Paul Cartledge, Origins of Democracy in Greece
What really happened? Certainties & uncertainties of meaning in 'value-laden' texts
Paul Cartledge wrote:
Chapter 6
Democracy, Origins of: Contribution to a Debate
For a start, Greece should at least mean Hellas, the Greek world as a whole, not just Athens. But obvious though this may be to specialists in ancient Greek history, it is not necessarily so to nonspecialist general readers or even to most historians of modern and contemporary democratic political thought, who begin with a ritual obeisance to the ancient Greece “from where we started”. I am not of course wanting to deny that the Western political tradition, in so far as it is democratic, goes back to Athens. What I am emphasizing rather is that the story of ancient Greek democracy is much broader than just a story about Athens. As Aristotle (Politics) was careful to note, in his day most Greek cities enjoyed either a form of oligarchy or a form of democracy; he did not also say that most were a form of the former only, or that democracy was somehow an anomaly.
That is the first of my three preliminary points. The second is that ancient Greek democracy was a total social phenomenon, a culture and not merely a political system (as we would understand that). Politeia, the word we sometimes translate “constitution,” could also mean, and indeed originally did mean, “citizenship”, a special status of active political belonging; and even when politeia had come to mean also the way a city’s order of self-government was arranged, that arrangement could still be referred to without strain as a bios (life, way of life, livelihood) or psukhe (soul, spirit, mind). I am not of course wishing, either, to deny that institutions are important—I agree on this entirely with Mogens Hansen. Where I differ from him is in not believing that they were all-important, or all-consumingly important. Theater, the public visual arts, and the battlefield—these are only the most obvious of the other arenas where Athenian democracy happened, but not in a narrowly governmental way.
My third preliminary point is that all ancient democracies, including therefore that of Athens, differed radically from all modern ones in the following six, often basic, ways:
Theirs were direct, ours are representative. Theirs did contain some representative—or better, representational—elements, but the exercise of power (kratos) through decision taking was open, transparent, face-to-face, direct.
Kratos, the etymology of which is connected with “grasp” and “grip”, and so is a very physical sort of word, is better not translated by the abstract, legalistic English term “sovereignty”. In an ancient democracy the demos—meaning alternatively the people as a whole or the mass/majority of the people actually taking the decisions—had their hands on power where it mattered, at Athens as elsewhere.
There was no separation of powers in any ancient democracy, either in theory (constitutional or philosophical) or in actual political practice; the demos in principle held power and ruled equally in all the relevantly operative spheres, legislative, executive, and judicial.
In ancient democracies, as indeed in all poleis of whatever constitutional or ideological hue, citizenship was construed and constructed actively, as a participatory sharing; as already mentioned above, it was not accidental that the same word, politeia, did service both for the status of citizenship and for what we call constitution.
The ancient Greeks, including—and perhaps especially—the democratic Athenians, did indeed distinguish a public from a private realm, but the rights (if “rights” talk is strictly legitimate in this context; better, I think, duties and privileges) that they were concerned to protect or encourage were civic/citizen rights, not human rights (regardless of gender, creed, nationality, etc.); and they had no concern for minority rights as such, especially not in a majoritarian democracy of the Athenian form, where decisions, including electoral votes, were taken by plenary meetings of the entire potential citizen body or by equipollent [dic. equal or equivalent in power, effect, or significance] bodies such as the divisions of the People’s Court.
There was no concern, finally, to protect “the individual” from the State (as we might naturally put it within the context of our tradition of Western liberal democracy), for two very good reasons. First, individuals were not positively evaluated as such in Greek society, where the primary emphasis was always on the good of to koinon, the commonality, or koinonia, the commonwealth or community, so that there were no individuals in our connotation and no Greek term that might be so interpreted (the Greek idiotes, meaning often something like our “layman”, i.e., citizen acting in an unofficial or amateur capacity, transmuted unforcedly into our wholly pejorative word “idiot”). Second, there was no State in a post-Hobbesian sense for the individual (citizen) to have his rights (or rather duties and privileges) protected from.
Against that background of rather dogmatically expressed preliminary points, I proceed to comment on the … ancient dimensions of our practically inexhaustible topic.
Sources and Methods
… All Greek political language was consciously and deliberately value-laden; there was not even a gesture made toward the probably in fact unrealizable ideal of Weberian wertfrei (value-free) political “science”. I restrict myself to just three illustrations.
First, why at Herodotus 3.80, in the so-called Persian Debate, does the pro-democracy speaker Otanes not actually use the term demokratia, when demokratia, in a pretty radical or extreme form, is clearly what he is in fact advocating, and although Herodotus does use the term elsewhere? The clue is given by Herodotus himself, when he makes Otanes assert that isonomiē [egalitarian?, equality before the law?] is “the fairest of names”—isonomiē, that is, not demokratia. And why not? Because, regardless of whoever precisely first coined the latter term and why, and of whenever it first became common currency at Athens, demokratia always contained and actively retained the etymological potential for negative interpretation: the word demos, that is, in the eyes of one of the socially and economically elite few opinion-makers, did not mean only or merely People (all the people, the citizen body as a whole) but also—and rather—the masses, the poor, the lower-class, and often underprivileged, majority of the citizens. Coupled with kratos, which had the underlying physically active sense discussed above, demokratia could therefore be interpreted negatively to convey something of the flavor of the phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat” (as not used by a committed Leninist communist). Better therefore by far for Otanes not to give a potential linguistic hostage to fortune, but to advocate—as he in fact does—a programme summed up in a single word with an intrinsically positive connotation: for all must surely agree that equality under or before the laws was in itself a choice-worthy ideal (any disagreement would concern rather who precisely were to count as relevantly “equal”, and how). Thus Otanes’ nonuse of demokratia says nothing about whether or not the word was already coined, either at the dramatic date of the Debate (it could not have been, since that was c. 521) or at the time Herodotus’s version of the Debate was composed (it almost certainly was, even if the prototype of Otanes’ speech goes back to 450 or somewhat earlier). It says everything, on the other hand, about the context-specific resonances of key—that is, essentially contested—political terminology.
[MGH: Regarding “contested political terminology” I will quote a passage from later in the book, in the final chapter by Cynthia Farrar: “One of the charms of studying the ancient Athenians is that everyone, student and scholar alike, has relatively easy access to the limited number of literary and epigraphic sources. Disagreements about the interpretation and implications of the evidence therefore appear in sharp relief. That is especially true in this volume, which asks a group of scholars to answer the same question using the same body of evidence. Each commentator’s choice of a period and context in which to locate the emergence of democracy reflects the salience he ascribes to particular elements of governance.”]
Second, where Herodotus is describing the means whereby Cleisthenes came to be in a position to introduce what he (Herodotus) later in his own person calls a demokratia, what exactly does he mean by saying that Cleisthenes prosetairizetai [incorporated?] the demos? Here it is most important to consider the point of view from which such terminology would seem natural or usable. Formally speaking, “adding (for his own benefit) the people/masses to his hetair(e)ia” or “making (for his own benefit) the people/masses his hetairoi” is either an impossibility, a contradiction, or, at best, an oxymoron, for, by definition, a hetair(e)ia was a small band of hetairoi (intimate comrades), and in 507—or even 407, for that matter—the word hetairos still retained a good deal of the force of aristocratic peer-group solidarity and comradeship that it had had in Homer (eighth–seventh century b.c.e.). Prosetairizetai must therefore be being used here in a metaphorical sense, and live-metaphorical, too. Such a metaphor would, I suggest, come most easily to an aristocratic speaker, one who by no means necessarily endorsed or approved either the means that Cleisthenes so successfully employed or the goal, demokratia, he thereby (in Herodotus’s view) achieved. Such a speaker, on the most economical hypothesis, would be a fellow aristocrat of Cleisthenes’, better still a fellow Alcmaeonid (it is tolerably certain that Herodotus counted Alcmaeonids among his direct informants), one who thoroughly disapproved of Cleisthenes’ reforms and regarded him—no less vehemently than Pericles was later regarded and for similar reasons … as a traitor to his family and class.
In short, Herodotus’s use of the formally inaccurate or misleading term prosetairizetai is due, in my view, to his reproduction of an aristocratic, possibly Alcmaeonid source, one who was keen to “spin” Cleisthenes’ in fact revolutionary transformation of the terms of the political game as a case of “aristocratic business as usual.” It is not at all surprising, either, that Herodotus should have been willing to employ such a metaphor, since he himself was by no means a wholehearted advocate of the system the Cleisthenic reforms ushered in. He may have approved of isegoria, equality of free public speech, which he uses as a kind of synecdoche for demokratia but, on the other hand, he rather contemptuously reports (5.97) that it was easier in 500/499 to fool thirty thousand Athenians (exercising their right of democratic free public speech and equal vote) than one Spartan (a king), and it is by no means clear that he would have straightforwardly endorsed Otanes’ radical-democratic reading of isonomia.
Cleisthenes in other words did not, in reality, either “add the people/masses to his hetair(e)ia” or “make the masses/people his hetairoi” but rather … transformed the whole nature of Athenian politics, precisely by finessing or overriding the previously taken-for-granted, aristocratic factionalism model of political infighting. By appealing to the people as a whole, or more narrowly to the effective sub-aristocratic majority of them, and by offering them what he was able to persuade them they wanted from political participation, namely, some sort of decisive say, he won them round to his way of thinking and for the first time incorporated them centrally in the political process … . Although this appeal might be interpreted cynically, at one level, as merely a self-serving and vote-catching political maneuver … it was not at all the same thing as doing what Herodotus’s anachronistic phraseology … misleadingly implies, namely, winning them over, as a whole new faction, within the conventional guidelines of the traditional political game.
Third, why did Aristotle … identify the essence, or goal, of democratic sociability and self-government as “living as you please”? Aristotle’s fundamental method of political-philosophical analysis and prescription was to proceed from the phainomena and endoxa, the reputable opinions of reputable persons, to what ideally and ideologically he thought should be the case, other things being equal. This method enabled him to give a much fuller and fairer appreciation of a democratic point of view than was normal among democracy’s critics; indeed to go so far as to concede that, in terms of a kind of social-contract idea of decision making, the opinions of the majority were likely on average and on the whole to be no worse in practice than those of an elite few.
However, Aristotle himself, like almost all known ancient Greek intellectuals (the known and certain exceptions can be counted on the fingers of one hand: Hippodamus, Protagoras, Democritus … others?), was no ideological or intellectual democrat. Just as in his doctrine of the essence of natural slavery, so in his exposition of the essence of natural democracy (as it were), Aristotle allowed his prejudices to get the better of his intellect, so badly did he want and need the doctrines he was advocating—against democracy, for natural slavery—to be true. The giveaway is his overstatement of his case: for he in effect accuses all ideological democrats of being anarchists, or would-be anarchists, since, he claims, so preeminently do they privilege their libertarian notion of freedom (freedom from, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms) that they ideally wish there to be no constraints whatsoever on their freedom of political action (freedom to). From there it was but a relatively small step to identifying in democracy an innate tendency to lawlessness, the overriding of the supposedly permanent laws by temporary decrees, and even to classifying the “last” or “ultimate” democracy (by which he surely meant a democracy like that of contemporary Athens) as precisely that in which the demos does not see itself as bound by the laws. …
The Invention of Politics and the Political
The distinction between politics and democratic politics has rightly been insisted upon. The former was common to most of Hellas, by the fifth century [BC] at the latest, whereas the latter became widespread only in the fourth century [BC], after which it virtually disappeared once again. None of our other contributors, however, seems to me to have taken on board fully the issue of the (non)existence of the State and the transparency of the political under the ancient Greek regime. Farrar, indeed, goes further and explicitly denies the relevance to democratic Athens of the notion of face-to-face-ness that Moses Finley borrowed originally from Peter Laslett. Against which I would argue that all ancient Greek political communities, Athens not excluded, were indeed relevantly face-to-face, in two different ways:
First, and more obviously, whenever it was a matter of taking binding decisions by majority vote on behalf of the community as a whole, whether in the Assembly or in a law court, the voters were in full view of each other—the fact that in both types of case only a small proportion of the total citizen body was present and voting is neither here nor there: had that been felt to be a problem, the Athenians themselves would have done something about it;
Second, in a less direct and more subtle sense, all ancient Greek communities were face-to-face and transparently so, in that there was no State (including a government and a civil service bureaucracy) interposed between ordinary citizens and the making of final, universally binding decisions, as there is in all our modern democracies, which are also of course—and not coincidentally—representative, not direct, systems of government.
In an ancient Greek democratic political community “the political” (das Politische), that is, the political space or political sphere, was placed es meson or en mesoi, transparently available “in the middle” to all citizens who wished fully to participate there. The famous Periclean Funeral Speech in Thucydides is actually not a simple hymn to democracy by any means but ideologically slanted and rhetorically overdetermined in all sorts of confusing ways. However, when Thucydides’ Pericles is made to say that Athens’ politeia was called a demokratia because governance there was effected in the interests of the many (citizens) rather than the few, he was stating a fact; likewise, all allowance made for the exaggeration of the “we alone”, there is a key truth in the claim that “we alone judge the person who has no share in those (ta politika) to be not (merely) a quietist but useless”.
The Invention of De-mokratia I: The Word
Our term “democracy” is derived from Greek demokratia, literally “People-power”, but democracy today has nothing to do with power or the People, let alone the power of (all) the people. If it still retains any content whatever, it is merely that of “free elections” and other sorts of occasional voting, a kind of placebo or Saturnalia for what is becoming an ever-smaller proportion of the potential electorate. In Athens they did—and said—things very differently. Demokratia, at first the name for a system of governance, ultimately became sacralized—presumably in response to secular opposition both at home and abroad—as the name of a goddess. We do not know, and probably will never know, who coined the term demokratia, or how and when precisely it became accepted in the way the speech of Thucydides’ Pericles (above) attests. But it is worth dwelling a little on the implications of the naming.
The speech attributed to Otanes in Herodotus’s Persian Debate is, as we saw, a case of the dog that did not bark. The earliest attested usages of the term as applied to Athens are therefore either Herodotus (above) or those in the “Old Oligarch”, the Pseudo-Xenophontic Politeia of the Athenians, which may have been composed as early as the 430s or as late as the 410s, but in my view falls most probably in the 420s, after—I believe—the “publication” of Herodotus’s Histories. Mogens Hansen once put forward an ingenious argument that to name an Athenian Demokrates, possibly in the 470s but certainly no later than the 460s, implied the existence of the abstract noun by that date, but that’s by no means probative. I should myself place greater weight on the phrase demou kratousa kheir (the controlling hand of the demos) in line 604 of Aeschylus’s Suppliants, a tragedy most plausibly dated 463, which in obedience to the rule of avoiding the most blatant terminological anachronism seems to use a punningly concrete poetic synecdoche implying the abstract term’s existence. Regarding both those examples, I would add that the second quarter of the fifth century seems to me the “right” sort of time for the word to have been coined, for several reasons. If I am correct, this has an obvious and direct bearing on the issue to be discussed in the following section.
The earliest “buzzword” used to evoke the post-Cleisthenic political order or system was apparently isonomia, precisely the word employed by Herodotus’s Otanes. By that seems to have been meant something like equality of active citizen privileges under the laws, combined with equality of interpersonal respect. If Herodotus was right, as I am sure he was, in seeing a direct connection between military prowess and political order or perception, then the battles of Marathon and Salamis in particular, together with the ostracisms of the 480s that were respectively their consequences and facilitators, provided the impetus for both institutional and linguistic change.
Demokratia, however, could be no simple replacement or modernizing of isonomia, for the main reason given above for its avoidance by Otanes: it could too easily be construed negatively—and that may indeed have been how it was originally meant to be construed, if its inventor was a, literally, antidemocratic individual or group. But if that is so, why and how did demokratia become not just current but officially accepted parlance? How, in other words, are we to explain its upward mobility?
The answer, I suggest, is that it occurred as and when members of the Athenian aristoi [aristocrats] opted to join rather than try to beat the ever more dominant demos, by becoming its “champions” (prostatai). In such a scenario the word demos would denote primarily the people as a whole, but “progressive” members of the elite would also have been endorsing an institutional system whereby the poor and humble masses enjoyed preponderant political weight, literally as well as figuratively, and seeing them no longer as the despised kakoi of Solon’s time and later, but as equal citizens or sharers in the politeia. The absence of very much in the way of democratic theory properly so called, even in the fourth century no less than in the fifth, has often been noted. But the coinage—or rather the reminting—of demokratia must have involved at the very least some articulate speculation as to its differences from, and alleged superiorities to, any previous system of governance.
The Invention of De-mokratia II: The Thing
Different, sometimes irreconcilable claims have been made for identifying the “beginning” of democracy at Athens, in this volume as elsewhere. One reason for disagreement can be failure to appreciate that democracy is not a single immutable animal. There were four main species of the genus, according to Aristotle’s biopolitical classification, and each species could undergo internally generated evolution and even mutation, or change due to external pressures. What sort, or what stage, of democracy we have in view, therefore, is a very material consideration. Part of the disagreement among the contributors to this volume is due also to their different criteria for establishing the existence of “real” or “true” or “full” democracy at Athens. Part—but not all. There are substantive disagreements, too, over how to interpret the evidence deemed usable and relevant. I shall be brief and rather dogmatic in my comments.
The Solon View
In the fourth century the Athenians themselves came to champion Solon as their ultimate Founding Father, and since they lived in a democracy, Solon had to become the Founder of Democracy. [Wallace] is prepared to give some credence to the notion that the regime that Solon’s reforms of 594 ushered in deserves to be called—strictly anachronistically—democratic, if only in some restricted sense and up to a limited point. It seems to me, however, to be revealing that not even Aristotle, whose ideal democracy was very much less radical and demotic than that which the Athenians of his day actually enjoyed, would have been able in conscience to classify the post-Solonian Athenian politeia as a demokratia. The most we can, I think, profitably do is identify certain features of Solon’s reliably attributed reforms as protodemocratic, in the sense that they were found much later on to be integral components of or at least compatible with a genuinely democratic structure of governance. Of course, too, they would not have been even to that degree protodemocratic had not Peisistratus, a tyrant or absolute ruler, chosen to coexist with them, to allow them to operate more or less without interference over a long and internally stable period, such that not even the nearly twenty-year period of much more unstable tyranny that succeeded his reign could entirely dislodge them from the general Athenian consciousness.
The Cleisthenes View
The Cleisthenes view has been vigorously and articulately championed by [Ober] in a strong, and strongly populist, version, according to which it was not so much a Cleisthenes acting independently from above, but a Cleisthenes impelled or even compelled by popular pressure from below, who reformed the Athenian politeia such that it became a demokratia. The extent to which a genuinely popular or populist self-consciousness can be said really to have existed by 508 [BC], and the extent to which such a self-consciousness was the principal driver of the Cleisthenic reform bill, seem to me, among others, highly dubious or problematic.
On the other hand, I do agree with [Ober] that some theoretical or proto-theoretical notion of what a demokratia (not yet so named, of course) might entail was a prerequisite of the success of the sort of mass action that occurred in and after 508. As Aristotle rightly said, one of the conditions for a politeia to work is that the relevant people in relevant numbers should actively want it to. And, even more to the immediate point at issue, I do also agree with him—and Herodotus—that what Cleisthenes introduced for the Athenians was a form—however inchoate—of “democracy.”
One critical test of an ancient democracy—that is, of whether a polity was in any useful sense democratic—is how it goes about determining foreign policy, the taking of decisions regarding “peace and war” in ancient Greek parlance. Immediately in 508/7, then again in 500/499, and most famously in 490, the Athenians in their Assembly took properly democratic decisions—respectively, to seek aid from Persia against Sparta, to aid the Ionians in their revolt from Persia, and to resist the Persians in pitched hoplite [dic. foot soldier] battle. The demos of these years was mainly a hoplite demos, very different from the active post-Salamis demos no doubt; the newly introduced Council of 500 was inevitably at first filled by at least reasonably well-off farm-owning demesmen; the Archons who were to compose the Areopagus were still elected rather than selected by lot; and the Areopagus they were to compose still held a “guardianship of the laws” or ultimate veto. Yet against all that, citizenship, and so potential membership of the Assembly, were now determined at local deme level, a face-to-face institution if ever there was, as was membership of the Council, which acquired a new, more independent identity vis-à-vis the Areopagus; the new office of the Generalship, filled by open voting within the Assembly, overrode the old post of War Archon (polemarchos, which was remodeled to serve different, peaceable functions); and the newly galvanized demos was both politically self-confident and, at least on home soil, militarily effective. It can surely be legitimately held to have been wielding some form of kratos, and for that reason this “Cleisthenes view” is the view of the origins of democracy at Athens that I myself espouse. However . . .
The Ephialtes-Pericles View
The Ephialtes-Pericles view, as argued here by [Raaflaub], is also mighty seductive. The reform package of Ephialtes (presumably the true protagonist, as he was the older man, and it was he, not Pericles, who was targeted for assassination on political grounds), which the Assembly passed in 462/1, removed the last formal aristocratic piece from the board, the ultimate legal veto of the Areopagus council of ex-archons (chosen by lot since 487), and replaced it with the empowerment of the People’s Court (the heliaia, as instantiated by particular jury courts or dikasteria), while the effective power of the people in assembly was also reinforced through further administrative strengthening of the Council of 500. Pay for jurors, added on in the 450s to the use of the quintessentially democratic mode of sortition for selecting Archons and most of the other (seven hundred or so?) domestic officials, helped to ensure the practical realization of a truly democratic idea of equality of opportunity and participation. All true (in my opinion). And yet … see the Cleisthenes view above. For me, that is, the post-462/1 democracy is a different, more evolved democracy, but not Athens’ first.
The Post-404 View
Anyone who argues that Athens did not become a demokratia in any suitable sense until after the restoration of republican government in 403 deserves in my view to have a graphe sukophantias (public action against quibbling) slapped on him or her forthwith. On the other hand, I do agree with Eder, against, for example, Mogens Hansen, that the fourth-century democracy was not qualitatively different from that of the (later) fifth century. Indeed, I would myself go further and argue that quantitatively it was actually more democratic—taken as percentages of the (smaller) total citizen body, there were more regular attenders at the Assembly, and more citizens at any one time holding an office.
Revolution or Reaction?
By way of a conclusion, I shall try to evaluate the Athenian democratic experiment within the conceptual matrix of political change (metabolē). … The Greek for “revolution” in the sense of dramatic, often physically violent political change was either stasis, a standing apart or standoff, or neotera pragmata, newer, that is, too new, political affairs. Even the most ideologically motivated democrats at Athens were always terribly keen to cast even the largest innovations as a return to a universally desired world that had once been theirs but had been lost, rather than as progress toward an ideal future goal. However, in actual fact democracy ancient Greek-style was a system of majority decision-making based on conflict rather than consensus. Democratic politics was a zero-sum game, as we might put it, or an agōn, as they did put it. In a transparent, face-to-face system such as theirs every vote on a major policy issue threatened the outbreak of stasis or was indeed in a sense a controlled expression of stasis … Hence the universally acclaimed ancient political ideal was homo-noia, literally “same-mindedness” or total unanimity, precisely because it almost never was—nor could be—realized in practice. …
… The number of ways in which Sparta could not be accounted a demokratia, even on the most generous Aristotelian definition, is legion, but I would single out especially the absence of the use of the lot for appointment to office; the absence of the notion of strict citizen equality of the one man/one vote variety, with everyone counting for one and no more than one; and the absence of a popular judiciary, coupled with the continued existence of an aristocratic council, containing ex officio the two hereditary kings, that wielded ultimate judicial powers.
Only as a culture, at most, could Sparta count as a democracy, and only in the weak sense that it subjected all potential citizens (except the two heirs apparent) equally to a state-imposed educational cycle and promoted a notionally (but not in fact) egalitarian communal diaita (mode of life) among the adult citizen body. Yet Athens’ egalitarian ethos was a match for Sparta’s, which was severely limited by the absolute necessity for soldierly hierarchy, and Athens’ democratic culture was of course far more pluralistically inclusive. Finally, if Athenian democrats were conservative in expressed outlook, they were mere children beside the Spartans, who notoriously overvalued tradition even to the—logical but ultimately self-defeating—point of fetishizing gerontocracy. …
The Source:
Paul Cartledge, ‘Democracy, Origins of: Contribution to a Debate’ in Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece, by Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, Robert W. Wallace, with commentary chapters by Paul Cartledge and Cynthia Farrar, University of California Press 2007
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.