Greek democracy was something new under the sun – but not in the sense that a role for the common people in government, even in the form of an assembly, was unknown in Greece or in the wider world up to the 5th century BCE; forms of assembly and consultation are widely attested in Greek history and in surrounding societies with which they interacted. What was new in 5th-century Athens was that ordinary people, including the poorest of the citizens, came to control (and not merely to be consulted by) the powers of government. They did so by deciding policy in the assembly; judging disputes among citizens in the courts; and scrutinizing (in the assembly, council and courts) the doings of officials, many of whom were themselves selected by lottery or election among a wide swathe of the public. Putting these functions together, the ‘people’ – the demos – exercised a plenipotentiary ‘power’ (kratos), which explains the new coinage of the word demokratia, appearing first in relation to Athens, and then being proudly claimed as a name for dozens of polities dotted across the Mediterranean and the Greek mainland that adopted similar regimes. What caused these developments is a matter for historical debate about the relative importance of factors like changing military tactics (naval ships that could be crewed by the poor becoming as important as the armies that had historically depended on men wealthy enough to provide their own armour and in some cases horses) and other social and economic changes at the time. Our focus here is on the political arrangements of the ‘democracies’ that were created, in many cases emerging from political turmoil in tyrannies or oligarchies and the assertion of popular power in the consequent struggles. What did it mean to be a regime in which the people – the common people, the poor people, the ordinary people – held the balance of power?
In the previous chapter, we met a range of Greek constitutional regimes that were named according to who held the offices (tas archas) and so ruled (archein) in the city: in a monarchia, one person held office (the meaning of mon- is ‘one’); in an oligarchia, an elite few did so (the meaning of oligo- is ‘few’). In democracy, by contrast, the power of the people was multifaceted and supreme, not limited to the holding of offices – and indeed there might be some offices that the people were not eligible to hold. Rather than being focused on office-holding alone, democratic power (kratos) stretched from direct exercise of decision-making, to judging almost all legal and political disputes, to staffing some of the offices, and finally to holding accountable all officials however chosen. Thus democracy was not just another form of constitution distributing offices to certain people; it was a new kind of constitution that distributed power in new ways.
Greek democracies may be considered popular sovereignty in a radical sense: they gave new and old forms of power to the people, designating as citizens a wide swathe of the free male native inhabitants of a city, including most or all of the poor, low status and worst educated.1 Equality in the means of exercising or controlling power constituted political liberty, insofar as the most important actions of the high-ups were in some way subject to popular control. And it generated new forms of creativity, as previously suppressed people began to explore and to create in unprecedented artistic and intellectual genres. Fostering ambitious aspirations for personal gain, learning and civic pride in its citizens’ way of life, democracies allowed wealth inequalities to flourish while insisting that they not be convertible into untrammelled political power bases independent of democratic control. Wealthy citizens could enjoy the prestige of largesse, even of commanded largesse (in the special taxes and duties levied on the wealthiest), but they could not use their wealth to secure influence in any way that could be fully insulated from the powers of the people.
Because of its role as the original, largest and most influential democracy, and as an economic and cultural powerhouse of the Greek world – its coins were the most prized, its dramatic competitions highly prestigious – the city-state of Athens best encapsulates the story of Greek democracy.2 Fortunately its cultural and political ferment has left us a disproportionately large record of evidence. The story starts with Athens’ gradual ascendancy through the early 5th century in the aftermath of playing a crucial role in decisive battles against Persia, and then its decades-long clash with Sparta, ending with ignominious defeat in 404 BCE.
In the wake of that defeat (as also seven years earlier), oligarchic conspirators achieved a brief coup before democracy was restored. The democracy then regrouped, making important constitutional and legal changes just before and during the 4th century, until the aftershocks of Alexander the Great’s imperial conquests led to its abolition (later attempts at recovery failed). At that time, the new Macedonian overlords insisted on the imposition of a high property qualification of 2,000 drachmas for citizenship, at a time when one drachma was a day’s wages for an ordinary worker.3 It was the exclusion of the poor from political citizenship that meant democracy was at an end.
The Beginnings of Athenian Democracy
If exclusion of the poor from citizenship was the end of the democracy, what does that tell us about how to understand its beginning and its development?
When did Athenian democracy begin? In Chapter 2, we gave the best short answer to that question: it began in 508/7 BCE, with the reforms of Cleisthenes following the popular revolt that swept out the tyrants and swept him into power.4 But, in fact, that short answer is unsatisfactory for two reasons. On the one hand, the Athenians did not consider the democracy to have been set up in one fell swoop, in the way that the Spartans credited their own regime to the legislative acts of Lycurgus. When analyses of Athenian political history were offered, as in the analytical narrative history Constitution of the Athenians, mentioned in Chapter 2, we find enumerated not one but eleven distinct Athenian constitutions. These stretch from the legendary days of the settlement of Athens by Ion, on to Theseus, and so on through better-documented historical changes to the time of writing.
HIGHLIGHTS OF ATHENIAN HISTORY
In the approach taken in that constitutional account, democracy was not achieved at any single moment. Instead, it emerged gradually, in four key stages. Solon’s constitution was the one ‘in which was born the beginning of democracy’; Cleisthenes’ constitution ‘was more democratic than that of Solon’; Ephialtes took a further step by ‘putting down the Areopagus’ (the elite court that had previously arrogated government to itself). The eleventh and final constitution, from 403 BCE, is described as involving ‘the people taking part with one another in power’, such that in the late 4th century ‘the demos has made itself sovereign in every respect, determining everything by decrees of the ekklesia [assembly] and by decisions of the dikasteria [law-courts with popular juries], in which the demos is the power’ (all, AP 41.2).
That sequence remains a broadly helpful guide. Solon indeed laid the basis or preconditions for democracy, above all by abolishing debt-slavery, as we saw in Chapter 1, but also by opening most prosecution and defence appeals to the popular courts in place of the Areopagus, and by according the poorest citizens’ group ‘a share in the ekklesia and the dikasteria only [meaning, not in holding the offices]’ (AP 7.3). Having been accorded a leading role in Athens by the citizens who had expelled the tyrants (as we saw in Chapter 2), Cleisthenes established a more properly democratic constitution primarily by reconfiguring the Athenians into a set of new political identities: ten tribes stretching from sea to city-centre and divided into local ‘demes’ that became administrative and cultic centres.5 Ephialtes, for his part, was an influential Athenian who opposed elite advocacy of solidarity with Sparta in the 460s BCE and went on to undermine elite hegemony by depriving the Areopagus of most of its remaining powers before being assassinated by an unknown hand. By suppressing the powers of the Areopagus, he established, in effect, a different kind of democracy (though much about his actions is uncertain).
Ephialtes’ successor as leader of the more radical democratic faction in Athens was Pericles, famous as the long-serving general and leader who encouraged Athens at the outset of the Peloponnesian War. Although he is not mentioned in the list of eleven constitutions, the Constitution of the Athenians tells us elsewhere that Pericles, too, introduced important democratic measures, including a new definition of Athenian citizenship requiring a citizen-mother as well as a citizen-father.6 While that measure might sound more restricting than democratizing, it was aimed at curbing the elite’s habits of inter-city kin and friendship marriages, which, in the eyes of democrats, watered down elite allegiance to Athens to suspiciously low levels. (Ironically, the Athenians would eventually make a special grant of citizenship to Pericles’ illegitimate son with the brilliant foreign-born non-citizen Aspasia.)7
In sum, Solon instituted the foundations of Athenian democratic equality; Cleisthenes (followed by Pericles), of democratic identity; and Ephialtes (building on laws of Solon and Cleisthenes), of democratic accountability. These names, of course, are illustrative only. None of these laws could have been passed without support among the diversity of the people, and none of these men could have held power without popular support. Acting collectively and accumulating many different kinds of power (but not all or unlimited powers), the Athenian demos – including a dominant voice for the poor majority but also distinct political roles for the wealthy elites – were able to resist tyranny, defeat oligarchic conspirators two times running, and, for a time, consolidate and dominate a far-flung empire. They did all this by exercising the fundamental democratic powers to decide, to judge and to hold accountable.
Democratic Ideas in Action
How and where did the people exercise these powers? The most obvious site in which the people decided was in the assembly, which was open to all (male) citizens who chose to attend and vote. While most Greek regimes, democratic as well as non-democratic, had an assembly, the remarkable thing in Athens and in certain other democracies was that assembly participation was not restricted in any way by wealth or by status among those who enjoyed citizenship. The assembly site, on the Pnyx hill, held 6,000 citizens (somewhat more than one tenth of the male citizen population at its height in the 430s, probably less than one fifth after the defeat of 404 BCE); in cases when 6,000 was the minimum quorum required for a decision on the status of particular citizens, the assembly would meet in the marketplace instead. It was open to any male citizen to attend on any day that he chose. More than that, any one of them could in principle decide to speak (or, at least, put themselves forward to be called upon if time allowed): the assembly sessions were opened by a herald asking, ‘Who wishes to speak?’ But it was far from the case that any and every Athenian would respond to that invitation. Most people probably never spoke once in their whole lifetime. Instead, the speakers were self-selected, drawn from a small group of ambitious men who aimed to make a name in the public arena.
These men, the ‘speakers’ (rhetores), were the closest thing to professional politicians in Athens. Their political roles were precarious: unless they were separately elected to a one-year term as a general (as were, for example, Aristides, Themistocles and Pericles) they held no formal office. Their influence and power depended in large part on their next speech, and even when the people accepted their advice, they might resent it as a bitter pill to swallow. Those who risked speaking in the assembly knew that they could be rejected, punished or cast aside at any moment by the people whom they were trying to lead. If the policies they advocated failed, they themselves were likely to suffer as a result.
One speaker in Thucydides’ history, Diodotus, bitterly points out the asymmetry in the workings of the Athenian assembly (3.43): the speakers are accountable (legally) for the advice they give, he observes, but the listeners are not accountable to anyone for the decisions they make. Speakers were accountable for the advice they gave in the sense that they were subject to possible prosecution at the hands of anyone who thought that they had given advice contrary to the laws or (in the 4th century) disadvantageous to the city. The assembled multitude, however, were not accountable for their votes. Assembly votes were counted by hand and only the total number was recorded, without names being noted except in the memory of those who happened to be sitting nearby.
Whereas anyone could turn up in the assembly to vote, the jurors in the large popular courts that gained most judicial powers from the 460s onwards had to be sworn in at the beginning of the year as prospective jurors. After that, any one of them could choose to turn up at the law-courts on the days they were sitting, and the jurors for the day (and eventually for each case) were chosen by a system of lotteries. The jurors were even less accountable for their individual votes than the assemblymen, since, from at least 458 BCE, they voted by ballots that were meant to be secret – though their having sworn an oath to the gods to judge righteously when being inducted into the panel must have enforced significant moral accountability. They did not debate or discuss their verdicts, but simply heard the speeches on both sides and cast their secret votes. This served to protect their independence of judgement while also protecting the defendants whose fate they were judging from any contamination of their judgements by social contagion.8
Any citizen empanelled as a juror could judge; any citizen could also prosecute. Prosecution was an open sport for those Athenians who wished to join in. Most prosecutions were brought by lay people, either by putative victims on their own behalf, or in certain cases by someone connected with them or bringing a suit for the public benefit of righting a wrong done by one person to another. In these ways, ordinary citizens had the power to initiate political action, even if most exercised the power of evaluation far more often than the power of initiation.
The agenda for the assembly, along with other matters like the reception of ambassadors and the election of certain officials, was managed by a body called the Council of 500. Each of the ten tribes supplied fifty men, chosen by lot from volunteers (who may have had their arms twisted to stand if numbers were scarce), who served for a single year. The council voted by a show of hands, like the ordinary assemblies when making general decisions; a variation of the jurors’ secret ballot procedure was used when making decisions about the good standing of individuals.9 Unlike assemblymen and jurors, councillors were deemed to be holders of offices, meaning that they had to be aged at least thirty and were liable to be scrutinized before taking office for their good standing in relation to their general civic duties, and to be audited upon leaving office for their financial and general probity in having managed its affairs.
Along with the 500 councillors, there were about 700 annually serving officials in this sense in Athens each year in the 4th century, collectively totalling about 8 per cent of those men over thirty serving at any one time.10 Officially, however, the ban on office-holding by the poorest Athenians, imposed by Solon, was never overturned, and a few offices were explicitly reserved for the wealthiest tiers. Whether or not the ban on the service of the poorest was entirely a ‘dead letter’, as some historians have suggested, its nominal persistence makes it hard to see office-holding as the ultimate key to democratic power.11 The rotation and widespread (if not universal) participation in holding offices is certainly impressive, but still more significant is the role of the whole people, including the poorest, in judging proposals put before them in the assembly and in the courts alike.
The assembly met at its peak forty times a year; the council every day with the exception of certain holidays; the courts possibly as many as 300 times a year. Well over 100 localities, called demes, also had their own assemblies and courts, offering further sites of active political engagement for those who chose to be involved. For it was possible to be a ‘quiet Athenian’, largely keeping away from politics except when required by one’s deme or when unwillingly embroiled in a court case.12 Still, Athenian democracy put a premium on showing up to play one’s part, or at least on being willing to do so. The assembly included all who chose to attend on a given day; the courts and the council were drawn randomly from those who had had their names put forward (so, too, were the jurors for the civic–religious drama competitions, chosen randomly from names nominated by each tribe). In each of these venues, the participating Athenians exercised the power of sovereign decision-making, free to decide however they chose, judging the speeches or performances given by others when (as in most cases) they did not elect to venture a speech themselves.
That sovereign power of judgement meant that the multitude – including the poorest among them – were numerically and also politically and ideologically dominant over the wealthy in key respects.13 The poor saw themselves as part of the city as a whole, but the wealthy elite were prone to seeing themselves as a special group to whom the power of the poor was characteristically opposed. Not all of those in the elite of wealth or birth shared the disdain for the common people of the ‘Old Oligarch’ whom we met in Chapter 2; nor were all those in the political elite wealthy or well-born. In democratic Athens, as in democracies today, such advantages tended to cluster together and foster one another, but there are always exceptions. Among important leaders of the 5th century, Aristides was born moderately wealthy but died poor; while Cleisthenes and Pericles, part of the aristocratic Alcmaeonid family that had dominated Athens before the tyranny and claimed a role in overturning it, aligned themselves politically with the poor multitude.
Others without birth or inherited wealth behind them made their names as public speakers or generals, joining this self-selected coterie of political leaders who put themselves forward for popular favour and lived or died by the people’s decision. Whether self-made or landed, whether drawing on power wholly from political success or supplemented by wealth, Athenian elites had no entrenched and independent collective political base. They had special duties, and could make certain opportunities for themselves, but their fate was ultimately in crucial ways in the hands of the people.
The Athenian Democratic politeia as a Way of Life
Just as in the rival kinds of regimes we explored in Chapter 2, in Athens, too, the politeia in the sense of political arrangements and the politeia in the sense of a way of life mutually reinforced one another. The political power of the demos gave meaningful freedom and equality to even the poorest landless beggar who was a citizen. It made him acutely sensitive to any form of disrespect, and made many eager to use the legal system to redress such injuries. One Athenian’s speechwriter described the indignation motivating his client’s prosecution of another citizen thus: ‘it is not because of any physical harm from his blows, but because I suffered insult and dishonour that I am come seeking justice, for it is proper for free men to be most angered by this and for the greatest penalty to apply.’14 Ordinary citizens were potentially vulnerable to broader charges, too, if they were accused of having neglected or mishandled civic–religious or political–military duties, though the self-selected political leaders were more vulnerable to such accusations.
Athens offered far more than its formal institutions as arenas in which to explore these questions. Political life spilled over into the marketplace, the gymnasium, the symposia or dinner parties, at the last of which some enjoyed raucous music and lewd dancing while others aspired to more elevated conversation. Citizens gathered at a whole host of annual festivals. Perhaps the greatest was the Panathenaea, where the women of Athens displayed a giant cloak woven every four years for the statue of the patron goddess Athena. At every festival, men – and perhaps some women also – sat in rapt attention as tragic trilogies (each festooned with a fourth satyr-play) and individual comedies competed for prizes awarded by dramatic jurors chosen by procedures akin to those of the law-courts. Travelling rhapsodists regaled company gatherings with the epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod; Olympic victors were honoured at public dinners alongside visiting ambassadors.
Although women mostly stayed at home practising the domestic arts, a few courtesans consorted with leading public men at the symposia, where men gathered for entertainment ranging from the bawdy to the philosophically sublime, with music performed by male and female musicians from Athens or abroad. In the marketplace, artisans displayed their wares, slaves jostled foreigners and country farmers enjoyed their occasional rapt-eyed outings, marvelling at the glories of the Parthenon constructed with the treasures paid into a common defence league by Athens’ allies. Old men sat about the entrances to the law-courts, while younger bustling men, speechwriters and rhetoricians pushed by. In all these settings, formal and informal, the power of the demos to set the terms of debate in the city was palpable, if sometimes – especially by elite critics – bitterly resented.15
The Athenian Democratic Record: Success or Failure?
The Athenians gave themselves bad press among their own contemporaries soon enough. Certainly, they had gloried in their triumphs at Marathon and Salamis, the latter prepared by their having heeded the advice of Themistocles to invest newfound mining wealth in the building of warships – an example of the supposedly ignorant demos (in the eyes of the ‘Old Oligarch’) making a prudent and farsighted decision. But those victories sowed the seeds of further hubris, as the Athenians started to lord it over their allies, using common defence funds to adorn Athens architecturally, and eventually requiring the allies to use only Athenian currency, weights and measures.
In the process, a democracy acquired an empire, as the regime dedicated to freedom and equality at home confronted the temptation to exploit others abroad. The temptation was complex. The Athenians were still inclined to side with democratic regimes abroad against oligarchical interventions, for example. But they were also self-interested, easily turning vituperative against democracies and oligarchies alike that had crossed their ambitions or thwarted their will. Having gained sway over their allies and having benefited so richly from that hegemony, the Athenian democrats largely accepted that for the demos to live large at home meant (regularly, perhaps necessarily) the doing of injustice to others abroad.
The ‘Melian Dialogue’ that we considered in Chapter 1 is one example of this; the Athenian ambassadors to Melos explained that Athens was ruled in its decisions not by justice but by its own advantage, since it was strong enough to be able to enforce that. Two other examples, also from the heart of the Peloponnesian War, are also worth considering. In the pages of Thucydides, the Athenian ex-general who turned himself into an historian of that war to learn a lesson in political understanding, we find a sober analysis of Athens’ position by the general and orator Pericles, who is credited by the historian with outstanding judgement and moderation (2.65). Shortly before dying of the plague in 429 BCE, leaving Athens embroiled in the war with Sparta that he had encouraged, Pericles in his last speech (as recounted by Thucydides) acknowledged that, for the Athenians, justice in relation to other cities had been superseded by the demands of empire. He told his fellow citizens: ‘your rule [over other cities, i.e., your imperial rule] is like a tyranny – to have taken it seems unjust, but to let it go now is dangerous’ (2.63).
Imperial rule is ‘like’ a tyranny in that untrammelled power is exercised unaccountably, though it is not usually as directly pervasive as tyranny in its effects on those it dominates. Pericles is admitting the injustice of having acquired imperial rule – an acquisition in which he had eagerly colluded. But he situates that recognition in a context of regretful realpolitik. Having admitted that imperial rule is unjust, the natural inference, all things being equal, would be that it should be abandoned. But, according to Pericles, the Athenians hold a tiger by the tail. They cannot afford to let go, lest the hostility of the erstwhile allies coupled with the threat of enemies elsewhere prove a toxic combination.
Thucydides presents a striking near-echo of Pericles’ words in the voice of one of the men who became influential in the assembly after Pericles died of the plague the following year. The echo is remarkable because Thucydides, in his own voice, contrasts the way in which Pericles led the demos by good judgement with the ways in which the dominant speakers after his time instead merely flattered it and followed its whims. But it is also modified, and the modifications are telling. The speaker, Cleon, whom Thucydides says is the ‘most violent’ and ‘most persuasive’ of those influential at that time, in 427 BCE (3.36), is urging the assembly to stand fast in a decision it had made the day before but decided to reopen. This was to punish the failed rebellion of their erstwhile ally Mytilene brutally: by ordering all the men of military age of that city to be put to death and the rest of the inhabitants to be enslaved.
In the course of the debate, he states as a fact what Pericles had more cautiously offered as a simile: says Cleon bluntly, ‘your rule [meaning, your imperial rule] is a tyranny’ (3.37). A tyrant has no need to consider justice, only his own advantage, and must do the latter in a disabused way, expecting danger from every corner. Just as in a tyranny, one must expect revolts to be plotted by those who are ruled unwillingly; just as in a tyranny, one has to face up to the need to dominate them by force. Domination is not simply a sad necessity of finding oneself in the position of tyrant, as Pericles had implied (however disingenuously, since the Athenians didn’t just wake up and find themselves to be tyrants: their becoming so was the result of policies that Pericles had supported). Cleon implies that domination is the very purpose and goal of rule, of amassing the power of a tyrant in the first place. Cleon loses the debate, but the arguments on the winning side, made by Diodotus, are a paler shadow of the same position. Diodotus does not argue from principles of justice, but, on the contrary, from the standpoint of Athenian advantage, which, he implies, is the suitable standpoint for a debate about foreign affairs that is free from the shadow of legal treaty stipulations: ‘we are not judging in a court of law with regard to them [the Mytileneans] where it is necessary to do justice; rather, we are deliberating about them, how they may be most useful for us’ (3.44).16
In the glory of defeating the Persians, Athens displayed the remarkable strengths that democracy can achieve. Once inflamed with the hubris of empire, the Athenians also displayed some of the characteristic weaknesses of democracy as a form of collective decision-making: self-interested, short-sighted decisions, made on the basis of flattering or vindictive advice; being too hasty to act in some cases, too slow to react or anticipate in others. Defence mechanisms like scapegoating and wishful thinking are good examples of these tendencies. While the original decision to execute the men of Mytilene and sell their women and children into slavery was cancelled in the nick of time, the scapegoating, in 406, of generals who had won a naval battle at Arginusae, but failed in the face of a storm to collect all the bodies of the Athenian dead, was not;17 nor would be the execution of Socrates in 399. The war against the Spartans and their allies was lost in 404 largely as a result of the consequences of a disastrous expedition to Sicily in 415, based on wishful thinking and ignorance about political and military conditions there. And eventually the Athenians would succumb to the whirlwind of Macedonian conquest, having been accused by some of their statesmen for decades of doing too little to counter that threat.
Yet the Athenian democrats were able to restore their regime judiciously in 403 BCE, with a generous amnesty for the surviving participants in the oligarchic revolt against it. And, if the democracy eventually succumbed to pressures from Macedon in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great, it is not clear that the city could have done anything to have staved off this fate forever (though 4th-century politicians bitterly disagreed at the time about whether Macedon should be resisted or accommodated). Still, the democracy was certainly self-interested, grandiose in its ambitions and sometimes callous towards those who got in its way.
Ancient and Modern Democracies: What’s in a Name?
Is ancient Athenian democracy similar to or different from democracy today? The answer to that question is both. Athenian democracy is surprisingly similar to and yet also strikingly different from modern democracies – say for example the USA and the UK (though they are of course in important ways different from each other and from other contemporary democracies). The value of considering their relationship comes not from forcing oneself to take a stand for or against (they’re the same! no, they’re different!) but rather from appreciating how those facts interrelate and how they can help us to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of ancient and also modern democratic regimes.
Unlike other ideas in this book, Democracy is one whose roots in ancient Greece took considerable time to become viewed as the precursors of the positive modern ideal going by the same name. The story of how modern states came to think of themselves as democracies as a result of late 18th-century and 19th-century developments, taking pride in that name rather than seeing it as a derogatory term of abuse, is fascinating but beyond the scope of this book.18 Until that time, the idea of beneficial forms of rule involving the multitude were more commonly described on the Roman model: as ‘republics’ rather than as ‘democracies’, the latter term having been tainted by the severe criticisms of Plato and Aristotle and by a rather one-sided focus on the stories of Athenian democratic failings that could be found in the accounts of Thucydides, Aristophanes and other writers of the period. These failings were supposed to be arbitrariness and stupidity, illustrated by the purportedly bad Athenian decisions mentioned above (Mytilene, Arginusae, Sicily and so on), and these were taken to have issued from a radical over-inclusion of the ignorant and from an absence of sufficiently deferential and informed forms of deliberation and decision-making.
In the 18th century, during which the modern idea of the representative republic emerged, Athens still served largely as a negative contrast. Only then did the Athenian star rise with the subsequent development of the language of ‘representative democracy’ among thinkers and political practitioners in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain and America, and with re-evaluations of the achievements of Athenian democracy itself, most powerfully in the work of the Victorian-era historian George Grote. It was from the mid 19th century onwards that comparisons between ancient and modern forms of democracy began to flourish, despite the historical path between them being far from straightforward. Those comparisons have hinged largely on three points: the role of the people in lawmaking; the use of lottery as opposed to election; and the value of liberalism.
Differences between Ancient and Modern Democracies: Lawmaking, Lotteries, Liberalism?
LAWMAKING
The 18th-century revolutionary Thomas Paine – who participated in political activity in his native Britain, the British colonies in America and France – argued that ‘Athens, by representation, would have surpassed her own democracy.’19 He was drawing a contrast between the role of all Athenian male citizens – who had the right to attend and, in theory, to speak in the assembly – and the role of the people in modern representative democracies, who elected representatives to the legislature. That contrast has been fashioned in many discussions of political theory into one between ‘direct’ ancient democracy and ‘indirect’ modern democracy.
That direct versus indirect contrast between ancient and modern democracies is misleading.20 On the one hand, it is based on the assumption that, by analogy with modern legislatures, the main thing the Athenian assembly did was to pass laws. In actuality, the normal activity of the Athenian assembly was not to pass or amend laws (something it did only occasionally in the 5th century, at the very end of which it fixed the law code and then handed the power of amending it over to a separate jury-like body). Instead, the assembly acted primarily as a decision-making body on the major questions of public policy, such as war and peace, ‘the corn supply and the security of the countryside’ (AP 43.4), and similarly vital matters for civic survival. Ancient and modern democracies do differ in how they make laws; but the more fundamental contrast lies in the divergent roles they assign to citizens in the making of public policy.
On the other hand, Paine’s contrast suggests that the Athenians had simply lacked a conception of delegating authority. As it happens, the Athenians knew very well how to have some do work on behalf of others. They chose by election or by lottery some 1,200 civic officials each year (including the 500 members of the council); they also chose jury panels by a complex system of lottery. If they chose to allow all citizens who wished to attend the assembly, that was a strategic choice about the best forum in which to make decisions that would affect the life-blood of the polis, rather than a consequence of institutional primitivism or a failure of the imagination. Thus, by drawing the contrast between ancient and modern democracies as one between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ (or ‘representative’) democracies, one misses out on understanding the ways in which multiple forms of Athenian popular power went beyond the question of legislation alone.
LOTTERIES
While the Athenians elected about 100 of their 1,200 officials – most importantly the board of ten generals – they made use of lottery to select most of the annually serving officials to conduct business ranging from regulation of the harbour to oversight of the coinage.21 Here lies a second contrast that is commonly drawn between ancient and modern democracies: it is said that the ancients used lottery, a truly democratic mechanism, as a sign of their faith that any citizen could and should be entitled to fill any role; whereas the moderns use election, which is ironically a more aristocratic or oligarchical mechanism in presupposing that some are better suited to govern than others.22 But, again, that simplistic contrast misconstrues the real concerns and practices of the Athenians.
While it is true that the Athenians chose to use lottery for most offices, they did so in full knowledge of how to conduct elections instead – which they did for certain posts, primarily those requiring the most experience and expertise (above all the generalships). When they did use lottery, they surrounded it with prescreening mechanisms to test willingness to serve and good standing in civic affairs, ensuring that those chosen were respectable and law-abiding.23 So the Athenians were far from using lottery as if it presupposed that just any citizen could and should be entitled to fill any role. But they did assume that most citizens were competent enough to be able to learn the ropes of the administrative offices they were asked to undertake – including those of clerks, commissioners of roads, superintendents of the market, even public executioners. And their allocation of these roles by lottery and annual rotation (for the most part) could help to prevent corruption and self-aggrandizement. Offices staffed by lot, for the duration of a single year, were no platform for the conversion of wealth to political power, and no basis for anyone aspiring to political dominance or domination to be able to do so.
One might say that Athenian lotteries were used to staff the equivalent of the civil service more than the functions of high political decision-making. Key political decisions rested in the hands of the elected generals together with the popular votes won by the self-selected speakers in the assembly, who advised on public policy. Hence the use of lottery in ancient democracies points us not to a simple contrast with modern elected officials, but rather to a complex reflection on how to distribute essentially administrative offices so as to prevent corruption while encouraging the participation of citizens who were held in good repute. The ancients had no blind faith in lottery, and, though they used it extensively, they did so with care and with limits. They valued participation, but they also valued expertise more than is often recognized, including pre-existing skills and knowledge as well as the expertise that ordinary citizens could develop in post.
LIBERALISM
The contrasts between ancient and modern democracies on lawmaking and lottery have turned out to be subtler than is widely thought. A final contrast that has often been drawn is between ancient illiberalism and modern liberalism. If Tom Paine was the tribune of representative democracy, the Swiss-born thinker (who served in several French governments) Benjamin Constant, in 1819, made himself the tribune of ‘modern liberty’, as opposed to a supposed ‘ancient’ conception. Drawing on the contrast between bourgeois moderns and warlike ancients that we saw Rousseau sketch out before him in the introduction to this book, Constant describes ancient regimes as having thrived on war and subjugated individual concerns to collective power and aims, treating liberty as a matter of collective self-determination, while leaving the liberties of individuals vulnerable to those collective projects. He contrasts these regimes with modern representative ones, which thrive on commerce and so leave individuals alone to pursue their private aims, using their wealth to delegate politicians to manage their collective affairs.24 In a sense, Constant is suggesting that the wider constitutions – ‘the way of life’ – of ancient and modern liberties are so different as to belie any institutional resemblances between them.
Yet Constant’s distinction again distorts our understanding of ancient democracy and especially that of Athens. For he treats Sparta, in effect, as the paradigm of these ancient regimes, admitting that his analysis applied least well to Athens, whose scope for private individual liberties, trade and open intellectual ferment had been so notable. Pericles himself praises the Athenians for their open and tolerant political culture. The Athenians live together, Pericles proclaims, without suspicion or censoriousness, an implied contrast with the Spartan ephors, who strictly police behaviour. The Athenians are free and generous, and enjoy their lives (an implied contrast with Spartan austerity), celebrating contests like games and dramatic festivals, making the requisite sacrifices to the gods, and enjoying all the luxuries that their flourishing merchant economy has imported and produced. Instead of imposing the kind of grim secretiveness that would again have been seen as characteristic of Sparta, the Athenians, according to Pericles, put their trust in an openness to strangers and a civic courage that are compatible with the enjoyment of a ‘more relaxed life’. They simultaneously cultivate concern for public affairs with active care for private ones. Admittedly, the Athenians drew the line between public and private differently from most modern democracies: religion, for example, was a matter of public concern and public prescription. Athens was liberal in a way with regard to religion, being open to the incorporation of foreign deities, for example. But this had to be done with the city’s consent.25
It is tempting for modern liberals nevertheless to join Constant in indicting Athens, like other Greek regimes, for having lacked secure protection of rights. Without the full apparatus of due process protecting strong individual rights claims, Athenians are easily charged with having been less than ideally liberal in leaving individuals vulnerable to collective power. Perhaps the most egregious case is the one that Constant takes to clinch the case for Athens having lacked the modern concept of liberty, despite all its quasi-bourgeois freedoms: the case of ostracism.
Established on the advice of Cleisthenes, every year a question was put to the vote in the assembly (meeting for this purpose in the marketplace): should anyone be ostracized, that is, banished from the city for ten years? If the ayes had it, every citizen would be given a shard of pottery (an ostrakon) on which to inscribe the name of one person. The person getting the highest number of ‘votes’ was summarily banished from the city for the ten-year term. Now ostracism is described in the 4th-century Constitution of the Athenians (22.1) as one of the defining means by which Cleisthenes democratized the city.26 But, to modern ears, it sounds highly illiberal. If such a lack of due process is democratic, depriving someone of liberty at the whim of a majority, without any evidence of wrongdoing or the chance to defend himself, many modern liberals would want nothing to do with that kind of democracy. So we must ask: was ostracism illiberal, and was democratic Athens guilty of illiberalism more generally?
Ostracism was carried out without evidence or due process because the Athenians did not see it as punishment for a crime, but rather as a political mechanism to ensure the survival of the democracy. It was used pre-emptively and, it has been argued, symbolically, to express the power of the demos over rival elites striving for influence, and so served to bolster the egalitarian sensibilities of the many on the shoulders of whom the democracy rested.27 A general like Themistocles, who had led Athens in the vital military victory over the Persians at Salamis in 480 BCE, could be ostracized (as he was) eight or nine years later for perceived arrogance.28 Of course, ostracism could be used for partisan purposes. But it was more than just a factional shenanigan. It was a means by which a democratic regime sought to defend itself and its own values, even at the price of limiting the very equality under the law that it sought to defend.
Before modern liberals follow Constant in convicting Athens of illiberality, they might consider that ostracism compares rather well with some of the mechanisms pressing or exceeding the limits of law that modern democracies have recently evolved to sanction individuals deemed threatening to the political order. Ostracism was not targeted killing. It was not even civic death, since the Athenians did not deprive those whom they ostracized of civic privileges once the ten-year term of exile was completed (a length of time long enough to let antagonisms and hostility die away). The general Cimon, for example, came back quietly ten years after having been ostracized in 461 and re-entered the city as an equal, tacitly accepting the more radical democratic measures that Pericles had put in place in the meantime.
Hence in the case of ostracism, Athenian democrats afforded some measure of respect to the liberties of the individual, even though judging in some cases that it was necessary for the community to remove someone for a definite time period. And, more generally, the Athenians protected a wide range of freedoms. Indeed, their laws and legal practices afforded a wide set of protections not only to citizens, but also in some respects to non-citizens, who could in practice shelter under the same umbrella.29 Critics of the democracy were especially affronted by the personal freedoms enjoyed by the poor and even by metics and slaves who were indistinguishable in their dress from citizens. The ‘Old Oligarch’ complains that ‘it is not possible to strike’ a slave or metic in Athens, because if this were legally allowed, one ‘would often strike an Athenian, thinking that he was a slave’ (1.10).30
One conclusion is that in a free society, it is difficult and invidious to try to draw distinctions among people based on appearance alone. Attempts to profile non-citizens all too easily result in harming the citizens whom they will closely resemble. Athenian society was more liberal in its tacit acknowledgement of this, as in many other respects, than dismissals of it as radically illiberal in modern terms would allow.
Ancient and Modern Democracies: A Reckoning
We have seen that the contrasts often drawn between ancient and modern democracies on lawmaking, lottery and liberalism are far too crudely and starkly posed. Moreover, in focusing only on such exaggerated and misconstrued differences, we lose sight of the important similarities that link ancient and modern democracies. Perhaps the deepest one is a concern for controlling officials – a concern that preoccupied the Athenians for lotteried and elected offices alike, and so which cuts across the genuine difference between the ancient and the modern in the prevalence of those mechanisms.
The Athenians controlled their officials by subjecting them to scrutiny before they entered office. They did not allow lottery to function as a way of defeating their concern for civic rectitude; instead, they followed it with the check of scrutiny to ensure this. They also, and crucially, made every official – again, whether lotteried or elected – submit accounts at the end of his tenure of office. Holding office was a public trust; and an account – an actual financial one as well as a more general inspection of performance – was demanded by the people on its completion. To the extent that modern democrats share a vision of the people as holding their leaders to account, they have a deep similarity with the ancients, but could also learn much from their institutional differences.
This chapter has set out three things that Athenian democracy stood for: it meant the power of the people – including the poorest of the citizens – to decide (key policies in the assembly, and in the council and other offices, if selected by lot, as chances were they would be several times in a normal lifetime); to judge (in most legal cases); and to control (officials). We also observed the importance of the power to initiate: either as an individual, speaking in the assembly or bringing a prosecution in the courts, or as a lottery-selected body (the council, initiating the assembly’s agenda). It was the integrated effect of those powers that constituted the kratos of the demos, giving the people freedom from being dominated by the arbitrary will of the elite, and equality in a meaningful sense despite the persistence of economic divisions.
The dramatic extent of popular judgement and decision-making, and of inclusiveness (for the time) in defining the people as all freeborn men born to citizen parents, made Athenian democracy as remarkable of its kind as was the Spartans’ regime of theirs. The Athenians offered their elites certain forms of recognition and satisfaction, but they used a panoply of mechanisms to control those elites, so as to prevent them from parlaying wealth or influence into a secure basis for domination of others. They demonstrate an ideal of democracy as genuine popular sovereignty – that is, exercised in key moments of everyday control rather than only notionally as the ultimate basis of political authority. Without resorting either to plebiscitary votes limited to the common people, or to universal entitlement to office-holding, the Athenians found ways to make popular power real.
In some respects, Athenian democracy and modern democracy are very similar, in seeing the people as controlling their officials and as the source from which all power ultimately flows. In other respects, however, Athenian democracy went much further: in its attempts to control economic as well as political power; in its allowing of popular judgement to make decisions about fundamental questions of public policy; and in its according of the ultimate judicial powers in almost all cases not to professional judges but to courts made up of ordinary people, jurors empowered to decide facts (as are modern common law juries) as well as the meaning of the law. Athenian democracy is not so far beyond our ken that it is irrelevant to ours, but nor is it merely a clumsy shadow of mechanisms that the moderns have supposedly perfected. The very discontinuities between ancient and modern practices make reflection on certain shared values – and their different institutional expressions – all the more instructive. Athenian democrats expressed a distinctive institutional and intellectual vision of the meaning of popular power and the means by which it may be exercised, one that was radical in the powers of judgement that it accorded to ordinary citizens, and radical as a result in its challenge to more recent ideas of democracy that accord those people far fewer powers. Yet not everyone living in the Athenian democracy in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE held the democratic constitution to be of unqualified value. Two of the most famous children of Athens, the philosophers Socrates and Plato, would profoundly question whether democracy was, in fact, the best path to living a good human life – a life that they took to depend on the achievement of moral and intellectual virtue. That is the subject of Chapter 4.