Ancient Greek political thinking and practice were always enmeshed in a relationship of dialectical tension and ambiguity.1 The polis, or citizen-state, would not have emerged as Greece’s quintessential form of political organization without the widespread belief that all free members of those small-scale agricultural communities were at least roughly similar to one another in prudence, military strength, and dignity. Equally, political thought – as well as more systematic political philosophy – could not have achieved its recognized significance if thinkers had not been closely engaged with the real-life practices, rituals, and ideologies of the classical Greek cities. Traditionally, scholars had understood the Platonic and Aristotelian texts as self-contained investigations of permanent political questions. More recently, scholars have focused on the dialectical relationship between political life and philosophy, but they have tended to represent the philosophers as hostile critics of Greek politics as usual, most particularly of democratic politics in Athens. The present chapter follows a different tack altogether.
Our goal is to discover within democratic politics certain strands of ideology and political thought that informed the Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian political projects.2 Accordingly, our focus will be on ideologies and structures of thought rather than political institutions and practices. It will emerge, however, that the two extremes of this apparent polarity are closely interrelated. Institutions and practices were designed on the basis of normative thinking – that is, thinking about how things ought to be done; conversely, the horizons of political thought were defined by each thinker’s engagement with the behaviors of local political life. It is for this reason that we emphasize democratic Athens, as opposed to other ancient democracies, because Athens, as a wealthy imperial city, was not only the epicentre of classical political philosophy, but also Greece’s first and greatest democracy. Athens also provides us with the bulk of our extant evidence concerning ancient democracy. Yet we must ever distinguish between ideological features that derive from democracy per se, as opposed to those deriving from Athens in particular or those characteristic of the Greek polis as such.3 It will be helpful to begin by charting the dialectical engagement between thought and practice in archaic Athens.
Later traditions held that in 594 Solon was chosen to be arbitrator between competing political factions in Athens. Conventionally numbered among the Seven Sages, Solon figured prominently in Herodotus’ Histories as an ethical advisor, criticizing the excessive appetites of Eastern monarchs and (by implication) those of his imperialistic Athenian descendants. Roughly a century later, Aristotle credited Solon with establishing a “regime” (politeia) for Athens, with three notably democratic features: a ban on loans made on the security of a person (that is, the abolition of debt-slavery); permission for any third-party prosecutor, not only family members, to seek legal redress; and the privilege of appeal to the jury-courts (Ath. Pol. 9.1). These provisions invited all Athenian citizens, not only aristocrats, to help guarantee that Athens would deliver justice to its citizens, through shared, transparent, and publicly recognized legal procedures. Moreover, Aristotle says, Solon enabled the people to elect magistrates and to hold them accountable after their terms (Pol. 2.12). Even so, Aristotle also reports that Solon gave the demos “only the necessary minimum of power” (ibid., trans. Barker 1995). Solon’s legislation was probably intended, in its own era, to settle aristocratic infighting; Solon’s own goals were not self-consciously democratic.
Nonetheless, the reforms contained a democratic potentiality that was subsequently actualized. The reforms’ democratic potential derived from Solon’s recognition that establishing peace at Athens required him to mobilize citizens to take personal responsibility for the city’s welfare (Anhalt 1993; Balot 2001). In stressing the citizens’ own responsibility for the city, Solon’s measures legally embodied the belief that all citizens were roughly equal. If his goal was not to establish democracy, however, nor to establish a Spartan-style regime of warriors, or a Carthaginian mercantile city, then what did Solon have in mind in his focus on justice, citizenship, and active political participation?
Evidently, Solon tried to dampen competition over the city’s scarce resources, by cultivating moderation among Athens’ grasping aristocrats. Solon’s surviving poetry blames the city’s aristocratic leaders, in particular, for indulging their excessive appetites too freely:
It is the citizens themselves who by their foolishness and subservience to money are willing to destroy a great city, and the mind of the people’s leaders is unjust; they are certain to suffer much pain as a result of their great arrogance. For they do not know how to restrain excess or to conduct in an orderly and peaceful manner the festivities of the banquet that are at hand … they grow wealthy, yielding to unjust deeds (Solon, fr. 4 W, trans. Gerber 1999).
Solon aspired to establish civic peace through distributing power and resources fairly.4 Elsewhere, indeed, he speaks of giving the demos “as much privilege as is sufficient” and ensuring that the wealthy and powerful “should suffer no indignity” (fr. 5 W). The efficacy of Solon’s fair distribution depended on the citizens’ ethical character, which had to be educated in moderation (sōphrosunē) and justice (dikē). Solon’s political thought developed longstanding traditions of social criticism, including the critique of elite arrogance and greed voiced by such diverse figures as the Homeric Achilles and the persona of Hesiod’s Works and Days (Balot 2001).
Solon attempted to embody in his political reforms the ideology of civic fairness and the political critique of greed and injustice so clearly manifest in the lawgiver’s poetry. Ideas and political change operated in a closely interconnected way, as political reform incarnated Solon’s ethical vision and Solon’s new political institutions and laws promoted a public education in citizenship, political responsibility, and moderation. The mutually enriching and yet contentious dialectics of theory, ideology, and practice emerge in a different and more complete way in the relationship forged between the developed democratic practices of the fifth century and the dissemination of social theory by those we now call “sophists.”
With Solon we appear to stand at the beginning of a tradition that will culminate in the dialectical relationship between the classical Athenian democracy and the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. With the benefit of hindsight, scholars have typically regarded the “sophists” as a middle term in this linear narrative. Yet there are good reasons to question the legitimacy of this conventional interpretation, starting with the understanding of “sophistry” itself.
“Sophist” is nothing other than a derogatory misnomer used by Plato and his followers to distinguish their idealized Socrates from other contemporary philosophers of nature, ethics, and society.5 In fact, these typically peripatetic and mostly non-Athenian teachers – men such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus, and Thrasymachus – deserve to be dignified as “philosophers” just as much as Socrates. Sketching their relationship to democracy is difficult in brief compass. They themselves did not advance a unified political philosophy, and their works survive only as fragments. More importantly, the “sophists” suffer from Plato’s frequently uncharitable representation of them in his dialogues. For example, the famously successful Gorgias of Leontini is “known” most fully, though perhaps not so accurately, through Socrates’ withering elenchus of (the character) Gorgias and his incoherent thoughts on rhetoric, education, and justice in the Platonic dialogue Gorgias.
We need not doubt, though, that democratic free speech proved attractive to the unorthodox inquiries of these thinkers. They spent much time in Greece’s democracies, above all Athens. By developing distinctions between nomos (“custom” or “law”) and phusis (“nature”), these philosophers suggested that traditional norms were mutable and that liberating possibilities (such as those of universal human equality or democratic political authority) were within the grasp of their audiences. The political salience of rhetoric in democracies, moreover, made these thinkers, who were often professional teachers of rhetoric, attractive to the wealthy elite who aspired to lead their cities. At least as Plato depicted him, Gorgias maintained that rhetoric was the queen of the arts and sciences, the most powerful form of knowledge available to human beings. And, conversely, scholars have argued that the sophists, having grown up in democracies, “learned and taught techniques of popular political power,” as they travelled throughout Greece in search of pedagogical and other professional opportunities (Robinson 2007: 122). But what do we genuinely know about their thought and its relevance to democracy?
Democritus and Protagoras, both from the democratic colony of Abdera (Robinson 2011: 140–5), provide our best case studies for exploring this question. Owing to our incomplete source base, Democritus is known chiefly as an atomist and hedonist, rather than a political philosopher. In one relevant fragment, though, Democritus is quoted as saying, “Poverty in a democracy is as preferable to so-called prosperity among oligarchs as freedom is to slavery” (DK 68 B252, trans. Procopé 1989: 314). This statement is of a piece with standard fifth-century contrasts between democracy and oligarchy. Yet, this statement says little about what democracy is, why it might be desirable, and whether it too is defective compared to other imaginable regimes, such as monarchy or aristocracy. Nor can we be certain that Democritus meant by dēmokratia what classical Athenian democrats meant by the term – namely, the regime in which the entire demos, including all poor as well as “middling” and wealthy citizens, exercised power and governed the city.6 From other meager fragments, we know that Democritus used conventional democratic vocabulary and praised such standard democratic practices as broad-based participation, voting, and the accountability of magistrates. But the record does not enable us to see democratic ideas integrated into Democritus’ own philosophical system or Democritus’ own ideas embodied in “live” democratic practices.7
With Protagoras, the picture is both more complete and more tantalizing. Various fragments survive, including Protagoras’ famous homo mensura doctrine; but, being chiefly metaphysical and epistemological, these fragments are not directly relevant to politics. More interesting for us is Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, which, at first glance, presents Protagoras offering a full-scale democratic theory – indeed, the only such systematic theory that survives from classical antiquity. But we cannot assume too quickly that Protagoras endorsed democracy. Protagoras’ treatment of democracy is embedded within a fictive drama of Plato’s own design. We can have little confidence that Protagoras himself endorsed this theory personally; prior to examining Protagoras in the dialog, moreover, we cannot be certain even that the character Protagoras is portrayed as endorsing this theory.
The reasons for skepticism are twofold.8 First, the character Protagoras is motivated chiefly by greed and ambition, which drive him to charge hefty fees for educating wealthy young men in the artful uses of political rhetoric (335a, 348d–349a). The implication is that his customers will, in turn, address their fellow citizens in ways designed to advance their own careers (Coby 1987: 37–44; Bartlett 2003: 615). Second, Protagoras specifically shows himself to be hostile to the idea of “democratic wisdom.” He bluntly criticizes the ordinary citizens for their stupidity and sheep-like willingness to follow their leaders (317ab, cf. 352e, 353a). On the other hand, Protagoras claims to teach his own students “sound deliberation” in household management and techniques for succeeding in democratic politics (318e–319a). These dramatic indicators suggest that, in the ensuing conversation, Protagoras will present his arguments in a calculating way. In the very act of presenting his “democratic theory,” indeed, Protagoras may be corrupting the aristocratic youth, by teaching his students how to use manipulative rhetoric (Lampert 2010). Hence, the question of “Protagoras and democracy” transforms itself into the question of Plato’s own criticisms of democracy and “sophistry.”
Yet does Protagoras proceed to offer a viable “democratic theory”? The central question, arguably, is not whether the character himself endorses the theory, or whether the character Socrates undermines it, but rather whether the theory itself provides a plausible account of the democratic experience. Protagoras’ account is intended as a response to a Socratic challenge. On behalf of the young Hippocrates, Socrates wonders aloud whether virtue is teachable. He has observed, he says, that the Athenian Assembly accepts the opinions of all citizens, including manual laborers and merchants, none of whom have special expertise in war and peace or political administration (319be). For Protagoras as a self-proclaimed teacher of virtue and as a supposed exponent of democratic politics, then, the challenge is to explain how the Athenian democracy can be right to accept the opinions of the many uneducated citizens, while also showing that he himself has special techniques enabling him to cultivate exceptional virtue in the wealthy political elite.
Protagoras confronts this challenge in a seemingly compelling way, through narrating a mythological tale of human origins (320d–4d) and then providing a rational account of his own pedagogy (324e–8d). Protagoras’ myth suggests that human beings originally found themselves in a “state of nature” in which they were forced to join together in cities for self-defence (322b). Doing so, however, they began to wrong one another, because they lacked the art of politics (322bc). To avoid the wholesale extinction of humanity, Zeus bestowed upon human beings both justice and a “sense of shame” (aidōs), which enabled them to live in cities peacefully and in friendship (322c). These gifts had to be distributed universally, because anyone without them would prove harmful to the city and would therefore deserve death (322d). Hence, argues Protagoras, the Athenians are justified in accepting the advice of all citizens on non-technical political questions, because their advice grows out of their possession of the civic or sociable virtues, that is, justice and moderation (322e–3a).
Almost as a footnote, however, Protagoras adds that, by contrast with technical skills such as flute playing, everyone in the city at least pretends to be just and moderate.9 This indicates, he says, that all agree that justice and “the rest of civic virtue” must be possessed by anyone worthy of the designation “human” (323ac). Subsequently, Protagoras suggests that, like him, the Athenians hold that virtue is teachable, as they indicate when they punish and reprove acts of injustice or impiety, as opposed to natural facts such as ugliness or physical weakness (323d–4d). As Protagoras says, “This attitude towards punishment as deterrence implies that virtue is learned” (324c, trans. here as elsewhere Lombardo and Bell 1997). Through his emphasis on the metaphor of “seeds,” Protagoras appears to view the democratic citizenry as having the potential for virtue or excellence – a potential that needs to be developed through democratic practices of education and deliberation. Throughout his muthos, then, Protagoras represents himself as agreeing with the democratic ideology of equality and virtue.
The question is whether Protagoras’ self-representation is fully plausible or complete. Careful readers will discover in this opening salvo, on the one hand, genuine references to and elaborations of firm democratic ideals, such as the egalitarian distribution of civic virtue and, more specifically, the belief in the collective wisdom of the many. Yet Protagoras’ description of Athenian civic virtue omits reference to any intellectual virtues such as prudence or sound deliberative judgment, the very virtues that would be most appropriate to democratic deliberation. Protagoras has not demonstrated that the Athenian democracy should welcome the deliberative contributions of all citizens – an argument that should be based on the idea that open deliberation among citizens would somehow lead to a better result than the closed deliberations of one or few wise individuals (Taylor 1991: 81–4).
Moreover, it is at least perplexing that Protagoras emphasizes not the goodness of actually possessing justice and moderation, but rather the citizens’ cultivation of a (possibly misleading) reputation for these qualities. Does Protagoras thereby imply that he himself will teach his wealthy students not to cherish justice and moderation as intrinsically good, but rather to cultivate the image of a conventionally virtuous man with a view to winning glory and making money? Such ambiguities suggest that Protagoras’ long presentation is not a significant democratic theory so much as a subtle Platonic critique of democratic ideas – a critique that shows, along the way, that the democratic process is subject to rhetorical manipulation by rhetorical masters, as Protagoras had earlier intimated (Coby 1987; Bartlett 2003; Lampert 2010).
This impression is confirmed in the next stages of Protagoras’ argument, which involve a switch from muthos to logos (324d). Protagoras responds to Socrates’ worry that the rich and powerful, such as Pericles, often fail to cultivate their own outstanding virtues in their sons – which might tell against the claim that virtue is teachable. Protagoras replies that the well-off always send their children to tutors for ethical training (325c–326e). But, one might already ask, does this observation convincingly demonstrate that virtue is teachable, or only that the wealthy misguidedly trust professional teachers? After all, the very point of Socrates’ cross-examination of Protagoras is to show that Hippocrates might well be misguided in entrusting his soul to this “teacher” (312c, 313c–e).
Protagoras’ next step is more persuasive. Protagoras argues that learning virtue in the city is like learning the Greek language. Speaking Greek is not “natural,” in that children must learn even their mother tongue; such learning is undoubtedly contingent on their environments and circumstances. Yet virtually everyone growing up in Athens learned Greek; everyone taught his own children Greek; and everyone in Athens spoke Greek expertly compared to (say) Thracians who could not speak Greek at all. The case is similar, Protagoras argues, with civic virtue: although no one can “be a layman [in civic virtue] if there is to be a city” (327a), the citizens can point to no particular teacher of virtue. Rather, simply living in the city, practicing its rituals, obeying its laws, and so forth, constitutes an education to civic virtue that distinguishes citizens as “experts in virtue” from those without a city, such as wild animals. Talent for virtue is randomly distributed by nature; this explains why the sons of outstanding men, despite their fathers’ best efforts, occasionally or even often fail to attain to their ancestors’ greatness. Nevertheless, Protagoras can still justifiably claim a place as a professional teacher of civic excellence. For, he argues, just as with language there are expert users and teachers, so too are there expert teachers with regard to virtue. Protagoras claims to be uniquely qualified to cultivate nobility and excellence in his students (328b), particularly, as he had said, in the arts of sound household and civic management (318e–19a).
Protagoras clearly refers in these arguments to democratic principles not only of egalitarianism, but also of civic education. Athenian democrats everywhere maintained that civic life in the democracy constituted an extraordinary education in political virtue, superior even to the acclaimed regime of the Spartans (cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1180a25–9). Equally, however, Protagoras’ account emphasizes the pressures placed by the community on individuals to be just, pious, and obedient, rather than the cognitive contributions of “the many” or even their welfare as individuals. Readers will legitimately wonder whether Protagoras’ account yields a conception of civic virtue adequate to the proper functioning of democracy. More concretely, Protagoras has shown that the Athenian democracy can educate its citizens to be law-abiding and thus minimally “just,” but he has not demonstrated that the decision-making procedures of the Athenian Assembly are sound, or that the ordinary Athenians possess the cognitive virtues on which they universally pride themselves (see 319b; Taylor 1991; Coby 1987). Nor has he shown that living in the democratic city contributes substantively to the welfare of Athenians as individuals. Democratic laws can certainly keep the city peaceful, but can they teach “the many” to think for themselves like self-respecting and flourishing members of a self-legislating republic?
The ambiguities of Protagoras’ performance have three implications for us. First, his account of civic virtue not only underemphasizes the cognitive elements of virtue, but also broadly accommodates women, resident aliens, and even slaves. Nothing he says about the citizen’s virtue could not equally be applied to these marginalized groups, who also habitually obey Athenian law and exhibit piety, moderation, and justice – but not wisdom – at a minimal level. Protagoras’ reduction of the citizen’s distinctive place within the city would have been, or at least should have been, offensive to proud Athenians.
Second, Socrates’ ensuing questions about the “unity of virtue” quite appropriately emphasize the importance of wisdom in formulating a proper conception of virtue (329b–33b, 345b, 345e–6a, 349b–d, 352b–e). Without doubt, Plato’s dialog is a unified whole designed to interrogate the manipulative overtures utilized by this prototypical representative of the professional teachers of rhetoric.
Third, even though Protagoras is not the quintessential democratic theorist that many have discerned, and even though Plato’s presentation of Protagoras and democracy is critical, nonetheless Plato illustrates that the Athenian democracy’s own search for adequate governing principles points beyond itself to the deeper and more complete inquiries characteristic of Socratic philosophy. In writing dialogs like Protagoras, Plato was less a hostile critic of democracy than the exponent of the view that democracy needs political philosophy in order to make sense of its own ideals. We can discern this principle in Plato’s presentation of Socrates, citizen and philosopher.
Plato’s Socrates often uses vocabulary and linguistic formulations drawn from democratic politics. Consider, for example, the rhetoric and practice of “accountability.” Amidst Socrates’ attacks on Protagoras, Alcibiades accuses the sophist of wishing to elude questioning by speaking long-windedly: Protagoras uses lengthy speeches to fend “off the issues because he doesn’t want to be held accountable” (336c). By contrast, Socrates proposes the short question-and-answer method, which enables him and Protagoras to hold themselves accountable to one another in turn (338d). The notion of accountability – and especially of being held accountable “in turn” – was prominent in the Athenian self-conception.
As we saw previously, Aristotle credited Solon with laws enabling ordinary citizens to hold their magistrates accountable. Popular oversight of political officials, and even of the elite generally, was considered by many classical Athenians to be the cornerstone of popular sovereignty in Athens. Athenians felt this so profoundly that characters on the comic stage occasionally (for instance, in Aristophanes, Wasps 621–30) joked about their tyrannical power when elite litigants flattered them in order to win their approval. What is most important for us is the form that such accountability took in Athenian public life, and particularly in trials of public orators and officials before popular juries. Apart from more technical cases, elite litigants put themselves and their entire lives on trial whenever they went before the assembled people, either as public advisors or as litigants, and however specific the question put to the popular assembly or jury.11
Consider the wealthy Mantitheus, who spoke at a public hearing on the occasion of his “scrutiny” (dokimasia) for office as a member of Athens’ Council of 500. As we know from his preserved “apology” (Greek apologia, or speech in self-defense: Lysias 16), as his speech is entitled, the chief accusation was that he had served in the cavalry during the oligarchic junta of 404–403 (Lys. 16.3). Mantitheus considers his slanderers to have rendered him a great benefaction, because they force slandered people “to undergo an examination (elenchos) of the record of their lives” (1, trans. Lamb 1930). After responding to the specific political denunciations, Mantitheus says that he will “give an account of his whole life (pantos tou biou logon didonai)” (9), in order to confirm his loyalty to the Athenian demos.
The key to Mantitheus’ “giving of accounts” is his emphasis on ethical character. Despite his comparatively small inheritance, he says, he gave generous dowries for his two sisters’ marriages and distributed his patrimony open-handedly (Lysias 16.10). He had never been involved in a judicial suit previously (12), while in his military service he displayed great courage (13, 15–17). He provided fellow demesmen with armor and weapons (14). His goal had always been to impress the Athenians with his nobility, because he considers the Athenians themselves to be the best judges of the worth of their fellow Athenian citizens (17, 21).
Readers familiar with the Socratic dialogues will be struck by Mantitheus’ vocabulary and arguments. When Socrates converses with Nicias about courage in the Platonic Laches, Nicias, an experienced interlocutor, remarks that “whoever comes into close contact with Socrates and associates with him in conversation must necessarily, even if he began by conversing about something quite different in the first place, keep on being led by the man’s arguments until he submits to giving an account of himself (to didonai peri hautou logon, 187e10) concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto” (187e–8a, trans. Sprague 1997, adapted). Moreover, like Socrates in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Mantitheus too offers an apologia pro vita sua. And, like Socrates, Mantitheus recognizes the importance of self-examination over the course of one’s life as a whole: Mantitheus is prepared to “give an account” of his life as an ethically coherent unity.
What can we discern, then, about the relationship between institutionalized scrutiny, the Athenians’ language of self-examination, and the Socratic insistence that the “unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (Plato, Apology 38a)? Was Socrates’ own self-examination an outgrowth, expansion, and deepening of the Athenian democratic emphasis on the ethical scrutiny and auditing of citizens by their fellow citizens?
First, let us examine Socrates’ invocation of the “examined life.”12 Socrates’ statement is intended to explain his belief that “it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day (hekastēs hēmeras peri aretēs tous logous poieisthai, 38a3) and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others” (38a, trans. Grube 1997). This activity is good because continuous self-auditing was, in Socrates’ view, essential to any “care of the soul” adequate to our human nature. Human beings ought to recognize that their souls are their most precious possessions. Hence, assuming that human beings wish to live well, it follows that they will utilize their highest intellectual faculties in order to understand how best to care for the soul. They will want to discover the truth about their own most essential human capacities.
This line of reasoning led Socrates to conduct his life in an unusual, though culturally explicable, way. As Socrates himself described his daily modus vivendi, he moved through Athens saying to his fellow citizens, “Good man, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honours as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?” (Apology 29d–e). As in the Protagoras (319b), here too Socrates pinpoints the Athenian claim to wisdom as dubious. In Socrates’ presentation, by contrast, the pursuit of wisdom through leading an examined life, in his special sense, was specifically meant to cultivate the excellences of the soul for the individual – intellectual understanding, along with justice, courage, moderation, piety, and the other canonical ethical virtues – as a way of enabling the individual to flourish as a human being (Cooper 2007). The Socratic ideal was the life of eudaimonia, or human flourishing, understood in this specific way. The pattern of interpreting eudaimonia with reference to the perfection of essential human capacities endured in the work of both Plato and Aristotle.
Bluntly confrontational exchanges about virtue also characterized Athenian democratic discourse – even, one might say, “on a daily basis.” The Athenian orators frequently explored the significance of cardinal virtues such as courage, justice, moderation, and piety, along with specifically political or democratic virtues such as leadership, honesty, and loyalty. Without venturing into the decidedly abstract theoretical world of Socrates, the Athenians fought out their local, specific political disagreements by using the vocabulary of virtue (Balot 2009). Their discourse on virtue provided many of the elements of the philosophers’ own accounts of ethics and politics.
In a famous oration attacking Demosthenes, Aeschines urged the Athenians to “call him to account in this way: with your help I will reckon up what ought to be the qualities by nature of the man who is moderate and loyal to the democracy; and over against them I will set down what manner of man one would expect the oligarch and the worthless man to be” (3.168, trans. Adams 1919, modified). As often, Aeschines and Demosthenes publicly battled out the question of what defines the virtuous citizen and leader, with specific reference to democracy as a regime type. In his own speech in response, Demosthenes (18, On the Crown), like Mantitheus earlier, offered a detailed account of his own life as a self-consistent unity, emphasizing his democratic virtues and articulating their precise character. In his own initial attack, Aeschines (3.169–70) had outlined the characteristics of the self-restrained and trustworthy democratic leader as follows: he should hail from a service-oriented family, in order that he would bear no legacy of resentment against the democratic laws; he should be self-controlled and moderate; and he should have highly cultivated qualities of judgment, persuasion, and courage. It is noteworthy that Aeschines defined these virtues as excellences of specifically democratic leadership, as opposed to the vices and self-interest of leadership in oligarchies (170). The democratic discourse emphasized that the cultivation and conception of virtue varied according to regime type.
A Socratic philosopher might respond to Aeschines’ presentation by asking what, precisely, constitutes “moderation” or “courage”; how are these virtues related to knowledge of human goodness? Early on in the Platonic Apology, for example, Socrates unconventionally cross-examines his prosecutor Meletus, inquiring, above all, into the depth of Meletus’ own commitment to educating the youth of Athens in ethical virtue (24d–25c). In typical democratic fashion, he lets Meletus respond that he himself, along with democratically constituted juries, the laws of the city, the councilors, the assemblymen, and so on, all educate the young in virtue (24e–25a; cf. e.g., Aeschin. 3.175). According to Socrates, Meletus’ answers show that he has not adequately examined what such an education would require and how it might best be conducted.
Socrates has a point. However much they deployed the vocabulary of civic virtue, Athenian politicians did not habitually concern themselves with abstract, theoretical questions. Their own genre of speaking, practical orientation, and rhetorical purposes, in fact, usually militated against the more speculative inquiries characteristic of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Even so, the Athenians’ public discourse implied a deeper theoretical structure that occasionally rose to the surface. To that extent, Socrates’ criticisms did not completely do justice to the Athenian ideology.
To consider one case, the Athenians, like Socrates, recognized connections between civic virtue, ethical understanding, and the courage to execute their decisions properly. As Demosthenes said in 338, “For of all virtue, I say, and I repeat it, the beginning is understanding and the fulfilment is courage: by the one it is judged what ought to be done and by the other this is carried to success” (60.17, trans. DeWitt and DeWitt 1949). Or, differently, Pericles is represented by Thucydides as saying that “Those would rightly be judged most courageous who understand both the fearful and the pleasant and do not turn away from risks on account of this” (2.40.2–3) – a statement that has often been compared with the searching exploration of courage found in the Platonic Laches. Examples of such more daring conceptual theses could be multiplied. Hence, although Socrates is justly credited with “inventing” the paradoxical thesis that “virtue is knowledge,” the Athenian democratic discourse itself had long explored the relationship between the ethical virtues and knowledge within a specifically democratic context.
The Athenians could lay claim not only to practicing a politics of virtue, but also to developing a political discourse on the “examined life.” Even without the benefit of a philosophical education, the Athenians understood that moderation, loyalty, and courage, among other qualities, represented intellectual questions that had to receive definition within local frameworks of public discussion. As many democratic leaders argued, democracies were distinctively well-equipped to address such questions because they invited all citizens to discuss things freely. Even Aristotle (Politics 3.11) agreed that democratic public deliberation tended to produce enlarged horizons of political understanding. Democratic political reflection extended even to radical questioning of the democratic system itself. As Demosthenes pointed out (20.105–8), the Athenians were invited to criticize democracy at Athens, whereas Spartans were forbidden to criticize the Spartan conduct of politics at Sparta. Even though Socrates emphasized the dangers of criticizing democracy in the Platonic Apology, the surviving speeches (not to mention the Aristophanic comedies) show that Athenian orators did not hesitate to accept this invitation.
Hence, even if Socrates’ complaints about the Athenians were legitimate, the Athenians at least had a persuasive counter-argument. They discussed the significance of the ethical virtues on a regular basis, within the framework of their public conversations about flourishing in the democratic polis. The Socratic exhortation to self-examination originated in and developed the fertile discussions of virtue that emerged from the democracy’s open, and even risky, practices of free speech, self-auditing, and self-criticism.
There are two possible objections to the foregoing picture. First, one might object that Socrates espouses a robust individualism that invites each citizen to judge for himself the quality of his own and others’ lives – whereas, by contrast, Mantitheus was merely a flatterer who alienated his own judgment to the authoritative demos. The alienation of judgment, or the unreflective acceptance of common opinion, not to mention ingratiation with Athenian juries, was central to Socrates’ critique of typical Athenian judicial practices.
This difference turns out to be more apparent than real. Athenian democratic ideology also encouraged citizens to think for themselves, to oppose conventional opinions, and to offer novel suggestions. Athenian democrats justifiably thought of themselves as innovative and experimental. Just as they retrospectively scrutinized citizens’ lives as a whole, so too did they prospectively follow rational arguments wherever they led, without showing unnecessary reverence for conventional belief. Demosthenes, for example, urged his fellow citizens not to assume that a speaker’s pugnacious bravado per se indicates that he is courageous, or that a speaker’s advice to avoid battle is, for that very reason, cowardly (Prooimia 50.1). No: each case has to be decided on its own merits. Demosthenes proposed that soldiers must follow their captains, but in the Athenian Assembly, he said, “each one of you yourselves is a general” (50.3). Each individual Athenian was responsible for deliberating well; it was incumbent on the citizen qua citizen to think seriously about human goodness and to speak and vote accordingly (see also, e.g., Thuc. 2.40). Such sentiments can be paralleled in other speeches in which orators insist that the most trustworthy speakers refuse to flatter the demos and courageously voice opinions contrary to conventional views (e.g., Dem. 3.21–22; 9.63; 10.54).
The second objection is that the foregoing account implies an uncharitable diminution of Socrates the citizen – in particular, that it would be misleading to suggest that Plato’s Socrates is, in reality, an ordinary democratic citizen, who lived the reflective life expected by democratic culture and nothing more. To the contrary: Plato represents Socrates as, among other things, a fulfilment and completion of democratic virtue. Socrates is the kind of exemplary democratic citizen who articulates for the democracy its own most cherished principles and abides by those principles with greater commitment than any other Athenian (Villa 2001; Euben 1997; Balot 2006).
In the Crito, for example, Socrates evinces deep respect for the laws of Athens, out of a sense of justice, piety, and reverence (54b–c). His dedication to the law, even at personal expense, most perfectly embodies the reverence for law that Athenian orators enjoined upon their democratic audiences (e.g., Thuc. 2.37.2). In the Platonic Apology, Socrates frequently advises the Athenian jury on the virtues required of democratic citizens in courtrooms: the virtue of the judge is to pay strict attention to the justice of the speaker’s case (18a, 35c), and not to be swayed by slander (19a, 19b, 20e); the virtue of the speaker is to tell the truth (18a), as Socrates does throughout the speech (17b, 20d, 22a, 22b, 24a, 26b, 28a, 31c, 31e, 32b, etc.); accordingly, speakers should not make emotionally corrupting appeals by parading their weeping children before the jury, as Socrates refuses to do (34c–35c). By contrast with his fellow citizens, Socrates healed the divide between logos and ergon. He lived up in practice to the ideals that came to sight within his pursuit of the truth (32a with Laches and the comments by Schmid 1992). By standing fast in the face of danger, Socrates courageously saved his fellow citizens at the Battle of Delium when the Athenian generals were in headlong flight, and he controlled his erotic passions to such an extent that he could resist the advances of the sexiest Athenian of his day, Alcibiades.
In Plato’s representation at least, Socratic inquiry makes sense of democratic ideals and practices in a way that the democracy itself could not do. Socrates is the courageous, self-controlled, free-speaking, self-auditing, unconventionally inquiring, and lawfully obedient citizen par excellence. Hence, Plato’s Socrates is intended to be both an ethical and a philosophical hero. Socrates’ life and thought, as we know them from the Platonic dialogues, were not a stinging departure from the democratic experience, but rather a perfection of that experience. Does the same principle hold true for the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle in general?
The interpretation of elaborate Platonic and Aristotelian political texts (let alone their relationship to Athenian democracy) is, in itself, an unusually controversial matter. At first glance, both authors offer searing criticisms of democracy. In Plato’s Republic, for example, democracy is the worst political regime of all, barring tyranny, because of the randomness of its civic education and its disorderly hedonism. Meanwhile, in his account of the “defective” regimes, Aristotle catalogs five forms of democracy, ranging from the least offensive (in which popular sovereignty is strictly limited) to the worst possible (in which arbitrary popular decrees hold sway instead of laws). Yet, despite these criticisms, our approach will be to emphasize the essential continuities between Athenian democracy and fourth-century philosophy.
Athenian ideology as well as Plato and Aristotle maintained that the proper task of politics is to enable citizens to flourish. Such a conception of politics emphasizes the human good, or eudaimonia – as opposed to conceptions, such as that of Hobbes, which emphasize that the task of politics is to avoid the greatest evils. Eudaimonia is best known in its Aristotelian incarnation, where it refers to the “human flourishing” constituted by the active exercise of virtues of character and intellect. Contemporary philosophers employ “eudaimonism” as a term of art to refer to the idea that human beings achieve happiness, or flourishing, through exercising and perfecting their worthwhile natural capacities for theoretical speculation, practical judgment, and virtuous action motivated by developed dispositions of character. Eudaimonism is characteristic of the entire ancient philosophical tradition, ranging from Socrates to Plotinus.13 The conceptual rudiments of this idea can already be found in Athenian democratic ideology.
Lysias’ funeral oration (roughly 390) proposes that the achievements of the heroic dead are a lesson for the members of the audience (2.3). Nicole Loraux (1986) has called Lysias’ review of the Athenian past an “Athenian history of Athens,” in order to emphasize the orator’s selective recollection of past Athenian glories. But Lysias’ presentation speaks to a deeper purpose – namely, the articulation of distinctive Athenian virtues as intrinsically worthwhile features of an excellent human life. Lysias’ speech brings out three themes that are essential to understanding the Athenians’ ideology of eudaimonia: first, the orator stresses the intrinsic importance of acting virtuously; second, he argues that virtuous behavior based on genuinely virtuous dispositions constitutes, at least partially, the flourishing condition of Athenians, whatever the “external” products of that behavior; and third, Lysias views Athenian political life as an education to virtue, which perfects the Athenians’ inborn capacities.
Consider Lysias’ emphasis on the intrinsic nobility of the Athenians’ commitment to freedom, justice, and courage, in his narrative of the sons of Heracles (2.11–16). They were fleeing Eurystheus and had been banished by all other Greeks, who, Lysias says, “were ashamed at what they did (aischunomenōn … tois ergois), but feared Eurystheus’ power” (11). The other Greeks’ decision to act on the basis of their fear, in contravention of what they knew to be noble and just, meant that they had to live with shame. They could not respect themselves. The Athenians, by contrast, chose to protect the suppliants at great personal risk, out of reverence for Heracles’ virtue. Their respect for Heracles’ nobility motivated them to act in self-respecting ways. Lysias says that the Athenians felt aidōs for Heracles’ virtue (Herakleous aretēn … ēidounto); they “deemed it worthy (ēxioun; not “preferred,” as it is often translated) to fight with justice on behalf of the weaker” (12). When danger was imminent, the Athenians “maintained the same judgment (gnōmēn) as before, though they had received no particular benefit at the father’s hands, and could not tell what manner of men the sons would grow to be” (13, trans. Lamb 1930, adapted).
This description provides Lysias with the rudiments of a conception of human excellence according to Athenian standards. The Athenians’ aidōs – their prospective sense of shame – helped them avoid the other Greeks’ mistake of yielding to their fears and thereby condemning themselves to a life of shame. Similarly, Lysias says, the Athenians acted in ways they thought worthy of themselves. They did not calculate the profits of their virtuous behavior. Instead, they put their practical judgment into action, in an outstanding display of courage, without the sense that they were repaying a debt or hoping for reciprocation in the future (14). They were living up to their own ideals, whatever the consequences. By drawing these contrasts between Athenians and the other Greeks, Lysias showed that the Athenian ancestors acted for the sake of intrinsic nobility, as an expression of their excellence as human beings. The good life – which is here presented as a life of self-respect won through imitating and elaborating the virtues of Greece’s foremost civilizing hero – was possible for them because they had the wisdom to act in ways that were worthy of themselves (Balot 2009).
Lysias developed this conception of human excellence by explaining the compassionate Athenians’ behavior with reference to Athenian pre-history. The Athenians had worked to develop to a high degree the ethically worthwhile capacities that are essential to human nature. Lysias argues that it was “natural” or “proper” for their ancestors to fight for justice with a unified moral judgment (miai gnōmēi chrōmenois), because their life as autochthones had always been just from the very beginning (17–18). On the basis of their shared autochthony, he says, the early Athenians – alone of all men at that time – drove out “narrow oligarchies” (tas … dunasteias), established democracy, and thereupon conducted their politics freely and in a spirit of concord. The nobility of Athenian politics was an outgrowth of the Athenians’ autochthonous origins. Lysias proceeds to show that specifically democratic political life adds a new culturally informed dimension of education to untutored nature.
Does Lysias suggest that being related as autochthonous quasi-kin satisfied Athenian longings for harmony or unity? Does he propose that the Athenians’ autochthony constituted natural virtue, which, needing no further development, sprung fully formed from the city like Athena from the head of Zeus? The answer to both questions is “no.” Rather, the Athenians’ political order was the essential framework within which they could develop their distinctive human capacities: “For they supposed that it was the task of wild beasts to be ruled over by one another by force, but that it belonged to human beings to define justice by law, to persuade by reasoned speech, and to serve these purposes in action, governed by the law and instructed by reasoned speech” (19). Athenian political development was a process guided by the early Athenians’ character traits as autochthones. Over time, the Athenians came to express their highest human virtues by exercising their capacities for seeking justice, for deliberating rationally through speech, and for acting prudently. Their political achievements perfected their natural human traits. Lysias concludes that the Athenians “used the law to honour the good and punish the evil” (19). Political life provided an education to virtue for autochthones who were already born with unusual propensities for cultivating ethical virtue. Admittedly, Lysias says that in defeating the Persians the Athenians showed that their valor was “genuine/inbred in the race (gnēsios) and autochthonous” (2.43). Yet he goes on to explain that the heroic dead are men worthy of emulation because “they were first trained in the excellences of their ancestors, and then in manhood they preserved that ancient fame intact and displayed their own virtue (aretē)” (69).
The belief that political culture helped to perfect the Athenians’ exceptional natures is a constant theme of the funeral orations. In Euripides’ Suppliants, Adrastus’ funeral oration over the “Seven against Thebes” emphasizes that courage and other excellences of the soul can be taught, and he accordingly exhorts his listeners to train their children carefully (857–917). Demosthenes’ funeral oration says that after a noble education within the city the heroic dead arrived at manhood and “made their innate nobility well known, not only to their fellow citizens, but even to all men” (60.16–17). Speaking of the fallen soldiers, Hyperides reminds his audience “how as children they were trained and reared in strict self-discipline; none of us, I think, is unaware that our aim in training children is to convert them into valiant men; and that men who have proved of exceptional courage in war were well brought up in childhood needs no stressing.” (6.8, trans. Burtt 1962). In each case, the heroic Athenian dead had achieved greatness because, through the city’s education to virtue, they had perfected their natural capacities, as autochthones, and actively exercised their virtues when it counted most. The idea that their lives and actions were worth emulating makes sense only if a similar education to virtue is taking place during the ritual of the funeral oration itself. This is why the heroic deeds of the Athenian ancestors were a “lesson” to the living Athenians, particularly the young.
Lysias’ Athenians regarded the exercise of virtue as intrinsically worthy of choice and as constituting their flourishing as human beings. This does not imply, however, that virtuous behavior had no external products. To the contrary, its external products were crucial to the life of the city: “For the benefits that they have conferred on their own native land are many and splendid; they restored the broken fortunes of others and kept the war at a distance from their own country” (2.70). These external products were undeniably beneficial to the city and to the men who provided for them; and they were recognized as such. But Lysias envisions a hierarchy of nobility in the minds of the heroic dead. These men “thought that everything was of less account than virtue” (71), and therefore, he says, they willingly deprived themselves of their own lives and left their wives, children, siblings, and parents bereft. Their heroic final act implied, as only such an awesome act of devotion can imply, the deep paradox that the external products for the sake of which they acted (the well-being of the city and their families) were somehow less important to them than the realization, in action, of their dedication to virtue.
How are we to make sense of Lysias’ statement? Can Lysias really be saying that the fallen soldiers were more dedicated to virtue than to their families or the city? The answer is yes. We can see the point of his idea in two related ways. First, he argues consistently that the Athenians would never have purchased the safety of the city or their families at the cost of acting shamefully. Second, they would willingly have put the city at risk, even at risk of extinction if circumstances required, in order to satisfy the demands of nobility. The good life within the city is simply not worth having, not even possible, unless it is also the virtuous life. This fundamental plank of the democratic self-image is the predecessor of Cicero’s way of relating the noble to the useful in his De Officiis. There is nothing useful or worth possessing without nobility.
Lysias’ culminating thought resounded throughout the ancient philosophical tradition, beginning with his fourth-century contemporaries. In the Platonic Laws, for example, the Athenian Stranger insists that the city should be devoted to cultivating virtue in citizens throughout their lives. Not even honoring or saving the city should take precedence over this project. The city exists in order to make people good and virtuous, and not the other way around; the Athenian’s fictive Magnesians should abandon the city, he says, if the city turns out to make human beings worse (Laws 770c–e). Platonic and Aristotelian political thought always held that politics should take human flourishing as its cardinal task – or else politics is nothing. This is why, indeed, Socrates tells the “immoralist” Callicles that Socrates is the only Athenian “to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics,” in that he aims not at gratifying the Athenians’ unreconstructed desires, but rather at improving his fellow citizens (Plato, Gorgias 521d, trans. Zeyl 1997). According to Socrates, the true political art consists in making the citizenry as good as possible (ibid. 513e–14a).
For Plato and Aristotle, more precisely, politics fails to make sense unless political life prioritizes the “care of the soul” necessary for individual citizens to live well. The most straightforward expression of this ideal within politics can be found in Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that human flourishing consists in the active exercise of our essential intellectual and character-related capacities – and, at the limit, in the perfection of such capacities even to the vanishing point of excellence. Aristotle maintains that, in ethical investigations, we endeavor not simply to know what virtue is, but to make men good (Nicomachean Ethics 10.9.1179b1–4). Hence, when dealing with a population that is unevenly endowed with intellectual and ethical talents, the best way to embody ethical conceptions of the good is to study the science of politics and legislation, with a view to adapting political institutions and practices to the character of the people (10.9). Aristotle’s Politics is intended to provide a political sequel to the philosopher’s ethical inquiries, in the belief that cities exist not merely to make possible the satisfactions of life as a biological function, but “for the sake of living well” (1252b31), interpreted to mean “living a life of eudaimonia.”
This framework enabled Aristotle to offer a sympathetic account of democracy. Despite his criticisms, the philosopher finds credible arguments in favor of democratic authority (3.11). In his “summation argument,” Aristotle draws directly on the democratic belief in the “collective wisdom of the masses” (Ober 1989). Like the Athenian orators, Aristotle argues that even if eminently talented aristocrats might possess better judgment than any individual member of the demos, nonetheless the mass of ordinary citizens, when collected together and encouraged to speak freely, will show good judgment in their own right – even better judgment than narrowly circumscribed aristocratic councils. The reason is that each citizen will contribute perceptions, ideas, and criticisms that support the collective effort to reason prudently. From the perspective of eudaimonistic politics, deliberative decision-procedures have the special merit of providing opportunities for citizens to exercise their prudence, to cultivate civic friendship, and to sharpen their understanding of justice.
Aristotle’s emphasis on citizenship and deliberation is not familiar from Platonic political philosophy. Yet Aristotle’s eudaimonistic framework is nonetheless a development of Platonic political philosophy. To be sure, Plato’s political texts are diverse. They range from the more narrow investigations found in the Protagoras, the Apology, and the Crito, to the more speculative projects characteristic of the Republic and Laws. Throughout all these texts, however, Plato’s protagonists operate within the horizons of eudaimonism. Plato’s Republic, for example, investigates what justice is and why it benefits just human beings both intrinsically and extrinsically. Within the dialog, Socrates interprets justice and the other virtues as embodiments of “psychological health,” which, like physical health, is worth having both for its own sake and instrumentally. In order to make progress on the murky questions of health in the soul, Socrates develops an analogy between souls and cities, which is intended to shed light on both existing and appropriate relations among elements of the soul. Politically, Socrates imagines the creation of a “beautiful city” (Callipolis) in which philosophers rule as kings for the good of the whole, nuclear families are abolished, women are equal to men, and warrior and productive classes wholeheartedly acquiesce in the governance of the philosophers.
Hardly any political regime could be more alien and even repugnant to democratic Athenians. Even apart from the idea of philosophical rulers, Plato’s Callipolis attacks the democracy’s freedom and egalitarian political structures. Callipolis offers no conception of active, participatory citizenship. Yet Callipolis – like Magnesia, the utopian city of Plato’s Laws – is designed to satisfy its citizens’ natural needs and desires in the healthiest possible way. This is the claim that the Athenian democracy also made for itself, by comparison with its non-democratic rivals. As we saw in Meletus’ responses to Socrates, Athenians held that the democratic laws, institutions, and culture of Athens fulfilled the citizens’ essential needs in the most satisfactory possible way. Callipolis’ educational regime is intended to help its citizens (albeit only those of the upper two classes) attain the highest levels of virtue, harmony, and rational order of which they are capable. As in the Athenian democracy, Callipolis emphasizes the emotional education of citizens through poetry, narratives, and religious ritual. If Athens was a democracy of virtue, then Callipolis was designed to be an aristocracy of virtue; both of them constitute varieties of “eudaimonistic politics.”
The topic of education brings into view important differences between the Athenian democracy and Platonic political philosophy. Classical Athenians practiced not only a democratic politics of virtue, but also a politics whose paramount ideal was freedom – both the freedom of the city from external control, and the freedom of individuals to live as they pleased.14 Needless to say, virtue politics and ideals of individual freedom co-existed in an uneasy tension. The individual freedom to satisfy desire – even uneducated or badly formed desire – appears to conflict directly with the Athenians’ commitments to justice, self-restraint, courage, prudence, and other civic virtues. Civic education in Athens depended, moreover, on the poets’ own desires, or lack thereof, to conform to communal norms or ideology. Perhaps these principles can be reconciled, provided that individuals seek freedom within parameters defined by the collective discourse on, and dedication to, excellence and human flourishing. But this will mean that the Athenians were, whether they recognized it or not, committed to rejecting the satisfaction of desire as such, as it was empirically found, and to prizing only the individual freedoms consistent with the development of the city’s authoritative virtues. At all events, this is a tension that can be unusually instructive for citizens of twenty-first-century liberal democracies, which tend, following Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and other early modern thinkers, to emphasize individual freedom at the expense of cultivating nobility or excellence.
Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, held more complex conceptions of freedom and civic education. Like other Greeks, they both embraced the autonomia of the polis – that is, its independence from foreign control. Plato (in the Laws) and Aristotle (in the Politics) also regarded the citizen’s freedom to act politically as an essential feature of human flourishing. In the Republic, however, Plato’s Socrates limits political activity to a narrow philosophical elite, while in the Apology, as we have seen, Socrates emphasizes his own withdrawal from political life as his contemporaries knew it. Most importantly, though, both Plato and Aristotle criticized the Athenian ideal of “living as one likes,” on the grounds that unreconstructed desires often led both individuals and polities away from the path to a fully adequate human existence. This is why both philosophers emphasized a form of civic education that was philosophically informed or supervised. The philosophers envisioned cities that were more self-consistent than democratic Athens, perhaps, but also less free.
Plato in particular was adamant that philosophers alone were suited to think through the question of human goodness, even if their answers remain provisional. Plato’s emphasis on the “rule of knowledge,” in fact, marks a second point of contrast between the democratic and philosophical approaches. Although the Athenians tried to understand how to live well through their democratic deliberations and other cultural practices (e.g., artwork, the theater, or religious ritual), Plato’s chief protagonists, Socrates and the Athenian Stranger, maintained that free and open deliberation among citizens was no reliable way to make progress on the most important questions. Progress in understanding would come about only through dialectical exchange carried on by those most suited to grasp it. Only philosophers themselves could recognize that common opinion was not knowledge, but rather mere opinion; that democratic modes of discussion were open to manipulation by the likes of Protagoras and Gorgias; and that the depth of democratic understanding was limited.
Plato would have been unrealistic, of course, to imagine that Greek cities could be ruled by philosophers; we should be wary of attributing to him any naive utopianism. But his thought experiments confronted his fellow Athenians with a profound question: would the Athenians not be better off if the city could make decisions based on a deeper, larger, and more accurate appreciation of the human good? Are philosophers not, based on their comparatively deep understanding of such questions, therefore entitled to rule, even if their chances of doing so in the empirical world are almost nil, and even if they themselves could only ever be “lovers of wisdom,” and not, like the gods, possessors of full and complete knowledge of what is good? It is in recognition of both the city’s need for political philosophy and the practical impossibility of philosophical governance that Plato’s Athenian Stranger recommends, in the Laws, the establishment of a powerful council (the so-called “Nocturnal Council”) whose membership consists of Socratic-style philosophers, high-status and politically active non-philosophers, and younger councilors in training. The city – initially the democratic city – needs political philosophy in order to fulfil its aspirations to attain human flourishing, even if it is unlikely that Philosopher-Kings would ever directly rule ordinary citizens.
From the philosophers’ perspective, however, even this concession is inadequate to the highest elements of human nature. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would agree that the philosophical life is the best human life. Even if other lives, such as the political life, were worth living to a lesser degree, it was only the activity of philosophy itself, well conducted and properly understood, that enabled human beings to exercise their highest and most god-like capacity: that of theoretical understanding. In this sense the activity of philosophy as such was the greatest good for a human being, not in any instrumental way, but simply in itself and for its own sake. Thus it turns out that in classical political philosophy, Socrates and his fellow philosophers were not just the perfect embodiments of ethical virtue, but also, and more importantly, the incomparable exemplars of philosophical virtue. This brings us to the ultimate and unbridgeable gap between Athenian democratic thought and classical political philosophy.15
Not just any life of speculation would qualify as a philosophical life in this sense. As Socrates insists in Plato’s Republic, many “sophists” and other unworthy candidates pretend to be philosophers without being sufficiently talented, selfless, courageous, open, and intransigently dedicated to the truth. According to Socrates, it is precisely the existence of such pretenders that accounts for the widespread belief – say, among Athenian democrats – that philosophers are not the highest realization of human nature, but rather weirdoes, clowns, cranks, and even potentially catastrophic threats to the city’s well-being. Even if we discern in classical political philosophy an exhortation to the democratic city to cultivate virtue in a more systematic way, and even if the philosophers argued that in that sense the city needs political philosophy, it is perhaps more accurate to conclude by pointing out that for Plato and Aristotle, in particular, the philosopher himself was the highest end and fulfilment of the city. The philosopher needed the city, to be sure, in practical and material ways. But the city needed political philosophers not only to advise, exhort, and correct itself, but also to constitute the single most appropriate final end toward which the city should aim: the creation of the highest human type, the philosopher.
This belief took Plato and Aristotle down two different and incompatible tracks. In the Platonic Gorgias, on the one hand, Socrates argues that the philosophical life diverges from, and is superior to, the political life admired by Callicles, dependent as it is on loving and being loved by the Athenian demos (513a–c). A democratic politician will always be subservient to the power and desires of the Demos. Such a life is not free, admirable, or fitting for those capable of philosophy.
Yet, on the other hand, Plato’s Laws and Aristotle’s Politics took a different tack, one that proved to be more conscious of philosophy’s debt to the democratic polis. These texts envisage a rapprochement between philosophy and the democratic city, based on models provided by the Athenian democracy, with its virtue politics, participatory citizenship, and open pursuit of eudaimonia by all its citizens in concert. In these texts, philosophers still represent the highest end of the city, but not in the radically oppositional way presupposed by Socrates in the Platonic Gorgias. Plato and Aristotle were critical of Athenian democracy, to be sure, but, as they themselves were fully aware, their moral psychology and political philosophy depended on longstanding structures of democratic thought, ideology, and practice.
Without participatory self-government and classical democracy, the ancient Greek philosophers would not have written the works that so profoundly influenced later European philosophical traditions. In language, structure, content, and form, the ancient Greek philosophers were heavily influenced by democratic practices, ideals, and ideologies. Whether in approval, in substantive derivation, or in acute divergence and opposition, political philosophy was decisively stimulated by democracy’s habits and ideals. Without democracy, classical political philosophy could not have developed the frameworks and conceptual underpinnings that continue to challenge us today.
I thank Kurt Raaflaub, Peter Wagner, Johann Arnason, Brad Inwood, and Victoria Wohl for their extremely helpful suggestions and advice.
Notes
1 All dates are BCE. Abbreviations: Ath. Pol.: Aristotle, Athēnaiōn politeia (Constitution of the Athenians); DK: Diels and Kranz 1961–4; W: West 1992.
2 For other recent efforts along these lines, see Euben et al. 1994; Euben 1997; Monoson 2000; Wallach 2001; Mara 2008.
3 On this general point, see Boedeker and Raaflaub 1998; Samons 2001; Rhodes 2003; Balot 2010.
4 For further discussion of Solon’s concern with distributive justice, see Balot 2001. On Solon’s reforms and their contribution to the evolution of democracy in Athens, see also Raaflaub, this volume.
5 For a thoughtful recent treatment of the “sophists” along these lines see Wallace 1998. The standard introduction remains Kerferd 1981.
6 For an overview of the debates on citizen participation in the Athenian democracy, see Raaflaub et al. 2007.
7 For a more detailed discussion of Democritus and political philosophy, see Balot 2006: 73–4 with bibliography.
8 The following discussion of Protagoras is indebted to Nussbaum 1986; Coby 1987; Farrar 1988; Taylor 1991; Kahn 1996; Euben 1997; Bartlett 2003; Lampert 2010; I draw on but revise the account offered in Balot 2006.
9 On this pretence, see especially Coby 1987, Bartlett 2003; Lampert 2010.
10 In this section I build on and try to refine the efforts of those scholars cited in n.2 above; in particular, I try to develop Peter Euben’s excellent work (1997: 91–108) on the connections between Socratic accountability and self-questioning and the democratic culture of accountability, by exploring more deeply the democratic orators’ own specific modes of self-questioning and account-giving. By contrast with Euben, and yet building on his fundamental work, I discern in the Athenian orators a eudaimonistic virtue politics that shares many key elements with the moral psychology and political philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
11 For the more technical cases, see Lanni 2006, and see Lanni, this volume. On the general point, Ober 1989 remains fundamental.
12 I wish to thank my colleague Clifford Orwin for pushing me to clarify my position on the significance of Socrates’ examined life.
13 For helpful examination of eudaimonism in this long tradition, see Annas 1993; Nussbaum 1986; and Balot 2006, 2009, for further discussion of Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach”.
14 On freedom in ancient Greece, Raaflaub 2004 remains fundamental.
15 For illuminating reflections on this gap, see Strauss 1964; Pangle 2006.
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