Mass and Elite in the Greek and Roman Worlds

From Sparta to Late Antiquity

Richard Evans, Richard Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317066873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume has its origin in the 14th University of South Africa Classics Colloquium in which the topic and title of the event were inspired by Josiah Ober's seminal work Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989). Indeed the influence this work has had on later research in all aspects of the Greek and Roman world is reflected by the diversity of the papers collected here, which take their cue and starting point from the argument that, in Ober's words (1989, 338): 'Rhetorical communication between masses and elites... was a primary means by which the strategic ends of social stability and political order were achieved.' However, the contributors to the volume have also sought to build further on such conclusions and to offer new perceptions about a spread of issues affecting mass and elite interaction in a far wider number of locations around the ancient Mediterranean over a much longer chronological span. Thus the conclusions here suggest that once the concept of mass and elite was established in the minds of Greeks and later Romans it became a universal component of political life and from there was easily transferred to economic activity or religion. In casting the net beyond the confines of Athens (although the city is also represented here) to – amongst others – Syracuse, the cities of Asia Minor, Pompeii and Rome, and to literary and philosophical discourse, in each instance that interplay between the wider body of the community and the hierarchically privileged can be shown to have governed and directed the thoughts and actions of the participants.

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1 Mass and elite revisited

Josiah Ober

When, in the early 1980s, I began work on the book that was first published in 1989 by Princeton University Press, as Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, I had no idea that it would still be read and discussed in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Much less did I dream that it would inspire a major international conference and this volume of essays – most of which are neither about Athens nor about its democracy. But in light of our current knowledge of what has happened in this field over the course of the last quarter century, it may be worthwhile retracing the series of fortuitous accidents that led to my book being written and published in the form it eventually took, and then to the analytic concept of ‘mass and elite’ being taken up so quickly, persistently, and productively by scholars whose knowledge of other historical times and places, and other aspects of ancient studies, is so much greater than my own.

The original idea for a book concerning depictions of elite and non-elite attributes in Athenian rhetoric of the late fifth and fourth centuries bce arose when I was doing background reading for my dissertation, which was written under the benevolent and thoughtful direction of Chester Starr at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. My dissertation, on the topic of Athenian defense policy after the Peloponnesian War, had its origins in a seminar paper on views of sea power in the Attic orators, produced for one of Starr’s seminars, when I was a second-year graduate student. That paper became my first published article (Ober 1978), appearing in the first issue of a new journal, The Ancient World. So I had already gained some experience in working with Greek rhetoric by the time I began working through the corpus of the Attic orators, while doing research for the dissertation. In re-reading a speech by Demosthenes, I was struck by an apparent contradiction. He seemed, in the course of a few sentences, to be contradicting himself: making elitist claims, to the effect that he himself was especially meritorious, and thus especially worthy of leadership as a result of his own privileged background, and anti-elitist claims, to the effect that his opponents were wealthy snobs who considered themselves better than ordinary Athenians. While it was possible that Demosthenes himself might believe both things simultaneously (i.e. that he was the right sort of elitist, with a legitimate claim to elite standing and his opponents the wrong sorts of elitists, who lacked the right to that claim), I could not readily explain to myself why he could have expected an audience of Athenian jurors to follow him in that belief, at least without explaining matters in a lot more detail than he did.

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Having noticed the apparent tension (as I thought of it) between elitist and anti-elitist sentiments in Demosthenes, I soon realized that passages expressing similar tensions are common in the Attic orators, and indeed in historical, philosophical, and dramatic texts written in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries bce. I began to collect references to ‘elitism and anti-elitism in classical Athenian literature,’ with the vague thought that something might come of it someday, once I had completed work on various topics in Greek military history. That day dawned, in spring of 1983, when my request for a permit to undertake an archaeological surface survey in Greece was unexpectedly refused by the Greek Archaeological Service – along with all other such requests that year, as I later discovered: It was a bad year for survey archaeology in Greece. Being an Assistant Professor at the time, with a tenure clock running, I decided that any future career I might have in Greek archaeology would need to be put on hold. I found my ‘elitism and anti-elitism’ notes, refocused my research program around that topic, and six years later the book was published. Not surprisingly, the project changed dramatically in the course of those years.

As work on the project progressed, it became clear to me that the theoretical underpinning of my project must be political sociology. Indeed, my working title was for a time ‘a political sociology of classical Athens.’ Political sociology, in the tradition of Max Weber, had been robustly advocated by Moses I. Finley, undoubtedly the most influential interpreter of the Greco-Roman world for those Anglophone ancient historians of my generation who were concerned with the intersection of social and political history.¹ Along with many others, I was strongly attracted to Finley’s application of modern social theory to ancient history. I was also influenced by Finley’s conviction, expressed most clearly in his book Democracy Ancient and Modern (1985) that a proper understanding of the history of ancient Greek democracy could be deployed against both the ‘democratic elitism’ that was popular among some mid-century political theorists, and against the universality of the ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy,’ originally developed in a classic of early twentieth-century political sociology, Robert Michels’ (1962 [1911]) Political Parties. Finley had presented a set of problems clearly enough, and had forcefully argued for their importance, both as topics within ancient history and within social theory more generally. But he had not, or so it seemed to me, made a comprehensive or systematic use of the very substantial literary and documentary evidence for Athenian democracy. The works of the Attic orators appeared to me in particular to be an under-exploited resource for the problems of political sociology to which Finley had drawn attention.

Thanks to discussions with some prominent and intellectually generous social scientists with whom I shared a fellowship year in 1983–84, at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina (‘Humanities’ was, happily, broadly interpreted there and then) I soon realized that the relevant subfields of social science, including sociology and political communications, had progressed well beyond Weber and Michels. With the resources of this more recent scholarship, and with further inspiration from Michel Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge (1980) which I took very seriously in the mid-1980s, I was able to develop a hypothesis about the relationship between public discourse, political ideology, and democratic stability. I tested the hypothesis – for ‘goodness of fit,’ rather than in a formal way that would satisfy contemporary standards of proof by causal inference, falsification conditions, and counterfactuals – against the abundant evidence of the Attic orators and other classical texts.

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Although there was an emerging literature on Athenian political factionalism, which reached a peak with Barry Strauss’ (1986) study of Athens after the Peloponnesian War, and although some other classical scholars, notably Kenneth Dover (1974), had exploited the evidence of the Attic orators for investigations of Greek popular attitudes, there was, other than Finley, no very obvious model for the book I was writing. But, at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, where I was then teaching, I was the only full-time professional classicist or ancient historian within a several-hundred-mile radius. So I had no nearby mentor in the field to warn me that I was drifting into uncharted and shark-infested waters. On the other hand, I was lucky enough to have outstanding historians of the US and Europe as my colleagues at Montana State, and they helped me to see more clearly how political and social history could be conjoined. The book was largely completed in 1986–87, when I was unexpectedly back in Ann Arbor as a visiting assistant professor for a year.² Access to a fine and familiar library, and a teaching load much lighter than I had become used to in Montana, made it possible for me to finish research and writing in the course of the year. Conversations with faculty colleagues, notably with Sally Humphreys, a pioneer in the use of contemporary social science to explain the role of kinship in Greek society who had recently joined the Michigan faculty, were helpful in enabling me to pull together the various strands of my argument, and to relate my theories about the ancient Greek world to recent developments in the historical study of other places in other eras.

As it turned out, 1989, a momentous year in the political history of the modern world, was a fortuitous time for the appearance of the sort of book that I had written. The book quickly received much wider and much more positive attention than I had had any reason to expect. Equally unexpectedly, the book has continued to be read and commented upon ever since. According to (the necessarily incomplete and therefore somewhat impressionistic) statistics available through Google Scholar, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens has by now (December 2015) been cited in other works of scholarship more than 1,000 times. Moreover, the rate at which the book is cited has increased markedly since 2008.³ I assume that at least one part of the continued scholarly interest in the book must be that the underlying issues in political sociology continue to be relevant to the way that scholars (among others) interpret the world. The perceived value of ‘mass and elite,’ as an analytic concept for social analysis, may be expected to persist for at least the near future, if we are to judge by recent popular interest and academic attention to the question of the political ramifications of economic inequality. The rise of social movements, for example ‘Occupy,’ which take as their theme large and invidious differences in wealth and power between an elite – ‘the one percent’ – and everyone else, is exactly the sort of topic that is well addressed by political sociology.

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My book was originally motivated, not only by apparent inconsistencies in social attitudes expressed in classical Greek political oratory, but also by a deep puzzle about politics in classical Athens: Why was democratic Athens, with such a complex and seemingly costly system of government ‘by the people’ so successful over time? Why was Athens such a dynamic cultural powerhouse and so apparently stable for much of the fifth and most of the fourth centuries? How did Athens manage to innovate in so many domains while remaining so robust to severe shocks – plague, military defeat, and brief but sharp interludes of civil strife in the late fifth century? How, ultimately, was the power of the mass of ordinary people, as it was manifest in democracy, reconciled with the power of an elite of wealth, education, and status, so as to produce a high-performing society over an extended period of time? The human cost of a failure to reconcile masses with elites – in the form of endemic instability and, potentially, bloody civil strife – was made glaringly obvious by the history of other major classical Greek poleis (e.g. Argos and Syracuse). And civil strife was, of course, a central and recurrent theme in the political writing of Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, among other classical authors.

My solution to the puzzle of Athenian democratic success was based on the premise that the emergence of a civic ideology and associated practices of reciprocity among citizens gave Athenians reasons to cooperate across the lines of class, status, and education. Athenian civic ideology and practices of citizenship were grounded in, and helped to promote, substantial benefits for elite and ordinary citizens alike. The relevant benefits, in terms of material goods and honors, were produced and consumed in a process of reciprocal exchange between masses and elites.

Practices of reciprocity, expressed in and sustained by public communication, especially in the form of speeches in the Assembly and law courts, resulted in the development of a sophisticated and widely shared civic discourse. An ongoing dialogue between eloquent elite speakers eager for influence and honors on the one hand, and highly vocal and responsive mass audiences concerned with preserving their equal high standing as citizens on the other, served to define and to justify to each side the terms of a fair bargain. That dialogue clarified responsibilities of generosity and public service on the part of elites. On the part of the masses, the bargain emphasized the responsibility to respect the property and educational attainments of those elites who fulfilled their part of the deal. The emergence of reasonably clear rules of appropriate public behavior and speech allowed for violations of the implicit agreement to be identified, and thus for effective monitoring for compliance. Those elites who willfully violated the implied social contract were liable to informal social sanctions, degradation of reputation, and legal punishment.

My account of the relationship between mass and elite in Athens rested on several premises. First was the assumption that the social categories of ‘mass’ and ‘elite,’ although never precisely defined (an impossibility given the only partially overlapping characteristics of education, wealth, and status), were nonetheless quite clear both to the original participants in the bargain and to us, as observers. The tendency of the relevant Greek social vocabulary to divide society into binary categories (polloi v oligoi, plousioi/euporoi v aporoi/penetes/ptochoi, gnorimoi/charientes v plethos/ochlos and so on) seemed to point to an adequately clear bifurcation of Athenian society along lines of mass and elite, at least within the citizen population of the democratic state.

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My second primary assumption was that the citizen masses had the capacity and the tendency to act (e.g. in response to elite rhetoric in assembly or law court) as a reasonably coherent and consistent ‘collective agent.’ As a collective agent the mass of citizens that gathered, for example, in Assembly or as the jury of a law court, must, collectively, be able to form and act upon a judgment on elite individuals and their rhetorical performances. The mass of citizens must, therefore, be both willing and capable of judging, and subsequently rewarding or punishing, elite contestants seeking honor and influence. Those collective judgments and their consequences must, moreover, be reasonably consistent over time. Elites, for their part, must be in a position to understand the implicit rules of the game they were playing, and thereby to act under a reasonable presumption that following the rules – conforming to a given set of behaviors and a given protocol of rhetorical self-presentation – would (all things being equal) evoke a positive response from the mass audience/judge. The mass judgment was, therefore, expressed by collectively responding appropriately and more or less clearly to the rhetorical performances (and other forms of public display) of individual elites.

My assumption about the possibility and relevant processes of collective judgment and agency did not, at the time of writing, have any very deep roots in the analytic philosophy of knowledge and action.⁴ That assumption was, at the time of the writing of the book, taken over from background premises about the formation and behavior of social groups that were commonly held by modern political sociologists. The assumption seemed, moreover, to be confirmed by the evidence of the content of elite Athenian discourse, as manifest especially in assembly and courtroom rhetoric. That discourse makes more sense – that is, the contradictions that had initially puzzled me in speeches by Demosthenes and others, no longer appeared inexplicable – when we assume that elite speakers were consistently conforming to unwritten but quite clear social rules that were devised and publicized by a collective ‘lawmaker.’ The unwritten rules of discourse and social behavior were related to, and continuous with, the more formal rules of the game of Athenian politics, as manifest in the procedural rules governing Athenian legislative bodies and legal institutions. Part of the burden of my book, expressed in terms that were more polemical than I would now use, was that institutions, understood only as sets of formal procedural rules, were insufficient to explain Athenian democracy.

The mass/elite binary is not, of course, the only way to conceive of ancient Athenian society – or of any other historical society. One obvious alternative is to model society as divided into three categories, with lower, middle, and upper strata. Modern societies are, for example, often described in this tripartite scheme; the creation and maintenance of a substantial middle class is typically regarded as a sign of advanced economic development. Greek evaluative social vocabulary, both that employed by political and moral philosophy (notably by Aristotle) and Athenian public rhetoric (notably by Aeschines) certainly recognized and valorized th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Mass and Elite in the Greek and Roman Worlds
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Mass and Elite Revisited
• 2 Coinage and Democracy: Economic Redistribution as the Basis of Democratic Athens
• 3 The Frame of Mind of εὐταξία
• 4 Ancient Cynicism: For the Elite or for the Masses?
• 5 Livy on Mass and Elite Interaction in Syracuse in 214 Bc: Libertas, Multitudo, Uxores
• 6 Plebeian Agency in the Later Roman Republic
• 7 Populating Satire 1.6: Mass and Elite in the Poetry of Horace
• 8 Living in Republican Rome: ‘Shanty Metropolis’
• 9 City, Village, Sacrifice: The Political Economy of Religion in the Early Roman Empire
• 10 The Cost of Leadership: The Relationship Between Crowds and Power in the Misopogon of the Emperor Julian and the Aethiopica of Heliodorus
• 11 From Mass to Elite in the Later Roman Empire: Framing the Problem of Mass to Elite Social Mobility
• 12 Mass and Elite in Late Antique Religion: The Case of Manichaeism
• Bibliography
• Index