Download BM Lavelle. Fame, Money, and Power: The Rise of Peisistratos and

540
Reviews of Books
that while Santiago has often been at the center of Chilean political history, historians have known relatively
little about what transpired politically on the municipal
level in the capital during most of the postindependence era. Walter’s book focuses on the municipal
council of Santiago, whose workings, internal conflicts,
and relations with the national government give us considerable insight regarding broader national problems
and circumstances. As was the case with his study of
Buenos Aires, Walter enters the complicated world of
municipal politics—contested by Conservatives, Liberals, Radicals, Democrats, Balmacedists, and others—by
examining, to a certain extent, the relationship between
local government and the development, financing, and
operation of the city’s foreign-owned electric streetcar
company.
This book is about what today is “downtown” Santiago, or Santiago Centro; it is not a study of municipal
politics and urban change in the surrounding suburbs of
greater Santiago. Upon making this clarification,
Walter brings to bear an array of sources, including
travel accounts, newspapers, magazines, census figures,
correspondence, and government publications to create a vivid description of local politics, warts and all,
and urban transformation.
In the capital, where the streetcar system ferried people, in cars of and for different classes, beginning in
1900, elected municipal government appeared, as it did
elsewhere in the country, when the smoke cleared from
the Civil War of 1891, which toppled Balmaceda. The
war inaugurated a period known as the Parliamentary
Republic (1891–1925), which saw executive power at
the national level greatly reduced, resulting in a much
more powerful legislative branch. Consequences of this
shift were incessant bickering in the Congress, ongoing
and irresolvable conflicts between entrenched political
parties, and a general political malaise that bogged
down decision-making processes at a critical time of socioeconomic change. While most historians have understood what Chileans called parlamentarismo as a
phenomenon that developed at the national level,
Walter’s excavation of municipal-level politics reveals
that parlamentarismo had very deep roots and local
manifestations in the body politic, as did corruption and
other questionable activities of one kind or another.
Subsequent political turmoil, including more than
one military intervention between 1924 and 1931,
brought difficult times to local government in Santiago.
A succession of mayors and local governing juntas
struggled to address the needs of a municipality that
was bulging at its seams, with new suburban development and expanding working and middle classes reshaping greater Santiago as well. Stability and democracy returned in 1932, signaling yet another transition
for local government, and municipal elections were reestablished in 1935 after nearly a decade of local government controlled by officials hand-picked by national
leaders.
Meanwhile, as Walter shows, the streetcar company
in question and power generation facilities were sold to
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
the U.S.-based American Foreign Power Company
(AFP), reflecting a broader shift toward North American capital investment. With the onslaught of the
Great Depression and the crippling of the Chilean
economy, the newly elected municipal government of
the mid-1930s not only had to deal with a financial
crunch but also was under pressure from constituents to
address the AFP’s skyrocketing electricity rates.
Walter then moves on to the very interesting story of
municipal government in the era of the Popular
Front—a story that includes the fortunes of Santiago’s
(and Chile’s) first female mayor, Graciela Contreras de
Schnake, a Socialist, who assumed the important position in January 1939. Aguirre Cerda’s Popular Front
government allowed the municipal government to flex
some muscle, as Contreras proposed new plans for further urban development. Among other things, Walter
also shows how the Popular Front coalition’s quick decay created significant political and administrative
problems at the local level.
Concluding the book is a thoughtful comparison of
Santiago and Buenos Aires, which, at least in terms of
local politics and administration, makes the very different capitals seem more alike. The author also briefly
takes the stories of Santiago and Buenos Aires into the
1990s, drawing attention to important issues facing municipal governments amid a continent-wide process of
democratization.
Historians, urban geographers, political scientists,
and many others will find great value in Walter’s very
detailed, informative, and well-written study. For too
long, historians of Chile have failed to stop and investigate the intricacies of local government, and this book
goes a long way in helping scholars piece together a
political history of modern Chile from the bottom up.
PATRICK BARR-MELEJ
Iowa State University
EUROPE: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL
B. M. LAVELLE. Fame, Money, and Power: The Rise of
Peisistratos and “Democratic” Tyranny at Athens. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 370.
$65.00.
The three previously existing major studies specifically
about Peisistratus were parts of general works: Fritz
Schachermeyr’s “Peisistratos” in Paulys Realencyclopädie der Classischen Altertums-wissenschaft 19.1
(1937): 156–191; Antony Andrewes’s “The Tyranny of
Pisistratus” in the second edition of The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 3, part 3 (1982): 392– 470, and Loretana De Libero’s excursus in Die archaische Tyrannis
(1996): 50–116. Therefore, the first and so far the only
scholarly book exclusively on Peisistratus and his tyranny in Athens should be welcome. But this is not the
only merit of B. M. Lavelle’s monograph.
Lavelle changes the question of Heleen SancisiWeerdenburg, in Peisistratos and the Tyranny: A Reappraisal of the Evidence (2000), from “Where did Pei-
APRIL 2006
Europe: Ancient and Medieval
sistratos get his power?” into “How did Peisistratus
manage to establish and, even more important, maintain his rule until his death in 527?” To answer the latter
question, he departs from the traditional rationalizing
of Peisistratus’s tyranny as a form of aristocratic infighting. Lavelle’s detailed examination of the surviving evidence about cultural, legal, religious, economic, military, ideological, and other aspects of Peisistratus’s
tyranny treats them as the ways in which Peisistratus
built up popular support. The author’s main thesis
about Peisistratus’s “democratic tyranny” might look
surprising. But once “democratic” is understood as referring not to demokratia as a political system with its
specific institutions and principles but to the support of
the people (demos), Lavelle’s approach becomes clear.
From this point of view, his idea that the demos was a
“partner” in the tyranny of Peisistratus (p. vii) follows
naturally.
By emphasizing the importance of popular support
for Peisistratus’s tyranny, Lavelle does not argue
against the idea about the political insignificance of the
demos. Just the other way around: focusing on public
support allows Lavelle to expose the regimes of Solon,
Peisistratus, and Cleisthenes as representing a certain
continuum. Whereas the idea about the continuity of
public politics in Athens throughout the sixth century
is not new, it has been rationalized in political terms:
A. J. White spoke of Athenian politicians entreating the
demos, irrespective of political regime, and Michael
T. W. Arnheim, in Aristocracy in Greek Society (1977),
while presenting Solon, Peisistratus, and Cleisthenes as
a series of aristocratic “champions of the people,”
stressed the mutual dependence of the demos and such
“champions.” It is from this political perspective that
Antony Andrewes, in The Greek Tyrants (1963), described the tyranny of Peisistratus as “preparing ground
for democracy.” Accentuating Peisistratus’s social politics, Lavelle offers a more nuanced approach to the
ways that allowed Peisistratus to largely preserve the
Solonian “constitution” and which, in Lavelle’s opinion, Cleisthenes would also use to secure social support
for his own political reforms; the tyrant Peisistratus
thus served as the model and “the prototype for later
democratic leaders” (pp. 163, 166).
Whereas the intended readership is nowhere clearly
indicated, explanations in passing, such as those for
metic (p. 201: “a non-Athenian”), me៮ troxenoi (p. 321:
“mother-foreignness” [sic]), or kle៮ rouchoi (“colonists”), suggest a general audience as well as college
and graduate students. The extensive bibliography
comprises mostly “mainstream” publications, leaving
out, for example, Dimitris Paleothodoros, “Pisistrate et
Dionysos: Mythes et réalités de l’érudition moderne,”
Les Études classiques 67 (1999): 321–340, and Harijs
Tumans, “Ideological Aspects of the Authority of Peisistratus,” Vestnik Drevnei Istorii 239 (2001): 12– 45. The
index, detailed as it is, would have benefited from avoiding repetition, as well as from paying more attention to
non-English words and phrases. Further uniformity
could be extended to transliteration and the use of ital-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
541
icized words. These and a few other minor slips, which
are oversights of the press, cannot prevent this book,
with its clear style, innovative approach, use of numerous sources of different kinds, and impressive bibliography, from gaining a well-deserved place on required
reading lists in general surveys as well as upper-level
classes and undergraduate and graduate seminars in
history, political sciences, and sociology.
SVIATOSLAV DMITRIEV
Ball State University
ELKE STEIN-HÖLKESKAMP. Das Römische Gastmahl: Eine
Kulturgeschichte. Munich: C. H. Beck. 2005. Pp. 364.
€29.90.
The past two decades have seen an impressive amount
of research on ancient convivial institutions, but this
research has focused more on the archaic Greek symposium than on the Roman banquet (convivium). Rome
is not altogether neglected, as, most recently, Catherine
Dunbabin’s splendid The Roman Banquet: Images of
Conviviality (2004) and Konrad Vössing’s Mensa regia:
Das Bankett beim hellenistischen König und beim römischen Princeps (2004) demonstrated. But the Roman
banquet has never received the general overview that
Elke Stein-Hölkeskamp presents in this book, which is
aimed equally at the specialist scholar and the more
general reader. The book covers the convivium in the
period between Cicero and Pliny the Younger, and it
gives an account of the basic stability as well as the developments and changes in this central institution of
Roman aristocratic society. Unlike the antiquarians of
a century ago, Stein-Hölkeskamp keeps carefully away
from constructing an immutable ideal type. After all,
for the Roman elite the banquet was the main space of
communication and a major tool of self-representation
(not only in the period on which this book focuses); and,
at the same time, the discourses about the banquet that
we receive from ancient authors give insight into the
norms, ideals, and expectations of this same elite. The
changes in the convivium mirror the considerable
changes in Roman society between the time of Cicero
and that of Trajan.
After a short introduction on method, with an amazing amount of name-dropping (from Max Weber to
Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu), the author systematically leads the reader through all the aspects of
the banquet as the central institution of Rome’s elite.
The first chapter explores the ubiquity of the banquet
and its key role in the daily routine of a member of
Rome’s upper class (and those, like the rich freedmen,
who imitated them). The following chapters present all
relevant aspects along the sequencing of the event itself: the invitation, a surprisingly complex social ritual;
the participants, from Cicero to the emperors, poets,
and women, who had to be seated in hierarchically correct positions; the highly standardized time and the
physical space of the convivium, its precious furniture
and furnishings; the food, the wine, and the moralistic
rejection of contemporary dining habits by the Stoic
APRIL 2006