakness in monarchy and aristocracy, the door to disaster lay open in Persia and in Massilia, but in Athens, in his view, it was a fact that the democrats walked through these portals. The misfortunes of Persia and Massilia remain hypothetical, while those of Athens are construed as historical and actual. It is amusing to notice as well that Scipio in selecting the Thirty Tyrants as an example of the evils of oligarchy manages to make Athens not only the prototype of the degenerate democracy but host to the latent vice of aristocracy as well. Democracy in general, indeed, is contrasted unfavorably by Scipio with monarchy and aristocracy in respect to the motives of the principals. Kings, Scipio says, seem like fathers to us; aristocrats maintain that they can bring a greater amount of wisdom to government; while the people shout “with a loud voice that they are willing to obey neither one nor a few, that nothing is sweeter than liberty even to wild beasts, and that all who are slaves, whether to a king or to an aristocracy, are deprived of liberty” (1.35.55). Monarchs and aristocrats, in other words, put forward their merits, while the people clamor for their rights, compare themselves to animals, and announce their determination not to have their wishes overridden. There follows a long paraphrase from Plato’s Republic on the evils of democracy and its proclivity toward tyranny; this disquisition reproduces Plato’s allegation that under a democracy even the animals are uppity, but without the slightest trace of the original Platonic playfulness. (It is interesting to note the contrast between Scipio’s attack on democracy, so singularly grounded in Athenian history, with that of Plato, in which difficulties are presented in the “degeneracy of constitutions” argument that seem to bear no relation to what actually happened.) Scipio’s final conclusion is that the best forms of government are a benevolent monarchy or a mixed state.
Cicero’s use of Athenian examples throughout his works demonstrates a complex, then, of three interrelated topoi: the topos of Athens as the cradle of the verbal arts; the topos of the ingratitude of the Athenians toward their leading politicians; and the topos of the unruliness of democratic government. The three themes come together to forge an image of Cicero as the eloquent but unappreciated champion of Roman traditions, Athenian in his intellectual accomplishments but eminently Roman in his antidemocratic orientation, undervalued heir to the mantle of Solon, Peisistratus, Themistocles, and Pericles. By recurring to the superiority of the carefully rigged voting systems of Roman assemblies over Greek free-for-alls, Cicero aligns himself pointedly with the values of the Roman aristocracy into which he was determined to be co-opted. In his eloquent statesmanship he sought to embody what was best in Athenian civilization and set himself firmly against what was worst. He emulates the leaders of the democracy while excoriating the democracy itself. His condemnation of Athenian government is a necessary backdrop to his identification with Athens’ scorned statesmen, and his exaltation of Athens as the ancient home of eloquence and the arts lends a certain specious objectivity to his condemnation of the Asiatic Greeks of his own era. To Cicero’s early division of Greeks into good (mainland) Greeks and bad (Asiatic) Greeks he added two parallel divisions—one between contemporary and ancient Greeks, and one between Athenian democratic statesmen and the Athenian democratic assembly. These oppositions serve to buttress his own self-proclaimed posture of thanklessly defending good elements from bad in the Rome of his day.
The topos of the Athenians’ ingratitude toward their leaders was solidly grounded not only in the works of Thucydides, Plato, and Isocrates but probably in such lost writings as those of Theopompus and Ephorus as well, and it also appears in the biographies composed by Cicero’s friend Cornelius Nepos.16 A correspondent of Cicero as well as an intimate friend of Cicero’s crony Atticus, Nepos is the author of the first biographies ever preserved under their author’s name. Although his life of Cicero was lost, that of Atticus survives with numerous others in his collection On Famous Men comparing celebrated Greek and Roman political figures. Nepos has not as a rule been highly rated as a historian, but his departure from the anti-Athenian tradition is noteworthy and shows if not originality then at least intermittent discrimination in the use of sources.
In writing about the impeachment of Timotheus and Iphicrates during the Social War of the 350s, Nepos characterizes the Athenian people as “emotional, suspicious and on that account changeable, hostile and envious” (Timothens 3.5), but this sentence is not of a piece with Nepos’s treatment of Athenian impeachment and exile, and in any event the text seems to be corrupt at these lines. Though in his life of Alcibiades he portrays his subject as unwilling to return home to face trial because he was pondering the immoderate license of his fellow citizens and their cruelty to men of high rank (Alcibiades 4.4), it is not clear whether Nepos shares the aristocrat’s view of Athenian accountability. On the whole, Nepos shows surprising sympathy for the Athenians’ readiness to rid themselves of their great men. In discussing the condemnation of Miltiades after his unsuccessful expedition to Paros in the year following his stunning victory at Marathon, he is quick to point out the recency of Peisistratus’s tyranny at Athens as well as the fact that Miltiades had borne the name of tyrant while in charge of an Athenian settlement in the Gallipoli peninsula and he passes no judgment on Miltiades’ impeachment (Miltiades 7.5–8.4). Similarly in his life of Themistocles, though his admiration for the controversial politician is evident, still he gives an even-handed treatment to the question of his ostracism and attributes it to “the same apprehension that had led to the condemnation of Miltiades” (Themistocles 8.1). Most surprising of all, Nepos in his brief life of Phocion portrays his subject’s trial as the natural outgrowth of his own actions. Though the longtime general was to become a martyr in modern European ideology, in Nepos’s biography he appears as a man of dubious patriotism and judgment, advocating the exile of his own friend and supporter Demosthenes and failing to defend Piraeus against the Macedonian Nicanor in a crucial hour. Like Alcibiades and Chabrias before him, Phocion is quoted as complaining of the Athenians’ treatment of their clari (Phocion 4.3–4). But whereas this antidemocratic tradition is preserved by Nepos as it lived in the minds of Athenian leaders, Nepos’s own position is surprisingly judicious, and when he observes in his life of Chabrias that it is the common flaw in free states that they cannot abide those they see rising above the level of their fellow-citizens (Chabrias 3.3), his approach appears more analytical than judgmental.
The biographies of Nepos, then, include many references to the existence of the anti-Athenian tradition, but these references are absorbed in a larger picture in which the Athenian demos appears in a less harsh light.17 The topos of the Athenians’ maltreatment of their leaders reappears, however, in Valerius Maximus’s collection of Memorable Sayings and Doings, a sanctimonious compendium assembled along topical lines in the reign of the emperor Tiberius, probably in the fourth decade after Christ. In his brief chapter “On Temerity” Valerius condemns the Athenians roundly for their trial and execution of the victors of Arginusae in 406. Accepting the story that the men in the water were no longer alive, Valerius maintains that in executing the generals the Athenians “punished necessity where they should instead have honored bravery” (9.8. Externa Exempla 2). The bulk of his censure, however, is reserved for his longer chapter on ingratitude. Beginning with the murder of Romulus in the senate he had himself established, Valerius goes on to list numerous other Roman victims of ingratitude, including five members of the illustrious family of the Cornelii Scipiones. That Valerius portrays them as victims of the “pestilent band” of the popular reformer Tiberius Gracchus and of the “nefarious” supporters of his younger brother Gaius presages no good for his treatment of the Athenian demos, and not surprisingly he is able to round up a good number of Athenian martyrs to the masses as well. These include Theseus, whom Valerius treats as a fully historical personage, and Solon, who he reports died in exile in Cyprus, barred even from the right to be buried in that country he had served so well and from which he had deserved so much. But even such an exile, he goes on, would have been more fitting for Miltiades, the victor of Marathon, than the ignominious death in prison chains that was meted out to him instead. The exile of the just Aristides is duly recorded, as is that of Themistocles (the most celebrated example, Valerius maintains, of those who have experienced the ingratitude of their country). Phocion, predictably, rounds out the list. (The origin of the strange story of Solon’s “exile” is unclear, but it continued to pop up throughout the Western tradition. Valerius describes him as living out his old age profugus, an exile/refugee in Cyprus. Solon liked to travel; Diogenes Laertius, writing in the third century A.D., reported his death in Cyprus, but no exile was implied.18)
The unreliability of the Athenian demos and its unreasonable treatment of its most famous sons had its origins, as we have seen, in the writings of Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plato, and it lived on not only in Latin literature but in the writings of the Greek historians who lived in the Roman empire as well. Historians in the Greco-Roman world had access, of course, to numerous sources no longer available. It is a great sorrow that with the exception of Xenophon none of the Greek historians of classical Greece active between Thucydides and Augustus survives in more than fragments or epitomes. For the purposes of Athenian political history, it would be particularly useful to have the entirety of Theopompus’s essay On the Demagogues, but overall probably the greatest loss is that of Ephorus, a citizen of Cyme on the coast of Asia Minor who had written a universal history in thirty books from the close of the bronze age to the middle of the fourth century. He appears to have consulted a variety of sources, including not only Herodotus and Thucydides but their contemporaries Ctesias, a Greek doctor at the Persian court, and Hellanicus, a historian from Lesbos whose history was slighted by Thucydides for its accuracy (Thucydides 1.97) and by Cicero for its style (De Oratore 2.12.53). It is likely that Nepos consulted Ephorus, and it was apparently Ephorus who served as the principal source for fifth- and fourth-century Greece in the universal history of Diodorus of Sicily.
During the last years of the Roman republic, Diodorus composed his world history in forty books, beginning from the earliest times and continuing to the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar (54 B.C.). Though Diodorus seems to admire the Athenians for their empire and is generally approving of them in matters of foreign policy, he is highly critical of the democratic system of government as it operated on the domestic front. The only attack on an Athenian leader that Diodorus fails to deplore is the murder of the democratic reformer Ephialtes. This demagogos, Diodorus reports, had provoked the multitude (plethos) to anger against the Areopagites and had gotten the demos to curtail the powers of the Areopagite council and to overturn their renowned ancestral usages (ta patria … nomima). Ephialtes, however, so Diodorus tells us, did not escape punishment for this lawless act but rather was murdered by night (11.77.6). Intensely concerned with reminding his readers of the evil fates to which wrongdoers are condemned, Diodorus offers several variations on this theme. The Athenians, he maintained, received the Thirty Tyrants as a punishment for their unjust treatment of the victors of Arginusae in 406; the unfortunate generals’ case is stronger in his account even than in that of Xenophon, for Diodorus, like Valerius Maximus, maintains that the sailors whom they failed to pick out of the water were already dead (13.100.4). Similarly, when the democrats at Argos who had put over a thousand wealthy citizens to death then turned on their own demagogues and meted out the same fate to them, Diodorus alleges that these demagogues “were punished in accordance with their transgressions as if at the hands of some avenging divinity, while the people, purged of their mad rage, recovered their senses” (15.58.4). Though he maintains that the murdered Ephialtes got his just deserts, he is consistently critical of the Athenians when they make use of the machinery available to them to discipline political leaders in less final fashion. He labels the Athenians’ treatment of Themistocles cruel, finds the accusation against Pericles in 430 to be petty, and calls the allegations against Alcibiades slander. He reveals his view of the Athenian demos in his discussion of Athenian trierarchs, valued public servants who fitted out ships at their own expense: this institutionalized largess Diodorus portrays as indulging the masses. When the Athenians are contemplating the recall of Alcibiades, Diodorus makes a sharp distinction between the motivation of the rich, who expected Alcibiades boldly to oppose the people, and that of the poor, who assumed he would show his support for them by intentionally throwing the city into confusion (13.68.4).19
IMPERIAL LENSES
Shortly after Diodorus composed his universal history, another project of similar scope was undertaken by Pompeius Trogus, a historian under the reign of Augustus whose grandfather had received citizenship from Cicero’s contemporary Pompey. Pompeius Trogus’s work is now lost, but parts are preserved in the epitome assembled around the third century A.D. by a certain Justin. This abbreviated account of early times served as a principal source of knowledge about antiquity during the Middle Ages. Justin coursed through the history of classical Greece at a dizzying pace, but he paused after the death of Epaminondas to reflect on the condition of Athens around the middle of the fourth century B.C. After the death of Epaminondas on the battlefield in 362, he wrote (in a paragraph that was to enjoy considerable popularity in early modern Europe),
Valor perished among the Athenians. Having lost the man they had learned to imitate, they fell into indolence and sloth. Now the state revenues they had once spent on the army and the fleet were devoted instead to holidays and festivals, and they mingled eagerly with celebrated actors and poets in the theater, preferring the stage to the military camp and praising those who made verses more highly than those who made policy. It was then that the public treasury, which had been used to support the soldiers and sailors, began to be divided among the people in the city. In this way it happened that in a Greece preoccupied with entertainment the previously lowly and obscure name of Macedon was able to emerge.
Presumably Diodorus’s work had reflected the ideology of Ephorus and that of Justin the thinking of Pompeius Trogus. Two important sources for imperial history, however, put considerable creative energy into their work. Both the orator Aelius Aristides and the essayist Plutarch made extensive use of a variety of sources when writing about Athens. For all his rhetorical excesses, Aristides was a critical and original thinker. It was Plutarch’s more derivative view of Athens, however, that captured the imagination of subsequent generations.
Born in Asia Minor in A.D. 117, Aristides lectured throughout the Greco-Roman world, settling toward the end of his life at Smyrna, where he had studied in his youth. It was probably in the summer of 155 that he delivered the Panathenaic oration in praise of Athens at the festival of the same name.20 Sensing that the occasion called for an encomium in the grand manner, Aristides praised every aspect of the city from its constitution to its foreign policy. Mistress of the sea, Athens is portrayed in his oration as the liberal benefactress of the Greek world, destined for dominion by some combination of geography, character, and divine right. Those who would question Athenian hegemony are presented as recalcitrant malcontents who do not know when they are well off. If the Athenians’ treatment of Mende and Scione was wrong, he claims, then all empires in all regions are wrong; imperialism, he argues, can be opposed only by someone who “is uncompromising about equal rights and prefers to be a sophist rather than to admit the nature of the matter,” to wit, that “every empire obviously belongs to the stronger and is contrary to the very law of equality” (1.306).21 The lack of a clear historical framework makes it possible for Aristides to celebrate the Athenians’ openness in extending their citizenship and to conflate the early monarchy, the aristocratic era of Areopagite ascendancy and the period of the unchecked democracy, claiming thereby for the Athenian system the merit of offering elements of all the traditional forms of government. Democracy, however, is given pride of place in Aristides’ discussion of the Athenian constitution, as he maintains that a democratic spirit pervaded even the stewardship of kings and councilors (383–92). Addressing the traditional complaints against popular government, moreover, he insists that of all ancient democracies Athens was the least unruly, writing that citizens of all other democratic states “will clearly have been much more unstable and unjust in their wishes and desires, and have not even approached the dignity and glory of those in this city” (389).
Thus far the rhetoric of the Panathenaic oration, predictable in view of its genre except perhaps for the vigor and determination with which its author defends Athenian imperialism. Although the Panathenaic speech was well known in antiquity and came to be imitated by posterity (most notably by Leonardo Bruni, who used it as a model for his praise of Renaissance Florence), Aristides treated the democratic ethos far more hardheadedly in another essay, which, while admired in antiquity, has since been largely ignored. In the early 160s Aristides produced a long piece entitled To Plato: In Defense of the Four. The immediate focus of his concern was the defense of Miltiades, Themistocles, Pericles, and Cimon against Plato’s attack on them in his Gorgias, but more broadly the speech deals with the nature of political life, the function of oratory, and the inadequacy of Plato’s worldview in general.
In defending the place of oratory in politics, Aristides unquestionably had a personal agenda. For all that, his vitriolic attack on the central premises of Plato’s political universe is thoughtful and engaging. Human life, he argues, is more complex than Plato makes it out to be and is shaped by a wider spectrum of variables. Aristides denies the legitimacy of the expectation that a good statesman should suffer no reverses and leave the entire citizenry better than he found it. Arguing that it is impossible to improve all of the people all of the time, he stresses the role of fortune in determining the vicissitudes of a statesman’s career; he also includes a long and merciless disquisition (369–94) on Plato’s stunning failure to achieve his goals at the court of Dionysius in Sicily. He defends the legality and procedural propriety of ostracism, though he does not agree with all the individual decisions the Athenians made about their leaders’ fates; and at several junctures he is quick to point out that both the virtue and the fate of (the Athenian) Aristides undermine Plato’s argument that no noble politicians existed at Athens and that ostracism is proof of a statesman’s inadequacy. In praising Aristides in contradistinction to other Athenian leaders, he argues, Plato is attempting to have his cake and eat it too.
Ultimately, however, his argument rests on the nature of political excellence itself. How, he asks, can Plato discount Athens’s pivotal role in the Greek victory over the Persians: if this is not statesmanship, then what is? And why should Pericles be lambasted for offering state pay to the poor, an action that in one stroke alleviated suffering, served justice, and discouraged strife (98–113)? State pay, he argues, is hardly unprecedented and appears even in Plato’s own Republic. Aristides is particularly sarcastic in attacking Plato’s denigration of naval power, claiming (in connection with Themistocles’ service to Greece) not at all to understand “where the distinction lies, that a land victory is fair, but one at sea is shameful; or that cornel wood and hide [the materials of which spears and shields were made] is valuable, but ship planks and oar wood is worthless; as if someone should remove the sea from the category of real things or should say that it came into existence for no purpose …” (290).
Attacking Plato’s social prejudices against sailors, his sentimental attachment to the Athenian Aristides, and his central premise that the moral improvement of the citizenry is both possible and necessary for the true statesman, the orator here suggests that the complexity of human psychology and political life make Plato’s view of statesmanship both too narrow and too broad. Unlike philosophers, Aristides argues, politicians are forced to make demands on citizens, and consequently it is no wonder that tensions arise. To be sure, his arguments are carried to tiresome lengths and are decked out with mythological trappings that distract from their fundamental thoughtfulness; in his defense of the dignity of sea power, Aristides cites the authority of Poseidon (290), and, alluding to their reported role in fighting the Persians, he also adduces Pan and Heracles as character references for Miltiades (191–92). Nonetheless, beneath the rhetorical reaching and mythological pleading lies a serious sympathy with the dynamics of Athenian political life and a perceptive indictment of Plato’s limitations.
It was not to be Aristides, however, who molded the thinking of later ages when it came to classical politics. That honor belongs to Plutarch, who particularly in the Renaissance and the eighteenth century came to be accorded an authority rather surprising in view of the centuries that separated his lifetime from those of many of the politicians he discussed—over half a millennium in the case of Miltiades, Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles. Despite Plutarch’s many weaknesses, however, the access he enjoyed to sources no longer extant makes him an important resource for ancient history. He had read widely, and if he failed to employ a scientific methodology in comparing the value of his sources, at least the sources were there to be evaluated. Where Athens was concerned, they seem to have been primarily Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians, and Xenophon, but he also cites lost writers like Theopompus, Idomeneus, Stesimbrotus, and Ephorus, and he made use of the list of Athenian decrees compiled probably during the third century B.C. by the Macedonian Craterus.22 Except in the case of Herodotus, who dealt only with the early period of Athenian democracy, the antidemocratic stance of the extant writers is well known, and the two treatises on demagogues by Theopompus and Idomeneus seem to have attacked Athenian political leaders as a whole and the system that brought them to prominence. Plutarch’s essay on the malice of Herodotus shows that he was certainly aware of possible bias in his sources, but his affable temperament and humane values, combined with his experience under the enlightened imperial government of Trajan, predisposed him to support generous autocracy or aristocracy as circumstances might require, and his preoccupation with character and ethics led him to place his faith not in good institutions but in good men. Although hauteur and arrogance offended him, his concern with great men and their formation focused his attention and his empathy on the significant individual, and the behavior of people in groups—particularly of large numbers of uneducated people in groups—did not excite his intellect; his alleged interest in politics in fact extended only to the behavior of powerful politicians. Like Plato, whom he cites over six hundred times, he saw humanity as divided into rulers and ruled.23 Only the former held interest for him, and despite his wide reading in Athenian history and politics, the notion of a society in which this dichotomy was not operative was beyond his grasp.24
Plutarch took tremendous pride in his Hellenic heritage, and his native Chaeronea afforded easy access to contemporary Athens. A university city as well as the seat of ancient glory, Athens in Plutarch’s day was not only a living museum but a bustling one as well; professional guides abounded, and detailed handbooks of antiquities were available to those whose curiosity exceeded that of the ordinary tourist. Unquestionably Plutarch was captivated by the city’s mystique, and probably some of the admiration for Athens manifested in his essay On the Glory of the Athenians is real and transcended the rhetoric demanded by the occasion. Like Cicero before him and countless others who came later, however, he distinguished the city’s cultural achievements from its regrettable form of government, and where politics was concerned he preferred Sparta, whose legendary founder Lycurgus he celebrated in the biography that was to be one of his best-loved works.
Plutarch’s treatment of Athenian democracy is enormously important, because his works probably had more impact on the writing of Greek history prior to the nineteenth century than those of any other writer. He is best remembered for the collection of paired biographies in which he coupled Greek and Roman politicians whose careers struck him as roughly comparable, the so-called Parallel Lives. The avowed purpose of the biographies was pedagogical and inspirational, moralistic and didactic. Betraying in the bargain some revealing prejudices, Plutarch explains in the preface to his life of Pericles that examples of virtue inspire emulation in a way the accomplishments of, say, sculptors and poets do not. No youth “of good breeding and high ideals,” he contends, “feels that he must be a Pheidias or a Polycleitus after seeing the statue of Zeus at Olympia or Hera at Argos, nor does he aspire to be an Anacreon or a Philetas or an Archilochus, because of the pleasure he derives from their poems, for it does not necessarily follow that because a particular work succeeds in charming us its creator also deserves our admiration.” Virtue in action, on the other hand, “immediately takes such hold of a man that he no sooner admires a deed than he sets out to follow in the footsteps of the doer”—hence his own perseverance in writing the biographies of great men.25
If the preface to the life of Pericles sets forth Plutarch’s goals in the Lives, the opening of his Cimon tells us about his methodology. “When an artist has to paint a face which possesses fair and handsome features,” Plutarch writes, “we demand that he should neither exaggerate nor leave out any minor defect he may find in it,” since the first would make the portrait ugly and the second invalidate the likeness. By the same token, “since it is difficult, or rather impossible, to represent a man’s life as entirely spotless and free from blame, we should use the best chapters in it to build up the most complete picture and regard this as the true likeness. Any errors or crimes, on the other hand, which may tarnish a man’s career and may have been committed out of passion or political necessity, we should regard rather as lapses from a particular virtue than as the product of some innate vice” (Cimon 2.4–5). Plutarch says nothing about those errors and crimes committed neither out of passion nor out of political necessity, and overall the methodology he outlines does not offer a promising scenario for serious historical writing.
And not only this: Plutarch’s indifference to chronology and geography is a minor irritant when compared with his indifference to the social, economic, and political variations that marked the widely disparate eras he treated in his prolific writings and, a fortiori, to complex realities within a single generation. He sees no difficulty with championing Demosthenes and Phocion each in his own biography, and he does not hesitate to transplant the conflict between optimates and populares in the late Roman republic to fifth-century Athens. His treatment of Athenian government and politics consequently suffers from the distortion that so often accompanies cross-cultural models and, befitting the moral and didactic purpose of the Lives, casts the complex political machinations of the fifth century as an ongoing duel between sober civil servants trying to maintain ancestral traditions on the one hand and self-seeking demagogues playing up (or down) to an ignorant and volatile populace on the other.
Plutarch’s willingness to recount troubling anecdotes only to disown them afterward suggests that his sources disagreed in their assessment of Athens’s political leaders. We would like to know more about these sources. Although Plutarch generally adheres to the principle set forth in the life of Cimon and chooses the more flattering rendition—a principle that he adamantly attacks Herodotus for flouting—his inclusion of various slanders in the Lives serves as a good guide to the tradition in which he was working. From Plutarch we hear about allegations that Solon leaked word of his projected cancellation of debts to friends who promptly borrowed as much money as they could; rumors that Cimon committed incest with his sister; and accusations against Pericles for crucifying Samian rebels. The life of Themistocles is particularly rich in anecdote, testifying to the existence of a long and lively tradition about the renegade general.26 Although Plutarch rejects the most damning of the rumors that have come his way and stresses Themistocles’ shrewdness and foresight, throughout he portrays him as ambitious and self-seeking, and he loses no opportunity for contrasting him with the selfless Aristides. The opposition between Themistocles’ deviousness and Aristides’ rectitude is painted with a particularly thick brush in the life of Aristides, where Plutarch reports without confirmation or denial the attempts of “some writers” to trace the rivalry of the pair back to schoolboy games that even in childhood “quickly revealed their respective natures, Themistocles’ being resourceful, daring, unscrupulous, and ready to dash impetuously into any undertaking, while Aristides’ was founded upon a steadfast character, which was intent on justice and incapable of any falsehood, vulgarity, or trickery even in jest” (Aristides 2.1–2).
Plutarch’s preference for more conservative statesmen is also manifest in his treatment of the next pair of rivals to appear on the Athenian scene, Cimon and Pericles. Cimon, he reports, “succeeded in arresting and even reducing the encroachments of the people upon the prerogatives of the aristocracy, and in foiling their attempts to concentrate office and power in their own hands” as long as he remained at Athens; but when in 462 he left the city on campaign, the people “broke loose from all control” and, overthrowing “the established order of the constitution and the ancestral customs [patria nomima] which they had always observed up to that moment,” proceeded to transform the city “into a thorough-going democracy” (Cimon 15.1–2). When Cimon returned home, Plutarch continued, and, in disgust at the new developments, tried to restore the Areopagus to its original position and revive the aristocratic regime of Cleisthenes, the “democratic leaders combined to denounce him and tried to stir up the people against him by bringing up all the old scandals about his sister and accusing him of pro-Spartan sympathies” (15.2–3). By linking these two very different sorts of accusations, Plutarch calls into question the appropriateness and legitimacy of the Athenians’ concerns about Cimon’s stand on a crucial policy issue. As Plutarch concedes in the next chapter, however, Cimon’s pro-Spartan sympathies were real and well known, and Plutarch himself tells how Cimon, opposing Ephialtes, recommended that the Athenians grant Sparta’s request for aid against the rebelling helots. Upon arrival in Sparta, the Athenians (alone among Sparta’s allies) were promptly sent home. Plutarch shows little understanding of political realities in Athens when he reports that the Athenian soldiers who were rejected so unceremoniously at Sparta voted to ostracize Cimon “upon some trifling pretext” in a fit of temper (17.2). All the evidence about Athenian ostracism suggests that it functioned, among other things, as a safety valve by which the demos might choose between two contentious political leaders and their policies. Cimon’s support of Sparta had led to a major disgrace for Athens, and his ostracism announced his countrymen’s resounding rejection of his policy. But for Plutarch, pettiness and fury alone explain the decision. Plutarch’s avowed policy of seeing the best in everyone did not apply to the Athenian demos.
Plutarch’s sources did not permit a neat opposition between Cimon the statesman and Pericles the demagogue, for Plutarch respected the judgment of Thucydides, and had not Thucydides stated explicitly that Pericles led the people rather than being led by it? But hundreds of citations demonstrate the influence of the Platonic corpus (particularly the Gorgias) on Plutarch’s thinking, and the many anecdotes Plutarch slips into his biography attest to the health of the anti-Periclean tradition in his day even outside the sphere of Platonic influence. Plutarch assures us that Pericles did not (as Idomeneus claimed) arrange the assassination of his friend Ephialtes (10) or crucify the rebel Samian captains in their marketplace (as Duris insisted; 28) or (as Ste-simbrotus maintained) seduce his daughter-in-law (13), and that those who blamed Pericles for deliberately bringing on the Peloponnesian War to escape from charges leveled against him and his friends were in error. Still, he remains our source for many of these “mistakes.”27
Plutarch states his dilemma quite plainly at the opening of the ninth chapter:
Thucydides characterizes Pericles’ administration as having been distinctly aristocratic—“democracy in name, but in practice government by the first citizen.” But many other writers maintain that it was he who first led on the people into passing such measures as the allotment to Athenians of lands belonging to subject peoples, or the granting of allowances for the public festivals and fees for various public services, and that because of his policy they fell into bad habits and became extravagant and undisciplined instead of frugal and self-sufficient as they once had been.
Let us consider, Plutarch proposes, “in the light of the facts what may account for this change in his policy.” But no one had suggested a change in Pericles’ policy; the notion of a change is in fact Plutarch’s proposal for reconciling his awkwardly disparate data. Torn between admiration of Thucydides and the thriving anti-Periclean tradition, Plutarch adopted a compromise as methodologically unsound as it was rhetorically unconvincing: Pericles started out rotten but ended up good. During his rise to power, Plutarch maintains, Pericles was a self-seeking demagogue. Following the ostracism of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, however, he was no longer so ready to yield to the people’s caprices, “which were as shifting and changeable as the winds,” and, abandoning the indulgent mode he had practiced previously, “which might be compared to a soft and flowery melody,” he “struck instead the firm, high note of an aristocratic, even regal statesmanship” (15.2). Plutarch goes on to praise the unselfishness and incorruptibility Pericles manifested once his power was firmly established.
Whether for a lack of material or out of the conviction that he was beneath contempt, Plutarch did not write the life of Cleon. This is extremely unfortunate. In his life of Nicias, however, he maintains that Cleon’s greed and effrontery were so great that even those whom he went out of his way to win over turned to Nicias for leadership instead (Nicias 2.3), and he claims too that it was Cleon “who first introduced shouting and abuse into his speeches, as well as the habit of slapping his thigh, throwing open his dress and striding up and down the platform as he spoke.” His habits, Plutarch maintains, produced among the politicians an irresponsibility and a disregard for propriety that before long were to throw the affairs of Athens into chaos” (8.3). Plutarch based his life of Nicias primarily on Thucydides, and he echoed Thucydides both in his distress at Nicias’s marked pusillanimity and in his censure of the way in which he believed the Athenian demos intimidated its leaders. Though he is himself wary of Nicias’s extreme caution, still he alleges that Athenian history afforded “unmistakable examples” of the Athenians’ inability to cope with those who truly excelled—in the fining of Pericles, for example, the ostracism of Damon, the distrust of Antiphon that brought about his downfall, and, perhaps most dramatic of all, the case of the strategos Paches, who, Plutarch maintains, killed himself while on trial, apparently for actions committed during the sack of Lesbos (6.1–2).28
Throughout his fifth-century Lives Plutarch recurs to the theme of the Athenian demos’ relationship with its leaders, and he attributes the frequent ostracisms and impeachments of Athens’s prominent politicians not to policy differences or genuine malfeasance but rather to emotion. The banishment of Aristides is put down to the jealousy of a demos puffed up with pride and exultation after its victory in the Persian wars, and the ostracism of Cimon is ascribed to rage. Plutarch depicts the Athenians after Pericles’ impeachment as purged of their anger; Alcibiades, he claims, was impeached because of anger and resentment. Except for a brief period during the ascendancy of Pericles, Plutarch portrays the relationship between the demos and its leaders as an unhealthy and destructive one: the demagogues, he writes, after Pericles’ death, increased the tribute in the empire, not so much because of the length and cost of the war as because they themselves had accustomed the people to accepting money for entertainment and for the erection of temples and statues (Aristides 24.3).29
Plutarch’s assessment of Athenian politicians is not consistent: he wants to have it both ways with Pericles, and he is torn as to whether the principal cause of the Sicilian debacle was the Athenian precedent of tough accountability hearings or Nicias’s inborn timidity. His treatment of the Athenian demos, however, is uniform. Throughout, he portrays the demos as unreasonable and unreasoning. The rational element in popular decision making is minimized, indeed virtually denied. For Plutarch, as for Plato, the demos is frequently conceived as a nonreasoning entity such as a boat, a musical instrument, a diseased body, or, most commonly, an animal or collection of animals; it is alternately passive and malleable at one extreme or unruly and unmanageable at the other. This is true both in the Lives and in the Precepts of Statecraft he assembled late in his life.
Along with the degeneracy of the fourth century, Plutarch’s concern with the ingratitude of the Athenians forms the unifying theme of his life of Phocion, executed for his pro-Macedonian sympathies in 318. The decadent character of Athenian government during Phocion’s lifetime informs the biography at every turn. Phocion himself he pairs with Cato the younger, whose probity was also at odds with the “debased lives and evil customs” characteristic of his day (Phocion 3.2). Throughout, Plutarch opposes the wise and virtuous Phocion to the body of the Athenians; indeed, there is scarcely another citizen of Athens of whom he speaks well in the entire biography. The allies and the islanders, Plutarch reports, regarded envoys from Athens conducted by other strategoi as enemies; upon the arrival of such visitors they would block their harbors and bring their women, slaves, children, and herds into the city for safekeeping. But those led by Phocion they greeted with garlands and conducted to their own homes (9.1). A similar story is told about Phocion’s reputation in Macedon (17.4). The notion of a dichotomy between the wise Phocion and the foolish Athenians was evidently as precious to Phocion as it was to Plutarch. The biography is filled to the brim with Phocion’s crabby reminders of his own worth—sayings like “You are fortunate in having a general who knows you since otherwise you would have perished long ago” (9.3; cf. 5.1). Plutarch tells how once when Phocion was speaking to the demos and found that his argument met with general approval, he turned to his friends and asked, “What, did I say something dumb without knowing it?” (8.3).
It is difficult to determine who despised the demos more, Phocion or Plutarch. And it was not the teeming masses alone who drew to themselves the scorn of the crusty old general; much of Phocion’s contempt was directed at orators to whom the people hearkened. After the death of Alexander, Plutarch writes, when Hyperides asked Phocion when he would advise the Athenians to go to war, Phocion replied that he would not do so until he saw “the young men willing to stay at their places in the ranks, the rich to make contributions—and the orators to refrain from stealing public funds” (23.2). Plutarch also reports that Phocion after a victory released all his Greek prisoners of war, “being afraid lest the orators of the Athenians persuade the demos to treat them cruelly” (13.4). Phocion was also deeply distressed by the interaction of the rhetores and the demos with each other and with the strategoi. In a passage that has been cited by dozens of historians, Plutarch wrote:
Seeing that the public men of his day had divided up as if by lot the work of general and of orator, some of them only speaking in the assembly and proposing decrees, such as Eubulus, Aristophon, Demosthenes, Lycurgus, and Hyperides, and others—men like Diopeithes, Menestheus, Leosthenes, and Chares—advancing themselves by serving as generals and waging war, Phocion wished to resume and restore the political behavior [politeian] of Pericles, Aristides, and Solon, which was equally apportioned to both spheres of action. (7.3)
The point of Phocion’s famous observation is twofold: that a division had sprung up in Athens between generals and orators, and that this division was a bad thing.
The ingratitude of the Athenian people, the degeneracy of political life in the fourth century, and the destructive division that sprang up after Pericles’ death between generals and orators became important themes in the anti-Athenian tradition, and Plutarch’s life of Phocion was to serve as an important text in the historiography of Athens. It fits clearly into Plutarch’s general schema for Athenian politics. Good Athenian politicians illustrate by their cruel fates the demos’s lack of judgment, and bad ones serve to bring out the idleness, volatility, unruliness, and envy inherent in the masses.30 Such was the message of the man who served as the most common source for Greek history until the nineteenth century. A repository of cautionary tales of all kinds, Plutarch’s voluminous writings did incalculable damage to the reputation of a democracy their author did not begin to understand.
. . . . .
The first alien civilization to write extensively about the Greeks, the Romans were intensely anxious about what it meant to be Roman and not Greek. Seeking to appropriate what appeared best in Greek culture and to distance themselves from what seemed worst, Roman writers made extensive use of Greek topoi in their search for self-definition. How much of what they had to say came from the heart and how much was dictated by rhetorical necessity is difficult to determine, but much can be learned from the necessities the Romans perceived as pressing on them.31 Though shaped by the challenges that defensive Romans faced in discovering and delineating their own identity, however, the silliness of Cato combined with the convert’s zeal of Polybius to lay the groundwork for Cicero’s arriviste contortions, and in time the affability and stamina of the tireless Plutarch laid the capstone on the anti-Athenian tradition at Rome. (Other Romans contributed to the anti-Athenian tradition in an oblique but crucial way; the dislike of the plebs evident in Livy and his connection of popular unrest with the collapse of the Roman republic was to play a large role in shaping the apprehensions of modern thinkers.)
Plutarch was one of the most prolific of the non-Christian writers of antiquity; his extant works, which probably represent only about half his actual output, fill many volumes. During the Renaissance in Italy, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and France, and in America during the generations before and after the revolution, Plutarch was by far the most popular classical author. His admiration for republican virtue was so neatly balanced with his warmth for enlightened autocracy that both monarchists and republicans could claim him as their Bible. It was not until the nineteenth century that critical thinkers began to question whether his lively and amiable prose was really a reliable resource for historical and political analysis.32 When Cato began his grousing about the decadence of Greece, Pericles had been dead over two centuries, Demosthenes a little less. By the time Plutarch sat down at his desk in Chaeronea, the defeat the Athenians had suffered at Philip’s hands was nearly half a millennium old. The same time span separated Plutarch from the heyday of Athenian democracy as divides men and women of the late twentieth century from Columbus’s voyage to America, and none of us would be taken very seriously as a primary source for the Age of Exploration. Many readers over the past centuries, however, have imagined that Plutarch is just such a source for democratic Athens—partly because he worked from sources no longer available today and because he spoke the same language, but partly because many have shared the belief of American undergraduate students that there existed in antiquity a large island called “ancient civilization” where Plutarch lived in close quarters with Minos, Homer, Sappho, Pericles, Hannibal, Caesar, and Jesus. Because of these beliefs, because of the vast size of Plutarch’s surviving output, and because of their preoccupation with the education of the good citizen, reflective thinkers in early modern Europe and America turned frequently to Plutarch as the font of wisdom of all kinds. Until the nineteenth century, Plutarch probably taught people more (or less) about ancient history than all other classical authors combined, and what he had to say about Athenian democracy was not flattering. Combining the specious authenticity of a Greek insider with the equally deceptive objectivity of a Roman outsider, until quite recently Plutarch enjoyed an unparalleled reputation as a source for Greek political history. This reputation would play a crucial part in forming the view of Athens that characterized the Italian Renaissance, the subject of the chapter that follows.