Chapter Seven
Athens and the other cities of Greece, when they had abandoned kings and concluded to live as it were in a commonalty which abusively they called equality, how long time did any of them continue in peace? Yea what vacation had they from the wars, or what noble man had they which advanced the honour and weal of their city, whom they did not banish or slay in prison?
—Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour
No People upon Earth were more grateful to their good Citizens than the Greeks and Romans were, or encouraged Virtue more, or rewarded it better: Nor did they scarce ever banish any Man till he became terrible to them; and then it was Time…. It is better that one Man, however innocent, should suffer, than a whole People be ruined, or even hurt, if not by him, yet by his Example…. Even in England, the hanging of two or three Great Men among the many guilty, once in a Reign or two, would have prevented much Evil, and many Dangers and Oppressions, and saved this Nation many Millions.
—Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, Cato’s Letters
AS THE DEBATE over the best form of government moved north, it changed its shape to accommodate different social, economic, and political conditions, and after 1519 it was necessary for it to accommodate a new religious diversity as well. The concerns that exercised northern political scientists of the early modern era and led them to mine antiquity for evidence to support their varied claims came to a head in the conflict between monarchists and republicans in seventeenth-century England. In this clash considerable violence was done to ancient history, as the developments of antiquity were pulled this way and that to buttress all permutations and combinations of political argumentation. Beginning with the so-called Paper War, moreover, classical examples were dredged up relentlessly for use as ammunition in the increasingly bitter party strife that marked the first third of the eighteenth century as well.
ATHENIANS AND ELIZABETHANS
Britons paid little attention to classical Greece before the seventeenth century, and before the sixteenth even access to classical texts was limited.1 The sixteenth-century Cambridge printer John Siberch was the first to use Greek type in England; the works he published included an edition of Galen’s De Temperamentis by Thomas Linacre, who founded the College of Physicians in 1518 and had studied Greek in Italy under the eminent Chalcondyles. During his two and a half years in England between 1511 and 1514, Erasmus offered informal instruction in Greek, and in 1516 Bishop Fox in founding Corpus Christi College at Oxford provided for instruction in both Latin and Greek; in 1518 Wolsey founded a lectureship of Greek.
Around the same time, Thomas More, who not only learned Greek but saw to it that his daughters were instructed in it, incorporated Hellenic elements into both the structure and the vocabulary of his Utopia: his phylarches, each of whom presided over thirty families, were named after Athenian tribal officials, and the rotation of his syphograuntes in the council of the chief phylarches is reminiscent of the Athenian boule. The notion of rotation, however, may well have been derived from Venetian practice, and certainly the selection of a prince who served for life was eminently un-Athenian, as was the provision that all matters had to be debated for a full three days before being decided. Classical examples were rife in Thomas Elyot’s 1531 Boke Named the Governour, in which the author advocated the study of Greek for even young children.2 Elyot sees the best hope for good government in a properly educated prince surrounded by properly educated magistrates, and in chapter 2 of book 1, where he depicts the pitfalls of popular government, he portrays the Athenian state as a “monster with many heads,” unstable and ungrateful.3 Both Greece and Rome, he argues, were destroyed by the license and audacity of the encroaching masses; in Athens and the rest of Greece, popular government led to endless wars and frequent exiles and executions of worthy leaders.4 (Florence and Genoa, he adds, suffered from similar problems.) Elyot refers the reader to Plutarch as a source for the unfortunate fates of Athenian statesmen, but he seems to have forgotten this lament in Chapter 14, where he encourages the study of the classics on the grounds that it may lead to “a public weal equivalent to the Greeks or Romans.”5 A different tack is taken by another monarchist, John Poynet, in his Shorte Treatise of politike power and of the true Obedience which subiectes owe to kynges and other ciuile Gouernours (1556). Poynet argues in his preface that all ancient governments, including those of the Greeks, the Romans, and—mirabile dictu—the Assyrians, were limited by the delusion that reason itself was a sufficient principle of government, as ancient peoples had not yet come to recognize that the one God who ruled all had prescribed for man “how he should behaue him self, what he should doo, and what he maye not doo.” He goes on, however, to insist that in the people as a whole lay the power to supervise in some degree the government of the king.
In 1565 Elizabeth’s minister Sir Thomas Smith completed his essay De Republica Anglorum, written, despite its title, in English and dotted from the start with Greek terminology—distinguishing, for example, between politeia on the one hand and, on the other, Demokratia hapanton, “the usurping of the popular or rascall and viler sort, because they be more in number.”6 Inevitably Athens is brought forth as an example.7 By the middle of the sixteenth century, interest in things Hellenic had obtained a strong foothold in England, and Roger Ascham in his Scholemaster gives a vivid picture of the Greek studies of Elizabeth, whom he served as tutor both before and after her accession to the throne.8 In 1600 the little-known Thomas Floyd produced his tract The Picture of a perfit Common wealth, describing aswell the offices of Princes and inferiour Magistrates ouer their subiects, as also the duties of subiects toward their Gouernours. Though the title page goes on to maintain that the work had been Gathered forth of many Authors, aswel humane, as diuine, by Thomas Floyd, master in the Artes, in fact the author’s reading was anything but wide. The treatise is derived principally from Elyot’s Governour, and the collection of parallel passages assembled by D. S. Starnes in 1931 demonstrates that the patterning was at times on the level of paraphrase.9 Listing the three possible types of government, Floyd opts for monarchy; for the sins of democracy he cites Switzerland, Florence, and Athens, “in which Democratie aforesaid the seede of rashnes and laweless lust held the superioritie.”10 The “weatherlike vulgar,” he warns, “are prone to admire every thing, & ready to turne as often as the tide. Wherefore they are rightly accounted to resemble the ugly Hydra, which is sayd, no sooner to lose one head, then immediatly another groweth. Herehence,” he continues, concluding the familiar trope, “they are called the monsterous beast of many heads.”11 While the prudence of Lycurgus led Sparta to flourish over five hundred years, the democracy of Athens brought ruin on itself by condemning wise counselors like Solon and Phocion.12
In Tudor England, then, the bright flash of Utopia was followed by conventional treatments of governance that exalted monarchy as its best form and put Athens forward as proof of the wickedness of democracy. Elyot put his faith in the proper education of princes and magistrates, Poynet dismissed the possibility for sound government without acknowledgment of the one sovereign God, and Smith insisted that the bad character of the common man would ruin a democratic state in short order. In France, meanwhile, sixteenth-century political thought bore its richest fruit in the works of Jean Bodin, who affirmed that sovereignty was by its very nature indivisible and sought in his writings to counter “the rooted error of the mixed state.”
Bodin broke new ground in the field of political science in his treatise entitled (with undue optimism) The Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, written in Latin and first published in 1566.13 Indifferent to canonical texts of any variety, Bodin questioned the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle persistently, comfortably labeling many of their notions about government untenable and in some cases flatly absurd. He accepts, however, the classical schema (that he ascribes to Aristotle) of the three good forms of government and their three debased variants. The tyranny of one he labels the least pernicious of the debased forms; the tyranny of oligarchy ranks second; and “worst, finally, is that dominion of the mob, released from all law, which the Greeks called ochlocracy.”14 Popular government, he complains, would not even merit the slightest discussion were it not for the fact that it was supported by numerous writers, including Machiavelli, who, he maintains, thought it was the best of all forms of government. He goes on to remark upon the ambivalence in Machiavelli we have already observed in chapter 6.15 Though he cites classical authors regularly to bolster his arguments, Bodin reflects distress at the excessive dependence on the ancients that he discerned in other writers, who, he complains, fail to understand that “it is necessary to show by reason why anything is so, not by authority.”16
Bodin takes a dim view of all ancient republican governments, insisting that not only Athens but Rome as well was ruined by democracy, and he expresses particular concern about the trend toward popular government following great military victories. This phenomenon, he claims, can be seen in Athens, where the Athenians established popular government after the victory at Salamis but handed power over to “the four hundred optimates” after the defeat at Syracuse.17 The reason for this contrast, Bodin claims, is obvious: the plebs, like an untamed beast, rejoice in prosperity and are suddenly cast down by adverse fortunes, while the “optimates,” on the other hand, “who are nearer to the danger, take the helm as in a tempest.” In a democracy each ambitious man buys the plebs with banquets and spectacles, and anyone who attempts to intervene meets an unfortunate fate, as did Aristides and Thucydides (the ostracized son of Melesias) at Athens.18 (A later passage in the Six Books makes clear that Bodin conflated this Thucydides, the rival of Pericles, with Pericles’ admirer Thucydides, the historian.19) Bodin also stresses the role of Aristides in extending political participation to Athens’s lower classes, but he sees Pericles as the pivotal corrupter of the Athenians because of his curtailment of the powers of the Areopagus and his institution of state pay for public service.
Although the Method was reprinted several times during Bodin’s lifetime, Bodin’s work came to be known in England chiefly through his later Six livres de la République, with which British readers became familiar in its French and Latin versions and then, after 1606, through the English translation made by Richard Knolles from a text painstakingly conflated from the original French text of the 1570s and Bodin’s own Latin version of 1586. In the Six Books (which somehow seem like more), Bodin plods across much of the ground already covered quite adequately in the Method.
Bodin had recurred frequently in the Method to the topos of the animal-like nature of the demos, portraying the Florentine plebs stampeding about like a shepherdless flock and comparing Florence under popular rule to a mindless body.20 (The truth was that angry Florentines, unsure of their future in a chaotic and frustrating world, did sometimes stampede; angry Athenians, secure in their sovereignty, did not. Bodin, however, failed to make this distinction.) The topos of the demos as a wild animal needing to be tamed reappears in book 4 of the Six Books, where Bodin describes Pericles as using distributions of grain and money to tame “this beast with many heads, one while by the eyes, another while by the eares, and sometimes by the bellie,” thereby making it possible to promulgate sound laws.21 The whole panoply of nature is mobilized in Bodin’s attempts to demonstrate the inadequacy of popular government, as metaphors are mixed pell-mell. Democratic peoples are compared to those in the grip of “a phrensie, which causeth them to skip and daunce without ceasing,” and cannot be cured unless a skillful musician should “tune his instrument vnto their mad manner and fashion, to draw them vnto his owne … untill that they be so againe made more quiet and tractable”; in such a way the wise magistrate, seeing the people gone mad, should begin by accommodating himself “vnto their disordered appetite, that so he may afterwards by little and little induce them to hearken vnto reason: and so by yeelding at first vnto the tempest, at length put into the desired hauen.” Controlling an angry multitude, he says, “is no other thing than as if a man should by maine strength seeke to stay the force and course of an headie streame, most violently falling from the high and steepe rockes.”22 And so on and on. Predictably, Bodin criticizes the choice of arithmetical equality over the geometrical or “harmonical.”
Bodin maintains that it was because of the superiority of one-man rule that such states as Athens and Rome drove out their inadequate republican regimes and replaced them with monarchies.23 He suggests, however, that some changes in government are due to the fickleness inherent in some national characters such as that of the Athenians, the Florentines, and the Swiss. This “phantasticall disease,” he maintains, most commonly afflicts popular states, since there the subjects are “too wise and of too subtill spirits,” everyone thinking he is worthy to command.24 Parallels between Athens and Florence that work to the detriment of both are frequent in the Six Books. In book 4 Bodin compares the machinations of Savonarola with the parallel campaign of Ephialtes, accomplished “by the setting on of Pericles by his seditious orations.”25 The same parallels underlie his protracted discussion of democracy in book 6, chapter 4, a long purple passage that weaves together the standard themes of the Athenians’ injustice to their leaders (Aristides, Themistocles, Miltiades), the martyrdom of Phocion, and the foundering of the leaderless ship of state, adducing authority upon authority.
Though an independent thinker in many respects, in his analogies between Florence and Athens Bodin followed the lead of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti (all of whom he cites), and his attacks on the evils of Athenian democracy are the conventional ones. His work came to be so influential in Britain during the period of the civil wars that during the first half of the seventeenth century no author was cited more frequently or more favorably. Between their first appearance in 1576 and the end of the seventeenth century, the Six Books appeared in twenty-two French editions, nine Latin editions, and Knolles’s English edition of 1606.
Elizabeth Tudor died seven years after Bodin, and with her death came the fall of her friend Sir Walter Ralegh. Convinced that Ralegh had been opposed to his succession, James I had him seized and imprisoned, and before Ralegh was finally released in 1616 he had begun his multivolume History of the World. Whereas Bodin had been intrigued by psychology, geography, numerology, and other camp schemata for the ordering of human experience, Ralegh leaned instead to a moralistic orientation. The ancient Athenians earned his disapproval mightily, and though he blames both Athens and Sparta for drawing all their followers into a cruel war, the Spartans fare far better at Ralegh’s hands than do the Athenians.26 While the Spartans lived “Utopian-like,” the “rascal multitude” in Athens were constantly incurring divine punishment for their insolency.27 The military disaster in Egypt in the 450s was the Athenians’ reward for their “vanity and indiscretion”; the defeat of the Sicilian expedition must not be ascribed to Athena or fortune but rather was the Athenians’ deserved punishment for their wickedness in exiling the generals Pythodorus and Sophocles (not the playwright but another man by the same name) after their expedition to Sicily, for it was this decision that explained the extreme caution of Nicias a decade later. Though Ralegh concedes that Nicias should not have yielded to his fear of public opinion and was wrong to be so fearful of an eclipse that he could not fight, still the episode demonstrates that God, “who ordinarily works by a concatenation of means, deprives the governors of understanding when he intends evil to the multitude; and … the wickedness of unjust men is the ready mean to weaken the virtue of those who might have done them good.”28 The Thirty Tyrants, Ralegh contends, represented the gods’ just retribution for the execution of the victors of Arginusae.29
THE FEARS OF HOBBES
It was with this kind of heritage that British thinkers entered on the era of revolution. Predictably, classical topoi were trotted out by a variety of political theorists to buttress assorted arguments during this time of bitter division, and within half a century of the death of Elizabeth Tudor, Thomas Hobbes was to complain that there was nothing so provocative of sedition as the reading of classical texts.30 The connection Hobbes draws between republicanism and the study of the classics is amusing in view of his own passion for the work of Thucydides, which he translated in the 1620s. Though his reasoning was different from Ralegh’s, Hobbes came to equally disparaging conclusions about Athenian democracy; in his autobiography he reports that from his earliest acquaintance with the classics Thucydides had been his favorite subject because of Thucydides’ contempt for democratic government. Hobbes makes his opinion of Athenian democracy clear in the introduction to his translation, where he wrote that in Athens
such men only swayed the assemblies, and were esteemed wise and good commonwealth’s men, as did put [the Athenians] upon the most dangerous and desperate enterprizes. Whereas he that gave them temperate and discreet advice, was thought a coward, or not to understand, or else to malign their power…. By this means it came to pass amongst the Athenians, who thought they were able to do anything, that wicked men and flatterers drave them headlong into those actions that were to ruin them; and the good men either durst not oppose, or if they did, undid themselves.
It was for these reasons, Hobbes maintained, that Thucydides sought to abstain from public life.31
If the study of ancient history had failed to make a republican of Hobbes, still more had it failed to make one of his contemporary Robert Filmer, whose theory of patriarchal monarchic supremacy Peter Laslett has labeled “the most refuted theory of politics in the [English] language.”32 Some of the most dramatic seventeenth-century appeals to ancient examples both positive (biblical) and negative (classical) came from this monarchist par excellence, the first draft of whose treatise Patriarca was penned in the late 1630s. The title of the work bespoke its thesis: according to Filmer, the establishment of Adam as sovereign of all creation betokened God’s intention that sovereignty should be by its very nature in each and every case absolute and indivisible. (Filmer maintains in another essay that this thesis is not only supported by such thinkers as Grotius, Selden, Hobbes, and Ascham but indeed “evident and affirmed by Aristotle,” whom one can only suppose he sees as being a superior authority on the subject of creation because of having lived closer to the event.33 This orientation represents a dramatic throwback from the mentality Pocock identifies as evolving during the Renaissance, when, he contends, “Thought was approaching the … central discovery of the historical intellect that ‘generations are equidistant from eternity’—that each of the phenomena of history existed in its own time, in its own right and in its own way.”34)Drawing heavily on Bodin, Filmer managed to make laughable a thesis that in Bodin’s hands had commanded considerable respect. Filmer’s chapter headings give some indication of his view of democracy in general: 16, “Imperfections of Democracies”; 17, “Democracies not Invented to Bridle Tyrants, but Came in by Stealth”; 18, “Democracies vilified by their own historians”; and 19, “Popular Government more Bloody than a Tyranny.” Under “Imperfections of Democracies,” he points out that the most flourishing democracy the world had ever known, to wit, Rome [sic], had lasted a paltry 480 years, and states his preference for the stability of the 1200-year Assyrian monarchy.35
Hobbes and Filmer, then, though they read widely in classical texts, had no trouble resisting the seductions of classical republicanism. At the same time, the most radical of British dissidents, the egalitarian Levellers and Diggers, took no heed of the classics, grounding their call for the elimination of political privilege not in ancient precedent but in the self-evident rights of human beings to equality before the law. There was, however, a school of classical republicanism that seemed to bear out Hobbes’s apprehensions about the study of the classics. Two writers of the 1650s, Marchamont Nedham, editor of the journals Mercurius Britannicus and Mercurius Politicus, and James Harrington, author of the Utopian Oceana, recurred periodically to classical exempla to fortify their arguments. (That their political sentiments had actually been inspired by classical reading seems unlikely, but it is easy to see how things might have looked to an anxious observer.) Although both Nedham and Harrington saw much virtue in Athenian government, however, they also saw much to reject.
Harrington’s ideas about Athens are evident both in Oceana, which appeared in 1656, and in his other political tracts. In seeking to incorporate the best of all previously existing governments into his ideal Britain, Harrington gives Athens serious consideration, affording as it did an example of power divided between a large assembly and a rotating council selected by lot. Englishmen, he writes, will be horrified at the notion of a popular assembly, but they must understand that such an assembly is like the touchstone in a goldsmith’s shop—dull in its own right, but essential to the workings of the whole.36 Defending the Athenians’ decision to ostracize Aristides, he sanctions the institution of ostracism as a matter of public security and, as on dozens of other occasions, cites Machiavelli approvingly, this time for his contention that popular governments are less ungrateful than princes.37
Still, Athens violated several of Harrington’s cardinal principles for the proper mixed state, and ultimately he rejected the Athenian model, contending that Athens was lost through the want of a good aristocracy. How, he asks, can you compare mechanic commonwealths (i.e., commonwealths run by the ordinary man, such as Athens, Switzerland, and Holland) to Sparta, Rome, and Venice, “plumed with their aristocracies”? For “mechanics, until they have first feathered their nests—like the fowls of the air, whose sole employment is to seek their food—are so busied in their private concernments that they have no leisure” to study politics and cannot safely be trusted with government.38 Drawing also upon the ship of state imagery found already in classical authors, Harrington maintains that no man is faithfully embarked on this kind of ship unless he has a share in the freight. No, far better a government like Sparta or Venice, where a genuine aristocracy is balanced against an assembly that votes but assuredly does not debate. Citing the contention of Cicero in Pro Flacco that the Greek states were all undermined by the “intemperance of their comitia,” that is, assemblies of the people, Harrington insists that no commonwealth in which the people in their political capacity are talkative, will ever see half the days of Sparta or Venice, but rather “being carried away by vainglorious men (that, as Overbury says, piss more than they drink) [will] swim down the sink, as did Athens, the most prating of these dames, when that same ranting fellow Alcibiades fell on demagoguing for the Sicilian War.”39 As for foreign policy, he complains that Athenian aggression brought down Greek civilization, and this development he sets up as a warning to his contemporaries: the Athenians “brought their confederates under bondage; by which means Athens gave occasion of the Peloponnesian War, the wound of which she died stinking, when Lacedaemon, taking the same infection from her carcass, soon followed. Wherefore my lords,” Harrington exhorts his readers, “let these be warnings to you not to make that liberty which God hath given you a snare to others in using this kind of enlargement of yourselves.”40
Harrington, then, though dogged in his determination to convert his reluctant countrymen to the cause of popular assemblies, saw the existence of a continuing aristocracy as essential to the stability of government, and so, despite much promise, Athens offered primarily a negative example to the architect of Oceana. Other seventeenth-century republicans, however, viewed things differently. Nedham in his pointedly titled study of The Excellencie of a Free State expressed a view of Athens far rosier at most points than that of Harrington, and although he seems to have admired an Athens that never existed, the Athens he condemned at certain junctures had not existed either.
It is Nedham’s purpose to demonstrate to the divided English the superiority of government by free election and popular consent.41 He finds Solon’s determination to concentrate power in the hands of the assembly entirely praiseworthy and proclaims that Solon has been recognized by all posterity as having left the only workable pattern for a free state to follow. Bringing forward Machiavelli and Guicciardini as exponents of free states, he notes the amazing rise of Athens after the expulsion of Peisistratus. He plays on the terror that the Levellers had struck in the hearts of the British establishment and pleads earnestly that “kings and all standing powers are the levellers,” citing the example of Louis XI and his successors in France (“the greatest levellers in Christendom”). Warning that the same thing has been happening in England as “kings began to worm the people out of their share in government, by discontinuing of parliaments,” he also cites the example of Athenian “levellers”—not the people meeting in their assemblies, but rather the Thirty Tyrants of 404/3, “which were a sort of levellers more rank than all the rest.”42
Nedham repeatedly extols the Athenian system of rigorous accountability.43 Though some, he notes, have censured free states for impeaching their statesmen so frequently, Nedham inclines rather to the view of those who argue that such vigilance is the mark of a healthy and vigorous state. What provoked the impeachments of such men as Alcibiades, Themistocles, Phocion, and Miltiades, Nedham asserts, was “their own lofty and unwary carriage,” an interpretation he claims originated with Plutarch.44 Though he waxes eloquent about the glories of Athens when the machinery of democracy was well lubricated and running smoothly, Nedham’s account of Athens’s less shining moments is incoherent and puzzling. Mentioning few names or dates, he compares the brief rule of the Thirty Tyrants with the long ascendancy of Peisistratus. Repeated references to the government of the Thirty treat it not as a short-lived accident of circumstance but rather as a predictable development of Athens’s rise to power. Athens, Nedham maintains,
whilst it remained free in the people’s hands, was adorned with such governors as gave themselves up to a serious, abstemious, severe course of life; so that whilst Temperance and Liberty walked hand in hand, they improved the points of valour and prudence so high, that in a short time they became the only arbitrators of all affairs in Greece. But being at the height, then (after the common fate of all worldly powers), they began to decline … [and] permitting some men to greaten themselves by continuing long in power and authority, they soon lost their pure principles of severity and liberty: for, up started those thirty grandees…. Such also was the condition of that state, when at another time (as in the days of Peisistratus) it was usurp’d in the hands of a single tyrant.45
The Athenians, he maintains later on, “lost their liberty when they suffered certain of the senators to over-top the rest in power; which occasioned that multiplied tyranny, made famous by the name of the thirty tyrants: at another time, when by the same error they were constrained, through the power of Peisistratus, to stoop until his single tyranny.”46
What is meant here? Who are the “senators” of Athens? Who are these “governors” who “gave themselves up to a serious, abstemious, severe course of life”? Aristides, perhaps, but surely not Themistocles or Cimon. Pericles, possibly, who cut himself off from social life on his accession to power—but who other than Pericles can be meant by men permitted “to greaten themselves, by continuing long in power and authority”? When was this glorious era? Athenian impeachments are defended as early as Themistocles and as late as Phocion. It was the era of Ephialtes and Pericles that was most associated with the auditing of Areopagites, a system that Nedham praises, but this era was also the age of Athens’s greatest expansion, which he cites as the natural cause of its decline. Was decline the inevitable result of expansion, or of Athens’s allotting undue influence to powerful individuals? Which individuals? The loss of the war and the problems of the fourth century have often been ascirbed to the Athenians’ failure to secure continuous leadership after Pericles’ death; for Nedham, the opposite seems to be true. Nedham, it would seem, sought, like Plutarch in his life of Pericles, to integrate two different traditions, the slender strand of the glories of freedom derived from Sallust (cited in the introduction) and Machiavelli, and the thicker and more venerable strand of the collapse of democracy found in the bulk of the sources. Though Nedham insists that Athens fell not because of the intrinsic weaknesses of democracy but rather as a result of departures from the democratic system, allotting too much power to ambitious individuals, his account of when and how this took place is too incoherent to carry much weight. It is striking, however, that the attempt should have been made.
Nedham also included in his collection of editorials an essay on the theme “The Originall of All Just Power is in the People,” in which he attempts to refute Filmer’s patriarchalism by references not only to modern history but to the Old Testament as well. A quarter-century later Patriarca was reprinted with dramatic consequences. Its reappearance set in motion a chain of events that eventually led the republican Algernon Sidney to the scaffold on 7 December 1683. For Sidney was moved to such an impassioned assault on Filmer’s simplistic constructions that he found himself accused of disloyalty to the crown.
Sidney’s opening attack on Filmer makes clear his apoplectic exasperation with the patriarchal school of thought: “I have been sometimes apt to wonder,” he writes, “how things of this nature could enter into the head of any man; or if no wickedness or folly be so great, but some may fall into it,” he goes on in bewilderment, “I could not well conceive why they should publish it to the world.”47 Agreeing with Harrington that mixed governments are best, Sidney nonetheless maintained that Athens was just such a government, with its archons, its assembly, and its Areopagite council, whose fall in the mid–fifth-century he ignores. Sidney accuses Filmer of abusing the ancient sources in his attack on Athens and claims that he has “abominably prevaricated, and advanced things he knows to be either impertinent or false.”48 Xenophon, he argues (i.e., pseudo-Xenophon), was criticizing democracy not in contrast to Filmer’s beloved monarchy, which did not exist in Greece, but rather in contrast to aristocracy.49 Sidney defends ostracism, maintaining that it entailed no hurt or dishonor, and though he concedes that some were put to death unjustly, he argues—ironically, in view of his fate—that Socrates, for example, died because the people were deceived by false witnesses, against whom neither the laws of God nor those of man have ever prescribed a sufficient defense.50 In any event, he insists, there must be remedies against unjust magistrates who place themselves above the law. This, he stresses, is needed in England, and he cautions his readers to remember that Parliament derives its power from the people.51
For shame or glory, then, the name of Athens was put forward by seventeenth-century writers on the British constitution caught up in the debate between monarchists and republicans. For all his jeremiads about the anti-monarchic bias instilled in readers of classical history, Hobbes found the study of the ancient world to support his monarchic views. To the single-minded Filmer, Athens was an unremitting evil; for the hardheaded Harrington, it was a model from which only selected elements could be extracted with profit; for Nedham and the ill-fated Sidney, it was an inspiration, as it was to John Milton, who named his Areopagitica after its Areopagite council and spoke warmly in Paradise Regained of the school of Hellas and even of the fulminating orators whose “resistless eloquence / Wielded at will that fierce Democraty.”52
Thus far political theory. During the first third of the eighteenth century, exempla from Greek history were dredged up to support agendas that were increasingly partisan and personal. Although Rome claimed the lion’s share of attention, Athenian history was also harvested for what fruit it might bear. The use of ancient history to score points in contemporary politics is particularly evident in the diatribes that capped the so-called Paper War of the turn of the century and in the opposition journals that hounded Walpole in the 1720s and 1730s.
ATHENS AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Bitter partisan conflict gripped England at the end of the seventeenth century, with Whigs and Tories at each other’s throats and engaged to boot in strange role reversals, as Tories insisted on the primacy of Parliament and Whigs not only undermined the House of Commons but defended the divine right of kings in the bargain. By 1699 it became clear that the Tories intended to impeach several Whig ministers. In November, the Tory Charles Davenant published his massive Discourse upon Grants and Resumptions, a tome of over four hundred pages devoted to searching out parliamentary precedents for impeaching ministers who had procured for themselves grants of crown estates. Conveniently, the beleaguered Whig ministers were suspected of having secured forfeited crown lands for themselves in Ireland. The search for ancient precedents for impeachment did not come until somewhat later, but when it did, it engaged several minds quite intensely.
By the end of 1701 the impeachments had fizzled, leaving a considerable residue of rage on both sides. It was during that summer that Jonathan Swift decided to make a name for himself by utilizing ancient history to demonstrate the evils of impeachment in his Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome with the Consequences they had upon both those States.53 In this elaborate allegory, the ministers under attack—Edward Russell, John Summers, Charles Montagu, and William Bentinck—appeared as Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles, Alcibiades, and Phocion. Four does not equal six, and Swift is careful not to make the correspondences too neat; Sir Walter Scott in his edition of Swift’s works saw both Miltiades and Themistocles as representing Edward Russell and Montagu as indicated by both Pericles and Alcibiades, whereas Frank Ellis, the twentieth-century editor of the Discourse, sees both Russell and Montagu in Alcibiades.54 Swift portrays all charges against the impeached Athenian statesmen as false or trivial. These impeachments did no good to anyone, he argues; rather, through them the most powerful state in Greece was “utterly destroyed by that rash, jealous, and inconstant humour of the people, which was never satisfied to see a General either Victorious or Unfortunate.” The power of the Athenian people, he claims, “was the rankest Encroachment imaginable, and the grossest Degeneracy from the Form that Solon left them. In short, their Government was grown into a Dominatio plebis, or Tyranny of the People, who by degrees had broke and overthrown the Balance which that Legislator had very well fixed and provided for.”55 Similar arguments are made about Rome. Just such evils may fall upon his countrymen, Swift maintains, if they place too much power in popular bodies.56
Swift was answered in several works. In 1702 James Drake published his History of the Last Parliament, in which he upheld the value of impeachment in preserving liberty in both Greece and Rome.57 Arguing that the Athenians’ watchfulness afforded their state vital security, he discusses some specific cases “because of a fancy’d Similitude” that some of his contemporaries believe they have identified in the political conflicts of their own day—though, Drake maintains with mock bewilderment, he himself “can’t yet discover wherein lies the parallel.”58 Themistocles, he claims, was unduly ambitious. Aristides sought to gather too much of the administration of justice into his own hands. Phocion had gone over to Macedon. Profligate in spending public money, Pericles pursued preferment and grandeur by intrigue; knowing the fondness of the Athenians for pomp, he entertained them with plays and “descended to Court the Common People” (those same common people whose political wisdom Drake defends). On balance, Drake argues, the responsibility for frequent impeachments lay not with the Athenian people but with the misconduct of their politicians whose harsh fates he ascribes to their own “Immoderate Ambitions.”59 If Athenian tribunals were this fair, Drake concludes triumphantly, English ones can be expected to be fairer still.60 In the following year the anonymous author of The Source of Our Present Fears Discovered also responded to Swift’s discourse, which he believed to have been written by the controversial Bishop Gilbert Burnet.61 (Burnet apparently had to disown the discourse publicly in order to avoid being impeached in the House of Commons himself.) “Burnet,” the author complains, lays “the gret Body of our Legislators upon an unmannerly level, with the Mob of Athens and Rome,” and advocates for England “the most Arbitrary Despotick Government in the World.”62 The author characterizes Swift’s discussion of the few versus the many as one of the “Learned Fits” of a man who “rakes up all the Enormities that he can find in the ancient Roman and Greek Histories, to have been committed by any number of Confederated Usurpers, and endeavours by Application, to draw an odious Parallel between those Usurpers and our House of Commons.”63 Frustrated by the turn the government was taking, he writes, the Athenians established the Council of Four Hundred, and when that did not work, they dissolved it again. This flexibility the author compares happily to that of English Kings in putting the treasury into commission instead of creating a Lord Treasurer, and reverting to the original system when the new one proved inadequate.64
The habit of using ancient history to illustrate the proper relationship of a people to its ministers subsided briefly after the accession of Queen Anne, but it returned in the flurry of opposition that hounded Sir Robert Walpole in the 1720s and 1730s.65 It was in 1719 that Sir John Trenchard and his protégé Thomas Gordon published The Character of an Independent Whig, in which they articulated the general outlines of their political philosophy, one that entailed—in addition to strong opposition about standing armies and the status of Protestant dissenters—a fierce commitment to accountability in government.66 Beginning in January 1720, The Independent Whig began to appear weekly, and later that year a series of letters composed chiefly by Trenchard and Gordon first made their appearance in The London Journal under the name of “Cato,” idolized in the pages of the Journal as a republican martyr who chose death rather than accept autocratic rule at Rome:
How bright the shining Patriot stands confest.
Great Cato’s soul informs his generous breast!
’Gainst power usurp’d, he points his God-like Rage,
And deals out Freedom to a future Age.67
The letters made plain the apprehension with which many Englishmen responded to the increased concentration of power in the hands of one minister—not an entirely unprecedented development, but nonetheless cause for alarm. In addition to more general concerns about lack of accountability, “Cato” and his associates considered the Walpole ministry venal and corrupt. “Cato” was intensely concerned with virtue in public life, the importance of unfettered free speech, and accountability in government, all of which he derived from the blessings of liberty. So intense and unrelenting was the attack by “Cato” on corruption in government that within three years Walpole had staged a takeover of the Journal, and the voice of “Cato” was not heard there again.
The letters continued to be published, however, and although their title makes clear the Roman bias of Cato’s Letters, still Athenian exempla pop up from time to time. The purpose of these examples was principally to demonstrate the dangers of runaway ministers and the need to hold public men accountable. Because of the dangers posed to the state by bad ministers (like Pericles, who “lavished away the publick Money, to buy Creatures” and brought on the Peloponnesian War to divert the Athenians’ attention from his peculation), Trenchard and Gordon defend vehemently the machinery of accountability in classical Athens.68 Loud echoes of Machiavelli are audible in the letters of March 1722 bearing the rubric “Free States vindicated from the common Imputation of Ingratitude.”69 In reality, the letters argue, this frequent accusation is false, as free states are considerably more grateful than “arbitrary princes.”70 The source of conflict between a people and its ministers, they maintain, is the common tendency of ambitious politicians to overrate their own merits and consequently the adulation to which they feel entitled. When the people refuse to become slaves to their own servants and presume to distinguish protection from oppression, they are tagged as ungrateful.71 In this vein, the authors defend the impeachment of Alcibiades.72
Thus far the letter of 2 March; the 9 March epistle begins with the assertion that “no People upon Earth were more grateful to their good Citizens than the Greeks and Romans were, or encouraged Virtue more, or rewarded it better: Nor did they scarce ever banish any Man till he became terrible to them; and then it was Time.”73 “Cato” goes on to enumerate the honors the Athenians lavished upon their leaders and to uphold the utility of ostracism, contending that it was acceptable for an occasional innocent man to suffer if his example might prevent an entire people from being ruined “if not by him, yet by his Example.” The periodic hanging of two or three great men in England, they contend, “would have prevented much Evil, and many Dangers and Oppressions, and saved this Nation many Millions.”74
In the preface to the collection entitled Cato’s Letters, Gordon insisted with an air of injured innocence that no analogues to contemporary history were intended in the epistles. “In answer to those deep Politicians, who have been puzzled to know who were meant by Cicero and Brutus,” Gordon wrote, “I assure them, that Cicero and Brutus were meant; that I know no present Characters or Story that will fit theirs; that these Letters were translated for the Service of Liberty in General; and that neither Reproof nor Praise was intended by them to any Man living…. There was nothing in those letters analogous to our Affairs.”75 These earnest disclaimers notwithstanding, it was clear to all readers of “Cato” that the authors had followed the line of attack proposed by Swift in 1710, when he had recommended an “expedient, frequently practised with great safety and success by satirical writers: which is, that of looking into history for some character bearing a resemblance to the person we would describe”; and, he adds, “with the absolute power of altering, adding or suppressing what circumstances we please, I conceive we must have very bad luck, or very little skill to fail.”76 The same strategy was adopted by the authors of the Craftsman, founded in December 1726 by Bolingbroke and his confederates with the purpose of undermining Walpole’s ministry at every turn.
The first issue seems to have been supervised by one Nicholas Amherst, described by a contemporary as “full of Latin and Greek and fuller of himself than of either.”77 Throughout its history the journal was to employ classical exempla as a principal means of attacking Walpole and his government. The issue of 17 February 1727 was devoted to the evils of popularity attained by unjust means, and the example of classical government is brought forward in defense of rigorous and vigilant scrutiny of public officials. Consistent with the political orientation they shared with “Cato,” the authors portray the people as honest and honorable, wishing only to be left in peace, encumbered with as few taxes as possible, but by virtue of their very good nature “liable to be imposed upon by false Shews, and artful Pretences.” Popularity, therefore, is not necessarily to be regarded as a badge of patriotism, as it is all too often attained by sinister methods for pernicious purposes. It was in accord with this principle, the authors argue, that in the best-constituted governments of antiquity, it was made a crime “to affect uncommon Popularity,” and it is for this reason that ancient history affords so many examples of outstanding patriots who were banished solely for rendering themselves unduly loved. The Craftsman is well aware that the ancient states have often been reproached for this habit—clearly Athenian ostracism is intended—but the authors find the conduct of antiquity prudent and praiseworthy in this regard, for these governments, they argue, judged rightly of human nature, knowing how “Popularity is apt to turn the wisest Heads, and corrupt the purest Hearts.”78
The authors involved in the invective of the Craftsman—whose printer Walpole went so far as to have arrested—identified with Demosthenes and complained of “those modern, Philippick Statesmen, who have endeavoured to destroy the Liberty of the Press.”79 Most of all, however, they identified with the Athenian poets and comic dramatists, whom they billed repeatedly as the ancient equivalent of the free press, and they saw in the Athenians’ joyous reception of jests upon their statesmen the hallmark of a free and vital people. Although the theme is touched upon in a variety of essays, it is developed most fully in a piece published in August 1730 consisting primarily of protracted citations from a recent work by the eccentric malcontent and future suicide Eustace Budgell. At Athens, Budgell had written, a bad minister “was sure to be mawled by the Wits and Poets … and his Vices and Blunders expos’d upon the publick Stage.” So far from participating in the traditional outcry against the ingratitude of the Athenians, Budgell rejoiced that in Athens, “tho’ a Man had done his Country the most important Service, his Vices or ill Actions were not spared,” and he cites with approval both the fate of Themistocles and the revilement of Cleon and Alcibiades by the comic dramatists. The bulk of the argument, however, concerns the attacks of the poets and comedians on the arbitrary and profligate administration of Pericles. Citing the verses of Teleclides, Cratinus, Hermippus, and others, Budgell concludes with satisfaction that for all Pericles’ tyranny, the one liberty of which he dared not deprive the Athenians was freedom of speech; for all his autocracy, “he never durst proceed to the last Degree of Tyranny, and attempt the laying a Restraint upon their Pens.”80 The sins of Pericles provide a frequent theme for the writers of the Craftsman, and the message of their attacks is clear: for “Pericles,” read “Walpole.”
The grounds of the attack on Pericles are several: he undermined the venerable Council of the Areopagus because he was ineligible for admission, not having served as archon; he contradicted himself in the assembly in order to remain on the popular side of any issue; he regularly betrayed his friends; but, most of all, he was venal and corrupt, and the bulk of the allegations against him concern money in some way, shape, or form. The Craftsman was not alone in alleging that Walpole misused funds regularly, and additional suspicion attached to anyone involved in the disastrous South Sea Company debacle. Though Walpole had originally opposed the government’s financial dealings with the South Sea Company and had worked with discretion and diplomacy to control the damage when the stock crashed, he himself had profited handsomely from South Sea stock, selling out the shares he had bought in 1720 at a profit of 1,000 percent. With this sum he began amassing his famous art collection at his estate at Houghton, and in November of 1730 the Craftsman claimed that the housekeeping bills at Houghton amounted to £1,500 a week. The Craftsman viewed Pericles as Walpole’s administrative ancestor. Pericles’ “licentious Distribution of Bribes and Bounties amongst the People” (i.e., state pay for state service) introduced luxury to all ranks and made even members of the most distinguished families unashamed to become his “known Pensioners.” To bolster Athens’s position abroad, the authors argue, Pericles had recourse to similar strategems and “back’d all his foreign Transactions with the Offers of a round Sum of Money.” Taking advantage of the confusion surrounding diplomatic negotiations between Athens and Sparta and their various allies in the 430s to “fleece the People,” Pericles ultimately pushed through “a Proposal for allowing Him ten Talents for Secret-Service-Money,” an act that constituted “a publick Sanction to Corruption.” Their chronology leaving something to be desired, the authors go on to complain that Pericles next confiscated the treasury at Delos. Any attempt to appoint overseers to examine Pericles’ books, they maintain, “was opposed with the old Cant of distrusting so virtuous an Administration.” (For “old,” read “new.”) Finally, to deflect any possible further attempts at holding him accountable for the vast sums he was spending, Pericles brought on the Peloponnesian War. Thus, the authors conclude, the corrupt ambition of a single man ruined the most flourishing state in the world; and history provides numerous examples to demonstrate that parallel conduct will produce the same consequences “in all Ages and all Nations.” But though Pericles in their view ultimately destroyed Athens, the authors are quick to point out the valiant efforts made to save her by the poets and comedians, who “endeavour’d to open the Eyes of their Countrymen, and animate Them against Pericles, by exposing his Conduct in satirical Poems and Invectives.”81
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The pious preference for a just monarchy that characterized Elizabethans who took time to write about Greek government encouraged a view of Athens that stressed the vulgarity and volatility of the Athenian demos, and in France at the same time the influential Bodin condemned the Athenian state on precisely the same grounds. For Bodin, as for Thomas Floyd, the demos, whether in Florence or Athens, was a beast with many heads, beyond the reach of justice or reason. Where Italians rejected Athens in favor of a stable mixed polity, on the whole English and French intellectuals rejected it in favor of monarchy. Morality and religion also affected British thinking about Athens: Poynet discounted the Athenians as heathens. Religion would play a role in shaping seventeenth-century attitudes as well, for Filmer insisted that God intended for kings to rule and to rule absolutely.
Though Filmer certainly resisted the seductions of the classical republicanism that so exercised Hobbes, others did not, and the ideals of mixed government that had been so cherished by Italians searching for stability produced a more open exploration of the Athenian system in seventeenth-century England. By and large rejected by Harrington, Athens was put forward as a positive example by Nedham, who heaped adulation on an Athens that had no more reality than the vulgar hydra of Floyd and Bodin, and by Sidney, who ignored the demotion of the Council of the Areopagus and looked ahead to the concerns of the next generation in his praise of the Athenian system of accountability. The use of classical exempla by Swift and others in the furor over the abortive impeachment of the Whig ministers at the turn of the century continued the pattern of writing about Greek history solely for the purpose of illuminating contemporary problems. No narrative histories of Greece appeared before 1729, when the French schoolmaster Charles Rollin published his Ancient History; the Englishman Temple Stanyan produced his history of Greece shortly afterward. But the first decades of the century saw Greek history relegated to the status of ammunition in political debates.
These debates, however, called forth considerable creativity and imagination in the use of Athenian models.82 Through attacks on Pericles, first the London Journal and then the Craftsman not only lambasted what they saw as the venal and corrupt government of Walpole but also affirmed the merits of the Athenian political system. So far from viewing the purported excesses of Pericles as rooted in the Athenian ethos, the opposition journals saw in them the proof that the vigilant suspicion with which the Athenians regarded their statesmen was in fact warranted, and in it they saw a constructive model for modern Britain. And not only that: the careers of men like Pericles validated their belief in the crying need for a press that was both sleepless and ruthless. It is impossible to know whether Hobbes was correct in viewing ancient texts as breeding grounds for sedition; what is clear is that classical history could be used to advantage in the lively and sometimes bitter disputes that racked Britain from the beginning of the Stuart era. Though it continued be to be conducted with more petulance and stridency than twentieth-century readers are likely to associate with intellectual integrity, the debate over Athens that began in cliché at the dawn of classical studies in Britain early in the sixteenth century turned by the end of the seventeenth into a forum for vibrant and vigorous political discussion.