It was not until the fifth century BCE that the term dēmokratia was first used to designate the Athenian political regime. In the famed dialogue of the Persian noblemen in Book 3 of Herodotus’s Histories, the term for the regime in which archē (rule) belongs to the people is not dēmokratia but isonomia. Not before Aeschylus’s Suppliants did the terms dēmos and kratein come together. From the outset kratos (power) meant something different than archē, the term from which the names of the other political regimes are formed.1 Kratos implies an element of force linked to the conditions in which democracy was actually established, that is, the stasis (feuding) that threatened the unity of the polis immediately after the fall of the Pisistratids.
Opinions diverge as to what conditions enabled democracy to prevail. Some historians claim that Cleisthenes the Alcmaeonid, adopting Pisistratus’s strategy, decided to use the demos to get rid of his opponent Isagoras. He then set up a new system of organizing citizens in civic subdivisions, intended to abolish “regional” powers, thus depriving the great aristocratic families of authority over their “clientele,” and he created a council that represented the newly formed ten tribes (phylai) on equal terms. Each year these tribes cast lots to select fifty of their members to serve on the council (boulē). Cleisthenes also increased the number of his partisans by integrating foreigners and even slaves into the newly created tribes.2 Other historians, citing Herodotus’s account of what happened after the fall of the Pisistratids, emphasize instead the role of the demos, particularly the urban masses. After Cleisthenes’ opponents expelled him from Athens with the help of Cleomenes, king of Sparta, and by evoking the famed “curse” of the Alcmaeonids, the demos besieged the Spartans, who had meanwhile taken over the Acropolis, forcing Cleomenes out and calling back Cleisthenes and the other exiles. In this interpretation of “Cleisthenes’ revolution,” the demos is understood to have played an essential role, having become aware of its political importance during the period of tyranny (Ober 1996: 32–52; 2007; Lévêque & Vidal-Naquet 1996). In any case, the effect of Cleisthenes’ handling of the situation, inspired perhaps by the thinking of Ionian philosophers, was to establish a political system that would gradually become a democracy.
To retrace the steps of this development we depend on written sources, particularly the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians, whose author reconstructed the past in light of the problems of his own time.3 In the first part of this narrative presentation of the history of the Athenian constitution (politeia), it is clear that Cleisthenes’ reforms had not put an end to the conflicts among the heads of the great families; this is attested by the repeated use of the ostracism procedure in the first years of the fifth century (Ath. pol. 22.3–6). The Persian threat exacerbated these conflicts. But the role of the Athenian fleet during the second Greco-Persian war increased the influence of the lower-class citizens in the polis, as we learn from both the author of the Ath. pol. (24.3) and the “Old Oligarch,” an anonymous author of a late fifth-century anti-democratic treatise.4
The role of the fleet and of the mass of seamen (nautikos ochlos) in Athenian politics was strengthened by the newly formed Delian League and the introduction of contributions to be paid by the city’s allies. Some of the men involved in implementing this policy assumed the role of the demos’s “patrons” or protectors: there was Ephialtes (about whom we know next to nothing except that in 462-461 he convinced the assembly to revoke the greater part of the Areopagus’s powers and transfer them to the Council of Five Hundred and the people’s law courts) and above all Pericles, who, by instituting a misthos (payment) for judges and perhaps also council members, enabled poor citizens to participate in these offices and so spend some of their time handling city affairs (see Raaflaub 2007 and Raaflaub’s chapter in this volume; on Pericles now Azoulay 2010). Misthophoria (pay for public service) became the main grievance against democracy.
The famed funeral oration that Thucydides attributes to Pericles clearly lays out the principles of the regime that the Athenians were the first to establish: decisions were to be made by the majority; all citizens were equal, though merit did have to be taken into account; in no way could poverty constitute an obstacle to serving the polis. This is of course an idealized vision of how Athenian democracy operated (Thuc 2.37.1; Loraux 1986). How fully did it coincide with reality? How and to what degree did the demos actually participate in decisions affecting the governing of the polis?5
Once again, we have no direct sources to answer these questions. I have already mentioned the Aristotelian reconstruction of the Athenian past in the Ath. pol. For the fifth century we also have what is attested by the theater of the time, and for the following century, a large body of political and forensic speeches. There are also many inscriptions of decrees formulated by the people’s assembly, all with the same concise formulaic opening, edoxe to demo (“this was decided by the demos”), confirming that the decision had indeed been made by the demos. Although some official titles are missing from the inscriptions, these attest to a fully organized system. The literary sources, on the other hand, suggest that the demos’s sovereignty was a much more complex matter. To answer our questions, we first have to examine the presence of the demos in the assemblies and courts; then the role of the “political class”; lastly, the nature of the political conflicts dividing the city.
The first question is, what did the term “demos” refer to in Athens? On this point the inscriptions are perfectly clear: the demos was the entire civic community. However, in the writings of orators and philosophers the term generally meant “poor citizens” as opposed to the elite. How sharp the opposition was varied from case to case; at any rate, this was an effect of one of the foundations of the system: the majority principle. As Aristotle noted (Politics 1291b6–8; 1291b13), if democracy is government by the poor, that is because the poor are everywhere the majority. Here Demosthenes’ speech Against Meidias (or. 21, with comments by Ober 1996: 86–106) is particularly enlightening. This was of course a plea before the courts, and the particular “poor” it addressed – for the purpose of denouncing the pressure exercised on the court by a “wealthy” minority represented by Meidias – were themselves members of that court. The orator identified those members with the demos as a whole, trying to demonstrate that the democracy itself was endangered by the intrigues of Meidias and his ilk.
To grasp the two meanings of demos better, it is useful to clarify the composition of the Athenian citizenry. Unfortunately, we do not have much information on citizen numbers. According to the law established by Pericles in the mid-fifth century, any man born of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother was an Athenian citizen. This law has been interpreted as a means of thwarting marriages between sons of great Athenian families and daughters of foreign sovereigns (barbarian kings or Greek tyrants), or perhaps of limiting the number of persons who could enjoy the benefits of citizenship (Patterson 1981). The only figure we have – 21,000 Athenians – is from a census believed to have been ordered in 317 by Demetrius of Phalerum. Plato vaguely mentions 30,000 citizens for the early fourth century, just after the Peloponnesian War, in which a great number of lives were lost. Most moderns put the figure at between 20,000 and 40,000 for the fourth century (Mossé 1979: 137–45; Hansen 1985). The vast majority of those citizens were landowners, as indicated in two late sources. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing on a decree proposed by a certain Phormisius in the early fourth century that would “deprive of politeia” all persons without land, estimated that this would exclude 5,000 Athenians from citizenship. However, in 322, when the Macedonian Antipater required anyone wishing to be a member of the citizen body to have either income or property worth 2,000 drachmas, many of the 12,000 persons excluded by this measure were peasants who agreed to go into exile in Thrace, where the Macedonian was offering them land. The other people excluded by the measure continued to eke out a living from their fields.6 The two sources concur: most Athenian citizens earned their income by working the land. Only one-sixth of the citizens were craftsmen, tradesmen, or men working alone in modest occupations.
But contemporaneous sources almost never highlight what we can nonetheless glean about the composition of the citizenry: Athenian society was characterized by the contrast between a “rich” minority and a “poor” majority (Mossé 1979: 234–9). The two notions obviously need to be qualified: those who did not work with their hands and derived their income from slave labor were considered “rich,” whereas anyone who was a “laborer” – peasant, small craftsman or tradesman with a shop in the agora – was considered “poor,” even if he possessed one or two slaves. The political four-class system attributed to Solon and based on citizen wealth (Ath. pol. 7.3–4 with Rhodes 1981: ad loc.; de Ste. Croix 2004: 5–72) is virtually absent from the sources, and although some elective offices (generals, treasurers) were reserved for the highest citizen class, civic offices filled by lot seem to have been open to any and all citizens (though there were age requirements for some).
Which citizens did actually participate in the assemblies? Once again, a categorical answer is impossible. We need to consider how often the assembly met. The meeting calendar described in Ath. pol. 43.4–6 was adopted relatively late. Thucydides seems to suggest that in the fifth century the decision to call the assembly was usually made by magistrates and exceptionally by generals (stratēgoi); this means that there could be long periods in which the citizens were not consulted. Later, there were four assemblies per prytany (prytaneia, one tenth of the year) – that is, forty assemblies a year – and a detailed agenda. The number of sessions further increased in the early fourth century when presence at assembly meetings began to be remunerated by a misthos (Ath. pol. 41.3).7 Yet all citizens never assembled at the same time. To pass certain measures (such as an ostracism or to grant citizenship rights), a quorum of 6,000 was required – the requirement itself attests that this figure was seldom reached. Moreover, the Pnyx hill where the assembly met could not hold more than 9,000 people (Thompson 1982; Hansen 1999: 128–32). This means that the assembly usually comprised fewer than one-fifth of all citizens. But this point requires two qualifying remarks. First, the composition of the assembly could vary by circumstances, especially in wartime, when the fleet was on campaign. We need only think of the assembly vote in 411 ratifying the oligarchic revolution fomented by opponents of the regime.8 Yet the majority that four years earlier had voted in favor of the Sicilian expedition in the hope of a “never-ending source of pay” (misthophoria, Thuc. 6.24.3) was surely made up of poor persons serving on the fleet. The second remark is a matter of common sense: it was easier for city-dwellers to reach the Pnyx at dawn than for peasants who would have had to come from distant districts of Attica. Even the promise of a misthos was not enough to draw peasants away from their land at harvest time. The image of an assembly made up of a majority of indigent citizens is based on the wrong assumption that three obols four times a prytany was enough to sustain an impoverished citizen with no other means of subsistence. The misthos may have been an incentive for some to make the trip to the Pnyx, but it was only a marginal one.
The last question concerns the cheirotonia or practice of voting by a show of hands. How could votes be counted with any certainty (Hansen 1999: 147–8)? One suggestion is that the citizens assembled by tribe, which would have facilitated vote counting. The inscriptions do not mention how the majority was discerned and established. The only mention of a vote count is in Thucydides and concerns the Mytilenian affair: after presenting the debate between Cleon and Diodotus, the historian says that the decision to overturn the initial decree that condemned adult male rebels to death and women and children to slavery was approved only by a small majority (3.49.1). A secret ballot was required only for ostracisms and in the courts.
The assembly was not the only place where the demos could express their sovereignty; the people’s law-courts were another.9 Tradition holds that it was Solon who granted every citizen the right to contest a measure that seemed to him to go against the laws (graphē para nomōn) and to denounce a magistrate or orator suspected of endangering the democracy (eisangelia). In fact, it seems that both these procedures were put in place in the later fifth century, and they played a significant role in the demise of ostracism (Mossé 1985; Hansen 1999: 205–18). Here it is important to point out two facts that appear contradictory. The first concerns the question of how real the sovereign power of popular court judges was. The 6,000 dikastai who made up these courts were chosen by lot every year from among citizens over thirty years of age – clearly, then, court judges were of the demos, a product of its will. Against their decisions, reached by secret ballot (as described in Ath. pol. 68–69), no appeal was possible, whereas a decision voted by the assembly could be reversed, either immediately after it was made (as we learn from the Mytilenian affair) or in accordance with the graphē para nomōn or eisangelia procedure. Even in such cases, it was up to individuals to file lawsuits with the court, and the accusation had to be against another individual. If all arbitration procedures had been exhausted and the case did indeed go before the court, accuser and accused were given the same speaking time. At the conclusion of this “competition” (agōn), judges ruled without debating or deliberating. This suggests that the opponents in such trials were likely to be men of some public importance rather than average citizens, as in private lawsuits, and indeed, this is attested by the orations that have come down to us from political trials.
Even if appeals against judges’ decisions were not allowed, these were reached after a debate in which the only real participants were two orators. This point has to be taken into account when the power of the assembly is likened to that of the people’s court, and when the law itself is said to have become an absolute value, the idea being that in the fourth century “the law” took the place of popular sovereignty (Hansen 1999: ch. 7, and esp. Ostwald 1986). But if the assembly remained sovereign in decision-making even after the laws were revised (subsequent to the second oligarchic revolution), democracy was restored, and nomothetai were appointed who were charged with making sure that no assembly decision went against the law – what about the existence of a “political class” that was distinct from the mass of simple citizens who sat in the assembly or acted as judges in the people’s courts? It is true that any citizen had the right to participate in assembly debates. Yet, as Socrates explains to an interlocutor in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (3.7), one could only address a crowd of several thousand persons, even a poorly educated one, if one had some powers of persuasion. This meant that speaking usually was reserved for officials who belonged among the elite, particularly the stratēgoi, and men called orators who were not necessarily vested with public office but knew how to speak to the demos. Naturally enough, these same orators were the speakers before the court in political trials.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet defined Greek civilization as “a civilization of political discourse” (1986: 1). The Homeric poems already reveal the importance of debating before taking action (Ruzé 1997: 14–106; Finkelberg 2011: I.104); in the Iliad, Thersites (presented as a commoner) is excluded from debate, though perhaps less because of his low status than because he does not respect the norms guiding debate (2.213–14). As Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests (1982: 45–8), the civic community came to assert itself by seizing the right to speak. Once again, there was necessarily a discrepancy between principle and reality, and this is what explains why orators were so important in the democratic polis of Athens. Thucydides’ account is illuminating here: every debate prior to making a decision that will commit the entire community (particularly about peace or war) involves speeches. The historian intends to render the orators’ speeches, “keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used” (1.22.1; trans. Rex Warner). Clearly he does not consider all orators worthy of this treatment: in reporting Pericles’ speech on the Spartan ultimatum on the Megarian decree, he specifies only that many orators spoke “and opinions were expressed on both sides, some maintaining that war was necessary and others saying that the [Megarian] decree should be revoked and not be allowed to stand in the way of peace” (1.139.4). But in most cases Thucydides sums up the debate by giving the floor to two orators advocating opposite positions on the decision the assembly had to reach – Cleon versus Diodotus for the Mytilenian affair (3.36.6) and Nicias versus Alcibiades for the Sicilian expedition (6.15.1) – and noting that other opinions (allai gnōmai) had also been expressed.
Isēgoria (equality of public speech) was thus a reality. But even though, as Finley points out, the many places in which the people could speak out ensured that the entire demos had a certain “political culture,” a citizen could only intervene in public debate if he was knowledgeable about the problems in question – in addition to possessing a certain degree of eloquence.10 When the purpose was to decide whether to undertake an expedition, for example, it was important to know something about the armed forces that would be implicated, and the city’s resources for mobilizing the fleet and paying the soldiers. In the fourth century, when Athens no longer had the empire’s resources and the problems of grain supply and how to finance war were at the top of the agenda, anyone intervening in a debate had to have quite specific knowledge, just as orators in the law courts had to know how the laws had been revised early in the century.
It thus becomes clear why the politeuomenoi (members of the “political class”) came to be distinguished from common citizens (idiōtai; Mossé 1984). The vast majority of politeuomenoi belonged to the group that Ober (1989: 11–17) calls the elite, men who lived in comfort even if they did not possess great fortunes, and who therefore were in a position to devote themselves entirely to the life of the city. In most of the fifth century, these men usually belonged to the old Athenian families with a “clientele” in the demos – such as Cimon, if we are to believe the famed anecdote on Pericles’ introduction of misthoi (Ath. pol. 27.3–4). But in the last third of that century, “new politicians” came to the center of the political stage (Connor 1971). These were the men mocked by the comic poets for their “banausic” activities, the fact that they earned their living in despised occupations: the tanner Cleon, the lamp-maker Hyperbolos, the harp-maker Cleophon. By the fourth century, however, people no longer ridiculed Demosthenes for being the son of an owner of workshops producing knives and beds. Most of the politeuomenoi whose names have come down to us were no longer linked to the great families that were strong at the time of Pericles and even Alcibiades, but they did belong to the wealthy elite. And although they surrounded themselves with a “clientele” of partisans ready to testify in their favor in the courts, that clientele was no longer “regional” as it had been in Cimon’s time (Mossé 1994–5).
What was the size of this “political class” compared to the mass of the demos? This question is hard to answer, not least because the contours of the group were not defined. “New men” could find their way into it, as seems to have been the case with Aeschines and Demades. Moreover, its members should not be confused with men of the “rich” set. It is virtually impossible to assess the numerical weight of the rich. One criterion might be the 300 proeispherontes who offered a financial or material advance to the community or paid the exceptional property tax called the eisphora. But, again, eisphora payers were not a closed set, and the existence of antidosis (exchange of property) trials attests that fortunes were never acquired definitively. Finally, although J. K. Davies was able to produce a list of “Athenian propertied families” (1971, 1984), not all the names in this list refer to politeuomenoi, and we can reasonably imagine that rich men taking on the burden of the trierarchy and other large-scale financial obligations on behalf of the community (liturgies; Hansen 1999: 110–12) would choose to limit their civic service to these financial contributions. On the other hand, some of the names occurring in inscriptions (of men who initiated motions or amendments) are not in Davies’ catalog. This is hardly surprising, since we know that high-visibility politicians relied on men who were not equally well known to make propositions that they themselves were reluctant to make. Significant in this regard is the case of Apollodorus who was heavily fined for moving to use excess income to establish a military aid fund – a proposal favored by Demosthenes (Ps.-Dem. or. 59, Against Neaira, 4–6).
How did this political elite manage to win the demos’s support? Modern scholars have proposed a variety of answers to this question. Some, taking up a critical argument used by democracy’s opponents, cite the art of flattering citizens in the assembly – a practice in which the “demagogues” excelled. Others emphasize more “noble” means, such as referring to the ancestors’ achievements and the community’s past greatness – ideas inspired by the teachings of professional rhetoricians. In her study of a particular type of discourse, the funeral oration, Nicole Loraux (1986) emphasizes the speakers’ concern to present an idealized, “aristocratic” vision of a demos united in common love for Athens. Josiah Ober has shown convincingly how some speeches worked to resolve the contradiction between the ideal of political equality and the reality of social inequality: the orator sought to demonstrate that the wealth of a minority was what made it possible to ensure the security of all; this led to a relationship of reciprocity, a “charis relationship” based on gratitude. Orators were thus heavily involved in promoting what Ober calls the “democratic ideology,” defined as the culture of a society in which the people possessed the “basic” power, that of ascribing meaning to symbols.11
All these interpretations of relations between the “political class” and the mass of the demos are in part founded on specific examples showing what may be called the stability of the Athenian political regime during its two-century apogee. But if we consider only the relationship between elite and demos it seems to me we lose sight of a fundamental aspect of Athenian democracy: debate, which implies choosing between antagonistic positions. It would be too simple to claim that such choices were made on the basis of competitions among members of the political class. The demos’s resistance to two late fifth-century attempts to establish an oligarchy reveals not only the desire of the persons excluded from active citizenship to recover what was the very sign of their dignity, but also their attachment to the democratic ideal of equality for all members of the civic community of Athens. The choices the demos was called upon to make before and after these two exceptional episodes were not indifferent, and if the citizens who gathered on the Pnyx were more sensitive to one argument than another, this was not only due to the skill of the orators confronting one another on the speakers’ platform, but also to the interests at stake – interests that divided the community.
To assess the demos’s choices we once again depend on our sources. In his assessment of the Persian threat in the early fifth century, Herodotus puts greater emphasis on the role of Miltiades and Themistocles than on political debate proper. And it seems fair to say that the personal relations obtaining between the Great King and this or that important family counted for something.12 But the importance that the victories of Marathon and Salamis were to assume in the community’s collective imaginary makes it clear that the majority was ready to adopt a policy that appeared to every Athenian as the right means of holding out against a threat to the polis’ freedom. Themistocles’ naval policy called upon the mass of citizens serving on the fleet (because they could not afford the hoplite panoply) to defend the community.13 Although we should perhaps not go so far as to see the rise of an “imperialist” policy as merely an effect of the new weight acquired by poor citizens, we can reasonably suppose that the mass of the demos was ready to support Pericles’ and his successors’ policy of dominating the Aegean. It is hardly by chance that in the famed “Melian dialogue” (5.84–113) Thucydides has the Athenians speak as a single entity, created by a shared ideology.
Yet it is also Thucydides who reports Pericles’ third speech that reveals a crack in such consensus. The two opposed groups are clearly designated: on the one hand, rich landowners and small peasants suffering from the Spartan devastation of the Attic countryside and desirous of peace, on the other, city-dwellers, protected by the city walls and the harbor in the Piraeus and in favor of continuing a war that will secure for them the material advantages deriving from Athens’ sway over the Aegean world (Thuc. 2.49–53). The debate on what to do with the Mytilenians (3.36–49) also signals a crack in the consensus. Alcibiades was able to restore that consensus for a while, until the failure of the Sicilian expedition enabled opponents of the democratic regime to seize power almost legally when constitutional change was sanctioned by an assembly in which citizens working on the fleet could not take part since the fleet was stationed in Samos. And it was in Samos that citizens claiming to be the majority deposed the stratēgoi who were in favor of oligarchy; their revolt prepared the way for the fall of the regime of the Four Hundred in Athens (Thuc. 8.69.3, 74ff.; Mossé 1964; Ostwald 1986: ch. 7).
The second oligarchic revolution broke out in a different context: the occupation of the city by the Spartan admiral Lysander. Once again, resistance was expressed in the name of the demos and its sovereignty and of the right of the mass of poor citizens to be equal with the rich – as explained by the leader of the democrats, Thrasybulus, upon his return to the city, in a speech attributed to him by Xenophon (Hellenica 2.4.40–42). Thrasybulus also mentions an oath taken by the democrats, a pledge not to take vengeance on their vanquished adversaries. Plato and Isocrates, who can hardly be suspected of democratic sympathies, must have found this quite exceptional.14
But if the form of the regime was not once called into question (except in the philosophers’ schools) in the eighty years following the amnesty of 403, this did not mean that there was no longer any disagreement on decisions about how to run the polis. One such decision concerned the policy to be pursued in response to the ambitions of Sparta under the rulership of Lysander and Agesilaus. As early as the 380s, a number of stratēgoi began trying to reestablish Athens’ positions of power in the Aegean, taking advantage of the break between Sparta and some of its allies. In 378, this goal was attained with the creation of the Second Athenian Confederation.15 This of course implied reconstituting a powerful fleet – which implied finding financial resources that could not be provided by the new alliance since Athens had pledged not to levy tribute from its allies. Other resources had to be found; the eisphora had to be levied more often (it became a permanent tax), while the wealthiest citizens were to assume the burden of the trierarchy. In 392, Aristophanes evoked the different reactions on the part of the wealthy and the peasants on the one hand, modest city-dwellers on the other, when it came to voting on the principle of a new naval expedition (Assemblywomen 197). Athens’ re-awakened imperialist ambitions worried those who would have to pay for them and wished to maintain the alliance with Sparta; standing against them were citizens who wished to defeat Spartan ambitions and therefore favored an alliance with Thebes. Xenophon does not describe how the assembly debates developed, since he is not primarily interested in Athens, but the conclusion he draws from the uncertain result of the battle of Mantinea in 362 – that all poleis were now in the same position of impotence (Hellenica 7.5.26–27) – reveals the failure of those various ambitions. Shortly thereafter, Athens was confronted by a revolt of its most powerful allies that culminated in the defeat of the Athenian fleet at Embata in 356.
Two or three years later, Xenophon (in a treatise inappropriately entitled On Revenues) and Isocrates (in his speech On the Peace) both advocated abandoning the policy of Athenian imperialism and to replace it by that of peaceful hegemony respecting the autonomy of the various poleis. We find an echo of this new political approach in contemporaneous court pleas attributed to a certain Eubulus about whom we know next to nothing. Several measures adopted either prior to or following the defeat at Embata – particularly the extension of the symmoriai (tax group) system to the trierarchy16 – helped ease the burden on the rich. We may wonder why the majority of the demos approved Eubulus’s “peaceful” policy. Perhaps the vote should be understood in connection with the fact that certain stratēgoi were making greater use of mercenaries. Moreover, the maritime expeditions were not bringing in tangible profits, whereas the peace and savings approach had made it possible to distribute the theōrikon to the poorest citizens.17
We can now better understand the difficulties that Demosthenes encountered when, in response to the growing threat from Philip of Macedonia, he proposed having the polis adopt an active military policy whereby theōrikon money would be shifted to a military fund, and re-establishing the traditional form of the trierarchy. In speeches delivered in the late 350s and the years preceding the defeat at Chaeronea in 338, we catch a glimpse of the antagonisms dividing the polis that was trying to cope with the difficulties of securing sufficient grain supplies, the threat represented by Philip’s maneuvering in the northern Aegean, and the increased burden on the wealthy. Lycurgus’s description (Ag. Leocrates 16, 39–42) of the climate of anxiety pervading Athens when Philip’s victory at Chaeronea was announced is quite telling.
When it was learned that Philip would not move on Athens, calm returned and political life resumed its course. However, it was at this moment that the assembly passed a law based on a motion by a certain Eucrates calling for measures to be taken against any members of the Areopagus who favored establishing a tyranny in Athens. According to Martin Ostwald, this law was directed against the pro-Macedonian “party” just after the defeat, when political passions were running high. I see it instead as attesting to adherence to the recommendations in the treaty of the League of Corinth.18 Ober (2003) reaches a similar conclusion, citing the relief on top of the stele on which the law was inscribed: a majestic male Demos is being crowned by the female figure of Demokratia. While the famous trial “On the Crown” in 330, in which Demosthenes faced off against Aeschines, resparked passions for a time, the judges’ vote in favor of Demosthenes’ friend Ctesiphon might have looked like an approval of Demosthenes’ policy just when Alexander was gaining control over the Persian Empire. The “government” of Lycurgus at the time was perhaps praised excessively.19 But only the announcement of Alexander’s death would truly reignite passions, marking the beginning of a turbulent period that culminated in the restoration of formal democracy: rule by notables publishing decrees in the name of the demos, but a demos now reduced to the condition of recipients of state aid or welfare.
I thank Amy Jacobs for translating this chapter into English.
Notes
1 Herodotus, Histories, 3.80.6; Aeschylus, Suppliants 600–7. The other regimes were monarchy and oligarchy.
2 This more widespread interpretation attributes much of the credit to the Alcmeaonid. In his introduction (2007: 9–10), Samons emphasizes the connection with Pisistratus’s approach.
3 Athēnaiōn politeia, henceforth Ath. pol.; Engl. trans. Moore 1975; Rhodes 1984.
4 The pro-oligarchic pamphlet was long attributed to Xenophon; see Leduc 1976; Osborne 2004; Other Engl. trans.: Bowersock 1971; Moore 1975.
5 See also discussion in Ruzé 1997 and Forsdyke’s chapter in this volume.
6 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Argument to Lysias, or. 34, which presents Phormisius’s decree. On the tax system imposed by Antipater, see Plutarch, Phocion 28.7; Diodorus 18.18.4 (who claims that 22,000 citizens were stripped of politeia).
7 On the assembly meeting calendar, see Ath. pol. 43.4–6; on the institution of the misthos ekklēsiastikos, ibid. 41.3.
8 See Ath. pol. 29.1 on the people’s adoption of Pythodorus’s decree establishing the Council of Four Hundred.
9 Ath. pol. 41.2: “The people have made themselves masters of everything, and control all things by means of decrees and jury-courts, in which the sovereign power resides with the people” (trans. Rhodes 1984).
10 Finley 1985: 25–33. Finley concludes with the remark that Athens “provides a valuable case-study of how political leadership and popular participation succeeded in coexisting over a long period of time”; see the chapter entitled “Athenian demagogues,” where demagogues in the neutral sense of the term – that is, orators – are described as “a structural element in the Athenian political system” (69).
11 See Sealey 2007; Samons 2007: 1–23, 282–307. On democratic ideology, see Ober 1989: 293–340; on charis in political relations, Azoulay 2004: 76–90.
12 See Herodotus 6.94 on relations between the Great King and the Pisistratids, and 6.123–24 for the historian’s refutation of the malicious rumor that the Alcmaeonids were actually accomplices of the Persians because they had “held up a shield” during the battle at Marathon.
13 Herodotus 7.144; Thucydides 1.14.2; Ath. pol. 22.7 and, for the consequences of this choice, 24.1–3.
14 So opines the author of the Ath. pol. (40.3): not only did the winners “wipe out all prosecutions for past acts, but, since it was thought that this should be the first step in establishing concord, the state repaid to Sparta the money which the Thirty had received for the war.” Plato, Menexenus 243e; Isocrates 7 (Areopagiticus) 67–8.
15 On the decree of Aristoteles establishing this confederation, see Rhodes and Osborne 2003: no. 22; on the new features of this alliance in comparison with the Delian League, see Isocrates, On the Peace 16; Diodorus 15.28.4.
16 Demosthenes, or. 14 (On the Symmories) 16–17. On Eubulus, see Carlier 1995: 84–8; Badian 1995: 100–5.
17 Isocrates, On the Peace 44. Originally, the theōrikon was a state distribution to enable citizens to pay the costs of attending the theater; later it became what some orators called an “allocation,” the amount of which increased continually; see Buchanan 1954. On the organization of the polis’ finances, see Brun 1983 and chs. by Hartmut Leppin and Winfried Schmitz in Eder 1995: 557–71, 573–97.
18 See text in Hesperia 21 (1952): 355–9; Rhodes and Osborne 2003: no. 79; see Ostwald 1955; Mossé 1979: 282 n. 3.
19 Brun 2000. See Schuller 2000 on the trial on the Crown. We know too little about the “Harpalus affair” in which Demosthenes was accused of embezzling some of the money left on the Acropolis by Alexander’s former treasurer Harpalus, and thus are unable to speak in that connection of divisions within the city; for discussion, see Eder 2000.
References
Azoulay, Vincent. 2004. Xénophon et les grâces du pouvoir: De la charis au charisme. Paris.
Azoulay, Vincent 2010. Périclès: La démocratie à l’épreuve du grand homme. Paris.
Badian, Ernst. 1995. “The Ghost of Empire: Reflections on Athenian Foreign Policy in the Fourth Century BC.” In Eder 1995: 79–106.
Bowersock, G. W. 1971. Pseudo-Xenophon, Constitution of the Athenians. In E. C. Marchant (ed.), Xenophon, VII: Scripta minora. London and Cambridge MA.
Brun, Patrice. 1983. Eisphora, syntaxis, stratiotika: Recherches sur les finances militaires d’Athènes au IVème siècle av. J.-C. Besançon.
Brun, Patrice. 2000. L’orateur Démade: Essai d’histoire et d’historiographie. Bordeaux.
Buchanan, James J. 1954. Theorika: A Study of Monetary Distribution to the Athenian Citizenry during the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C. Princeton.
Burckhardt, Leonhard, and Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg (eds.). 2000. Grosse Prozesse im antiken Athen. Munich.
Carlier, Pierre. 1995. Le IVème siècle grec. Paris.
Connor, W. R. 1971. The New Politicians of Fifth-Century Athens. Princeton.
Davies, J. K. 1971. Athenian Propertied Families (600–300 B.C.). Oxford. Rev. ed. in preparation.
Davies, J. K. 1984. Wealth and the Power of Wealth in Classical Athens. Salem NH.
Eder, Walter (ed.). 1995. Die athenische Demokratie im 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Stuttgart.
Eder, Walter (ed.). 2000. “Die Harpalos Affäre.” In Burckhardt and von Ungern-Sternberg 2000: 201–15.
Finkelberg, Margalit. 2011. The Homer Encyclopedia. 3 vols. Malden MA and Oxford.
Finley, M. I. 1985. Democracy Ancient and Modern. New Brunswick NJ. Rev. ed.
Hansen, Mogens H. 1985. Demography and Democracy: The Number of Athenian Citizens in the Fourth Century b.c. Herning, Denmark.
Hansen, Mogens H. 1999. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes. New, augmented ed. Bristol and Norman OK.
Leduc, Claudine. 1976. La constitution d’Athènes attribuée à Xénophon. Paris.
Lévêque, Pierre, & Pierre Vidal-Nacquet. 1996. Cleisthenes the Athenian: An Essay on the Representation of Space and Time in Greek Political Thought. Trans. D. A. Curtis. Atlantic Highlands NJ. First French ed. Paris 1964. Rev. ed. Paris 1992.
Loraux, Nicole. 1986. The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Cambridge MA. Repr. New York 2006. First French ed. Paris 1981.
Moore, J. M. 1975. Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy. Translations with Introductions and Commentary. Berkeley.
Mossé, Claude. 1964. “L’armée dans la révolution de 411 à Athènes.” Revue historique 231: 1–10; republished in Mossé 2007: 241–48.
Mossé, Claude. 1979. La fin de la démocratie athénienne. New York. First pub. Paris 1962.
Mossé, Claude. 1984. “Politeuomenoi et idiôtai: L’affirmation d’une classe politique à Athènes au IVème siècle.” Revue des études anciennes 86: 193–200; republished in Mossé 2007: 209–16.
Mossé, Claude. 1985. “De l’ostracisme aux procès politiques: Le fonctionnement de la vie politique à Athènes.” Archeologia e storia antica 7: 9–18; republished in Mossé 2007: 159–66.
Mossé, Claude. 1994–95. “Les relations de clientèle dans le fonctionnement de la démocratie athénienne.” Métis 9–10: 143–50; republished in Mossé 2007: 189–95.
Mossé, Claude. 2007. D’Homère à Plutarque: Itinéraires historiques. Bordeaux.
Ober, Josiah. 1989. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. Princeton.
Ober, Josiah. 1996. The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory. Princeton.
Ober, Josiah. 2003. “Tyrant-killing as Therapeutic Stasis: A Political Debate in Images and Texts.” In Kathryn A. Morgan (ed.), Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and Its Discontents in Ancient Greece, 215–50. Austin.
Ober, Josiah. 2007. “‘I Besieged That Man’: Democracy’s Revolutionary Start.” In Raaflaub et al. 2007: 83–104.
Osborne, Robin. 2004. The Old Oligarch: Pseudo-Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians. Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Lactor 2. 2nd ed. London.
Ostwald, Martin. 1955. “The Athenian Legislation against Tyranny.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 86: 103–28.
Ostwald, Martin.1986. From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of the Law. Berkeley.
Patterson, Cynthia. 1981. Pericles’ Citizenship Law of 451–50 B.C. New York.
Raaflaub, Kurt A. 2007. “The Breakthrough of Dēmokratia in Mid-Fifth-Century Athens.” In Raaflaub et al. 2007: 105–54.
Raaflaub, Kurt A. Josiah Ober, and Robert W. Wallace. 2007. Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece. With chapters by Paul Cartledge and Cynthia Farrar. Berkeley.
Rhodes, P. J. 1981. A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia. Oxford. Repr. with additions and corrections, 1993.
Rhodes, P. J. (trans.). 1984. Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution. Harmondsworth.
Rhodes, P. J. and Robin Osborne (eds.). 2003. Greek Historical Inscriptions 404-323 BC. Oxford.
Ruzé, Françoise. 1997. Délibération et pouvoir dans la cité grecque de Nestor à Socrate. Paris.
Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de. 2004. Athenian Democratic Origins and Other Essays. Eds. David Harvey and Robert Parker. Oxford.
Samons II, L. J. (ed.). 2007. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles. Cambridge.
Schuller, Wolfgang. 2000. “Der Kranzprozess des Jahres 330 v. Chr. oder: Der Abgesang auf die klassische Polis.” In Burckhardt and von Ungern-Sternberg 2000: 190–200.
Sealey, Raphael. 2007. “Democratic Theory and Practice.” In Samons 2007: 238–57.
Thompson, H. A. 1982. “The Pnyx in Models.” Hesperia Supp. 19: 133–47.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 1982. The Origins of Greek Thought. Ithaca N.Y. Orig. French ed. 1962.
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. 1986. The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World. Trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak. Baltimore. Orig. French ed. 1981.