"Participation" in Greek poleis
BOOK EXHIBIT excerpts on the theme of participation
John Ma, Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity, Princeton University Press published July 2024.
Chapter 2 To New Beginnings
… Whereas the islands led a subdued existence in the time of the Mycenaean palatial polities, the following period sees them exploding into inventive solutions for, and full participation in, the creation and negotiation of society … that characterizes the following period.
The Protogeometric period [1025-900 BCE], and its individuals and communities (of whatever form and nature) might represent “a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare,” of the sort that has been studied by anthropologists. … This period may have laid the grounds for a particular political anthropology, characterized by the absence of deeply embedded hierarchies, the weakness of elites, and the prevalence of multiple claims to power and recognition. These traits shaped the societies studied in … this book; they also determined the particular nature of statehood in the polis, as different from the entities studied in theories of the early state, which focus on the consolidation of ruling classes, bureaucratization, and hierarchization.
This period of abeyance hence must be studied with the following period of increased activity, from ca. 900 BCE onwards … because this period shows the outcome of the creative Dark Age pause. The increased activity may suggest an increase in population—or simply more visible, sophisticated social organization. In the first part of this period of development (900 BCE–800 BCE), three major themes deserve close attention: the emergence of loose settlements; the intensification of overseas contacts and trade in a general context of mobility and even migration; and more generally, the constitution of social relations between community and elite …
Chapter 3 Diversity and Community
… The whole of Homeric society is not a feudal pyramid structured regular ties of obligation. Even the idealized world of epic is not a harmonious hierarchical order, but is diverse and open to conflict and contestation. The number of retained hetairoi and therapontes seems small (often made up of refugees, exiles, guest-friends); in many cases, the participants in the feast are autonomous agents, participating in feasts as acts of social reciprocity and competition, and not as retainers in a generalized feudal-style pyramid. …
Chapter 4 Institutions, Community, Ideology: 1, 2, 3, Polis
… The crucial moment of the emergence of the possibility of the polis as a horizon remains obscure in its details (just as C. Wickham describes the rise of the medieval commune in Italy as elites “sleepwalking” into institutional arrangements). This uncertainty is one major problem with the elaboration of a unitary definition of the early polis as institutional form.
The other problem with a unitary account is that we do not know who was included within the polis’s forms of participating, belonging, and sharing. Who could vote or hold office … who could attend the Assembly … who risked their lives in fighting for the community—the interrogation “what was a polis?” also poses a question about “who was the polis?” Some practices suggest inclusiveness. The diverse battlefields offered a place for both heavy men-at-arms and the light-armed fighters, both exhorted by Tyrtaios to fight bravely in Sparta’s desperate battles. We nonetheless might wonder if the men-at-arms were drawn from the elite, or at least the prosperous property owners in the early poleis, and what the political consequences of army service were.
Other processes raise the question of the degree of integration within the community: integrative structuration between big sites and smaller sites involved issues of membership and access …
Chapter 5 600–450 BCE: Development, Complexification, and Citizenship
… The result of continued and increasingly complex consolidation was to create a concept of citizenship—clearly defined membership of a polis linked to identity and translated into the form of political participation and a share of various public realms, such as religious activities. Membership entails privileges—participatory and legal in nature; these privileges construct citizen status. One consequence is the protection of citizens against violence or oppression by other citizens through the presence of laws, processes for redress, and sanctions for violation. …
Chapter 6 The Travails of Integration
… Egalitarian, “middling” political culture played a crucial role in nonegalitarian, exclusive versions of the polis where access to membership was strictly controlled.
The other, diametrically opposite path was to structure the polis through wide inclusiveness, by the integration of a large segment of the adult male population as citizens, in strict distinction to noncitizens, namely foreigners and especially the enslaved. The “open” poleis were inclusive socially, by the acceptance of nonelite members without having to satisfy a fortune criterion, and geographically, by the full integration of members of smaller settlements around the big site (rather than reducing them to subordinate status). Certain privileges, linked to citizenship, will be widespread among the population; for instance, a share in sacrifices, communal feasting, or festival activities, and participation in decision-making and judicial institutions, indeed in the basic level of political power in the polis. …
Part 4 Framing the “Classical” Polis 480–180 BCE
… There is not much evidence for the institutional, social, and political organization of … small poleis, but it is likely, if only on grounds of their small size, that their political culture was not aristocratic and exclusive, but inclusive and participatory, structured around membership and integration. A recently published bronze tablet, inscribed and reinscribed, probably from Western Lokris is almost certainly an allotment token. Such artifacts were used to assign citizens by lot, for jury-courts and officeholding, a practice derived from democratic Athens: its provenance is highly suggestive for the inclusive nature of the West Lokrian poleis. Western Lokris thus represents another form of structuration, external and internal, in the world of the early polis—built around peer polities that are themselves internally organized as integrative and egalitarian.
The elite-driven, center-and-periphery, domination-and-dependency model in Eastern Lokris, and the inclusive, dispersed, multiple equipollent-actor model in Western Lokris, represent two possible ways of relating and structuring poleis … Both regional entities underwent a continuous development, and lived a political history of their own, notably in the form of temporary absorption by other larger, more aggressive regional entities … and in the form of interaction with a large autocratic state, the Antigonid kingdom based in the northern Aegean. But this history had a clear outcome: one of the models, the one represented by Western Lokris, won out. In the long run, the world of poleis would be one of many entities, interrelated and in equilibrium, and running their affairs along (roughly) inclusive and participatory lines, whereas the old model would become marginalized and rare, with pockets of survival and mutation. …
Chapter 8 Political History (2): Politeia and Stasis
… What matters here is that the mass of evidence allows us to tell the detailed story of … one polis, the Athenians at a particular period (480–322). A crucial moment came with the adoption during the fifth century BCE of a whole package of measures that widened political participation and access to power. Censitary barriers to state office were loosened and finally ignored. The state resorted to the systematic use of the lot to choose officials, such as the Councilors; concomitantly, we see a multiplication of these officials, both in the functions fulfilled and in the number of officials in each function, and the frequent rotation of officeholders. There were some exceptions (notably the board of ten generals, repeatedly electable), but it is remarkable that the crucially important 500-strong Council, or the old and prestigious offices of archon, were filled by lot out of a preselected list. In the case of the Councilmen, this took place according to a system of quotas structured by the system of ten tribes and uniting the whole Attic territory in special subdivisions drawing from town, inland, and coastal regions.
Furthermore, citizens received compensation or pay (misthos) for office (year-long) or for service, for instance for a day’s service in the jury courts … even attendance at the Assembly was eventually compensated. Finally, judicial matters were routinely referred to very large jury courts that represented the citizen body (Dēmosthenēs could address the Athenian people, as represented by Council and Assembly, while speaking before a court), and general administrative oversight was transferred from the old standing Council of the Areiopagos to the Council of Five Hundred or the courts. Such oversight notably involved the continuous examining and controlling of power holders: officeholders were subject to testing before office (dokimasia), the public auditing of accounts and examining of behavior upon exit of office (euthunai), and the constant confirmation of suitability during office. …
… Dēmokratia took the form of mass participation at all levels, as a distributive tool and a reflection of popular sovereignty, throughout the history of Classical Athens.32 The importance of participation and distribution can further be seen in specific practices such as the frequent meetings (forty times a year by the 330s BCE) of the mass assembly, the rather freewheeling additions to proposals put before the Assembly, or the constant tinkering with institutions to direct them toward a greater circulation of power (for instance, the modification of the procedures for presiding over the Assembly). …
Chapter 10 The Qualities of the Polis
… In Asia Minor, the third and second centuries BCE saw competitive religious monumentalization, comparable to competitive temple-building in the sixth century BCE. What is clear is that the expression of the strong integration of the polis communities served both as markers and means of internal cohesiveness, and as tokens for participation in the processes of structuration and peer-polity interaction that were a vital part of being a polis. Myth and historical memory could be manipulated: this was not a sign of decadence or cynical frivolity, but of the vitality and usefulness of myth and memory in fostering shared understandings as the basis for community, just as in the sixth or fifth centuries BCE. …
… The importance of formally recognized, institutionally integrated territorial subdivisions cannot be exaggerated: they show the existence of citizens living in the countryside but participating in the polis, rather than working to provide rent to masters in a consumer city. …
… Popular sovereignty determined the shape of the institutional state in accordance with practices and principles that emerged from earlier debates about power and rule. These principles include mass participation, scrutiny and control of power holders, and the prevalence of the public good over individual interests. In the polis, the forms of power-holding … were widely distributed among the community of citizens, notably through extensive collegiality. Most archai were multiple affairs, and the single emergency magistracies of the Classical period, let alone the various monarchical solutions, were abandoned. This holds true for minor officials, but also for officials in charge of major business of state, namely finance or military affairs such as defense works or active operations (in practice often joined with day-to-day administration). …
Chapter 15 Polis as Society
… If citizenship itself was not a matter of institutional definition, then what was it? To define membership away from merely institutional definitions shifts our focus to a wide array of participatory activities, which were political in the sense of community-forming, without being strictly about politics in the narrow sense. …
… One of the signs of the emergence and consolidation of the polis is the building of monumental temples to patron deities, which unifies the community and relates it to a network of its peers (through competition and by analogy), and the religious nature of civic monuments and spaces never abates. The agora itself was a sacred space, filled with shrines. The city’s main deity, honored in its most important shrine and festivals, could represent the community in visual shorthand … The nature of the polis as a compact between a human community and the world of the gods is visible not just in the participatory nature of polis religion, but also in the claims it makes on its inhabitants. Festival activities reached out to individuals within the whole diverse social space of the community; they imposed the physical, bodily, and spatial performance of participation in the form of leisure, special clothing or accessories such as crowns, and installations such as domestic altars.
To see the polis as essentially a religious organization takes us far from Aristotle’s institutional focus on political power. In this capacious performance- and participation-based model, the adult male citizen and his involvement in political institutions are no longer the measure for all things, or at least the touchstone for the nature of the polis. Women, for instance, are taken to be as full members of the community. Notably, citizen women fulfil an important part in the cultic affairs that are a central part of civic activities, as participants in festivals, or as holders of religious office. …
… By guaranteeing citizen status, they also transmitted the right to participate in the ritual life of the polis as sacred community of religious interaction with the gods. Crucially, women perpetuated the polis by biological and social reproduction, by bringing forth legitimate citizen children. They ensured the inheritance of citizen property and hence the continuity of households in the polis. In this view of the polis, women are fully citizens, and even children are citizens, inasmuch as both groups participated in the polis’s religious life. Their presence as citizens and full members of the polis can serve as an emblem for a history of the polis as a society that is not dominated by adult male elite presences. …
… the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens records sacred matters as an important concern of the Assembly—but the latter also handled matters such as defense, food supply, or edilitary administration. The grant of citizenship in the poleis often specified “participation in divine matters and office-holding” as the salient facts of civic activity. Likewise, the public examination of citizen candidates for office made sure that they were good family men, that they participated in religion, but also that they served the polis in war and paid their dues and taxes.
… participation and rituals embody real goods in themselves. The polis provided consumables such as partaking of animal protein or diluted but vitamin-rich, psychotropic, and addictive ethanol-based drink, paid for by political processes of redistribution or semi-voluntary elite generosity. Further public goods that flowed as a result of entitlement were economic, such as cash or grain (distributed for free or sold cheap thanks to collective means). Finally, the polis also provided, as an entitlement of membership, emotional satisfactions: the feeling of belonging to a community, the sense of ownership over space, territory, built environment, and history, or the collective and orderly communion with the supernatural in order to honor the gods, ask them for favors, and offer thanks. The nature of the polis as purveyor of emotional or affective goods also appears in occasions of ceremonial mourning in public funerals (at Pergamon, provided for all citizens) or consolation decrees for the death of promising elite citizens. Indeed, all those were part of the “good life” that the polis procured for its members (rather than the contemplative life that Plato and indeed Aristotle wished for), and gave participation and performance real substance and desirability.
The metaphors of participation were all the more important because the polis did not clearly define citizenship as a bill of rights (though a concept of dikaia, “just and right things,” did emerge). Participation in rituals offered a visible symbol of membership as well as a means of accrediting the members of the political community. The close connection between the polis as institution and the ritual performance of identity is visible everywhere, notably in the cardinal genre of the honorific decree. In this type of document, the city displayed itself as the play of institutions and politics, morphing into civic ritual and monument through stereotypical gestures such as the repeated proclamation of honorific crowns, or through normed repertoires such as honorific inscriptions or even portraits in painted or sculpted forms. The hot city of politics turned to the cold city of ritual and imagery. …
… Diverse statuses in the polis, favored or indeed disfavored, were defined in relationship to citizenship as participation in institutions, especially judicial, but also political (since the noncitizens were defined by access to the former but not the latter). In other words, such statuses work by being like the “full” or “complete” citizen of Aristotle—or by subtracting certain properties of citizenship, such as socioeconomic rights but also participatory rights. The position of citizen women (politides) in the polis was likewise defined in relationship to male citizenship as held by participants in political institutions. It reflects a civic order produced by negotiations between the citizen stakeholders in the institutions of decision- and law-making; women’s roles and functions, notably in transmitting property and perpetuating citizen households, are ultimately regulated by those institutions. If we accept my suggestion that participation in ritual and performance are civic fictions, acting as very real metaphors for participation, female participation in these rituals at festivals or through the representative function of priestesses, can be viewed as another constituent metaphor of civic order. …
… In short, I am here suggesting that a whole swathe of the phenomena grouped above under the portmanteau heading of “polis-as-society”—subdivisions, rituals, performed identities, statuses, gender—should be viewed as functions of the Aristotelian polis of political institutions and debates about power between mass and elite. Moreover, I am arguing that these functions were metaphorical, and hence ideological—and that much of the noninstitutional interpretations of the polis have merely taken the ideological force of these metaphors too literally (for instance in arguing that citizenship was performance, or that different but equal roles of citizenship were distributed by gender). Indeed, their precise function was to naturalize political relationships of obligation and participation into pseudo-organic, “social” relationships. Political metaphor transcended institutionality by reifying participation per se rather than political power, and hence mystifying the issues of power and access at the heart of citizenship. However, the realities of institutional power were clearly defined and starkly operative. The Milesians allowed their Olbiopolitan kinsmen free access to cultic participation but asked them to register if they wanted to actually participate in officeholding. They further expressly specified, when granting citizenship, that the latter gave access to cultic activities, officeholding “and all the other things”.
Without wanting to diminish the central importance of religion, ritual, and belief as part of the real experience and emotional life of preindustrial communities (at the mercy of endless contingencies, starting with the vagaries of weather for agricultural production), and without wishing to adopt a purely functionalist interpretation of the sacred, I also propose seeing polis religion as performing the same mystifying role as other political metaphors. To see the polis as a group bonded by its relation to the gods was a heightened discourse about community, with political implications (without necessarily being the result of a deliberate, instrumentalizing choice). When the young citizen men of Athens graduated from their two-year military service in the ephēbeia, and swore an oath not to abandon their “sacred weapons” (hiera hopla), there was nothing sacred about the weapons in themselves … Sacrality is a metaphor for the interests of the community, defended by the citizens’ bravery in warfare. …
… In arguing for the power of institutions to impose binding decisions, and hence the central importance of access to state institutions for the definition of membership, I have drawn attention to the polis’s desire to naturalize itself, by presenting itself through metaphors of participation and societal articulation and, consequently, the idealizing nature of polis institutions. ..
Chapter 16 Polis as Ideals
… popular sovereignty was not materialized by mere performative hegemony in discourse and law (through some sort of magic inherent in democratic speech-acts). It was realized and perpetuated by the working of the democratic institutions of Athens—namely the Assembly, broad access to office, accountability and transparency, the popular law courts, and the local assemblies at the level of the demes where issues of citizenship were negotiated in the first instance. Equally crucial was the willingness of citizens to participate in institutional work, as assemblymen, jurors, or as prosecutors or speakers in the Assembly (though the latter two in practice demanded skill, leisure, wealth, and social capital). …
… Ancient Greek law is heavy on procedure and hence the modalities of participation, but light on substance, which is left to the community to decide through praxis in the courts, and whose ethical basis is, again, not articulated beyond a sense of the public good. …
Chapter 19 Worst Polis: Polis as Injustice
… In the Aristotelian ideal of the polis, the adult male citizen’s capacity to rule over his household is linked with his capacity to participate, as a deliberating person, in politics—in decision-making, adjudication, temporary rule over other citizens, and control of the public goods produced for the commonwealth by extraction of revenue from the elite, economic transactions in the polis and common property. It is worth considering the relationship in the other direction. Participatory politics, namely shareholding in the enterprise of preserving freedom (from slave-like subjugation) and of creating a life in common (through public-mindedness and virtue politics), might have acted as alibis for domination, patriarchy, nativism, and enslavement, by proving the innate moral entitlement of the adult male born citizen to rule over others (women, foreigners, and the enslaved), to take their labor, and to treat them like stock. …
… Citizenship made domination possible, not just by rejecting domination and exploitation outside the circle of members, but by giving members an ideological justification for their power to exclude and to exploit: the “virtue politics” of the polis, apart from enforcing solidarity between rich and poor, also ensured their solidarity against outsiders. Participation in politics was conceived as natural to adult male citizens, the fulfillment of their human potential, the reflection of their public-minded character (as illustrated by civic discourse about good citizens). …
What would the good polis look like? I have been tempted to point to the island world of Hērakleia, perhaps, as a community of citizens making conditions and solutions for the common life, or the spaces of the autonomous and democratic polis of Priēnē, if our gaze peoples them with citizens. We can imagine the citizens living in an urban center and solving common problems as part of a project of political freedom and equality. They appear to us working as free, property-holding members rather than as rent-producers for an elite; living an egalitarian political culture of citizen dignity, restraint, and solidarity around ideals of the public good; and exercising collective agency in interacting with other city-states and in resisting or bargaining with bigger imperial entities, thanks to force-multiplying peer-polity bonds and federal structures. Citizens do so by participating in effective democratic institutions and rules born of centuries of experimentation and diffusion, successfully constraining and embedding the wealthy within law and redistributive practice. These good institutions produce literal public goods that alleviate poverty in the polis. The polis works to channel the rational pursuit of interests within institutions that reinforced general welfare. Its prosperity comes from ideals and institutions; it is mostly based on free labor rather than slaves.
And what of the bad polis? In these last two chapters, I modeled the polis as inextricably bound with endemic bads: riven with violence upstream and downstream from political processes, a violent rather than restrained society; insidiously affected by elite power in controlling issues and outcomes; and foundationally based on mechanisms of exclusion (formal or informal), to the benefit of a privileged in-group of adult male citizens, an urban elite enjoying access to participation in state institutions, and benefitting from the protection that institutions generate. Bad polis is especially dependent on widespread enslaved labor at all levels of society. We now can understand why the polis is so ready for complicity with imperial control and exploitation. This, too, could be a description of the island polity of Hērakleia (perhaps riven by conflict, controlled at a deep level by a small wealth elite, and dependent on enslaved labor for cash crops), or the polis of Priēnē, with its small citizen body, enslaved workers, and dependent countryside. …
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Priene was an ancient Greek city of Ionia (and member of the Ionian League)