Paul Cartledge wrote:
Chapter 2 [extracts]
THE EMERGENCE OF THE POLIS
[It] is crucial first to define what one understands by ‘politics’. And here—as in the case of democracy—I propose to operate with a strong definition: the taking of collective decisions in public on matters both operational-pragmatic and ideological-conceptual of crucial, central importance to the decision-taking collectivity as such, following an agreed process of open debate among the decision-takers who for the sake of this argument will be called empowered citizens, that is, have the executive power to enforce those decisions.
Some debate still surrounds the question of how best to translate polis into English. The standard older translation ‘city-state’ runs up against the two difficulties that many, if not most, poleis could hardly be described as ever being genuinely urban and that many, if not most, lacked certain essential defining characteristics of what political scientists or political sociologists would be comfortable describing as ‘states’. The former difficulty is the more easily addressed: by substituting ‘citizen-’ for ‘city-state’, one both captures the ancient Greek notion that its citizens were the polis, a notion reflected in the ancient political terminology, which did not speak of ‘Athens’ or ‘Sparta’ doing this or that but always of ‘the Athenians’ or ‘the Spartans’, and sheds the unwanted anachronistic associations of ‘city’.
The problem of ‘state’ remains, however, but so long as one thinks of an entity that has political functions rather than of an entity with full-blown ‘State’ (capital S) institutions (bureaucracy, civil service, government, standing army, etc.), it will serve its purpose adequately.
However, the process whereby the citizen-state emerged—the ‘rise of the polis’—is hard to grasp, given the available sources.
Chapter 6 [extracts]
GREEK DEMOCRATIC THEORY?
I have insisted from the start on two fundamental propositions, or equations. Ancient (Greek, Roman, whatever, but anyhow Western and pre-modern) Democracy = Direct Democracy: the kratos of the demos was exercised directly by the demos, though no doubt on occasions with elements of representation; whereas modern Democracy = Representative Democracy: ‘We the People’, insofar indeed as We are granted even formal or token kratos, are in principle acted for, by ‘our’ governments—‘Them’, not ‘Us’, albeit that modern representative systems may contain elements of directness. …
… I argue that by combining the evidence of Aristotle’s Politics with that contained in the Aristotelian (but not Aristotle’s) Ath. Pol., one might obtain quite a full picture of democratic politics at Athens at least in the third quarter of the fourth century (350–322). But that by no means exhausts Aristotle’s exceptional utility. Whatever his own political views may have been, and whatever one may think of whatever they were, he is in a class of his own when it comes to doing political analysis and political sociology from a theoretical point of view—and not just of the Athens of his day, but in principle of all Hellas. He and his pupils at the Lyceum were engaged in a multi-volume collective project of classification, codification, and analysis of a whole series of Greek (and one or two non-Greek) political entities. The fruits may be partially glimpsed in the ‘Politics’ …
… Aristotle was not uninterested in monarchy, including tyranny as well as, at the other end of the spectrum, an ideal ‘all-kingship’. But he was aware that the vast majority of Greek cities in his day enjoyed or suffered some form of republican regime, either democracy or oligarchy. ‘Some form’: for Aristotle the political ‘scientist’ it was not enough to speak just of demokratia or oligarchia, since each should be broken down (analysed) and subdivided into four species. The resulting spectrum ran as it were from the far left, the most extreme species of democracy, through the less extreme to the most moderate species of democracy, which in turn most closely resembled the most moderate of the four species of oligarchy; oligarchy then resolved itself into ever less moderate species until, on the far right of the spectrum, lay the most extreme. What differentiates the species of each are chiefly four variables: first, the matter of eligibility—who can vote, who can stand for office, or for which offices; second, the type of Council—whether it’s administrative (democratic) or ruling/governing (oligarchic); third, whether the officials are or are not responsible to the demos; and, fourth, whether or not there is a popular justice system. Aristotle, as we shall see, automatically rejected extremes, and, although he could see some virtue in a ‘wisdom of crowds’ sense of democratic decision-making by consensus, he had little taste for the ‘last’, most extreme form of democracy, in which the demos rules by decree and considers itself above the laws.
But besides his analytical, classificatory interest in subdividing democracy and oligarchy, Aristotle was no less theoretically interested in what it was that really divided all oligarchs, however extreme or moderate, from all democrats. With unerring accuracy he as usual put his finger on the nub of the matter: despite oligarchy’s literally meaning ‘rule of the/a few’, and ‘demos’ being capable of being construed as either ‘majority’ or ‘masses’, the essential difference between any demokratia and any oligarchia was not a matter of sheer or mere numbers, of the differential empowerment of the ‘many’ and the ‘few’. Nor was it a matter of residence (town versus country) or of trade or type of occupation (farmer versus merchant). No: for him, democracy is the rule of the poor (over the rich), and oligarchy, vice versa. What, then, does Aristotle understand by ‘poor’ and ‘rich’? Greek language distinguished between those who were more or less without means and resources and those who were absolutely down-and-out beggars. So ‘poor’ (penetes), when used as a binary term in opposition to ‘rich’ (plousioi, euporoi), meant not having enough resources to enable one not to have to work for a living, whereas being rich meant not having to work at all: that is, being able to command the labour power of others, and having the requisite leisure to live the good life of—ideally—active contemplation, the kind of life lived by Aristotle himself. …
… The earliest expression of approval of a political-constitutional mixture of democracy with oligarchy is actually to be found in Thucydides, who—speaking for once explicitly in his own person—specially commended the moderately oligarchic regime that Athens experienced between 411 and 410 after the end of the extreme counter-revolutionary oligarchy of the Four Hundred. This he accounted as the best (either pragmatically or in principle) that he personally had known (though he was in exile from Athens at the time), since it represented a ‘moderate blending, in the interests both of the few and of the many’. The ‘many’ here are the demos in the sense of the poor majority of citizens, the ‘few’ are the rich elite, those who are earlier (8.64) said to believe they deserved the greater share of power because they contributed more to the state in terms both of resources and of personal service. But the nature of the blend, too, was clearly of key importance for Thucydides—not just the mere fact of a blend, as it was also for Aristotle, who wrote that a ‘well-blended oligarchy’ was the type of oligarchy nearest to his (ideally desired) polity. …
Chapter 7 [extracts]
ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY IN PRACTICE C. 450–335
It is a fact not perhaps much emphasised outside the scholarly community that the overwhelming bulk of the evidence for ‘the’ Athenian democracy is concentrated in the thirty years—roughly an Athenian father–son generation—between about 350 and 322. …
… In the third book of the Politics Aristotle defined the citizen generically as the (free, legitimate) male polis-member who has a share in decision-making, including passing legal judgement (krisis) and in ruling, that is office-holding (arche), adding that practically speaking that definition applied more closely to citizens of democracies than of oligarchies. But before an Athenian citizen could exercise either of those powers he had first to assert and have validated his credentials as a bona fide citizen. And that meant being entered on the official register of citizens kept by each deme, membership of which was hereditary after 508/7, regardless of where one normally resided. …
[NOTE from earlier: the local level administrative unit known as the deme (from demos, the same word as demos = ‘people’, but here meaning village, parish, ward)]
The strong impression conveyed by … documents, which is confirmed in some cases by quite elaborate sacred and secular public architecture, is of the deme as being—or wishing to present itself as—a microcosm of the polis … The deme documents also help buttress the claim that it was the deme that was ‘the basis of the Athenian democracy’. Deme officials—elected or chosen by lot, above all the mayor—had to manage the regular deme assemblies, the deme law-courts, the choice of members to represent the deme (and so tribe) on the central Council of 500, the collection of any irregularly imposed property tax, and the handling of any military call-up. … One might have thought that an aspiring politician with ambitions to make a name for himself on the big stage in Athens would hone his skills at deme level in arenas less demanding than the Assembly (up to 6,000 citizens present) or a popular jury court, often with 500 jurors, almost five times the size of the total citizen list of Halimous in the 340s; see further below. But the evidence doesn’t seem to back that supposition up. For ordinary citizens, however, regular participation in routine deme politics was a school of democratic prudence. …
… Normally social mobility in any Greek city was likely minimal, but in Athens between c. 480 and 430 thanks to the Athenian ‘empire’ there developed the greatest scope for improving one’s social lot and moving upwards into the hoplite group (zeugitae, literally ‘yoke-men’) … But to be in the census of the pentakosiomedimnoi (‘500-bushel men’), and so a member of the top 5 per cent or so economically, one normally had to start out seriously rich by inheritance …
… The Council (Boule) of 500 (50 from each of his 10 new tribes) was [a] masterstroke … If the primary Assembly was to be the city’s genuinely decisive body, it had to have an adequate smaller body in more or less permanent session to act as its steering committee—both to prepare the business of its regular stated meetings and to see to the proper carrying out of its decisions by the relevant officials. It was through the Council that after the Ephialtic reforms one of the three chief democratic functions lauded by Herodotus—the accountability of officials to the people—was effected. Councillors were chosen by lot from all eligible demesmen, and each of the 139 or 140 demes had its allotted quota to fill, implying a notion of representation. …
… This, then, was a participatory democracy with a vengeance, given the intensity and frequency with which the Council sat. For it was in session on about 300 days out of each year (omitting only certain religious festival days); for 35 or 36 days at a time (one civil month) the 50 men representing one of the 10 tribes were said to be in or holding the ‘presidency’, that is, were responsible for organising the Assembly’s agenda and presiding over any Assembly meetings that fell during that month; and of these one-third had to be on permanent watch duty, sleeping overnight in the Council Chamber. …
… Apart from auditing the previous years’ Councillors, the Council also conducted audits of any officials who had in their charge the spending of public funds. It was the Council too that awarded such public contracts as those for public construction projects …. [It] was a committee of the Council that decided how much public money should be allocated to the building of the enormously expensive (about a talent each) trireme warships, and the housing of them in shipsheds in the Peiraeus and elsewhere. In short, being on this body really did give an Athenian a sense that he was involved directly in the running of the state. It is very noticeable that big politicians such as Demosthenes somehow managed to time their periods of service on the Council to coincide with really crucial moments.
The doings of the Assembly (Ecclesia) are best attested in ‘the age of Demosthenes’ (b. 384, d. 322). It bears repeating that the details of practice given in the Ath. Pol. as applying to the 330s and early 320s do not necessarily hold for the situation even twenty years earlier, let alone for the whole period from 508/7 on. For example, it is a quite remarkable fact that in the 330s and early 320s four Assembly meetings were supposed to be held every civil month; that is, 40 per annum or one roughly every nine days. Extraordinarily demanding. But for how long had that been the case? Only, it seems, from c. 350 on, before which only three meetings per month were stipulated. …
… The mode of delivering and counting votes seems never to have changed: extending of the right hand (kheirotonia) was the order of each and every Assembly day, the numbers of votes cast being ‘told’ (assessed) not counted one by one. This was a matter not of ideology—for that, the individual counting of votes, as in the Heliaia from Solon’s time on, was critical—but of pragmatics: meetings had to be held in the hours of daylight and business concluded within a single day. …
… After the initial ritual purifications and prayers had been concluded and the president for the day had announced the first item on the agenda, a crier bellowed out, ‘Who wishes to speak?’ (the word for ‘to speak’, agoreuein, being derived from the basic word for a political assembly, agora). This was a matter of fundamental democratic principle: that of isegoria, the exactly equal entitlement of each and every citizen present and in good standing (or rather sitting) to make public political speech; an important corollary of isonomia. … But in practice, it seems, very few citizens would get up … ever. Which is one reason why professional politicians could be referred to as orators and full-time politicians. By no means all citizens were equally well equipped—physically or mentally—to make persuasive speeches in the Assembly or even in the quieter, smaller environs of a Council meeting. …
… Indeed, not all professional politicians were also public orators; some were what we would call technocrats—specialising behind the scenes in complex matters of public finance or the logistics of war or, as in the case of the arch-oligarch Antiphon, preparing briefs for oligarchs both Athenian and non-Athenian to help them cope with the rigours of a Council sub-committee or, more terrifyingly, a popular jury court. The separation between politicians and orators mirrored that between politicians and Generals; both were to some extent products of the same tendency towards specialisation of expertise that was a feature of the years from the 430s on. …
… [The] notion has gained traction that after the death of the statesmanlike Pericles Athenian politics descended into an unseemly series of spats between mere ‘demagogues’. These were supposedly low-class—or at least lower-class—politicos who brought democracy into (deserved) disrepute, since they merely pandered to the base desires of the unwashed masses; whereas Pericles had led the People and even forthrightly told them what they ought to decide and to do. That, however, is all pure ideology, modern as well as ancient. The word demagogos by itself means ‘leader of the demos’ (in the sense of all the People); it is only when such leaders or would-be leaders are viewed from an oligarchic-conservative standpoint that it comes more often to mean ‘rabble-rouser’, or misleader of the masses. …
… Moses Finley, revisionist American historian of ancient Greece at Cambridge, performed a … rescue act for the Athenian demagogues. As he succinctly put it, they were a structural feature of the Athenian democratic way of doing politics, which—in the absence of either a modern party system or mass informational media—could not have functioned without them. …
… It is important to remember that in democratic Athens, unlike say Republican Rome, it was perfectly possible to be a major political player without holding any office. In fact, in a democracy such as the Athenian, unlike in a Greek oligarchy, offices as such (archai) and the powers of office-holding were relatively unimportant by comparison to the power wielded by the demos in Assembly and jury court. The three exceptions to that rule were the administrative Council of 500; the top military offices (Board of 10 Generals); and the top financial offices (the Board of 10 Treasurers of Athena, and also in the fifth century the imperial treasurers, called Hellenotamiae, or Stewards of the Greeks). All of the latter two kinds of offices were elective, not sortitive; the Athenians here in theory put pragmatic efficiency above democratic egalitarianism, but they also exercised accountability even more stringently over these privileged officials, sometimes to a fault. Altogether it seems that, including the 500 Councillors, there were year on year some 1,200 domestic offices to be filled; and if we believe the Ath. Pol (24.3), another 700 in order to manage the fifth-century Empire. Most were not only chosen by the lot but also collegiate, typically grouped in Boards of 10 to cater for universal tribal representation. In the fourth century, however, two new elective top offices were created that were perhaps harbingers of further changes to come: one was something like the equivalent of a chief secretary to the treasury or chancellor of the exchequer, that is, a financial supremo separate from and superior to the long existing financial boards; the other was a water commissioner, possibly a sign of population pressure or a measured response to excessive use of precious water for non-essential purposes.
And so, last but very much not least, we come to the jurisdictional dimension of the demos’ kratos. I long ago lost count of the number of undergraduate essays I read on the topic ‘How much kratos did the demos really exercise in the Athenian democracy?’ that failed even to notice or mention the existence of the People’s Court or popular jury courts. So let it be stated loud and clear: the demos exercised its kratos in the courts, not only in the Assembly—a peculiarly democratic phenomenon, if we embrace Aristotle’s definition of the citizen canvassed at the beginning of this chapter, and recall Ath. Pol. 41.2 (quoted above). Hence the significance of the oath taken individually by each of those 6,000 citizens annually empanelled, by lot, at the beginning of the civil year as potential jurors for the year to come:
I shall cast my vote in accordance with the laws and with the decrees passed by the Assembly and by the Council but, if there is no law, in accordance with my sense of what is most just without favour or enmity. I shall vote only on the charge and I shall listen impartially to prosecutors and defendants alike.
Hence too the dominant presence of courtrooms in the architectural layout of the Athenian Agora.
After 462/1 popular jury courts were courts of first instance, not merely of appeal. Moreover, decisions by the allotted juror-judges were formally inappellable. The only way in which a disappointed plaintiff or defendant could reopen a case or challenge a verdict was by prosecuting one or more of the opponent’s witnesses on grounds of perjury. Jurors for any particular case were chosen by lot from those of the 6,000 who chose to put their name forward for selection on the court days in question. The allotment was done in different ways at different times in the fifth and fourth centuries; the system we know most about is the latest, according to which jurors handed over their bronze juror’s token, and these were placed in a stone allotment machine; white and black balls decided respectively whether a row of juror’s tokens was or was not selected. All trials were presided over—but not judged—by one or more of the nine Archons, each with a different sphere of competence; the Basileus (King) had charge of religious case …
… Courts sat, it has been estimated, between about 150 and 200 days a year, making attendance as a juror potentially almost a full-time occupation; on average probably most jurors were both elderly and rather poor. This partly explains the vitriol directed at all jurors as a breed in Aristophanes’ comedy Wasps of 422: the Chorus are designated wasps because they allegedly liked only to convict and then to sting the convicted for the heaviest possible penalty available. But it was not only an economic but also a political disaster when for a considerable period in the 360s court sessions had to be interrupted and suspended for lack of available money in the public coffers to pay the jurymen. So attached indeed were volunteer jurymen to their bronze juror’s token that relatives found it quite natural to include it among a dead kinsman’s burial goods. By extension, Athens acquired a reputation in the outside Greek world for its exceptional litigiousnness; this was partly because in its days of greatest imperial power between about 475 and 430 it had been able even to compel non-Athenians to attend courts in Athens and be tried before Athenian jurors if they were suspected of conspiring in their home cities against what most Athenians took to be the alliance’s best interests. But the reputation also justly reflected the democratic centrality of litigation and jurisdiction. …
… Crimes (e.g., ‘impiety’) were not carefully defined. Procedures were considered more important, and for some crimes more than one procedure was available to a potential litigant. There were no barristers; the rules of evidence both oral and written and rules of procedure were lax. There was no notion of precedent; and equity was the nearest they got to anything like strict ‘justice’. Rather than the strict guilt or innocence of the defendant as charged, the jury often considered whether conviction or acquittal was better for the Athenian polis as a whole … Punishments were fitted to the criminal rather than to the crime. Some types of case, like Socrates’ alleged impiety, carried no fixed penalty, opening the way after the initial verdict of guilty for rival bids and yet a further chance for jurors to sit in judgment on their peers—and very often on their social superiors, since most jurymen seem to have been poor and humble, whereas some defendants were exceptionally high-profile. …
… Of all the many and various kinds of writs, one in particular stands out for its democratic political function, and this is the ‘writ against unconstitutional proposals’. … ways had … to be found … of deciding between … rival high-profile politicians, and of aborting stasis, and the writ against unconstitutional proposals neatly fitted the bill. …
… Oligarchs or crypto-oligarchs always hated the power over them that the democratic court system provided to the demos. Both in 411, when a rigged Assembly held outside the city walls in wartime voted the democracy out of existence, and in 404, when Athens was handed over by Sparta to the untender mercies of the Thirty (‘tyrants’), that system of jurisdiction was at once dismantled. And it has to be said that in 406—following the flawed naval victory at Arginusae, with its accompanying heavy loss of poor citizen lives—the Assembly did not cover itself in glory when it arrogated to itself the prerogative of the courts to try generals for high treason, and moreover breached the city’s own rules of procedure in so doing. All eight generals who had been in command at Arginusae were prosecuted for high treason; six of them unwisely showed up at the ensuing Assembly meeting, which turned into a kangaroo court and condemned them collectively to instant death, although legally they should have each have received an individual trial before a properly convened lawcourt. The Arginusae trial went down in infamy, especially among those of an oligarchic tendency or temperament such as the exiled Xenophon, who was happy to record the alleged mob-rule shout that it was ‘monstrous if the People were not to be allowed to do just whatever it pleased’. That was one reason why after 403 the Assembly was no longer permitted—that is no longer permitted itself—to legislate. From then on a strictly legal distinction was drawn between a decree of the Assembly and a law, that is, a legal decision of general application and in principle permanent validity that had to be passed by a separate body of law-makers or legislators.
However, that was actually not quite such a derogation from direct popular power as it may at first sight seem, since the law-makers who technically passed judgment on a proposed law by putting it as it were on trial were themselves drawn by lot from the annual panel of 6,000 juror-judges, and such general laws were anyway few and far between: only a few dozen are known. One is worth mentioning specifically, though it is unusual. The Law on Tyranny of 337 was both a law and an Assembly decree. That is, first the Assembly passed the text as a decree, which was then sent for ‘trial’ to the law-makers, who duly passed it. Moreover, the courts remained a crucial political decision-making arena right to the end of the democracy on any definition …
… The one area of legal practice where the demos did not necessarily rule as such was in the post-Ephialtic, politically shriven Areopagus. Symbolically, this august body remained of huge importance, as its central role in Aeschylus’ Eumenides of 458 attests, and there are even hints that in the third quarter of the fourth century, as Athens reeled under the impact of superior Macedonian power, this body of ex-Archons for life may have made some attempt to reassert itself politically: its explicit mention in the Law on Tyranny is witness to that apparent recrudescence. But by and large its role after 462/1 was purely jurisdictional, although far from unimportant at that. Religious charges such as unintentional homicide and interfering with the sacred olive trees grown to provide the oil for prizes at the Great Panathenaea were included within its province. [end of chapter]
[Addendum p. 32 on the important but apparently rather ill-definable ‘isonomia’]
Aristocratic drinking songs (skolia) soon after the event had celebrated the pair as having been responsible for introducing isonomia to the Athenians, meaning perhaps something like restoring to them the rule of law as opposed to arbitrary dictatorship. Following the Cleisthenic reforms of 508/7, however, isonomia was appropriated as a peculiarly democratic slogan standing for equality of status and respect under the laws, and the aristocratic pair were also appropriated and re-imagined in order to serve new, popular and democratic ends.
The Source:
Paul Cartledge, Democracy: A Life, Oxford University Press 2016
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.