Chapter

Constitutions, Political and Otherwise

What is a constitution? Today we think of it as the basic laws defining the distribution of power in a regime, sometimes collected in a single document. The original handwritten Constitution of the United States of America is on display in the rotunda of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. By contrast there is no such single document embodying the British Constitution, which is instead understood to be a combination of important laws, conventions and treaties that have evolved over time.

No ‘constitution’, even in the uncodified British sense, can be found in the political languages of classical Greece and republican Rome. The word in English derives from the Latin constitutio, referring, in post-republican Rome, to an edict issued by an emperor, rather than to a comprehensive and fundamental body of laws.1 Nevertheless, ‘constitution’ is widely used to translate what the classical Greeks called politeia. This translation, and the title of the present chapter, can be justified by thinking about a meaning of ‘constitution’ that is more fundamental than its current primarily political usages. That deeper sense is of a constitution as a specific kind of ordering and structure – what in French is called regimen – the characteristic make-up that maintains a body in good health. The philosopher Aristotle would eventually employ politeia in both its most comprehensive sense and its most narrow political sense. He refers at one point to politeia as meaning the general ‘way of life’ of a city.2 But he also at another point defines it narrowly as ‘an arrangement of offices’.3

The broad sense of constitution as a specific kind of ordered regime applies to natural bodies as much as to political bodies. The comparison shows why ‘constitution’ may go beyond the narrowly political to mean a way of life. A person has a strong constitution if she is able to maintain her internal balance and order, warding off disorganization by rogue cells and invasion by harmful foreign bodies. A political body has a strong constitution if it is able to maintain its internal balance and order, warding off disorganization by rogue disaffected groups and invasion by harmful foreign bodies. And there is a connection between the two. Only a certain ordering of the habits and values of a group of citizens will serve to maintain the customs and principles animating a particular way of life.

This is why the Greek word politeia – the word most often translated as ‘constitution’ – is, in its earliest surviving reference, used to describe a condition of what we might call being a citizen. The word is used by the historian Herodotus (who will shortly be introduced in more detail) in describing the demands of a foreigner in 5th-century Sparta. The foreigner declares himself willing to take up a post in the Spartan army only if he and his brother are made Spartan citizens.4 It is significant that the word is used here for the particular case of citizenship of Sparta. For Sparta, above all other Greek constitutions, dramatized the importance of ‘constitution’ in connecting together its narrow political and wider way-of-life meanings. Being a Spartan citizen meant not only being granted certain privileges and duties, but also being enrolled in a comprehensive way of life, one that was noticeably distinct from that of other Greek city-states. Studies of the Spartan constitution, in works entitled Politeia of the Spartans, from the late 5th century onwards were preoccupied by this way of life: concerned with the demands of military readiness, they examined extreme physical training as well as common meals and other distinctive customs for producing and rearing children. The idea of the broad constitution as going beyond political organization to include the social division of labour generally – how people are procreated, educated and trained to contribute to society – would become characteristic of many Greek discussions of the ‘best politeia’.5

It is the connection between politeia in the sense of citizenness, way of life, and politeia as a specific political structure that is the topic of this chapter. What is the relationship between a regime’s way of life and its characteristic political organization in particular? For the Greeks of the classical period, there was no single answer to that question. Rather, each kind of regime – each different politeia – gave its own distinctive response, produced and tested especially in the two major bouts of convulsion that shook the Aegean world in the 5th century BCE. Those convulsions arose from the violent confrontations of different constitutional models. For those Greeks who participated in these battles or chronicled them soon after the fact, what modern scholars translate as the clash of constitutions was at the forefront of ideological claims as well as more sober analyses. In the dramatic course of Greek wars as chronicled by historians, we find rival cities displaying the merits, or the flaws, in their constitutions; we also find constitutional analysis dividing regimes into three basic types of one, few and many. Exploring constitutional clashes in practice, and then in theory, are tasks to be pursued in this chapter.

Herodotus and the Politics of the Persian Wars

The first major set of conflicts involving 5th-century Greek societies was the Persian Wars (499–479 BCE, with battles continuing for years afterward), in which a diverse group of Greek polities banded together to ward off invasions by the king of Persia, who controlled a vast territory across the Aegean Sea from the Greek mainland. This story would be recounted by Greek historians as a battle of liberty against servility, of free Greek states against the slavish and despotic Persian monarchy, though we will investigate ways in which their descriptions were not quite so simple as this summary makes them seem.

The second set of conflicts in the same century was the Peloponnesian War (a preliminary set of conflicts 460–c. 445, then what is called the war proper 431–404 BCE), in which the Greek alliance that had successfully repelled Persia tore itself apart, splintering into two main groupings led by Sparta and by Athens. Historians would describe this as a war between oligarchies led by Sparta and democracies led by Athens, though, again, their descriptions and the course of the conflict were not quite as simple as that summary would suggest.

In reflecting on these conflicts, the historians and playwrights of the day saw them in terms of a conflict of constitutions. They alternately idealized or excoriated those regimes for the political choices that they fostered and for the ways of life that they promoted. To understand the basic political choices facing 5th- and 4th-century classical Greeks, we need to understand the ideas at the centre of those recurrent clashes of constitutions – the ideas that animated the ongoing competitions between very different ways of life in the regimes of different cities and empires. And we do that best by focusing on the story of the Persian Wars – and the constitutional analysis offered in the course of that story – told by the historian Herodotus.

Born in about 484 and dying probably soon after 430 (the latest events he mentions in his Histories are in that year), Herodotus hailed from the city of Halicarnassus (now the Turkish city of Bodrum) on the mainland of Asia Minor.6 Coming from this eastern edge of the far-flung Greek settlements, while later living in its western reaches in a new Panhellenic colony planted on the Italian peninsula, Herodotus was a man of wide travels, broad sympathies and multiple audiences. He was a writer with an understanding of the borderlands of Greek societies, who forged an undying account of Greek military victory in the Persian Wars (which had ended in his childhood) and cast a shrewd eye over the self-deceptions and grasping for power on all sides. And he did that as the later bout of war between alliances led by Sparta and Athens was already raging, being about twenty-five when the later war began.

OVERVIEW OF PERSIAN WARS AND PELOPONNESIAN WAR
5TH CENTURY BCE
499–494 Revolt of Ionian Greek cities against Persian rule
490 First Persian invasion of mainland Greece; Athenians lead victory in battle of Marathon on land
480–479 Second Persian invasion: in 480, Spartans and others defeated in battle of Thermopylae, but Athenians lead Greek allies to victory in sea battle of Salamis; in 479, Athenians, Spartans and others together win land battle of Plataea and defeat Persian fleet at Mycale
465 Major earthquake in Laconia kills many Spartans; helots revolt
460–445 Military conflicts between Sparta and Athens (and their allies)
431–404 Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens (and their allies): in 404, Spartans win

Herodotus tells us that he travelled widely in Egypt, as far as Memphis, and preferred the Egyptian calendar to the Greek. He describes the costumes of the Bactrians, the habits of the camel and the traditions of the Scythians, delving into foreign customs with broad-minded assessment (sometimes criticizing, sometimes praising). He draws an influential contrast between Persian despotism and Greek liberty. Yet he also points out the contradictions between Greek regimes that prized freedom at home but imposed despotism abroad, and explores how Sparta and Athens drew on very different political habits and outlooks in deploying their forces to resist Persia.

Ethnographer and moralist, historian and tale-bearing traveller, Herodotus combined all these roles in writing his great account of the Persian Wars. This is the first work of ‘history’ written in Greek, a name given to it by the Greek word historia, which meant inquiry or investigation. Herodotus invented a new discipline of history, concerned with the making of ‘inquiries’ among eyewitnesses and records, in order to explain and memorialize significant human actions. This was close in spirit to modern investigative journalism or contemporary history, and could be pursued only in relation to relatively recent events. It simply isn’t possible to write history in this sense about the very distant past. (When Herodotus’ self-appointed successor, Thucydides, would come to write about the very distant past, he cordoned it off as a prologue from his main enterprise.) In inquiring into a war that had ended in his early childhood, questioning informants and assembling testimony, Herodotus pioneered judicious source criticism (‘this I do not myself believe, but others might do otherwise’, 5.86) and argumentative evaluation. At the same time, this ‘prose Homer’ (as his native city inscribed him three centuries after his death)7 placed himself emphatically within the traditional role of the epic poet, inventing history while reciting it as poetry. The young Thucydides is said to have wept tears of envy on hearing Herodotus recite his work at Olympia – a revealing if possibly concocted story.8

Let’s listen to Herodotus on the diversity of human habits and customs before concentrating on his depiction of different forms of government (one, few and many) in action in the Persian Wars. Influenced by the sophistic distinction between nomos (law, custom) and phusis (nature) introduced in Chapter 1, and by currents in medical writing about the diversity of human physiology, he highlights how many and various are human ways of living across the whole stretch of the world known to him. Most famous are his remarks criticizing the conduct of a Persian overlord in Egypt for violating local religious customs (3.37), observing that all men cling to the belief that their own laws and customs are the best. He tells a story about the earlier Persian king Darius, who staged a confrontation between a group of Greeks whose custom was to cremate bodies, and a group of Indians whose custom was to eat their dead fathers’ bodies. The Greeks were revolted by Darius’ asking what price they would accept to eat their dead fathers, the Indians by his asking what price they would accept to burn theirs (3.38). Centuries later Montaigne would meditate on these stories, suggesting that, in the face of such disagreements, it is most reasonable to be sceptical as to whether there is any truth about the best or most just way to live at all. Herodotus draws on other variations in norms in explaining what had enabled the Greeks to fight victoriously over the Persians, while at the same time offering a clear-eyed view of the foibles and prejudices of all sides.

To appreciate the shape of his overarching story, we do best to consider the context in which he told it. Herodotus was writing about the Persian Wars of around the time of his birth (499–479 BCE), in which some thirty of the Greek polities had united against the Persians, the Spartans leading and the Athenians making decisive contributions at crucial junctures. But he was writing during and after the battles between Athens and Sparta and their allies that dominated his youth and maturity (460–c. 445 BCE; the Peloponnesian War proper broke out in 431 BCE shortly before his death, and would continue until the Athenian defeat in 404) – and that struggle pitted Athens and Sparta against each other.

That contemporary struggle makes his Histories all the more poignant. For, in the earlier generation he chronicled, Athens and Sparta had stood side by side in solidarity with a selective group of Greek cities in confronting the might of the Persian empire. Yet, while the Spartans had contributed significantly in memorably defiant defeats like Thermopylae and in the ultimately decisive land battle of Plataea, the Athenians had proved themselves indispensable in the important battles of Marathon on land and Salamis at sea. So, while the Spartans had officially led the Greek coalition against Persia, the war actually ended up showcasing and further strengthening the power of the Athenians.

Herodotus acknowledges that his own opinion that Athens had been the saviour of Greece from Persia ‘will be odious to the majority’ of his contemporaries (7.139). For, unlike most of the writers whose works survive from classical Greece, Herodotus was not Athenian and was not even writing in Athens, though there is some evidence of his work influencing Athenian playwrights from the Antigone onwards, as it had already begun to circulate in various stages of completion during his lifetime.9 Yet his outsider’s vantage point made him better able to see how Athens’ newfound dominance was feeding her citizens’ arrogance and appetite for power. As the Athenians amassed an informal empire, their growing power provoked Spartan fears, which, in turn, led to the skirmishes and breakdown of trust that ended in open warfare between them.

Recounting the story of the Persian Wars as the staccato rhythm of the Peloponnesian War was unfolding was an enterprise that was necessarily loaded with complicated messages. Herodotus’ history evokes a lost sense of Greek solidarity. But it also emphasizes the origins of Athenian imperialism, an imperialism that looked uncannily like the Persian aggrandizement against which that earlier generation had fought. And it further showcases a contradiction between the Spartans’ devotion to liberty at home and their willingness to crush the liberty of democracies abroad. (The Peloponnesian War would end in 404 BCE with a Spartan-supported coup against democratic Athens, though the democrats successfully counter-attacked within a year and Sparta ultimately tolerated their reinstallation.) We will see below that Athens and Sparta alike emerge as dangerously hypocritical actors in Herodotus’ writing, marked by tensions between the values they claim to uphold and the actions that undermine those values for themselves or for others. But, first, we will turn to the constitutional analysis that Herodotus embeds in his history, in the course of which he articulates the fundamental categories of one/few/many that orient Greek constitutional thinking.

One/Few/Many: Three Kinds of Regime

In addition to the doubled timeframe of writing a history of the Persian Wars with implicit awareness of the later Peloponnesian War, Herodotus engages in another act of dramatic overlay: setting a ‘constitutional debate’ in 6th-century Persia but charging it with the vocabulary of 5th-century Athens and Greece.10 One of the most important passages of Greek constitutional thinking, this debate (3.80–82) is described by Herodotus as taking place in 522 BCE among seven Persian aristocrats, who have just conspired to bring down a pair of royal usurpers and are choosing what form of government will rule them next. Three of them give speeches – each favouring one particular kind of constitution and attacking others – that sound in their arguments and vocabulary startlingly like the language of Greeks, especially Athenians, at the time that Herodotus is writing some seventy years later. In fact, the historian signals, perhaps tongue in cheek, that his audience may not find the account of the Persian debate to be historically accurate: ‘things were said that by some Greeks are not believed to have been said, but they were’ (3.80). Because our interest is in classical Greek constitutional categories, this seeming anachronism makes them all the more relevant.

The Persian Otanes speaks first, and he begins by criticizing the regime of monarchy under which Persia has lately been governed:

It seems to me that there can in no way any longer be one king over us, for such rule is neither pleasant or good … [I] no longer agree to making one of us the single ruler, for rule by one man is neither pleasant nor good … How could monarchy ever be a well-adjusted schema, since it is possible for the king to do whatever he wants, being unaccountable? (3.80)

Monarchy has two fatal faults, Otanes explains: it breeds arrogance in the ruler, while eliciting envy – said to be fundamental to human nature – in the ruled. Having become arrogant, the monarch will lord it over his subjects, ruling arbitrarily and inconsistently, so as to ‘disturb’ the ‘ancestral customs’. The fundamental flaw in monarchy is its lack of accountability. There is no one with the power to hold the monarch to account, so requiring him to use his powers properly on pain of a penalty if he does not. The criticism is pointed, since democrats in Herodotus’ day trumpeted accountability as one of the main achievements of their constitution.11

Having skewered monarchical pretensions, Otanes himself advocates rule by ‘the majority’ (to plethos). Because in this model of majority-rule constitution, offices (archas) would be assigned by lot and subject to accountability through public examination, no one would be able to aggrandize power or to use it arbitrarily, as would a monarch. From about the 430s, a 5th-century Greek would have called this regime demokratia.12 Perhaps in a bow to his choice of a 6th-century Persian setting, Herodotus does not put this word into Otanes’ mouth (though the historian in his own voice uses it elsewhere, at 6.131). Instead Otanes is made to call the regime of rule by the majority by the name of isonomia.

Isonomia derives from the roots for ‘equal’ and for ‘law’, so is best understood as ‘equality according to the laws’. The link between this model of rule by the majority and what 5th-century Greeks called ‘democracy’ is evident in the word itself and in many specific features that Otanes’ description shares with 5th-century democratic institutions. In particular, the idea of a mathematically equal (ison) share to be accorded even to the poor, and the idea of an annual rotation of office-holding, thus preventing the accumulation of arbitrary power, are exactly the points heralded by others praising democracy from roughly the 430s onwards. In Euripides’ play Hiketides (Suppliant Women), probably performed in the late 420s,13 the legendary Athenian king Theseus (in another act of temporal overlay) speaks in praise of these very same Athenian practices, though they had, in fact, come into force several centuries after he could have lived (if he ever did). Theseus declares:

There is no rule of one man here: it is a free city.

The people [demos] are lord here, taking turns

In annual succession, not giving too much to the rich.

Even a poor man has an equal share [ison] (404–8).14

And he adds further conditions for such fairness and equality:

Herodotus’ Persian Otanes celebrates an ideal of majority rule as similarly embodying equal justice for rich and poor, the same ideal taken to be quintessentially democratic by 5th- and 4th-century Athenian writers (and ascribed by them also to figures of an earlier time). When Herodotus elsewhere in his writing speaks in his own voice (not that of a Persian aristocrat) in describing 5th-century democratic Athens, he highlights its power as based on isegorie, or ‘equal speech’.16 So we see that he understands democracy as very closely connected to the isonomia celebrated in his rendering of Otanes’ speech.

Otanes’ valorization of rule by the many as a non-arbitrary and equal rule of law is immediately attacked by a second Persian debater, Megabyzos. He challenges the virtue of the ‘majority’ to whom Otanes wished to assign power. For Megabyzos, the majority is a ‘useless crowd, than which nothing is more stupid or more arrogant’ (3.81). Otanes had charged that the monarch is arrogant and arbitrary; Megabyzos deflects that charge from the monarch and applies it to the demos. Why so? Because the mob (as he sees them) ‘have not been taught, and do not know what is best and proper’. The ignorance of the many, compared with the cultivation of the few, would be a recurrent trope in elite arguments, central to the Greek version of the ‘rhetoric of reaction’.17 Herodotus once again puts this trope of 5th-century Greeks in the mouth of a Persian aristocrat – though the elite self-confidence he voices is somewhat timeless. Megabyzos concludes, voicing that recurrent elite pride, that ‘it is likely that the best policy should come from the best men’ (3.81).

The final Persian speaker is Darius, who changes tack. Each of the three regimes, he says, can make an argument to be the best (3.82). But monarchy is best in practice – if and only the one man ruling is himself ‘that one of the good than whom there is no one better’ (3.82). For, in that case, his character will equal his judgement, so that Otanes’ fears about arrogance and arbitrariness can be set aside. Moreover, the rule of one person has structural advantages over that of any plural group, whether few or many: for groups are inherently subject to division. In oligarchies, this takes the form of ‘faction’ (stasis) among elite rivals; a scourge of the Greek world, this led to the ‘heart-eating faction and civil conflict’ that one archaic poet had lamented in late 7th-century Mytilene.18 In democracies, stasis characteristically takes the form of a struggle between rich and poor, as the poor work to gain or to maintain political and ideological power in the face of the fatter purses giving significant advantages to the rich. ‘Rule by one’ could be idealized as a way of avoiding those characteristic conflicts. We turn now to explore rule by one and rule by few in turn – setting aside democracy for a fuller consideration in the next chapter.

RULE BY ONE

The idea of ‘rule by one’ had several very different associations for Greek thinkers, depending in part on when and where they lived. Certainly they could see an ideal of monarchy on display across the Hellespont in Persia, where hereditary kings wielded plenipotentiary powers over an empire from the 6th century onwards. And they could look back to the legendary kings of the archaic Homeric age, men like Agamemnon and Odysseus, or tell mythical stories about a ‘golden age’ ruled by a divine or semi-divine king, the ‘Age of Kronos’.

Yet some scholars doubt whether there were ever in Greece rulers with the sort of ‘absolute, hereditary power’ that later generations imagined, as distinct from ritual functions.19 Nevertheless, there were certainly influential kings scattered about the Greek world, most importantly in Sparta, where the unique, hereditary double kingship sometimes furnished a king with great influence,20 and in northern Greece, where the kings of Macedon would burst on to a world stage in the 4th century and attract massive attention for their political and military ambitions.21 Only then would serious Athenian thinkers like Xenophon and Isocrates dedicate treatises to monarchy: the former treating contemporary concerns about the Macedonian king Philip II by veiling them in the figure of the earlier Persian king Cyrus, the latter addressing Philip II more directly. Outside Sparta and Macedon, however, the leading Greek city-states of the classical era lacked the kind of powerful kings that students of the Bible or of later European history might expect.

Instead, in the leading Greek societies from about 650 BCE, ‘rule by one’ was primarily associated in practice with a ruler described as ‘tyrant’ (turannos, perhaps a loan word from Lydian or another language of Asia Minor). Turannos is of course the source of the English word ‘tyrant’, and by the mid 4th century the pejorative meaning of ‘tyrant’ is exactly what it would predominantly come to express, in Greek as well. Yet, in the 7th century, the turannos was not the founder of a new form of dictatorial regime, nor was he necessarily someone to be reviled. Instead he was a figure who managed, for a time, to dominate a group of oligarchs, bringing them to heel and so taming cycles of conflict and revenge without having hereditary sanction to do so.22 The turannos might even be viewed as benevolent by the people, insofar as he offered them a measure of justice, order and protection from the rapacity of the wealthy. In short, the early turannos was more often a figure like an Italian Renaissance doge in the Venetian republic – who assumed power among Venetian nobles as a kind of first among equals – than like a dictator trying to install himself at the pinnacle of an authoritarian regime.

Herodotus is once again an excellent source for this development, describing an older non-Greek figure in categories derived from the Greek debates of the 5th century in which he was writing. Perhaps his story is too pat, but it is instructive. According to the historian, a Mede named Deioces wanted to become a turannos (1.96–100; the Medes held a kingdom whose power was first supplemented by Persian dynasties and then supplanted by them). To gain this unrivalled power, he studied the laws defining justice (dikaiosune, 1.96) and set himself up in his village as a judge, winning respect for his fairness. When the people had become dependent on his judicial services, he threatened to withdraw them, so manipulating them into appointing him as king (using the more honorific, ancient title). In that role he seems to have been self-promoting but still fair, maintaining his grip on power by acting as a ‘severe guardian of justice’ who spied on his citizens in order to ferret out and punish any breach of the laws. So here we have a self-made turannos who manoeuvred himself into power in order to act as much like an old-fashioned ideal king as possible (while using new-fangled techniques of surveillance to do so).

The transformation of the idea of the turannos into what we mean by ‘tyrant’ today – a practitioner of cruel, arbitrary and illegitimate government – took place roughly between 525 and 480 BCE, when we see from many sources of evidence that the polis community was asserting its identity and authority over the previously warring elites.23 It was in this period that citizen armies and civic identity put paid to private cycles of vengeance and prohibited the bearing of weapons in sacred civic spaces. History was written, as so often, by the victors: only after the overthrow of a turannos would the word be ascribed to him with connotations of condemnation. The reputation of Dionysius I, turannos of Syracuse, would not survive Plato’s veiled portrait of him in the Republic as a rapacious and greedy ‘tyrant’ par excellence. The decadent meals of Sicilian seafood and the mixed dramatic genres, including comic performers from abroad, that he sponsored, would become paradigmatic cases for the Republic’s criticisms of excesses in food and drink, and poetry and music, for stirring up licentious passions in an undisciplined way.24

In fact, Dionysius I, like his predecessor Hieron I, was, in his own time and place, a more complex figure. Hieron I triumphed in Greece-wide chariot races and attracted famous playwrights like Aeschylus to his court; Dionysius I became a playwright himself, eventually winning first place in the Lenaea festival competition in Athens (in 367 BCE), and seeking out the company of mathematicians and philosophers. (Some of the Athenians enslaved in Syracuse after their disastrous defeat there in 413 are said to have been freed if they could recite any passage of Euripides by heart – Euripides being another favourite Athenian playwright of the sophisticated Syracusan audience.)25 In practice and in memory, as in many regimes since, the line between glorious patron of the arts and exploitative overlord was easily blurred.

The transition from benevolent turannos to evil tyrant is encapsulated in the history of Athens, where Solon’s attempt to establish a moderate regime including rich and poor was succeeded by two generations of turannoi. The first, Peisistratus, is described as having been seen as a supporter of the people in a 4th-century text emanating from Aristotle’s school, a study of the history and nature of the Athenian constitution called the Constitution of the Athenians (recovered in the 19th century, this is the source from which all quotations and citations in this and the next paragraph are drawn).26 Peisistratus gained and lost plenary power several times, using every trick in the book. First he framed his political enemies for a wound that he had inflicted upon himself, which led the people to vote him a bodyguard; then he used the bodyguard to support him as he ‘seized the Acropolis’ from the people in 560 BCE (14.1); then he was driven out, only to return accompanied by a woman dressed up as the goddess Athena, a ruse suggesting sufficient divine sanction to induce the Athenians to take him back (14.4).

Most interesting for present purposes is that he is described (in the same 4th-century source deriving from Aristotle’s school) as ruling ‘constitutionally rather than tyrannically’ (16.2). This later judgement shows that the term ‘tyrant’ had by that stage accreted so much negative baggage that even the paradigmatic tyrant of Athenian history could no longer be described as such. This is because that tyrant had at the time been seen as ruling moderately and benevolently, establishing local magistrates and even advancing money to the bankrupt (16.1–10). More than a few Athenians seem to have tolerated and even enjoyed his rule at the time.

In contrast, the excoriation of tyranny would, in the memory of later Athenians, attach indelibly to one of the sons of Peisistratus, Hippias. Hippias initially ruled jointly with his brother Hipparchus, who became embroiled in an unrequited love affair leading to a violent insult and quarrel. The erstwhile beloved, who had scorned Hipparchus’ advances, conspired with his lover and other citizens to overthrow the Peisistratids. In the midst of a civic procession they thought themselves betrayed, panicked and struck too soon, killing Hipparchus but being killed themselves (one immediately, one after torture) as a result. Hippias began to rule much more harshly, becoming a paradigm of tyranny in the modern pejorative sense, and the Spartans were induced by manipulated oracles to overthrow him and his family, allowing them safe conduct out of Athens once they had handed over the Acropolis, on which the meeting and sacred places of the city were concentrated. A further struggle between supporters of the tyrants and those of a previously powerful aristocratic family ensued, the Spartan force changing sides to expel the anti-tyrannical faction. But, at that point, the people besieged the tyrannical forces on the Acropolis, recalled the exiles and gave power to one of them, Cleisthenes, who had ‘befriended the people’ (Hdt. 5.66).

It is with this assertion of popular power and the subsequent legal innovations promoted by Cleisthenes that ‘democracy’ proper in Athens is widely acknowledged to have begun.27 The democracy would immortalize the two tyrannicides who had killed Hipparchus – putting up statues of them in the agora and commissioning new ones after the first lot were stolen (ironically, by the Persian Xerxes, a tyrant par excellence in many Greek imaginations). This inscribed an opposition to tyranny at the heart of the democracy, even as the demos (the people) began to act abroad – and perhaps at home – as a tyrant itself: taking power to act unaccountably even while demanding accountability of its officers and allies.28

By the 5th century, the turannos was largely a figure of a discredited past, though powerful individuals might still dream of tyranny or be assiduously suspected of doing so. Once the Persian Great Kings’ invasions of the Greek mainland (first by Darius, then by his successor, Xerxes) had been rebuffed and rival alliances began to form around Sparta and Athens, the live constitutional choice was between oligarchy (of which Sparta embodied a rather peculiar kind) and democracy (for which Athens proudly stood). Before turning to a full consideration of democracy in the next chapter, we will flesh out the oligarchical constitution and the peculiar case of Sparta, and then sum up the contrast between oligarchy and democracy drawn out by Herodotus from the course of Spartan and Athenian behaviour during the Persian Wars.

RULE BY A FEW: OLIGARCHY

Oligarchy means the rule of some or a few, which usually implies their rule over the many, in the sense of a body of poor native-born citizens whom they exclude from offices and civic honours, and sometimes even from citizenship.29 Among themselves, oligarchs enjoyed political equality with one another, although this did not stop them from often jockeying for more subtle forms of superiority. But they were typically united in denying such equality to non-citizens at home (usually including some group of the poor) and to subjugated groups abroad. Thus they shared with democracies the ideal of equality while disputing the boundaries of those entitled to share in it.

One could be a citizen without being eligible to hold office, or, at least, every office. That distinction was especially important in oligarchies, where a sliding scale of wealth was commonly used to measure out those entitlements. In the 4th-century text Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, we find the following prescription for oligarchies:

In the case of oligarchies, the laws should assign the offices on an equal footing to all those sharing in the constitution [tois tes politeias metechousi]. Selection for most of the offices should be by lot, but for the most important [tas … megistas] it should be by vote, under oath, with a secret ballot and very strict regulations. The penalties enacted for those attempting to insult any of the citizens [ton politon] should in an oligarchy be very heavy, as the multitude [plethos] resents insolent treatment more than it is annoyed by exclusion from offices [ton archon].30

In other words, according to this account, the multitude in an oligarchy should be ‘citizens’, but they should be excluded from the ‘offices’ that are assigned ‘on an equal footing to all those sharing in the constitution’, i.e., to the select few who share in governing the oligarchy.

We see here that both oligarchies and democracies could make use of lottery, although the next chapter will show that lotteries for certain purposes were especially associated with democracies. Still, in oligarchies, according to this author, the ‘most important’ (megistas) office-holders should be elected by vote (this was actually true of some important offices in democratic Athens as well).31 Both oligarchies and democracies used property qualifications as well as election, in different ways and degrees. The line between them could be a fine one in terms of political mechanics. But it was more a matter of political culture. Oligarchies cultivated greater deference and sought to limit and restrain forms of popular participation – as in the ‘Melian Dialogue’ discussed in Chapter 1, which takes place between a group of oligarchic office-holders and the Athenian ambassadors, after the oligarchs refuse to let the ambassadors address the popular ‘crowd’.32 Democracies, by contrast, tended to insist on stringent forms of popular accountability and judgement even when allowing some office-holders to be elected or selected from among the ranks of the wealthier alone.

Sparta: A Peculiar Oligarchy?

Whether Sparta should be classified as an oligarchy is a complex question. Certainly, in their alliances and tactics during the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans were generally far friendlier to oligarchies and supported their installation or maintenance abroad where possible. But Sparta was also a kind of monarchy – a unique dual monarchy, as noted earlier. Yet, in a further twist, its kings exercised primarily military powers, while other important powers were exercised, respectively, by: a council of elders elected (by acclamation) for life; five annually elected ‘ephors’ (the most important public officials) and some other officials; and a popular assembly. While Greek observers continually had recourse to the one/few/many typology, introduced by Herodotus, to explain Sparta, it was clear that the Spartan regime was unique and did not fit neatly into any one simple constitutional category in terms of its political arrangements.33

Nevertheless, one can argue that the Spartan regime had crucial oligarchical tendencies, including its proclivity to support oligarchies abroad. Its relatively ‘few’ citizens – in the 5th century, it had a remarkably small citizen body of some 8,000 for the sprawling size of its territory – regarded each other as full equals and ‘similars’ (homoioi). That small band of citizens dominated a much larger body (though we have no exact numbers) of harshly exploited agricultural labourers who were among the local peoples whom the invading Spartans had conquered (while they allowed others to live as free but subordinated perioikoi, or, roughly, ‘inhabitants of the area roundabout’, meaning the countryside outside the city-centre).34 Thus there was in a sense no ‘many’ in the Spartan political community, since the greatest number of inhabitants of the territories they ruled were collectively subjugated by and made subservient to the Spartan citizen body, as ‘helots’, not included as citizens. Fear of their revolt fed a vicious cycle of military training to intensify and maintain exploitation, prompting, in turn, fear of a revolt against this brutality, and so on. It was the stark, constant demand that this oppression by military power be maintained that seems to have fostered the unique Spartan way of life that so vividly embodies the link between politeia as political constitution and politeia as constitution in the sense of way of life.

The Spartan politeia was attributed in all its fundamentals to Lycurgus, a possibly legendary figure who, if he lived, did so probably in the 7th century BCE. He was the guardian and uncle of an under-age king, not a king himself, but he arrogated the role of lawgiver to himself. Yet our main sources are from centuries later (Herodotus and Thucydides in the 5th century, Xenophon – whose sons were educated in the Spartan regime – in the 4th, Plutarch in the 1st to 2nd centuries CE).35 This is problematic for describing the classical period of Sparta, for, although all generations of Spartans insisted on the total continuity of their laws with the laws of Lycurgus, in fact there is considerable evidence that many of those laws were made up after the fact in recurrent waves of political change. Still, we can safely say that the Spartan constitution centred on preparing its men – and its women – for war, including: the ongoing military campaigns to suppress the helots; the defensive and sometimes offensive expeditions abroad; and, incidentally, mercenary military roles undertaken by many individual Spartans for other states.

Before graduating to the common meals shared by the military companies,36 all Spartan boys underwent a long and arduous training process (agoge), focused especially on athletic endurance and on obedience, and directed by city officials. This emphasis on public education contrasted starkly with the private educational courses for which only the wealthiest Athenian families paid. Spartan girls, too, were trained by the city in athletic and even military pursuits, and were entitled to inherit property in their own right; their Athenian counterparts were not. As this shows, Spartans did have private property: the ideology of equality among the homoioi did not prevent inequalities of wealth, to the point that men lost their civic privileges when they became unable to afford to contribute to the common meals as required. But Lycurgus was said to have banned the use of gold and silver coinage to prevent the Spartans from accumulating luxuries from other cities.37

These varied provisions were thought to fashion remarkably self-denying citizen paragons, who would inspire awe in Plutarch and other later writers. One of the most famous tales related by Plutarch involved the Spartan practice of depriving boys of sufficient food at certain stages of their upbringing, so as to teach them to do whatever was necessary to survive, while at the same time punishing them severely if they should be caught stealing. Hence the story of a Spartan boy said to have hidden a stolen fox under his cloak, who, rather than betray the fact that he had acquired stolen booty, let the fox gnaw his intestines until he died (Apophth.38 234a–b). Other accounts in Plutarch describe a Spartan mother whose five sons were away at war, whose first question to the messenger was not their fate, but rather whether or not the city had won; and, even more startlingly, a Spartan mother who killed her son for having returned alive to report that all the other men had (more honourably) died in battle (Lacae. 241c). These stories – fictional though they may be – would fascinate later ages and reinforce the image of Sparta as a uniquely politically virtuous city.

Spartan virtue was one in which the value of liberty played a central role. One Spartan woman who had the misfortune to be sold as a slave was purportedly ‘asked by the auctioneer what skills she had’ – to which she answered proudly: ‘ “To be free” ’ (Lacae. 242d). That freedom was understood as combining the independence of the city with the equality enjoyed by the Spartiates among themselves. No one else could tell them what to do; they decided for themselves. Yet, paradoxically, they protected that ability to decide for themselves by subjecting themselves collectively to the most stringent forms of discipline. The liberty of the politeia as a constitution and the liberty of the individual citizen derived equally from the broader maintenance of the politeia in a certain special way of life.

The maintenance of the way of life in every detail – scrutinizing military preparedness, marriage practices, wealth possessed – was entrusted to five annually elected officials known as ephors. Their tasks included overseeing the training of the youth, overseeing property regulations, and generally disciplining Spartans to live according to the demanding individual and collective values of their constitution. That idea – of a political constitution exercising direct oversight of values and ways of life – would become linked in the minds of later thinkers with the Roman institution of censors, who could demote men from their rank and office for flagrant violation of expected mores, insofar as they were expected to be models for the importance of virtue in public life. To the values of equality, liberty, justice and accountability at the heart of the constitutional orderings that we have been exploring so far, we may now add the idea of Virtue, to be further explored in its formulation by Socrates and Plato in Chapter 4.

RULE BY THE MANY: AN OLIGARCHICAL VIEW

While the next chapter will be devoted to the politeia of rule by the many, which the Greeks also called democracy, a good bridge between oligarchy and democracy is provided by the fact that some of our most eloquent analyses of Greek democracy come from its oligarchical opponents. Thus we may begin to consider rule by the many by seeing how it was viewed in the eyes of the oligarchs. An amazing text offers just this kind of perspective. It was written by an unknown sympathizer with oligarchy living in Athens, addressing kindred ideological spirits at home and abroad, perhaps around 425–424 BCE (at a time when Athens was still largely successful in its sparring with Sparta).39 The author – now widely known as the ‘Old Oligarch’, though he may well not have been old in age at all – takes a firm stand on a question that we have yet to consider. Is ‘democracy’ to be understood as the rule of ‘all’, or the rule of the ‘many’ – as opposed to (and potentially oppressive of) the wealthy few?

Because demos can mean both ‘the people’ as a whole and also ‘the common people’ (the ‘many’ or ‘the crowd’ or ‘the majority’, as opposed to the ‘few’), the word itself is marked by this ambiguity. Democratic politicians and rhetoricians can exploit the ambiguity to argue that the interests of the people as a whole cannot be opposed to, or overlook, the interests of the common people. But oligarchic politicians and sympathizers like the ‘Old Oligarch’ see the ambiguity in a sharper light. They argue that, while democrats pretend to pursue the interests of all, a ‘democracy’ is merely a cover for using political power to advance the interests of the many at the expense of the few.

In ancient Greece, as in many regimes since then, the ‘many’ were, on the whole, poorer and less educated than the ‘few’. (That was especially true in Athens after Solon shifted the basis of certain political privileges from birth to wealth.) Like Megabyzos in Herodotus’ ‘Persian Debate’, the ‘Old Oligarch’ stresses poverty and lack of education as the reasons for the moral and political failings of the poor. These voices of elite partisanship do not naturalize the failings of the poor, but they insist that, given the economic facts, the poor simply will be less well educated and so less virtuous and moral as a result. As the ‘Old Oligarch’ puts it: ‘within the best men there is the least amount of licentiousness and injustice, and the most scrupulousness over what is valuable; whereas within the demos there is the greatest ignorance, indiscipline and worthlessness’. Why? Because ‘poverty tends to lead them into shameful behaviour, and in the case of some people their lack of education and their ignorance is the result of their lack of money’ (1.5).40

Smug elites might assume that a regime governed by such ignorant men is doomed to fail even in meeting its own goals. But the ‘Old Oligarch’ disagrees. Starting from the view that the goal of the democracy is to maintain the power of the common people, he insists that the democracy does remarkably well in arranging matters to achieve its goal – however much it may offend elite sensibilities in so doing. By allowing anyone to speak in the assembly, the democrats ensure that those who do speak are interested in promoting the popular advantage (1.6–7), but, meanwhile, they restrict the most important offices to the wealthy, who are better educated in choosing the means to achieve the goals set by those spokesmen for popular interests. Democracy is not doomed to fail, however much the rich may not like it – as the ‘Old Oligarch’ himself does not. He says squarely that he does ‘not approve’ of the democracy because it privileges the well-being of the low and base over the better sort, even while reluctantly admiring its longevity (1.1).41

To this aristocratically minded critic, the democratic relationship between rich and poor is a relationship of injustice. It is unjust for the better sort to be ruled by the worse. From the point of view of an oligarch, democracy is an oppression of the few by the many. From the point of view of a democrat, oligarchy is an oppression of the many by the few. The struggle between these two kinds of regime came to define the political choices of the Greek cities in the classical period.

Conclusion: Comparing Constitutional Strengths and Weaknesses

Let’s conclude this account of constitutions by returning to Herodotus. For having laid out the set-piece ‘constitutional debate’ among proponents of rule by one, by some and by all that we have been examining, Herodotus in his work dramatizes the strengths and weaknesses of each kind of regime as they manifested themselves during the Persian Wars. For example, when Xerxes, the Great King of Persia, is deciding whether to send a major expedition against Greece, he is said to be ‘over-persuaded’ (anapeise) by self-serving advisers (7.6). This subtly demonstrates a weakness in the case made by Darius for monarchy in the constitutional debate, relying as it does on the monarch being a person of outstanding character and ability even while claiming to appeal to ‘practice’ rather than merely to ‘argument’. For, as with Xerxes, monarchs who are less outstanding, or perhaps even more worryingly, the very best, may be led astray by bad advice. Yet Herodotus is alert to the very same vulnerability in democracy (in this case, the kind of bad group decision-making that Megabyzos had predicted). Having resolved to be at war with Persia, the Athenians are ‘over-persuaded’ (anapeisthentes – a form of the very same word applied to Xerxes) by a representative of Miletus – one of the eastern Greek cities at most risk of Persian domination – to send twenty ships to aid the Ionian alliance to which Miletus belongs (1.97). Vulnerability to honeyed rhetoric is a weakness of democracies as it is of monarchies.

Herodotus thus subtly suggests that no one type of regime – neither monarchy nor oligarchy nor democracy – offers a guarantee of good rule. Flattery and rhetoric are dangers of courts and closed oligarchical circles every bit as much as they are dangers of democracies – something that Herodotus, with his peripheral position in respect of each, was unusually well placed to appreciate. Yet, if democracy and monarchy both have vulnerabilities, some of them surprisingly shared, Herodotus shows us that oligarchy is at least in one respect in a weaker position still: it is beset by a fundamental contradiction. Oligarchical regimes desire liberty as independence for themselves from foreign domination. But they deny liberty to the many, at home, where they exclude them from citizenship, and abroad, where they are intolerant of democratic regimes that empower the many and subordinate the ‘few’ who are the oligarchs’ ideological (and often actual) kin.

Herodotus puts his finger on this contradiction in the repeated behaviour of Sparta. As we saw, Sparta had been manipulated into invading Athens in 512 BCE, and again in 510, to expel the turannos Hippias. But when Cleisthenes put an end to the ensuing turmoil by decisively setting up new and more democratic institutions than ever before, the Spartans regretted their aid and tried twice, though ultimately unsuccessfully, to topple the new regime. When they proposed to their allies in about 504 to try for a third time to restore Hippias as tyrant, a speaker from Corinth named Socles identified a flagrant contradiction in Spartan policy: the Spartan proposal was ‘destroying the rule of equals’ (isokratia – an ideal common to Sparta and Athens, despite their different understandings of who counted as equals). Instead the Spartans were bringing back ‘tyranny’ into the cities (5.92a).

For Socles, this was tantamount to inverting the order of the heavens and earth, so as to have ‘men inhabit the sea and fishes inhabit the place that was previously the place of men’ (5.92a), because it so contradicted the ideal of political liberty that Sparta prided itself to hold:

For if it seems to you beneficial that the cities be ruled by tyrants, first set up a tyrant among yourselves and then aim to do so for the others. But now, you yourselves having never experienced tyrants, and guarding with the greatest care lest they should arise in Sparta, you abuse your allies [by imposing tyrants on them; the Spartan allies at this time officially included Athens] (5.92).

Liberty as a constitutional value at home too often turns into despotism abroad. This is a characteristically oligarchic failing here. It is, however, akin to a democratic one, the same one that we saw in Thucydides’ presentation of the ‘Melian Dialogue’ discussed at the end of Chapter 1, where the democratic Athenians insist on their untrammelled power to do what they like with the Melians, claiming that justice is not binding between the weak and the strong. Greek constitutional thinking was in the hands of the historians a matter of ideology as well as reality. Regimes prided themselves on the special ways in which they controlled power and achieved justice, equality or liberty, but their victims or observers could always ask, at what price, paid by whom, and with a strategy successful for how long? The official values trumpeted by any one regime are always likely to sit uneasily with the realities of its practice. At the same time, each regime is subject to characteristic flaws as well as characteristic features of the citizens that it fosters, in its constitutional political arrangements and in its constitutional way of life. In the next chapter we will examine in some depth the distinctive constitution (in both senses) of the Athenian democracy.