The Athenian Revolution

Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory

Josiah Ober

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691217970
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

Where did "democracy" come from, and what was its original form and meaning? Here Josiah Ober shows that this "power of the people" crystallized in a revolutionary uprising by the ordinary citizens of Athens in 508-507 B.C. He then examines the consequences of the development of direct democracy for upper-and lower-class citizens, for dissident Athenian intellectuals, and for those who were denied citizenship under the new regime (women, slaves, resident foreigners), as well as for the general development of Greek history.
When the citizens suddenly took power into their own hands, they changed the cultural and social landscape of Greece, thereby helping to inaugurate the Classical Era. Democracy led to fundamental adjustments in the basic structures of Athenian society, altered the forms and direction of political thinking, and sparked a series of dramatic reorientations in international relations. It quickly made Athens into the most powerful Greek city-state, but it also fatally undermined the traditional Greek rules of warfare. It stimulated the development of the Western tradition of political theorizing and encouraged a new conception of justice that has striking parallels to contemporary theories of rights. But Athenians never embraced the notions of inherency and inalienability that have placed the concept of rights at the center of modern political thought. Thus the play of power that constituted life in democratic Athens is revealed as at once strangely familiar and desperately foreign, and the values sustaining the Athenian political community as simultaneously admirable and terrifying.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEOLOGIES

IT SEEMS only fair to state at the outset that this book, like most of the academic work I have undertaken in the last decade, has its part in a triple agenda: It is intended first to define an approach to understanding the past that might be called a “history of ideologies.” It is next meant to help establish the study of classical Greek democracy (and the ideological apparatus that sustained it) as a significant and active subfield within both Greek history and political theory. Finally, it is written in the hope of making ancient historians and political theorists more aware of one another’s work.¹ With regard to the third of these ambitions, I believe that the study of classical democracy could serve as a bridge between two disciplines that have much to gain by closer interaction. The potential payoff is considerable: Historical studies grounded in contextual specificity can gain purchase in contemporary debates when informed by the concerns of normative theory. And theory will be both tempered and strengthened by a confrontation with the pragmatic consequences of political thought and practice in a society that developed norms strikingly similar to those of modern liberalism, but predicated those familiar norms on radically unfamiliar grounds. Likewise, in terms of my own intellectual history, these essays stand between the fields of practice and theory. Some (Chapters 3, 4, and 7) are intended to develop and clarify concepts introduced in my 1989 study of democratic practices, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. Others respond to alternative scholarly treatments of classical democracy (Chapters 8 and 9). Two assess the relationship between democracy and foreign policy (Chapters 5 and 6). Several chapters look forward to and lay some of the groundwork for a book in progress on the origins of critical political theory (Chapters 2, 10, and 11).²

These essays on ancient Greek political ideology and democratic theory, written (with the exception of Chapter 6) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, originally appeared in a miscellany of collections and journals aimed at equally diverse audiences (classical historians, political scientists, specialists in international relations and military policy). Yet they are all informed by a consistent and simple idea: Something historically and politically remarkable took place in the polis of Athens between 508 and 322 B.C.³ This era, which can reasonably be called the “classical period” of Athenian social and political history, begins with the popular uprising that I argue (Chapter 4) should be regarded as the inaugural moment of the “Athenian Revolution.” It ends with the suppression of popular government by the militarily superior Macedonians. The sociopolitical phenomenon with which this book is primarily concerned is dēmokratia—a term coined in late sixth- or fifth-century Athens to denote the rule of the dēmos, the mass of ordinary adult male natives. Athenian democracy is remarkable because it was the real thing—in classical Athens the demos was the true political authority. Though political leadership was a key element in the workings of Athenian government (Chapters 4, 6, and 7), there was no behind-the-scenes oligarchy of bureaucrats, dealmakers, landlords, warlords, or aristocrats.⁴ The Athenian Revolution in its wider sense (regarded as an era rather than as a moment) featured a radical and decisive shift in the structures of political authority and of social relations, and (a matter of special concern to me) in the concepts and vocabulary with which people thought and talked about social and political relations. The key element in this revolutionary change in patterns of thought, speech, and action was a matter of political sociology: the replacement of a relatively small ruling elite as the motor that drove history by a relatively broad citizenship of ordinary (non-elite) men. The consequences of accepting this basic premise are profound in terms of ancient Greek history and modern political theory. I have argued for the premise in detail elsewhere.⁵ These essays explore some of its consequences.

If democracy is real, then Athenian political history is, imprimis, the story of (1) the origins and development of a coherent ideology and an articulated institutional structure that facilitated the process of decision-making by the demos, especially (although not uniquely) in the Assembly and in the people’s courts, (2) the decisions actually made by the demos, and (3) the results of those decisions in terms of policy, ideology, and social structure. The essays collected here consider the role of demotic authority in each of these three historical aspects of dēmokratia, along with a fourth issue: the relationship between democratic political practice and the development of a self-consciously critical literary tradition of abstract theorizing about politics and society. Athenian political theory was written by educated elites for consumption by elite audiences of readers or listeners. But again, my contention is that the primary impetus for the phenomenon in question comes “from below,” from the demos. Athenian political theory is, in my reading, an imaginative and creative (if not always particularly fair, accurate, or attractive) response by Athenian intellectuals to the perceived problems and contradictions that arose as a result of the rule of the people.

The phenomenon of democracy that was “true”—in the sense of being a relatively stable and long-lasting system of government “by the people” that operated without an overt or cryptic ruling elite—is noteworthy given its historical rarity, at least among so-called complex societies. Even in the classical period there were probably never a great many democracies in existence.⁶ Through most of Western history, democracy in the sense that I am using the term was either unconceived (i.e., not part of the existing conceptual universe) or merely a memory. But Greek democracy is not only interesting as a historical rarity. The inherent interest of a well-documented example of a real democracy is especially great in the twentieth century, because very influential thinkers, notably Robert Michels and other “elitist” theorists, have denied that a true democracy could exist.⁷ Though Michels and the other theorists of elitism are perhaps not much read today, at least by classicists and ancient historians, their ideas have become generalized both in the scholarly culture of classical history and in Western political culture. If we are today, in the late twentieth century, all democrats in principle, most of us nonetheless seem to regard the authority of an entrenched elite as inevitable. The debates among historians and among citizens are, in my experience, not so much about whether a ruling elite exists now or existed in past cultures. Rather, they are about, first, the identity of an aphoristically postulated ruling elite and, next, the question of whether the rule of a given elite is a good or a bad thing. Twentieth-century conceptions of ruling elites are both plentiful and colorful: the socialist vanguard, the military-industrial complex, the Trilateral Commission, the shadow government, the information elite, the best and the brightest—the list could be extended indefinitely. What seems to have been lost in these debates is the notion that a social and economic elite could effectively be controlled by the political authority of the citizenry at large. “We the People” have lost faith in our own powers.⁸

The conceptual situation in which we find ourselves, with true democracy regarded not only as rare but as impossible, would, I believe, be difficult for a classical Athenian to comprehend. A consistent theme in this book is that the Athenians themselves, both ordinary and elite, assumed the reality of democracy in their own time. This does not mean that they supposed that democracy was their inevitable lot—both nervous Athenian democrats and disgruntled Athenian aristocrats could and did imagine an Athenian government dominated by the elite (Chapters 7 and 10). But they supposed that in order for an elite to rule, the current ideological and institutional regime (politeia) of the Athenians would have to be destroyed—the standard locution for the destruction of democracy was “to overthrow the people” (kataluein ton dēmon). Moreover, asserting that Athenians believed in the reality of their democracy is not a matter of a subtle reading of sources “against the grain”: the actuality of democracy is frequently and unambiguously asserted in our ancient sources both by those writers who celebrate it and by those who disparage it.⁹ Thus the conservative interpretive approach of supposing that our primary sources have something to do with the realities experienced by their authors can lead to a radical conclusion that is potentially disturbing to complacent modern interpreters. This, it seems to me, is all to the good.

My attempt to pay close and critical attention to the sources is the product of my training as an undergraduate under the direction of Thomas Kelly and as a graduate student under Chester G. Starr, and I suppose that whatever merit these essays may possess derives in large part from that ingrained habit of attention. I have, however, tried to avoid allowing my respect for the sources to lead to the formation of banal assumptions about the correspondence between literature and historical reality. Much of the polemical energy of this volume is directed against a naive version of historical positivism whose advocates suppose that it is possible to discover the “objective truth” about the ancient past by “letting the sources speak for themselves.” I am at pains to demonstrate why the naive positivist’s approach to history is intellectually indefensible and positively dangerous to the historian’s enterprise of attempting a fuller and more accurate understanding of the past.

Writing a history of Athenian political ideologies entails an effort to unpack the ideological positions and the associated (though nonidentical) social realities that underpin the rhetorical statements and claims of complex texts. Those texts were typically written to persuade sophisticated audiences (jurors, Assemblymen, elite readers) to think and to act in ways that might not seem, prima facie, to be intuitively obvious or even in their own interests (e.g., to vote for a litigant whose factual case was weak). But it is, I believe, possible to become over-subtle in the process of “unpacking”—to the point at which the source-suitcase is forced to divulge an item that was never packed into it but that the modern interpreter “knew” all along must be in there—such as a ruling elite and its dominant ideology. Most of these chapters deal explicitly with methodological issues of historical interpretion (especially Chapters 2 and 3), but I know of no sure way of navigating between the Scylla of an interpretive naivete that takes the source too much on its own terms and the Charybdis of an overly subtle approach that permits the source to say anything its reader wishes and thereby forbids it to reveal anything that the reader did not know beforehand. Despite our best efforts at methodological explanation, interpretive navigation remains more of an art than a science. I am convinced that the answers to the historical and theoretical questions that haunt me can only be discovered by repeatedly attempting this narrow and difficult passage between free-floating relativism and obdurate positivism. But I leave it to readers and critics to decide whether or not my interpretive ship has made it through intact.

The primary sources are quite plentiful for certain periods of classical Athenian history, most especially for the fourth century B.C. (i.e., the period between the end of the Peloponnesian and Lamian wars: 404-322 B.C.), and sources can, at times, serve as checks on one another. Fourth-century sources include a very rich epigraphic tradition that has recently been analyzed in terms of ideological authority by David Whitehead.¹⁰ My focus in this collection (as elsewhere) is primarily on literary sources: rhetoric (preserved orations delivered in the Athenian Assembly and people’s courts) on the one hand, works of historiography and political philosophy on the other. A secondary theme of these essays is that the fourth century is a vital and exciting period in Athenian history, one in which the democracy was at once vibrant and stable. This point of view is increasingly widely accepted among professional Greek historians, but the image of the era after the Peloponnesian War as one of decay, decline, and fall is still pervasive outside the classical profession.¹¹ This misconception is particularly troublesome when it is propounded by political theorists, and especially by those who are sincerely interested in the example of Athenian democracy and who are otherwise sophisticated in their treatment of classical texts. Part of the burden of this volume is the recuperation of fourth-century Athens as a source of nonphilosophical material useful for political theorizing (especially Chapter 3).

Each of these essays represents an attempt to connect historical reality with ideology, practice with theory. In brief, I suppose that in classical Athens, ideology (a term whose definition I will discuss in the following chapters) is not merely a mask for an underlying reality (e.g., “market-based relationships,” “the mode of production,” or “people’s genuine needs and interests”) but rather is among those elements that constitute historical reality: People act in certain ways because they take certain postulates to be true, because they believe things. The connection between ideology and reality is manifested and carried forward by discourse (things people say) and by practice (things people do). Thus we have in play the three apparently discrete categories of believing, saying, and doing. But in writing a history of ideologies, these categories cannot remain fully distinct from one another. A central tenet of these essays is that discourse is an aspect of social practice and, as such, not only reflects beliefs, but brings into being social and political realities. Thus, in the terminology developed by Michel Foucault, power in society is not simply repressive or juridical, it is discursive and productive of the “truths” by which people organize the categories of analysis and the hierarchies of value that constitute the ordinarily unquestioned (and almost unquestionab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Athenian Democracy and the History of Ideologies
• Chapter 2: Models and Paradigms in Ancient History
• Chapter 3: Public Speech and the Power of the People in Democratic Athens
• Chapter 4: The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 B.C.: Violence, Authority, and the Origins of Democracy
• Chapter 5: The Rules of War in Classical Greece
• Chapter 6: Thucydides, Pericles, and the Strategy of Defense
• Chapter 7: Power and Oratory in Democratic Athens: Demosthenes 21, Against Meidias
• Chapter 8: The Nature of Athenian Democracy
• Chapter 9: The Athenians and Their Democracy
• Chapter 10: How to Criticize Democracy in Late Fifth- and Fourth-Century Athens
• Chapter 11: The Polis as a Society: Aristotle, John Rawls, and the Athenian Social Contract
• Bibliography
• Index