CHAPTER VII
CONCLUSIONS: DIALECTICS
AND DISCOURSE
Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. believed in political equality, and their state organization reflected this basic principle. But all Athenians were not equal. Some citizens had superior abilities to communicate their ideas, were highly educated, possessed fortunes sufficient to free them from the necessity of laboring, belonged to noble clans, and were able to engage in a style of life inaccessible to most of their fellow citizens.
Throughout the period of the democracy, Athenian society remained stratified along lines of ability, class, and status. Social stratification was not only a matter of relative degrees of material comfort. The possession of elite attributes by the few resulted in obvious power inequities, and when a conflict of interests between individuals resulted in legal action, the elite litigant enjoyed various advantages. The Athenian who had natural speaking skills and was educated in rhetoric was more likely than his less skilled opponent to present a convincing argument to the jury. The rich litigant could buy a finely honed speech from a logographer. Wealth also provided leisure for preparation and made a protracted series of litigations financially possible. The aristocrat could call upon influential friends and clansmen for support. Even after the jury had reached a decision, the “self-help” nature of legal restitution favored the individual able to muster superior physical force.1 The functional advantages enjoyed by members of the elite within the legal system posed a quandary for the non-elite political equals of the Athenian demos.
On the other hand, the existence of the democratic political order posed a quandary for the elite Athenian. As Aristotle noted (Rhet. 1378b26—1379a9; cf. Pol. 1283b34—1284b34), an individual who is superior to his fellows in any one way tends to believe he is entitled to a generally privileged position in society. He who considers himself worthy of privilege because of his social superiority may regard it as an injustice to be placed on equal political footing with average citizens. And yet, the Athenian form of government was predicated on the assumptions that all citizens were of equal political worth and that no citizen had an innate right to political privilege, regardless of his special attributes or attainments. Furthermore, the Athenians applied egalitarian principles in assigning many sorts of official duties. In modern democracies, in Britain and the United States, for example, the principle of representation and the process of election allow the politically ambitious elite citizen to use his or her functional superiority in gaining official positions from which he or she can legitimately wield political power. The Athenians did not delegate political power to representatives and tended to regard elections as undemocratic. Most offices were filled by lot, and in principle the elite citizen had no better chance than anyone else to serve as an officer of the state. Most officials held little real power in any case.2
The resolution of the competing demands of the elite for more legitimate privileges and of the mass for more complete equality was essential. On the one hand, the social advantages and individual power enjoyed by the elite threatened the rights of average citizens; on the other hand, elite citizens who became too irritated by their position of political equality might attempt a counter-revolution or refuse to participate in running the state.3 Aristotle (along with other critics of the democracy) considered the enforced equalization of the elite to be one of the central injustices of the democratic form of government, but he also recognized that the only protection the masses had against the power of the elite lay in their numbers. Hence he attempted to devise a theoretical constitution based on a mathematical balance between the “arithmetical” principle of equality (one man-one vote) and the notionthat superior individuals deserved superior political powers.4 Aristotle’s idea of “proportionate equality” led him into a conundrum, from which he escaped only by a retreat to the elitist constitution of the “ideal state” of the Politics (Books 7 and 8). However, Aristotle’s attempt to find a constitutional balance between the interests of mass and elite suggests that a solution to the problem might have been sought in the legal/constitutional domain. While the evolution of the Athenian constitution may be seen as an attempt to employ political equality as a counterweight to social advantages, the Athenians never achieved nor did they ever attempt, a final constitutional resolution of the dissonance between the relative social and political standing of masses and elites. The Athenian masses were not willing to compromise the principle of political equality in ways that might satisfy the ambitions of the elite, nor were the members of the elite willing to part peacefully with the conditions of their superiority in order to alleviate the apprehensions of the masses.
The limits of the Athenian ability to devise constitutional solutions to sociopolitical problems are elucidated by a consideration of two dichotomies that have concerned us throughout this inquiry: personal liberty/political consensus and popular sovereignty/rule of law. Aristotle considered freedom (eleutheria) to be the end (telos) that democracy was designed to foster,5 and the Athenians were firm believers in at least some aspects of individual freedom. In his Funeral Oration, Pericles praises freedom in both its public and private aspects, proudly noting that the Athenians did not need to supervise the personal behavior of citizens (Thuc. 2.37.2).6 Indeed, Athens did not have the official superintendents of private behavior that Aristotle (Pol. 1300a4-8, 1322b37-1323a6; cf. above I.A) considered proper to aristocracies. But the Athenians construed freedom more in terms of the positive right of the citizen to engage in political activity than in his “negative freedoms” from governmental interference.7 The central freedom that the Athenians cherished, therefore, was isēgoria: the right of the citizen to address the sovereign Assembly of the people. This important right was reiterated at every Assembly, when, after a motion had been made, the “president” of the Assembly asked who among those present had advice to give to the Athenians. Isēgoria, literally “equality of public address,” was a specifically egalitarian freedom, as Aeschines noted.
He [the lawgiver] does not exclude from the bema the man who lacks ancestors who served as generals, nor indeed the man who works at some craft in order to earn his daily sustenance. Rather these men are most particularly welcomed and for this reason he [the president of the Assembly] asks repeatedly, ‘who wishes to address the Assembly?’ (1.27)
Athenian emphasis upon the importance of the freedom of public address led them to recognize (by the second half of the fifth century) a more generalized freedom of speech (parrhēsia) which implied the necessity and validity of individual freedom of thought. If one was to be free to offer one’s advice to the Assembly, one must be free to think through that advice and to discuss it informally with others. Freedom of political speech furthermore implied the freedom not to speak out in public if one had no advice to offer, as Aeschines (3.220; cf. Dem. 22.30) reminded Demosthenes.8
Freedom—even the limited positive freedom of public speech with which the Athenians were particularly concerned—was not without its dangers. The freedom to speak or not to speak noted by Aeschines might imply the freedom of the citizen to contribute or not to contribute to the welfare of the state in other ways. If the upper classes decided to withhold their material contributions, the state would be in very serious trouble indeed. On the other hand, he who thrust himself forward to the bema, abandoning his place in the mass, had, by that act, declared an individuality that was potentially suspect. His motive in choosing to address the people might be self-interest, rather than a desire to further the interests of the state as a whole. The skilled and trained speaker who used his isēgoria to address the Assembly might mislead the people into voting against the good of the state by employing the power of rhetoric.9
The inverse of freedom of speech and thought was the concept of homonoia: consensus, literally “same-mindedness.” The glories of homonoia are celebrated with particular frequency by Isocrates and Lysias, and no doubt in the years after the democratic restoration of 403 the importance of consensus was very acutely felt.10 But homonoia was always important to the Athenians and was praised as a central social virtue by Demosthenes (e.g., 9.38, 25.89-90), Hyperides (4.37), and Dinarchus (3.19) much later in the fourth century.11 The term homonoia, as it was used by the political orators, generally implied a condition in which all citizens think the same thing, in which their social and political differences are submerged in a unified community of interest. Hence, the state becomes an organism with a single mind and a single will. The ideal nature of this condition is emphasized by Demosthenes (19.298) and Dinarchus (1.99), who refer to the advantages of the citizenry being “of one mind” (mia gnōmē) on important issues; similar sentiments are expressed by Andocides (2.1), Lysias (2.13, 17, 24), and Aeschines (3.208).
Consensus probably preceded freedom of speech as an operative principle in the development of the early democracy (see II.E). Homonoia is, on the face of it, the very antithesis of freedom. When the citizenry was “of one mind” there was no need for freedom of speech, thought, or action; everyone desired the same thing, and all could be expected to act with a unitary will. While this might be unattainable in practice, the ideal it represented was an important element in Athenian political ideology and provided the moral basis for a higher degree of regulation by the group of private behavior than Pericles’ comment in the Funeral Oration might suggest.12
Why then, should the Athenians have bothered with freedom of speech at all? Presumably, because perfect and long-term political consensus was not only impossible but dangerous. If the citizenry is of a single mind, debate and discussion become irrelevant. But without debate, how could the Athenians be sure they had considered all options and selected the best policy? A politics of pure consensus could easily lead to stagnation and the loss of political initiative, since only simplistic or unimportant issues were likely to yield a complete consensus. Consensus decision making furthermore left the Athenians with no scapegoat and no easy way of revising policy when the consensus decision turned out to have unpleasant consequences. In this situation, the Athenians had no one to blame but the demos, and they might be forced to confront the fact that mass decision making did not always produce wise policy. Those who believed in the superiority of elite decision making would be vindicated and sociopolitical tensions exacerbated. Paradoxically, “same-mindedness” on a political plane threatened to tear the society apart.
Many Athenians no doubt could have grasped the antithetical nature of the concepts of individual freedom and political consensus, as well as the dangers that each concept entailed. And perhaps they could have come up with a set of laws that would have moderated the dangers of each. But most Athenians saw no need to resolve the issue constitutionally or philosophically. For them the two concepts were not so much antithetical as complementary. In his Funeral Oration, Lysias (2.18) discusses how the autochthonous ancestors of the Athenians threw out their rulers (dunasteias) and established a democracy, “believing that the freedom of all is the greatest consensus” (tēn pantōn eleutherian homonoian einai megisten).13 Far from facing the contradiction squarely and deciding which concept was of greater utility or how each might be moderated, the Athenians continued to believe that both freedom and consensus were simultaneously good, valuable to state and society, and attainable. That freedom was a good thing and worth defending and that consensus was a good thing and worth promoting were self-evident to the Athenians. Any attempt to limit either one by constitutional means might have been construed as an intolerable assault on basic Athenian values. No canny politician would willingly put himself in the position of attacking basic values. Hence, no constitutional solution (as far as we know) was attempted. The Athenians’ willingness to maintain both principles, despite the philosophical contradiction this implied, allowed them to avoid the conflict between individual rights and the legitimate exercise of majoritarian power which is a major concern of modern democracies.
A related pair of seemingly antithetical concepts was the sovereignty of popular will and the sovereignty of law and the courts. The attempt to demonstrate that the demos in Assembly was not sovereign is misdirected because the Athenians did not think in terms of a strict separation of powers (see especially III.E.4). Every Athenian knew that the people ran Athens and that their will was, in the normal course of events, law. The standard term for destruction of the political order used by the orators was “to overthrow the demos” (kataluein ton dēmon), rather than “to overthrow the laws.”14 Nevertheless, fourth-century Athenians also recognized the authority both of “The Laws” (those made by individual nomothetai of the past—especially Solon—and those more recently made by boards of nomothetai) and of the courts in which laws were applied to individual Athenians.15
There is indeed a philosophical and constitutional contradiction between sovereign laws and sovereign popular will, but modern discussions of the question of the relative sovereignty of law and demos in Athens, while interesting in terms of abstract legal theory, misrepresent the Athenian reality: most Athenians were not interested in resolving the contradiction. We have seen that the Athenian masses were perfectly capable of maintaining two philosophically contradictory concepts when they felt that each was valid and useful. And nothing prevented them from embedding contradictory concepts in the state “constitution.” The law-making procedure included provisions for eliminating contradictory laws, but the decision about which laws were contradictory was made by the demos, not by philosophers schooled in logic or by legislative experts (above, II.G).
Demosthenes’ client (42.15) expresses the simultaneity of popular and legal sovereignty when he tells the jurors that they would be right to “save those who believe that the voice of the laws is your [the people’s] own voice.” The lack of a formal police force in fourth-century Athens meant that the authority of the laws rested immediately on the ability of the populace to exert moral pressure upon individuals who broke the laws.16 This is the thrust of a key passage in Demosthenes’ peroration (21.223—24) to his speech Against Meidias. Demosthenes first asks the jurors what it is that makes them authoritative and masters (ischuroi kai kurioi) of all the affairs of the state. It is not their individual physical prowess, but “the authority of the laws” (tēi tōn nomōn ischuï). He continues,
But what is the strength of the laws? For if one of you is wronged and cries out, will the laws come running up and offer aid? No; they are just inscribed letters (grammata gar gegrammen' esti), and they have no power to act independently. So what provides their power (dunamis)? You—but only if you support them and keep them masterful (kurious) in support of he who is in need. Thus, the laws are authoritative (ischuroi) through you, and you through the laws.
Consequently, “The Laws” never became truly externalized or abstract.17 The cardinal principle of Athenian law remained that all laws should be in the interest of the Athenians. If Athenian political society would be harmed by the resolution of a constitutional contradiction, it was prima facie unnecessary to resolve it.
The interests of the Athenians were in fact protected by the simultaneous sovereignty of the people and the law. The immediate transmutation of the momentary will of the people into a policy or action that might have long-term ramifications could sometimes lead to serious difficulties, as the Athenians had certainly recognized by the early fourth century. The central problem was, as Aeschines (3.3-4) noted, that the masses might make a hasty decision in the Assembly on the basis of the emotions of the hour or because they were swayed by the rhetoric of an unscrupulous orator. The eventual consequences of a quick decision made under the influence of emotion or evil rhetoric might be disastrous, as was the case with the Sicilian Expedition of 415—13. Furthermore, the popular will might fluctuate with sufficient rapidity to obviate the possibility of establishing a decisive and cohesive policy; the classic example is the reversed decision on the fate of the Mytilenean revolutionaries in 427.18 In that instance the reversal was no doubt salutary, but if the Athenians changed their minds on important matters with great frequency, they would soon cease to have a policy at all. Finally, while as a general rule Assemblies were more or less representative of the social composition of the Athenian citizen body (above, III.E.2), it was impossible that every Assembly could represent a full cross section of the demos. An Assembly that happened to be weighted toward one end of the social spectrum might come to an important decision that would not be in the best interests of the majority of citizens. The worst case scenario was played out at the Assembly held outside the city walls at Kolonos in 411, when the democracy was voted out of existence (Thuc. 8.67; cf. above, II.F.6).
No doubt the experience of the errors made by Assemblies under the stress of the Peloponnesian War brought home to the Athenians the dangers of unrestrained exercise of the popular will. Consequently, they enacted constitutional measures aimed at correcting the problem; the procedure of graphe paranomōn, the process of nomothesia, and the clarification of the distinction between nomos and psēphisma (above, II.G) must certainly be seen in this light. But there is no reason to suppose that these changes abrogated the ultimate authority of the demos. The comments of the orators on the relationship between demos and jury, discussed above (III.E.4), demonstrate that the demos was still thought of as retaining fundamental political power. Rather, the reforms provided new ways of punishing rhetores who misled the demos in the Assembly (or were construed to have done so) and allowed the Athenians to reconsider important decisions at a remove, in light of their own established principles. The desired result was that politicians might become more circumspect in their proposals and more inclined to consider the basic and essential values and norms of the people, which could be expected to reassert themselves when the emotion of the hour had faded. The will of the people was still sovereign, but now that will was defined in broader chronological terms. The central and long-term political principles of the demos—some of which were now given written form as nomoi—were given primacy when they came into conflict with immediate desires.19
Turning over the power to set state policy to any group much more narrowly defined than the demos itself would have meant the end of the democracy. But in light of the perceived dangers of the unrestrained exercise of popular will, one might ask why the Athenians did not go somewhat further in broadening the constitutional locus of authority, perhaps by instituting an automatic judicial review of all major decisions made in the Assembly. Part of the answer is presumably that in the normal turn of events the short-term desires and long-term principles of the people did not conflict. This explains the apparent rarity (relative to the total number of psēphismata passed) of conviction under graphai paranomōn. Aristophon (Aesch. 3.194), for example, claimed to have been indicted seventy-five times and never convicted. Even if the number is an exaggeration, it may tell us something not only about political litigiousness but about the general unwillingness of Athenian juries to overturn the decisions made in the Assembly.20
Furthermore, the Assembly had to retain de facto sovereignty if Athens was to keep its ability to act quickly and decisively to new and sudden challenges, especially in the sphere of foreign policy. Late fifth-and fourth-century diplomacy was complex, and alliance structures shifted rapidly. For much of the fourth century, the Athenian democracy was threatened by powerful monarchies, and the Athenians were well aware of the advantages monarchs had in devising and quickly implementing policy decisions. The democratic decision-making process was by nature public and relatively time-consuming; the last thing Athens needed was to complicate and retard the process by requiring legal review of every decision of the Assembly.21
A detailed code of sovereign laws might be an advantage to the elites. It is hardly accidental that elite philosophers like Aristotle (e.g., Pol. 1292a3—38) considered the rule of law a good thing and something essentially different from the rule of the people, since the rule of law would favor the wealthy and educated. A highly complex law code might give rise to a professional class of lawyers.22 Those who believed that a limited group of political experts should run the state might be expected to support such a development; the average Athenian would not. The more fully articulated the law code, the less leeway jurors would have in interpreting it. This would favor the elites who had the education and leisure to work through the legal niceties and would lessen their need to appeal to common interest and shared values when addressing a jury. Finally, complete articulation of the law was a denial of the collective wisdom of the masses. Aristotle (Rhet. 1354a31-b1) argued that laws properly should define matters as thoroughly as possible, because (inter alia) a few wise lawmakers are easier to find than many wise jurors. Since the Athenians believed in the wisdom of mass decisions, they drew the opposite conclusions: most laws should be general rather than specific, and juries should have much freedom in interpreting them. In this way their collective wisdom could be brought into play on the particularities of the case (cf. Dem. 24-193).23
Raphael Sealey concluded a seminal article on the Athenian concept of law by stating that “the Athenians achieved something more valuable and more fundamental than democracy. They achieved the rule of law.”24 I imagine that the Athenians could have understood the opposition. And if required to choose between the two ideals, I think they unhesitatingly would have chosen democracy. We cannot put this proposition to the test and need not regret our inability to do so, because the Athenians never bothered themselves with the notion that democracy and rule of law were mutually exclusive. They saw that unrestrained popular will was dangerous, but they also saw that excessive constitutional checks and balances along with a fully articulated law code threatened the interests of the masses. Hence the constitutional settlement of the late fifth and early fourth centuries remained limited in scope and application. The Athenians maintained their belief both in the power of the law and in the power of the people. Lysias (14.10) noted that the elite cavalrymen acted properly because they feared both the laws and “you.” The “you” referred to the jurors but also to the Athenian demos as a whole.
The problems of balancing freedom against consensus, and the sovereignty of the demos against that of the law are linked to the general problem of the relationship between mass and elite. In each case the question is whether there is or should be any limit to the power of the collectivity—the demos—over any of its constituent parts, group or individual. In each case, the Athenians proved unwilling to deal with existing contradictions, at least on a constitutional plane. Constitutional resolutions might have proved dangerous and must have seemed unnecessary. The citizens more easily and safely embraced pairs of concepts that, if contradictory, were also complementary and that collectively served a useful function in the organization of state and society. The tensions generated by simultaneously maintaining social inequality and political equality therefore had to be resolved on the ideological plane.
The sociopolitical order operated smoothly as long as the social power of the elites was balanced by the political power of the masses. The trick was how this felicitous situation could be maintained, given the limited efficacy of constitutional reforms. The balance absolutely had to be kept. The stability of the democratic state was dependent upon avoiding the concentration of political power in the hands of the elite on the one hand, and on the willingness of the masses to allow the elite certain privileges on the other; in short, upon maintaining a community of citizens’ interests that overrode individual and subgroup differences. But tension between mass and elite remained; Athenians on either side remained suspicious of the other’s privileges and intentions and jealous of their own prerogatives.25 Hence, there was a continual and pressing need to deal with the question of the mass/elite antithesis.
Courtroom oratory played an important role in resolving the conflicting claims and desires of mass and elite Athenians. A series of ideological compromises, defined and referred to by legal rhetoric, helped to bridge the gap between the social reality of inequality and the political ideal of equality. These compromises mediated the superior power of the elite individual vis-à-vis the average citizen and protected the elite individual from the tyrannical exercise of collective power by the masses. Legal rhetoric was an obvious medium for compromise because the need for mediation was particularly acute in the law courts, where the people sat in collective judgment on the individual citizen. As an individual confronting the group, the litigant was in a high-risk position. The very fact of his appearance in court might arouse suspicion—every defendant had to explain why he, an honest citizen, found himself in court; every prosecutor had to explain why he should not be regarded a vicious sycophant. The elite litigant, who also possessed attributes that further differentiated him from the mass, was in a particularly delicate spot. Communication with the jurymen was his only way out of the dangerous individual-versus-community and elite-versus-mass situation.26 The elite litigant who could persuade the jurors that, despite his elite privileges, his interests and theirs were identical, would win their sympathy and so save himself.27 The rhetorical tactics of elite litigants, described above (IV-VI), are examples of ways in which elites attempted to explain themselves and their position in society to mass juries. Ultimately, the complex of rhetorical strategies successfully deployed by elite litigants over time helped to create a vocabulary of social mediation which defined the nature of mass-elite interaction for the Athenians and legitimated both the power of the masses and the special privileges of the elites.
The degree of urgency of the litigant’s need to employ tension-diffusing tactics was a function not only of the innate strength or weakness of his case but also of the degree of his divergence from the norm. The more obvious and extreme a litigant’s elite attributes—the greater his attainments in terms of ability, wealth, and status—the more dependent he was upon ideological mediation. But, at least by the fourth century, even a very obviously elite litigant was able to communicate with the jurymen through a well-established language; his immediate task was to prove that his particular case should be judged acccording to the accepted forms of mass-elite cooperation.
Mediation based on legal rhetoric worked—both on an individual and a society-wide level—when everyone involved played his role correctly. The elite litigant was expected to make clear to the jury his generalized adherence to egalitarian principles, his acceptance of the correctness of mass rule and mass judgment. By explicitly accepting the people’s right to judge him, the litigant helped legitimate the legal processes of the democratic government. This in turn removed the trial from the realm of force and power, to the realm of peaceful adjustment of long-term mutual interests. By submitting gracefully to the people’s judgment, the litigant showed himself to be a good citizen, a dēmotikos (cf. Isoc. 18.62), the sort who would be likely to use his elite attributes for the good of the demos.
The elite litigant further emphasized the community of interests he shared with the jurors by resorting to dramatic fictions. The speaker who was highly educated or had purchased an ornate speech from a logographer begged forgiveness for his lack of eloquence. The wealthy liturgist bemoaned his poverty. The well-connected aristocrat asked the jury to act in lieu of his family. On other occasions, the elite speaker addressed the jurors as fellow possessors of elite attributes: the jurors became highly educated, taxpayers, and possessors of a communal nobility of birth. By lowering himself and by elevating the members of the jury in status, the speaker put himself on the same social footing as his audience. He deemphasized his privileges, and/or associated the jury in those privileges, in order to reduce the degree of his differentiation. The elite litigant portrayed himself as an average Athenian who could naturally expect sympathy and support from his fellow citizens: he rejoined the mass. The jurymen, at least many of them, must have been able to see through these transparent fictions, but they chose not to call attention to them. The conspiracy of speaker and juror in maintaining the fiction helped to integrate the citizenry by encouraging homonoia. The metaphor of the theater helps to explain the relationship between the play-acting litigant and his audience. The juror’s experience as a member of a mass audience in the theater, watching and hearing actors play their parts, reinforced the useful process of suspension of disbelief that he employed when sitting as a member of a mass jury, listening to the elite litigant plead his case.
Having established community of interest, the speaker in court might then attempt to demonstrate that certain of his elite attributes were valuable to the state. Especially important in this regard is the notion of charis. The wealthy man who contributed materially to the state in the correct spirit of generosity, patriotism, and philotimia could request that the jury return the favor. The jurymen were, in effect, given control of the litigant’s wealth, since their decision would determine its disposition, but they were induced to “give it back” to the generous citizen, out of gratitude for his past benefactions and in expectation of future gifts. The well-born litigant played a similar game, by reminding the jurors of the fine deeds his ancestors had done and emphasizing his inborn love of democracy and state.
Each of these rhetorical ploys helped to smooth over power inequalities. The elite citizen diffused the jurors’ suspicions about the dangerous power that his elite attributes afforded him by humbling himself, by dissimulating his rhetorical skill, by putting his power-producing wealth at the service of the state, by showing that his illustrious ancestors had been highly patriotic, and by affirming that all citizens were of noble birth. For their part, the jurors—and, on a society-wide level, the demos as a whole—were persuaded that there was no need to bring their collective political power to bear against the elite. The individual who played his role correctly was no longer perceived as a a threat, and hence there was no need to act preemptively against him. In short, having shown himself to be at the mercy of the masses, the individual had reason to expect merciful treatment from them (cf. Aristot. Rhet. 1380a12-b1).
The drama acted out by elite protagonists in Athenian courtrooms had many variations, but the theme was always the same: the community of interests and interdependence of mass and elite. The citizens were bound together more securely through the role playing on both sides. Social tensions within the citizen body were reduced, and the solidarity of the citizenry vis-à-vis noncitizens was upheld. The same community of interests the citizens experienced when sitting together in the theater and when voting in the Assembly could be achieved even in the contentious atmosphere of the courtroom, where the interests of mass and elite threatened to come into open conflict. The social stability that resulted from the development of a language of mediation allowed the Athenians to avoid the extreme forms of civil strife that tore apart many Greek states in the late fifth and fourth centuries.28
Public rhetoric not only revealed social tension, it was a primary vehicle for resolving tension. The evolving vocabulary of symbols of social mediation expressed in the topoi and other rhetorical tactics of legal orations was, therefore, a key ingredient in the maintenance of social peace at Athens. We need not assume that very many Athenians were consciously aware of the process. There is no way of judging how sensitive the ordinary litigant was to the ideological context of the courtroom. But the preserved speeches, written by and for elite Athenians, certainly show a high degree of awareness of that context. The rhetorical ploys described here are sophisticated and complicated; it seems unlikely that all elite citizens would have been fully aware of their efficacy or that unconscious awareness could have produced such highly elaborated mechanisms for playing to mass attitudes. The fact that most, if not all, of the private speeches we possess were written by logographers, whose job it was to fit the speech both to the individual litigant and to mass attitudes helps to explain the sophistication of the symbolic vocabulary in private orations. Indeed, the need to diffuse popular suspicion when appearing in court may have led the Athenian upper classes into an increasing dependence upon logographers.
The vocabulary of mediation was continuously being refined by the logographers, based on their reading of the ideological relationship between mass and elite, and their speeches helped to further define that relationship. As jurors became increasingly sophisticated “readers” of the logographers’ “language,” the elite litigant who wrote his own defense must have been more and more at a disadvantage. Juries accustomed to communication through a highly elaborated vocabulary of symbols might discount or even resent those who did not employ it. Thus, while the masses never officially condoned the existence of the logographer, in fact the logographer became a necessary figure in the legal system, an interpreter who ensured that the needs and interests of his elite employer remained explicable to the mass jury. The willingness of the jurors to accept the fiction of the “unskilled speaker” topos became essential to the social order.
Ironically, the Athenians avoided the elaboration of law and the development of a class of professional lawyers but, through their concentration upon public speech, became dependent upon a class of expert speechwriters. It is, however, important to bear in mind that the speechwriters were never able to institutionalize their position in society and that their function remained one of social integration. The logographers, therefore, never formed the nucleus of the sort of oligarchy that Michels and the elitist philosophers thought must be the inevitable product of democratic societies.
Turning from the question of social stability to decision making in the direct democracy, we move from the realm of private legal orations delivered by idiōtai to that of public legal and deliberative speeches delivered by rhetores. The Athenian politician was typically a member of various elites (see III.C), and his political activity put him in the position of facing judgment by the masses much more frequently than an average elite idiōtēs. Every time the political orator stood up to speak, he confronted the community as an individual, and as we have seen, that moment was fraught with tension and danger. Furthermore, when the politician spoke—whether in the Assembly or in court—it was typically in the context of open combat with opponents who were themselves skilled and experienced speakers. The people judged those contests; hence the political orator was intensely aware of the popular climate of opinion, and he was particularly eager to use mass attitudes to his own advantage and against his opponents. Not surprisingly, therefore, political orators employed many of the sophisticated rhetorical tactics that were used in private legal orations. It was to the politician’s advantage to present himself as a dēmotikos, an individual fully in sympathy with the democratic government and with the egalitarian principles that underlay it.29 Like the private litigant, he attempted to show that his interests were identical to those of the community, while the interests of his opponents, who acted from selfish motives, were not.30
In order to demonstrate his conformity to popular norms, the political orator often attempted to obscure his own elite attainments and to spotlight those attributes that caused his opponent to stand out from the mass. Thus he might imply that his own education was no more elaborate than that of the average citizen, by claiming that he learned history from his elders and poetry in the theater. His opponent could then be portrayed as egregiously over-educated, the sort of elite sophist who engaged in specialized research with the goal of misleading the masses and who trained others to use rhetoric to pervert the mass will. He might stress too that his own style of life was simple, his needs few; this, in contrast to his opponent who could be cast in the role of the luxury-loving rich man who thought his wealth gave him the right to attack those who were less powerful than himself.
Yet there are significant differences between the overall rhetorical strategy of the elite politician and the elite idiōtēs. The politician avoided the topos of personal inability to speak well, and he might actually find occasion to brag about his superior education, wealth, and birth. His opponent was portrayed not only as someone whose elite attributes rendered him offensive in his personal habits and antidemocratic in his attitudes but also as someone who lacked elite attributes: a man who had to work for a living, who was ill educated, low- or foreign-born, a slave by nature and blood. The politician demonstrated his attainments and denigrated those of his opponent as part of the ongoing public competition between rhetores; each speaker tried to show the demotic judges of the contests that his own superiority made him useful to the state, while his opponent’s inferiority rendered him useless or dangerous. The educated rhetor was an eloquent spokesman and insightful adviser for the demos; his ill-educated opponent was unable to make any lasting impression or to devise useful policy options. The wealthy political orator was immune to bribery; his opponent was cast as impoverished and hence a likely bribe-taker, or recently wealthy through having taken bribes. The politician who was materially generous deserved the charis of the people, while his opponent was archaristos since he did not appreciate the people’s generosity in allowing him to drag himself up from the gutter at their expense. His own high birth made him particularly patriotic and a lover of democracy; his opponent’s impure and servile blood rendered him a natural traitor who had unjustly insinuated himself within the citizen body, only to corrupt its ideals.
The political orator therefore played a double role, wore a mask with two faces. On the one hand, he was the perfect exemplar of the norms of society, an “average guy,” a metrios in the most basic sense of the word. On the other hand, he was superior to the ordinary citizen, an elite in terms of his ability, wealth, and status. The two aspects of the politician’s role are summed up in rhetorical discussions of the orator’s proper character and function. The mix of elite and egalitarian virtues in these passages reinforces the impression we receive from more specific rhetorical comments on individual elite attributes: the speaker portrays the ideal orator as simultaneously of the mass and of the elite.31 This situation may be seen as an elaboration of the dramatic role playing of elite idiōtai in private court cases. The difference is that the political orator was expected to demonstrate both egalitarian and elite credentials and to do so on a regular basis. The balance had to be maintained for as long as he was in the public eye, not merely for the duration of a trial. Maintaining this balance required, once again, consumate “acting” on the part of the speaker and a willingness on the part of the audience to accept the performance.
The psychic mechanisms that allowed the Athenians to respect elitist claims in a political context, while rejecting them in most other contexts, were complex. Some of the political orators’ elitist claims, especially to ability and education, may be explained by the assumption that the members of the audience would rationally choose to lend their attention to men who had proved their competence. But it seems absurd to suggest that the Athenians consciously decided to stymie the ambitions of the elite by forcing them to conform to a complex and contradictory code of public behavior and speech or that they consciously devised a symbolic language that would explain mass and elite to one another, along with a context for that language which would ensure that it was used frequently. Previous chapters have detailed the elaborate set of symbolic tactics that collectively formed the structure of a workable social and political strategy. But what is the etiology of those tactics, and how were they integrated into a coherent strategy? A definitive answer to these important questions is beyond the scope of this study, but a review of the historical development of Athenian social attitudes and a consideration of audience response to elite speakers may allow us to formulate a plausible hypothesis.
Athenian popular culture in the classical period was strongly oral and remarkably public—the theater, courts, and Assembly provided its major forums. Hence, public speech was a natural medium of social mediation. The tactic of employing rhetorical topoi by public speakers was learned behavior on the part of persons who had been “taught” (directly or indirectly) what to say by several generations of Athenian audiences. The tendency of the audience in both the Assembly and courtroom to react immediately and vocally to the speaker’s comments allowed the success or failure of each rhetorical ploy to be tested independently from the success or failure of the speech as a whole. Fourth-century logographers writing speeches for elite litigants in private court cases learned that blatantly elitist comments met with disfavor and that egalitarian comments would be regarded favorably, and so they used egalitarian topoi frequently. But political orators, in their turn, learned that elitist comments would be regarded favorably in certain contexts and so employed elitist topoi along with egalitarian ones. Each topos or ploy evoked a response, positive or negative, from the listener because it touched an existing sensibility—whether overt or latent—within the listener’s value system. The origins of symbolic/ rhetorical tactics and the key to their strategic integration might therefore be sought through a functionalist analysis of the historical evolution of Athenian modes of response to the stimulus of privilege claims based on elite attributes.
Athenian elitist ideals presumably originated at a time when the elite ruled. The basic principles of Greek elitist ideology may be traced back to the growth of a self-consciously aristocratic elite in the late Dark Ages and early archaic period. Within the generalized “panhellenic” aristocratic ideology, individual aristocracies in each coalescing state developed their own particularized set of ideas regarding the proper role of the elite in the state (cf. above, VI.B). The Athenian stress on birthright and on the aristocratic code of behavior may be traced to this early period. The ideology of the ruling elite continued to develop as the elite itself evolved. As the political position of the aristocrats was taken over by the wealthy and well educated, elitist ideology accumulated the other primary attributes discussed above. The long period of political dominance by the elite before the mid-sixth century ingrained in the masses a respect for elite attributes and a deferential pattern of behavior (above, II.B). We may posit, therefore, that when a fourth-century Athenian political orator made the right elitist comment in the right context, he stimulated in his audience a deferential mode of thought and action. They responded by allowing him privileges somewhat similar to those a member of the ruling elite might have enjoyed before the development of the democracy.
From the mid-sixth century through the fifth century, the growth of national consciousness and the subsequent development of democratic political forms encouraged the growth of an egalitarian sensibility which, by the fourth century, clearly dominated Athenian ideology and had subverted some important aspects of the old aristocratic ideal. The dominance of the egalitarian sensibility explains why mass audiences responded favorably to topoi stressing equality. The elitist sensibility was, however, never completely suppressed. Some elite Athenians continued to advocate the adoption of an oligarchical form of government until the late fifth century. But the failed coups of 411 and 404 and the democratic victory of 403 spelled the death of oligarchy as a viable political alternative. Nevertheless, fourth-century political orators found that their audiences still responded favorably to elitist rhetoric. Why?
An evolutionary or behavioral/functional model seems to provide at least a partial explanation: the psychic mechanisms here called political ideology, like the physical and instinctive characteristics of a species, appear to have changed in reaction to events through a process of trial and error. After the establishment of the Assembly and court system as the primary decision-making apparatuses of the state, Athenian political ideology operated in an environment that encouraged relatively rapid evolution. Psychic mechanisms were reinforced and retained if they helped Athenian political society to function better (in terms of good decisions arrived at by the masses) in response to its broader environment. Mechanisms that damaged the society’s ability to respond effectively—or which led to decisions harmful to society—were discouraged and discarded. The outcome may seem rational, but the process was not dependent on the conscious choices either of individuals or of the society as a whole. 32
Thus, over the course of the fifth century, the Athenian masses’ response to rhetorical symbols evolved according to how that response affected Athenian political society. The experience of the last third of the fifth century, especially the oligarchic counter-revolutions which had proved dangerous to the body politic, reinforced psychic mechanisms for the blocking or inhibiting of responses fostering respect for elites. An elitist comment therefore was not likely to evoke a favorable reaction in the hearer but, rather, suspicion and irritation. Yet the tribulations of the late fifth century also demonstrated that leadership was necessary to the survival of the state, that a complete suppression of all willingness to allow members of the elite a leadership position was deleterious to the functioning of Athenian society. Hence a psychic mechanism evolved that allowed the citizen’s normal reaction that inhibited respect for elites to be suppressed under certain conditions and the surviving (but normally repressed) respect that Athenians felt for elite attributes to be released.
In sum: the Cleisthenic political order created a social environment conducive to the evolution of psychic mechanisms and of symbolic tactics to release those mechanisms. The mechanisms and symbols were integrated into a flexible sociopolitical strategy through an evolutionary process that selected mechanisms and tactics according to their functional efficacy. The result was that fourth-century Athenian private litigants and politicians were forced to perform the balancing act described above. If this etiological hypothesis is correct—and if the Athenian state did not run into an evolutionary dead end (and its survival in the fourth century suggests that it did not)— the balancing act of the elites should have been to the benefit of the citizenry as a whole. A review of the roles the politicians played in the Athenian state suggests that the act was indeed beneficial to the state.
The function performed by the political orator in the democratic polity was multifarious. He was expected to express the unspoken will of the people, to defend the masses against their internal and external enemies, and to offer them sound advice. In some circumstances he might also serve in a more forthright leadership capacity. These several roles appear in some ways contradictory, but they were not mutually exclusive. The mode of their integration in the person of the individual rhetor can be explained in terms of the dialectic of mass and elite.
I discussed above (IV.B.4) the importance to the Athenians of the notions that mass decisions were likely to be wise and that what everyone believed was likely to be right. If these premises were applied consistently in the political arena, the orator’s role would be a simple one: he would vocalize the will of the people, making manifest the homonoia of the demos. His function would be more or less that of a glorified herald. Demosthenes argued along these lines when he stated (18.280; see above, IV.c.1) that the worth of the orator was his preference for the same things as the people. And, from his own rather different perspective, Isocrates came to a similar conclusion. In the speech To Nicocles he suggested that the best orator was he who, like a poet, could collect what is scattered through the minds of men and say it most concisely.33 Thus it might appear unnecessary, foolish, even perverse for the democratic political orator to oppose the will of the people, and, not surprisingly, Demosthenes (19.206) claims that, unlike Aeschines and his cronies, he had never tried to force the Athenians to do what they did not want to do. Other orators were similarly unwilling to oppose the clearly expressed will of the people.34
The role of the orator as mouthpiece of popular opinion was emphasized by ancient elitist writers; Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and Isocrates all condemn demagogues as mere crowd pleasers who said only what the people wanted to hear. Elitist writers, of course, typically considered mass decision making to be foolish, and the populace anything but wise. Therefore, they castigated the political orators for failing to exert a leadership role in the state, for failing to oppose the will of the mass, and for saying what everyone wanted to hear rather than what was good and salutary for the state.35
Athenian politicians were well aware of the climate of opinion in which they operated, and no public speaker could afford to contradict central principles of the Athenian belief structure very often (see I.E). Political orators did praise the demos, telling the people just the sorts of things we might imagine that they would want to hear: that the speaker himself was completely dependent upon the goodwill of the many (Dem. 18.5, 281), that Athenians had fine institutions, good habits, were intelligent, just, free, and philhellenic by nature.36 It was also common to attack an opponent on the grounds that he was a demoshater (misodēmos: Lyc. 1.39, Aesch. 2.171), someone who despised the politeia (Din. 1.112), was contemptuous of the masses (Lys. 9.17), and thought them fools (Hyp. 3.23). In the speech Against Meidias (21.203-204, cf. 194) Demosthenes makes the point that Meidias’ constant haranguing and berating of the masses in the Assembly was evidence that he nurtured a “secret hatred of you, the many.” The attack seems to be based squarely on the notion that the orator’s role was to enunciate mass opinion, not to oppose it.
As Finley pointed out, however, the Athenian political orators did more than simply parrot the desires of the people and mouth vacuous niceties; rather, they served as a structural element in the functioning of the state.37 One important function the orator fulfilled was to protect the masses—the term prostates tou dēmou, “he who stands before the people,” meant not only one who stood first in the eyes of the people and who physically stood before the people in order to address them, but one who interposed himself between the people and dangers that threatened them.38 Orators could be referred to as “guardians of the democracy” (Aesch. 3.250-51; cf. Lys. 27.3). Their guardianship lay in part in attacking internal enemies of the people in the courts.39 They might also use their superior speaking abilities in court to aid citizens who were less able than themselves to speak persuasively (e.g., Hyp. 1.10). But the orator was also the protector of the people in the Assembly. Lysias (12.72) recalls the terrible Assembly of 404, called in order to name the Thirty Tyrants in Lysander’s presence, when “no rhetor could oppose them [the Thirty] and you [the demos] could not overawe them.”
The protective role of the political orators merged with an advisory function. As speakers in the Assembly, the rhetores presented the demos with a range of policy options that ordinary citizens might not have considered.40 As Pericles noted in the Funeral Oration (Thuc. 2.40.2), speeches can help to instruct the people, and debate is salutary for a democracy. Each speech delivered in the Assembly was a public affirmation of the basic principle of isēgoria. Demosthenes (Ex. 44.1-2; see above, IV.B.4) bridges the gap between mass will and the orator’s advisory function when he notes that he would not offer his own opinion in the Assembly if all were in agreement on the matter at hand, since he, being one man, would be more likely to be mistaken than “all of you.” The implication is that since there were differences of opinion within the Assembly, Demosthenes felt he could legitimately offer his advice. The advisory role of the political orator is reflected in the term sumboulos, which politicians use of themselves and of “good orators” in general (e.g., Lyc. 1.11; Hyp. 5.28; Dem. 58.62; cf. above, 111.B.2). Demosthenes sums up the advisory role of the political orators in the First Olynthiae.
Oh Athenians, I believe that you would prefer it to great wealth if it could be made clear to you what would be the best policy in the matters now under discussion. This being the case, it is proper for you to listen intently to all those desirous of giving advice (tōn boulomenōn sumbouleuein). For not only might someone come forward with a carefully thought out proposal, and you, having heard it, might decide to adopt it, but I consider it part of your good fortune that other speakers may be inspired with suitable suggestions on the spur of the moment, so that from among many proposals it will be easy to choose the one most in your own interest. (1.1)
Demosthenes’ comment leaves room not only for the expert public speaker who comes forward “with a carefully thought out proposal” but also for the ordinary citizen who might be “inspired with suitable suggestions on the spur of the moment.” Certainly, ordinary citizens did sometimes take it upon themselves to address the people, and their contribution should not be underestimated (cf. above, 111.B.2). But the regular speakers had a special part to play in the advisory process; the importance of their role is stressed by Demosthenes (19.285), who suggests that a conviction of Aeschines will improve the integrity of the politicians (politeuomenoi) “on whose shoulders rest the most important affairs of the state” (ta megista kinduneuetai tēi polei). Consequently, the political orator must give the best possible advice, and he must not allow anything, even fear of a possible negative reaction to his comments by the Assembly, to stand in the way of his oratorical service to the state (cf. Dem. 1.16, 8.71).
Dinarchus (1.40, 72, 74) seems to go even further in granting the politicians a special position in the decision-making process when he states that the advisers (sumbouloi) and the political leaders (hēgemones) are those who were responsible for all good or evil in the polis. In the same speech (1.17, 94, 97) he attacks Demosthenes for the latter’s continual changes of policy which, Dinarchus says, neglect “the affairs of the demos” (tas huper tou dēmou praxeis; cf. Dem. 19.9—28; Aesch. 2.164). The emphasis upon the vital importance of expert public speakers, the recognition that good political orators must be willing to oppose the will of the people, the implication that a good politician stuck to one line of policy regardless of changes in the popular mood, and the conjunction of the terms “adviser” and “leader,” all suggest that the rhetores might take a more active role in the state than merely offering the Assemblymen a smorgasbord of policy options from which the latter could pick and choose as they would.
Indeed, a political orator sometimes was willing to claim for himself a leadership role that went far beyond merely advising the demos on policy options. Demosthenes (18.320; see IV.E) claimed that at a key moment (in 339 B.C.) “. . . I revealed myself to be the best speaker, and all state business was conducted according to my decrees, my laws, and my diplomatic delegations. . . .” In a fragment that appears to be from a political trial speech in his own defense, preserved only in a Latin translation, Lycurgus strikes a similar note.
When the young men (iuventus) in their enthusiasm had thoughtlessly taken up arms ... I compelled the Council [Senatum] to use its authority to restrain their violence. I, by my threats to the treasurers, forbade them to grant money for soldiers’ pay. I stood firm when the armory was opened and refused to have arms taken out. It was thus entirely my doing, as you see, that an unnecessary war was avoided. (Lyc. F I.5 [Conomis] = A.1 [Burtt])
Both passages have an almost authoritarian tone, but I do not think that either Demosthenes, who notes that his leadership coincided with the freedom of the demos to decide policy, or Lycurgus intended to cast himself in the role of the tyrant. Their leadership was within the context of the democratic polity; therefore the Athenians apparently considered it acceptable and democratic for a politician to exercise a leadership role in times of emergency. The roles of adviser and leader were both parts of the essential “structural element” that the political orators provided to the state; and both required that the public speaker be willing to oppose the will of the demos.
The politicians’ role in providing the state with thoughtful advice and leadership, and the necessity of their opposing the popular will in order to fulfill these functions, supply a general context for instances in which political orators actively castigate the demos for its failings. One particularly common topos of blame in political orations was the contrast between the Athenians of the present day and their illustrious ancestors. The “modern generation” was reproved for having fallen from the pinnacle of excellence achieved by its ancestors: in the past jurors were strict and enforced the law rigorously, unlike modern jurors who do not even pay attention when the clerk reads the law aloud (Aesch. 3.191-92). The ancestors lived in simple virtue and maintained equality among themselves (Aesch. 3.26); they did not give excessive honors to unworthy men (Aesch. 3.178, 182); they were on guard against traitors and were free from the laxity now common (Dem. 19.181). The ancestors had chosen excellent men as political leaders and advisers.41 They attributed to the demos all that was good and fine, to the rhetores that which was evil (Aesch. 3.231). Unlike the ancestors, who had punished even Themistocles for making himself “greater than themselves,” modern Athenians were not willing to bring malefactors to justice (Dem. 23.204-205); thus, whereas in the past the polis was master of the politicians, now the polis was servant of the politicians (Dem. 23.209).42
Other criticisms, while not mentioning the ancestors, take a similar tone: the contemporary Athenians were slack, failed to be on their guard, and idly awaited disaster (Dem. 18.149, 19.224); they made citizens of slaves and rabble ([Dem.] 13.24); they gave up their own control of offices, especially generalships, by allowing the same men to be reelected for years on end (Dem. Ex. 55.3). Their ideas on foreign policy tended to be too optimistic, and they left matters of war and peace to ambassadors, rather than deciding these matters for themselves (And. 3.35, cf. 41). Most particularly, they chose bad leaders. The Athenians gave political orators too much leeway, placed too much trust in them, and did not punish them strictly enough. They put their faith in rogues, while ignoring the good advice of genuine patriots.43 They were misled, despite their native intelligence and good laws, because they chose to pay attention to speeches alone and ignored the lifestyle of politicians (Aesch. 1.179). They had fine judgment but did not apply it consistently, as shown by their unwillingness to be harsh enough toward bribe-taking politicians (Dem. 23. 145—46; cf. 24.172). On the other hand, the Athenians failed to appreciate the real worth of the orator (Lyc. 1.3); they did not recognize which politicians were their true benefactors, because each citizen was too concerned with his private concerns (Dem. 19.227-28).
Although each criticism had its particular context and was intended to put the speaker in the best light and his opponent in the worst, the thread running through the various topoi of blame is clear enough: the orator “attacks” the people for not living up to their own ideals. The people are accused of being too generous with grants of citizenship, of giving over their mass power into the hands of a few evil men, of ignoring their own laws, of trusting rhetoric instead of depending on their collective wisdom. Thus, when the political orator blamed the people, he typically did so by appealing to egalitarian principles. He took the position of reminding his audience of the pristine democratic code of thought and behavior from which they had strayed. The appeal is to an essentially reactionary sensibility which regarded the past as good, the present as a falling-away from that ideal, and the future as likely to be better only if it recapitulated the past.44 The ideal past evoked by the rhetores was not, however, the idealized pre-democratic past longed for by Isocrates and other elitist writers, but the recent and “radical” democratic past. The orator called upon the Athenians to be the democrats their immediate forefathers had been; in so doing, the speaker payed court to an egalitarian climate of opinion.
Substantively, the blame topoi therefore have much in common with praise topoi, but when blaming the people the orator took on a didactic, quasi-paternal role. The orator who reproved the demos claimed for himself the remarkable privilege of setting his individual opinion and vision of the state in opposition to the ideas and current habits of the masses. Any one Athenian who deliberately set himself apart from and in opposition to the demos was taking a great risk. But castigating the people and opposing their will were central and expected parts of the political orator’s function; this is amply demonstrated by the tendency of the rhetores themselves to attack the evils of public flattery and demagoguery.
In Assembly speeches, Demosthenes vigorously denounces both the practices of crowd-pleasing orators and the demos’ tendency to listen to them. As he suggests in the Third Olynthiae (3.3), the popularityhunting (pros charin) speeches of a few men led to the present crisis (of 348 B.C.). The true politician set the welfare of the state above the attempt to gain charis through his speeches (tēs en tōi legein charitos), and this is what the good legontes of the past, like Aristides, Nicias, Demosthenes the general, and Pericles had done. But now rhetores ask the demos: “What do you desire? What law should I propose? How can I please you?” (ti humin charisōmai). Hence, affairs of the state are frittered away for the sake of the pleasure of the moment (tēs parautika charitos: 3.21-22). The evil rhetores corrupt the demos by fawning upon “you,” and they lead you to desire foolish things (like theoric payments), thereby “making you their prisoners” (cheiroētheis hautois poiountes: 3.31-32). Demosthenes concludes this last passage (3.32) by suggesting that he may get rough treatment from the Athenians, since there is not freedom of speech (parrhēsia) about all things in Athens; he was amazed indeed that the demos had allowed him to speak his mind so freely. In a similar vein, in the First Philippic, after having criticized the Athenians roundly for their laziness and indolence, Demosthenes concludes (4.51) that he had never said anything to gain the demos’ charis which he did not believe was to its advantage. In the current instance he spoke bluntly (haplōs), using parrhēsia, although he was not sure his audience would like it. He strikes a similar note in the speech On the Chersonese: the politicians had prepared the demos to be difficult and fierce in the Assembly but lax and contemptible in war preparations, whereas they should have trained you to be gentle and humane (philanthrōpous) in the Assembly and fierce in military preparations (8.32-33).
But now, by practicing demagoguery and pleasing you (dēmagōgountes humas kai charizomenoi), they have brought you to such a state of mind that in the Assembly you are elated by their flattery and lend a willing ear to their compliments, while in your public affairs and practices you currently run the gravest risks. (8.34)
Aeschines takes the same line in his political trial speech Against Ctesiphon: Aeschines chooses to speak the truth, rather than to please his audience, since it is the orators’ bad habit of always speaking to please (aei pros hēdonēn legomenon) that has brought the polis to such an awful state (3.127). The many were in the process of giving over the democracy to the few, and the demos was fortunate in that so far no rhetores whose bravery matched their ponēria had sprung up to overthrow the demos, as had happened before (in the revolution of 404). At that time the demos had been thrown down because of its own love of flattery (echaire gar kolakeuomenos); the destroyers of democracy were those to whom the demos had willingly become prisoner (hois heauton enecheirize: 3.234).
The passages cited above suggest that the comments attributed by Thucydides to Diodotus and Cleon (Thuc. 3.38.4-5, 3.42.6) in the Mytilene debate, that the people were wrong to accept flattery and willingly became slaves to the orators, may reflect genuine statements by late fifth-century orators. Isocrates, who has often been accused of being out of touch with political realities, makes very similar sorts of comments in On the Peace (8.116, 121) and Antidosis (15.133). Both speeches purport to be genuine attempts to influence Athenian public opinion, and the similarity of the “attack” on the people’s tendency to listen to flatterers, rather than true-hearted citizens who had the state’s best interests in mind, shows that Isocrates here was working with topoi the Athenians were used to hearing from politicians.45
Like so many of the topoi employed by the political orators, the “Athenians corrupted by evil flattery” topos cuts two ways. On the one hand, it suggests that the Athenians really did like to be flattered in public oratory. And their pleasure in hearing dulcet phrases certainly explains the flowery praise with which the orators garlanded their speeches. But the topos also suggests that the Athenians were aware of their own tendency to listen to the pleasant and not to the necessary and were willing to be chided for it. While the line between telling the people what they wanted to hear and exercising a genuine advisory and leadership role was often a fine one, the “evils of flattery” topos suggests that Athenians mistrusted any orator who too overtly attempted to “please all of the people all of the time.” The good orator not only praised the people, he also criticized and opposed them; orator and audience alike recognized that criticism and opposition to the will of the masses were central to the orator’s political function.
The public speaker’s position as critic and opponent of popular will was something of an anomaly in the egalitarian political order. Haranguing the people might well get a politician in trouble; as we have seen, Demosthenes attacked Meidias as a demos-hater on the strength of the latter’s tendency to criticize the masses. The conviction of Socrates made clear the dangers of indulging in unrestrained public criticism. But a rhetor’s willingness to go out on a limb, to oppose the will of the people in advocating a new and innovative policy, was the characteristic that made him useful. The political orators showed the Assembly the full range of possible policy options. Without the rhetores to develop and present reasonable proposals, the state might stagnate and drift. Without leadership in times of national emergency, the inherent slowness of democratic decision making could cause disaster.
Political power resided with the demos, but the demos was willing to “delegate” its powers in certain circumstances: power to lead the people in arms was delegated to generals in the held, power to make treaties to ambassadors, power to judge and to punish miscreants, as well as to reconsider decrees of the Assembly, to the dikastēria, power to review, confirm, and change the laws to the nomothetai. Similarly, the demos could, when it chose, grant to the orators the authority to advise the demos on a regular basis and even to lead the state in times of crisis. But the procedures by which specific powers were granted to generals, ambassadors, dikastēria, and nomothetai were clearly defined by the laws; the process of granting rhetores the authority to oppose the mass will was not. What then was the mechanism that determined when and to which individuals the political leadership of the people should be entrusted?466
Elitist statements by the political orators should be viewed in the context of the need for a nonconstitutional mechanism for delegation of authority by the demos. The orator’s elite attributes allowed him to fulfill his political function. He had to be intelligent and well educated in order to be able properly to analyze the problems of the state and to formulate policy that might solve those problems. He had to be a highly skilled speaker in order to render the complicated issues facing the state clearly to the people and in order to gain support for his own proposals. The orator’s wealth provided him with the leisure to study the challenges facing the state and (at least so the Athenians believed) might help to make him impervious to bribery. Noble birth might provide him with connections among the Athenian elite generally, but more importantly, citizen ancestors passed on to him the inborn sense of patriotism and love of democracy that was a prerequisite to a political career. Furthermore, the Athenian politician could successfully attack Athens’ enemies, internal and external, and so serve as a “protector of the people,” only if he possessed attributes that rendered him functionally equal to the state’s enemies. Thus, he must be as well educated, as clever a speaker, as wealthy, and as well born as the various malefactors he guarded the demos against. In short, elite attributes were sine qua non for the political orator who hoped to compete in the public arenas for the attention and respect of the people. An orator who was not elite could never be more than a mere “pleaser of the people.”
The Athenian system of government was based on mass decision making following upon public discussion. By law, each of the 6,000-8,000 citizens in attendance at a typical Assembly had the right to take an active part in the public discussion. But if even one in a hundred citizens chose to exercise his isēgoria at any given meeting, the volume of debate that would precede the vote would cause the system to founder. Many significant decisions had to be made every year; the Assembly had to come to some decision by the end of each meeting. Ancient and modern critics of democracy have pointed out that the time for deliberation in Assembly was very short.47 Obviously, some procedure was required that would serve as a filter, to assure that those who addressed the Assembly at length on major issues had something worthwhile to say. The elite status of the orators provided such a mechanism. By alluding in his speeches to his own attainments, and by pointing out his opponent’s lack of similar attainments, the orator demonstrated his “professional credentials” as adviser and defender and tested the credentials of his opponent. This filtering process stood in place of the more formal systems of representation and elections that allow elites in modern democratic societies to take legitimate roles of political leadership (cf. above, VII.A).
Through reiterated demonstration of his elite status in Assembly speeches and public trials, as well as by advocating successful policy, the politician developed in his audience a belief in his worthiness to advise them. His achievement of trusted adviser status was signaled by the willingness of the Assemblymen to hear him out when major issues were being discussed, to refrain from exercising their collective isēgoria by shouting or laughing him down. The politician who achieved this status was informally granted the authority to reprove and reprimand, to press for the adoption of his own policies even in the face of popular resistance to them. He might also be allowed to fail to convince the people of the rightness of his ideas from time to time. He could therefore continue to advocate a policy that had been at least temporarily rejected by the voters. The “vote of no confidence” represented by a speaker’s failure to carry a proposal in the Assembly did not, therefore, necessarily stifle his voice, and the Athenians kept open the option of changing their policy (cf. Din. 1.13).
The accrediting process took time. It required perseverence and skill on the part of the prospective politician and a careful understanding of the role he was expected to play. Demosthenes himself failed to hold the Assembly’s attention in his early attempts to address the people (Plut. Dem. 5-8). His difficulties were no doubt the norm for a budding politician, since the Athenians could not afford to have too many elite political experts in contention (cf. Lys. 16.20; Dem. Ex. 13.1; Plato Protagoras 319b-323a). It was to the advantage of the demos to have a range of opinion presented in Assembly, but the available options had to be laid out in the course of a few hours. Too many speeches might muddle the issue, and not surprisingly, therefore, only a handful of “full-time” politicians operated in Athens at any one time (above, III.B.1).
The orator’s elite status also facilitated his assumption of a more direct role in the government of the state. His demonstration that his superiority was directly linked to the public interest legitimated his claim to a position of leadership which might well appear anti-democratic in other circumstances. In a moment of crisis, the orator “revealed himself,” in Demosthenes’ words (18.320), as a leader. The theatrical metaphor clarifies the nature of this “revelation”: the orator, normally playing a double role and balancing any elitist claims with egalitarian sentiments, stepped out of character (as the elite idiōtēs never did); he shed his double mask of “equal but better” and displayed himself to the audience as a superior being, worthy of rule. As such, he stood not only before, but above the people and so could lay claim to the delegated power of the demos. All state business might, for the duration of the emergency, safely be placed in his hands. Hence, Demosthenes, Lycurgus, and perhaps Thrasybulus, Callistratus, and Eubulus, among others, were able to promulgate consistent policies that allowed the Athenian state to get through difficult periods.48 The elevation in status from adviser to leader was always temporary, the people’s delegation of power always provisional. At the conclusion of the crisis, the leader was expected to revert to his normal advisory role. The obvious analogy is the Roman Dictatorship, but notably the Romans made emergency leadership a constitutional office; the Athenians never did.
In order to allow them to perform their political functions, the rhetores were freed from some of the ideological controls that bound other elite Athenians to the interests of the mass and that circumscribed the public display of elite attributes. But the very fact that restraints were loosened rendered the political experts potentially dangerous. Their occasional assumption of “delegated” powers increased the danger, as did the fact that they were not automatically accountable to the state after their period “in office,” as were all elected and lotteried magistrates. The elite politicians might appear to have been in a good position to evolve into an institutionalized ruling elite: many if not all of the factors that led to elite monopolization of power in other democratic societies were in place. Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy might, on the face of it, seem to be the inevitable end to which Athenian democratic government was tending.
Although they had not read Michels, the Athenians were well aware of the danger that politicians might come to dominate the state, and the political orators indeed played on this fear in their speeches. Juries in public trials were warned that evil politicians planned a revolution (Aesch. 3.225), regarded the politeia as their private possession (Aesch. 3.3-4; cf. Dem. 51.19), set themselves up as stronger than the decrees (Dem. 51.22), had taken diplomacy into their own hands so that ambassadors from other places ignored the demos (Aesch. 3.250). Laws that dealt with orators should be harsh, so that they would be dissuaded from harming the many (Dem. 24.193); treason should in fact be punished before the crime was committed, because afterward the traitors would be too strong (Lyc. 1.126). Allowing anyone or any group of people to become greater than the people and their laws presented the gravest of dangers. A proper ruling by the jury will make “them” equal to “you” (Lys. 12.35), put political orators back under the power of the masses (Dem. 58.61), will free the Athenians and their governmental institutions from the grip of entrenched orators (Dem. 22.37). A conviction of rotten ambassadors will show Philip of Macedon that those who claim to be the masters of the Athenians are not their masters (Dem. 19.301) and will lead Philip to deal with the many as directors of all affairs, rather than with the few (Dem. 19-340.
But in actuality the rhetores were closely controlled in a number of ways. First, they were a check on each other. There were many sorts of legal action to which the public speaker was liable (above, 111.B.2). The thirty-four political trial speeches preserved in the corpus represent just the tip of the iceberg of legal competition among politicians. As noted above (VII.C), Aristophon commented he had been indicted, by graphai paranomōn alone, seventy-five times, and this figure must have been credible to his audience. Indeed, part of the protective role of the orator consisted in legal attacks upon other orators—acting as a viper-eating brown snake in Hyperides’ striking image (above, IV.C.1). Of course, it was necessary to beware of vipers in brown-snake skins. Dinarchus (199) warned the Athenians against conspiratorial orators who pretended to abuse one another in the Assembly but who in private were united and so deceived the masses by their speeches. Rather than forming secret cabals, the duty of a traitor-hating dēmotikos rhetor was to do as Demosthenes’ predecessors had done: indict one another by means of eisangeliai and graphai paranomön (Din. 1.100; cf. Dem. 22.66).49 The constant attacks of the orators on one another tended to prevent their developing into a cohesive ruling elite.50 But legal restraints alone would not necessarily prevent the sort of informal and underhanded cooperation Dinarchus described. The existence of the graphē paranomōn did not prevent the conspiracy that led to the oligarchic coup of 411. At that time, as Thucydides notes (8.66.1), the major public speakers were in on the plot, and they agreed ahead of time on what to say to the Assembly. This conspiracy among the orators had effectively controlled the range of options available to the citizens, a serious and ongoing danger in the restored democracy.
Furthermore, although political trials provided exciting and useful sociopolitical theater, severe judicial punishments meted out to convicted rhetores were problematic since such punishments might actually rob the Athenians of a valuable source of advice. Diodotus (Thuc. 3.42.3—4) notes that attacks on good orators as bribe-takers led to unwarranted suspicions of them, and thus the state was robbed of advisers. Aeschines also complained about the slanders that stopped those with good ideas from offering their advice (3.226). Demosthenes (18.138) reproached the Athenians for allowing low types great powers to overthrow by sycophantic attacks anyone who gave good advice.
The Athenians were not limited to judicial punishments as a means of enforcing proper public behavior of politicians, nor were they completely dependent upon the rhetores controlling one another. Athenians considered accountability, both by the scrutiny of the prospective magistrate before he entered office (dokimasia) and by the formal review of his conduct in office after his term was up (euthunai), vital to the democratic polity. The orator’s past political activity might be brought up at his scrutiny and review when he served in an archē.51 But legal indictments, dokimasiai, and euthunai were only the most obvious and formal manifestations of the generalized power of the Athenian masses to review the actions, behavior, and political status of all citizens. Citizenship itself depended upon an individual’s ability to persuade a deme assembly of his right to membership, and this could be challenged in court and in the occasional “cleansings” of the deme registers (VI.C.2). Every time an Athenian stood apart from the political in-group, he had to persuade its members that he was still in conformity with group norms.
The orator was scrutinized and reviewed every time he spoke in public. A sort of euthunai was held whenever the Assembly voted upon his proposal or when the jury in a political trial voted to acquit or convict, to accept or reject the arguments he had made as defendant or prosecutor. The Athenians’ collective knowledge of the rhetor’s life, character, and past history constituted an informal, but effective dokimasia.52 Aristotle (Rhet. 1403b 10-13) noted that the personal character of the speaker was one of the three “proofs” (along with affecting the emotions of the listener and logical demonstration) that yield persuasion. And Aeschines (1.179, 2.150, 3.174-75) made a point of arguing that an orator’s entire life should carry more weight with the people than any individual speech. Public knowledge of an orator would be gained from the politician’s own speeches, the comments of his adversaries, and rumor (see above, III.E.5). When he emphasized his elite attributes in a public speech, the orator was not only attempting to gain the momentary respect of his listeners, he was polishing and refining an image he hoped they already held of him. The orator might profess to be reticent to speak about himself (e.g., Dem. 5.4), but discussion of his own actions and character was a necessary and expected part of his political activity.
When the Athenians considered a proposal, they reviewed its merits, no doubt, but they also looked at it in light of their knowledge of the proposer. Many a proposal (especially in the area of foreign policy) was of necessity so complex that most Assemblymen might be unable to grasp its various ramifications. The ordinary Athenian voter might not understand all the technical arguments for or against a particular policy, but if he trusted the proposer, that trust alone might be sufficient to gain his vote. Once again, the time-limits that direct democracy placed upon decision making are important to keep in mind. The coincidence of complex proposals and limited time in which to discuss them led to the necessary conflation of man and policy; consequently, full differentiation of social and political roles, typical of modern society, was impossible (above, 111.D.3). The orator who passed the dokimasia of community opinion on the subject of his life not only had an excellent chance of getting a hearing for his views in the Assembly but a better chance of having his proposal regarded favorably.
The orator was thus given special privileges, because the demos felt that he had something special to contribute to the state. But the unique position of trust he held entailed a grave responsibility. Demosthenes (19.298) reminded the Athenians of the oracles that warned them to beware of the leaders of the politeia, “for you have trust in them” (toutois peithesth’ humeis) and so must not allow yourselves to be misled by them. The orator who withheld from the people his true opinion betrayed the pact between politician and demos. Demosthenes attacked Aeschines on the grounds that the latter did not address the people with sufficient frequency (e.g., Aesch. 3.216). But worse yet was the orator who chose to speak in public but did not speak his own mind. Demosthenes (18.282) argued that the worst crime a rhetor could commit was to believe one thing and say another in public. Dinarchus agreed; in his speech against Demosthenes he attacks the latter both for constantly changing his policy (above, VII.E.3) and for expressing ideas in public that he did not personally believe (1.17, 47). Other rhetorical passages express the same sentiment.53 Clearly, when the Athenians paid a politician with the coin of their trust and their willingness to weaken ideological restraints, they expected to be paid back in the form of the best and most heartfelt advice he could come up with. Anything less was treason.
There might be various motives for a rhetor not to tell the demos his true thoughts, but the motive for saying one thing while believing another most commonly alluded to in political trials was bribery. The bribe-taking politician was evil in various ways. He perverted the relationship of reciprocal gratitude that helped to bind together the interests of masses and elites (cf. esp. V.F.3). But the bribe-taker also subverted the link between character and policy. The Athenians’ dependence upon conflating the character and lifestyle of the individual politician with the policies he publicly advocated helps to explain the prevalence and vehemence of attacks upon opponents as bribetakers.54 The bribed speaker advocated proposals favored by his paymaster, whose interests had not been demonstrated to be identical to the interests of the people and whose views were not necessarily even those of a patriotic citizen. Since the offerer of a bribe did not have to face the people himself but remained in the background, his life was not available for public scrutiny. The man who bought an orator was a genuinely unaccountable and uncontrolled element in the political process. By choosing a trusted adviser of the people to present his ideas, the covert employer purchased not only a glib tongue, but the backlog of trust the orator had built up by proper demonstration of his own credentials, elite and egalitarian, to the people over time. This consideration helps to explain why the orator who accepted a bribe for public speaking was liable to indictment under eisangelia, a legal process specifically designed for cases involving treason. Eisangelia was employed if anyone should attempt to “destroy the demos,” attend a seditious meeting, form a conspiracy, betray the armed forces, or “if a rhetor should not say that which is most in the interest of the demos, because of having taken a bribe” (Hyp. 4.7-8; cf. above, 111.B.2).
Because the Athenians were often in the position of voting on an ad hominem basis, terrible effects were attributed to politically-motivated bribery: bribery is, for example, Philip’s way of conquering great poleis (Hyp. 5.15). Dinarchus hits upon a number of common themes in his attack upon Philocrates, a stratēgos accused of having taken money from Harpalus, the fleeing treasurer of Alexander the Great: the bribe-taker accepted gifts “against all of you, and your countryside, and children, and wives . . .” (Din. 3.2). Philocrates deceived all the Athenians, betrayed the trust (pistis) which he did not deserve to have received from “you” and so “did his best to destroy everything in the polis” (Din. 3.4, cf. 3.10). Clearly, bribe-takers are demos-haters (Din. 3.22). No doubt, speakers continued to accept money from individuals, but the extreme antagonism that the Athenians apparently felt toward the orator who betrayed his unique and trusted position perhaps made the orator less eager to take money “with some policy in mind” (Hyp. 5.24).
The ideological control of the elite by the Athenian citizen masses was not a perfect system, but on the whole it worked remarkably well. Resentments and tensions remained between elite idiōtai and the ordinary citizens, but those tensions could be and were mediated through symbolic means in the law courts. The result was a relatively high degree of social harmony and a lack of overt class conflict. Equally important to the survival of the state was the system of granting elite politicians special privileges in the arenas of public debate which allowed them to serve as defenders, advisers, and sometimes leaders of the state. From the restoration of the democracy in 403 to the Macedonian overthrow of the democracy in 322, the Athenians had the use of the considerable personal abilities of thoughtful, well-educated, patriotic politicians who remained sensitive to the interests of the masses and helped to guide the state through difficult times. These individuals often held strongly opposing views and attempted to portray one another as traitors and lower-class rascals unworthy of the people’s attention. Such attacks were part of the political contest system which in turn became part of the system of demotic control; it is not necessary for us to take any Athenian orator’s assessment of his opponent’s habits, background, or motives at face value. 55 Rather, these statements allow us to analyze just how successfully the Athenian demos reserved for itself the right to judge the qualifications and character of its politicians. The ideological hegemony of the masses effectively channeled the fierce competitiveness of elites, a legacy of the aristocratic code, into patterns of behavior that were in the public interest. The vital shift occurred in the late sixth and early fifth centuries, when the elite competitors began to compete for the favor of the masses, rather than—or in addition to—the respect of their elite peers. The effect of the shift was that the abilities, wealth, and birthright of the elite politician (and to a lesser degree of all elites) were only valorized when he received public recognition by the demos. Thus, the continuing strength of the aristocratic code of competition and philotimia served the interests of the democracy.56
Athens’ political leaders and advisers were unable to avert the Macedonian victory in 338 B.C. at Chaeronea or the subsequent loss of Athenian freedom of action in foreign policy. But that failure need not be laid at the door of the political organization of the state. Perhaps some solution to the “Macedonian problem” could have been found, perhaps the problem was insoluble given the inequality in resources. In any event, the mistakes the Athenians may have made in assessing and reacting to the military threat posed by Macedon were not the result of fatal flaws in the constitution, the gullibility of the people, or the treachery of the politicians. 57
There was no major change in the Athenian sociopolitical order after Chaeronea, despite the new element in the sociopolitical equation represented by the power of Macedon to interfere in the affairs of the defeated Greek poleis. The bonds of interdependence between Athenian masses and elites might have been weakened by the alternative route to political power that cooperation with the Macedonians represented. Instead of humbling themselves before the masses, members of the Athenian elite might have chosen to court their conquerors in hopes that the latter would support a new political order that would offer them a more overt role in the government. There was indeed a good deal of fear in Athens that something of this kind might occur, and politicians publicly labeled their opponents Macedonian pawns. But the coup never came. On the other hand, if fourth-century Athens actually had been run by a crypto-ruling elite whose members successfully masked their real power behind a facade of democratic government, the facade could presumably have been dropped after 338. Yet no elite rulers emerged from the shadows after 338; the democracy remained strong and vital.
The solidarity of the Athenian democracy in the sixteen years between Chaeronea and the imposition of a puppet government by Antipater after the Lamian War supports the notion that no hidden governing elite had evolved in the course of the fourth century.58 Therefore, Athens is an example of a direct democracy that achieved genuine, long-term, stable methods of decision making by the masses and that was not coopted by the growth of an internal ruling elite. The Athenian example may therefore be used to challenge the universality of Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy.59 Michels would, perhaps, respond that the Athenian politicians were merely play-acting; he noted that the elite “aristocrat” in modern society must appeal to the masses by seemingly democratic methods, hide his true motives, persuade the masses that his interests and theirs were identical: “He dissembles his true thoughts, and howls with the democratic wolves in order to secure the coveted majority.”60 This, I think, underestimates the power of ideology and rhetoric to define the values not only of the led but of the leaders themselves.61 The actions of the Athenian politician were so carefully scrutinized, the privileges granted him so provisional, that he was constrained to act and speak in the best interests of the masses or not at all. No orator was given much of a chance to “howl with the democratic wolves” unless he could also sing a pleasant tune with a meaningful libretto. No orator was delegated true power before he had proved the sincerity of his patriotic adhesion to the principles of the democratic state.
The Athenian system for controlling elite politicians worked precisely because it was based on a series of contradictions. The orator had to be simultaneously of the elite and of the mass, and he was expected to prove his membership in both on a regular basis. The contradictions implicit in Athenian mass-elite ideology are exemplified in the intertwining meanings of charis: the wealthy orator gave material gifts to the people, protected them by attacking their enemies, worked hard to provide them with good advice, and hence they were grateful to him. But he was also grateful to them: every time they gave him their attention when he spoke in public, voted for him in a political trial or for a proposal he supported in the Assembly, or allowed him to profit materially by his political position, the orator was put in the demos’ debt. Charis bound orator and audience together by reciprocal ties of obligation. But charis and the bonds it engendered could be dangerous. The orator who spoke only in order to please and win charis betrayed his function and harmed the people by binding them to himself: hence Aeschines’ and Demosthenes’ reiteration of the pun on charis (and its cognates) and cheiroō: to take someone prisoner.62
The contrariness of the expectations placed on the political orator clearly benefited the demos. Politicians competed for popular favor in public contests which were played according to certain conventions, but the details of the rules remained vague: when was charis good and when was it bad? when would an elitist claim be suitable and when would it constitute evidence of secret demos-hating tendencies? when should one praise the citizens and when should one castigate them? None of the answers were spelled out, and so politicians always operated from a position of uncertainty. When the rules of a contest are ill defined, its judge is given a wide interpretive scope. The masses set the rules and always acted as combined referee and scorekeeper; the vague and internally contradictory rules they devised for those who would play the game of political influence allowed the demos to reserve for itself the right to cast its own judgments according to its own lights—and hence to keep control of the state.
As a result, the orators were never able to define a sphere of influence, authority, or power for themselves that was independent of the continued goodwill of the people. As Mantitheus noted (Lys. 16.21), since the Athenians considered as worthy only those who acted and spoke concerning the good of the polis, ambitious citizens were stimulated to do just that. The orator was constrained to lay up eunoia with the demos (as Hyperides [2.7-8] claims Philippides failed to do). The orator was forced to admit that he was privileged due to the democratic politeia (Dem. 21.63). He must recognize that any public speaker whose interests were not identical to those of the demos was an enemy of the polis (And. 2.3). Rather than being subverted by the elite politicians, the democracy was protected and advised by them, and in some periods the situation that Isocrates (7.27) describes as a lost ideal really pertained: “How can we find a more secure and just democracy than this, which places the ablest in charge of affairs and gives the demos authority (kurion) over them?” Isocrates, like Aristotle (Pol. 1281a2-1282b14; cf. 1277b25-30) wanted to give the “ablest” unique access to permanent and powerful magistracies. The Athenians realized this sort of legal reform would mean the end of real political equality and hence of true democracy. By granting the elite conditional privileges based on their rhetorical display, rather than inalienable legal/constitutional rights, the demos achieved social stability and political leadership in times of crisis without losing its control of political affairs or seriously compromising its egalitarian principles.
My investigation of the political sociology of democratic Athens began as an attempt to shed some light on a neglected facet of Greek history and incidentally to test the validity of some central tenets of the elitist school of political philosophy. But my conclusions may also call into question some interpretations of democracy, and of sociopolitical organization generally, that have been advanced by other schools of thought. As Finley, Ste. Croix, and Meier (among others) saw, a key feature of the Athenian democracy was the use of political power by political equals to counterbalance various social inequalities—especially the unequal distribution of wealth.63 Consequently, democracy came to occupy a central position in Athenian society. This result was not inevitable from the beginning, as demonstrated by the peripheral position democratic process came to occupy in the society of colonial Massachusetts.64 How then was the Athenian democratic political power deployed?
The most obvious manifestation of the power of the Athenian citizenry was the franchise. But ballot power was not the ultimate key to the success of the Athenian democracy. The modern world offers examples of states run by narrow elites in which a very high percentage of the citizenry votes in elections; voting is relatively meaningless when there are no genuine choices or when the results of the decision are unimportant. As noted above (111.E.2), it is unlikely that more than one- or two-fifths of the Athenian demos voted upon even the most important matters, and the demos itself remained “imagined” in that all franchise holders never assembled together in one place. On the other hand, every citizen who communicated with other citizens participated, directly or indirectly, in the creation and maintenance of the political ideology of the state. Consequently, the will of the entire “imagined” demos was manifest in the decisions of Assemblies and juries.
A democratic constitution creates an environment in which the masses may be presented with real alternatives and so have the chance to make real decisions. But only mass control of political ideology will ensure that elite advisers and leaders present to the voters real alternatives on important issues. Even in the direct democracy of Athens, many decisions, some of them very important (e.g., by ambassadors and by generals in the field), were in fact made by elites. Voting in the Assembly and courts may, therefore, have been most important as an enforcement mechanism, a means of reward and punishment, by which the masses reined in the tendency of elite political experts to diverge from the interests of the masses. The control of ideology was the key, voting merely the means of maintaining that control.
The overriding importance of the popular control of the ideological climate of opinion, along with the ambivalent and contradictory nature of Athenian political ideology, render futile any attempt to explain the Athenian polity in terms of law and constitution alone. The processes of social and political control described here were orderly and efficient only in the long run; they were not rational in origin. Consequently, ancient political philosophers tended to scorn the democracy as based on irrational principles. Much of the confusion in modern debates over the Athenian conception of freedom and the locus of sovereignty in the state seems also to be the result of misguided attempts to find an ordering principle that would render Athenian thought and governmental practice rational and internally consistent. Most Athenians were burdened by no such obsession. They tolerated a degree of inconsistency in their legal and political systems, because too much order was inimical to continued mass rule.
Some important “checks and balances” existed within the Athenian legal and political systems, but of more fundamental importance was the sociopolitical balance achieved on the symbolic plane. The demos ruled, not so much because of its constitutional “sovereignty,” as because of its control over significant aspects of the symbolic universe of the Athenian political community. Athenian democracy—like all other forms of political organization—was predicated on and functioned through a network of symbols. At Athens, the key symbols were both revealed and generated through the two-way communication of public speech. Rhetorical communication between masses and elites, expressed through an increasingly rich vocabulary of topoi and images, was a primary means by which the strategic ends of social stability and political order were achieved. Communication was the tool the political equals used to exert their ideological hegemony over both social and political elites.65
Athenian public rhetoric—with its complex mix of elitist and egalitarian tactics—was a key form of democratic discourse. It stood in the place of an abstract theory of democracy and made theory unnecessary to the participants. It was arguably the failure of the elite to control political ideology that led them to devise and write formal political theory which would explain what was wrong with the system they failed to dominate. The thesis that the masses controlled the upper classes through ideological means also inverts the traditional Marxist approach to ideology and raises the possibility that lower classes can achieve major changes in the organization of society without overt struggle on the material plane. Hence, the assessment of the nature of Athenian democracy offered here may present an alternative to both ancient and Marxist—as well as to modern elitist—conclusions on the fundamental relationship between politics and society.
Finally, the conclusions arrived at in this book may be seen as challenging the view that democracy never achieved a language or conceptual system independent of aristocratic ideas.66 Democracy did, I believe, have its own language, created by the invention of new words (e.g., dēmokratia, isonomia), transvaluation of existing terms (isēgoria, plēthos), subversion and appropriation of the terminology and ideals of the aristocrats (kalokagathia, aretē), but above all by the elaboration of the vocabulary of rhetorical topoi and images described in the preceding chapters.67 As long as the demos remained arbiter of public opinion and policy, the word dēmokratia was a name for a political society and culture in which the most basic and elemental human power—the power to assign meanings to symbols—belonged to the people.
1 On the power of the elite, cf. Dem. 21.45: force (ten ischun) belongs to the few, laws to the many; Aristot. Rhet. 1372a11-17: those who are powerful speakers, experienced in affairs and in legal cases, those with many friends, and the rich believe they can do wrong and not be punished for it. On self-help in Athenian law, see Lacey, Family, 155-56; Hansen, ‘Apagoge,’ 113-21 ; Finley, “Freedom of the Citizen,” 11-12.
2 Lottery: above, II.F.I. On the lack of power of the magistracies, cf. Osborne, Demos, 9: Athenian officials were “little more than ciphers of a civil service” with no executive powers. Cf. also Maio, “Politeia," 21-22.
3 Cf. Lys. 31.25: if the chrēstoi are honored no more highly than ponēroi they will no longer be eager to contribute materially to the state. On the importance of encouraging the rich to contribute liberally in the fourth century, see Daviero-Rocchi, “Transformations,” 40; Whitehead, “Competitive Outlay.” Cf. above, II.G, V.C.1.
4 Proportionate equality: Aristot. Pol. 1280a22-24, 1282b14—1284a3, 1287a13-17, 1296b15-34, 1301a25-1302a15, Nicomachean Ethics 1132633—34. Cf. Finley, PAW, 137; Finley, “Aristotle,” 5 with n. g; Romilly, Démocratie, 49-52; Harvey, “Two Kinds,” 113-20, 126-29; Ober, “Aristotle’s Political Sociology.”
5 Aristot. Rhet. 1366a4, Pol. 1317a40-616, cf. 1318a2-10; Ober, “Aristotle’s Political Sociology.”
6 On the double (public/private) force of this passage, see Loraux, Invention, 180 with n. 30. Cf. also Thuc. 7.69.2.
7 On positive and negative freedoms in Athens, see Finley, “Freedom of the Citizen,” 15-23; Lacey, Family, 154, 176; Holmes, “Aristippus”; Raaflaub, “Democracy, Oligarchy,” 521—22, “Freien Bürgers Recht,” esp. 44; cf. above, I.A.
8 On isēgoria and parrhēsia in classical Athens, see Raaflaub, “Freien Bürgers Recht,” 11-17 (isēgoria), 18-23 (parrhēsia), “Democracy, Oligarchy,” 523-24, Entdeckung der Freiheit, 277-83, 325-26. Cf. Carter, Quiet Athenian, 13-14 and the studies cited in n.nn.44, 59. Link of freedom of speech to democracy: e.g., Dem. 21.124, 60.26 (isēgoria); Aesch. 3.6 (parrhēsia); Euripides Suppliant Women 430-42; cf. Raaflaub, “Freien Bürgers Recht,” esp. 15, 34-38. On the general absence of these terms from the public funeral orations: Loraux, Invention, 175.
9 Maio, “Politeia,” 19-20, notes that the fundamental Athenian values of personal freedom and political freedom were in conflict, because personal freedom offers the option of not participating in politics and was threatened by the Athenian failure to exempt privacy from government control. Cf. Finley, “Freedom of the Citizen,” 9—10, DAM, 72—103; Meier, Anthropologie, 54-55.
10 Isoc. 6.67, 7.31, 69, 8.19, 12.178, 258, 18.44, 68; Lys. 2.63-65, 18.17-18, 25.21-23,30. Among other early fourth-century uses of the term: And. 1.106, 108. Cf. Finley, DAM, 62-64; Holmes, “Aristippus,” 118—23; Funke, Homónoia und Arché, 13-26. Although elite writers sometimes spoke of homonoia as an ideal that was lacking at Athens (e.g., Xen. Mem. 3.5, 16), I do not agree with Loraux, Invention, 196, that homonoia was a “moderate” (as opposed to a democratic) political virtue.
11 For other examples of homonoia in Demosthenes and Isocrates, see Belegstellenverzeichnis, s.v.
12 On the power of the demos to legislate concerning private action, see esp. Finley, “Freedom of the Citizen,” 14-15. It is important to keep in mind that Pericles’ comment about Athenian respect for privacy is in the context of an implicit comparison of Athens with Sparta. On the fundamentally undemocratic nature of a politics of pure consensus, cf. the comments of Zuckerman, “Social Context,” 526—27, 533, 538-44.
13 The context of eleutheria in the Lysias passage, the throwing out of the rulers, suggests that freedom here is meant to be construed as the freedom of the citizens to engage in political action, rather than freedom of the state from external domination. Cf. also Loraux, Invention, 202. On the more general linkage between freedom and equality in the fifth century, see Meier, Entstehung des Politischen, 297—98; Raaflaub, “Democracy, Oligarchy.”
14 Kataluein ton dēmon (vel sim.): Lys. 20.13; Dem. 15.14.4, 19.175, 294, 24.144, 146, 149, 152, Ex. 42.2; Lyc. 1.147; cf. Thuc. 8.47.2; Aristoph. Ecclesiazusae 453, Plutus 948. Kataluein tous nomous: Dem. 24.22-23, 31. Neither list is comprehensive; cf. also Sealey, “Origins,” 283 with n. 35.
15 Cf. Dem. 21.223-25 and esp. 57 56. The modern debate on relative sovereignty of law, courts, and people seems to have been sparked (at least in the English-speaking world) by Hansen, Sovereignty. Hansen discusses the issue in several of the essays collected in AECA (esp. “Demos, Ecclesia”) but has evidently moderated his views somewhat recently: AECA, 159-60. For other recent studies emphasizing the “separation of powers” and/or urging that by the fourth century the laws and/or courts were sovereign while the people were not, see above, I.n.48. Maio, “Politeia," is one of the most reasonable and judicious discussions of the issue known to me. Cf. above I.c.2, II.G, III.E.
16 Cf. Finley, PAW, 18-23.
17 Cf. Humphreys, “Law as Discourse,” 251: “Codification, as a form of rule-making, needs to be seen as an aspect of practice, a way of making assertions about social relationships, not as a description of practice or a blueprint existing on a different level of reality like a Platonic Idea.”
18 Debate on the Syracuse expedition: Thuc. 6.8-30; disastrous outcome: 6.72-7.2; Mytilenean Debate and outcome: 3.36-50. Cf. Gomme et al., Historical Commentary, ad locc.
19 The relationship between the Athenians and their laws is clarified by Bowles and Gintis’ (Democracy and Capitalism, 186) discussion of the ideal functioning of a “democratic dynamic”: “The problem of building a democratic society is . . . one of a dynamic interaction of rules and actors, with the actors rendering the rules more democratic, and the increasingly democratic rules rendering the actors more firmly committed to and skilled at democratic participation and decision making.” Cf. Harrison, “Law-Making,” 35: “The question is not whether the sovereign people allowed itself to be robbed of full control of the law-making machine, but whether it deliberately invented a perfectly democratic brake to slow down the machine.”
20 The number 75 is surely not exact, as was pointed out by S. I. Oost, “Two Notes on Aristophon of Azenia,” CPh 72 (1977): 238-40; but it must have been in the right general order of magnitude: D. Whitehead, “The Political Career of Aristophon,” CPh 81 (1986): 313-19, esp. 313-14. Hyperides (5.29) suggests that the frequent acquittals of politicians by the dikastēria was proof of the confidence of the demos. But convictions were certainly far from unknown; e.g., Apollodorus’ conviction over the theōrika, and that after a unanimous vote of the Assembly: Dem. 59.4-8; cf. Markle, “Jury Pay,” 291; and Hansen, “Theoric Fund.” On the frequency of graphai paranomōn, see Hansen, Sovereignty, 25-26; of the 39 examples of the action collected in ibid., 28-41, 12 resulted in convictions, 15 in acquittals or in the action being dropped; the result of the other 12 cases is unknown. This is, of course, not a statistically meaningful sample.
21 Complexity of fourth-century diplomacy: above II.nn.108, 109. On the slowness of democratic decision making when compared to monarchies or oligarchies, see Dem. 19.185-86.
22 On the conditions that led to the rise of an elite of legal specialists in Rome, see B. Frier, The Rise of the Roman Jurists (Princeton, 1985), esp. 269—87.
23 On the advantages to the demos in keeping law vague, see E. Ruschenbusch, “ΔΙΚΑΣΤΗΡΙΟΝ ΠΑΝΤΩΝ ΚΥΡΙΟΝ,” Historia 6 (1957): 257-74; Finley, Ancient History, 102. Cf. Maio, “Politeia,” 40-43 (on the positivistic aspect of Athenian law); Osborne, “Law in Action” (on the “open texture” of Athenian law).
24 Sealey, “Athenian Concept of Law,” 302, cf. Athenian Republic, 91-106.
25 Among the many passages cited above that illustrate the ongoing tension between mass and elite, the ongoing need of the masses for the contributions of the wealthy, and the fear of the wealthy that the masses will confiscate their wealth, see esp. Lys. 27.1-2; Dem. 21.66-67, 143, 210; Hyp. 4.33-36.
26 On the opposition of the many and the one, see, for example, Lys. 3.9; Is. 5.38; Dem. 21.198. On the tension between the individual and the group in Greek tragedy, see Vernant, “Historical Moment,” 2, 10, “Tensions,” 10.
27 Even if the litigant lost his case on its merits, a sympathetic jury would not be tempted to use the full extent of its punitive powers against him, so that the damage done him by the judgment would be limited.
28 Lintott, Violence, 179, notes that the absence of an oligarchic coup at Athens in the first half of the fourth century “is remarkable, inasmuch as the rest of Greece was plagued by revolution and counter-revolution during that period.” He suggests that Spartan weakness after 378 might be part of the reason, but also notes (179-80) that, even with the rise of Macedon as a genuine power in the 340s and the Macedonian victory in 338, there was no upswing in oligarchic activity.
29 Orator as dēmotikos: Aesch. 3.168; Dem. 19.277; Hyp. 2.10, 5.5; Din. 1.44; cf. Hyp. 4.21.
30 E.g., Lyc. 1.140: the only people who would want to help Leocrates are those whose true interests are not those of the state.
31 E.g., Thuc. 2.60.4-5 (Pericles’ second speech to the Assembly); Isoc. 18.23 (on Thrasybulus and Anytus); Dem. 24.134-35 (on Agyrrhios of Kollytos), 18.171-72, 258, 320, 19 337-38; Aesch. 3.169-70.
32 An analogy is the set of mechanisms, developed within a species by evolutionary means, whereby instinctive actions by an animal can, under certain conditions, inhibit or release specific behavior patterns in members of the same species; see K. Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. M. K. Wilson (New York, 1966). Cf. the mode of chemical communication between mother and fetus, which inhibits and releases the normal activities of the maternal immune system at specific points in the gestation cycle in order to afford a “special privilege” to the fetus, which would otherwise be rejected: P. M. Johnson, quoted in Science News 130.15 (October 11, 1986): 234-35.
33 Isoc. 2.40-41, 43, 49. Cf. Jaeger, Paideia, 111.104.
34 E.g., Thuc. 8.92.10 (Theramenes). According to Plutarch (Phocion 16.2), one of Phocion’s political opponents warned him against attempting to turn the Athenians from war when they already had arms in hand.
35 Sources: above, I.n.102. Cf. Bolger, “Training,” 36-37; and above, 111.D.2.
36 E.g., Dem. 6.8, 8.40-42, 19.285, 330, 22.76, 23.109; Aesch. 1.178; Lyc. 1.51. Examples could easily be multiplied.
37 Finley, “Athenian Demagogues,” PAW, 75-84; cf. above, 111.D.2.
38 On the term prostatēs meaning “protector,” see Connor, NP, 110-15. Cf. Lys. 13.7-8, 12: after Aegospotami the revolutionaries were only blocked by tous tou dēmou proestēkotas, along with the stratēgoi and taxiarchs. Therefore those who desired oligarchy had Cleophon put to death by a rigged jury. Aesch. 2.176: good government was restored when the deinos came back from Phvle and the prostantān tou dēmou were Archinus and Thrasybulus. Wilcox, “Scope,” 155, cites the closure of the schools of rhetoric by the Thirty Tyrants (Xen. Mem. 1.2.31) as evidence that the oligarchs saw that “oratory is the life-blood of democracy.” Attempts to distinguish the prostatai of the polis from the prostatai of the demos (Reverdin, “Remarques”) or the prostatai from the rhetores (Ehrenberg, People of Aristophanes, 354-56) are futile and misleading.
39 Court attacks salutary: e.g., Lys. 27.3; And. 1.136; Lyc. 1.3, 138; cf. Osborne, “Law in Action,” 40—42; and above, III.B.I, below, VII.F. 1.
40 As Plato Theaetetus 167b-c notes. Cf. Wilcox, “Scope,” 146; Bryant, “Rhetoric,” 412. Meier, Anthropologie, 50-51, discusses the advisory role of democratic leaders, arguing that leadership was acceptable only at the level of discussion rather than at the level of organization. I am in general agreement, but cf. Montgomery, Way to Chaeronea, 58—60, 91—94, 102-103; and below, VII.E.4.
41 E.g., Din. 1.40; Lys. 30.28; Dem. 58.62; Aesch. 3.181-82.
42 Aristotle (Rhet. 1417b12-16) notes that in deliberative oratory one may relate things about the past so that the hearers will make better decisions in the future and that this may be done either in a spirit of praise or of blame. On the tendency of the orators to reproach their audiences for not living up to their ancestors’ standard, cf. Dover, GPM, 23-25, “Freedom,” 49.
43 Too much leeway, too much trust: Lyc. 1.12; Dem. 9.54, 23.147, Ex. 55.2; Lys. 18.16. Insufficiently strict: Lys. 27.4-6; Dem. 23.206. Trust rogues, ignore patriots: Dem. 18.138, 19.226, 51.21, Ex. 42.1. Aristophanes’ comic demagogues make similar comments: e.g., Knights 1340-44, Ecclesiazusae 173-207.
44 Cf. the frequent allusions, by fourth-century writers and politicians of various political persuasions, to the “ancestral constitution” and its various “fathers”: E. Ruschenbusch, “ΠΑΤΡΙΟΣ ΠΟΛΙΤΕΙΑ,” Historia 7 (1958): 398-424; K. R. Walters, “The Ancestral Constitution and Fourth-Century Historiography in Athens,” AJAH 1 (1976): 129-44; Mossé, “Comment.” On the idea of progress generally, see Meier, Entstehung des Politischen, 435—99.
45 For other examples of “blame” in oratory and in comedy, see Dover, GPM, 23-25, 28—30, who argues that both may be viewed within the context of a “didactic tradition” in which the speaker criticizes and instructs the audience. But traditions survive or die out according to the concerns and needs of the society. The specificuses of blame topoi by the political orators are of significance for understanding fourth-century political behavior. Cf. also Montgomery, Way to Chaeronea, 18-28, for a succinct discussion of Demosthenes’ criticism of other orators and of the demos. See also citations above, I.n.111.
46 Hansen, “Demos, Ecclesia,” 144-46, argues that the concept of delegation is not useful in understanding the relationship between ekklēsia and dikastērion, on the grounds that the superior body should be able to rescind delegated powers from the delegatee. Hansen’s legalistic argument is based upon his belief that only the ekklēsia was regarded as embodying the will of the demos, but cf. above, 111.E.4, VII.C. The ideas, which I believe were commonly held by Athenians, that nomothetai and jurors were expressing the will of the demos and that the demos reviewed decisions by the jurors, seem to me to justify the use of the concept of delegation in analyzing Athenian political behavior. In my other examples of delegation, the problem does not arise, since the demos indeed had the right to rescind the powers.
47 E.g., Aristot. Rhet. 1354b1-4; Cicero Pro Flacco 15ff.; Michels, Party Politics, 64-65.
48 Humphreys, “Lycurgus,” 201, suggests that Lycurgus’ powers “diverged in some significant ways from the pure type of fifth-century democracy” and notes (218) the combination of democratic form and authoritarian content “which characterizes [Lycurgus’] political style.” Although his control of finances gave Lycurgus an institutional base earlier politicians lacked, a similar combination of the democratic and the authoritarian characterized other Athenian politicians at certain points in their careers. Cf. Bowles and Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism, 183: “. . . effective political leadership and unanticipated innovation by individuals or groups other than ‘the whole’ is fully consistent with the ideal of popular sovereignty as long as both leadership and innovation are subject to effective ex post facto deliberation and accountability.”
49 Cf. Perlman, “Politicians,” 343; Maio, “Politeia,” 33-37.
50 On the importance of cohesiveness for elite formation in classical elitist theory, see Marger, Elites and Masses, 82; cf. above, 1.C.2.
51 Importance of accountability: Ste. Croix, CSAGW, 285; Roberts, Accountability; Adeleye, “Purpose”; Maio, “Politeia,” 37-40. Orators formally accountable because of their service in archai’. Roberts, Accountability, 168-71, “Athens’ Politicians”; cf. above, 111.B.2.
52 Not to be confused with the formal dokimasia rhētorōn: above, 111.B.2.
53 E.g., Thuc. 3.37 4-5 (Cleon on Mytilene), 6.8.2, 6.12.2 (Nicias on Sicilian preparations); Lys. 18.16; Dem. 19.184, 24.124; Hyp. 5.17; cf. Aristot. Rhet. 1399a30-32.
54 Late fifth century: Thuc. 2.60.6 (Pericles), 3.38.2 (Cleon on Mytilene); early fourth century: Strauss, “Cultural Significance”; mid- to later fourth century: Dem. 9.54, 18.103, 114, 19.146-47, 265, 23.146, 24.172, 200, 203, 29.22, 51.21-22; Aesch. 2.79, 3.218, 220, 232, 257; Din. 1.1, 28, 42, 98, 3.19; Hyp. 5.21. J. Cargill, “Demosthenes, Aischines, and Crop of Traitors,” Ancient World 11 (1985): 75-85, argues that Demosthenes’ statements to the effect that Philip’s supporters in Athens took bribes from him were true. Cf. also Harvey, “Dona Ferentes,” and above, VI.D.3.
55 Of course it would be equally foolish to argue that the comments of the orators never had a basis in reality; no doubt many orators really did take bribes, perhaps some really were from lower-class families, and it is not impossible that a few were actually traitors to the democracy. There may well be a “nugget of truth” in these attacks, but we are seldom able to put the matter to the test, and so each modern writer is tempted to see as “nuggets” those comments that suit his or her own preconceptions. On the errors this approach led to in the reconstruction of archaic Greek history, see C. G. Starr, “The Credibility of Early Spartan History,” Historia 14 (1965): 257-72.
56 Cf. Carter, Quiet Athenian, 10-17; Whitehead, “Competitive Outlay.”
57 I have attempted to define some of the errors in military policy made by the Athenians in FA, esp. 222. The central error that I believe the Athenians made, assuming the next conflict would be similar to the last, is hardly limited to antiquity, as the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated, or to democracies: witness the Russian war in Afghanistan of the 1980s.
58 Hence, I disagree with de Laix, Probouleusis, 191-92, on this point and think that Whitehead, Demes, 248, is imprecise in speaking of an “Athenian governing class.” See also Plato Menexenus 238d, who speaks as if there were a hidden elite: “Some call it democracy, others whatever name they please, but it is in reality government by the elite with the approval of the crowd.” Loraux, Invention, 189, suggests that this is a deliberate revelation of what remains cryptic in Pericles’ Funeral Oration (Thuc. 2.37-40). Perhaps so, but both Thucydides and Plato despised the “radical” democracy, and neither was willing to countenance the idea that the Athenian masses had the ability to rule themselves or to control their leaders. I remain in substantial agreement with Gomme, “Working,” 25; and Finley, DAM, 25—26, PAW, 139-40. Bolgar, “Training,” esp. 36, 47-49, also notes that “it would be wrong to describe them [politicians] as a ruling elite,” and he attributes this “failure” to Athenian educational institutions.
59 On the difficulty that opponents of elitist theory have had in adducing empirical counter-examples to the notion of the inevitability of elite domination of democratic institutions, see Marger, Elites and Masses, 81.
60 Michels, Political Parties, 44-46; quote: 46. Field and Higley, Elitism, 19-20, postulate a revisionist paradigm of elites in political society which assumes that elites always require non-elite support and that elites are limited by the need to make political arguments “conform to the orientations and attitudes of the non-elites to whom they are addressed.” Elites who fail to operate within these non-elite limits risk losing their power and tenure. So far this model might well suit the Athenian example, but I do not believe that their final tenet is valid: that non-elite orientations are only manifested in very general opinion tendencies and that therefore detailed treatments of political questions are largely left to elite choice. As I have attempted to demonstrate, Athenian “opinion tendencies,” though not logically consistent, were quite specific. Athenian political questions were not necessarily left to elite choice, although the questions may have been framed by elite speakers.
61 On the importance to eloquence of the speaker genuinely feeling the emotions he is attempting to portray, see Bryant, “Aspects II,” 327—28.
62 Dem. 3.31-32; Aesch. 3.234 (cited above, VII.E.4). Among other passages that allude to the charis relationship between orators and audience, see Aesch. 3.255; Dem. 18.131, 23.184; Hyp. 5. 28-30.
63 Finley, PAW, 139-40; Ste. Croix, CSAGW, 96-97, 298, 317; Meier, Anthropologie, 7-26, 52—53; cf. Luhmann, Differentiation, 146.
64 Zuckerman, “Social Context,” 535; cf. above II.F.
65 The concept of “ideological hegemony” was originally developed by Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks, as an explanation for the origin of the “false consciousness” which leads exploited workers to conform to the ideals of the ruling classes. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London, 1971); cf. Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford, 1981), 1-129. I have deliberately used Gramsci’s term to describe a situation which is in some ways an inversion of the one Gramsci himself saw as pertaining in modern capitalist societies. For criticisms of Gramsci’s (inter alios) ideas of the function of false consciousness in sociopolitical relations, see Bowles and Gintis, Democracy and Captitalism, 152—75, 231 n. 4. Cf. Wyatt-Brown, “Community,” 179-80, 189-90, on the mechanisms of “social control by the poor over the rich” among whites in the antebellum American South.
66 See esp. Loraux, Invention, 172, 176, 180-202, 217-20, 334-35, with literature cited.
67 Cf. Meier, Entstehung des Politischen, 275-325, Anthropologie, 27—44, who suggests that in fifth-century Athens, as in the Enlightenment in Western Europe, there was a transformation in the entire conceptual universe, and as a result new words were invented and old terms redefined; and Washburn, Political Sociology, 257, who cautiously suggests that ideologies originating from elite sources have less effect on overall patterns of national behavior than do ideologies “which emerge from people’s everyday social, economic, and political experiences.”