Hansen, Athenian Democracy [Part 1]
Direct democracy and the sources of evidence [Chapters 1, 2]
In his book The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology, published in 1991, Mogens Herman Hansen wrote:
Chapter 1
Direct Democracy
Almost everybody who writes about democracy begins with the distinction between 'direct' and 'indirect' or 'representative' democracy. Those whose focus is on institutions sometimes put it in the form of 'assembly democracy' as opposed to 'parliamentary democracy'; but the distinction is the same: in a direct democracy the people actually govern themselves, i.e. all have the right to participate in decision-making, whereas in the other sort the only decision that all have the right to make is to choose the decision-makers. …
… We thus find ourselves brought back to Athens as the best case of a significant state governed by direct democracy. That form of government was introduced by Kleisthenes in 508/7 BC and abolished by the Macedonians when they conquered Athens in 322/1. We know that numerous other Greek city-states had democratic constitutions; but virtually all the evidence we have relates to Athens, so that is the only democracy of which we can give a proper description, even though it can be shown that in some important respects Athens was an anomaly, and that the Athenian type of popular rule was not the only one known to the Greeks.
Aristotle in the Politics refers to a type of democracy where the only function of the assembly of the people is to choose the magistrates and call them to account for their conduct in office, while all political decisions are taken by the magistrates without the people having any say: that, of course, is 'indirect' democracy, so we must reject as erroneous the common notion that Greek democracy was always 'direct' while modern democracy is always 'indirect'. But Athens, at any rate, was a 'direct' democracy, the best known in history to date; and it is that direct democracy that will be described and discussed in the pages that follow.
Chapter 2
Evidence
… The sources of evidence for Athenian democracy can be grouped in several ways, each with its particular usefulness. Let us consider first a division into what we may call 'survivals' of the democracy and ‘accounts' of the democracy. Survivals include not only archaeological remains and inscriptions: they also include some literary sources, such as the speeches of Demosthenes.
… In contrast to that sort of documentary evidence must be put the accounts of Athenian democracy in, for example, Aristotle and Plutarch: the former is testimony to contemporary understanding of the democracy, the latter to how it was seen in later times, but they are both 'accounts', not ‘survivals'. …
… Publication was a prerequisite for a democracy, so the Athenians had to display everything they could in public. … What sort of materials, then, did the Athenians feel the need to publish? Every year the Assembly passed probably more than 400 decrees. In the fourth century the Board of Legislators, the nomothetai, had several times a year to deal with proposals to alter or expand the revised law code … At the end of every year, boards of magistrates by the score had to answer for their administration and the funds in their control: the Treasurers of Athena (tamiai) for the temple treasury on the Akropolis, the Auctions Board (poletai) for the moneys obtained by public auctions, the Superintendents of the Dockyards (epimeletai ton neorion) for the naval vessels and all their gear, and so forth. So magistrates had to maintain inventories and accounts: the documents were doubtless first written on papyrus or on whitened boards, but many were also inscribed on stone. Also a good number of marble stelai are inscribed with lists of names the list of debtors to the state that was kept on the Akropolis, the lists of the administrative committee of the council (the prytaneis) and lists, even, of all the councillors of the year, kept in front of the Council house (the bouleuterion), and the names of all citizens who had died in battle, inscribed year by year and kept (somewhere) in the Kerameikos cemetery. …
… Athenian democracy was an assembly democracy; moreover, in the People's Court no less than in the Assembly, the numbers ensured that debates must necessarily consist of a series of speeches made by politically active citizens to an audience. Hence, political power was based on eloquence, and the demand for eloquence called into being an entirely new genre of prose, namely rhetoric. … The three species of the genus were all political: the speech of advice, given before the Assembly or the Council; the forensic speech, before the People's Court; and the speech for special occasions … Soon it was well nigh universal for political leaders to take lessons in rhetoric … and from about 420 BC some political figures started to publish their speeches. The purpose may have been to keep the political pot boiling by fixing an oral contribution in written form; but, even when the political issues and the public trials had long lost their contemporaneity, the old speeches went on being read as literature and as school examples of eloquence. …
… Especially important for us are the surviving prosecution speeches in the public prosecutions for having proposed unconstitutional decrees or undesirable laws, for in them there are long passages about the structure and working of democratic institutions and well formulated defences of the ideals of popular government. …
A mere generation after the birth of rhetoric the Greeks invented another prose form, the political pamphlet: it was an extension of the political speeches, a speech that had never actually been delivered in a political gathering but was simply circulated in written copies to be read in private circles. …
Historiography began as a prose genre in Greece a generation earlier than rhetoric, in the first half of the fifth century, but when Herodotos is called the 'Father of History' that is very largely true. It is he who gives a long description of what is from our point of view the beginning of the tale, the civil strife that led to the introduction of democracy by Kleisthenes; and … he records (believing it to be authentic) the alleged debate of the Persian nobles in 522 BC about the three types of constitution - monarchy, oligarchy and the rule of the people - which is the earliest substantial piece of political theory we have in Greek prose.
The historians were mainly interested in political and military history, and social history, by and large, only caught their interest when they were describing foreign peoples; but, since war and peace were decided in Athens by the Assembly, there was every opportunity to bring in the process of decision-making in the Assembly or the course of a political trial in the People's Court …
… The oldest of the prose genres was actually philosophy; but only in the fifth century did the philosophers start to consider the place of mankind in the universe. Men are social beings, they said; so of all the philosophical disciplines the study of the polis was the most important. (The first reflections on constitutions in the philosophers are to be found amongst the fragments of Demokritos - not earlier than, say, 430. That is why both Plato and Aristotle set as king-pin of their writings about morality their thoughts about the state and society, and, consequently, about the ideal society. …
Occasionally there can be found … specific and critical evaluation of the particular democracy of Athens. … Plato … has … the philosopher argue with the rhetoricians … and demonstrate that in an assembly democracy such as Athens the rhetorical skill of the demagogue will always prevail over the expert knowledge of the statesman. Even more important for us is the famous speech placed by Plato in the mouth of Sokrates, the Apologia, which for more than 2000 years has been read as a charge-sheet against Athenian democracy and its vaunted freedom of speech. …
… The plots of tragedies are usually mythological, but the ancient heroes who are their characters speak a language that reflects contemporary society. … In the tragedies it is always the ideals of democracy that are discussed; in the comedies it is often its working and institutions. In fact, in the first century of comedy (down to c.390) the satirical handling of contemporary themes provides most of the jokes, and the democratic leaders are flayed alive …
… In the Hellenistic age there began a whole new epoch of European culture: it was the beginning of erudition and libraries and catalogues and literary research and commentaries on the Best Authors, and Alexandria, not Athens, was the home of erudition. It was there that Kallimachos in the third century compiled the authorized edition of Demosthenes …
… In Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine times learned commentaries were published as scholia or lexica. Scholia are point-by-point commentaries written in the margin (though in earlier times published separately); lexica are alphabetically arranged explications of words and names in the classical literature. The scholia to, especially, Aristophanes' comedies and the speeches of Demosthenes are treasure houses of enlightenment about Athenian institutions, on just the sorts of things that later generations needed to have explained in order to understand them. …
… Speeches in the Assembly and in the courts were often interspersed with the reading of documents, such as laws and decrees, by the clerk, and in a number of cases the medieval manuscripts retain the documents, still in place in the midst of the rhetorical argument. Many of them are demonstrably genuine …
… It is from all the sources outlined above that we derive our knowledge both of the institutions of Athenian democracy and of its ideals; but the evidence for those two aspects of the democracy is very unevenly spread, both in genres and, still more importantly, in time. …
… The sources for the institutions of the democracy are mainly documentary, i.e. partly inscriptions and partly speeches; of the other literary sources, the only ones that shed much light on the institutions are the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens, certain scenes in Aristophanes, and the scanty fragments of the Atthidographers. And as soon as we concentrate on the documents it becomes clear that they are unevenly spread chronologically, their centre of gravity lying in the second half of the fourth century, particularly the years 355-322. …
… One result of the uneven distribution is that the only democratic institution of the fifth century of which we have detailed knowledge is ostracism. Some 11,000 ostraka are preserved; 130 by pure chance, in two fragments of the Atthidographers (plus one source paraphrased by Plutarch) we have descriptions of the procedure; and the political importance of ostracism ensured that it was mentioned more often by the historians than other institutions. Apart from that, when we seek light on the democracy of Perikles' time [495–429 BC] we discover that even the Assembly, the Council and the courts remain in twilight owing to lack of evidence. Traces of the architectural framework of the institutions survive, but only the scantiest of traces of the institutions themselves. It is quite otherwise with the democracy of the fourth century, where a far greater number of inscriptions and all the speeches can be put alongside Aristotle's detailed descriptions of the institutions of his day to furnish an integrated picture of how the democracy worked in the time of Demosthenes. …
… The source material takes on a quite different appearance if we turn to describing Athenian democracy not as a political system but as a political ideology. Amongst the contemporary documents it is now the speeches that are much more important than the inscriptions, but we can also in this context bring into play important literary sources that do little to illumine the institutions of democracy … The reconstructions by modern historians of the democratic ideals of the Athenians before 430 need to be taken with a pinch of salt, since they rest on the thinnest imaginable source material or even, sometimes, on none. …
Evaluations
There is a marked difference in value-judgements between our modern Western attitudes to democracy and that of the ancient Greeks to demokratia; for nowadays liberty, equality and democracy have become 'hurrah words', values that everyone rates positively — in public, at least. Democracy in antiquity was the object of dispute, having its enemies as well as champions, and it was perfectly possible to assert, without causing eyebrows to be raised, that democracy was a bad form of government and freedom and equality misconceived ideals capable of leading people astray. …
… Like their counterparts in all ages the philosophers took a particular delight in fouling their own nests: they sat in Athens and glorified Sparta to the detriment of Athens. They took the natural view of philosophers that all states everywhere are badly governed, but when it came to the point they preferred Spartan 'ancestral aristocracy' to Athenian democracy, though at a pinch they could at least give approval to what was supposed to be its original form, a kind of 'ancestral democracy' …
… Our most important sources for the democratic ideal … are the surviving Assembly and court speeches, which contain an all-too-often-neglected treasury of passages praising 'rule of the people' as against 'rule of the one' and 'rule of the few' …
The supporters of democracy, be it remembered, were addressing a quite different public from its critics: Plato and Aristotle … wrote for a small band of disciples or intellectuals, whereas the dramatists and the orators were talking in principle to the whole people.
In the court speeches, indeed, reference to the democratic ideal is actually often used as a captatio benevolentiae [the winning of goodwill]; and, surely, the ideas and attitudes of the orators must reflect what the majority of their audience were only too glad to hear.
Practically all our sources for Athenian democracy were written at Athens, and by Athenians. We possess no account of any democracy other than the Athenian, nor any evaluation of Athenian democracy by other Greeks …
The lack of outside evaluations of the democracy is somewhat compensated for by the fact that Athens was par excellence the state that celebrated freedom of speech as part of its ideals. In a speech of 355 Demosthenes rightly remarks that the most important difference between the political systems of Athens and Sparta is that at Athens it is permitted to praise that of Sparta and denigrate one's own, whereas at Sparta no one may praise any system other than the Spartan.
Many Athenians of critical temper exercised that freedom of speech, especially the philosophers. Sokrates, it is true, was condemned and executed in 399, inter alia for expressing his criticism of democracy in the aristocratic circles he frequented … But the prosecution of Socrates is an isolated occurrence in the history of Athens, and normally both citizens and foreigners living in Athens could exercise freedom of speech unhindered. It is Plato and Aristotle who give most of the unfavourable analyses of democracy in general and Athenian democracy in particular, and the criticism of democracy to be heard in Athenian sources is the strongest possible evidence that the Athenians' pride in their freedom of speech was not unfounded.
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The Source has been:
Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology, translated by J. A. Crook, Blackwell Publishers 1991
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