CHAPTER I
The form of political organization that evolved in the polis of Athens over the course of the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C. is one of the best known, most frequently evoked, but least well-understood legacies of the Greco-Roman world. Formidable stumbling-blocks stand in the way of a modern understanding of Athenian political life: the problems that arise because of our great chronological distance from classical Athens are compounded by our emotional proximity. Today the word “democracy” almost invariably carries a positive connotation. Democratic government—an anomaly in the fifth century B.C., an idea disparaged by ancient philosophers, and a term of abuse in eighteenth-century political debates—is now nearly universally accepted (at least in the public pronouncements of national leaders) as the most desirable form of human political organization.1 Of course, not all modern proponents of democracy mean quite the same thing when they speak in its favor, and few citizens of any modern democratic state would be likely to find themselves in full agreement with an ancient Athenian’s views of how a democracy should operate. But there is also some common ground.
The Greek word dēmokratia can be translated literally as “the people (dēmos) possess the political power (kratos) in the state.” In ordinary discourse, “the people” meant for the Athenians, as for modern democrats, the whole of the citizen body, and citizenship was determined by birthright rather than by property-holding.2 Much of the appeal of democracy in antiquity, as now, rested upon the attractiveness of two closely related ideas: first, that all citizens, despite differences in their socioeconomic standing, should have an equal say in the determination of state policy; second, that the privileges of elite citizens, and the elite collectively, must be limited and restricted when those privileges come into conflict with the collective rights of the citizenry, or the individual rights of non-elite citizens. I suppose that few modern advocates of democracy would find reason to quarrel with Demosthenes’ (24.171) characterization of the ethos of democratic Athens: compassion for the weak, a prohibition against strong and powerful individuals acting violently toward other citizens, and a refusal to countenance either brutal treatment by the powerful of the mass of citizens or subservience by the masses to the powerful.
Yet despite similarities in principle, there remain many significant differences in practice. Modern democracies assume clear distinctions between the concepts of the state, the citizenry, and the government. The day-to-day business of a modern democratic government typically is run by an elite, whose members provide the abstract entity of the state with the experience and leadership necessary for its continued existence. Some members of the governing elite are elected by the people as their representatives. The people (the citizenry) thus delegate much of their political power to an elite (the government) whose members are expected to make policy in the interests of the state.
In addition to elected representatives, the governing elite in a modern democracy normally includes executive officials, at least some of whom are appointed rather than elected, and a professional judiciary. The duties of each official in the government are relatively clear and often legally defined and circumscribed. Furthermore, the functional role of government officials in modern democracies has tended to be quite clearly differentiated; hence, individual officials are expected to fulfill leadership and administrative functions, but they are not necessarily expected to be exemplars of every moral value held worthy by the society as a whole. Within the governmental organization itself, there is typically a fairly clear division of powers and responsibilities between legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The citizenry, whose only direct responsibility to the governance of the state consists in voting for officials, is ordinarily composed of both men and women. There is no large class of unfree persons, and in some modern democracies aliens are able to achieve full citizenship without undue difficulties.3
The Athenians, for their part, limited citizenship rights to freeborn males of Athenian ancestry. Women, slaves, and resident aliens, a majority of the total adult population, were excluded from participation in political life. As a consequence, Athenian “political society”—that is, the community of franchise-holders—was less closely coextensive with the “whole society” than is the case in modern democracies. In the following pages I will analyze the rules and procedures—explicit and implicit—by which Athenian political society operated. I will attempt to show how its mode of political organization helped the Athenian polis to function as a society. But readers should bear in mind that there were many individuals living in Attica who were not direct beneficiaries of the social and political balancing act described here. Indeed, the achievement of a degree of social harmony among the citizens ensured that those without political rights would have less chance to exploit social disorder as a possible means of improving their own standing.
The political cohesiveness of the citizenry was partly a product of the oppression of noncitizen groups within the polis. Kurt Raaflaub suggests that “the success of the democracy in securing the loyalty and devotion of the vast majority of citizens rested largely on its insistence on a marked distinction between citizens (whatever their social status) on the one hand, and all categories of noncitizens on the other.”4 Although “rested largely” seems to me an overstatement, the group interest of the citizens vis-à-vis noncitizens undoubtedly provided the former with an inducement to cooperate among themselves. Fear (conscious and subconscious) of the “others” may also have persuaded Athenians to overlook some of the class and status inequities that existed among themselves.
Exclusion of “others” from the political sphere was, in sum, a very important factor in the coalescence of the political society of the Greek polis, and we will consider some of the ramifications of exclusivity for the Athenian citizen body’s definition of itself below (esp. VI.C). But, in order to prove that exclusivity was the necessary and sufficient cause of the efficient functioning of Athenian democracy (viz., that democracy was a direct product of exclusion), a demonstration that Athenian treatment of resident noncitizens differed significantly from practices of nondemocratic Greek poleis would be necessary. Given the state of our evidence for social relations in poleis other than Athens, the matter is not amenable to rigorous empirical proof. It is notable, however, that democratic Athens did not engage in the sort of organized terrorism against its unfree population that pertained in Sparta.5 Athenian laws and customs kept women in an inferior social position and denied their political existence. But Aristotle (Pol. 130034–8, 1322b37-1323a6) points out that boards of magistrates for controlling the behavior of women were suitable to aristocracies and unsuitable to democracies, since it was impossible to prevent the wives of the laboring (aporoi) citizens from going out in public.6
The exclusion of women, slaves, and foreigners from political rights must be faced by anyone who hopes to gain a fair understanding of classical Greek civilization. Oppression of noncitizens is, however, an insufficient explanation for the unique direction of Athenian sociopolitical development. The limitation of the franchise to freeborn males is certainly undemocratic by current standards, but to deny the name democracy to Athens’ government, on the grounds that the Athenians did not recognize rights that most western nations have granted only quite recently, is ahistorical.7 We may deplore the Athenians’ exclusivist attitude, but moral censure should not obscure our appreciation of the fundamental importance of the new democratic political order. For the first time in the recorded history of a complex society, all native freeborn males, irrespective of their ability, family connections, or wealth, were political equals, with equal rights to debate and to determine state policy.
The radical nature of Athenian democracy is clear when measured against the standards of the age in which it developed. Throughout ancient Greek history, oligarchy remained the most common form of polis government. According to Aristotle, who devoted much thought to the question of how to define various political regimes, an oligarchy pertains wherever there exists a property qualification for citizenship, so that the wealthy control the state (Pol. 1279b17–1280a4, 1309b38-131032; Rhet. 1365b31-33). But he notes elsewhere (Pol. 1317b39-41) that oligarchy is defined by birth (genos), wealth (ploutos), and education (paideia). Given the parameters of Greek political culture, it is less useful to ask why the Athenians failed to grant political rights to women, slaves, and foreigners, than to ask how the Athenians achieved political equality among the adult male citizens and restricted the political privileges of the elites.8
The Athenian form of political organization differed from modern democratic governments in that there was no entrenched governing elite and there were no elected representatives. Elections were considered potentially undemocratic, since they favored those with demonstrated ability (Aristot. Pol. 1273b40–41, 1294b7-9); most government officials were selected by lot. Lotteried officials had very limited powers; their office was generally collegiate, annual, and subject to judicial scrutiny. The key decision-making body of the Athenian state was the Assembly. Open to all citizens, the Assembly met frequently (forty times per year in the later fourth century) to debate and to decide state policy. Any citizen who could gain and hold the attention of his fellows in the Assembly had the right to advise them on national policy. As Plato (Protagoras 319d) put it, “Anyone may stand up and offer advice, whether he be a carpenter, a blacksmith, a shoe-maker, a merchant, a ship-captain, wealthy, poor, noble, or base-born. . . .” After debate, the assembled citizens voted on specific proposals; simple majorities therefore determined the state’s policy. Each meeting’s agenda was set by a Council (boulē) of five hundred citizens, chosen, like other magistrates, annually by lottery. Until the end of the fifth century, all decisions of the Assembly had the immediate force of law; at that time a procedure for judicial review was instituted. But the juries that reviewed some Assembly decisions, like all Athenian juries, were chosen from nearly the full spectrum of Athenian citizens: the juries were large (generally 200–1,500) panels of citizens over thirty years of age, who voted democratically on the verdict. The demos, its will expressed in both Assembly and in court rulings, was master of Athens. The roles of political leaders were also much less clearly defined and less differentiated from the social matrix than has been the norm in modern states. There was neither a formal division of powers within the government, nor any clear distinction between state, people, and government. Thus, if the Athenians were less inclusive than modern democracies in their citizenship policy, they were more egalitarian in their governmental organization. Athens was a direct democracy, a mode of state organization that seems not to exist in the modern world.9
Identification of some of the basic similarities and differences between Athenian and modern democratic principles and practice is important. Much modern scholarship on ancient democracy has been marred by a tendency to overstress the similarities. As a result, because many modern western democracies are based on a pluralistic political party system within a parliamentary context, some scholars have distributed Athenian politicians into parties, whose platforms are delineated and whose successes and failures at the “polls” are laboriously charted and endlessly debated. The result is a thoroughly erroneous view of Athenian political life.10 But if we overstress the differences and ignore similarities in principle, the study of ancient political activity becomes empty antiquarianism, sterile cogitation by specialists in dead languages, which can (and will) be ignored by those interested in current affairs.11 This situation is not only regrettable but harmful. The Athenian example has a good deal to tell the modern world about the nature and potential of democracy as a form of social and political organization. Athens can serve as a corrective to the cultural chauvinist’s argument that only the experience of the modern western world is of contemporary value. By clearly identifying both similarities and differences in principle and practice, we can make the Athenian democracy both explicable in its own terms and an accessible tool for political analysis and action by those who are, or would be, citizens of democratic states.
The Athenian democratic “constitution” (a convenient, if imprecise term to describe the formally recognized principles and practices of Athenian government) was undergirded by a belief system that stressed the innate wisdom and binding nature of group decisions, the freedom of the citizen, and the equality of all citizens. Freedom and equality were both limited and conditional, however: individual freedom was constrained by the necessity that the individual subordinate himself to group interests, and equality was limited to the political sphere. The Athenians never developed the principle of inalienable “negative rights” (freedom from governmental interference in private affairs) of the individual or of minorities vis-à-vis the state—a central tenet of modern liberalism. Nor were they convinced that social advantages would result from the equalization of property—an idea discussed by Greek philosophers and a cornerstone of Marxist sociopolitical theory.12 In addition to inequalities in property-holding, the Athenians continued to live with inequalities of status on the basis of birth—the result of an aristocratic tradition—and of ability—the result of differences in natural gifts and educational opportunity. There were elites in Athens, and elite Athenians tended to compete with one another over anything they thought might enhance their personal standing. These contests were hard fought, because for every winner whose status was enhanced, there were inevitably losers whose standing was lowered.13 Hence, there remained significant and unresolved tensions within Athenian political society which might have resulted in divisive conflict between community and individual, between mass and elite, between elite and non-elite individuals, and between members of the elites. The political power of the group threatened the liberty of the individual and the property of the wealthy; the wealth, status, and abilities of the elites threatened both the non-elite individual and the masses collectively; intra-elite contests threatened to undermine the stability of the entire society.
The relationship between elites and the mass of ordinary citizens within the context of Athenian political society is the central concern of the present study. The general definition of “the elite,” as a relatively small subgroup of society whose members enjoy extraordinary advantages of one sort or another, is, however, too vague to be useful for analytical purposes. Modern sociological discussions of elites tend to use the term in one of two ways. First, “the elite” may refer to a cohesive ruling oligarchy that runs an organization or a state. In this study, such a group will be called a governing or ruling elite. The second modern definition of the elite is less specifically linked to political power: those members of society who are (1) much more highly educated than the norm (the educated elite), (2) much wealthier than the norm (the upper class or the wealth elite), or (3) recognized by other members of society as deserving privileges based on their birthright and/or by their performance (or avoidance) of certain occupations (the nobles, aristocrats, or status elite). The term “masses” can be used to refer to all members of society who are not members of an elite. But here we are concerned specifically with non-elite members of Athens’ political community: citizens who had political rights but were otherwise “ordinary.”14 The Athenian citizen-masses are described in the ancient sources as to plēthos (the mass), hoi polloi (the many), or—more insultingly—ho ochlos (the mob).15
Perhaps the best ancient analysis of Greek mass-elite relations is Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle notes (Pol. 1291h14—30) that the free population of a polis can be subdivided into the mass of ordinary citizens (demos—note that this is a more restricted sense of the word than its usual meaning as “the entire citizenry”) and the elite (gnōrimoi). The latter group, he continues, is characterized by the elements of wealth (ploutos), high birth (eugeneia), aretē (a difficult term to define, but generally meaning “virtue,” or excellence), and cultural education (paideia).
Leaving aside the moral category of aretē, Aristotle’s list parallels the constellation of elite attributes used by modern students of elites. The education/wealth/status list is repeated, with some variations, by Aristotle elsewhere and by some of the Attic orators.16 The three primary elite attributes are described variously in the ancient sources. Wealth was (as in many modern societies) the clearest indicator of elite status. Membership in the wealth elite might be manifested either by demonstrated ownership of valuable possessions or by notable public and private generosity. Nobility was indicated by reference to birthright per se and by allusions to aristocratic pursuits, especially sports and contests. Nobles were expected to refrain from participation in degrading occupations, such as manufacturing or commerce, which the Greeks referred to as “banausic.” Education, which might consist of formal training in philosophy or rhetoric, was demonstrated by mastery of literary culture and by the ability to speak persuasively in public.
The ancient definitions of elites and elite attributes are collectively similar enough to modern definitions to permit the use of modern analytical categories without immediate danger of anachronism. At least some of the theoretical foundations for a sociology of Athenian politics have been laid by scholars willing and able to use sociological models and categories in a careful and sophisticated manner,17 G.E.M. de Ste. Croix’s monumental Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, the most complete and rigorous Marxist assessment of ancient society ever attempted (at least in English), includes an analysis of the role of class in the Athenian democracy.18 M. I. Finley, in a series of articles and monographs, has elucidated ancient, and especially Athenian, sociopolitical life based in part on Max Weber’s studies of status and hierarchy.19 Both class and status are useful analytical constructs, and an investigation of the consequences of status and class inequalities within the citizen population is vital to an understanding of Athenian political sociology. Yet neither Finley nor Ste. Croix succeeded in fully explaining the operational significance of the relations between ordinary and elite citizens in Athenian social and political life.
Modern philologists, not surprisingly, have been particularly interested in the educated elite of Athens, since it included the writers of virtually all surviving Athenian texts. Many classical scholars have supposed that major literary figures had a direct influence on society. The works of Werner Jaeger, especially his three-volume Paideia and his biography of Demosthenes, might be singled out as worthy exemplars of the philologists’ emphasis on the importance of educated elites in Athenian political life.20 But Jaeger’s thought was not much influenced by sociology, and relatively little satisfactory work has been done by other students of Greek literature on the relationship between the actions taken by the Athenian masses and the ideas generated by the educated elite. While all studies that touch on ancient society implicitly deal with both elites and masses, the bibliography of titles that explicitly define the interaction of elite and mass as a key element for analysis of Athenian democracy is remarkably small.21
The relative paucity of works on mass-elite interactions in democratic Athens may be explained in part by the difficulty of accurately identifying Athenian elites. There were various general Greek terms for “elite”—besides “notables” (gnōrimoi), they could be called the “beautiful and good” (kaloi k'agathoi), “worthies” (charientes), the “excellent” (aristoi), the “happy” (eudaimones), the “prominent” (chrēstoi). The elites of ability, wealth, and status in a Greek polis (as elsewhere) tended to overlap, and it is sometimes difficult to determine whether those referred to by the various Greek terms are to be taken as the possessors of some particular elite attribute or of a broader constellation of attributes.22
The problem is compounded by the Athenian refusal to grant formal political privileges to the elite; indeed, the only subset of the citizen body to be normally and frankly granted a special constitutional position were the older citizens.23 The members of the wealth elite were legally distinguished, less by extraordinary privileges than by their responsibility for undertaking extraordinary duties in terms of material contributions to the state.24 Members of the birth elite might hold special priesthoods, but these do not appear to have been regarded as important privileges (see VI.B.2). The dominant egalitarian ideology discouraged Athenian elites from most forms of public display. Thucydides (1.6.3-4) notes that in conformity to contemporary Athenian taste the wealthy citizens led lives that were as much as possible like the lives of the ordinary people. Isocrates (3.16, in an oration not intended for mass consumption) praised monarchy because it allowed the elite individual (chrēstos) to avoid being mucked in (pheresthai) with the mass (plēthos), as was the tendency in democratic regimes. As we will see (below, IV-VI), elite Athenian litigants involved in private legal actions often attempted to obscure their status in court. Yet the Athenians were very much aware of the elites among them and were seldom really fooled by the elite citizen’s attempt to cast himself in a demotic role. While the Athenians stuck by their conviction that all Athenians were political equals, they would have appreciated the irony of the pigs’ revised slogan in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”25
Orwell’s “animals more equal than others” were ultimately distinguished by their privileges in regard to dress and habitation, and they constituted a ruling elite. The existence of a similar ruling elite in democratic Athens has sometimes been assumed but never demonstrated.26 Elite citizens certainly took an active role in political affairs: generals and expert public orators typically came from elite backgrounds, and no Athenian politician was poor.27 Yet, as Finley notes, “it would not have been easy for an ancient Athenian to draw the sharp line between ‘we,’ the ordinary people, and ‘they,’ the governmental elite, which has been so frequently noted in the responses of the present-day apathetic [citizen of a democratic state].”28 The political advisers and leaders of the Athenian state (at least after Pericles) failed to develop the continuity of control of bureaucratic infrastructure, group cohesiveness vis-à-vis the masses, and means to control decision making and state policy, all necessary for the existence of a genuine ruling elite.
Finley’s comment, cited above, was in response to the theories of the so-called elitist school of political theory. The elitist philosophers, notably Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, enunciated a view of political action that emphasized the tendency of powerful elites to evolve within and ultimately to control social institutions. Elite domination was made possible in part by the natural tendency of the strong to dominate the weak and in part due to the natural apathy of the numerically superior masses.29 Mosca’s and Pareto’s work was amplified and strengthened by Robert Michels’ very influential book Political Parties. Michels’ primary thesis was the “Iron Law of Oligarchy”: the inevitable tendency for oligarchies to evolve “in every kind of human organization which strives for the attainment of definite ends.” For Michels, “democracy is inconceivable without organization,” and organization, which leads to the development of a hierarchical bureaucracy, is itself the source of the “conservative currents” which “flow over the plain of democracy, occasioning there disastrous floods and rendering the plain unrecognizable.” True direct democracy, in which simple majorities determined policy, was declared an impossibility in the long run because of physical factors (e.g., the physiological difficulty of even the most powerful orator making himself heard by a crowd of 10,000 persons) and the inability of a collectivity to settle major controversies between its members. Hence, Michels argued, there was always the need for responsibility to be delegated to a group of educated and able individuals, and this group would naturally evolve into a ruling elite as they gained control of an increasingly complex bureaucratic apparatus. Michels’ empirical basis for his Iron Law was a study of early twentieth-century democratic socialist political parties, but he believed that his Law applied to state organization as well.30
Michels’ Iron Law has become (at least implicitly) a central tenet of modern political sociology and has suffered few effective empirical challenges.31 Neither Michels nor any other elitist philosopher is much cited by students of the Athenian democracy, although I suspect that some of the scholars who have assumed the existence of a ruling elite in Athens were influenced (directly or indirectly) by their ideas.32 Only M. I. Finley seems to have recognized clearly that elitist theory offers a challenge to our understanding of the Athenian democracy and that the Athenian example in turn may offer an empirical challenge to the general validity of Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy. In Democracy Ancient and Modern and again in Politics in the Ancient World, Finley vigorously attacked the assumptions of elitist political theorists, especially those who attempt to demonstrate that the existence of a ruling elite in a democracy is not only inevitable, but desirable, and that the citizens of the democratic state are naturally apathetic.33
Finley realized that denying the existence of a cohesive ruling elite at Athens required a reexamination of the nature of Athenian political leadership. He concentrated on the upper-class political orators of the late fifth century—the “demagogues” (dēmagōgoi, literally “leaders of the people”) who addressed the citizenry in the Assembly and law courts—identifying them as an essential structural element in the direct democracy’s decision-making process. Finley’s work on the demagogues was an important breakthrough, and the structural role of the political orators in the Athenian state has been further elucidated by other scholars.34 Yet neither Finley nor subsequent scholarship has faced what appears to be a central dilemma inherent in the “structural demagogues” model: how and why did the Athenian demos come to accept as legitimate the political leadership of elite individuals who, moreover, referred explicitly to their elite attributes in public speeches? That the Athenian masses did accept members of various elites as leaders is undeniable, yet if the ideology of the democracy was fundamentally egalitarian, the existence of leaders who chose to identify themselves as elites must have led to considerable tension. And, since the educated and wealthy demagogues never evolved into a ruling elite, the frustration of their “natural” tendency and desire to rule must have been a source of further sociopolitical stress.35 A major burden of this study will be to explain the ways in which the masses came to accept elite leadership and the means by which they limited the concentration of power in the hands of elite citizens without driving them into open opposition. Only when these ways and means have been clearly defined can we understand the practical significance, in terms of political theory and action, of using the Athenian example as an empirical challenge to the elitist argument that direct democracy is impossible.
The identification of tensions between ordinary and elite Athenians, seen in the light of Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy, leads to the question of how the Athenian direct democracy could have survived over a long period of time. For almost two hundred years, from the late sixth through the late fourth centuries, Athenians governed themselves more or less democratically. The only serious interruptions were two brief oligarchic coups in the late fifth century (411/10, 404/3), one established under the pressure of the Peloponnesian War, the other imposed by the victorious Spartans after the defeat of Athens in that war. In both cases, the Athenians promptly threw out the oligarchs and restored their accustomed government. Vastly superior military forces allowed the Macedonians to replace the Athenian democratic political order with an oligarchy in 322 B.C. But even after repeated demonstrations of Macedonian military might in the late fourth and early third centuries, the Athenians continued to struggle to restore democracy. The historical record forbids the notion that the stability of the democracy was the result of inertia or a historical fluke.
The question of democratic stability may be broken down into two intertwined problems. The first is how the Athenians were able to deal with existing inequalities, especially between rich and poor. Class tension was endemic in Greece and often contributed to the violent and disruptive political conflicts (staseis) that were common in the poleis of the archaic and classical periods.36 The existence of the democracy itself provides only a partial solution to the problem of Athenian social stability. The democratic government indeed gave the poorer citizens a degree of protection against the property-power of their wealthy fellows and so moderated class antagonism.37 But the elite litigant retained functional advantages over his ordinary opponent, and the poorer Athenian’s envy and resentment of the social privileges enjoyed by the wealthy man were far from eliminated. Nor does the existence of the democracy in and of itself explain why the wealthy were not more active in agitating for a political position that would match their property-power and could guarantee the security of their goods against the poor.
The second problem is explaining how a direct democracy could function without institutionalized leadership. How did thousands of men, with no specialized knowledge or education, set a consistent and rational policy, over a long period of time, for a complex state? The solutions to these problems are key to understanding the political sociology of classical Athens. As S. M. Lipset noted, “If the stability of society is a central issue for sociology as a whole, the stability of a specific institutional structure or political regime—the social conditions of democracy—is the prime concern of political sociology.” Lipset goes on to point out that “a stable democractic system requires sources of cleavage so that there will be struggle over ruling positions . . . but without consensus—a value system allowing the peaceful ‘play’ of power . . . there can be no democracy.”38 In order to answer the question of democratic stability, therefore, we need to explain the nature of the power of the Athenian people. Power is not simple; a proper explanation of the demos’ kratos will have to embrace not only the more obvious elements of the franchise and the reality and threat of physical force but also authority and legitimacy, ideology and communication, interpersonal and intergroup relationships, reciprocity, and heterogeneity.39
How and why the Athenian democracy worked as well as it did is, I think, one of the original questions that led to the development by the Greeks of self-conscious political theory.40 It remains one of the major questions of Greek history, and many answers have been proposed. A complete survey of the literature is impossible here and would serve little purpose, but some of the more recent lines of inquiry may be sketched out briefly. Before proceeding I should point out that many of the works that I will accuse here of having failed to provide a full and adequate explanation for the workings of the Athenian sociopolitical order will be frequently and approvingly cited in later chapters. Attempting a new understanding of Athenian democracy is indeed to stand on the shoulders of those who are giants not only in terms of their scholarship but because of their moral commitment to demonstrating the enduring importance of the question.
The simplest way of explaining the survival of the Athenian political order is to deny that true democracy ever existed at Athens, by asserting that the masses never held true political power. Lionel Pearson, for example, argued in an article on Athenian party politics that until the death of Pericles (in 429) the demos controlled only domestic policy, while more important questions of foreign policy were dealt with by the board of ten generals. Pearson suggested that Pericles, who served as a general for many years, became involved in domestic policy, and his intermixture of the two formerly discrete spheres led the demos to dabble in foreign policy after his death. The result was anarchy and so “the old democracy was dead.”41 But there is simply no evidence for the existence of discrete domestic and foreign spheres of responsibility at Athens, and no evidence that the board of generals ever had independent policymaking powers. Classical Athens never fell into a condition even approaching anarchy for any extended period, and the government functioned more or less efficiently for well over a hundred years after the death of Pericles. Pearson’s argument was based on the a priori assumption that “if free speech and the power of the ecclesia had been extended to larger issues, it is unbelievable that the Athenian democracy could have remained intact for a century.”42 His article, therefore, is not really an explanation of why the democracy worked, but a speculation on what the nature of Athenian government must have been, based on the presumption that it could not have been truly democratic and functioned so well.
A more detailed, but equally unsatisfactory, argument against the existence of true democracy at Athens was developed by R. A. de Laix, in a book on the Athenian Council. De Laix argued that the Council was the “senior partner” in the government and thus the most important policymaking body. The Assembly, as junior partner, was normally responsible only for rubber-stamping preliminary decisions (probouleumata) made in the Council. The Council was dominated by aristocrats and the wealthy until the latter part of the fifth century, by “middle-class” politicians thereafter; these politicians were given a constitutional position in the state in the fourth century and served as a ruling elite. 43Leaving aside “middle-class politicians” and their putative constitutional position, which will be considered below (1.C.5), the idea that the Council ruled Athens is fundamentally erroneous, as A. W. Gomme demonstrated in an article published some years before de Laix’s book appeared. Gomme argued that the Assembly truly ruled Athens, noting that the major political speeches were delivered in the Assembly, not the Council, and he pointed out that a corporate body can only rule if there is a continuity of membership and a corporate identity.44 Neither pertained in the case of the Athenian Council, whose membership changed annually. More recent scholarship has favored Gomme’s general conclusion. Although the agenda-setting function of the Council was certainly a necessary element in the democratic decision-making process, and the Council was responsible for some technicalities of state business, the final and most important decision-making body was the Assembly, which frequently amended, replaced, or rejected outright, recommendations the Councilmen put forward.45
M. I. Finley cited de Laix’s study as an example of “falling into the constitutional-law trap”: the fundamental error of imagining that it is possible to understand politics “by a purely formal . . . analysis of the ‘parliamentary’ mechanics alone.”46 M. H. Hansen has written extensively on the relationship between legislative enactment and policymaking; the division of powers among boards of “Lawmakers” (nomothetai), the peoples’ courts, Assembly, and individual citizens; the locus of sovereignty in the Athenian state; and in general on whether the Athenian state of the fourth century was constitutionally a “radical” or “moderate” democracy. Hansen concludes that the democracy was in general more “moderate” than it had been in the fifth century and that, due to the division of powers between the Assembly and people’s courts elaborated in the later fifth and early fourth centuries, the Assembly lost its ultimate sovereignty.47 The sovereignty issue has generated a good deal of discussion. Martin Ostwald agrees with Hansen that as a result of constitutional reforms in the late fifth century, the “sovereignty of law” replaced the political sovereignty of the people. R. Sealey has argued that dēmokratia never implied popular sovereignty but rather meant “rule of law”; according to Sealey, Athens was therefore a republic, not a democracy.48 I will return to the issue of sovereignty below (111.E.4, VII.C); suffice it to say here that much of the recent discussion seems to have fallen into the “constitutional-law trap.” Attempts to dehne divisions of powers, to find a unitary locus of sovereignty, and to enunciate a “rule of law” that was exterior, superior, and in opposition to the will of the people will not, I think, help us to understand the nature of Athenian democracy, because the Athenians themselves never acted nor thought along those lines.49
Laws and constitutional forms are indeed important, and I will turn to them often, because they both reflected and subsequently influenced the political attitudes of the Athenian populace. But the laws themselves may be less significant than the thought process that led to decisions about when laws should be enforced and when they should be ignored. A constitution remains, in Finley’s words, “a surface phenomenon,” and if we are to understand the reasons for Athenian sociopolitical stability, we must get beneath the surface, to the level of the society.50
Finley himself, who thought deeply and seriously about the social roots of Athenian democracy, sought a solution to the stability question in the economic realm. The democracy was made financially possible and social tensions were lessened, he postulated, at least in part because of the existence of the Athenian empire (ca. 478-405 B.C.). The empire benefited both rich and poor citizens materially, the former by providing outlets for investment, the latter by providing land (in overseas clerouchies, that is, citizen-colonies) and occupation (as rowers in the Athenian navy). Moreover, since the state was able to draw on sources of revenue (especially in the form of tribute) from outside its own local resources, it could afford to pay poorer citizens to participate in the government (as jurors and magistrates) without the necessity of exerting excessive economic pressure (in the form of steep taxes) upon the upper classes.51
The general argument that Athenian democracy depended upon the empire dates back to antiquity (cf. Ps-Xenophon and Thucydides, in particular). The major problem with the argument had been recognized well before Finley reopened the issue: democracy was restored in 403 after the collapse of the empire, and the state survived as a democracy without imperial revenues for over eighty years there-after.52 Finley was aware of this objection to the argument that the empire fueled the democracy, but he suggested that when the empire dissolved, the system was “so deeply entrenched that no one dared attempt to replace it. . . .”53 Surely this begs the question. In the decade after the fall of the empire, the Athenians actually expanded the state’s financial obligation of ensuring that poorer citizens could participate in the government, by introducing pay for attendance at Assembly meetings.54 If imperial revenues had been the key factor in fifth-century stability, it seems highly unlikely that stability could be maintained for so long after the revenues were lost. Perhaps there never would have been a full-blown “radical” democracy at Athens without the empire to buffer the financial strains of its development, but we need some further explanation for the continued success of the democratic form of government in the fourth century. Indeed, Finley’s identification of the social significance of the imperial revenues to the democratic state in the fifth century highlights the necessity of finding some different explanation for the stability of the Athenian social and political order in the period after 404 B.C.
A second important economic argument is based on linking democracy with the prevalence of chattel slavery. M. H. Jameson, arguing for the existence of a large population of agricultural slaves in Attica, suggested that the participation of large numbers of rural citizens in the government would only have been possible if they owned slaves whose labor would provide them with the financial wherewithal to spend significant amounts of time in the city performing the duties of a citizen.55 Jameson’s argument (like Pearson’s, above I.C.I) attempts not so much to explain the stability of the government as to demonstrate the existence of an institution by positing the impossibility of a stable democratic government without it.
Jameson’s conclusions on democracy and slavery were endorsed by Ste. Croix, who asserts that the existence of widespread agricultural slavery helps to explain the social stability of the democracy.56 Before proceeding, the stability/slavery argument should be separated from extraneous considerations. Ste. Croix’s concern with identifying a large population of agricultural slaves at Athens is conditioned by his desire to demonstrate empirically the validity of Marx’s hypothetical ancient “slave mode of production,” and by a need to explain in materialist terms the absence of overt class conflict in the best-documented state of Greek antiquity. The stability/slavery argument may, however, be made independently of Marxist theory; I emphasize Ste. Croix’s discussion of the democracy-and-slavery issue because it seems to me the most sophisticated in the recent literature, not in order to knock down a Marxist straw man.57 A broader, but separate, question is whether or not Greek civilization as a whole was “based on” slave labor. This question is of only peripheral significance to the present inquiry, since I am attempting to explain the apparent uniqueness of the Athenian political experience, not the general linkages between economic mode of production and culture.58
It is important to decide whether the issue of Athenian political stability is to be linked directly or indirectly to slavery. An indirect argument that slavery was important to Athenian government could be framed as follows: the existence of large numbers of slave laborers provided an economic surplus, part of which could be tapped by the state through taxation and used to finance the expenses of the democratic government. Given the certainties that (1) a significant (if not quantifiable) slave population existed in Athens, (2) slaves could generate a surplus (wealth above and beyond what they consumed), and (3) the state had the power to tax surplus wealth, this indirect argument cannot be disproved. But it does not necessarily tell us much about the roots of Athenian sociopolitical stability. If Jameson’s conclusion is incorrect, and most slaves were owned by a relatively small group of wealthy men (whether citizens or resident aliens), the question devolves to a financial one: how did rich men in Athens make their money? The answer to this question is of intrinsic interest, and various answers have been proposed, but it will not adequately explain either the social rapprochement between the Athenian elite and the mass of citizens or the processes of direct democratic decision making.59
In order to demonstrate that there was a direct and causal relationship between stable democratic government and slavery, we must prove that a large percentage of Athenian citizens owned slaves and thereby gained sufficient leisure to become actively involved in democratic government and acquired a vested interest in maintaining a stable social order that protected private property. The slave-owning population must be shown to include many of the non-elite Athenians who attended the Assembly, sat as jurors, and served as magistrates. Given that a majority of Athenians owned land and at least half the citizen population lived in rural areas (see below, III.E.I), it is also essential (as Ste. Croix recognized) to show that agricultural slavery was common.60 Widespread slaveholding by neither non-elite Athenians nor by average Athenian farmers can be demonstrated. The available evidence was marshaled by Jameson and Ste. Croix, but neither was able to prove the matter empirically ; other scholars have looked at the same body of evidence and have arrived at the opposite conclusion.61
I will attempt in the body of this study to disprove the presumptions on which Jameson and Ste. Croix grounded their a priori arguments for broad-based agricultural slave owning in Attica (that neither citizen participation, nor the absence of class conflict can be explained except by the assumption that many small holders owned slaves). Meanwhile their hypotheses may be set against the powerful argument that slave ownership would not have made financial sense to the average Athenian farmer in light of the smallness of plots and the seasonal nature of agricultural labor.62 In sum, while the importance of slavery to Athenian society and economy should not be underestimated, no direct, causal relationship between chattel slavery and social stability or democratic decision making is demonstrable at Athens.63
Several scholars have argued that the stability of the democracy was due to the predominance of “middle-class” citizens in all important governmental bodies, especially in the Assembly and on juries. The question here is whether a large middle class, with identifiable class interests and with a strong political voice, actually existed in Athens. We do not possess the evidence to generate an accurate wealth/population curve for classical Athens, but Greek writers seem to have had no well-developed concept of a middle class. The sources typically speak of the “wealthy” and the “poor,” meaning by the former the leisure class and by the latter those who were constrained to work for a living.64 The Greek rich/poor terminological dichotomy suggests that the wealth/population curve was quite steep, but there would still be some individuals who would fall into the middle range in terms of wealth. One might legitimately ask how these “middling” citizens saw themselves in relation to the state, how they made their living, and to what extent they helped to stabilize Athenian society and the political process.
A.H.M. Jones, whose book Athenian Democracy helped to dehne the modern debate over the influence of a hypothetical “middle class” in Athens, argued for the existence of a middle class on the basis of a demographic analysis. Jones suggested that the size of the Athenian citizen population dropped sharply in the late fifth to the early fourth centuries, on the assumption that the poorest citizens were forced by economic constraints to emigrate after Athens’ loss in the Peloponnesian War. The population thereafter, he argued, was very stable, about twenty-one thousand citizens. Of these, about six thousand had enough surplus income to pay war taxes (eisphora), and these taxpayers were the ones who saw to the government. Demographic factors, then, help to account for “the increasingly bourgeois tone of the fourth-century democracy.”65
There was a population decline between 431 and 403, perhaps a very precipitous one. And the lower population probably did relieve some of the pressure of land-hunger and so may have contributed to social stability in the early fourth century. But it is unlikely that the population curve between 403 and 322 was as flat as Jones believed.66
Furthermore, the taxpaying contingent of the fourth-century population was much smaller than Jones assumed. J. K. Davies, after a careful study of the Athenian upper classes, has convincingly argued that only about twelve hundred to two thousand Athenians had fortunes of about one talent (6,000 drachmas) or more and that a fortune of roughly this size would be required to live a life of leisure and to be liable for payment of war taxes. The rest of the citizens had to work for their living. The leisure-class population of two thousand (maximum) was much too small to have numerically dominated Athenian egalitarian political institutions, such as the Assembly or courts.67
Even though the leisure class was too small to control directly the democratic government, a common occupational interest and so a common “moderate” political outlook might be presumed to exist among those who were less than leisure class but well above poverty level. S. Perlman, for example, who took the existence of a large “middle class” at Athens more or less for granted, argued that its members were heavily involved in commerce and that they constituted a cohesive political interest group large and influential enough to keep the state on an even keel through most of the fourth century.68 The existence of a commercial middle class, with an interest in state support of trade and in competition for markets with foreign nationals, was denied a half-century ago by J. Hasebroek, who argued that most of those involved in large-scale trading at Athens were metics (resident foreigners). Hasebroek’s thesis on the number of citizens involved in trade may have been overstated, but his general conclusion that there was no cohesive commercial class of citizens to influence state trade policy is surely correct.69 While there were certainly a good number of Athenians who were directly and indirectly involved in commerce, no evidence suggests that these persons constituted anything like a “class” (however one wants to define the term), had well-defined political goals, or were sufficiently numerous to influence the tenor of Athenian politics.70 Most Athenians no doubt lived at a level somewhere between affluence and abject poverty, but their class interest, insofar as they had one, was that of persons who had to work for a living and who viewed themselves in relation to, and sometimes in opposition to, the leisured rich.
Economic factors alone are inadequate to explain Athenian sociopolitical stability, but one must keep the economic background in mind while searching for other answers. The empire (in the fifth century) and a surplus-generating slave population were indeed important. Athens also had major natural resources. The rich silver mines of south Attica were especially lucrative, but clay beds, marble quarries, and adequate (if unexceptional) agriculture contributed to the state’s wealth. The fine harbors of Piraeus attracted a large transit trade as well as a large metic population.71 Each of these resources contributed to the financial base of the democratic state which benefited directly through leasing of silver mines, collection of taxes on metics, and port duties.72 The larger the revenues that could be collected from these various public sources, the less need there was to tax the wealthy citizens in order to support the political activity of the poor, and so (at least potentially) the lower the level of social tension. But by the fourth century, Athens’ revenue from the various public sources was insufficient to keep the state solvent. The revenues of empire were gone, and silver production, disrupted in the war, apparently remained depressed until the 340s.73Consequently, the rich citizens had to support the democratic state, ideally through voluntary contributions, otherwise through taxation. The Athenians’ ability to extract wealth from sources other than the citizenry may therefore have buffered social tensions in the fifth century, but those tensions were never eliminated, and the loss of public revenues might have exacerbated class feeling in the period after 404. Furthermore, the economic advantages of Attica do not help to explain the Athenians’ success in policymaking by direct democratic means.
Recognition of the failure of material factors to explain social stability adequately, or decision making at all, may have been what led Finley to characterize Athens as “the model of a face-to-face society”: a society whose members knew each other intimately and interacted with one another closely.74 This knowledge and interaction led to an informal, but intense, training in public, political life and allowed the members of the society to work together toward common goals in a way that would be impossible for a group of strangers. The concept of the face-to-face society was borrowed by Finley from Peter Laslett’s studies of pre-industrialized English village life and may indeed have much to tell us about the processes of social integration on the local level. Recent work on the demes (villages, townships, or urban neighborhoods) of Attica has emphasized the importance of the deme as a unit in which relationships between citizens necessarily crossed class lines and so helped to unify the interests of elite and non-elite citizens.75
As a factor in local social stability, the integrative function of village life should not be underestimated. But Finley’s face-to-face model has serious flaws when extrapolated to the polis level. The polis of Athens was very much larger than a village, and the Athenian state was not constituted as a federation of villages. In order for true social stability to obtain, the elite of Athens had to be reconciled to the masses of Athens, and reconciliations on a local level, although good practice and arguably a valuable metaphor for the participants, were insufficient. When a rich Athenian entered the people’s court as a litigant, he could not count on having even a single fellow demesman on the jury, and the rest of the jurors were likely to be strangers, with no particular reason to feel especially grateful to him for benefactions he may have performed for his home village.76
If the model of the face-to-face society is limited in the social sphere, it is even less useful in the political sphere. The demes did not provide a training ground for politically ambitious citizens. No doubt the experience of the deme assembly and participation in the public life of the deme generally was useful for the political education of the ordinary Athenian (cf. below, IV.B.2), but the deme assemblies did not make major policy.77 The real political work of the state was done in the “national” Council, Assembly, and courtroom, and here each citizen had a history of intimate interaction with only a very small percentage of the participants. Exact population figures are unobtainable, but there were probably at least twenty thousand to forty thousand Athenian citizens through most of the fifth and fourth centuries. Thucydides (8.66.3) emphasizes the populousness of the polis and the fact that the members of the Athenian demos were not known to each other (dia to megethos tēs poleōs kai dia tēn allēlōn agnōsian) in explaining the success of the coup of 411, by which date war losses had considerably reduced the size of the citizen body?78
In support of his face-to-face model, Finley adduced the testimony of Aristotle’s discussion of the proper size for the ideal society in the Politics.79 Aristotle first notes the physical difficulties imposed by a large citizen body—who had the ability to be herald, other than Stentor, the famous great-voiced herald of the Iliad? (the same acoustical problem also occurred to Michels, see above, I.B). Aristotle then states that the citizen body must be limited in size so that the citizens will get to know one another personally and so become familiar with one another’s qualities. This is necessary because the citizens must be able to judge one another’s suitability for holding state offices. Aristotle’s discussion of the demographic organization of the ideal state is in fact a strong argument against explaining Athenian democratic process in face-to-face terms. While Aristotle never gives absolute figures for his ideal state’s citizen population, this passage and others show that it was obviously intended to be much smaller than Athens, where, as we have seen, most citizens did not know one another well. Aristotle’s ideal citizens are intended to be only a small fraction of the total population of the polis: a leisured ruling elite whose members would make their living by extracting the surplus value of the labor of a population of “natural” slave farmers and noncitizen craftsmen and merchants. Unlike the Athenians, Aristotle’s ideal citizens therefore would be able to devote themselves full time to education, military training, and political activity and so would come to know one another intimately.80
Aristotle’s comments demonstrate that the face-to-face model is not anachronistic when applied to Greek philosophical thought and that it might indeed have been regarded as an ideal. But that ideal did not and could not pertain in Athens, where there were relatively great numbers of citizens, most of whom necessarily spent the majority of their time engaging in remunerative, nonpolitical activities. Aristotle was well aware of this; whatever his practical goals in writing the Politics, his ideal society was not intended as a blueprint for reforming the existing Athenian citizen population.81 Unlike the ideal city of the Politics, which was to be “easy to take in at a glance” (eusunoptos: 1326b24), Athens remained an “imagined community” in that no one had ever seen the entire demos assembled; it was a political society that existed at the level of law and of ideology but not of personal acquaintance.82
Occasionally, writers have fallen back upon quasi-mystical explanations to account for “The Athenian Miracle.” Some of these, such as the virtues of the clear Athenian air as a tonic leading to clarity of thought, we may pass over without further comment. But serious scholars have suggested that the Athenians were somehow innately better suited to democracy than other men. Gomme, for example, proposed that the Athenians “had an almost unique genius for democratic politics.”83 While not wishing to impugn the influence in human affairs of individual genius, or to deny the possibility that a society could provide a particularly good environment in which genius might be manifested, I do not think the Athenians were inherently more democratic than other peoples. Since it seems unlikely that any human group possesses a genetic propensity toward democracy, it is misleading to rely on expressions like “unique genius for democratic politics.”
Nor can the stability of the democracy be attributed to the action of any individual genius, although the influence of certain individuals in the development of the democracy is undeniable (see below, n). While Cleisthenes and Pericles (for example) did much to establish and further the democratic form of government, the democracy would not have long outlived the latter had the Athenians not already developed a strong and viable social basis for political action.84 Any explanation for the survival of the Athenian state must take into consideration the post-Periclean period, when there was no directing “genius” controlling affairs. The Athenian democracy should not be viewed as a clock devised and wound up by a master technician.
The present study is justified both by the theoretical implications of the Athenian example for testing Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy and by the inadequacy of previous explanations of the stability of the Athenian social system and the functioning of direct democratic decision making. Despite the great quantity and high quality of scholarship on Athenian history, the key to Athens’ success in maintaining a political system unique in its own time and labeled an impossibility in ours has continued to elude students of the classical world. I would suggest that the failure may be attributed to the habits of looking for the key in familiar but wrong places and of using the wrong analytical tools. Most investigators have (whether consciously or not) employed the assumptions of political pragmatism, liberal pluralism, or materialism. Hence the key has been sought for the most part in the relationships between “politicians,” in the constitutional realm of individual rights and the state’s powers, and in materialistic explanations of various sorts. Each of these approaches has shed some light, but collectively they have obscured what I take to be the real key: the mediating and integrative power of communication between citizens—especially between ordinary and elite citizens—in a language whose vocabulary consisted of symbols developed and deployed in public arenas: the peoples’ courts, the Assembly, the theater, and the agora. This process of communication constitutes the “discourse of Athenian democracy.” It was a primary factor in the promotion and maintenance of social harmony, and it made direct democratic decision making possible.
In addition to assuming the fundamental importance to democracy of relations between mass and elite, this study is grounded in six interlocking premises: (1) that politics is a social phenomenon; (2) that a synchronic approach can validly be used to study the sociopolitical history of Athens in the period ca. 403-322 B.C.; (3) that every individual has opinions about human nature, morality, and politics, and that some opinions are common to many people in any given society; (4) that communication is symbolic and that symbols derive in part from ideology; (5) that an individual’s decisions, judgments, and actions are based, at least in part, on ideology and communication; and (6) that formal rhetoric in general, and the corpus of Attic orations in particular, provide examples of symbolic communication and can be used to reconstruct social opinions and principles and therefore can help us to understand the ideology of the Athenian citizenry. These six premises, and my basis for adopting them, are stated more formally in the following paragraphs.
1. “Politics is a cultural phenomenon, embedded in society; it is impossible to understand the political decisions or actions of either masses or elite leaders outside of their social context.”
While it has been suggested that Greek political thought and action can be can be understood in isolation from the social matrix of “private life”—indeed that the Greeks consciously chose to act according to political principles and to reject the private sphere—the value of looking at ancient politics in a social context has been adequately demonstrated by Finley, among others.85 The close relationship between politics and social structure seems to be a central assumption of all ancient political philosophers; Aristotle’s Politics, for example, is explicitly predicated upon a series of correlations between social groups and politics.86
2. “A synchronic approach can be valid when attempting a social historical analysis; and the period ca. 403-322 B.C. can be treated as a chronological unit for the purposes of analyzing mass-elite relations.”
On the general relationship between synchronicity and analysis we may note the work of William Dray, a philosopher of history who has argued that when historians engage in analysis they refer to periods rather than moments and that historical writing (even supposedly “pure” narrative) is invariably analytical.87 The social historian of antiquity typically deals with relatively long periods; an extreme example is R. MacMullen’s Roman Social Relations, 50 B.C—A.D. 284, which treats a period of over three centuries as a unit.88 The justification for treating extensive eras as analytical units is typically the scarcity of useful sources, undeniably a factor for all periods of ancient Greek history, although less so for fourth-century Athens than for many others (see below, I.E). The danger remains that a synchronic approach may treat a rapidly evolving society as static and thereby misrepresent the dynamic social reality. Hence, it is incumbent on historians to justify their assumptions that synchronic social analysis of a relatively long period can yield meaningful results.
Chapter II will trace the evolution of the constitutional and institutional relationship between mass and elite in the sixth through the fourth centuries B.C., but the detailed analysis of sociopolitical interaction in Chapters III-VII will concentrate on the period from the end of the Peloponnesian War to the end of Athenian independence after the Lamian War (403-322 B.C.). There seems no fundamental demographic problem with treating the period 403—322 synchronically, once we are aware of the probability that the Athenian citizen population grew during this period. We cannot demonstrate either the rate or steadiness of demographic growth, but it was in any case organic; there was no large new body of citizens added after 403 who might have imported radically different cultural or social assumptions.89 Furthermore, despite some constitutional changes, the period can reasonably be treated as a unit in terms of political development, as it was by the contemporary author of the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens (AP 41.2). In terms of sources, the period is characterized by the corpus of Attic orators (cf. below, I.E); genuine legal and political orations are rare before this period and nonexistent after it. The subject matter of the orations varies, but there is no dramatic change in either form or general content over the course of the period. K. J. Dover, who analyzed Athenian “popular morality” on the basis of the orations and of Attic comedy, argued for a high degree of continuity in social attitudes from the late fifth through the late fourth centuries.90 The corpus of speeches will provide my most important texts. While I have attempted to pay close attention to the chronological context of each text, I have come to a conclusion similar to Dover’s: the attitudes toward the relations between mass and elite expressed in the speeches throughout this period seem quite consistent over time. I would not deny that those attitudes evolved in the course of the era, but a significant degree of ideological continuity can be demonstrated, and the period can therefore be treated as a unit for purposes of sociopolitical analysis.
3. “Each member of any given community makes assumptions about human nature and behavior, has opinions on morality and ethics, and holds some general political principles; those assumptions, opinions, and principles which are common to the great majority of those members are best described as ideology.”
Attempting to prove the first part of this statement rigorously would take us much further into epistemology, moral philosophy, and cognitive psychology than I am prepared to go here; I hope most readers will be willing to accept it at face value. My definition of ideology is similar to that of Finley, who suggests that ideology is “the matrix of attitudes and beliefs out of which people normally respond to the need for action, . . . without a process of ratiocination leading them back to the attitudinal roots or justification of their response . . . ,” or “the combination of beliefs and attitudes, often unformulated or subconscious and certainly neither coherent nor necessarily consistent, which underlay . . . thinking and . . . behaviour.”91 Ideology is hence distinct from philosophy and theory in that it is not necessarily clearly articulated, logically consistent, or consciously employed in the decisionmaking process. To speak of Athenian democratic ideology, then, is not to assume the existence of a body of democratic theory; as has often been pointed out, there was no philosophically articulated democratic theory in fifth- or fourth-century Athens.92 On the other hand, I follow Brent Shaw in defining ideology as “a more organized and structurally consistent set of ideas” than mere prejudices.93
Ideology, therefore, consists of a set of ideas sufficiently well organized to facilitate decision and action. Political ideology is the subset of ideology that relates to the political sphere. P. C. Washburn offers a concise conceptualization of political ideology as “individuals’ relatively stable, more or less integrated set of beliefs, values, feelings, and attitudes about the nature of human beings and society and their associated orientations toward the existing distribution of social rewards and the uses of power and authority to create, maintain, or change them.”94 Political ideology is therefore an important part of the interior context that will help a subject to judge and to formulate an appropriate response on the political plane to changes in the exterior environment. In short, it defines how one is likely to react to events.
The second part of the statement, that one may speak of an ideology common to most members of a community, may be more problematic but should need no elaborate defense. The very term “community” implies some minimal level of shared values, and a degree of commonality of values in every functioning society is assumed not only by modern sociologists but by ancient historians, philosophers, and orators.95 The main problem comes in determining the extent and specificity of shared ideology. In particular, does ideology transcend the gulf between mass and elite? I agree with Chester G. Starr and other scholars that at least to some degree it must.96 It is, however, dangerous to assume too much ideological continuity, and texts written by and for elite audiences must be treated differently from texts written by the elite for mass audiences. Furthermore, we must attempt to discover the origins of Athenian political ideology and to locate its operational significance within the communication between Athenian citizen masses and elites. Is popular political ideology the result of a “trickle down” of ideas and values from the elite? Is it a product of the experience and self-definition of the masses? Whose interest does it serve? Many traditional Marxists (who regard ideology as the ideas of the dominant class, used to promote false consciousness among the lower classes) and some students of Greek aristocratic culture assume that ideology is indeed a creation of the elite. But my formulation, which has much in common with the view of ideology developed by the structural Marxist Louis Althusser, raises the possibility that ideology is the locus of a struggle between mass and elite conceptions and images, a struggle that has the potential to transform institutional structures.97
4. “Communication between members of a society, especially in the context of political decision making, will make use of symbols (metaphors, signs) which refer to and derive from ideology.”
The theoretical basis for this statement ultimately derives from a semiotic model of cognitive psychology that assumes that the human mind works through the process of analogy by means of symbols or metaphors. Thought and perception, and therefore language, are symbolic and metaphoric; thus, communication is based on complex and intertwined symbolic references and cross-references. Communication is never simple, since symbols are not static and refer to other symbols. The meaning of words, sentences, images, and so on changes depending on the broader context, since the interpretation of any given symbol depends on associating it with other symbols. Semiotic theory therefore suggests that the meaning of a text lies not only in the writer’s original intention but in its “discourse,” which includes the text’s structure and context as well as its content. The interaction between receptor (reader or auditor) and text is also part of discourse, since each reader construes the text’s meaning according to his or her own symbol-network.98
The general principle of communication as discourse should raise few problems for anyone who agrees that the interpretation of a metaphorical message is affected by the frame of reference employed by both sender and receiver and by the relationship between them. Herodotus (5.92) provides a good example of this process in the story of Periander, tyrant of Corinth, who sent a messenger to Thrasybulus of Miletus to learn the secrets of a successful tyranny. Thrasybulus refused to speak to the messenger of political matters, but took him for a walk through a grain held where he lopped off the heads of the tallest stalks with his stick. The baffled messenger reported back to Periander that he had failed to learn anything useful and described the walk in the held. Periander immediately grasped the meaning and proceeded to put the lesson into action by eliminating the most prominent citizens of Corinth. Thrasybulus’ metaphorical message was inexplicable to the messenger, who lacked a proper frame of reference. Periander understood it because he shared a common frame of reference with Thrasybulus. But the message remains subject to different interpretations—did Thrasybulus advise killing the highest people, or suppressing them in some other way? Of course the message might have been “read” very differently by someone with a different frame of reference, for example an agronomist.
5. “An individual’s decisions, actions, and judgment of his or her fellows will be based, at least in part, upon ideology and symbolic communication.”
I suggested in point 3 that the Athenian citizens, like members of other communities, shared a common ideology. Expressed, like all other ideas, in terms of groups of symbols, this ideology provided a common metaphorical frame of reference—a mutually agreed upon “internal context”—by which the citizenry responded to events or ideas. Hence, a public speaker attempting to persuade the citizenry to act in a certain way might employ metaphors referential to that common ideology, in the hope of evoking a specific response from his audience. The text of every oration was a matrix of many symbols that operated at various levels, and no speaker could anticipate exactly how each member of the audience would react to each symbol. The expert public orators of Athens were extremely skilled at manipulating symbols, but communication is not completely dependent on conscious attempts by a speaker to evoke a specific response in his auditor. Much of the communication that went on between the orator and his audience may have operated at an unconscious level, but it was no less significant for that.
The idea that Athenian social and political decisions, actions, and judgments were the products of ideology and discourse functioning within the environment of the democratic political order and in response to external events is the central organizing principle of this study. The employment of an analysis based on communication and discourse seems justified in light of the failure to explain the democracy by theories that assume that Athenian political action and social relations were motivated largely by a rational assessment of clearly understood alternatives. This rationalist assumption has tended to lead to Finley’s “constitutional-law trap.” I am in agreement with those who have argued recently that the study of constitutional arrangements and other formal institutions is a dead end and that without an understanding of the attitudes and values that created and maintained institutions, ancient social and political life will remain indecipherable.99 Therefore, while recognizing the danger that Goethe notes in Faust (lines 577—79), of the Zeitgeist being a mere reflection of the mind that perceives it, I hope that a study of the Athenian climate of opinion—of ideology and discourse—may offer some new insights into Athenian political and social life.
6. “Formal rhetoric in general, and the corpus of Attic orations in particular, provides examples of the symbolic communication of point 4; and hence for reconstructing the ideology of point 3; and therefore for understanding the Athenian citizens’ decisions, judgments, and actions in regard to their fellows.”
Recent critical theory has concentrated on the concept of rhetoric, the form in which content is cast, as an important principle that can be usefully applied to any text, literary or otherwise.100 The form of any text may well help to reveal the ideology of the society that produced it, but I am not in the position of having to prove that general proposition, since the ancient sources most important to my argument are rhetorical in the more narrow, traditional sense of the term.
The corpus of Attic orators provides a particularly valuable set of texts for analysis of mass-elite ideology. Most ancient texts were written by elites, specifically for an elite readership. Many of these “elite/elite” texts deal with the question of relations between mass and elite, but the attitudes and opinions that Thucydides or Plato, for example, attributed to the Athenian citizen masses were conditioned by their own elite frame of reference and that of their probable audience. While elite authors may not have intended to mislead their expected audience of elite readers about popular ideology, they were not directly accountable to non-elite critics. The orators were certainly members of the elite (see below, III.C.), but they wrote most of their speeches for oral delivery to a mass audience, generally either a large jury or an Assembly. Furthermore, the overt purpose of most orations was to persuade the mass audience to act—specifically, to vote—in a particular way. As Aristotle clearly recognized, an orator who wishes to persuade a mass audience must accommodate himself to the ethos—the ideology—of his audience. He must therefore in general speak well of what the audience thinks is good and ill of what the audience thinks is evil. He will present his own behavior and character as conforming to the values of his audience, his opponent’s as failing to conform.101 The tendency of orators to say whatever they believed might please their audience was considered reprehensible by elite political philosophers, who thought a speaker’s responsibility was to say what is true and necessary, not what is pleasant.102 But at the practical level of discourse in the courtroom and the Assembly, the orator had to conform to his audience’s ideology or face the consequences: losing votes or being ignored.
When addressing a mass audience, the Athenian orator used symbols, in the form of modes of address and metaphors, that derived from and referred to the common ideological frame of reference of his listeners. At least some metaphors became standardized and can be described as topoi. Rhetorical topoi were repeated by different orators over time; they were therefore familiar but certainly not empty of content. Indeed, topoi were reiterated precisely because of their symbolic value and demonstrated power to influence an audience. It would be reductionist to suppose that every comment in an oration derives immediately from popular ideology, but we may suppose that skilled and experienced speakers would avoid making comments that they thought were likely to contradict deeply held popular convictions.103 It is therefore possible to analyze the collected orations of the Attic orators to discover the sorts of symbols that were employed frequently and to reconstruct the political ideology of the citizen masses on the basis of these symbols.104
In the absence of a large collection of texts written by ordinary Athenians and for a mass audience, analysis of rhetoric offers our best hope for understanding the ideological roots of Athenian political organization and action. But only a small fraction of the speeches delivered in Athens were ever published, and probably less than 10 percent of these have survived. Furthermore, the corpus does not offer a random sample of Attic oratory.105 The selection we have is, however, a particularly valuable subset of the universe of all Athenian orations. We seldom know whether a particular speech was successful or not, but the surviving corpus contains primarily the works of extraordinarily skillful and successful orators, men whose reputations, and sometimes lives, rested upon their ability to manipulate symbols to good advantage. Furthermore, most (perhaps all) of the extant legal orations were prepared by and/or for elite litigants. Although it would be very instructive to know how a non-elite Athenian litigant addressed a jury, a reasonable assumption is that the elite litigant, facing a mass jury, had a particularly pressing need to appeal to a common ideology.
In most cases we can assume that the orator’s primary motive for using any given rhetorical tactic is selfish—the desire to persuade the members of his audience to vote in his favor. Yet, as I will argue, speeches delivered by elite Athenians to mass audiences had a social function that transcended the individual motives of the speakers. Along with drama in the theater and gossip in the streets, public oratory, in the courts and the Assembly, was the most important form of ongoing verbal communication between ordinary and elite Athenians. Formal rhetoric was therefore a primary means by which mass-elite relations could be discussed publicly. Communication may be both a means to an end and an important end in itself. Through oratory the underlying political ideology was manifested in specific sets of symbols and thus was made operative at the level of collective action. Therefore, public rhetoric not only helps us to define Athenian political ideology, it was instrumental in the regulation of mass-elite relations for the Athenians themselves.
The approach I have suggested offers the advantage of treating rhetorical texts at the level of image and appearances, which were recognized by Aristotle (Rhet. 1404a 1-12) as the defining characteristics of practical rhetoric.106 Modern students of Athenian history, when they have used rhetoric for anything beyond mining speeches for nuggets of information regarding events, have often taken a literalist approach, supposing that speeches are a more or less accurate mirror of social and political reality. This has, I think, led to some fairly serious errors. On the one hand, there is the tendency to take (for example) Demosthenes’ description of Aeschines’ background at face value. But perhaps more damaging (because less obviously misdirected) is the assumption that (for example) when wealthy litigants address jurors as economic equals, the jurors must have been wealthy.107 I will attempt to demonstrate in the body of this study that a litigant may cast both himself and the jury in roles that are at variance with reality. But that does not necessarily mean that speakers were consciously attempting to deceive or that jurymen were gullible. Rather, oratorical discourse stimulated two kinds of responses. Not only did it reveal a social or political reality, but it also produced a response at the level of image and symbol. The juryman who was treated as wealthy by the litigant might temper the action he would otherwise have taken on the basis of existing class or status inequality, by operating on the level of the symbolic equality that the litigant proposed. Once again, we must keep in mind the interactive and dynamic nature of the texts we hope to understand.
The orators I cite most often in this study—Lysias, Andocides, Isocrates, Isaeus, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Hyperides, Dinarchus, and Lycurgus—all flourished between 404 and 322 B.C. We know by far the most about the life of Demosthenes, because of the large number of speeches preserved under his name and because of Plutarch’s Life of Demosthenes. The social backgrounds of the orators, insofar as they can be reconstructed, are considered in Chapter III(c). We also have some rather scanty fragments of speeches by these and other orators from the same period, but fragments are somewhat less useful than whole speeches since the context is usually lost.
From the second half of the fifth century we have the speeches recorded in Thucydides’ History and several speeches and rhetorical exercises by the logographer and oligarchic mastermind, Antiphon. None of these was demonstrably written for presentation to a mass audience, but they purport to be real and take the form of genuine speeches. Of particular interest among the Thucydidean speeches are Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the speeches delivered to the Athenian Assembly (by Pericles, Cleon, Diodotus, Alcibiades, and Nicias), and the speeches of the Syracusan politicians Hermocrates and Athenagoras before the democratic Assembly of Syracuse (see Appendix). The relationship of the speeches in Thucydides to the speeches actually delivered (and in the cases of the Funeral Oration and Athenian Assembly speeches, at least, there can be little doubt that originals really were delivered) has been much debated, but no scholarly consensus on the issue has emerged.108 I have attempted to avoid basing statements about Athenian ideology on passages from fifth-century speeches alone. On the other hand, the ideological underpinning sometimes seems very similar to that of genuine fourth-century orations, and some conclusions about fourth-century ideology may be extrapolated back at least as far as the latter part of the fifth century.
Aristotle (Rhet. Book 3) subdivided rhetoric into deliberative (political decision making), forensic (legal), and epideictic (display); the different conditions under which each type of speech was delivered affected the rhetorical tactics of the speaker and are detailed in Chapter III. Deliberative speeches include those delivered in the Assembly and Council. The surviving forensic speeches may be subdivided into those prepared for political trials (usually written and delivered by an expert politician) and those for private trials. The latter sort was usually written by a professional speechwriter (logographer), then memorized and delivered by his wealthy client.109 Display speeches include public funeral orations—which were delivered before a mass Athenian audience—and speeches prepared by professional rhetoricians as examples of eloquence—which were not. Some of the latter merge into the category of political pamphlets, which were probably meant to be read privately or aloud to a small elite audience. Also contained in the corpus are some letters and nonpublic texts.
Each of the various subgenres may be treated somewhat differently for ideological analysis. Among epideictic speeches, the public funeral orations can be used to look at general ideological notions but are often less useful than deliberative and forensic speeches for the particular purpose of analyzing mass-elite relations.110 Some epideictic speeches, such as Isocrates’ In Praise of Helen, seem to be purely esthetic; I have not made much use of these. Epideictic speeches written as political pamphlets must be used with considerable care, as they fall into the category of elite/elite literature. Many of Isocrates’ speeches are of this sort. On the other hand, in at least some of his pamphlet/ speeches, Isocrates seems to have hoped to influence a fairly broad spectrum of Athenian opinion, and these speeches often share at least some of the ideological presuppositions of speeches written for mass audiences.111 As in the case of the speeches of Antiphon and Thucydides, Isocrates’ pamphlets will be used primarily to reinforce arguments drawn on the basis of less problematic material. The same general considerations apply to Plato’s Apology of Socrates.
Deliberative and forensic speeches are, collectively, the most useful, but the various subcategories may serve somewhat different purposes. Private trial orations are important for investigating social relations. Deliberative and political trial orations, which I will refer to generically as “political rhetoric,” also refer to the social background, but they are particularly informative about the relationship between elite politicians and their mass audiences. The divergences between the rhetorical tactics employed by private litigants and politicians have much to tell us about the role of the politician in the Athenian state.
Debate over the authorship of some speeches stretches back to antiquity. Many of the private trial speeches assigned in the manuscripts to Lysias and Demosthenes, for example, have been attributed by scholars to other authors. In some cases the argument for different authorship is very strong, in others considerably less so.112 But the authorship, especially of private trial orations, is seldom of great moment to my argument. As long as the speech in question was actually written for delivery to a mass audience during the period we are concerned with, it can be used for ideological analysis. I have assumed throughout that the speeches as we have them are similar in content and organization to the form in which they were delivered. Some speeches were no doubt revised before publication, but in general the revision probably was not serious enough to affect the argument materially.113
The date of delivery of many speeches can be determined quite closely on the basis of internal or external evidence. Others, which are less precisely datable, can be bracketed within a decade or so.114 Once again, although chronological context may be very significant in some instances, the synchronic assumption I have made above (I.D, point 2) may justify using speeches that cannot be precisely dated. The synchronic assumption is also important when we consider the uneven distribution of speeches across the period 403-322. For example, among dated speeches, we have an average of over twice as many per annum in the period 355-338 (2.2) as in 377-356 (1.0), and 14 of the total of 17 fourth-century Assembly speeches date to the former period (Appendix: Table 1). The Appendix lists the speeches of the corpus by author, according to the traditional numbering system. The subgenre and date (if known) of each speech is indicated, along with any contextual considerations (in terms of authorship, chronology, and so on) that appear to me to be particularly relevant.
While rhetorical texts provide my primary source material, a variety of other sorts of texts will be cited. Among ancient philosophical treatises, the most important for our purposes are Aristotle’s Politics and Rhetoric. Aristotle’s analyses of political sociology in the Politics and of the purposes, strategies, and conditions of public oratory in the Rhetoric are extremely valuable, both for his insights into mass-elite relations and for the context of those relations. In many ways, Aristotle was hostile to democracy and he wrote for an elite audience. Nevertheless, he was very aware of the power of mass ideology. His theoretical analysis of “radical” democracy provides a counterpoint to my own reading.115
Tragedy and comedy, like public orations, were written for presentation to a mass audience (cf. below, III.E.6). The theater offered a forum in which Athenians could attempt to explain themselves to themselves and could comment upon their own society.116 The Attic dramatists worked on a broader canvas and dealt with a wider range of human (and divine) relationships than did the orators, and the function and goals of playwrights may not have been been explicitly and immediately political.117 The dramatist hoped to please the audience and stood to gain (in terms of fame and prizes) if he succeeded in doing so, but his life and career were not placed as obviously on the line as were those of the political orator. Moreover, the playwright did not confront the audience in his own person. Drama, therefore, may not offer as direct and clear a commentary on the relations between mass and elite as rhetoric. Yet many of the symbols, metaphors, and plot structures of Attic tragedy and comedy are clearly informed by tensions between mass and elite, and dramatic texts can help to elucidate those tensions and the means by which they were mediated. The relative scarcity of citations of tragedy and comedy in this study is not due to a belief that the potential of drama to explicate Athenian political sociology is limited; to the contrary, the potential is so great that a separate study would be required to treat the subject of the political sociology of Attic drama with the seriousness that it deserves.118
Historiography and biography are important for gaining an appreciation for the context of mass-elite relations, and some historians, notably Thucydides, have much to say on the matter. The Lives of Plutarch (especially those of Pericles, Demosthenes, and Phocion) contain valuable material, although we must keep in mind that Plutarch’s purpose in writing was moral rather than historical or sociological (see Plut. Alexander 1). A particularly useful source of both historical and constitutional material is the Constitution of Athens (Athēnaiōn Politeia), probably written by a student of Aristotle. Other historical sources (e.g., Herodotus) will figure prominently in Chapter n. Once again, it is essential to remember that ancient historiography and biography were written by and for elite audiences. While we cannot hope to understand mass-elite relations on either a social or a political plane without the ancient historians’ description of the events that provided the environment in which mass-elite relations developed, we must view their testimony as to the whys and wherefores of those relations with considerable caution.119
The major category of “nonliterary” texts that can be brought to bear on the history of democratic Athens, namely, inscriptions, will play a relatively small role in this study. However, individual inscriptions often clarify legal questions, and the form, vocabulary, content, and iconography of public inscriptions, when viewed collectively, may help to elucidate some of the theories that will be advanced in the following pages. Once again, the potential contribution of epigraphy and iconography to mass-elite relations is considerable and deserves more space than can be devoted to it here.120
In sum, this volume is not a constitutional history of Athenian government, a history of Athenian politicians and their dealings, or the general “social and economic history of classical Athens” to which J. K. Davies considered his Athenian Propertied Families a prolegomenon.121 It is not intended to replace either of the first two categories of investigation. I hope that it will contribute to the larger enterprise of the third category by explaining how political sociology contributed to social stability and how direct democratic decision making was facilitated through mass-elite communication.
In the course of the investigation, a number of themes will recur. Besides the central problem of masses and elites, we will be concerned with the related dichotomies of individual/community, personal liberty/political consensus, and sovereignty of law/sovereignty of popular will. Chapter II deals with the historical development of the Athenian elites and masses in the context of, and as an influence on, the evolving democratic constitution from the sixth through the fourth centuries B.C. Here, coverage will necessarily be selective and will concentrate on what M. Foucault called “the history of that which renders necessary a certain form of thought.”122 Chapter III considers the nature of the relationship between public speaker and his audience, similarities and differences between private Athenian citizens and expert politicians, and the various forums of political debate and communication. Chapters IV-VI deal with how the elites of ability, wealth, and status were treated in Athenian rhetoric, in an attempt to understand both the strategies of Athenian speakers and the operational significance of oratory in state and society. Chapter VII suggests some general conclusions about the role of rhetoric and ideology in the maintenance of social harmony and in the processes of democratic decision making at Athens.
1 For a particularly nasty ancient portrait of the “democratic man” see Plato Republic 8.555b-569c with the comments of Ste. Croix, CSAGW, 70–71. On democracy in 18th-century political debates and its modern acceptance, see Finley, DAM, 9–10; cf. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 14–15. On the near universal acceptance of democracy as an ideal, and on differing definitions of democratic, see Andrew J. Nathan, Chinese Democracy (New York, 1985), esp. ix–x, 224–32. Of course there are exceptions; the ruler of the state of Brunei on Borneo, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, is quoted (Newsweek, December 22, 1986, p. 24) as saying of democracy: “We tried it, and it didn’t work.”
2 In elite discourse the term dēmos was sometimes used of the lower classes, rather than of the entire citizen body. See the discussion of the term in Vlastos, “ΙΣΟΝΟΜΙΑ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΗ,” 8 n. 1; Ste. Croix, “Character,” 21-26; Whitehead, Demes, 364-68; Raaflaub, “Democracy, Oligarchy,” 524 with n. 36, and below, I.B. The argument of Sealey, “Origins,” esp. 281, and Athenian Republic, esp. 91-106, 146-48, that Athenian ideas of democracy can only be understood by disassociating those ideas from the concept of “government by the people,” seems to me fundamentally wrong; cf. below, VII.C. Nor am I persuaded by Sealey’s claim (Athenian Republic, 5) that the laws of Athens were written with a “standard citizen” in mind—one who was considerably wealthier than the “average citizen” and whose values and norms “determined the values and norms of behavior for the whole society.”
3 On the influence of elites and the responsibilities of the masses in modern democracies, see Marger, Elites and Masses, esp. 209—98. On differentiation, see Luhmann, Differentiation, 138-65, and below, III.D.3.
4 Raaflaub, “Democracy, Oligarchy,” 532, cf. 544 n. 93; “Freien Bürgers Recht,” 44-46; Meier, Anthropologie, esp. 20-22; cf. Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York, 1975), 78. On the political position of Athenian women, see also Lacey, Family, 151-76; Cantarella, Pandora's Daughters, 38-51; Keuls, Reign of the Phallus. For slaves, see esp. Golden, “Slavery and Homosexuality,” on the importance of drawing the psychic distinction between male youths (potential citizens) and slaves.
5 Krupteia: H. Jeanmaire, “La Cryptie lacédémonienne,” REG 26 (1913): 121-50. Gouldner, Enter Plato, 33-34, suggests that Athenian slaves were, on the whole, better off than Spartan helots.
6 On the development of boards of overseers of women, which apparently originated on Thasos, see B. J. Garland, “Gymnaikonomoi: An Investigation of Greek Censors of Women.” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1981). Overseers of women are first attested at Athens in the last quarter of the fourth century, after the end of the democracy; Garland (11-45) suggests that the magistracy was introduced by Lycurgus in ca. 328-326, but the evidence for this date is no stronger than it is for the communis opinio of ca. 317, by Demetrius of Phaleron.
7 Universal male suffrage was still a very rare phenomenon in modern western nations at the close of the nineteenth century; female suffrage was unknown before the twentieth. Cf. the survey in Bowles and Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism, 42-47, 56: “. . . the universal suffrage and civil liberties generally associated with liberal democracy simply did not exist in any country before World War I. It was only distantly approximated in a handful of nations.”
8 Cf. esp. Davies, “Athenian Citizenship,” who points out the various more restricted alternatives by which citizenship might have been (and was, in other poleis) defined, cf. idem, DCG, 37-38; Ste. Croix, CSAGW, 283-84, “Character,” 41; Finley, PAW, 9; Reinhold, “Human Nature,” 24-25. Prevalence of oligarchy: Raaflaub, “Freien Bürgers Recht,” 8. Assuming a total slave population of 40-80,000 (below, 1.n.59), about 10,000 adult male metics, and a citizen population of ca. 30,000 (below, III.E.1), it is possible to suggest that the citizen population was about half of the total adult male population; but none of these numbers is secure.
9 Good introductions to the Athenian political structure include Gomme, “Working”; Hopper, Basis, Finley, “Athenian Demagogues,” esp. 9-13; and Jones, AD, esp. 99-133. The most important ancient source for the constitution is the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens; see the extensive commentary by Rhodes, CommAP; cf. Hignett, HAC. More specialized studies on various government institutions will be cited in Chapters 11 and 111. While the distribution of offices by lot was considered the distinctive constitutional feature of democracy (e.g., Aristot. Rhet. 1365b31-32), some officials were elected, notably the board of ten generals. Some elective financial offices had a property qualification, but this was to assure personal financial accountability, see Jones, AD, 48-49; Hignett, HAC, 224; Ste. Croix, CSAGW, 602 n. 21; Gabrielsen, Remuneration, 112-15. Hansen, AECA, 207-26, draws interesting parallels between the Athenian Assembly and some of the local cantonal assemblies (Landsgemeinde) of Switzerland. The parallel is, however, limited, since the cantonal assembly’s sphere of competence is limited by the powers of the federal Swiss government, and the citizens of the cantons meet in assembly only once each year. Cf. also Woodhead, “ΙΣΗΓΟΡΙΑ,” 132 n. 9.
10 Cf. the comments of Loraux, Invention, 1-14, concluding that “we no longer believe naively that we are the posterity whom the orators [of funeral orations] exhorted to remember Athens” (14). A notable example of the tendency to assume continuity of political forms is A. B. West, “Pericles’ Political Heirs,” CPh 19 (1924): 124-46, 201-28. For more recent assessments of Athenian political groups, see below, 111.D.2.
11 Meier, Anthropologie, esp. 7-26, 46, while making some extremely valuable observations, seems to me to overemphasize the gulf between ancient and modern political organization; cf. below, 1.n.83. See also Ober, “Aristotle’s Political Sociology,” for a discussion of the assumption of Holmes, “Aristippus,” that the lack of social differentiation in Greek poleis renders the experience of ancient politics irrelevant to the modern experience. Holmes’ article contains pointed criticism of the theories of the school of political philosophy based on the ideas of Leo Strauss, whose members have tended to take the lead in advocating the usefulness of ancient political experience. A primary problem with the Straussian approach, from my point of view, is the assumption that only the philosophical products of elite culture are of contemporary value. I think the Athenian mode of political organization itself is at least as relevant to the modern world as anything Plato or Aristotle had to say about it.
12 On Athenian ideas of equality and freedom, and their limits and contradictions, see Aristot. Pol. 1281a39-69, 1284a30-34, 1286a25-35, 1317a40-616, 1318a2-10, Rhet. 1366a4; cf. Finley, “Freedom of the Citizen,” esp. 13-14; Maio, “Pohteia” esp. 19-20; Jones, AD, 45-50; Larsen, “Judgment,” esp. 3-5; Arnheim, Aristocracy, 130-31, 156; Osborne, Demos, 9-10; and above all Raaflaub, “Freien Bürgers Recht,” “Democracy, Oligarchy,” Entdeckung der Freiheit, 258-312. On the misguided attempt to find a “liberal temper” in Greek political theory, see Holmes, “Aristippus,” 115 (criticizing Havelock, Liberal Temper). On the difficulty of applying purely Marxist notions of class struggle and consciousness to the Athenian example, the best discussion is Ste. Croix, CSAGW, who believes that both did in fact pertain and frankly admits the difficulties of proving it; cf. Dover, GPM, 38-39; Finley, “Athenian Demagogues,” esp. 6-8, 18; Ober, “Aristotle’s Political Sociology.” On the inability of either traditional liberal or Marxist theory to explain democracy adequately, see Bowles and Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism, 8-20.
13 On aristocratic society as a contest society, see, for example, Gouldner, Enter Plato, 13-15, 45-55; cf. below, VI.A.
14 My definition of “masses” therefore excludes many persons (slaves, women, laboring-class metics) who would be included in a Marxist description of “the masses of Athens.” For a discussion of modern definitions of mass and elite, see, for example, Mills, Power Elite, 13-18.
15 See Belegstellenverzeichnis, s.vv. Of these, plēthos is perhaps the most ambiguous. For a discussion of its evolution from an institutional term for “majority” to a political synonym for “demos” to a sociological term for “the lower-class populace” (especially in elite writers), see Ruzé, “Plethos,” 259-63; cf. Rhodes, CommAP, 88-89.
16 Aristot. Pol. 1289b27-1290a5, 1293b34-39, 1296615-34, 1317639-41, 1360619–30, 1378b35-1379a4, Nicomachean Ethics 1131a24-29; Dem. 19.295; Isoc. 19.36; Lys. 2.80, 33.2, 14.38-44. Cf. Seager, “Elitism,” 7, for other references. Adkins, “Pro61ems,” 154, notes that there is 3 general tendency for ancient orators to list three virtues, rather than four or five, because of the pleasing “tricolor” effect this produces.
17 P. Abrams, “Sociology and History (I),” review of R. Hofstadter and S. M. Upset, Sociology and History (New York, 1968), in Past and Present 52 (1971): 118-25, has a stimulating and insightful discussion of the congruity of historical and sociological epistemology and the vital importance of conceptualization and hypothesis formation to historical inquiry. On the use of sociologiesl models in ancient history, see the clsssic programmstic ststement by K. Hopkins, “Rules of Evidence,” review of F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World, in Journal of Roman Studies 68 (1978): 178-86; cf. Ste. Croix, CSAGW, 81-82; Finley, Ancient History, esp. 4-6, 60–66, 78-87; Shaw, “Social Science.”
18 CSAGW, esp. 283-300.
19 Finley, AE, esp. 35-61, “Ancient City,” Ancient History, esp. 88-90. In PAW (esp. 1-10), Finley rather blurs the category of status, by using the term “class” in its place, while claiming (10 n. 29) not to have changed his primary analytical category. On the debate over whether status or class is the better analytical category for social analysis, see below, VI.A.
20 Jaeger, Paideia, esp. 111.84–85, Demosthenes.
21 But see Seager, “Elitism”; Welskopf, “Elitevorstellung”; Bolgar, “Training.” Finley, DAM, esp. 3-37; Davies, WPW, esp. 1-2; and Starr, Individual and Community, esp. 89-93, are also very sensitive to the interplay of mass and elite in Athenian political development.
22 Cf. Belegstellenverzeichnis, s.vv. Finley, PAW, 2, considers these to be class terms. While wealth was often a common denominator between elites, this oversimplifies the situation.
23 See, for example, Thuc. 6.13.1, 8.1.3-4; Aesch. 2.22, 171, 3.2, 4; Hyp. 5.22. Athenian jurors had to be at least 30 years of age, as (most probably) did magistrates; see R. Develin, “Age Qualifications for Athenian Magistrates,” ZPE 61 (1985): 149-59. Arbitrators had to be 60. Sommerstein, “Aristophanes,” 320-21, notes that Old Comedy “displays a systematic bias in favour of older and against younger men.” S. C. Humphreys, “Kinship Patterns in the Athenian Courts,” GRBS 27 (1986): 89-90, points out that older relatives were preferred as supporting witnesses. Age status may have had some influence on the orators’ claims that they had learned the history of the city from their elders; cf. IV.D.
24 In the fourth century B.C. the ca. twelve hundred to two thousand citizens with personal fortunes of ca. one talent were expected to pay war tax; the three hundred or so with ca. three to four talents were liable to serve as trierarchs (warship outfitters) and to perform other liturgies. See below, 111.E.1.
25 G. Orwell, Animal Farm (New York, 1946), 112.
26 The existence of a ruling elite in Athens is assumed by, for example, Haussoullier, Vie municipale, 132-33; Larsen, “Judgment,” 8; Perlman, “Politicians,” esp. 340-41, and “Political Leadership,” esp. 161-62; de Laix, Probouleusis, 174-77, 191-92; Mossé, “Politeuomenoi,” 199.
27 Jones, AD, 42; Finley, AE, 37. Cf. below, III.c.
28 Finley, DAM, 64; on the absence of an institutionalized ruling elite at Athens, cf. ibid., 25-26, Ancient History, 97-98; Hopper, Basis, 18-19; Bolgar, “Training.” Cf. below, VII.G.1.
29 See G. Mosca, The Ruling Class, ed. and trans. E. and C. Paul (New York, 1962); V. Pareto, The Mind and Society, 4 vols., trans. A. Bongiorno and A. Livingston (New York, 1935, repr. 1963). For concise introductions to elitist political philosophy, see Marger, Elites and Masses, 63–86; Burnham, Machiavellians, 81–115 (Mosca), 171–220 (Pareto).
30 Michels, Political Parties, esp. 50-51, 61-77, 85-128, 333-71. The quotes are from 50, 61–62. Cf. Burnham, Machiavellians, 141–68.
31 Marger, Elites and Masses, 81. Mills, Power Elite, esp. 3-29, is an example of an influential modern study which, while critical of some of the classical elitists, assumes the essential correctness of an elitist organizational model. Cf. Lipset, “Political Sociology,” esp. 91; Washburn, Political Sociology, esp. 50-103. See also below, VII.G.l
32 See Connor, NP, 94 n. 11, for a rare example of an ancient historian citing Michels; notably, the citation is approving (although it does not concern the Iron Law of Oligarchy per se).
33 Finley, DAM, esp. 7-16, PAW, esp. 139–40, cf. Ancient History, 97. For apathy as good for democracy: Lipset, “Political Sociology,” 95, with literature cited in n. 20. For other criticisms of classical elitist theory, see, for example, Bachrach, ed., Political Elites; Field and Higley, Elitism.
34 Finley, “Athenian Demagogues,” cf. DAM, 3 -37, PAW, 70-84. Among important studies building on some of Finley’s ideas are Connor, NP; Strauss, AAPW.
35 Cf. the discussion of Carter, Quiet Athenian, 10-17. On the natural desire of the elite to rule, see Aristot. Pol. 1283b34-1284634; cf. Ober, “Aristotle’s Political Sociology.” See also below, II.F.6.
36 Aristotle (Pol., esp. 1265b10-12, 1296a21-32, 1302b24-25, 1303b13-17, 1304b20-1305a7) regards class tension to be among the greatest dangers facing the polis and devotes much space to recommendations of how tensions can be mediated, both on the ideological and material planes; cf. Ober, “Aristotle’s Political Sociology.” Ste. Croix, CSAGW, esp. 278-300, while tending to overemphasize the role of class at times, is the best and fullest treatment of the problem; cf. Fuks, “Patterns”; Vernant, “Remarks.” For different views on the prevalence and importance of class tension in relation to political disorder and civil strife in archaic and classical Greece, see, for example, E. Ruschenbusch, Untersuchungen zu Staat und Politik in Griechenland vom 7.-4. Jh. v. Chr. (Bamberg, 1978): ideology and class tension played little part in civil strife; all conficts were between competing hetaireiai of aristocrats and were caused by foreign policy problems. Lintott, Violence, 34: tensions arose “from the fundamental inequality between rich and poor,” but the relative “rareness of genuine class conflicts” is “their most striking feature”; cf. ibid., 272—73 for criticism of Ruschenbusch’s position. Cf. also the discussion of the role of class in archaic Athenian history, below, II.C, D. For a catalogue and analysis of staseis of the fifth and fourth centuries, see H.-J. Gehrke, Stasis. Untersuchungen zu den inneren Kriegen in den griechischen Staaten des 5. und 4. Jh v. Chr. (Munich, 1985).
37 On class struggle in the fourth century and the function of democracy in mediating it, see Ste. Croix, GSAGW, 284-87, 293-98; Vernant, “Remarks”; Fuks, “Patterns”; Rhodes, “On Labelling,” 208; Wood, “Agricultural Slavery,” 9-10, 13. Cf. the somewhat different view of the importance of the democratic political order of Meier, Anthropologie, esp. 18-21.
38 Lipset, “Political Sociology,” 91-92; cf. ibid., 83: “The central concern of the study of politics is the problem of consensus and cleavage. . . .” On the origins of political sociology, see ibid., 84-91, citing Marx, Tocqueville, Weber, and Michels as the “founding fathers” of the field. Washburn, Political Sociology, 27, considers Weber the real inventor of political sociology, on the basis of the latter’s recognition that political institutions are an independent source of social change. Cf. Shaw, “Social Science,” 36-47, who criticizes narrowly functionalist sociological models on the grounds that functionalists cannot adequately explain social change or conflict and so tend to overemphasize and eulogize equilibrium. But an excellent argument can be made in structuralist terms for the desirability of an institutional equilibrium that is the product of a dynamic process of democratic change; see Bowles and Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism, 185—88.
39 Among discussions of power I have found especially useful are Meier, Anthropologie, 32-35; Bachrach, ed., Political Elites, introduction: 2-5 (on the relationship between power and authority); Luhmann, Differentiation, 150-52 (power and decision making); Lipset, “Political Sociology,” 105-107 (access); Washburn, Political Sociology, esp. 19—20 (discussion of Weber on legitimacy); Foucault, History 1. 41-42, 81-102 (relationality); Bowles and Gintis, Democracy and Captitalism, 92-120 (heterogeneity).
40 See esp. Hdt. 3.80-82 with the comments of Ehrenberg, “Origins,” 525; and Connor, NP 199-206. Raaflaub, “Democracy, Oligarchy,” 517-18 with n. 3, notes that political thought “started early on” to deal with the exciting and unsettling phenomenon of democracy. My conception of the relationship between sociopolitical praxis and political theory—that practice and ideology interact to create democracy and that theory is posterior—is somewhat different from that of, e.g., Meier, Anthropologie, 7-8, 17, 27-44, who assumes that the idea of democracy must have preceded the practice. Cf. below, esp. II.E.
41 Pearson, “Party Politics”; quote: 50.
42 Ibid., 49.
43 de Laix, Probouleusis, esp. 139-42, 189-92. Cf. the other studies which assume the existence of a ruling elite at Athens, cited above, I.n.26. On the social composition of the Council, see below, 111.E.3.
44 Gomme, “Working.” Cf. Marger, Elites and Masses, 82.
45 Cf. Jones, AD, 111-22; Rhodes, Boule, esp. 78-87, 214-15. On de Laix’s erroneous reading of the relationship of the Council to the democracy, see the important reviews by Connor, “Athenian Council,” esp. 35-36; H. W. Pleket, Mnemosyne 4th ser. 31 (1978), 328-33, esp. 331. Hansen, “History of the Athenian Constitution,” 64, points out the rarity of the term probouleusis and notes that it is not attested as a technical constitutional term used by the Athenians.
46 Finley, PAW, 56.
47 See, for example, Hansen, Sovereignty, esp. 15-21 (an early and somewhat extreme statement of his position); cf. below, VII.C. Hansen, “Initiative and Decision,” is a good summary of many of his ideas on the nature of Athenian government and a strong statement of his “separation of powers” theory.
48 Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty, 497-524; Sealey, “Athenian Concept of Law,” Athenian Republic, esp. 146-48, 91-106. Cf. Harald Meyer-Laurin, Gesetz und Billigkeit im attischen Prozess: Graezitsche Abhandlungen 1 (Weimar, 1965); Joachim Meinecke, “Gesetzesinterpretation und Gesetzesanwendung im attischen Zivilprozess,” Revue internationale des droits de l'antiquité, 3rd ser. 18 (1971): 275-360.
49 Discussions of the nature of Athenian law by Humphreys: “Evolution of Legal Process,” “Law as Discourse,” “Social Relations,” “Discourse of Athenian Law”; Maio, “Politeia”; Osborne, “Law in Action”; Garner, Law and Society, and (with some reservations) Holmes, “Aristippus,” 118-23, seem to me to come much closer to the ancient reality than more narrowly constitutionalist arguments.
50 Finley, DAM, 23. Among various programmatic statements on the limited usefulness of constitutional study, see, for example, Finley, PAW, y, 56-58, Ancient History, 99-103; Ehrenberg, “Origins,” 546-47; Osborne, Demos, 64-65; Connor, NP, 4—5, “Athenian Council,” 33, 39. Cf. the vigorous attack on the “juridicodiscursive” conception of power by Foucault, History, 1.81-91, 102, on the grounds that it concentrates too much on restrictions and limitations: “It is this image we must break free of, that is, of the theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty, if we wish to analyze power within the concrete and historical framework of its operation. We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code” (90).
51 Finley, “Fifth-Century Athenian Empire”; cf. “Freedom of the Citizen,” 21, DAM, esp. 48-50, PAW, 33-36, 111-14, 131-34, Ancient History, 84. Similar comments are made by, inter alios, Mahaffy, Problems, 16-17; Ste. Croix, CSAGW, 290-91; T. J. Galpin, “The Democratic Roots of Athenian Imperialism,” CJ 79 (1983): 107-108.
52 See, for example, Gomme, “Working,” 13; Jones, AD, 5-10, Badian, “Marx in the Agora,” 50.
53 Finley, DAM, 49.
54 AP 41.3; cf. below, H.G.
55 Jameson, “Agriculture and Slavery.”
56 Ste. Croix, CSAGW, 141-42, 284, 505-506.
57 For the more general Marxist argument about slavery in the ancient economy, see Ste. Croix, CSAGW, 120-74, 226—43, 255-59, 504-505; Vernant, “Remarks.” Among earlier, non-Marxist arguments linking the democracy to slavery, see, for example, Mahaffy, Problems, 16—17; E. Meyer, Kleine Schriften (Halle, 1924), 1.193-98 (cited by Finley, Ancient Slavery, 90).
58 Among discussions of ancient Greece as a slave society, in addition to the studies cited in the previous note, see Gouldner, Enter Plato, 25-27; Finley, “Was Greek Civilization,” Ancient Slavery (with voluminous bibliography); Chester G. Starr, “An Overdose of Slavery,” Journal of Economic History 18 (1958): 17-32; C. N. Degler, “Starr on Slavery,” Journal of Economic History 19 (1959): 271-77.
59 If it were demonstrated that no significant surplus could have been generated by a Greek polis without the use of slaves, Greek civilization would be shown to be based on slavery. But Wood, “Agricultural Slavery,” 15, 21-31, shows that slaves were not necessary to produce wealth from Athenian land, since there were known ways of extracting a surplus from free labor. Finley, “Was Greek Civilization,” 150-51, following Lauffer (Bergwerkssklaven, 11.904-906, who estimates ca. 90,000: 916 n. 5), guesses that there may have been a peak of 60,000-80,000 slaves in Attica during the fifth and fourth centuries and notes that this represents an average of three or four slaves per free household. But cf. the much lower estimate of ca. 20,000 slaves made by Jones, AD, 76—79. Certainly slaves were not so evenly distributed as Finley implies; at least a few very rich citizens owned hundreds, and Nicias was reported to own 1,000 (Xen. Poroi 4.14). On other sources of wealth of rich Athenians, see Thompson, “Athenian Investor”; Davies, WPW, 38-72.
60 On landholding citizens and rural residence, see Audring, “Grundeigentum,” “Grenzen”; Ober, FA, 19—23; Osborne, Demos, 47—63; cf. below, III.E.I.
61 See especially Jones, AD, 10-20; Wood, “Agricultural Slavery,” 16, 41-47. Finley, “Was Greek Civilization,” 148—49, hedges on the degree of agricultural slavery that pertained in Greece, and (ibid., 163-64) flirts with the notion that democracy and slavery were linked, at least symbolically. But in Ancient Slavery, 90, he specifically rejects the link between slavery and democracy as “patently false,” while accepting (ibid., 89 n. 60) Jameson’s argument on the prevalence of agricultural slaves, an argument based on the false link! The empirical case for average citizens owning slaves, which hangs in part upon comments made by litigants in Athenian courts (e.g., Dem. 45.86), becomes even weaker in light of the habit of wealthy litigants of addressing lower-class jurors as their economic equals; see below, V.D.2.
62 Audring, “Grenzen,” 454; Ober, FA, 22-23; and esp. Wood, “Agricultural Slavery.”
63 A stronger indirect argument for linking Athenian slavery with democracy might be made on the parallel of colonial Virginia, where the growth of chattel slavery and the development of republican sentiment were simultaneous and apparently closely linked phenomena. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), esp. 363—87, emphasizes the importance to republicanism of political solidarity between upper- and lower-class free white males in Virginia and argues that the exploitation of slave labor by the upper class made this solidarity possible. The parallel, if fully developed, might yield important insights into the role played by slaveholding among the rich in the development among Athenian citizens of an ideological consensus which transcended class lines. But there are significant differences between the Virginian and Athenian examples. In Virginia, unlike Athens, the rural economy was overtly market oriented (ibid., 366); poor Virginians paid taxes (ibid., 366); and the free poor were relatively few in number (ibid., 366, 380, 386) and so posed no threat to the rule of the elite. I owe the Morgan reference to Billy G. Smith, to whom I am also indebted for a discussion on the slavery and democracy issue. Cf. also below, II.C, VI.D.
64 For an attempted wealth/population curve for Athens, see Davies, WPW, graph I (opposite 36). Davies’ graph is hypothetical; for a realistic assessment of the difficulties involved in attempting a statistically meaningful assessment of wealth distribution in a premodern economy, see Smith, “Material Lives,” “Inequality.” On the Greek terminology of wealth, see below, V.A.I. On Aristotle’s embryonic and incomplete notion of “middling citizens” and their place in his political analysis, see Ober, “Aristotle’s Political Sociology.”
65 Jones, AD, esp. 8-10, 23-37, 80-93; quote: 10. For further discussion of Jones’ “middle-class” argument, see below, 111.E.2, 4; V.D.2.
66 Gomme, Population, Table 1, p. 26, suggests a rise from ca. 22,000 in 400 to ca. 28,000 in 323. Hansen, “Demographic Reflections,” argues that the fourth-century population was quite stable; cf. idem, Demography and Democracy, esp. 9-13, 65. Barry S. Strauss, “Demography and Democracy in Fourth-Century B.C. Athens” (Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association, December 30, 1986), has argued for a rather steeper rise in population. For the argument that lower population after the Peloponnesian War had major political consequences, see Strauss, AAPW, esp. 81. Cf. below, III.E.I.
67 Davies, WPW, 28-35. See below, III.E.I, 2, 4.
68 Perlman, “Politicians,” esp. 327, “Political Leadership,” esp. 162-66; cf. de Laix, Probouleusis, 174-77, 191.
69 Hasebroek, Trade and Politics. Hasebroek’s thesis was challenged by, inter alios, Gomme, “Traders and Manufacturers,” in Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford, 1937), 42-66; Thompson, “Athenian Investor”; Marianne Hansen, “Athenian Maritime Trade in the Fourth Century B.C. Operation and Finance,” CM 35 (1984): 71-92. But cf. E. Erxleben, “Das Verhältnis des Handels zum Produktionsaufkommen in Attica im 5. und 4. Jh. v.u.Z.,” Klio 57 (1975): 365—98; and the various essays collected in Trade in the Ancient Economy, esp. Cartledge, “Trade and Politics.” A compromise (citizen traders were few, but this was a function more of the complexity of the trade than of Athenian distaste for trade) was suggested by H. Montgomery, “ ‘Merchants Fond of Corn.’ Citizens and Foreigners in the Athenian Grain Trade,” SO 61 (1986): 43-61. Cf. also below, VI.D.2.
70 On the uselessness of the concept of “middle class” as an analytical concept for ancient social and political history, see Finley, PAW, 10-11 with n. 31 ; Davies, DCG, 36; Ste. Croix, CSAGW, 71-72, 120-33. Demosthenes (e.g., 18.46, 24.165) seems to have no notion of a middle class.
71 On the place of natural resources in the economy of Athens, see Isager and Hansen, Aspects, 19-106; Ober, FA, 13-31; Osborne, Demos, 93-126. On metics: Whitehead, Ideology. Finley, PAW, 16, notes the importance of the large total Athenian population and territorial base and the silver of Laurion in Athenian political development; cf. Jones, AD, 93-96.
72 On the difficult problem of the state revenues from the silver mines, see Hopper, “Attic Silver Mines,” “The Laurion Mines: A Reconsideration,” Annual of the British School at Athens 63 (1968): 293-326. Cf. Ober, FA, 28—30 (with literature cited). On Athenian revenues in general, see Andreades, History, 268-363; cf. Burke, “Lycurgan Finances.”
73 Silver production down until 340s: Hopper, “Attic Silver Mines,” 215-16, 250-52; Ober, FA, 28-29.
74 Finley uses the analogy of a modern university community: DAM 17. Finley hinted at the face-to-face concept in “Athenian Demagogues,’’ 9, 13, but it was more fully elaborated in his “Freedom of the Citizen,” 23, DAM, 17-18, PAW, 28-29, 82-83. Quote: DAM, 17. Finley’s face-to-face model has been picked up by, inter alios, Holmes, “Aristippus,” 121.
75 Finley (PAW, 28 n. 9) cites chapter 10 of Laslett, Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford, 1956); cf. also Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age2 (New York, 1973), 55-83. Demes: Hopper, Basis; Daviero-Rocchi, “Transformations,” 36-40, 44-45; Whitehead, “Competitive Outlay,” Demes 68-69, 85, 226—233, 248; Osborne, Demos, 64-92. Roussel, Tribu et cité, 157, suggests a similar integrative role may have been played by the phratries. Cf. the stress placed by Tocqueville on local communities as units that could create and maintain both the political cleavage and the consensus necessary for a democratic society, discussed by Lipset, “Political Sociology,” 87-88.
76 Humphreys, Family, 9, “Social Relations,” esp. 350, and “Evolution of Legal Process,” discusses the ramifications for Athenian law of changing the locus of public judgment from the village, where participants did have face-to-face relations, to the city, where they did not. Osborne, Demos, 64-65, points out the inappropriateness of Finley’s face-to-face model on the polis level, but errs by assuming that local interactions are sufficient to explain the democracy; cf. Ober, Review of Whitehead, Demes and Osborne, Demos.
77 On deme assemblies, see Whitehead, Demes, 86-120. Significantly, there was no pay for attending deme assemblies, or even for the major deme magistrates: ibid., 161.
78 On the population of Athens, see the studies cited above, I.n.66 and below, III.E.I. On war losses, see Strauss, AAPW, 179-82.
79 Finley, DAM, 17. Finley cites only Pol. 1326b3-7, but lines 8-25 are also highly germane to the question.
80 Pol. Books 7 and 8, esp. 1326a5-b25, 1329a17-1330a33, 1332b29-33, 1337a21—26; cf. Ober, “Aristotle’s Political Sociology.”
81 On Aristotle’s goals in writing the Politics, see Lord, Aristotle: Politics (Introduction), Education and Culture, 30-33. Cf. the essays collected in Lord, Essays.
82 I have borrowed the idea of “imagined community” from Anderson, Imagined Communities, a study of modern nationalism that has much to say about political societies generally. See esp. 15-16: A nation is imagined “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Anderson (ibid., 15-16) contrasts this sort of community to “primordial villages of face-to-face contact.”
83 Gomme, “Working,” 24-25. But his comment there that the “genius” is demonstrated by the fact that the rich, both vieux and nouveaux, were not only prepared to take part in Assemblies, but were convinced “to obtain by demagogic arts the power which previously they had claimed by right of wealth and birth,” is typically insightful.
84 The tendency to enshrine Cleisthenes as the founder-genius is exemplified by Ehrenberg, “Origins,” esp. 540-43. Cf. the criticisms by Finley, Ancient History, 93—99, of the Weberian “ideal type” of charismatic domination-leadership for the Greek polis in general and the Athenian democracy in particular.
85 R. Sealey has repeatedly argued that the motivation of Athenian political actors was pragmatic and personal and that political change was not a function of social class conflict or tension; see, for example, his “Athens after the Social War,” “Callistratos of Aphidna,” Athenian Republic, 148. For an attempt to elevate political life above and separate it from the social matrix, see Paul A. Rahe, “The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 265—93. A somewhat similar approach is taken by Meier, Anthropologie, 7-26, but cf. also 40-44: the inseparability of society and politics. Embedded nature of politics in society: Finley, PAW, esp. 8-9; cf. Vernant, “Remarks,” 73; Daviero-Rocchi, “Transformations”; Osborne, Demos, 8-10; Lipset, “Political Sociology,” esp. 83; Washburn, Political Sociology, esp. 108; Foucault, History, 1. Humphreys, Family, 1—32, 61-75, is an excellent introduction to the question of the relationship between public political life and private life in Athens. She notes that a conscious attempt was made by the democratic polis to exclude the influence of private interests and loyalties from political contexts; but this is very different from claiming that private life was unimportant.
86 Ober, “Aristotle’s Political Sociology”; cf. the somewhat more extreme comments of Holmes, “Aristippus,” esp. 116, who suggests that Plato and Aristotle (inter alios) made no distinction between state and society.
87 W. Dray, “Narrative versus Analysis in History” (Paper read at North Carolina State University, 1983): idem, “On the Nature and Role of Narrative in History,” History and Theory (1971): 153-71; idem, “Point of View in History,” Clio (1978): 265-83. Cf. the comments of Humphreys, “Law as Discourse,” 257-59, on the need to integrate structuralist and diachronic approaches.
88 New Haven, 1974.
89 Whitehead, “Thousand New Athenians,” has argued that about a thousand metics were granted citizenship after the democratic revolution of 404/3, but this depends on a controversial reading of IG 11 2 10; see below, II.n.103. On the general tendency of the Athenians not to make many new citizens in the fourth century, see Hansen, “Demographic Reflections,” and below, VI.c.2.
90 Dover, GPM, esp. 30-32. For an alternative view, that there was rapid evolution in Athenian social attitudes from 380-330, see Davies, DCG, 165-87.
91 Finley, Authority and Legitimacy, 17; cf. his discussions of ideology in PAW, 122-41, Ancient History, 4—5.
92 Jones, AD, 41—72, and Havelock, Liberal Temper, are notable examples of attempts to “reconstruct” democratic theory. The futility of this exercise is noted by Finley, “Athenian Demagogues,” 9, PAW, 124-25 with n. 7. Loraux, Invention, 173-80, 204-206, finds it odd that the democratic Athenians failed to develop a coherent and systematic theory of democracy, but cf. Maio, “Politeia,” 18-19 n. 7, who states, correctly I think, that the lack of theory is not surprising, since “one defends his faith vigorously . . . when it is under general attack; in fourth-century Athens, the democratic faith was under no such attack.”
93 Shaw, “ ‘Eaters’,” 5. Dover, GPM, while an important collection of materials on Athenian social attitudes, seems to tend in the latter direction, to concentrate on prejudices rather than integrated sets of ideas, and therefore to obscure important nuances in Athenian attitudes that were used in political decision making. For a general criticism of Dover’s implicit assumption that because popular morality was not rationally thought out, it was also completely without structure, see Adkins, “Problems.” The study of “Begriffsgeschichte” pioneered by C. Meier and his followers takes a middle ground between the study of popular ideologies and the traditional “history of ideas” approach; cf. the comments of Raaflaub, “Freien Bürgers Recht,” 13.
94 Washburn, Political Sociology, 234-67; quote: 261.
95 See, for example, Aristot. Rhet. 1368b7—9: “law” (nomos) is either individual (idios), in which case it is written, or common (koinos)', the latter is unwritten and is “that which everyone agrees is right” (para pasin homologeisthai dokei). On Isocrates’ and Plato’s notion of the ethos of a community, see Jaeger, Paideia, III. 119-20, 11.238; cf. Demosthenes 24.121 (cited above). The difficulty of recovering this “common law” or ethos is noted by Osborne, Demos, 66; Gruen, Hellenistic World, 1.250.
96 Starr, Awakening, 88-89, Individual and Community, 61. See also Finley, PAW, 124-26, “Was Greek Civilization,” 154; Forrest, EGD, 21-36; Dover, GPM, 39-40 (overstating the case, I think). Washburn, Political Sociology, 245-46, cites J. Huber and W. H. Form, Income and Ideology (New York, 1973), who suggest that the ideology of privileged Americans is quite different from that of poor citizens. The rich tend to believe more than the poor that the economic system’s rewards are distributed justly and that voting is meaningful. But Washburn (Political Sociology, 245-46) also notes that divergent social ideals have not been accompanied by overt sociopolitical conflict in part because particular “ideological differences are often submerged beneath apparent agreement with general American values.”
97 Cf. the useful discussion of Loraux, Invention, 170, 330-37, and below, VII.G.2. For Althusser on ideology, see L. Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London, 1971), esp. 32-60 on the inseparability of the ideological from “the material” in human action and on the difference between ideology and ideological state apparatuses (educational and religious institutions, etc.). Cf. the discussion and criticism of T. Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and His Influence (London and Basingstoke, 1984), esp. 45-49, 96-107: “Ideology [for Althusser] has its own reality, it is not reducible to ‘consciousness’ which may be ‘true’ or ‘false,’ so that ideological struggle may now be thought of as itself ‘real’ struggle to transform institutional structures and social practices, rather than as an exercise in the ‘correction of illusions’ ” (106).
98 J. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, 1981), is a good general introduction. Bowles and Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism, 152-63, is an excellent discussion of the relationship of discourse to social struggle. For the relationship of semiotic theory to systems theory in a political context, see Luhmann, Differentiation, 166-89.
99 E.g., Connor, “Athenian Council,” 33, 39; Finley, Authority and Legitimacy, Maio, “Politeia” 19 with n. 9 (citing Finley, DAM); Whitehead, Demes, 251. Cf. above, I.nn. 49, 50.
100 For an early statement along these lines, see Bryant, “Aspects II”; cf. C. Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric, trans. by William Kluback (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1982), esp. 153-62.
101 Accommodating oneself to the audience’s opinions: Aristot. Rhet. 1367b7-12, 1390a25-27, 1395b1-11, 1395b27-1396a3, 1415628-32; presenting one’s own character and behavior as proper and one’s opponent’s as improper: Rhet. 1377b20-137a33, 1415a28-1415b1, 1416a4-1417a8. See also the similar comments by the closely contemporary Ps-Aristotle Rhetoric for Alexander 29.1436b16ff, 34.1439b15-36, 1440a25-61; 37.1441b36-1442a14, 1443b14-21, 1444b35-1445329, with the discussion of Sattler, “Conception of Ethos," esp. 56-60. Cf. the succinct statement of Bryant, “Rhetoric,” 413: the function of rhetoric is “the function of adjusting ideas to people and of people to ideas.”
102 E.g., Aristot. Rhet. 1354a1-31, 1395b27-1396a3; 1404a1-8; Plato Gorgias 452c-454b, 462b-c, Phaedrus 260a, Republic 6.493a-c Thuc. 2.65.8-12; Isoc. 1.36. The political orators themselves attacked this habit; see below, VII.E.4. Modern admirers and students of rhetoric have attempted to refute the charge that rhetoric is mere flattery; see Jaeger, Paideia, 11.71; Bryant, “Aspects 1.” Cf. also 111.D.2.
103 Aristotle (Rhet. 1403b9-13) points out that persuasion results from the three proofs: (1) the judges are affected in some way, (2) they consider the speaker to be of a certain character, or (3) something is demonstrated. The last is not necessarily ideology-dependent. Adkins, “Problems,” 145-47, notes that there may be a general flow of philosophical and other “non-popular” ideas into the orators’ speeches; no doubt this is so, but cf. below, VII.G.2. It is also necessary to keep in mind that ideology is complex and (relative to philosophy) inconsistent; the orator may appeal to different aspects of popular ideology as it suits his purposes. Consider the different treatment of the rich in Dem. 20 and 21—the former in support of a rich man’s privileges, the latter an attack on a rich man’s hubris.
104 On this general method, see Ober, FA, 5-6; cf. Dover, GPM, esp. 6; Davies, DCG, 124; Finley, “Freedom of the Citizen,” 10; Loraux, Invention, 176: “. . . the only texts genuinely inspired by democratic thinking are those of the fourth-century orators.. . .” On the importance of looking at groups of documents collectively, see Finley, Ancient History, 44-45 (speaking of epigraphy).
105 Over 1,700 speeches were attributed in antiquity to the ten best known Attic orators alone: Bonner, Lawyers, 4. Of this number we have about 140 (see Appendix). On the very small number of deliberative speeches preserved, see Hansen, “Two Notes on Demosthenes.” For theories about how lost speeches might have differed in form from the corpus speeches, see, for example, Adams, “Demosthenes Pamphlets,” 15-16, who suggests that lost extemporaneous deliberative speeches would contain more personal comments than the few we have, which were all apparently written in advance. Bonner, “Wit and Humor,” suggests that lost forensic speeches which were not written by logographers may have made more use of humor than the existing speeches.
106 Thus, there is no a priori reason to assume that an orator’s description of, for example, his opponent’s motives was intended to correspond to an objectively verifiable reality, as there is, for example, reason to suppose that Thucydides’ descriptions of events were. Cf. the comments of Cawkwell, Philip, 19; cited approvingly by Finley, Ancient History, 81.
107 See below, 111.E.4. The errors of a piecemeal approach to literature generally are pointed out by Shaw, “ ‘Eaters’,” 25-26, who emphasizes the need to reach beneath the surface of the text for “a comprehension of the dynamics of the whole mental structure behind it.” Loraux, Invention, esp. 338, is a fine example of a study that refuses to treat texts (in this case funeral orations) as a simple description of reality.
108 The literature on this question, much of which hinges on the interpretation of Thuc. 1.22, is vast. For an introduction to some of the main lines of the debate, see Kennedy, “Focusing of Arguments,” 131-35; Andrewes, “Mytilene”; P. A. Stadter, ed., The Speeches in Thucydides (Chapel Hill, 1973).
109 See Lavency, Aspects, esp. 195-98; Usher, “Lysias.”
110 For a thorough treatment of public funeral orations, see Loraux, Invention, who warns (11) against the error of considering them a simple subset of epideictic oratory.
111 For a review of the literature on Isocrates’ political opinions and intentions, see Ober, “Views,” 119 n. 4; R. A. Moysey, “Isocrates’ On the Peace: Rhetorical Exercise or Political Advice?” AJAH 1 (1982): 118-127 (arguing for the latter position).
112 For a review of some major controversies, see Dover, GPM, 8-10. Dover, Lysias, attacks the authenticity of many of the speeches in the Lysian corpus partly on the grounds that they are written in different styles with different voices. But Aristotle (Rhet. 1408a25-32) implies that the good speechwriter must be able to imitate the speaking patterns of his clients, noting that the “rustic” (agroikos) will speak differently from the “educated man” (pepaideumenos). Cf. C. D. Benson, Chaucer's Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales (Chapel Hill, 1986), esp. 20-22, who shows that Chaucer used strikingly different poetic styles and voices in the various Tales. Some of the forensic speeches in the Demosthenic corpus were certainly not by Demosthenes, but in all likelihood, all were written by fourth-century orators; see, for example, Hansen, Apagoge, 145, citing the communis opinio on this issue.
113 Argument from probability suggests that political orators and logographers would be unlikely to publish speeches (which, at least in the case of Demosthenes were published in his own life: Plut. Demosthenes 11) that were wildly different from the speeches they delivered, for fear of being mocked by their opponents for it, or losing clients if they were found out. In some cases we can cross-reference, by looking at speeches delivered by opponents, e.g., Dem. 19 and Aesch. 2; Dem. 18 and Aesch. 3. Statements about what an opponent will say are not proof of revision: cf. Aristot. Rhet. 1418b9-1 1. Burke, “Character Denigration,” 128 with n. 46, suggests that the contents of major political trial speeches may have been made public in advance. On the general question of relationship of text to original speech, see Kennedy, Art of Persuasion, 206; Adams, “Demosthenes Pamphlets”; Usher, “Lysias”; Hansen, “Two Notes on Demosthenes”; E. M. Carawan, “Erotesis: Interrogation in the Courts of Fourth-Century Athens,” GRBS 24 (1983): 209-226.
114 On dates for speeches, see, in general Blass, AB; Jebb, Attic Orators; Schaefer, Demosthenes; Wyse, Isaios; Dover, Lysias; Kennedy, Art of Persuasion; Sealey, “Dionysius”; and the introductions to the Loeb and Budé editions. Cf. Appendix.
115 On Aristotle’s view of the democracy, Strauss, “Aristotle”; Finley, PAW, 125-26. On the intended function and audience of the Politics, see the works by C. Lord, cited above, I.n.81. On the Rhetoric, see Lord, “The Intention of Aristotle’s 'Rhetoric',” Hermes 109 (1981): 326-339; Arnhart, Aristotle. Riley and Riley, “Mass Communication,” 538-39, 541 n. 15, 545 n. 33, note that modern mass communication theory is an elaboration of the basic principles set down by Aristotle, although they suggest (563—69) that modern models stress the interactive nature of communication more than did Aristotle.
116 This new approach to drama in a social and institutional context is exemplified by Winkler, “Ephebes’ Song”; Zeitlin, “Thebes”; S. Goldhill, “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” JHS 107 (1987): 58-76; and other papers collected by Winkler and Zeitlin, edd., Nothing to Do with Dionysus. Comedy has long been recognized to have strong roots in social commentary; see, for example, Ehrenberg, People of Aristophanes. But the complexities of the comedian’s commentary on society have sometimes been obscured by modern scholars’ tendency to view comedy as simple fun; cf. the critical assessment of J. Henderson, “The Demos and the Comic Competition,” in Winkler and Zeitlin, edd., Nothing to Do with Dionysus.
117 For the long-standing debate over Aristophanes’ political views and intentions, see D. M. McDowell, “The Nature of Aristophanes’ Akharmans," Greece and Rome 30 (1983): 143-62, and other recent studies discussed by Ian C. Storey, “Old Comedy 1975-1984.” Echos du Monde Classique, n. s. 6 (1987): 2-9, 36-37. On the politics of tragedy, see essays in Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory.
118 For a preliminary discussion of some of the issues involved, see J. Ober and Barry S. Strauss, “Drama, Political Rhetoric, and the Discourse of Athenian Democracy,” in Winkler and Zeitlin, edd., Nothing to Do with Dionysus.
119 For a good example of a sophisticated literary approach to historiography, see Connor, Thucydides. See ibid., 13-17 for an introduction to Thucydides’ elite audience and his goals in relationship to the goals of the orator.
120 The very significant contribution epigraphical iconography can make to the study of the democracy is demonstrated by Lawton, “Iconography.”
121 Davies, APF, xxx-xxxi.
122 “Monstrosities in Criticism,” Diacritics 1 (1971): 60, cited in Connor, Thucydides, 26.