Hansen, Athenian Democracy [Part 4]
Democracy (demokratia), as conceived by 4th century Athenians [10 mins.]
Democracy crowning the people (demos) of Athens. Phrynichos 337/6.
In his book The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology, published in 1991, Mogens Herman Hansen wrote:
Chapter 4 [continued]
[Democracy]
The term demokratia
The constitution of Athens was a demokratia from Kleisthenes' reforms in 507 until the defeat in the Lamian War in 322. … We have no sources from before 430 in which you would expect the word demokratia. .. [There] is a good probability that demokratia was a current political word used in a favourable sense by democrats themselves before the reforms of Ephialtes. And one of the earliest examples of the term demokratia is in a speech of Antiphon of about 420, where it is said that before every meeting of the Council of Five Hundred a sacrifice is made 'on behalf of demokratia'. There is no reason why that should not go back to the origin of the Council, and so no reason to doubt that demokratia was at least one word used by the Athenians in Kleisthenes' own time to describe their new constitution. As for isonomia [equality of political rights], … there is no adequate evidence that that term was a rallying-cry of the democrats in the first generations after Kleisthenes.
Anyhow, as far back as our sources go there is no doubt that the Athenians, both officially and in ordinary speech, called their constitution a demokratia. In the two surviving laws against tyranny (410 and 336) outlawry is the penalty for overthrowing the demokratia, and the law of 336 has carved above it the famous relief picture of the goddess Demokratia crowning an elderly bearded man representing demos, the people [see picture above]. In 333/2 the Council caused a statue to that goddess to be put up in the Agora, and an inscription shows that thereafter the generals made sacrifices to the goddess every year, perhaps on … the day on which in 403/2 the 'new democracy' was introduced. … Speeches in the Assembly and the courts praise the constitution of Athens as a demokratia, and … Perikles expressly says that Athens is 'called a demokratia’. …
Democracy as a political system
Athens was called a democracy by the Athenians themselves, and by everybody else in Greece, because that was the political system they lived under from 507 to 322 and because they cherished the ideals that went with that system.
But when we call Athenian democracy a 'political system' we are giving that term a broader sense than the modern reader might, without some warning, expect; for nowadays the concept 'political' tends to refer primarily to the process of political decision-making, and we distinguish (in principle at least) between politics and administration, including the administration of the law. We expect administration under a democracy to be in principle pragmatic and apolitical (even if that is hardly so in practice), and somebody who goes into the civil service or the law has not, in our parlance, chosen a 'political career' and would not be said to be engaged in 'political activity'.
The Athenians saw things differently. For them, everything that had to do with the polis was 'political': they were quite capable of distinguishing between initiation, decision and execution, but they did not distinguish between politics and administration, and in their view being a magistrate or a judge was just as much political activity as taking part in an Assembly meeting. When Aristotle describes political freedom in a democratic state as 'to be ruled and rule by turns’, he is thinking of rotation of magistrates, not of any sort of rotation in attending the Assembly.
So a description of Athenian democracy as a political system has to embrace all the city's political institutions: namely, the Assembly, the nomothetai [Board of Legislators], the People's Court, the boards of magistrates, the Council of Five Hundred (which was the most important of the boards), the Areopagus [ancient assembly place], and ho boulomenos, i.e. ‘any citizen who wishes’. … each of those seven institutions will be given a chapter to itself …
[Social Science Files skips those chapters, but will exhibit the ‘Primary Characteristics’ in chapter 13.].
[The individual citizen] ho boulomenos … had no official position and no authority. Nevertheless he is recognized in our sources as a specific agent in the political process, and … ‘he of the Athenians who wishes from amongst those who may’, frequently mentioned as the originator of laws, decrees and public prosecutions, was arguably the real protagonist of the Athenian democracy.
DEMOCRACY AS AN IDEOLOGY
Nowadays democracy is both a political system and a political ideology. What links the two is the conviction that democratic ideals are promoted by democratic institutions more than by any other kind of government. Exactly the same two facets are to be seen in the ancient concept of democracy, which meant on the one hand 'government of the people' in the political sense and on the other the ideals characteristic of such a 'government of the people'.
The democratic institutions of Athens supplied the framework for a democratic ideology centred, as both supporters and opponents unanimously admitted, on the notions of freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness. Where the two sides differed was in their valuation of this ideology, as two quotations make clear.
In Perikles' funeral speech Thucydides gives him the following famous characterization of the Athenian constitution:
It has the name democracy because government is in the hands not of the few but of the majority. In private disputes all are equal before the law … Freedom is a feature of our public life; and as for suspicion of one another in our daily private pursuits, we do not frown on our neighbour if he behaves to please himself …
Two generations later Isokrates in his Areopagitikos supplies a sour gloss to those same idealizing sentiments: the ancestors, he says, didn't have a politeia that
brought up the citizens to think that unrestraint was democracy and lawlessness liberty and saying what you please equality, and that the licence to do all those things was happiness.
Comparison of the two texts shows that the 'pursuit of happiness' in Isokrates corresponds to what Thucydides says about freedom in the pursuits of daily life. The three ideals are thus in fact two: liberty (subdivided into liberty in the political sphere and liberty in the personal sphere) and equality.
Another concept often treated separately from liberty and equality in modern discussions is the 'rule of law'. Democrats, in open polemic against supporters of the other two types of constitution, tried to monopolize that particular high ground, as can be seen from a passage in Aischines:
It is acknowledged that there are three kinds of politeia in all the world, tyranny and oligarchy and democracy. Tyrannies and oligarchies are governed at the whim of the rulers, but democratic states are governed by the established laws. And as you are well aware, Athenians, in a democracy it is the laws that protect the individual and the politeia, whereas the tyrant and the oligarch are protected by mistrust and armed bodyguards. Oligarchs, and those who run unequal states, have to guard themselves against those who would overthrow the state by force: you who have an equal state based on the law have to punish those who speak or have led their lives contrary to the laws.
What Aischines says shows that the 'rule of (democratic) law' is conceived as an aspect of democratic equality, so it remains the case that the basic ideals are really just two, freedom and equality. Demokratia, eleutheria [freedom] and to ison [το ίσον, equality] were a kind of trio in Athenian political ideology like democracy, Iiberty and equality in the liberal-democratic ideology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
[You have now reached the end of this Social Science Files exhibit.]
[Hansen’s discussion of Iiberty and equality will be exhibited separately.]
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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