Download 042. Athens as Polis

Athens as Polis
The Greeks were the first ancient civilization to realize that the problems of a community
were usually caused by the people of the community. They also were the first to seek rational
solutions to these problems and, as a community of citizens, thus turned to law as the highest
achievement of the human mind. Greeks came to view law as the embodiment of justice and
sought to apply laws equally to rich and poor, powerful and weak alike. No polis achieved this
aim more than did Athens, the birthplace of democracy in Western Civilization and thus in the
world. The principle of political freedom became central to Athenian politics but remained an
alien idea in the Near East as well as closer to home. Some Greek city states shunned this
principle, and even the Athenians abused it.
Athenian legends named Theseus as the founder of Athens. He is said to have been the
first to organize the villages of Attica, the southeast corner of mainland Greece, into a city-state.
You know Theseus as the travelling adventurer who sailed to Crete to defeat the Minotaur, a
cannibalistic half-man, half-bull monster. His victory was heralded on Athenian vases, and
Theseus was transformed into the hero who slew monsters and fought criminals in order to
preserve civilization. Athens viewed itself as, “the school of Greece,” and thus trumpeted the
virtues of their founder who launched them on their “civilizing mission.” Athenians could not
help but view themselves as superior to barbarians and even to other Greeks. Their skill in
agriculture was shared with their neighbors and also contributed to a population boom around
700 B. C. in their own “mother city.” One theory attributes Athens’s being the birthplace of
democracy to this sudden increase in population after the Dark Ages. Having so recently been
totally equal in the face of frontier-like conditions, the rapid rise in the number of citizens
launched Athens as a metropolis that would always have to listen to its people.
A series of early political alliances among the elites of Athens culminated in a foiled
attempt on the part of one Cylon to achieve tyrannical power. To restore order after this turmoil,
Athenians appointed one of their own, Draco, in 621 B. C. The soldier class in Athens backed
Draco and urged him to establish a code of laws promoting stability. Draco’s laws had the
opposite effect, though, because of their harshness. The details are vague, but Athenians ever
after remembered Draco as having lived up to his name, which means dragon, or serpent. We
still remember Draco in that any system of repressive laws can be referred to as draconian. An
economic crisis accompanied the overthrow of Draco in which several farmers fell into such debt
that they had to sell their land and work for more successful farmers creating an automatic
aristocracy. Before the crisis was over, Athenians were even being sold into slavery to pay off
their debts. Remember the large population, however. The increasing numbers of impoverished
peasants brought Athens to the brink of civil war.
War was avoided, incredibly, by the nomination by the aristocrats of a poet named Solon
to a position of leadership in 594 B. C. His poetry expressed a high political and ethical spirit in
which he stated the dictum roughly paraphrased as “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.”
In other words, injustice indirectly affected everyone. Justice underlies the human community
just as orderliness was the distinguishing feature of the wider universe, he said. Solon taught the
Greeks to seek a life of moderation and the concept that written law should be in harmony with
the natural order of things. Individuals that disrupted this order threatened all others. While he
sounds like he could be winding himself up to unleash more draconian laws, he actually was
loved because he himself loved life so much as to be almost unique among his fellow Athenians
in wanting to live a long life into old age.
Solon recognized that the aristocrats had abused their power. He set about restoring the
sick Athenian society to health by restraining these nobles and improving the lot of the poor. To
achieve this goal he limited the size of estates, freed Athenians enslaved for debt, brought back
Athenians who had been sold abroad, but fell short of confiscating the land of the nobles as some
radicals demanded. Solon saw that Athens was not quite ready for self-government. In a
practical compromise he let the aristocrats retain their seats in the ecclesia, or Assembly, but
now permitted all classes, even the poorest, to join this unique Athenian institution. He even let
wealthy commoners attain some of the higher offices in the state who had lacked this ability
because they lacked noble birth. Solon undermined the traditional rights of the large landowners,
opened the Assembly to all male citizens, and thus initiated the transformation of Athens from an
aristocratic oligarchy toward a democracy.
Solon is thus known as Solon, the Reformer. He even reformed Athenian agriculture by
convincing everybody their future lay in wine and olive oil as exports since the soil of Attica was
too poor to grow grain well. The proximity of Athens to the sea contributed mightily to its future
dominance as a commercial and naval power, a fact which Solon predicted. He required all
fathers to teach their sons a trade in order to encourage Athenian industry. He granted
citizenship to foreign craftsmen in order to entice them to migrate to Athens and improve its
technical skill. Under Solon, pottery works were begun for which Athens would become
famous. These vessels were adorned first with black figures on the red clay, and then in a burst
of creative genius Athenian potters reversed and made the figures red on black backgrounds!
Then, to prove that his statesmanship rested on the highest moral principles, Solon retired. He
resisted all efforts to make him a tyrant and insisted that only the rule of law could hold the polis
together.
Not all Athenians of influence were men of such scruples. Capitalizing on some
remaining disputes among the aristocratic clans of Athens, one of the aristocrats named
Pisistratus made himself a one-man power by 546 B. C. As soon as he was tyrant, Pisistratus
exiled all the aristocrats who had opposed him and surrounded himself with a loyal bodyguard.
To assuage the fears of the populous, he improved the city’s water supply, gave away the land
confiscated from his exiled enemies to the poor, and granted loans from his treasury to struggling
farmers. It worked. Casting himself as continuing the tradition of Solon, Pisistratus attended to
the needs of the masses in a deliberate attempt to pacify them.
Pisistratus, the Tyrant did much good for Athens. His great achievement was the
promotion of cultural life. By initiating grand architectural projects, encouraging sculptors and
painters, arranging for the public recitals of the Homeric epics, and founding festivals that
included dramatic performances, Pisistratus made culture, formerly only experienced by the
aristocracy, available to commoners who thus tolerated his amassing power to himself.
Pisistratus thus launched a policy that led eventually to Athens’ becoming the cultural capital of
the Greek world. In fact, in taking power for himself he weakened his fellow aristocrats thereby
opening the way for the establishment of greater democratic reforms after his death in 527 B. C.
His power fell to his two sons, one of whom was assassinated in 510 B. C. and the other forced
out of Athens by the Athenian people with the help of the Spartans who generally disliked all
tyrants.
After Solon the Reformer and Pisistratus the Tyrant came Cleisthenes, the Democrat.
Cleisthenes was yet another aristocrat who attempted to fill the power vacuum left by the death
of the sons of Pisistratus with a system of government he called “equal rights.” Having achieved
this by 508 B. C., Cleisthenes invented democracy roughly as we know it today. Instead of
having Athens suffer continually from rival clans supporting one aristocrat or another, he hoped
to make democracy the permanent form of government for Athens and thus replace rivalry with
loyalty to the city. He replaced the rule of aristocrats with what has been described as the rule of
amateurs. He was so successful that the two hundred years after the death of Cleisthenes saw
only two attempts to undo Athenian democracy. Both these attempts occurred under the stress of
the Peloponnesian War, the great tragedy of Greek culture of which you will learn more later,
and both attempts were short-lived. Ancient Greeks thus enjoyed a total of around three hundred
years of democracy before being crushed by neighbors to the north and added to one empire after
another until modern times. No other nation or people have made it that far, yet.
An accomplishment of that magnitude deserves a closer examination of the institutions of
Athenian democracy that made it work. The Athenian state became a direct democracy by 462
B. C. with the overthrow of the last aristocratic structure known as the Council of the Aeropagus,
named such because they met atop the mountain of Ares, the god of war. A direct democracy
meant that the citizens themselves, not elected representatives, made the laws. All male citizens
18 years of age or older could attend the Assembly which were held about every ten days.
Attendance at any one Assembly averaged around 6,000 citizens out of 45,000 who were
eligible. The Assembly debated and then voted on key issues using a system of pebbles—black
for no and white for yes. In a crowd of 6,000 urgent citizens a potter theoretically held as much
sway as a rich aristocrat, but only those speakers who commanded the respect of the crowd
would be heeded. One needed a booming voice. One speaker reported that he overcame his
tendency to stammer by practicing with his mouth partially filled with pebbles, and he improved
his volume by shouting over the roar of the surf in training.
This rough-and-tumble system relied on the quality of the citizens. In the great open
market place of Athens, the Agora, citizens held private debates and gathered information on the
way to the rocky hillside known as the Pnyx where the Assembly met. Certain interesting facets
of Athenian democracy encouraged all citizens to look out first for the welfare of the community.
Any law passed by the Assembly had to be proposed by some one person whose name was thus
attached to the law from its beginning. If the Assembly later thought they had made a mistake in
passing it, they could attack the law in a court as being contrary to Athenian principles
(unconstitutional). If the law were thus challenged within a year after its passage and removed,
its proposer was fined a sum that would bankrupt almost any citizen. Furthermore, Cleisthenes
had instituted a practice known as ostracism. Once a year Athenians were given the opportunity
to write on a potsherd, or ostraca, the name of anyone they deemed was a danger to the state.
Any citizen receiving a majority of the votes cast was ostracized, or forced to leave Athens for
ten years.
A group known as the Council of Five Hundred supervised the administration of Athens
and prepared the agenda for the Assembly. The members of this council were not elected, but
rather chosen by lot each year. No one could serve more than twice in a lifetime in order to
prevent any member or members from forming a ruling clique. Around 350 administrators of the
affairs of state were also chosen by lot annually since these tasks could be performed by any man
who lived up to Athenian ideals. The Council of Five Hundred examined all such chosen
officials before they entered office to insure mental and physical competence. Any official
handling public monies was subject to repeated inspections. One can tell that while Athenians
had great faith in democracy, they believed individuals should be watched closely. Interestingly,
the only elected officials in Athenian democracy were the Board of Ten Generals and the city
architect. These positions were recognized as requiring special skill and training and thus off
limits to a casual patriot selected by chance. As you might guess, the real power in Athens
ultimately centered among those ten generals, and you will soon meet one named Pericles who
dominated even the other nine in his day. Yes, Pericles once came close to winning the
“unpopularity contest” of ostracism, but he was powerful enough to manipulate the vote and
have his enemy ostracized! He was also powerful enough to build the Parthenon—stay tuned as
to how and why.
We are quite close to engaging in a discussion of the Golden Age of Greece, as it is
called. Before we marvel at the accomplishments of Athens any further, though, take note of the
several criticisms leveled at Athenian democracy then and now. At the time aristocrats who
carefully educated themselves to lead well were horrified that a cobbler’s voice and vote could
hold equal weight to their own. Even a rude farmer that stumbled into the city the night before
could wake up to an Assembly day and have a theoretically equal say. Aristocrats also were
mortified at the impact of freedom of speech on their reputations when any bawdy poet could
stand up in the Assembly and attack public figures lifting them up to public scorn. Non-citizen
residents in Athens would have also chafed under their complete disenfranchisement regardless
of their personal wealth or other accomplishments. Today we would point out that not only
could these resident foreigners not vote or participate or hold office but neither could Athenian
women, let alone slaves. Also, 6,000 is nowhere near the majority of the 45,000 Athenian males
who held citizenship rights so Athenian democracy could never be called majority rule, but
neither can American democracy, technically, when so few United States citizens actually
exercise their right to vote. Active Athenian citizens had to attend the Assembly around 40 times
a year. Shouldn’t you vote once every couple of years once you attain that privilege?
But enough of the guilt trip (for your parents) and on to the astounding Athenian
greatness that launched the Golden Age of Greece. After a look at their chief rival of Sparta,
we’ll look at the glory of Athens in the Persian War and at her many amazing feats in the
adornment of that glory with what many count the greatest architectural achievements of all
time. Still, we must acknowledge what Athens cherished for herself she did not extend to other
city states after establishing what became known as the Athenian Empire. I’ll let Pericles have
the last word, however. He famously said that Athens achieved arete, or excellence, far
surpassing that of Sparta or of any other Greek rival. Athens allowed the full development of the
human personality. Her political freedom and cultural creativity released an enormous amount
of creative energy leading to truly extraordinary cultural accomplishments. In praise of Athenian
society, Pericles said, “Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of
things of the mind does not make us soft.” If only this could be said of all modern descendants
of Athenian democracy!