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Conditions for Athenian Democracy
Chapter One
Conditions for
Athenian Democracy
JOSIAH OBER
as a word, concept, and set or practices, was invented in
D emocracy,
the ancient city-state (polis) of Athens. By democracy (demokratia)
"
the Athenians meant active political rule by the demos-the native adult
males. This political body was constituted for purposes of governmental
and legal decision making withour regard for extraneous socioeconomic
distinctions; there was no property qualification for voting rights. Democracy flourished at Athens from 508-322 B.C., with only two brief interruptions in the late fifth century. After 322 B.C., periods in which the
Athenians ruled themselves democratically were interspersed with periods of foreign-imposed oligarchy, but democracy remained an important part of the Athenian (and wider Greek) political landscape well into
the era of Roman domination. 1
This relatively long political history is strikingly different from that
of every subsequent democratic state in at least one salient respect: The
democratic Athenians had no historical model ofdemocracy from which
they might hope to learn. Whereas Athens' experience with democracy
became an important model (or, more often, an anti-model) for virtually all later thinking about the potential benefits and pitfalls of republican forms of government, there was no road map for the Athenians'
own audacious political experiment. They quite literally invented democracy as they went along.
The Athenians were, of course, innocent of any teleological conception regarding the "conditions of political maturity" or "goal state"
that a democratic form of government should or even might entail.
Moreover, in the early days of the democracy, the Athenians had no
clear expectations about the relationship between the form of political
organization they had adopted and potential extra-political "side
effects": They had no prior idea of what a democratic economy might
look like, no conception of how a democratic citizen might be expected
to behave, no notion of either "democratic peace" or the effect of
democracy on national capacity to wage war; in brier, they had no
pre-Platonic sense of the nature of the "democratic soul." It was not
until the mid-fifth and fourth centuries that Athenian political orators
and Athenian critics of democracy sought to analyze what democracy
meant for national and individual character, social behavior, economy,
and war.
In thinking about the Athenian experience with democracy, it is
important to keep this historical tabula rasa in mind. The intellectual
exercisl: rl:prCsclltl:<.! by this VOlllll1l: was lInavailabk, t:vt:J1 covt:rtly, LO
the Athenians for much of their history as a democracy. Indeed, the
thinking that led to this volume was (ultimately) made possible by the
Athenian experience. Greek historical priority does not, however,
mean that the Athenian political expcril:nce was so qualitatively dirferent from that of subsequent democracies as to obviate the value
of comparisons; it was, after all, Athenian political writers who first
attempted to analyze the conditions for democracy. Pseudo-Xenophon
(the "Old Oligarch"), Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, and Demosthenes
(to name only the best known) all wrote searching analyses of the social
consequences of democratic government. But among Athenian writers
it is Aristotle, in the Politics (especially Book 6) who most explicitly
poses the question that animates this collection: What precisely are the
conditions that promote, sustain, and threaten democracy as a form of
government?
Aristotle asked similar questions about oligarchy and tyranny, the
other two canonical "real world" regime-types familiar to him from the
historical experience of the Greek city-states. But, like the majority of
major Greek political writers of the classical period, Aristotle lived most
of his adult life in democratic Athens. Aristotle regarded democracy as
qualitatively inferior to three ideal-world "correct" regimes (polity, aristocracy, and monarchy). But he regarded democracy as the best (i.e., most
capable of approximating conditions of justice) of the three commonly
existing real-world political governmental alternatives (democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny) ordinarily available to his fellow polis-dwelling Greeks.
And so, like many of his Greek contemporaries who wrote what we now
think of as political theory, Aristotle was especially interested in the conditions associated with democratic flourishing. 2
The general problem of specifying the conditions under which
democracy arises, flourishes, collapses, and is reborn was among the
3
4
Josiah Ober
central concerns of Greek political philosophy from the mid-fifth century B.C. onward. 3 And, at least in part because of the profound influence of Greek political thought, the "democracy problem" remained a
central concern for many later Western political thinkers-even through
the long historical era (roughly the third through the seventeenth centuries C.E.), in which there was no living example of democracy as the
government ofa complex independent state to which empirically minded
political theorists might refer. 4 Once again, it is important to keep
in mind that "thinking abstractly about the conditions of democratic
flourishing" was only possible after Athens had become a democracy.
Whereas Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Paine, Madison, Jefferson, and others each had the history of democratic Athens (or
at least historical and philosophical traditions about Athens) to think
with, in the beginning the Athenians had only themselves and their own
lived experience.
Because he asked questions so similar to those posed by the editors
of this collection, Aristotle's analysis of democracy in the Politics offers
a useful starting point for thinking about the conditions that promoted
and threatened Athenian democracy. First, although he (famously) failed
to develop anything directly comparable to a modern analytic model of
the economy, Aristotle does associate democracy directly with relations
between clearly defined economic classes: For Aristotle, democracy was
formally defined as the rule (in a polis) of the fraction of the total "potential citizen" (j.e., native, adult, male: hereafter NAM) population that
was "poor."5 And thus democracy, for Aristotle, was best understood as
the self-conscious political dominance of men who were constrained to
work for their living. The fact that most NAMs in any given polis were
likely to be "poor" by Aristotle's (conventionally aristocratic) standard
means that democracies were in practice ruled by the "many" (the clear
majority ofNAMs) rather than by the "few"-that subset ofNAMs who
were leisure-class. But Aristotle insists that this empirical demographic
phenomenon (many poor/few leisured) is strictly irrelevant to the formal definition of democracy: The key to democracy was that it was government in the interest of the poor; the fact that it was therefore also in
the interest of the majority was epiphenomenal for Aristotelian political
analysis.
If democracy is defined as "the rule of the poor," we might expect
Aristotle to suggest that democracy will flourish whenever the material
interests of the "poor" are clearly recognized by the "many" qua ruling
faction, and maximized accordingly. But he certainly does not think this
to be the case: Democracy does indeed, in Aristotle's thinking, depend
Conditions for Athenian Democracy
on the constitutional dissociation of political participation rights from
property ownership, and thus on the political domination of citizens
with relatively little property. But if"the poor" were actually to use their
political power to maximize their own material interests (by seizing and
redistributing the goods of the rich), this would constitute a condition
of fundamental injustice.
In Aristotle's thinking, the systematic practice of injustice is not
only morally wrong, it is also destructive of established order. Injustice
destabilizes the entire society and eventually leads to class-based civil
warfare. In the Politics, justice is defined as "the common good" (to tei
koinei sumpheron). This does not imply a utilitarian ideal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" but a distributive ideal of "to each
according to his desert."6 The redistribution of material goods by the
ruling faction is unjust because it is an example of one empowered segment (meros) of the society using its political authority to further its factional ends by seizing from others that which they deserve, and thereby
damaging the good of the s,ociety as a whole. The correct approach to
securing the long-term stability of a democratic regime, according
to Aristotle, is to devise judicial and political remedies for moderating
the tendency of the empowered many to engage in excessive (material)
self-aggrandizement, thereby preventing the interests of rich minority
and poor majority from diverging too radically.? To facilitate this desirable outcome, he offers various practical suggestions, at the level of
institutional innovation or modification, for encouraging or discouraging particular classes of citizens from active political participation
(Politics, Book 6).
Ifwe do not worry ourselves too much about the details ofAristotle's
plan for "moderating" democracy,8 there is much to be said for the
fundamentals of Aristotle's analysis of the conditions conducive to the
long-term functional success of Greek (and particularly, Athenian)
democracy. In terms of prior Greek history, the most radical innovation
of the Athenian democracy was that it made participating citizens of
genuinely poor NAMs. This meant that the citizenship included not
only the 35 to 45 percent (or so) ofNAMs who were economically "middling men" (metrioi)-sub-Ieisure-class yeoman farmers and other property
owners who worked for themselves. It also included the 50 to 60 percent
ofNAMs who were constrained to work (full or part time) for someone
else, and whose lack of property precluded their military participation in
the ranks ofthe heavy infantry (hoplites). By making men who were so very
unequal to one another in economic and social terms into political equals
(the vote of the day laborer now equal to that of the hnded aristocrat),
5
6
Josiah Ober
Athenian democracy introduced a new socioeconomic factor into the
political equation.
The "naturalness" of the condition in which society's political
rulers are also those persons whose ancestors had traditionally monopolized social and economic forms of power was put in doubt at
the moment of democracy's inauguration. The ancient Greek aristocratic ideal, in highly schematic terms (which I will seek to nuance
somewhat), was one in which society was neatly divided into two
camps. On the one side stood the kaloskagathos. He was clearly distinguished by his noble antecedents; by his considerable wealth, correctly
acquired (i.e., mostly inherited) and correctly invested (especially in
agricultural land); by his bearing, gait, and the physical beauty of his
tanned athlete's body; and by his ample leisure to participate in contests with his peers. These contests ranged from warfare to athletic
games to drinking games at elite symposia. He was distinguished, finally
and definitively, by his capacity to engage in political rule along with
this fellow kaloikagathoi, and to compete with them for high office
and honors.
On the other side of the aristocrat's binary social universe stood the
poneros: He was"nobody, son of nobody"; he possessed no ancestral store
of prestige or wealth; he worked at a trade, did day labor, or engaged in
sordid retail exchanges. He was effectively the slave of those who bought
his wares or paid his wages. His body was ugly: bent from labor and often
pale from work indoors (here, the untanned shoemaker provides the paradigm). The poneros lacked the leisure to improve his body via gymnastics, or his mind via poetry and music. His soul systematically corrupted
by his menial existence, he had no capacity (and should have no desire)
to engage in political affairs. The distinction between kaloikagathoi and
poneroi was-in the schematic aristocratic view of the world-overt and
self-evident at each and every point: The two human types inhabited the
same physical terrain but completely different conceptual spheres. It was
simply impossible to imagine ever making a mistake about who was who,
or who deserved what. The type-scene ofthe confrontation of kalosk 'agathos
alld !J()Jll'I'O'" is provided by the Thersill's passage ill Book 2 or the Iljl/ri.
in which the lowly upstart Thersites, who dares to raise his voice against
his social and moral superiors, is soundly trounced by lord Odysseus.
Homer approvingly notes that Thersites was the ugliest man on the
expedition and that Odysseus' physical abuse of him resulted in salutary
laughter all around. 9
With the advent of democracy, this seamless vision of unquestionable distinction was no longer sustainable. Now the vote of "nobody, son
~j:' "''''''vl,,'' h"rl nr~ciselv the same weight in deciding the outcome of a
Conditions for Athenian Democracy
debate as that of the noblest scion of the noblest house. Moreover
"nobody, son of nobody" might actually choose to raise his voice in
public-if not as a formal speaker in the citizen Assembly, then in concert with his fellow nobodies attending that Assembly as voting members, hooting and jeering at the distinguished men who dared to stand
up to speak. 10 The Thersites-type scene is thus inverted: Hurtful public
scorn and laughter is levied by the self-confident poneroi upon the upstart
kalosk agathos.
After the inauguration of democracy, if a nobleman's speech in the
public space of the citizen Assembly was regarded by the mass of the
poor as incompatible with their own demotic convictions and aspirations, their collective voice might simply drown out the nobleman's
individual voice. They might furthermore demand to hear a speaker
whose public views were more in tune with their own. Given the traditional competition among aristocrats for political distinction, this
"behavioral training" of public speakers eventually led (in the view
of the old elite) to a SOrt of political Gresham's Law, by which the
"good public speech" of adherents to traditional aristocratic norms was
driven out by the "bad public speech" of "demagogues"-upstarts of
dubious background who were willing to say whatever would please
the mob. ll
Much of the negative evaluation ofAthenian politics offered by elite
Greek writers, from Pseudo-Xenophon and Thucydides in the fifth century B.C. through Plutarch in the second century C.E., is influenced by
more or less sophisticated versions of this general conception of "what
went wrong" in democratic politics. While I certainly do not share the
aristocratic evaluative stance of these elite writers, I think that their
general description of democratic Athens, as characterized by demotic
control of elite public behavior and (especially) elite political speech, is
accurate and that it helps us to explain how Athenian democracy functioned in practice. 12
The disgust of the traditional aristocrat at the social leveling that
the political enfranchisement of the lower orders brought in its train
is hrilliantly salirized in Tht'()phr:I.~IIIS' late {Ollflh-ccIHllry work
on Characters. Theophrastus sketches an amusing portrait of the
Oligarchic Man, who struts about in public dressed ostentatiously and
ranting against the entire "race of demagogues" (26.4-6). He demands
plenary powers for elected government officials. He seeks to display
his education by citing Homer, although he actually knows only the
verse praising monarchy.13 He calls for the elite to meet in private in
order to discuss political matters and asserts that they should give up
public participation in democratic politics so as to avoid being either
7
Conditions Tor
8
f\[llellldll UeIIH)U
acy
Josiah Ober
insulted or honored by the democracy. He claims that he cannot
grasp why gentlemen should take any part in communal affairs in
the democratic polis-either "we" or "they" must rule, and that's all
there is to it (26.3). He disparages the ordinary people both as ingrates and as slaves to gifts and bribes. And he feels himself shamed
when "some scrawny unwashed type" sits next to him in the Assembly (26.5).
Notably, Theophrastus wrote at the very end of the period of
the fully independent democracy: It is safe to say that his disgruntled
kaloskagathos-who regarded democracy as a gross insult to the natural order of the world, an order in which aristocrats dominated all
spheres of life and lower-class poneroi stayed in their servile placehad his counterparts throughout thc earlier history of Athenian
democracy. At least some of these intransigent would-be aristocrats
never forgot that it was the establishment of the democracy that had
fatally disrupted the "natural" order of things. And some of them
would seek to "put things right" if they thought they had a chance
to do so.
I would suggest that Athenian elites were quite right to see democracy and the hegemony of an aristocratic conception of the natural
sociopolitical order as mutually exclusive ideological conditions. On
this reasoning, among the necessary preconditions for the original
emergence of the Athenian democracy was a rift in the unchallenged
belicf that aristocrats were the only potential actors on the political
stage. And this in turn suggests that the historical scenario I have
sketched, in which a political regime predicated on a fully "naturalized"
aristocratic world view is immediately replaced by a self-conscious
democracy manifesting a completely different conception of human
worth and social desert, must be an oversimplification. The transition
to full democracy would seem to demand an intermediate step in
which the serene surface of the ideology of aristocratic naturalism is
broken. Moreover, remembering Aristotle's arguments, we can see that
democracy's long-term survival as a political system will necessarily be
predicated on a relatively high level of social stability, and that this
stability will depend on the practical capacity of thc dcmocratic rcgime
to establish a counterideology, one suited to aligning the perceived
interests of a significant proportion of the "elite few" with those of the
"ordinary many." It is only given this alignment of interests that the
recidivist analogues ofTheophrastus' Oligarchic Man will remain marginalized figures of fun rather than becoming dangerous agents of
political instability.
The history ofAthenian democracy demonstrates the overall success
of the effort to reconcile what might seem at first blush to be irreconcilably opposed social interests. With the establishment of democracy, the
lower-class "many" had unexpectedly stepped onto the historical stage
and asserted the startling claim that the poor man had as much right to
share in political life as his wealthy compatriot. Because that claim was
in fact made palatable to a significant portion of Athens' social and economic elite, the Athenian democratic state was not debilitated by incessant class warfare. Plato (Republic 422e-23a) famously claimed that
every existing Greek polis was in fact two poleis, one rich and one poor,
locked in eternal strife. But, in practice, the Athenian democracy proved
strikingly stable over time: Aristotle states explicitly that democracy
is the most moderate of the three commonly existing regime types (Politics, 1289b2-5).
The conditions ofAthenian democratic flourishing centered on the
pragmatic integration of elite Athenians into a political regime dominated by the non-elite many. That regime offered honors and positions
ofleadership to elite individuals who performed their public duties at a
consistently high level while simultaneously conforming to a demotic
standard of public behavior and speech. By the same token, the democratic regime humiliated and not infrequently punished would-be leaders if they failed in either accomplishment or public deportment.
Because a workable balance was not only struck but main tained through
an effective (although informal and "ideological") apparatus of public
discourse, social practice, and civic education, the democracy proved
highly resilient: The Athenians twice (410 and 403 B.C.) restored
democracy in the face of adverse circumstances after antidemocratic
conspirators briefly succeeded in establishing oligarchic regimes. 14 But
it remains to be seen how the democracy could have come into being in
the first place, in the face of the presumed dominance of the ideology
of aristocratic naturalism. We will return to that question at the end of
this chapter.
Happily, the history of democracy at Athens is (by the standards of
pre-modern political organizations) relatively well documented by wellinformed contcmporary or ncar-contcmporary historians (Herodotus,
Thucydides, Xenophon, Ps-Aristotle) and documentary cvidence (especially inscriptions of decrees and laws passed by the democratic government). We possess a rich corpus of speeches delivered in democratic
assemblies and courtrooms, a number of tragedies and comedies staged
by the democratic state and attended by a large cross section of the citizenty, and contemporary political commentaries, ranging from polemical
10
Josiah Ober
tracts (Pseudo-Xenophon) to careful (if critical) philosophical analyses
(Plato, Aristotle). There is also a large body of later ancient work that
bears directly on the history of Athenian democracy (notably the Lives
ofPlutarch), although this postclassical material must be approached with
great care.
In sum, the evidence for the conditions that sustained Athenian
democracy is quite good. And recent scholarship has gone a long way
in specifying the institutional changes and social negotiations that preserved the tenuous balance between the various competing interests
represented within Athenian citizen society (and among citizens and
noncitizens). Along with the relationship between mass audiences
and elite political leaders sketched here, recent scholarship has clarified
other significant aspects of Athens' democratic society: Freedom and
respect for the dignity of the individual citizen were established as
cornerstones of the democratic public order. ls Athenian law and legal
practices encouraged contestants to convert private disputes into matters of public concern, thereby opening them to public scrutiny and
subjecting them to the authority of judgments rendered by public arbitrators and mass juries. Through this process, traditional conceptions
of reciprocity and revenge were successfully incorporated into an overarching democratic regime of discipline and punishment. 16 The Athenian
military complex quickly adapted to include the poorest of citizens in
key military roles (notably, as rowers on war galleys) and to shift the
primary burdens (and honors) of financing military operations to the
wealthiest citizens-in the process, vastly enhancing the Athenian
capacity to wage war effectively at a distance from the home territory
of Attica. I?
Non-citizens-foreign-born men, Athenian women, and even
slaves-were folded into the ambit of the democratic social and institutional order. There is considerable debate among scholars over
whether that enfolding was predicated on a hypertrophy of NAM
exclusivity or whether it entailed a progressive amelioration of exclusionary distinctions between citizens and "others." It would be
absurd to claim that all residents of Athenian tetritory were COlltelH
with their lot: Athenian slaves took advantage of the disruptions of
the later Peloponnesian War to escape in droves (Thucydides 7.27.5).
Yet, faced by the oligarchy of 404 B.C., many ofAthens' resident aliens
and slaves joined forces with the NAMs, risking their lives in fighting to restore democracy. The ambivalent relationship between
Athenian citizens and their slaves was manifest in the function of the
public shrine of Theseus (mythical founder of democracy) as a formallv accepted place of refuge for runaway slaves. In any event, the po-
Conditions for Athenian Democracy
tential of non-citizens to subvert the democratic political order remained latent; democratic Athens (unlike aristocratic/oligarchic
Sparta, discussed subsequently) never felt constrained to institutionalize a regime of military terror aimed at suppressing local non-citizen
ambitions. 18
A rich array of intermediary Athenian civic and civil organizations
responded to the democratic regime, either by alignment with egalitarian democratic norms or by providing private-realm spaces in which
alternative norms could be celebrated. 19 The physical space of the democratic city was reconfigured to reflect the more equitable access to public
goods characteristic of democratic thinking. 20 State-sponsored festivals,
parades, public sacrifice and feasting, and dramatic performances-all of
which had deep roots in formerly elite-controlled religious rituals-were
all brought under democratic institutional authority and served variously
as loci for the display of social solidarity and (in the case of drama) for
sharp and salutary critical interrogations of public values. 21 New literary
genres and subgenres, from historiography to oratory to philosophical
dialogue emerged and evolved under the influence of democratic public
discourse. 22
In brief, it is clear that classical Athenian governmental and legal
institutions, political ideology and public speech, social practices, and
high culture all participated actively in creating a distinctive set of values and practices-at once affected by and important for the robustness
ofdemocratic Athenian politics. Plato's terminology may remain strange
to us, but we can begin to see what he meant when he claimed in the
Republic that the "democratic soul" was the microcosmic individual
analogue to the socially diverse macrocosmic collectivity that was the
democratic city. Although it may be impossible to specify the priority of
these various "sustaining conditions," they can be described in enough
analytic detail to make the study of democratic Athens worthwhile for
comparative purposes. 23
By contrast to the conditions sustaining democracy, the conditions
that undermine democracy have, on the whole, concerned recent Greek
historical scholarship kss than they did earlier generations of scholars.
The, by now, shopworn notions that a growth in democratic "radicalism" destabilized the democracy, that political leaders after Pericles abandoned concern for the public good and treated the public sphere as
nothing more than a system of private spoils, and that class tensions and
a growth in selfish individualism among the populace at large undermined civic solidarity, have been exposed as tendentious fictions by a
spate of detailed work on the fourth- and third-century phases of the
democracy.24
11
12
Conditions for Athenian Democracy
Josiah Ober
The twO late-fifth-century oligarchic coups d'etat (in 411 B.C.
at a time of crisis in the Peloponnesian War, and in 404 B.C. following Athens' loss of that war) certainly did reveal the depths of antidemocratic sentiment within some sectors of the Athenian elite. But
the denouement of the first of these political counterrevolutions was
more notable for demonstrating the depths of shared sentiment
between the genuinely poor citizens and the "middling men" of
hoplite status, and for the unwillingness of the latter to join in a longterm alliance with extreme oligarchs. The second oligarchic interlude was short, brutal, and nasty, proving to most Athenians (including Plato: Seventh Letter 324d-25a; and the school of Aristotle:
Athenllion Politeia 41-42) the moral bankruptcy of the antidemocratic dite. Thus, ironically, counterrevolution pointed unerringly to
the rela~ive moral superiority and choice-worthiness of the democratic
alternanve.
The fact that Athens was defeated by Philip of Macedon in 338 B.C.
at Chaeronea, dnd subsequendy failed to maincain a consistenc inckpendence vis avis Philip's successors on the Macedonian throne, is now
less commonly attributed to the Athenian democracy's internal failings
than to the diplomatic and military skills of Macedon's leaders and to
their access to vast reserves of material and human resources. The final
end of democracy in the Greek world is not, by the same token, now
understood as a product ofdemocracy's inherent internal contradictions,
but as a long-term result of the general preference of powerful imperial
entities (Macedonian and especially Roman) for dealing with oligarchies:
for small bodies of easily controlled elites over unruly and independentminded democratic multitudes.
The remainder of this essay returns to a previously raised question:
What conditions were necessary for the original emergence ofAthenian
democracy? I have suggested that a key prior condition was the disturbance in the uncontested sway of an integrated aristocratic ideology
that saw political rule, social relations, and human corporeal appearance as homologous aspects of an unquestionable natural order. Ex
hypothesi, that disturbance must have occurred some time before the
democracy was established. There are various contending dates for the
"origins of democracy" at Athens, but it seems that by far the best candidate is 508 B.C. 25 That year saw the demotic uprising of the Athenian
revolution and the sweeping governmental reforms subsequently inaugurated by Cleisthenes. And so we should seek a lapse in aristocratic
ideological hegemony some time in the "archaic" period, the age before
508 B.C.
i
t
r:
~
.
Regrettably, the (predemocratic) archaic period ofAthenian history
(and Greek history generally) is poorly documented in comparison with
the classical (democratic) era of the fifth and fourth centuries. And thus
any analysis of the conditions attending democracy's origins will necessarily be provisional, and established only at a high order of generality.
That said, the answer to the chicken/egg problem of whether democracy was a necessary precondition to challenging aristocratic ideological hegemony or a product of that challenge may lie in rejecting the
implicit premise of the argument, by abandoning the notion that there
ever was a Greek historical era in which the "naturalistic" and binary
aristocratic ideal reigned completely uncontested. If the aristocratic
ideal was always contestable and was periodically concested, then the
question of democratic origins changes somewhat alld I>ecomc.:s rather
less mechanistic. Rather than asking "What predemocratic event disturbed the previously unflawed ideological surface and thereby precipitated democracy?" we may now ask, "Why did the contestation of
binary aristocratic ideals wke the specifically 'clc.:lllocratic' f<>rrn ofcoullting allNAMs as participatory citizens in 508 in Athens, and not before
or elsewhere?"
The relevant history begins at least as early as the eighth century B.C.,
with the explosive cultural, social, and economic changes that ended the
long Dark Age (ca. 1200-750 B.C.). The Greek world in the eighth centutywitnessed the inauguration ofalphabetic literacy, a relatively steep rise
in population, a wave of colonization that established new Greek cities
through much of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coastal zones, and dramatic changes in art, architecture, and burial practice. The wide-ranging
changes of the eighth century presumably threatened whatever structures
of aristocratic authority had developed after the collapse of Mycenaean
civilization around 1200 B.C. But because the Dark Age was an illiterate
period, only mute archaeological evidence and the social memory preserved
by Homeric poetry are available for specifying the extent and nature of
Dark Age aristocratic authority. The evidence is far from transparent bur
points to a hierarchical society centered around aristocratic big men who
controlled the distribution of goods and honors, including the right of
formal buria1. 26
In a series of publications, Ian Morris has demonstrated that in
the eighth century the number of graves in Athenian cemeteries far outstripped the rise in population. He has persuasively argued that Athenian
burial patterns in the eighth and sevench centuries reveal a seesawing social conflict over the right to "formal burial": The initial eighthcentury opening up of burial rights to a wider cross seCtion of Athenian
13
14
Josiah Ober
society was followed by a seventh-centuty return to restrictions on burial.
Morris suggests that formal burial implied full inclusion in the society
(i.e., the social rank that would eventually be equated with citizenship).
Morris has recently suggested that the ideological struggle over membership in society that he detects in the material record can also be
traced in archaic (seventh- and sixth-century) Greek lyric poetry, a
literature written by and for elite audiences. On the one side in this
intra-elite conflict stood those aristocrats who sought to establish for
themselves a monopoly of social and political capital by the display and
conspicuous consumption of luxury goods (especially those imported
from the high civilizations of the East). The proponents of this "habrosune ideology" emphasized interregional ties between the elite members
of a cosmopolitan stratum of Greek and nearby non-Greek societies.
On the other side were those elite Creeks who favored stTongly local
(intra-po/ijo) tit:s that extendt:d flirly dt:ep into the "middling ranks" of
the local polis population; this "metrios ideology" disdained ostentation,
embracing a system of values and behavior centered on restraint, military discipline, and similarity among members ofa relatively broad cross
section of local property-holding society. Morris suggests that this
metrios ideology had gained ascendance throughout much of the Greek
world by the sixth century and provided the preconditions for the establishment of a variety of types of republican (broad-based oligarchic)
governments. 27
At Athens, t1)e victory of something like Morris' metrios ideal was
marked by the reforms inaugurated by Solon, who was appointed
chief magistrate (archon) with special powers of arbitration during a
period of social crisis in 594 B.C. Among the noteworthy reforms associated with Solon was the abolition of intra-polis debt bondage; Solon
effectively created the status of citizen at Athens by his retroactive
law forbidding any Athenian to enslave another. Citizenship was
thus established as an immunity from coercive forced labor: freedom
from being enslaved within one's own homeland. Although Solon was
later celebrated as the original father of Athenian democracy, he certainly intended the Athenian elite to retain the balance of power
in Atht:nian society. Solon's liberation of the poort:st Athenians from
the risk of slavery was a precondition to the demotic agency implicit in democracy, but he certainly did not intend to eliminate the
primary importance of wealth-status within the body politic. Quite
to the contrary, Solon established formal census classes, assigning
differential political rights to Athenians corresponding to each individual's annual income (as measured in agricultural produce or its
equivalent).2M
Conditions for Athenian Democracy
}
t
'
The Solonian reforms left lower-class Athenians with only minimal
access to the institutiol)s of political power. But whatever clarity the
renascent seventh-century Athenian exclusivist aristocracy had been able
to establish in terms of the binary distinction between a distinguished
few and an ordinary crowd of undistinguished "many" was blurred by
Solon's reforms. In the space between the kaloik'agathoi and the poneroi,
Solon interposed a relatively large body of metrioi: "middling and moderate" men who owned enough land to qualify for service as heavily
armed infantrymen. By 490 B.C. (the battle of Marathon), there were
about 9,000 Athenian hopJites, probably amounting to a third of the
NAM population.
While some aristocratic Athenians who clove to the habrosune
ideology might regard the middle-rank hoplite as nothing more than
a jJOllcros, elitt: Adlcnialls who embraced the nlrtrioJ itkology were
t:vidt:lltly willing to accept the men ohhe middle as sharers in the public realm. Solon perhaps hoped that Athens would develop into a
republican government based on a relatively moderate (i.e., broadbased, low property qualification) oligarchy of the sort that flourished
elsewhere in the late-archaic Greek world. Among the republican
alternatives imaginatively open to Athenians in the post-Solonian era
was archaic Sparta, where the hoplite warriors constituted of themselves a closed body of citizen "Similars," defined by their commitment to a regime of strict discipline, military education, and social
COntrol. That regime denied the existence of meaningful distinctions
between members of the in-group of Similars, while subjecting the
residents of Spartan-controlled territory outside that elite group to
intentionally degrading forms of servitude and systematic military
terrorism. 29
But in the event, Athens developed quite differently from other
Greek republics and very differently from Sparta. The Solonian legislation on slavery established (or at least signaled) as illegitimate the
absolute subordination of lower class native Athenians, and thus
gave no support to the growth of an exclusionary Sparta-like solidarity among "middling" Athenians. In the decades after Solon, and especially after the successful coup tl'~tat of the lyram j>isistraeus
(546 B.C.), new festivals and new legal institutions were inaugurated
that served to emphasize the conceptual unity of the entire native
population of Attica, a unity that further blurred the lines between
kaloik'agathoi, metrioi, and poneroi. The tyrants (Pisistratus, and later
his sons) sought to emphasize the connection ofAthenians of all social
classes with Athena as patron goddess, with Athens as a sociocultural
entity, and with themselves as goddess-favored patrons of the city.
1~
16
Josiah Ober
They were also, at first, careful to accommodate the ambitions of key
members of the traditional aristocracy. After one of Pisistratus' sons
was assassinated (the killing motivated, as Thucydides points out, by
individuals seeking vengeance for a private slight), however, the tyrannical regime became more oppressive and lost its broad base of support. Without support from the local infantrymen and dependent on
hired mercenary cavalry, the tyranny proved vulnerable. A Spartan
expeditionary force invaded Attica and expelled the surviving tyrant
in 510 B.C.
The collapse of tyrannical authority opened a confused political
field of play. The two preconditions of relatively open "republican"
social relations and a political ideology that we may (retrospectively)
see as enabling the emergence of democracy were in place by the late
sixth century 1I.c:. But f;lirly similar conditions pertained elsewhere in
Greece. The tlctual move from broad-based oligarchy co tkmocracy
cannot be explained without resort to historical contingency. Athenian
history before 508 B.C. had presented various distinctive features:
Athens controlled a very large territory for a city-state and supported
a large population; Solon was a particularly astute lawgiver; and tyranny
at Athens emerged later than elsewhere in mainland Greece and was
accompanied by a thriving trade in painted pottery and a nascent
silver-mining industry. But the basic pattern of territorial consolidation under aristocr:uic leadership, civil strife, lawgivers. and tyrants was
not atypical for an archaic Greek polis. As the historian Herodotus
points out (5.78), before the democratic revolution, Athens had not
been a particularly notable polis or an important player on the wider
Greek scene.
After the events of 508 and the establishment of the new democracy, Athens diverged quickly from the Greek norm. Athens moved
rapidly to prominence in inter-polis affairs by crushing regional rivals,
building a huge navy, providing key leadership in the Persian wars,
and then creating the first true Aegean empire. By the middle of the
fifth century, Athens was the preeminent center of Aegean trade and
culture.
The full articulation of democratic governmental and legal institutions was obviously not accomplished in a moment; those institutions continued to develop throughout the fifth century. But it is,
I believe, more correct to see Athenian flourishing as resulting from the
original establishment of democracy than it is to regard democratic
institutions as incidental by-products ofAthens' imperial growth. The
inauguration of the democracy meant a dramatic increase in the
Conditions for Athenian Democracy
human resources available to the state. The potential military population doubled from roughly half to the entire NAM population,
enabling the explosive emergence of Athens as a naval power. Moreover,' it was no longer necessary for the enfranchised NAM population
to waste its energy seeking to control the ambitions of "unenfranchised
NAMs," since the latter category literally disappeared. 30 Finally, the
incorporation into the political body of those who necessarily worked
for others contributed to the atrophy of traditional aristocratic constraints on individual economic activity. As recent scholarship has
emphasized, the Athenian economy of the late fifth and fourth centuries manifests strikingly "modern" features. And these must be
attributed, in some measure, to the emergence of frankly democratic
social values. 3' In brief, 508 and its immediate aftermath was a watershed in Athenian and, indeed, in Creek hisrory. Athens became :l
great state upon bccoming a dcmocracy. So what was lhc SC(!lIC1H.;C
of events that precipitated the unpredictable and decisive political
change?
The Athenian political stage in the years immediately following the
expulsion of the tyrant in 510 H.C. was dominated by two ambi tious
aristocrats, Isagoras and Cleisthenes. Although the state of our evidence
does not allow us to align these men or their supporters neatly along a
habrosunelmetrios axis, Isagoras clearly advocated a more exclusionary
approach to elite rule, yet he found enough support among the "middling men" to win the archonship for the year 508. Whether out of
principle or desperation, Cleisthenes turned to the remainder of the
NAM population, "making the demos [i.e., the poneroi] his comrades"
(Herodotus 5.66.2). In response, Isagoras called in military support
from Sparta. He then exiled Cleisthenes and the more prominent of his
supporters. Isagoras also sought to dissolve Athens' ruling council,
intending to replace the sitting councilors with 300 of his own supporters. Unexpectedly, the councilmen resisted and the demos ofAthens
rose up in arms, quickly besieging Isagoras and his Spartan allies on the
Acropolis. The Spartans surrendered; Isagoras was expelled from the
city. Cleisthenes was then recalled to Athens and inaugurated the reforms
that established the institutional basis of democratic government. A
year later the decisive Athenian military victory over an alliance of several regional rivals marked the beginning of Athens' ascent to Aegeanwide prominence.
The import of my brief recapitulation of the events of 508 is this:
Although the establishment of "republican/moderate-oligarchic" social
and ideological conditions in the archaic period was a prerequisite for
17
18
Josiah Ober
the establishment of democracy at Athens, democracy only came inro
being with the sudden eruption onto the historical stage of the demosthe undifferentiated body ofNAMs. It is only when the demos, rather
than "the aristocrats" or "the metrioi," became an actor in its own right
(at the Acropolis siege) that democracy was born. Cleisthenes' institutional reforms did not create democracy; they gave sustainable substance
ro the political agency claimed by the demos in its own name, through
its own act of revolutionary violence. By that act, the demos rejected the
exclusionary conception of politics that had recently been championed
by Isagoras. Thc poneroi bccame participants in a common cntcrprise, a
unitary regime. They joined their more privileged compatriots as citizcns by forcefully scizing, not by being granted, a share in the control of
Alht'lls' hit'. I.!
That Lite has continued, in some sense, down to the present day.
The hisrorical conditions that yielded Athenian democracy were perhaps
unique; certainly they were ro somc extent contingent and unpredictable, bur not unrcpeatable. Once democracy was securely in place, the
model ofAthenian democracy became a factor in world political history.
Because the new democratic state proved wildly successful on the international scene and spectacularly productive ofliterary, artistic, and philosophical culture, the Athenian model was highly influential and never
forgotten. Any post-classical attempt to assert the perfect naturalness of
arisrocratic or monarchical government had to face the potentially disruptive memory of democratic Athens. Concerted attempts by antidemocratic intellectuals to blacken the memory of Athens' political
experiment did indeed ensure that there was no attempt to apply the
Athenian model directly to a post-classical regime. But ironically, those
who sought to show "what went wrong" in Athens kept alive the conceptual possibility of popular government and the hope that it might
someday be "done right. "33
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20
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NOTES
1. On the origins and use of the word demokratia: Hansen 1991. Robinson 1997 collects
the exiguous evidence for early Greek democracies ourside Athens. I remain unconvinced
that any genuine democracy was established before that of Athens. On the origins of
democracy in Alhens (in 50S II.C.), St'C below. Democracy at Athens afrcr }22 II.C:
Habicht 1997.
2. I discuss Ariswcle on dcmocracy, and thc relationship betwcen thc ideal and commonly
existing regimes, in considerably more detail in Ober 1998, chapter 6.
3. Ober 1998 :1Cf\ues this general point in detail.
·1. The "dealh of dt'monacy" in the ancient world has beell pushed back by recellt scholarship
on rhe political t'xperience of the Hdknistic world, but even oprimisrs tend ro agree thaI'
democracies did not survive the era of the high empire; see Ph. Gauthier, "Les cites hellenistiques," in Hansen 1993. For proco-democratic rhought in pre-eighteench-cencury Europe,
see T. Rabb, this volume.
5. Politics 1290a40-b3; cf. 1290b 17-20. Finley 1970 remains an essemial incroduction co the
problem, although see fur mer De Ste. Croix 1983, 69-81. Ober, "Aristotle's Political
Sociology: Class, Status, and Order in the Politics," in Lord and O'Connor 1991; and
Meikle 1995.
6. Distributive jusrice in Aristode: D. Keyt, "Ariscode's Theory of Discributive Justice," in
Miller and Keyt 1991.
7. For the problem of self-aggrandizement (pleonexia) in Ariscode, and earlier Greek thought,
see Balot 2001.
8. The plan ends in making moderate democracy vireually indistinguishable from light-handed
oligarchy: Ober 1998,334-338.
9. Homer, Iliad, 2.232-300. On the Thersites incidem, with reeem bibliograph!" see fureher
Thalmann 1998. Ideals of Greek ariscocrats: Donlan 1999; Starr 1992.
10. See, e.g., Plutarch, Lift ofDemosthenes, 6.3.
11. Connor 1971 offers a detailed discussion of the progressive dislocation from Athenian
democratic politics of the habits of self-display and self-legitimization associated with the
traditional nobility.
12. The relationship between elite leadership and demotic audiences in democratic Athens, and
the response of elite writers to that relationship, are the respective themes of Ober 1989 and
Ober 1998.
13. The reference is to Ilia". 2.204; cf. Ariswcle Polilics. 1292a 13.
I~. Civic education: Ober, "The lJd,ale over Civic Educatioll ill l)emocr:uic Athells,"
in Too 2001.
15. Freedom: See essays by Hansen and Wood in Ober and Hedrick 1996; Ober 2000.
16. Recent important work on Athenian law includes: Carcledge, Millen et al. 1990; Todd
1993; Cohen 1995; Johnstone 1999; Christ 1998; AJlen 2000.
17. Military: essays by Hanson and Srrauss in Ober and Hedrick 1996; Ober 1996, chapter 5.
For a differing view: K. Raaflaub, chapters 3 and 5 in Morris and Raaflaub 1998.
18. Citizens and non-citizens in Athens: Christensen 1984; Carcledge 1993; Ober 1996, chapter 11; Cohen 2000; Allen 2000; Humphreys 1993; Pancrson 1998; Whitehead 1977. It
is sometimes claimed (recendy by Rose 1999) that the fifth-ceneury democracy depended
on military-supported imperialism and thus on the systematic exploitation of excraterricorial colonial subjects, but the nature of fifth-ceneury Athenian imperialism is hody contested. The fact that democracy antedated the empire, and flourished for 80 years after
Athens' loss of empire speaks against any direct correlation between imperialism and
democratic politics.
19. Jones 1999 argues that all Athenian civic organizations evolved in response co democracy, in
some cases to provide an alternative to democratic egalitarianism.
20. Democratic space: Schuller, Hoepfner et al. 1989; Hoepfner, Schwandner et al. 1994.
21. Processions: Connor 1987 and Connor in Ober and Hedrick 1996; Neils and Hood
Museum ofArt 1992. Feasting: Paneel 1992. Democracy and drama: Goldhill and
Osborne 1999.
22. On democracy and philosophy: Too 1995; Nightingale 1995; Yunis 1996; Euben 1997;
Ober 1998. On literary theory: Ford (2000).
23. Such is the argument ofseveral collections intended co relate the work of political theorists
and classicists: Euben 1990; Dunn 1992; Euben, Wallach er al. 1994; Ober and
Hedrick 1996.
24. The "crisis" of the fourth-ceneury democratic polis was major motif of Greek historical
scholarship in 1960s, but had becollle lIluch less of a conceCll by the 1990s; compare, for
example, Mosse 1962 with Mosse 1995. See, fureher, Eder 1995.
25. Recent survey of the debate over the date of origin of Athenian democracy: Morris and
Raaflaub 1998.
26. Speculations 011 Dark age political aurhoriry: Sal/arcs 1991: Morris 19i17 alld Morri, 2()()();
Whitley 1991. Sarah Morris, ill Morgan (forthcomillg), suggesls pruw-democratic insticutional structures as early as rhe 13ronze Age, but evidence is very slight.
27. Morris 1987; Morris 1992; Morris 1996; Morris 2000.
28. Solonian reforms: R. Wallace, in Morris and Raaflaub 1998, emphasizing the democratic
aspect and citing relevant bibliography.
29. Sparea: Cardedge 1979; Careledge 1987; Cardedge 2001.
30. By conerast, Athens' aristocratic/oligarchic rival, Sparea, suffered from endemic manpower
shortages; the restricted body ofSparcan citizens expended much of their time and energy
suppressing the ambitions of an extensive population of disenfranchised NAMs. Although
21
22
Josiah Ober
Sparta and its allies defeated Athens in rhe Peloponnesian War, Sparta fell apart as a society
soon there3fter, 3nd never recovered from the milir3ty defe3r 3t Lellcrr3 in 371 H.C. By
contrast, Athenian society recovered quickly from what seemed a catastrophic loss in the
Peloponnesian War.
3 J. "Modern" features of Athenian economy: French 1964; Cohen 1992. Contrast Millett 1991.
For a good overview of the question, see Morris 1994. Hostility of aristocratic "economic
values" to coined money 3nd moneymakers: Kurke 1999.
32. See, further, Ober 1996, chapter 4; Ober, "Revolution Marters," in Morris and
Raaflaub 1998.
33. History of hostility to Arhens: Roberrs 1994.
Chapter Two
Republic and Democracy:
On Early Modern Origins
of Democratic Theory
r,
MAURIZIO VIROll
i
arly modern political theorists have very little to say about democracy, ifby democracy we mean a political constitution based on rules
that confer the power to take collective decisions to a (more or less)
large number of the members of the group and respect basic liberal
rights. I Some of these political theorists, however, were republicans, in
the sense that they supported a republican political constitution. By
republic or popular government, they meant a political constitution that
affirms the principle of the rule of law and assigns sovereign power to
a collective body, as opposed to a monarchy or principality: "All the
states, all the dominions that have held sway over men, have been either
republics or principalities," as Machiavelli put it in the opening lines
of The Prince. Republics, in turn, can be either democratic or aristocratic. In democratic republics, sovereign power belongs to the majority of the citizens; in aristocratic republics, sovereign power belongs to
a minority. Although both scholars and non-scholars prefer to use the
term democracy, it would be more correct to use the term democratic
republic, because contemporary democratic polities are in fact democratic republics.
The implication of these historical and conceptual considerations is
that democratic theory is a special kind of republican theory. It also
means that early modern republican political wisdom is a vital source
for understanding the conditions and the problems of democratic
societies. In this essay I intend to explore the contribution that early
modern republican theory has to offer concerning the relevance of the
international context for the institution and flourishing of democratic
societies, the role ofeconomic and social conditions, and the interpretation
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