A Cultural History of Democracy in Antiquity 1350042722, 9781350042728

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
General Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction Carol Atack and Paul Cartledge
1 Sovereignty Andrew Monson and Carol Atack
2 Liberty and the Rule of Law Valentina Arena
3 The Common Good Dhananjay Jagannathan
4 Economic and Social Democracy Emily Mackil
5 Religion and the Principles of Political Obligation Georgia Petridou
6 Citizenship and Gender Carol Atack
7 Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism Denise Eileen McCoskey
8 Democratic Crises, Revolutions, and Civil Resistance Paul Cartledge
9 International Relations Carol Atack with Paul Cartledge
10 Beyond the Classical Polis Benjamin Gray
Notes
References
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY VOLUME 1

A Cultural History of Democracy General Editor: Eugenio F. Biagini Volume 1 A Cultural History of Democracy in Antiquity Edited by Paul Cartledge and Carol Atack Volume 2 A Cultural History of Democracy in the Medieval Age Edited by David Napolitano and Kenneth J. Pennington Volume 3 A Cultural History of Democracy in the Renaissance Edited by Virginia Cox and Joanne Paul Volume 4 A Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Enlightenment Edited by Anna Plassart and Michael Mosher Volume 5 A Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Empire Edited by Tom Brooking and Todd M. Thompson Volume 6 A Cultural History of Democracy in the Modern Age Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini and Gary Gerstle

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY

IN ANTIQUITY VOLUME 1

Edited by Paul Cartledge and Carol Atack

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Paul Cartledge, Carol Atack, and contributors, 2021 Paul Cartledge, Carol Atack, and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Raven Design Cover image: Acropolis Museum, 2014. Photo © Socratis Mavrommatis All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:    HB: HB Set:

978-1-3500-4272-8 978-1-3500-4293-3

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CONTENTS

L ist

of

I llustrations 

G eneral E ditor ’ s P reface 

vii x

A cknowledgments 

xiii

A bbreviations 

xiv

Introduction Carol Atack and Paul Cartledge

1

1 Sovereignty Andrew Monson and Carol Atack

15

2 Liberty and the Rule of Law Valentina Arena

37

3 The Common Good Dhananjay Jagannathan

57

4 Economic and Social Democracy Emily Mackil

77

5 Religion and the Principles of Political Obligation Georgia Petridou

95

6 Citizenship and Gender Carol Atack

115

vi

CONTENTS

7 Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism Denise Eileen McCoskey

137

8 Democratic Crises, Revolutions, and Civil Resistance Paul Cartledge

155



9 International Relations Carol Atack with Paul Cartledge

175



10 Beyond the Classical Polis Benjamin Gray

197

N otes 

218

R eferences 

224

N otes

249

I ndex 

on

C ontributors 

252

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Decree passed by the Athenian Assembly in 337/6 bce, showing Demokratia crowning Demos (“the people”) with a wreath

20

1.2 Sixth-century bce rock-cut inscription at Bisitun (or Behistun) in Iran showing King Darius I receiving captives

23

1.3 Kylix (wine cup used at the symposium) depicting the labors of Theseus, 440–430 bce

25

1.4 Silver Athenian “owl” tetradrachm, dated to the 450s bce

27

1.5 The Erechtheion on Athens’ Acropolis, fifth century bce

31

2.1 The Tyrannicides, version of statues from Athenian Agora

42

2.2

Detail of man wearing a pilleus from the Cista Ficoroni

46

2.3 This silver denarius, issued by C. Egnatius Maxsumus in 75 bce, depicts on its reverse a temple with Jupiter and Libertas, identified by their symbols of a thunderbolt and pilleus

47

2.4 Silver denarius, issued by Brutus in 43/42 bce

51

2.5 Maenad, depicted on first-century copy of a relief attributed to the Greek sculptor Kallimachos, c. 425–400 bce

52

3.1 Athens’ Acropolis seen from the Pnyx, home of the Assembly

58

3.2 Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509–11

59

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

3.3 Bust of Socrates

62

3.4 Vase for storage of public property, fifth-century Athens

64

3.5 Bust of Cicero

71

4.1 Bronze pinakion from the Athenian Agora, fourth century bce

84

4.2 Lead tokens from the Athenian Agora, Hellenistic period

85

4.3 The bema (speakers’ platform) at the Pnyx, Athens

86

4.4 Detail of a relief on the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum depicting support for children

89

4.5 Lysicrates monument, Athens, 334 bce

92

5.1 Attic red-figure kylix depicting Athena and Erichthonios

98

5.2 Roman statue of Athena Promachos

100

5.3 Honorary decree for Rheboulas the Odrysian

105

5.4 Red-figure wine jug, 470–460 bce

113

6.1 Athena and Hera shake hands, confirming an alliance between Athens and Samos

121

6.2 Women engaged in working with wool and weaving

123

6.3 Boreas abducting Oreithyia

124

6.4 Older men interacting with youths; one offers a hare as a gift

130

6.5 Older man propositioning a younger man

132

7.1 Political activist Malcolm X, pictured in Detroit in 1964

138

7.2 Medea’s revenge on Jason, Antonio Tempesta

144

7.3 Silver mines at Laureion in Attica

152

8.1 The Athenian Agora seen from the Areopagus hill

156

8.2 Tragic hero as tyrannicide

161

8.3 Ostraka used in votes to exile politicians, Athens

163

ILLUSTRATIONS

ix

8.4 Orestes as a heroic figure associated with democracy

170

8.5 Joseph Benoîs Suvée, Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, 1795

172

9.1 Amazonomachy scene

178

9.2 Eurymedon vase (side a)

181

9.3 Eurymedon vase (side b)

182

9.4 Polis dedications at the sanctuary of Apollo on Delos

190

9.5 Panathenaic prize amphora

191

10.1 Votive plaque from the Piraeus offered to the Thracian goddess Bendis

199

10.2 Sebastiano Ricci, Meeting between the Cynic Philosopher Diogenes and Alexander the Great

201

10.3 Silver coin of Seleucus I Nicator, Antiochus I Soter, Ai Khanoum/Bactra, 285–281 bce

207

10.4 Bronze tablet containing the regulations for reconciliation in Nakone

211

10.5 Inscription documenting the political union of Cos and Calymna, later third century bce

215

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

For politicians of both the Left and Right throughout the world, the rallying cry “democracy” has become so central to our political value system that it is easy to forget that many of the practices and rights that we associate with it were achieved only in the twentieth century. For example, only a handful of countries secured voting rights for all citizens of full age before 1918. In the United States, where women had won the vote in federal elections in 1920, racial prejudice deprived millions of citizens of full political rights for the next two generations. Yet, in a broader sense, democracy is also very ancient, stretching back 2,500 years to the “citizen states” of ancient Greece, or even beyond, to the earliest forms of assembly-based government developed in the Middle East and India centuries before the Athenians first spoke of dēmokratia (Muhlberger 2011: 49–59). What is democracy, then? Historically, there are many definitions, some of which even include authoritarian regimes ruling an egalitarian society in the name of the “proletariat” (Pons 2017). Though equality is central to all democratic experiments, in the present series we focus on traditions based on the practice of, or the aspiration to, citizens’ empowerment through individual or collective duties, privileges, and freedoms and a commonly accepted purpose, in relation to which rulers are held accountable. While conventional histories tend to leap from antiquity to the eighteenth century and treat Europe’s Middle Age and Renaissance as “flyover country,” our approach allows us to rediscover and explore the significance of these periods. How do we approach the history of democracy from a “cultural” point of view? Different authors in our multi-volume series have given their own interpretation, and a full answer must allow for pluralism, interdisciplinarity, and methodological diversity. Some of us engage with the relationship between politics, literature, and theatre. Others are more interested in the popularization

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

xi

of certain political traditions, while still others concentrate on the development of key concepts by political philosophers. Some chapters and volumes focus on representations, practices and forms of collective solidarity, and on limitations to executive power, that developed within a context foreign to our modern notions but played a role in shaping them. Though there are many aspects of the cultures of democracy that our work does not discuss, taken together our chapters cover what, with Wiebe (1995: 10), we could describe as “the webbing of values and relations” and “the intersection between beliefs and actions” within which democracy operates. While there is something deeply human, and in this sense “universal,” in the aspiration to equality, historically democratic experiments flourished at first around the Mediterranean, then in Europe, and eventually on a global scale. This is reflected in the series. Volumes 1, 2, and 3 are mainly focused on European experiences, though the authors have tried to place them in the widest possible context. Volume 4 has a strong “Atlantic,” as well as European emphasis, while volumes 5 and 6 are more global, with substantial attention being paid to the Americas (especially the United States), Africa, and Asia (especially India). It is part of democracy’s story that we have such expansion. This in turn has entailed a proliferation of contributors (most chapters in the last two volumes are jointly authored) to “track and trace” the reverberations of the democratic impulse around the world. One feature of our series is that all the volumes are built around ten clusters of key concepts and problems. The chapter titles are the same for each volume. The idea is to facilitate comparative discussions across both time and space, without forgetting that, even when there seems to be a commonality of language and terminology, meaning depends on the cultural expectations of the period under consideration. The ten categories we have chosen comprise “Sovereignty,” “Liberty and the Rule of Law,” the “Common Good,” “Economic and Social Democracy,” “Religion and the Principles of Political Obligation,” “Citizenship and Gender,” “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism,” “Democratic Crises,” “International Relations,” and “Beyond the Polis.” Bearing in mind that an aspiration to equality is the central regulatory principle, we settled on these particular ten areas because of their recurrence across time and geopolitical contexts. Some are pervasive and inescapable, such as gender, ethnicity, and religion. Others (such as sovereignty) were less clearly articulated or unitary than they have since become, but were nevertheless crucial to the notion of people-power—or indeed any political power. By contrast, while in the past the “common good” was such a crucial concept that it was almost a synonym for democracy (as in res publica and “commonwealth”), it became less prominent at the end of the last century under the influence of freemarket individualism and globalization. Liberty, understood as autonomy (self-rule) within the limits set by the law, is a constant aspiration in all democratic experiments, but its meaning

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and connotations vary, reflecting cultural expectations about who should be “free” and in which sphere. Because democracy is territorially exclusive, one recurrent question for its supporters concerns the ideal size of “a community which rightly governs itself and determines its own future” (Held 1993: 26–7). To be effective, democracy had to adapt to the changing scale of the challenges it faced. This involved going “beyond the polis” both in terms of state- and identity-building—from city-states to city leagues, wider regional confederations or “united states”—and with the development of multilateralist cultures of international relations. However, as the nineteenth-century American writer James Fenimore Cooper noted, “the principal advantage of democracy” is not that it produces more efficient government, but that it contributes “to elevat[ing] the depressed to a condition not unworthy of their manhood” (Cooper [1838] 1989: 121). In 1943 another democrat, the feminist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, boasted that the Irish Revolution had endowed all with “equal citizenship, equal rights and equal opportunities,” and cautioned Éire against any dilution of this legacy (Ward 2019: 452). We should heed her words, for democracy will survive only for as long as we value “equal citizenship, equal rights and equal opportunities” not as means to an end but as ends in themselves. Eugenio F. Biagini, General Editor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank our authors for engaging with the demands of this project and bringing their individual expertise to illuminating its themes. We are also grateful to Eugenio Biagini as series editor, and the editors of the other volumes in the series, for helping us to draw connections between different times and places. Finally, thanks are due to Venice van Someren for providing editorial assistance.

ABBREVIATIONS

BNJ Worthington, I. Brill’s New Jacoby, . FGrHist Jacoby, F. (1923–58) Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (3 vols.). IC Inscriptiones Creticae IG Inscriptiones Graecae IK Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien (1972–) IOSPE Inscriptiones antiquae Orae Septentrionalis Ponti Euxini graecae et latinae ML Meiggs, R. and Lewis, D.M. (1988) A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century b.c, 2nd edn.; Oxford: Oxford University Press. OR Osborne, R. and Rhodes, P.J. (2017) Greek Historical Inscriptions, 478–404 bc, Oxford: Oxford University Press. PCG Kassel, R., and C. Austin (1983–), Poetae Comici Graeci, Berlin: De Gruyter. P.Oxy Oxyrhynchus Papyri (1898–) RO Rhodes, P.J. and Osborne, R. (2003) Greek Historical Inscriptions: 404-323 bc, Oxford: Oxford University Press. SEG Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (1923–) Syll3 Dittenberger, W. and Gaertringen, F. von (1915–24) Sylloge inscriptionum graecarum. Ancient authors and texts are abbreviated as in the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

Introduction CAROL ATACK AND PAUL CARTLEDGE

The past is a foreign country. What follows is not or should not be read as a tale of triumph, let alone triumphalism. As a cultural history, this book examines the experience of living in democratic or proto-democratic communities in antiquity, from the early societies of the Middle East to the developed governmental structures of the Roman world, and of participation in democratic elements of societies with mixed forms of government, as well as limits to participation, exclusion of non-citizens, and negotiation of relationships beyond the democratic city. It focuses on the political experiences of cities in the Mediterranean during the period identified as classical antiquity, especially classical Athens with its highly developed democratic culture, although other and later democracies in the Greek and later Roman world play their parts. While the early Christian Church would inspire political reformers in later centuries, beyond the earliest self-organizing religious communities the church did not encourage a turn to democratic culture. At some times in history, including the long period of over a millennium covered by this volume, democratic features were largely absent from the institutions of empires and even from the local governance of cities, but they still might be found in smaller private organizations such as the clubs, colleges, and societies in which groups arranged aspects of their collective existence. The burial clubs of the household staff of the Roman imperial household, for example, were clearly not part of a democracy at the highest level, but their participatory structures echo the form of democratic institutions familiar from many cities of the ancient Mediterranean. The same can be said for the assemblies of early Mesopotamian societies, long predating the development of democracy in its classical Greek form; we have little knowledge of the qualifications for

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participation or restrictions on participation in these societies, other than the consistent depiction, in literature looking back to the distant past, of such groups as comprising older men, the heads of propertied households. Although classical Athens, and the other Greek democracies that surrounded and succeeded it, will be the focus of many of the chapters in this volume, democracy’s prehistory extends further back in time and throughout geographical space than that focus might suggest. Classical Athens deserves our attention because of the remarkable development of institutions and practices, the surviving documentation of its democratic culture, and its influence on the new democracies that arose in modern nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ancient Greek dēmokratia is not, however, our “democracy”: in fact, there was not even any one such thing as “ancient Greek democracy” but, rather, a variety of forms developing at different times in the hypertrophied “Greek world” of ancient Hellas between c. 500 and 150/100 bce. Classical Athens had three or four successive versions between 508/507 and 322/321 bce, and yet other varieties thereafter. It continued to exist, too, well after 100 bce, but in name alone. In the mid-second century ce, for example, the Greek rhētor (public declaimer) Aelius Aristides could speak of the Roman Empire, an autocracy, as “a perfect democracy – under one man” (To Rome 60). How different was an ancient, direct dēmokratia in one of its earlier, original forms from a(ny) modern, representative one? Let us count the ways. In the world of ancient Greek democracies there were no parties, no “loyal opposition” (Ionescu and De Madariaga 1972); election to office, a hallmark of modern Western (indirect, representative, parliamentary) democracies, was considered to be “oligarchic”; the use of the lot for appointment to office, including judicial office, was considered quintessentially democratic; and not only was (self-)governance direct and not representative, but there was no idea let alone practice of the “separation of powers.” In the 330s and 320s bce Aristotle, author of a work misleadingly translated as “Politics”—politika actually means “matters to do with the polis,” a peculiar ancient Greek state-form—authoritatively analyzed dēmokratia along a sliding scale of empowerment, the “last” or most extreme subspecies being his term for the most democratic—and the least like any of the other constitutional subtypes (monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy) (Aristotle, Politics 4.4, 1291b14–1292a39; Cartledge 2018; Finley 1983). While Aristotle’s versions of ancient democracy to some extent mirrored the development of Athenian democracy and the gradual expansion of full political participation to all classes of citizens, in practice the democracy of fourth-century Athens had pulled away from the features that Aristotle objected to—particularly the control of law by the assembly. We need therefore to rethink the history of democracy in recognition of such definitional, linguistic problems and limitations, as well as in the broadest

INTRODUCTION

3

cultural terms. Democracy, ancient democracy, has to be seen as itself a matter of culture—as more than just a set of voting arrangements. It was, for example, implicated and imbricated with religion: at Athens, for example, Demokratia, an abstract female personification, received sacrifices in an official state cult, which may have been instituted to mark the reestablishment of Athenian democracy in 403 bce (Parker 1996: 228–9). On the other hand, these were by and large patriarchal societies: gender identity excluded at least half of any ancient population from even a sniff of active democratic participation, let alone empowerment (with the partial exception of the holding of some religious offices, see below). Citizenship imposed limits on universalism, until the early third century ce, when by a decree issued by the Emperor Caracalla all freeborn persons within the Roman Empire were deemed to be citizens—but by then citizenship had lost even the remotest democratic connotations or implications. The development of Christian communities might have suggested a possibility of alternative forms of social organization to the autocratic control of the Roman Empire, as expressed through the rule of local governors. But although early Christian groups may have adopted the self-organized and participatory forms typical of local cult organization in the Roman world, the developing church grew to have a different relationship with monarchical power (Ritter 2006). The Roman Empire’s use of pagan emperor cult as a means of political control of loyalties meant that members of other religious groups—including Jews and adherents of unauthorized pagan cults as well as Christians—were placed under political suspicion; but this did not always mean that they provided a political opposition. The refusal to pledge to sacrifice to emperor cults was a route to martyrdom, often emphasized in the lives of martyrs executed for their faith (such as the Life of Perpetua; see Gold 2018). Yet as the Christian churches developed their own place within the Roman Empire, the church developed into a mirror of imperial power rather than an alternative to it. As Geoffrey de Ste. Croix noted, the earliest Christian authorities (including St. Paul) developed power structures for the church that echoed those of the empire, drawing a parallel between the emperor and God (De Ste. Croix [1981] 1983: 396–402). Rather than seek political freedom, Christians in some traditions were encouraged to submit to a different form of slavery; St. Paul’s arguments draw on tropes of freedom and slavery common in antiquity (De Ste. Croix [1981] 1983: 418–25; see also Chapter 2, this volume, on freedom and slavery). While some millenarian Christians saw salvation as coming from outside the political sphere, other authorities such as the Christian philosopher Origen recommended submission to the emperor (Ritter 2006: 533–4). In this period at least—unlike later periods—Christianity and democracy were not interlinked. At the temporal limits of this volume, in sixth-century ce Orthodox Christian Constantinople, dēmokratia could be used as a term

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of abuse—to mean riot: a particularly unpleasant form of mob rule. It took a very remarkable change of heart—and culture—to rehabilitate the very word “democracy,” a glacially slow process that began only in the sixteenth or seventeenth century ce.

THE LANGUAGE OF DEMOCRACY One of the major challenges with cross-cultural historical surveys is the translation of political language, the terms for institutions and concepts, which may convey something precise in their original culture and yet be analogized to something different by processes of translation. Writers in both Latin and Greek in the Hellenistic and imperial Roman worlds recognize the limits of language and the subtle differences that translation between Greek and Latin brought. Is a senate and a boulē (Greek term normally translated as “council”) the same kind of institution for both Latin- and Greek-speakers? When we call an emperor autokratōr, the Greek term, rather than imperator, the Latin, do we invoke a different set of images in European languages, which draw their own political terminology from these languages? The idea of imperial power is distinct from autocracy, with its suggestion of unconstrained personal rule. When translating the titles of roles and institutions, failing to acknowledge the values inherent in the terms of contemporary English (or any other language) can also mislead. Labeling a group as an “assembly” or a “senate” may import anachronistic images. In other cases, a conventional translation may not be entirely certain; scholars have debated whether cuneiform symbols used in Mesopotamian texts can be translated as “assembly,” as Thorkild Jacobsen did in his pioneering survey of the political institutions of these early societies (Baines 1989: 220–3; Jacobsen 1943). The choice of terminology is marked in ancient Greek sources. There is a notable unwillingness among early authors to use the term democracy itself; Herodotus prefers isonomia (e.g., Hdt. 3.80.6). This terminology also emphasizes the point most important to Greek citizens: that they participated as equals. Such equality was also important in nondemocratic regimes; in Sparta, for example, great importance was placed on the formal equality of the citizen elite, even though evidence points to disparate levels of wealth even among this class. Individuals’ standing to participate in such activities could be confirmed by citizenship or by membership of nonpolitical bodies. Citizenship—a word we derive not from ancient Greece but from ancient Rome—was a crucial status. The abstract Greek term for citizenship, politeia, is first attested in Herodotus (9.34), the concrete term for politēs (citizen) first appears about two centuries earlier, in the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus (c. 650 bce; POxy. 3316). But politeia could also mean roughly what we understand by “constitution,” for instance,

INTRODUCTION

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(a version of) dēmokratia. The politēs was defined authoritatively by Aristotle as “he who has an (active, participatory or controlling individual/collective) share in krisis (judgement, including legal judgement) and archē (office, rule)” (Arist., Pol. 3.1.1275a22–3), a definition that he conceded (since he was not himself an ideological democrat) more particularly applied to the citizen of a democracy. Only adult, free, legitimate males were thus actively politically empowered—with the partial exception of women who held the religious office of priestess; and at least in democratic Athens all legitimate, free citizen females had an indispensable role in reproducing the politeuma, the citizen body as a corporation (see Chapter 7, this volume). Greeks did not speak of “Athens” as the political referent but “the Athenians”: the most apt equivalent of polis is therefore something like “citizen-state,” except that the state (in a post-Hobbesian sense) was for the most part and in most places evanescent to the point of nonexistence (Hansen 2013). For the greater portion of the period surveyed by this volume, self-governance was a matter for localized communities. The expansion of federations of such communities in the Hellenistic era (last three centuries bce) and the increase of the geographical area ruled by the Roman Republic and later empire represented major transformations. Even the term dēmos itself was ambiguous—it could refer both to the citizenry as a whole and to the lower classes who formed the majority of that citizenry, and whose collective action and self-interest were feared by the outnumbered elite (Aristotle, Politics 4.4). Democracy’s critics relabeled the dēmos in pejorative terms as a ochlos (mob), a term that appears often in the political rhetoric of classical Athens and the works of writers such as Plato and Xenophon. The multiplicity of hoi polloi (the many) was contrasted with the ideal unity or even unaminity that was the object of the city’s political activity, often expressed as “same-mindedness” or “union of hearts” (homonoia in Greek, concordia in Latin). At times, the desire for unity was expressed through support of a single leader, as in Thucydides’ (positive) assessment of Athenian democracy under the leadership of Pericles (Thuc. 2.65); the rise of powerful figures such as Julius Caesar in the late Roman Republic was, at the time, seen as a threat to that republic but inspired later thinkers to consider ways in which powerful ruling figures could be authorized by election, mixing democracy and “Caesarism.” Max Weber was one advocate of such “plebiscitarian Caesarism” for the Weimar Republic (Weber 1994: 220–2).

DEMOCRACY’S PREHISTORY While the democracy of classical Athens provides the most comprehensive single case study of the emergence of democratic culture in an ancient society, the elements from which that democracy developed can be traced from earlier

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societies. Scholars have disagreed on how significant these precursors are to the history of democracy. John Keane asserted the broad roots of democracy across many cultures (Keane 2009); others have focused on specific examples from the ancient Near East, or taken a global approach focused on economic development (Stasavage 2020) or anthropological models (Graeber 2013).1 The question of what arrangements constitute a democracy or a republic is not just a question about Rome before the emperors. The traditions of many cultures involve stories of assemblies and councils at which social, political, and military issues are discussed and decisions taken or advice given to a monarch. Such collective bodies demonstrate democratic or proto-democratic features, implying limits to monarchical and elite power, and the importance of collective management of economic activity. However, these distinctions are not the only reason that the influence of earlier societies on the politics of the Greek and Roman world has been downplayed. The powerful myth of the exceptionalism of the so-called “Greek enlightenment” (of the fifth and fourth centuries bce) has led some scholars to resist situating the construction of Greek communities as political entities within a broader tradition of societal formation that includes non-Western cultures. Formal bodies for consultation and deliberation feature in the literary traditions and documentary records of early societies across the world; the oldest such societies in the Near East, in third-millennium bce Mesopotamia, have a temporal claim to priority over the later cities of the Greek settlements (Isakhan 2011). Some scholars have claimed that it is some form of egalitarian and consultative community, and not autocratic monarchy, that was the most usual form of rule in the earliest societies. However, gaining knowledge of the social and intellectual life of such early communities from the limited material evidence available leaves much room for speculation. Anthropological observations based on the behaviors of higher primates in the contemporary world are another problematic source of evidence for the social organization of early humans (Boehm 2012). Given that the modern reception of democracy’s early history has focused much on the specific cultural contribution of the Greek city-state, and indeed has led to the suggestion that classical Athens was an exception among ancient societies in its instantiation of reason and enlightenment, it is important to note that other, earlier societies arguably developed the features from which classical Greek democracy also developed (Isakhan and Stockwell 2011). Some commentators have rejected or downplayed the influence of these earlier societies on Greek political culture, a response exemplified by the hostile reception given to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena with its claims for a Phoenician origin for social institutions usually claimed to originate in classical Greece (Bernal 1987; cf. Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996).2 However, more recent scholarship has explored the connections between ancient societies and their

INTRODUCTION

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shared heritage, and particularly the influence of neighboring cultures on Greek cities. Understanding the similarities and differences between these cultures offers insights into the specific features of each, and their mutual interactions and implications. Literary, documentary, and material evidence from the ancient Near East provides insights into the societies that crucially influenced both the world of the Greek polis and the palace administrations of the Persian Empire, its contemporary (Kuhrt 2007). Evidence from other cultures across the world also shows that democratic features have been present in the institutions and administration of a wide variety of societies throughout history. While the classical Greek democracies that provide the bulk of the cultural material subjected to close scrutiny in this volume represent only one moment in a vast history, the data of different types available from these societies provides a reminder that classical Greece drew on the rich and established traditions of its neighbors. Proto-democratic Features in Early Societies of the Near and Middle East The civilizations of the Middle East that developed during the third to first millennia bce left rich archaeological and documentary records of their complex social arrangements, which have enabled scholars to identify protodemocratic features in the interactions of rulers and local groups of elders or even assemblies. The evidence is incomplete and, in the words of John Keane, a strong advocate of the need to anchor democracy’s history in cultures predating classical Athens, historians need to heed the “usual warnings” about working with fragmentary evidence (Keane 2009: 90). Keane also points up the biases that led historians focused on classical Greece to discount the evidence from early cultures. Both sides of this argument have, on occasion, made selective use of sources or pressed slender evidence too hard. However, as Amartya Sen noted, there are significant benefits to demonstrating the historical presence of proto-democratic elements across a wide range of cultures and arguing that democracy in some form can therefore be seen as a “universal value” (Sen 1999). The efforts of scholars to demonstrate these elements are at any rate a helpful counterargument against narratives of Western European exceptionalism. Historians’ emphasis on the palace cultures of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, and their successors the Achaemenid Persians, has associated these societies with strong top-down governance and autocratic monarchy; a view not discouraged by the monarchs themselves, as represented in the monuments, inscriptions, and self-presentation of Assyrian and Achaemenid kings such as Ashurbanipal or Darius I (Brereton 2018; Root 1979). Viewing these societies through the eyes of Greek historians such as Herodotus likewise tends to lead to seeing them as characterized by more or less brutal despotism, in which entire

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populations led slavish existences at the whim of autocrats such as Xerxes, meting out cruel punishment and engaging in grandiose schemes. Yet the documentary evidence preserved in the ruins of many ancient cities suggests the presence of proto-democratic features, and that negotiation between local assemblies and rulers was a key feature of societies across the preclassical Near East; moreover, that this phase of social development preceded rather than followed the rise of the autocratic and powerful kings. There is evidence for collaborative local organization within early cities from before the rise of monarchical empires, and also from periods when the power and reach of nonlocal monarchs was weakened. That corporate social organization coexisted and competed with monarchy in ancient Mesopotamia makes for a significantly different narrative, and the comparative anthropological evidence should be incorporated into the history of democratic cultures, revising the narrative of Athenian exceptionalism (Blanton 1998; Fleming 2004: 236–41). One such society that provides evidence of these processes is Mari, a Mesopotamian “city” defeated and destroyed by the Assyrians under Hammurabi of Babylon in 1761 bce; the site was abandoned after this defeat. Given that excavations have not uncovered a residential quarter, Fleming observes that the tell (built-up area) was a royal and ritual site from which the populace was excluded (perhaps akin to much later Median ruler Deioces’ Ecbatana, as presented in Herodotus 1.100; cf. Fleming 2004: 6–7). Nonetheless, vast quantities of cuneiform tablets have been excavated from the site; many of them document the mundane administration of the region and provide important insights into the presence of local systems of justice, governance, and administration beyond the citadel itself. The durability of clay and the abandonment of the site were both conducive to the survival of these records. These records do not depict unconstrained royal power but negotiations by the (last) king Zimri-Lim with complex hierarchies of officials including tribal officials operating as a council. All the same, Fleming concludes that it is difficult to concur with Jacobsen’s positive identification of a “primitive democracy” at work in this type of society and warns of the risks of conflating the consultative and participatory bodies of the Mari system with those of classical Athens (Fleming 2004: 235). The Vedic Republics of India Another venerable tradition of assemblies and republican decision-making has been recovered from the rich but complex literary traditions of southern Asian societies. Indian communities, just like those of historical Greece, developed practices of administration and governance, most likely first encountered through contact with Near Eastern cities (Muhlberger 2012; Sharma 1968). While there is little agreement about the composition of the assemblies in these

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communities, the extent to which they had any authority, and the processes by which they made decisions, the kind of consultative body familiar from ancient epic also features in the society of early India. More detailed evidence emerges of Indian society between 600 and 300 bce (as it does in the case of Greek cities), as these communities developed their social structures and processes. The Indian traditions trace the existence of participatory councils back to this early period, although the structures of communities were further developed under the impact of Hinduism. There is evidence of a struggle between those accepting the structures of varna (caste) and those seeking a more egalitarian community, a difference of views that was also expressed through religion, notably Buddhism and Jainism (Sharna 1968). Further evidence for the varied political culture of South Asia may be derived from Greek accounts of the expeditions of Alexander the Great and continuing post-Alexander Hellenistic Greek encounters with the region’s cultures. The long tradition of the panchayat (village council) played a significant part in the development of local government under colonial rule and also in discourses of Indian democracy opposed to colonial rule (Mukerjee 1923). The traditions of Greek democracy were not the only route through which the ancient idea of the participatory council reached modern political practice. Philosophical Interventions: The Axial Age It is not just the institutional arrangements of early and proto-democracy that transcend geography but some cultural aspects too. The idea of an axial age in the first millennium bce, in which significant societal changes led to changes in both the institutional structure and the culture of societies, has gained some traction among global historians (Bellah and Joas 2012; Jaspers [1949] 1953). Rather than focus on a single cultural event or process, such as the “Greek enlightenment” or “revolution” of the political culture of classical Athens, scholars in this tradition find cultural developments in many societies across the world, starting around the same time although reaching a peak at different points during the period covered by this volume. Reflections on the value of community cohesion and individual freedom focused on the specific case of classical Greek democracy and its implications for cultural change have had a huge influence on the later development of modern democracy and political thought in Western Europe and the colonial Americas. Reflection and introspection regarding comparative social arrangements can be found in many cultures and have significantly influenced political thinking, often in a democratic direction. Pharaonic Egypt is perhaps the archetypal monarchical society, but assemblies were features of communities in Egypt at various points in history, again as echoed in Herodotus’ history; his account of the accession of Psammetichus

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to sole rule (Hdt. 2.147–153) is particularly instructive. Again, the pattern of local groups taking up roles vacated by a weak center emerges; collective and collaborative bodies take the place of a monarch’s direction. The Phoenicians (as the Greeks called them) of modern Lebanon were another of the Mediterranean cultures whose social and trading practices importantly influenced the development of Greek societies. Carthage, the most prominent city of the northern coast of Africa, was a Phoenician foundation (from Tyre) and of great interest to Greek political thinkers. Aristotle identified Carthage’s constitution as a mixture, tending toward the aristocratic, but notes that popular assent to the regime meant that there was little or no factional conflict (stasis), the failing typical of Greek cities (Politics 2.11, 1272b24–1273a2; see Chapter 8, this volume). This preoccupation with Carthage offers a salutary reminder that the ancient Greeks themselves did not see participatory politics as a feature unique to the Greek polis. Democracy’s Development A traditional view among ancient historians is that classical Athenian democracy came to an end with the city’s defeat by Macedon. But as other scholars have explored new evidence for the workings of the Hellenistic city, in particular the quantities of inscribed decrees produced during this period revealed by excavation and survey of city sites, a more complex and detailed picture has emerged of a political culture persisting within these cities that retained and even in some ways developed the democratic culture of the classical polis. The rise of the Macedonian Empire under Philip II and Alexander III of Macedon, and its continuation under the successor kingdoms ruled for the most part by descendants of their generals, saw the Greek polis as a model for political communities expanded into new geographical regions and developed further where it was already established. New cities were founded and required administration; existing cities sought new collaborative relationships within the new political horizons. Meanwhile, within cities, citizens and noncitizens organized aspects of their lives in conspicuously democratic as well as nondemocratic ways. Republican Rome itself, arguably destructive of the democracies of Hellenistic cities, exemplified the presence of democratic elements within a complex mixture of institutions. While the Greek historian Polybius identified the people (populus romanus, but in Greek dēmos) as having an important role in approving and judging the actions of the monarchical and aristocratic parts of the system, and also noted the power of the tribunes of the plebs (Polybius 6.14– 17), subsequent scholars have disagreed with his analysis. Some have argued that the Roman Republic can be treated as a mostly democratic constitution (Millar 2002), others that this disregards the limited institutional power of the

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bodies in which the people participated, and the unequal terms on which they did so (see North 1990). On the other hand, while it is difficult to treat Rome as a pure democracy, and it is very noticeable that the American Founders embraced Rome and republicanism precisely because they were not full-on direct democratic, democratic ideas, and the legacy of Athenian democracy, have nevertheless made their vital contributions to the development of modern republican concepts and political culture. The approach taken by this volume is to survey democracy broadly as a cultural phenomenon operating in different ways across a very wide range of ancient societies throughout antiquity (defined here as extending from the last millennia bce to the sixth century ce). From Mesopotamia to Byzantium, popular elements within societies can be discerned. At times, these have led to a flourishing of democratic culture, classical Athens being the most notable and best-documented example. Occasionally, democratic practice has been all but totally absent from the heights of bureaucratic monarchies, while still featuring in local and low-level social intercourse. Hence this volume examines not just the Athenians’ democracy (or rather democracies) of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, but many ancient societies before and after that moment. Our detailed knowledge of Athenian political culture and the wealth of sources available provide some of the most compelling case studies of democratic culture, but Athens should not be seen as the only society in antiquity in which democratic culture can be observed and studied.

IN THIS VOLUME This volume surveys democracy in practice during antiquity. While it nods to non-Western tradition and to a diversity of practices across different societies during the period it covers, nonetheless classical Athens provides the bulk of its case studies, as the ancient democracy that has left the most and the most revealing evidence of its political culture and institutions. Carol Atack and Andrew Monson survey the tension between monarchical leader and consultative body that provided the location for much ancient thought on the nature of rule and authority, and go on to assess whether such thought can be seen as a theory of sovereignty, contrasting ancient thought on that key theme with that of early modern theorists and arguing that a regularly invoked model, that of Carl Schmitt, is insufficient. Valentina Arena takes up the idea of liberty as an ideal, exploring its social dimensions through religion as well as nonreligious phenomena. Although freedom from domination was an important framework for ancient thought about liberty, the idea of republican liberty as the absence of the possibility of domination does not exhaust ancient thought on the topic. Arena also demonstrates the centrality of slavery to thought on freedom, as an analogy for

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the status of individuals and of communities, and identifies the origins of ideas about freedom in collective agreement on the ending of citizen debt bondage as a social practice. Particular attention is devoted to the Greek/Roman cults of the gods Zeus/Jupiter and Dionysus/Liber, with whom different forms of freedom were associated. Dhananjay Jagannathan considers the notion of the “common good,” arguing that this concept emerged from Athenian democracy to be taken up by political theorists such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero who were themselves opposed to or ambivalent about democracy. Through what he identifies as their essentially democratic conception of the common good, Athenian democracy became hardwired into the canon of Western political theory and ethical thought as rulers and thinkers in less democratic societies sought purpose and justification. While the common good was a general aspiration for democracy, it could lead to significantly distinctive economic and social activity. Emily Mackil explores the ways in which democratic institutions redistributed societal resources in classical democratic Athens, and the wider social impact of institutions such as jury pay. She shows how democracy reshaped economic structures; yet the economic impact of Athenian democracy encompassed the appropriation of the resources of other cities and communities, through institutions such as cleruchy, the granting of overseas land to Athenian citizens. As previous chapters have shown, it is impossible to examine political thought or practice in the ancient city without considering the role of religion. Georgia Petridou examines how the city’s religion was interconnected with the practice of Athenian democracy; political action was often backed by religious sanction. Petridou also reexamines recent claims that religion offered those other than male citizens an active, participatory role in the life of the city. One long-standing claim about ancient polities is that they were characterized by an unusual degree of cultural homogeneity. Denise Eileen McCoskey considers issues of ethnicity within ancient politics and the interactions between different groups within the city and between cities. As she notes, this is an area that has often been overlooked by scholarship, yet is of vital importance given the modern (e.g., “Alt-Right”) use of classical antiquity to buttress racial hierarchies. The ancient world did not share those modern structures of prejudiced thinking but did operate its own forms of political inclusion and exclusion, which the benefits of democratic citizenship sharpened. The exclusion of women from political participation is another marked distinction between ancient democracy and modern liberal democracy. Carol Atack explores the limited roles open to women as participatory citizens in ancient democracy, especially the strong gender exclusions of democratic Athens, and draws a contrast with Hellenistic and Roman societies, in which women were active participants in social institutions such as civic cults and private burial societies. Democracy appears to deepen the separation of women

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from political action; the limited political power available within the cities of the Roman Empire appears to lead to less rigorous exclusion of women from social organizations. In classical Athens, democracy was associated by its critics with political instability. Paul Cartledge shows how regime change was indeed a recurring feature of many ancient communities, by no means only the democratic, and that the pursuit of stability was for all political communities a prime political goal often unrealized in practice. Democracy itself was imagined even by its advocates and supporters to originate in political violence, whether the overthrow of tyrants or the defeat of external enemies, both of which played a part in the classical Athenians’ democratic imaginary. Given the small scale of the polis, interacting with other cities was a necessity. How might a democracy conduct its relationships with other cities and political entities of various types? Carol Atack and Paul Cartledge explore how democratic Athens used its cultural assets to enhance its political hegemony, extending from the performance of drama at home to the display of Athenian power at Panhellenic sanctuaries. In contrast, the Roman Republic conducted foreign affairs in a much more oligarchic manner, building on its own traditional or ancestral cultural practices of political friendship and patronage. For the most part, the societies surveyed in this volume have been small citystates; larger political entities tended toward autocratic regime types, and in the long term to suppress democratic politics within subject entities. Nonetheless, the fluidity of the Hellenistic world saw a variety of initiatives that took politics “beyond the classical polis,” as Benjamin Gray explores. Federal relationships between cities and groups of cities were one way in which political arrangements might transcend the size limits of the polis while maintaining participatory features; other initiatives expanded the polis by extending citizenship to more inhabitants. While the polis with its infinite variety of citizen self-government did not persist as a form of community in the face of rising empires and the later development of the nation-state, it has provided an exemplar and a model for political thinkers and practical politicians ever since. Not all the ideas imported from classical Athens have been good, or even neutral, in their impact on modern societies—for instance, the effectual interaction between ancient ideas on slavery and the racialized slavery of modern colonial settler states has been particularly damaging—but antiquity or the ancient world has served as a sourcebook for later societies seeking to enact political reforms. From the voting procedures of Athens to the interstate relationships of Panhellenic sanctuary management, from the development of functioning federal structures in Hellenistic Greece to the balancing of democratic and nondemocratic elements in the Roman Republic, the politics of antiquity both democratic and nondemocratic have provided a starting point for political reform and institutional development.

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CHAPTER ONE

Sovereignty ANDREW MONSON AND CAROL ATACK

INTRODUCTION What, if anything, can the concept of sovereignty contribute to the study of the cultural history of democracy in antiquity? As a political-theoretical concept, sovereignty is often associated with the rise of the modern state in Europe, an institution that was both autonomous from society and homogenous within well-defined territorial boundaries. The term is most commonly used today in the context of international relations and the formation of supranational organizations. Its modern meanings are all derived from the theory of sovereignty developed in the early modern period by natural law and social contract theorists such as Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas Hobbes. Their focus was on identifying a supreme source of law within the polity who could not be bound by the laws he creates or by those created by any power outside his territory. As this chapter shows, similar discussions can be found in the texts of classical antiquity, as authors sought to locate the source of the power to act on behalf of other citizens in the much smaller scope of the polis as city-state. But the very nature of the polis and of the ancient Roman state inevitably entails key differences of approach and conception as well. The early modern theorists inaugurated the venerable tradition, which reached its apex in Theodor Mommsen’s Staatsrecht, according to which the sovereign of an ancient state and its source of legitimacy were identified as the constituent power of a constitution (Flaig 1997). Some scholars of antiquity have drawn on those definitions to defend the notion of popular sovereignty in ancient Greek democracy and the Roman Republic, or to show their affinity

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with ancient political theories (Millar 2002; Ostwald 1986). More recently, however, the idea of popular sovereignty, the idea that sovereignty arises from the people as a whole, rather than from the special status of the sovereign figure, has been revived by historians of political thought, and its origins placed firmly within the classical past of Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic (Arena 2016; Hoekstra 2016; Lane 2016). The political culture of Rome has also been a starting point for republican models of democracy, such as that of Philip Pettit (2012). Cultural historians, on the other hand, have stressed the differences between ancient and modern political systems, often questioning the relevance of the concept of sovereignty to antiquity (Cartledge 2009: 13–18; Hölkeskamp 2010: 2, 68). In this analysis, ancient cultures were more focused on the figure of the sovereign as the embodiment of power and authority, and the cultural processes through which that authority was transmitted, rather than any abstract principle. This was true both for autocratic regimes, such as the Persian Empire, whose rulers developed a visual language of power to assert rule over regions and peoples who may not have been as easily subjugated as their depictions suggest, and for the democratic and other self-governing cities of classical Greece. In the world of the Greek city-state, as Paul Cartledge notes, “Sovereignty, insofar as it was an issue or, indeed, a concept, remained blurred, despite modern legalistic attempts to identify a notion of the ‘sovereignty’ of law” (Cartledge 2009: 23; cf. Ostwald 1986). While developed theorizing about sovereignty is absent from Greek political thought, the figure of the ruler plays a role even in Athenian democracy and is associated with many actions and sets of imagery that are evoked in modern descriptions of the sovereign. That figure could be a traditional monarch— such as Theseus, the mythical king to whom even the democratic Athenians attributed some of their political arrangements—or the dēmos itself, personified in the visual relief images on published Athenian decrees and depicted on stage through the comic everyman characters of Aristophanes. These powerful depictions, along with the critical analysis of Athenian direct democracy found in the writing of historians such as Thucydides, offer a vivid picture of something that looks similar to modern ideas of popular sovereignty. In the postclassical Western political thought tradition, direct democracy of the classical Athenian variety often served to illustrate the perils of giving the people unaccountable sovereignty; Hobbes, as a translator of Thucydides (the first to translate him into English directly from the ancient Greek original), can be seen to draw freely on the classical author’s accounts of civic breakdown and of the failure of democratic processes to produce workable governance and leadership (Thuc. 3.82–3; Hobbes [1629] 1989). The antidote—already in antiquity—was supposed to be the sovereignty of law, a tradition of thought inherited by early modern natural law theorists

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of sovereignty as well as the framers of the US constitution. The cataloguing of existing law by the restored democracy of fourth-century bce Athens, and the cultural premium placed on ancient laws such as those attributed to Solon (like Theseus, credited anachronistically with founding democracy), both operated to prevent the assembly from tinkering with the law. A strong distinction between nomoi (laws) and psēphismata (decrees) was also developed and enshrined in legislation, as theorists expounded arguments that justified the restriction of the assembly’s law-making. New legal processes (the graphē paranomōn) also restricted enthusiasm for changing established law, as opponents could accuse any proposer as a subverter of the existing law. The penalties were severe and the incentives for politicians to use these rules to defang their rivals’ proposals accordingly great (Hansen 1999). In modern constitutional democracies, the people is at most supposed to be a “sleeping sovereign” disengaged from the practice of government (Tuck 2015). But in Athenian democracy, the structure could be characterized in opposite terms. The sovereign body, instantiated by the assembled people, was always awake and operational (even if, in practice, full assembly meetings were not that frequent). But the figure of the sovereign, represented in early modern states by the absolute monarch, and thought to be empowered by the people as sleeping sovereign, was not physically embodied in the polis in classical democracy. Even when an individual was granted unusual power to act without reference to other democratic bodies, as Athenian generals were when they were designated autokratores and sent on campaign (as, for example, Alcibiades, Nicias, and Lamachus in 415 bce for the Sicilian expedition, Thuc. 6.8.2), they remained ultimately accountable to democratic scrutiny. Contemporary political and legal theorists go even further and argue that unaccountable sovereignty itself is an incoherent idea, incompatible with a rule-based conception of law (Hardin 1999: 152–6; Eleftheriadis 2010). It is indeed difficult to see how any constituent power could possibly be legitimate without reference to higher order laws or conventions. Advocates of popular sovereignty have to admit that “self-legislation must be realized in the medium of law itself” (Habermas [1992] 1996: 126). Even who legitimately counts as the sovereign people is arguably a legal construction that presupposes some constitutional order. For those who wish to restore unaccountable sovereignty to democracy’s active political lexicon, the twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt offers some support. He defines the sovereign as the one “who decides on the state of exception” (Schmitt [1985] 2005: 5). What Schmitt means by an “exception” is an extreme circumstance that cannot be dealt with through existing procedures; in this model, both identifying the situation and responding to it fall to the sovereign. However, Schmitt’s normative justification for decisions by the sovereign as the expression of a prelegal existential political identity is

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misleading; the struggle of friend versus enemy creates legitimacy within the polity only in a trivial sense, due to the antecedent exclusion of diversity and dissent (Vinx 2015: 113–19). The concept of “identities” and the concept of “the political” are prominent in cultural history but need not serve as normative justifications for sovereignty. This chapter argues that culture may stand for a higher order set of beliefs, institutions, and behavioral norms, which are not immutable but are entrenched, producing a durable “grammar of politics” (Meier [1966] 2017: 5). Moments of political crisis teach us that, contrary to Schmitt, the one who decides on the exception typically has no legitimate right to do so nor any right to confer legitimacy on government, even if it claims to embody the people’s will. These acts will appear transgressive to the prevailing political culture and encourage those committed to its norms to defend them and entrench them more deeply as formal higher order constitutional rules. Whether a constitutional order succeeds or fails depends on whether it continues to serve the mutual advantage of those who hold de facto power or on whether they can do better by changing it despite the costs of doing so. Such moments of crisis can reveal whether democracy is viable in a given society, that is, whether its political culture enables the people to coordinate and decide on the form of their constitution (Hardin 1999: 276–7).

IMAGINED SOVEREIGNTY Dēmokratia is, literally, the power (kratos) of the people (dēmos). Unlike the Greek terms for monarchy and oligarchy, which connote the monopoly on office-holding (archē) by an individual or small group, it evokes “the People’s capacity to do things” (Ober 2017: 22–9). The term may have been coined soon after 508 bce, when the Athenians drove out the Spartans who had helped rid them of tyranny and embarked on what is now seen as a revolutionary political experiment (Hdt. 5.62–78; Ober 1996b; on “revolution,” see Chapter 8, this volume). However, the assertion of the collective identity of the people was neither new nor unique to Athens. A deep cultural history of democracy would require us to look not only at Greece and Rome but also at the vast majority of simple premodern societies where political decisions were made after deliberations in assemblies and councils. Most are unfortunately known only from archaeological data and ethnographic analogies, although some evidence survives (see Introduction, this volume). Moreover, civic autonomy and citizenship, albeit with varying degrees of political freedom and participation, were possible in ancient monarchies. To identify any individual or group as “sovereign” in these contexts raises both conceptual and empirical difficulties, especially when sovereignty is measured by the standards of modern European state formation.

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From the beginning of the Athenian democracy in 508 bce it was clear that “the People’s capacity to do things” was predicated on cooperation, sustained by behavioral norms of freedom, equality, and dignity, which were entrenched in the citizens’ civic education through symbols, rituals, performances, speeches, and laws. If the commitment to rule-based government were to be violated and the people were to act as a truly unconstrained and lawless sovereign—losing in other words its own cultural memory—the tyranny of the majority would undermine democracy itself. Josiah Ober illustrates this possibility with reference to Carl Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy. As other critics have shown, he notes that Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction leads to an infinite regress, because every sovereign decision entails the exclusion of the dissenting party. The Schmittian sovereign, therefore, is by definition a  homogenous unit that does tolerate internal diversity (Ober 2017: 68–9; Vinx 2015). Both the ancient Greeks and the Romans imagined their political community as a singular masculine entity, the people (dēmos, populus), which lent itself easily to personification. In Athens this appears strikingly in the relief images atop Athenian decrees, of which the most notable surviving example is the Decree of Eucrates from 337/336 bce (Figure 1.1, RO 79 = SEG xii 87). On other occasions, the city itself might be imagined as a female divine figure, as shown in the use of patron goddesses on similar inscribed texts (such as the cover image of this volume, a decree honoring citizens of Samos, RO 2/OR 191 = IG II2 1; Figure 6.1). For Aristotle, the dēmos was both a superhuman person and a collection of individual men with mortal passions. His description of the people anticipates in some respects the Hobbesian artificial man as well as Ernst Kantorowicz’s two-body political theology (Kantorowicz 1957), in which the monarch is both a physical person and the embodiment of the political collective: When all meet together, the people may thus become something like a single person, who, as he has many feet, many hands, and many senses, may also have many qualities of character and intelligence. (Arist., Pol. 3.11.1281b5–7 trans. Barker/Stalley) Aristotle’s point, as we shall see further below, is that a multitude differs from a monarch precisely because its will is the outcome of an institutionally embedded process of aggregation that filters out the moral and epistemic deficiencies of any single individual. Contrary to the sovereign posited by Hobbes, its superhuman qualities would not be possible for a monarch. One of the ways in which the Aristotelian collective demonstrates its epistemic superiority is in judging forms of art, such as the tragic drama that, as we will see, often dramatized questions of sovereignty and authority through the retelling of myth. Aristotle’s abstract model draws heavily on the political culture of democratic Athens, where the

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FIGURE 1.1  Decree of Eucrates, passed by the Athenian Assembly in 337/6 bce, showing Demokratia crowning Demos (“the people”) with a wreath. Photo: Getty Images.

ten tribes into which the citizens had been organized by Cleisthenes competed against each other on occasions such as the annual dramatic festivals of a religious nature. But the capacity of the people to act as a sovereign caused some disquiet. Commentators, including Aristotle himself, were quick to worry about the dēmos taking undue advantage of this power, particularly when it was reidentified with the majority of a citizenship divided by class conflict rather than the unified entirety operating under peaceful consensus (homonoia, literally “unanimity”). The idea that the dēmos itself was a tyrant was a commonplace of ancient, predominantly anti-democratic thought (Kallet 2003). The dēmos

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might act as a tyrant over both the interests of the minority internally and over allies externally. Yet this capacity lends support to the view, most recently developed by Kinch Hoekstra, that the dēmos was sovereign in a sense that connects to the modern usage (Hoekstra 2016). The dēmos can be seen as a “representation” of the collective will, even one that is potentially above the law (Pettit 2012: 285–95). The mere possibility that the dēmos could potentially exercise its will directly, unmediated by its own laws, indicates, according to Hoekstra, the Athenians’ sense of popular sovereignty. He draws in support on the competing assembly speeches over the punishments to be meted out to rebels in allied Mytilene after its revolt in 427 that Thucydides so brilliantly wrote up in his history. Leading politician and orator Cleon tells the Athenian assembly that their rule over their allies was a tyranny, enforced not by the goodwill of the ruled but by the superior power of the Athenians (Thuc. 3.37.2). In opposing him, Diodotus accepts this analysis but argues that this power should be exercised gently. For Hoekstra, the invocation of tyranny in this democratic context suggests that the term cannot have been wholly negative in fifth-century political thought (Hoekstra 2016: 27–30). However, Thucydides’ versions of speeches may not entirely accurately represent contemporary debate but rather to some extent theorize and analyze it (Thuc. 1.22.1—much depends on what is meant by “as seemed to me to be necessary”); and the idea of tyranny and the figure of the tyrant were well-established counter-examples and threats in Athenian political discourse (Osborne 2003). There were other ways in which the people could be invoked as an individual whose political choices mattered. The personification of Demos through everyman characters was a standard device of Athenian Old Comedy. Aristophanes’ Knights (424 bce) portrays Demos as an old man, unable to manage his slaves, who seek to influence him in their favor by flattery. The rival slaves are caricatures of leading politicians of the time (including Cleon) who control and manipulate their master through flattery and deception. The play won first prize (but Cleon was reelected soon after to the top executive office). In another comedy, the Wasps (422 bce), Aristophanes depicts the citizen as judge, both in the individual character of Philocleon, the rascally old man whose desire to judge—and to convict—has become unreasonable, and in the collective character of the Chorus, elderly but impoverished Athenian citizens who rely on the meagre pay given to jurors for subsistence and allegedly take a malicious pleasure in finding defendants guilty and imposing on them the harshest sentences. Aristophanes’ characters show a remarkable awareness of the power of their role. Philocleon uses an analogy with the power of Zeus, king of the gods and judge over all, to explain his role as a citizen-juror. Zeus is allocated a special

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status within Aristophanes’ pantheon, the only god to be addressed as basileus (king). Philocleon first compares his role as an Athenian citizen juror to that of a king: Right from the start I’ll demonstrate that our sovereignty (basileia) is lesser than no other. (Ar., Wasps 548–9, translation adapted from Henderson 2002) While basileia is usually reserved for the rule of a king, in this context it suggests something closer in meaning to sovereignty. Later in the play, it becomes clear that the rule Philocleon has in mind is that of Zeus; he compares the power of the Athenian citizen to that of the king of the gods: So don’t I wield great authority [megalēn archēn], no less than that of Zeus? I’m even spoken of in the same way as Zeus. For instance, if we’re in an uproar [thorubos], every passerby says, “Zeus the King, the jury’s really thundering!” (Ar., Wasps 619–24, translation adapted from Henderson) The humorous likening of the noise the chattering jurors make to thunder subtends the serious point that the activities of the citizen jurors can be as powerful and destructive as Zeus himself when he hurls his thunderbolt. When jurors create disturbance, or become disorderly (as thorubos implies both a disorderly group and the noise made in particular by democratic assemblies), the impact on those outside the courts (the proceedings of which were visible to passersby in the Agora) is assimilated to that of divine thunder. Aristophanes’ comic comparison is powered by the traditional Greek analogy between the order of the cosmos, presided over by Zeus, and the order of the city, presided over by its ruling power (Atack 2019). The idea that the dēmos as individuals and a collective judged all— and especially those to whom rule had been entrusted—was one of the key components of Athenian democracy. Office-holders were subject to extensive dokimasia (scrutiny) before they could take up office or be a candidate for elected roles, and also after they had completed their term of office, usually for a year. Melissa Lane has argued that these controls over office-holders are a mark of popular sovereignty (Lane 2016, 2019).

THE FIGURE OF THE SOVEREIGN It was not always necessary to imagine a sovereign figure as being in contrast to a dēmos. Autocratic monarchies outside the Greek world, and tyrannies within it, provided living examples of embodied power. The critique of such figures does not constitute a theorization of sovereignty but did offer the space for the cultural exploration of the idea.

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Evidence from early societies of the Near East, particularly Mesopotamian cities such as Mari, shows a tension between the collective self-governance of communities and the power of external rulers (see Introduction, this volume). Records from these civilizations show local groups negotiating with rulers and attest a dynamic relationship between the central power and local regions (Fleming 2004). The imagery of later rulers appears to respond to such tension. Rulers sought to display their power and minimize any sense of negotiation. Other peoples were shown in subjection and defeat. They were also shown as smaller than the figure of the ruler, a convention that Greeks used to depict slaves; a notable example is the rock-cut Bisitun relief set up in the late 520s by Persian emperor Darius I (Figure 1.2). The Greek idea of the Persians as all being subjected to slavery, under absolute rule in contrast with their own participatory citizenship, reflected this negative, antipolitical representation. The presence of the symbols of divine power close to the monarch also served to associate him with the divine and elevate him above the merely human sphere, without necessarily implying that he was himself divine (Root 1979, 2013). The self-presentation of Persian rulers contrasts with the representation of rule in Greek poetry and art. Rulers were seen as needing to negotiate with others and to participate in their community. The representation of assemblies in ancient epic demonstrates such procedures. Both gods and humans need to

FIGURE 1.2  The sixth-century bce rock-cut inscription at Bisitun (or Behistun) in Iran shows King Darius I of Persia receiving captives. Photo: Getty Images.

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debate and agree, in their separate worlds. Homer’s Iliad, the earliest work of Greek fiction in verse, depicts assemblies and debates taking place among both the gods on Mount Olympus and humans down on Earth. Within the human assembly, the superior status of the leaders is depicted both by their physical and intellectual preeminence, and their possession of physical symbols of rule such as the sceptre. When the lowly Greek ranker Thersites interrupts the order of business to criticize the leaders of the Greek expedition at Troy, he is struck with the sceptre by Odysseus (Hom., Il. 2.211–268) and firmly reminded that polukoiraniē (many-kingness) is a very bad thing. If the distinction between (autocratic, monarchic) ruler and ruled were not clear enough, Thersites is depicted as ugly and deformed, unlike the handsome royal or other aristocratic rulers. The aesthetic element in the Greek evaluation of leadership persisted in democracy with the figure of the kalos kagathos, literally the “fine-and-good,” who embodied aesthetic and other forms of personal excellence. The Athenian king Theseus was the figure most often deployed symbolically as a personification of Athenian citizenship. His image appeared in temple friezes where he represented the city, both at Athens and on Athenian buildings at Panhellenic locations such as Olympia and Delphi, and his heroic deeds were shown on vase paintings for private use (Figure 1.3) as well as retold in literary form (Isoc., Helen 23–30). The paradoxical use of a king to represent the democracy, particularly on stage as a character in Athenian tragedy, has long been noted, and often described as an anachronism (Easterling 1985); on vases, Theseus appears in the pose of a tyrannicide, fighting for democracy (see Chapter 2, Figure 2.1, this volume). The chief annual religious festival at which Athenian tragedies were performed, the Great or City Dionysia, were a prime opportunity at which the democracy displayed its ideology and the results of its activity to visitors from other cities (Goldhill 1987). Asserting democratic ideology through the retelling of heroic myth necessitated the use of characters such as Theseus, accorded present ideas some authority through the association with the glorious heroic past, and also asserted the importance of political unity (Atack 2020: 39–55). Theseus, along with other “democratic” kings such as Pelasgus of Argos in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, disclaim superordinate personal authority while embodying it. The dramatic setting in which they do so is also significant. These kings represent their cities in plays in which refugees and those on the losing side seek sanctuary and support. This is depicted through the formal process of supplication. Those seeking help must ask for it in a formal manner through ritualized contact with the figure of authority, who must then decide whether to accede to the request or deny it. Whether making this decision amounts to a Schmittian state of exception can be questioned. Accepting supplicants is not a foregone formality, and a decision is made by the person supplicated. But tragic kings for the most part avoid taking this decision, referring the supplicants to the assembly of citizens and seeking their support, even though they may present the case on behalf of the supplicants and advocate for them.

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FIGURE 1.3  Kylix (wine cup used at the symposium) depicting the labors of Theseus, 440–430 bce. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum. 1850,0302.3.

Pelasgus declines to make that decision, arguing that it is for the citizens in assembly to decide by public vote whether to offer safety and support to the supplicants, in this case the daughters of Danaus who are fleeing their Egyptian husbands and seeking refuge in the city of Argos, to which they have ancestral links. He explains that they must seek the support of the citizens. The Danaids, on the other hand, assert that the king is the person who should take those decisions and who has the authority to do so. The model they offer bears some resemblance to early modern absolute rule; the king is the community: You are the city [polis], and you are the people [damion]. You are an unjudged magistrate You rule the altar, the hearth of the land, you with your single-vote nods and on your throne with the sole sceptre rule over all business. (Aeschylus, Suppliant Women 373–5)

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Euripides’ Theseus, facing the supplication of another group of women, the mothers and widows of the Argives killed when their ruler Adrastos has led the army out in support of exiled Polyneices, son of Oedipus and brother of Eteocles, to a disastrous defeat. He explains his position to his mother Aethra, who intercedes on behalf of the Argive women: But by putting across this argument I would make the people better disposed. For I put them in the position of holding sole authority When I set free this city of the equal vote. (Euripides, Suppliant Women 350–3) Here the position is more complex than in Aeschylus’ depiction of Argos. While Theseus must go to the assembly to seek the citizens’ assent to the acceptance of the suppliants, the authority of the assembly in turn derives from his original grant of power. A third tragedy in which a democratic king receives a suppliant places even less emphasis on the role of the citizens. In Aeschylus’ play, dating from the 460s bce, the king is clear in his subjection to and participation in the rule of the  people. By contrast, in Sophocles’ last, posthumous play Oedipus at Colonus, the dēmos is shown to make an incorrect decision, which is overturned by Theseus, who recognizes the need to accept Oedipus as a suppliant in Athens despite his status as an outcast from his native Thebes tainted by ritual pollution and a familial curse. Sophocles’ Theseus is arguably the tragic character who comes closest to embodying a Schmittian model of sovereignty, in that he decides a case (Oedipus’ supplication) in a way contrary to the obvious choice embraced by the citizens of the deme of Colonus (just outside the city walls), who chose to reject the Theban outcast. Sophocles’ play was written during the final stages of the Peloponnesian War, when the Athenian democracy, restored after the 411/410 oligarchic revolution, was precarious. It was first performed posthumously after the second overthrow and restoration of democracy. Sophocles (who died in 406/405) was himself an engaged political actor who had been appointed to an exceptional office to oversee good democratic practice during an earlier period of democratic uncertainty. Here perhaps he depicts Theseus as a king who can, unlike Aeschylus’ Pelasgus or Euripides’ Theseus, surpass the epistemic (in)capacity of the crowd and also fulfill the conditions of Schmittian sovereignty. Theseus cannot be counted as a Schmittian sovereign. Although Sophocles depicts him making an extraordinary judgment, the context of Sophocles’ play and the evidence from other tragedies suggest that Sophocles is pushing an unconventional argument hostile to the practices of the democracy. The depiction of the heroic ruler might be thought to support a strong model of sovereignty.

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FIGURE 1.4  Silver Athenian “owl” tetradrachm, dated to the 450s bce. Photo courtesy of the American Numismatic Society. 1935.117.226.

Either way, clearly the Athenians saw the reordering of the city as an act to be carried out by a person of special status. Such ordering, or diakosmēsis, paralleled the actions of Zeus and other gods in shaping the cosmos. The foundation of the villages of Athens by Cecrops, their unification (synoecism) into a single entity by Theseus (Thuc. 2.15.2), and the foundation of democracy attributed anachronistically to Theseus all exemplified this exceptional process.1 Cleisthenes’ historical reordering of the city, which reorganized the original four “kinship” tribes into ten political units, constructed the system of demes and trittyes, and so reconfigured the political landscape of the city and literally reshaped its political culture, could be seen as such an act (Lévêque and VidalNaquet [1964] 1996), as could Solon’s constitutional reforms. Other democratic iconography, such as the image of the city’s patron goddess Athena and her own mascot on its coinage (Figure 1.4), communicated a strong civic identity both within Athens and across the Greek world.

CULTURAL CONSTITUTIONS Ober’s earlier work, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), marked a significant shift in scholarship on ancient Greek political history, offering a Geertzian thick description of the dominant norms and ideology of Athenian culture to which the elite had to conform in their rhetoric, which was the currency of power. Ober criticizes constitutional and legal explanations of democratic stability in Athens, which sought to identify a unitary locus of sovereignty in the people and to oppose it to the supposed sovereignty of law. For the Athenians

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there could be no question of resolving this apparent contradiction, so both claims were left to coexist in tension with one another (Ober 1989: 22–3, 299– 304). Instead, Ober argues that the “discourse of Athenian democracy […] was a primary factor in the promotion and maintenance of social harmony, and it made direct democratic decision making possible” (35, cf. 332–9). Within this framework the law itself becomes a form of discourse, whereby the Athenian assemblies and popular juries both create and interpret the law by listening to speeches (141–8). The construction of consensus was, in Ober’s model, one of the primary functions of political activity. Other scholars have noted its importance. Mirko Canevaro has shown that it is reflected in the practice of taking and recording votes in the assembly; that body aimed to achieve consensus through a show of hands which was estimated rather than to establish the narrow numerical domination of majority over minority (Canevaro 2018). Whereas the courts counted and recorded the votes that made up jury decisions, Canevaro’s analysis of the epigraphic record for a range of Greek cities suggests that in the assembly most decisions were taken by consensus or by a cheirotonia (show of hands), and that, where votes are precisely recorded, they point to nearunanimity (Canevaro 2018: 116). Canevaro suggests that recording of votes cast was done not so much to confirm the margin of decision as to demonstrate that the meeting was quorate and thus authorized to make legitimate decisions. This emphasizes the importance of the assembly as a source of authority, an association that persisted in a different form in Republican Rome. The desire for consensus saw a cultural prejudice against those acting outside or in violation of communal norms and without the assent of the community. This led to a vilification of tyranny and unaccountability in Greco-Roman political culture, something again seen on the tragic stage as characters such as King Creon (in Sophocles’ Antigone) are punished for disregarding norms. Citizens were thereby reminded of the legitimacy of their lawfully constituted government and steered away from the path described by Bodin as “lordly” (Bodin 1955). For Bodin, direct interventions of the sovereign into the field of government, exemplified by extraordinary commands granted in the late Roman Republic, precipitated political collapse (Straumann 2016: 289–95). Regardless of how one identifies or classifies the Roman constitution, the maneuvering of powerful Romans and the actions that they took to compete for and secure power do cast some light on the question of sovereignty.

THE STATE OF EXCEPTION In his analysis of monarchy in book 3 of the Politics, Aristotle makes a striking qualification to his argument earlier in the same book that the laws ought to be sovereign. It seems to be a response both to Plato, who claims that a philosopher

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king with knowledge of the true forms of justice and the good should rule, and to other fourth-century bce thinkers, such as Xenophon and Isocrates, who had developed a new figure of a king whose power is justified by his ability to act as a virtuous exemplar for those he rules (Atack 2015). Those who hold such a view, Aristotle notes, believe that it is foolish to govern by written laws and that rulers should instead be guided by the general principle of what is just. Aristotle for his part casts doubt on this line of attack on the laws by pointing out that, unlike laws, human beings contain a pathētikon (emotional element). Laws may fail to “hit the mark” and human judgment is needed, although the question remains of expertise versus the wisdom of the multitude (Arist., Pol. 3.10.1286.21–6). Aristotle’s own answer to this crucial question is that the multitude is more capable of deciding on the exception than one man. This is significant, because elsewhere he identifies kurios (sovereign) power with the capacity to judge, which was also a prominent theme in classical Athenian political culture examined below (Arist., Pol. 3.11.1282a41–b14; [Arist.], Ath. Pol. 53, 66–9). In this context, Aristotle’s constitutional choice is based on its workability and its mutual advantages rather than its moral superiority. First, he recognizes that it was common practice for citizens to judge, deliberate, and decide on particular cases in the Greek city-states of his time. Second, he claims that they were collectively better at doing this than any single person. Here he reprises the aggregation theorem expounded earlier in book 3 by likening democracy to a great feast to which all diners contribute, making it richer than one provided by a single person (Arist., Pol. 3.11.1281a39–b15; Lane 2013). An individual is more likely to be corrupted by his passions than a plēthos (multitude of people) in which at least the majority are good men.2 Aristotle’s model offers a counter-point to the model of the ruler authorized by epistemic superiority, sketched by Herodotus (see below) and developed in full in Plato’s Republic (Atack 2015). If knowledge is the quality that renders an individual or group of individuals kurios, Aristotle shows how groups can exceed the capabilities of the most exceptional individual, a figure he imagines as the pambasileus, the bearer of “total kingship.” He answers Plato’s claim, itself drawing on examples from history such as Herodotus’ story of Aristagoras the tyrant ruler of Miletus failing to deceive King Cleomenes of Sparta but triumphantly fooling the Athenian masses in c. 500 bce (Hdt. 5.49–55, 5.97), that an individual with strong epistemic capability is less easily deceived than a group. Plato, however, also explores how rule operates in the absence of the philosopher king, offering an intriguing parallel to Aristotle’s argument for democracy in his Statesman. If there is no philosopher king available to rule, then the next best solution would be for each constitution (monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy) to be strictly governed by law, in which case

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monarchy would still be the best (Pl., Plt. 301ab). However, when paranomon (illegality) instead of ennomon (legality) characterizes each constitution, then democracy would be the best, because power is too dispersed among individuals to do much harm (Pl., Plt. 302d–303b). It is unclear from the Statesman whether Plato envisages the philosopher king as a real possibility rather than a counterfactual, as Aristotle’s pambasileus appears to be. But he does recognize the possibility of a “skilled political actor” (the literal translation of the dialogue’s Latin title Politicus) creating a cohesive and stable society by weaving together the citizens with their contrasting characters and capabilities. In the Statesman, it is the product of the statesman’s action rather than the sovereign that is the artificial body. Yet even this political metaphor draws on Athenian culture: the idea that the “fabric of society” is created as an act of weaving appears earlier in Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata (Blondell 2005; Lane 1997). Again, abstract thought on the construction of society and the values that underpin the exercise of power draw on cultural predecessors, demonstrating how political theorizing in Athens was closely tied to other forms of cultural production. The difference is that Aristotle identifies Plato’s “paranomic” democracy with the limits of legality itself, where the written laws are faulty, incomplete, or ambiguous; he argues that in that case the multitude should then decide, as they do in contemporary Greek democratic practice, based on majoritarian principles. Plato too argues that there are situations in which the law gives no guidance, but he suggests that the solution is rule by an expert statesman trained in the basilikē technē (royal art) of philosophy (Atack 2020: 106–15; Lane 1997: 159–63). Like most of his wealthy peers, Plato was apparently willing to acquiesce to the dēmokratia (people’s power) only as being the least bad of all defective constitutions (Frank 2019). One might prefer an oligarchy or monarchy as long as one could be chosen as one of the oligarchs or be among the rulers oneself. The political crisis in Athens in 411 bce reveals how uncertain that was: an oligarchic faction of four hundred men convinced an irregular rump assembly to change the constitution, promising to share power with a citizen body of the five thousand richest citizens, but they never constituted or convened an assembly of such a body and soon they fell out into strife among themselves (Thuc. 8.67.1–3). Despite the false show of legality, the experiment obviously violated Athenian political norms and sparked popular outrage in the democratically minded fleet manned by the poorer citizens. Within a few short months, its support had evaporated. Subsequent regimes emphasized the codification and restatement of law. The people, in short, were able to coordinate collectively and reaffirm a broad consensus for democratic government, which was not ideal for everyone but was the least bad option. That many powerful citizens found democracy objectionable is evident from the antidemocratic literature of fifth and fourth

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centuries bce, but the costs of significant change to the constitution were high. This would be made evident in the second oligarchic revolution a few years later (Xen., Hell. 2.3.11–2.4.43; on revolutions, see Chapter 8, this volume). Its effect is also seen in Sophocles’ final play, Oedipus at Colonus, as we saw above. Sophocles in 406/405 perhaps chose the setting of this play both because it was his home deme and because the critical assembly at which transfer to the oligarchy had taken place in 411 bce was, exceptionally, held there (Thuc. 8.67.2).

RULERS AND JUDGING Sophocles depicted Theseus making the correct judgment in respect of Oedipus, contrary to the views of the (Athenian) citizens of Colonus. The capacity to judge is one ascribed to rulers across a wide array of ancient literature and is seen in other cultures outside the Greco-Roman world; Athens commemorated its first king’s judgment on the Acropolis along with other kings at the Erechtheion (Figure 1.5). However, recognition of the capacity to judge and granting authority to the good judge typically involves the wider citizenship. A prime example is Herodotus’ account of Deioces, chosen to be king of the Medes after they win freedom from domination by the Assyrians. The historicity of Herodotus’ account is doubtful, but the story demonstrates themes that will

FIGURE 1.5  The Erechtheion on Athens’ Acropolis was built by the democracy and housed key city cults to Athena and Poseidon and the city’s mythical kings. Photo: Getty Images.

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be developed in later Greek political thinking, but are also key elements of the monarchical ideology of the Persian Empire—the importance of unification, for example. Herodotus’ version depicts the society that Deioces creates and rules over as a kind of nondemocratic anti-Athens (Atack 2020: 23–6; Brown 1988). It also exemplifies features of sovereignty; the cross-cultural idea of the stranger king, invited into a society to provide judgment. There is no longer any overarching political authority; each village rules itself separately. Yet this does not result in stability or security. Deioces gains a reputation for dispute resolution and the adjudication of property cases within his own village (Hdt 1.96–8); Herodotus emphasizes that Deioces’ capability is an epistemic one. He is called to assist other villages and then holds out for the grant of overarching authority, secured for him by his friends’ manipulation of the Medes as they gather for an assembly (Hdt. 1.97–8). With this in place, he secures a form of absolute rule; Herodotus’ account credits Deioces with the invention of many of the practices and institutions the Greeks associated with absolute rule or despotism, from the seclusion of the monarch within a palace, to the information gathering needed to provide him with knowledge of the exterior world (Hdt. 1.98–100). Yet, in his depiction of Deioces’ citadel, Herodotus suggests that this form of despotism is aligned with cosmic processes of ordering. Plato, as might be expected, suggests that knowledge offers the best claim to authority, a view that coheres with his depiction of the rule of knowledge in Kallipolis, the ideal city imagined in his Republic, and with Magnesia, the society that the three interlocutors of the Laws will go on to imagine. For Plato, establishing knowledge as the criterion for rule would deliver a stable and harmonious society, in which all members could contribute to the well-being of the polity under the guidance of experts.

STATES OF EMERGENCY, THE HELLENISTIC POLIS, AND ROMAN CONSTITUTIONALISM One of the ways in which many scholars have separated the government of poleis after the Macedonian conquest in the 330s and 320s and under the Successor kingdoms from the classical poleis that preceded them is by highlighting the imposition of an external and overarching ruler. In this situation, cities operated their local governance largely according to their existing democratic practice, while simultaneously ceding some overarching powers to that ruler. As recent scholarship on Hellenistic democracy has shown, this is a period in which new-style political cultures flourish rather than the end of democratic politics suggested by earlier classical scholarship (Canevaro and Gray 2018, contra, e.g., Cartledge 2018; see also Chapter 10).

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However, it is chiefly concerning the question of sovereignty within the power structures of the Roman Republic that scholars have expressed substantial disagreement on both the nature of the Roman constitution and the presence of a sovereign power within it. Roman republican responses to paranomic states of exception and emergencies have been treated as both a continuation of and contrast to ancient Greek democracy. But Rome offers a different set of institutions and practices in which extraordinary power can be detected: pertinent examples include the (ex hypothesi temporary and limited) office of dictatorship, the device of the senatus consultum ultimum (“final” decree of the senate), and the imperia extraordinaria (extraordinary commands) awarded to generals in the late Roman Republic. Benjamin Straumann has shown that these moments of crisis triggered the beginnings of formal constitutional thought in Rome, as the traditional consensus of Rome’s political culture unravelled (Straumann 2016: 63–116). Perhaps the most cogent contemporary analysis of Roman republican power has been made by Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp (2010). He identifies the Roman Republic as an aristocratic political culture in which mos maiorum (ancestral customs) created flexible constraints on elite competition. A tenacious minority led by Fergus Millar, on the other hand, has defended the older thesis—advocated by Bodin and controversial already in his time—that the people was sovereign in Rome and that the Republic was governed by a form of democracy (Millar 2002). Yet in Hölkeskamp’s convincing analysis, such a view cannot be sustained in the face of a careful reading of the ancient sources and understanding of the political and cultural context of the late Roman Republic. Contemporary commentators on the Roman Republic, the Greek Polybius and insider-outsider Cicero, saw Rome as a balanced constitution, combining elements of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, but also gave a robust appraisal of its democratic element, especially in the people’s power to confer offices and the state’s need for popular consent for legitimacy. Cicero, however, living as he did in a time of grave uncertainty and extreme transition, changed his views. Valentina Arena argues persuasively that in his final work, the Laws, Cicero backed away from the claims for popular sovereignty maintained in his On the Republic to bolster the claims of oligarchical dominance, reducing the  people’s liberty to a nominal species libertatis (appearance of freedom) (Cic., Leg. 3.39; Arena 2016: 73), which was crucially and decisively constrained by aristocratic authority (auctoritas). Such a manner of conceiving the constitution as a system of laws that could be changed was arguably conceivable only after Sulla’s reforms of c. 80 bce and the violent ruptures within the ruling elite, which had undermined the ancestral customs of Roman political culture (the mos maiorum) that had governed behavior. Again, there

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is scholarly dispute about the precise elements of legislative power conveyed to Sulla as dictator, but little doubt that some form of political transformation took place in which individuals could seek and take powers not permissible to them under the constitution as previously understood. However, the emergence of figures such as Sulla and Caesar should not be seen as pointing to the arrival of Schmittian sovereign figures within the Roman Republic. Although the Roman constitutional context differed significantly from that of Athenian democracy, the sense that auctoritas (authority) and imperium (power) were conferred by the assembled people was tenacious, even when the processes through which that power was conveyed were merely formal and ritualized. Cicero’s experience as consul demonstrated the limits of that authority. Cicero identified Catiline as a threat to the Republic, and acted to curtail the conspiracy which he had identified (Cic., Cat. I–IV). Yet his actions were controversial, and would be turned against him by others acting at least as far outside Roman republican norms, or rather against that framework. The precise date at which the Republic was terminated may be disputed, but there can be no disputing that the power of the Roman emperor was itself founded on the notional legal transfer of authority from the Roman people, as the founding emperor Augustus was keen to underline in his mendacious and self-serving retrospective account of his rule (Augustus, Res Gestae 34.1–3; Nippel 2007). Augustus suggests a complex process by which he upheld the citizens’ powers and received honors from them in return. However, like other powerful Romans he adapted methods of propaganda and self-portrayal developed by Alexander and his successors from earlier models in order to lay claim to an authority beyond that conveyed by the people. “Res est publica Caesar” says it all. The exploitation of social and cultural capital by the Roman elite thereafter took on even more significance. Cultural constructions ranging from the temples and other public buildings erected or restored in the city of Rome to the literature of the Augustan age can be interpreted as claims to power beyond that conveyed by the formally assembled people. The assertion of genealogical claims to connection with the gods and with the heroic past, as made by the Julio-Claudian dynasty in their construction of the temples of Venus Genetrix or Mars Ultor, for example, transforms the traditional elite appeal to the ways of the ancestors, the mos maiorum. The Julians’ proclaimed descent from the son of Aeneas, who was revered as a founder figure, found a new expression in Virgil’s epic retelling of Aeneas’ story, the Aeneid, complete with its anticipatory, predestined visions of a powerful Jupiter-protected future Rome. The state continued, nevertheless, to be referred to as a res publica or Republic (literally “the thing of the People”) and thus contained formal institutional recognition of popular sovereignty, but the autocratic, imperial reality was quite otherwise, and it could be and was strengthened through cultural production and the retelling of myth.

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CONCLUSION While early modern commentators drew on ancient political systems and their theorists to develop theories of sovereignty, there is no explicit theorization of sovereignty in ancient political texts. However, there is a great deal of thought and activity that aims to produce or explain the authority claimed by political leaders and systems, evident in the focus on the balance between ruler and ruled seen in Athenian drama, in historiography, and in philosophical and political texts. Certain figures such as Theseus were seen as having the exceptional capacity to transform a polity. But this capability was associated with acts of foundation and synoecism rather than the everyday business of governing, and was not evidence for sovereignty. An unaccountable sovereign was not necessary for the legitimacy of the laws, and cases of decision on the exception are no more than claims to de facto sovereignty devoid of legitimacy, rather than evidence that powerful figures could ground their actions through an appeal to established concepts and processes. While Athenian tragedy depicted Theseus and the other mythical kings taking decisions on the exception, this was explicitly not a ground for their authority. Dramatists emphasized that these powerful individuals acted on the advice of and in consultation with the people. Those who did not were classified as tyrants, acting extra-legally. Even in antiquity, as Andreas Kalyvas has shown, historians identified Roman dictators with practitioners of Greek tyranny (Kalyvas 2007). Yet tyranny, if it was an institution, was a cultural as much as a political one.

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CHAPTER TWO

Liberty and the Rule of Law VALENTINA ARENA

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores some of the ways in which liberty was conceptualized in the ancient world, framing its investigation around the study of some of the deities whose conceptualizations embodied this notion in ancient Mediterranean societies. The analysis of these cults and their cultural symbols, embedded in their historical contexts, will enable us to shed light on the emergence and affirmation of distinct conceptions of liberty in the ancient world. Focusing mainly on the cults of Zeus Eleutherios, Jupiter Libertas, Dionysus Lyaeus, and Liber, it sketches some of the main historical moments when these distinct conceptualizations of liberty became prominent in the Greco-Roman world. These notions, which differed in respect of the identification of the interfering agent involved, of the subject enjoying liberty, or even in the conceptualization of what it meant to be free, were elaborated at important moments for the development of democracy and democratic thinking. Far from embodying quintessential archetypes, these deities, and the ideas they represented, were constantly reinterpreted and modified to articulate new conceptions of liberty. Zeus Eleutherios and Liberty as Absence of Arbitrary Interference: Greece and the Eastern Mediterrean Context An excavation of a Byzantine church in the (now Turkish) city of Hattuşa in 1983 revealed a bilingual poem in Hittite and Hurrian, known as the “Song of Release” or, better, the “Song of Liberation.” Probably developed by the

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captives of the Syrian campaign, this poem was composed in Hurrian in the wake of the destruction of Ebla (a city southwest of Aleppo) and eventually recorded in a bilingual edition in about 1400 bce (Bachvarova 2005, 2016; Van Dassow 2013, 2018). In this poem, which provides a theological explanation for the destruction of Ebla, the god of storm, Teššub, asks the king and the senate of Ebla to liberate the city of Igingalliš. The god cannot tolerate the injustice that arises from holding men in an unlimited condition of slavery, as it seems the city of Ebla is keeping the people of Igingalliš. The senate of Ebla responds that, if the people of Igingalliš are freed, the people of Ebla (and especially the notables of the city) will no longer have their personal slaves: “If  we release them, who would serve us? / They are cupbearers, waiters, cooks, and dishwashers / [reverse] The spinning […] / If you want a release, release your [own] slave, / release your [own] slavewoman” (lines 26–8 and reverse 1–3; Van Dassow 2013). The poem appears to establish a conceptual analogy between the condition of slavery of the whole people of Igingalliš and that of their individual community members. Describing the loss of political liberty of the community of Igingalliš, the author(s) of the poem adopted the same negative notion of liberty as a status of non-slavery as they adopted in describing the loss of personal and juridical liberty on the part of the individual members of the community. It follows that already by c. 1400 bce the meaning of possessing or losing political liberty for the whole community was conceptualized in the same terms as the enslavement of an individual. The political liberty that the god Teššub demanded for Igingalliš consisted in the restoration of these people to their original pre-subjugation state, that of political autonomy, in which they would not work in service of others but rather of themselves and their own community. In these communities of the Levant in the late Bronze Age, the idea of liberty was equated to the notion of serving their own state by providing their own share of wealth and labor to support the working of its legitimate form of government. There kingship, the prevalent form of government, directly interfered with the lives of its subjects by guaranteeing those civic and property rights without which they could not have been free, that is, could not have served the state (Van Dassow 2018; see Chapter 1, this volume). The injustice of the predicament of slavery for both individual people, highlighted in the context of debt-bondage, and of entire communities, often as a result of conquest, provoked divine outrage, which found its echoes in Jewish prophecy as well as in archaic Greek poetry. These early sources attest the conceptualization of liberty of the individual as well as of the community as a notion elaborated around its antonym, slavery: to be free meant not to be a slave, that is, to be one’s own master.

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Thus the prophet Jeremiah warned the Judaeans that their unjust enslavement of their fellow Jews had brought divine vengeance upon them (Jer. 34: 11–22; cf. Isa. 61.1), as their revolt against Babylonian control (587/586 bce) brought about the capture of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity. Thinking of dĕrōr (liberty) as the original, natural status of non-slavery, to which the declared remission of debts should return the Judaeans, Jeremiah delivers an oracle in which Yahweh accuses those Judaeans who have yet again enslaved their fellow Jews of disobedience, and prophesizes war, plague, and famine (Jer. 34.17). Already in the Torah book of Leviticus 25, reformulating earlier traditions about liberty as the remission of debts and the release of those in debt bondage, the idea of liberty had also been predicated on the periodic cancellation of debts (cf. Exod. 21; Deut. 15:1–18; see Stökl 2018). In these passages, however, where the absence of slavery yielded a return to a state conformable to divine will, liberty was understood not only as a status of non-slavery but also as the ability to comply with God’s wishes. The exploitative treatment of the many (poor) by the few (rich), the resulting unjust condition of debt bondage, and the ensuing divine outrage were tropes in circulation in contemporary Mediterranean societies that yielded a common articulation of liberty as absence of slavery (van Dassow 2018). In his poems, the early sixth-century bce Athenian politician Solon articulated this negative notion of liberty in its formulation as a status of non-dependence on the arbitrary will of both a master and a tyrant. Although, in the preserved texts, Solon only once explicitly equates the slavery of the people with their subjection to tyranny, in many elegies (especially fragments 4 and 36 West) he alludes to his program of seisachtheia, the “shaking off of burdens,” in which, according to Plutarch, he acted to “set free the condemned debtors, divide the land anew, and make an entire change in the form of government” (Plut., Sol. 13). In his poems, Solon frames his reforms, which have often been identified as foreshadowing Athenian democracy (Cartledge 2018), within the dichotomy of slavery and liberty: before, Earth was in bondage, now she is free And of the citizens whose persons had been seized for debt, some he brought back from foreign lands, uttering no longer Attic speech, So long and far their wretched wanderings; And some who here at home in shameful servitude Were held he says he set free. (Solon, fr. 36.1–17 West) Although the exact nature of Solon’s reforms has been debated since antiquity, it seems that he liberated those citizens who had been enslaved for debts,

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outlawed loans contracted on the security of the person, thereby de facto abolishing the outright enslavement of defaulting debtors, and canceled the obligations of hektemoroi (tenant farmers) to pay the landlord a sixth of their produce (Harris 2002; Leão and Rhodes 2015). Enacting these reforms, which liberated, as he puts it, the individual citizen from a status of slavery, Solon framed his social and economic reforms within a wider moral and cosmological context. If, as Solon said (fr. 4 West), Eunomia (Lawfulness), an abstraction symbolizing the orderly state of civic affairs, is prevented from acting in the city by the greed and arrogance of the wealthy, the goddess Justice will turn against the city and exact vengeance by enslaving the whole community and its individual members (Ostwald 1969: 64–9). This loss of liberty will affect both the city, which subjected to the domination of either a tyrant or a small group of people, will be distressed by internal struggles, and the citizens, who having given their person as security on a loan, will be enslaved and sold abroad. Less than a century later, this articulation of liberty found expression in the Greek cult of Zeus Eleutherios. This cult is most famously attested in Plataea, where it was established after the famous victory there (against the invading Persians) in 479 bce. “Roughly at the entrance into Plataea,” traveler-pilgrim Pausanias observed in the later second century ce, are the graves of those who fought against the Persians […] the Lacedaemonians and Athenians who fell have separate graves, on which are written elegiac verses by Simonides. Not far from the common tomb of the Greeks is an altar of Zeus, God of Freedom […]. Even at the present day they hold every four years games called Eleutheria [Freedom Games]. (Pausanias 9.2.5, trans. Jones 1935; see also Strabo, Geography 9.31) Here, Zeus was celebrated as the god who had saved the liberty of Greece from the external domination of Persia. As praise-poet Simonides put it in his celebratory epigram on the Spartan tomb: “having driven out the Persians; they raised an altar to Zeus, the free man’s god, a fair token to freedom for Hellas” (Bergk fr. 140). The liberty of the community, as this foundation of the cult attests, came to be articulated metaphorically along the same lines as the liberty of the individual from the arbitrary will of a master: a community was deemed free when it had the power to conduct its affairs unobstructed by the arbitrary interference of a foreign power.1 Within that same conceptualization of liberty, from 479 bce onward the cult of Zeus Eleutherios also came to embody the notion of liberty from domestic tyranny. According to Herodotus, perhaps reflecting the conceptual world of the fifth century rather than the historical reality of the sixth century, this cult had already been introduced in Samos in 522 bce by Maiandrios, the appointed

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vicegerent of the tyrant Polycrates. After Polycrates’ assassination, Maiandrios established the cult of Zeus Eleutherios and proclaimed both eleutheria (liberty) and isonomia (in this context, an equal sharing of power); both of these suggest an adherence to the rule of law. However, faced with the hostility of the Samian elite, Maiandrios and his brother Lycaretus opted to preserve tyranny, as it would seem, so Herodotus comments, that the Samians “had no desire for freedom” (Hdt. 3.143). The same cult of Zeus Eleutherios was later introduced in Syracuse, after the tyrant Thrasybulus was overthrown in 466/465 bce. According to the first-century bce historian Diodorus Siculus, after liberating their own and other Sicilian cities, and re-establishing democracies, the Syracusans voted to establish this cult and celebrate it with a festival and games (Diod. Sic. 11.68–72). Providing an aetiological explanation for the introduction the cult of Zeus Eleutherios in Athens in the second half of the fifth century, the Greek grammarian Didymus who lived in the second half of the first century bce, stated that the epithet Eleutherios derived from the idea of liberation from the Persian threat (Etym. Magn., Suda, s.v. “Eleutherios,” Wycherley 1957: nn. 25– 30; on the cult at Athens, cf. Paus. 1.3.2; 10.21.5). Resistance against Xerxes had been, and was long commemorated as, a collective enterprise, for which the whole community had come together as a political entity to reject the threat of domination by a foreign power. Around this time, according to Raaflaub (2004), the notion of liberty embodied by this cult came to assume a strong political connotation and, as attested by these new cults, embodied above all the idea of the absence of tyrannical rule. This notion found its most powerful visual representation in the statuary group of the so-called Tyrannicides. In 514 bce, at the celebration of the annual Great Panathenaea festival, two Athenians, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, had  killed Hipparchus, younger brother of the tyrant Hippias, and were in turn killed (Hdt. 5.56; Thuc. 6.57). Although Hippias continued to rule until 510 bce, the two Tyrannicides came to be mythologized: “in the collective memory of the Athenians the murder of Hipparchus progressively became the very symbol of the struggle against tyranny and the fight for liberty” (Azoulay 2017: 3). In the fifth century Harmodius and Aristogeiton were celebrated in a bronze statuary group erected in the Athenian Agora, the focus of the city’s political life (Figure 2.1). The original statues, sculpted by Antenor at some point between the exile of Hippias in 510 bce and the capture of the city by the Persians in 480 bce, were forcibly removed by Persian Great king Xerxes to Susa (and returned to Athens probably at the end of the fourth century), and replaced by a second group sculpted by Critius and Nesiotes in 477–476 bce. Their story thus became linked with the concept of liberty itself. And not only in Athens; in the first century ce, the encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder established

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FIGURE 2.1  The Tyrannicides, Roman copies of the fifth-century Greek statues set up in Athens’ Agora to honor the Athenians who assassinated a tyrant. Photo: Getty Images.

an important (if in fact inaccurate) synchronism between the erection of these statues in Greece and the establishment of libertas in Rome, which he identifies as 509 bce: “I rather believe that the first portrait statues officially erected at Athens were those of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton. This happened in the same year as that in which the kings were also driven out at Rome” (Plin., HN 34.9.17).

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The significance of the deeds of the Tyrannicides and of their statuary group changed between the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes (508/507 bce) and the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 (Azoulay 2017; Fehr 1984). Initially a symbol of liberation from the tyranny of the Pisistratids, after the Persian Wars they came to represent the struggle for freedom against the foreign oppressor. In the years that followed, when tyranny was no longer a widespread political reality, but acted as an ideological foil representing the true negation of all democratic values (Ar., Wasps 488–502), the statues of the Tyrannicides became one of the most powerful symbols of democracy and almost an emblem of Athenian civic identity. The shared value of liberty they represented was also enacted and reinforced by the “Harmodius song” which memorialized their deeds (Ath. 15.695a–b). At private drinking parties, where citizens celebrated their equality, the famous skolion (a drinking song) was sung in honor of the Tyrannicides, who were said to have ‘made the Athenians politically equal (isonomoi)’ (Jones 2014; Ostwald 1969: 121–36). In this song, which became an engrained component of Attic culture in general (Dem., On the False Embassy 19.280), the tyrannicides were celebrated as those who had first established equality before the law and the right to equal shares in magistracies and responsibilities. Celebrated models in Rhodes, Eretria, Ilium, and Chios, the Tyrannicides came to represent as well as enact a conception of liberty as a status characterized by the absence of subjection to the arbitrary will of a tyrant throughout the Mediterranean.2 In the first century bce, a copy of the statues was set up on the Capitol in Rome. As the Romans of the late Republic were familiar not only with the story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton (Cic., Tusc. 1.49.116; Mil. 80; Plin., HN 34.9.17), but also with its political significance, the erection of this statuary group on the Capitol hill near the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the statue of “the Liberator,” Lucius Iunius Brutus (who had ejected the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus; Plut., Brut. 1.1), represented a powerful political statement. Which precise event this installation commemorated is, however, unknown. It may have been the murder of dictator Julius Caesar in 44 bce by senators led by Brutus and Cassius, the two Roman Tyrannicides (Landwehr 1985: 41–2); or Scipio Nasica’s murder in 133 bce of tribune Tiberius Gracchus, commemorated by his descendant Metellus Scipio in 52 bce (Cic., Att. 6.1.17; Coarelli 1969); or even Sulla’s liberation of Rome in 81 bce from the “tyranny” of Marius and Cinna (App., Civil War 1.57.253) and his restoration of “liberty” (Azoulay 2017). Whatever the circumstances, the presence of the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton on the Capitol in Rome reinforced an articulation of liberty as a status opposed to tyrannical domination of a community. The Hurrian-Hittite “Song of Liberation,” the prophecy of Jeremiah, the elegies of Solon, the worship of Zeus Eleutherios, and the cult of the Athenian Tyrannicides belong to different historical contexts, yet they all shared the same

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conceptualization of liberty as a status characterized by the absence of arbitrary interference by an external agent, be it a master, a tyrant, or a foreign power. Within this conceptualization, however, two important components varied: first, the nature of the interfering power, individual (either in his capacity of slavemaster or tyrant) or societal (as the case of a foreign power); second, the identity of the subject enjoying liberty, being either an individual or a whole community. However, what remained unaltered was the overarching understanding of liberty as a status of non-dependence on the arbitrary will of another. From about the first half of the fifth century bce, this idea of political liberty from tyrannical mastery, which was shared by all members of the community— as it could be achieved under any form of constitution that distributed power to more than one individual—came to be articulated into a specifically democratic notion of liberty. No longer seen exclusively as freedom from arbitrary interference, liberty came to signify power: both the collective power of the people—a defined citizen-body—to rule, by virtue of their election or selection by lot into office as well as of their participation in the decision-making process and the power of the individual citizen to do as he wished. For those middling groups that had gained political status by the time of Cleisthenes, the idea of liberty as a value to support an argument for political control became crucial (Raaflaub 1983: 527). A couple of generations later, in the second half of the fifth century, we find this notion of democratic freedom first attested in the pseudo-Xenophontic “Constitution of the Athenians” and in the Histories of Herodotus. Alongside this notion, a new term, closely linked to democracy, also appeared: parrhēsia, liberty of speech, which first flanked and then overshadowed the old notion of isēgoria, equality of speech in political discourse. Although parrhēsia conceived as liberty of speech has been often understood as one of those fundamental privileges that guaranteed the democratic liberty of the citizen people, scholarly consensus has now been gathering around an understanding of parrhēsia not so much as an inalienable right of free speech but rather as unconstrained “frankness” of utterance, understood as one of the main attributes of citizenship, carrying with it both duties and privileges (Konstan 2012; Wallace 2004). As the author of the “Constitution of the Athenians” writes, “the ordinary people do not want a good government under which they themselves are slaves; they want to be free and to rule” ([Xen.], Ath. Pol. 1.8). What interests the people, in this analysis, is holding absolute control over political power; only this control will render them free. Only through the full exercise of political power, which transforms the dēmos (people) into a monarch, can liberty be achieved. Euripides makes the mythical Athenian king Theseus state in his 423 bce Suppliants, “I have established the people in the position of a monarch and made this city free by giving it equal votes” (Eur., Supp. 352–3; see also Chapter 1, this volume).3

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Power and liberty were closely linked in democratic thought. While for oligarchs power was an ancestral right, a natural component of their position in society, for democrats, power was the essential precondition for the liberty of the political community. By guaranteeing the political participation of all citizens, by virtue of holding offices in turn and exercising their right to vote, the kratos (power) of the dēmos (people) within and without the community enabled them to be free. As Kurt Raaflaub put it, “to rule over others was not only compatible with, but even became an indispensable precondition for, complete freedom” (Raaflaub 1983: 526n41). Aristotle in his Politics elaborated: The basis of a democratic state is liberty; which, according to the common opinion of men, can only be enjoyed in such a state; this they affirm to be the great end of every democracy. One principle of liberty is for all to rule and be ruled in turn, and indeed democratic justice is the application of numerical not proportionate equality; whence it follows that the majority must be supreme, and that whatever the majority approve must be the end and the just. Every citizen, it is said, must have equality, and therefore in a democracy the poor have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. This, then, is one note of liberty which all democrats affirm to be the principle of their state. Another is that a man should live as he likes. This, they say, is the privilege of a freeman, since, on the other hand, not to live as a man likes is the mark of a slave. This is the second characteristic of democracy, whence has arisen the claim of men to be ruled by none, if possible, or, if this is impossible, to rule and be ruled in turns; and so it contributes to the freedom based upon equality. (Arist., Pol. 6.2.1317a40–b17, trans. Jowett 1885) Thus, according to the supporters of democracy, the equal participation of all citizens in deliberation in council and assembly as well as the taking turns in holding offices would have guaranteed the political liberty of the community and, consequently, the opportunity for each individual citizen to conduct his life unobstructed in the pursuit of his own self-chosen ends. According to this conception of liberty, guarantees of individuals’ active political involvement are essential to achieving the collective rule of the whole citizen body, which alone can secure the collective liberty of the whole community (Liddel 2007; Raaflaub 2004). Jupiter Libertas and Liberty as Absence of Arbitrary Interference: Rome The Romans of the Republic managed their politics rather differently. Their internal power-struggles, between the patrician and plebeian social orders of citizens, had different bases and implications. But as regards political liberty,

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FIGURE 2.2  Scene showing man wearing a pilleus on the Cista Ficoroni, a metal storage casket made in Italy, c. 350–330 bce, of a type associated with Etruscan culture, Villa Giulia, Rome. Photo: Getty Images.

there were also significant commonalities, again visible in their cult practice. The temple of Jupiter Libertas on Rome’s Aventine hill was dedicated by the plebeian aedile Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in the mid-third century bce, possibly to celebrate a triumph over the Carthaginians. This cult, which might have reached Rome from the Greek city of Syracuse during the Second Punic war (218–201 bce), interpreted the Greek cult of Zeus Eleutherios in a different

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semantic system and with Italic influences. Although the Roman cult was more than a direct translation of the Greek one, both embodied the idea of liberty as the antonym to slavery. This notion of libertas in Rome found its clearest symbolic expression in the pilleus, the hat or “Phrygian cap” worn by newly freed slaves, which featured prominently in the imagery of the temple, and would go on to play an important role as a symbol of freedom through later history (Figure 2.2).4 It served as a sign of emancipation and release from dependency, while providing a visible reminder of past enslavement. Its metaphorical meaning was immediately intelligible to Romans, and it shaped and propagated the notion of libertas as a status opposed to slavery (Arena 2012: 30–43). As a denarius issued by C. Egnatius Maxsumus around 75 bce suggests (RRC 391/2), the cult-statue of Libertas itself, now lost, may have worn a pilleus. On the reverse, the coin pictures a distyle temple with two figures; corresponding with them, above the temple’s architrave are portrayed a thunderbolt and a pilleus, the attributes of the two divinities in the temple, identifying them as Jupiter and Libertas (Figure 2.3). The pilleus was the first symbolic representation of liberty encountered by visitors to the temple. From the end of the second century bce, its walls were adorned by a fresco, most probably still visible in the late Roman Republic, which represented a joyful feast to celebrate the victory over the Carthaginians in the 214 bce battle of Beneventum. In the fresco, newly freed and enfranchised soldiers, wearing the pilleus or wooden headbands, feasted either standing or on couches, according to the bravery they had shown in the battle. Here to the eyes of everyday visitors the image of the pilleus represented

FIGURE 2.3  This silver denarius, issued by C. Egnatius Maxsumus in 75 bce, depicts on its reverse (right) a temple with Jupiter and Libertas, identified by their symbols of a thunderbolt and pilleus. Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society. 1944.100.1970.

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the requirement of virtuous behavior that accompanied the acquisition of Roman freedom. This understanding of liberty was formulated more precisely in the juridical texts of the Imperial era: those who were free, either by birth or by manumission, they state, possessed the natural ability to do whatever they wish, as they were not under the dominium of someone else (Dig. 1.5.3–6). In Philip Pettit’s well-known formulation, libertas in Rome was understood as a status of “non-domination,” in which one was free qua living in a condition devoid not simply of actual interference but of the possibility of interference (Laborde and Maynor 2008; Pettit 2002). No individual could ever be free when in a state of domination, however kind their master might be: it would always be the master’s prerogative to revoke unilaterally any concession that he might have granted, leaving the subjected individual unable to conduct his life as he wished, at the mercy of somebody else. Since, in Roman juridical discourse, slavery was the status of dependence on the arbitrary will of another person or groups of persons, it follows that the Romans too, conceiving political liberty by means of the metaphor of slavery, conceptualized it as a status of non-subjection to the arbitrary will of another person or group of persons, and analyzed its loss in terms of falling into a condition of slavery. The ability to avoid this downfall, and to preserve the status of political libertas,  was dependent on two main factors: first, the constitutional arrangements of the commonwealth, which guaranteed the distribution of power to more than one individual/institution, and second, the civic status of a Roman citizen. In late republican Rome, this status was achieved by a matrix of rights (iura) that constituted the institutional means by which Romans could live and pursue their freely chosen goals unobstructed by elected magistrates or by any groups wielding political power. These were the rights to suffragium, provocatio, all the powers of the tribunes of the plebs (auxilium, intercessio, and the ius agendi cum plebe), and the rule of law, which by the first century bce had become universally accepted as the essential means of protecting citizens from arbitrary coercion or interference. Not only did laws guarantee these rights for all Roman citizens on the same basis, but they also, at least in principle, embodied the direct expression of the citizen people’s will, thereby enabling citizens to conduct their lives according to their own wishes (Cic., Rhet. Her. 2.13.19: “a statute law is what is sanctioned by the order of the people”; cf. Arena 2012: 62–72). Thus, laws enacted by the whole citizenry and expressing the common good allowed the members of the community to live according to their own will, thereby placing the Roman citizens and the Roman commonwealth in a state of liberty. Upholding the rule of law preserved this status of liberty. If this was not the case, the citizens would be exposed to the discretionary powers of those in command, and thereby placed effectively in a condition of servitude. “We are all slaves of the laws,” Cicero stated in his defence of Cluentius, “in order that we may be free” (Cic., Clu. 146).

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Unlike democratic Athens, in the Roman Republic laws guaranteed equal liberty to all citizens at a minimal level, protecting the right to vote of all adult male citizens, but they did not grant the right to self-govern. As Cato the Elder states: “it is proper that we enjoy the same rights, law, liberty, and commonwealth (iure, lege, libertate, re publica); but glory and honour only in so far as anyone had procured them for himself” (Cato, fr. 252 Malcovati: 96; see also Cic., Phil. 1.34). Two powers or privileges that were not included in those legal means that established the status of libertas were the right to speak freely and the right to economic independence. Neither came to be recognized as formalized subjective rights in republican Rome (Arena 2018, 2020b). Although individuals and perhaps the community were legally protected against slander, the relevant laws aimed at protecting the receiver of such attacks rather than establishing the right of an individual to express freely his opinion (Arena 2020a; Bur 2018). In a world where it could be legitimately said that liberty of speech was indeed a reality, liberty of speech was included in the overarching Roman notion of libertas. However, the fact that liberty of speech could easily be interpreted as irreverent licentia makes it clear that freedom of speech was not conceived of as a right, since speaking up could not otherwise have been considered a sign of impertinence. As David Konstan (2012) argues in his study on the Greek notion of parrhēsia, “the exercise of a right cannot be considered an abuse of the right. Parrhēsia in the democracy ought to be wholly positive.” In Rome, by contrast, the power to speak freely was not conceived as a matter of right but rather as the exercise of a personal capacity, constitutive of human nature, that was regulated by contemporary social norms. This exercise could be considered either as an act of free expression or as one of impudent slander, depending on the context. As Valerius Maximus shows, liberty of speech was understood as a virtuous quality, closely bordering its corresponding vice rather than as an action or field of actions that should be protected by law (Val. Max. 6.2.8). One does not legislate on a moral quality of speaking freely any more than one legislates on the quality of being courageous (Arena 2020a: 91). Unlike in other ancient societies, in Rome the right to one’s economic independence, whatever juridical form this may take (ranging from protection of one’s own work to protection of one’s own property), does not appear as one of the fundamental rights, the enshrinement of which in law would secure the liberty of an individual, but rather as one of its consequences (Arena 2019). The institution of the peculium, the financial allowance that a father gave a son in his potestas or that a master gave his slave (be it either a sum of money or a commercial business, or even a small property) shows that the line of demarcation between the status of libertas and the condition of economic independence was not so firm (on the peculium, see Gamauf 2016). Although in law the master’s property, the peculium remained separate from the rest of the family patrimony. Slaves could increase it through business transactions,

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personal earnings due to their specialist skills, or even through borrowing, and could even use it to buy their own freedom. Although later sources report that in the fifth and fourth century bce nexi (debt-bondsmen) fought in the name of liberty against their subjection to the creditors, their successful struggle did not at first produce the right to protect their own work and property as one of the basic liberties of Roman citizens. Instead, it occasioned the establishment of the tribunate of the plebs, an inviolable magistracy, open only to plebeians and endowed with the ius auxilii, the right to help fellow citizens. Claiming the right to self-ownership rather than the right to ownership of “the external things of this world” (tangible property or the service provided by their own work; see Garnsey [2017]), such debtors appeared unable to distinguish between the abstract notion of labor, which should have been protected by law, and in turn would have guaranteed their liberty, and the laborers themselves (Finley [1973] 1985: 65–71). This inability, which had its roots in the Roman way of thinking about debts in terms of gift exchange within a framework of relations of mutual fides (trust), made the issue of abolition of debt bondage not a question of liberty, as in many other ancient societies, but one of trust and justice (Arena 2019). It took many more years of struggle before the condition of nexum was formally legally abolished in 326 (or 313) bce. As the status of liberty of Roman citizens was conceived along the lines of the juridical notion of libertas, so the liberty of the commonwealth was conceptualized in the same terms as the freedom of the individual citizen (Wirszubski 1950: 5). As the loss of political liberty of the individual Roman citizen was analyzed in terms analogous to those of falling into a condition of enslavement or servitude, so too the loss of liberty of a commonwealth was conceptualized and expressed in these same terms (Arena 2012: 73–168). Conceiving the absence of liberty of the commonwealth as a condition of domination, the Romans maintained that this could be lost under two distinct circumstances: first, when a civic community falls into a condition of dependence on another community, usually as a result of conquest. Second, and more importantly in the late Republic, they maintained that a civic community loses its liberty when it falls under the power or control of an agent distinct from the sovereign body of the citizens, be it either a monarch or a group of people. In the late Roman Republic, the abovementioned pilleus continued to be a powerful cultural symbol of this liberty. In 43/42 bce Marcus Junius Brutus issued a coin (RRC 508/3), which on the reverse shows the pilleus between two daggers and, below, the legend EID·MAR (Figure 2.4). Framed explicitly in reference to the murder of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March 44 bce, the pilleus came to signify the notion of liberty as a status of non-slavery for the whole commonwealth rather than for its individual citizens (Arena 2012: 42–3; Clark 2007: 149–53). The status of non-slavery of the commonwealth was projected

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FIGURE 2.4  This silver denarius, issued by Brutus in 43/42 bce, depicts its issuer, with daggers and a pilleus as symbols of the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society. 1947.2.575.

as guaranteed by the slaying of the tyrant, as Brutus (in imitation of his distant Liberator ancestor) had successfully styled dictator Caesar. The liberty of the commonwealth required the elimination of a single individual, who had acted, in his opinion, as a dominus (lord and master) over the whole community. As Greek historian Cassius Dio commented two centuries later: “Brutus stamped upon the coins which were being minted in his own likeness a cap and two daggers, indicating by this and by the inscription that he and Cassius claimed to have liberated the fatherland” (Cass. Dio 47.25.3). Regardless of the historicity of the events involved in the original establishment of republican liberty (Richardson 2011), in the Romans’ collective memory the true founder of the Republic and defender of Roman libertas was Lucius Junius Brutus, ancestor, so the latter claimed, of Marcus Junius Brutus and deposer of the last king of Rome (Nep., Att. 18.3; Cic., Att. 13.40.1 = SB 343; Phil. 2.26). Around 300 bce a bronze statue of Brutus was erected in front of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline hill, alongside the images of the seven kings of Rome, and where the statuary group of Harmodius and Aristogeiton discussed above was later erected. This statue was covered by graffiti that exhorted Marcus Brutus to emulate his alleged ancestor and liberate the commonwealth from the domination of the tyrant Caesar: “if only you were living now, Brutus” and “if only Brutus were alive” (Plut., Brut. 9.6; Suet., Iul. 80.3). Dionysus Lyaeus and Liber: Liberty as Becoming In the second half of the sixth century bce, Dionysus was brought to Athens from Eleutherae, a town on the Boeotian border and the route from Thebes (Larson 2007: 132; on the ritual introduction, eisagōgē, of the god, see Paus. 1.2.5 and

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FIGURE 2.5  Maenad, depicted on first-century copy of a relief attributed to the Greek sculptor Kallimachos, c. 425–400bce. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 35.11.3.

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Dem., Meid. 52). This Athenian Dionysus acquired the epithet of Eleutherios (the Liberator, punning on Eleutherae) and was venerated at a sanctuary on the south slope of the Acropolis, to which the theater of Dionysus was attached and where dramatic performances honored the god (on their relation with civic democratic ideology, see Goldhill 2000). Most probably, however, the earliest worship of Dionysus in Attica owed much to Boeotia; even Attic drama refers to Thebes as the center of this religion in Greece (Farnell 1896–1909: 114; Larson 2007: 140–2). In Thebes, as later on in Corinth and Sikyon, the god was venerated with another epithet, Lysios (the Releaser), which described his function as “looser,” who promised to liberate his followers from all kinds of restraints, physical, emotional, and psychological (Paus. 9.16.6; Ath. 363b; Plut., Mor. 613c). If Thebes was the prime epicenter from which the cult of Dionysus was propelled, the epithet Lysios must have been his primary appellation. Even if by the late fifth century lyein, loosing, and eleutheroun, liberating, may have been used interchangeably in Attica, it remains the case that Dionysus’ epithet Lyaeus indicated a conceptualization of liberty distinct from that articulated in the appellation Eleutherios; it should not therefore be subsumed under the idea of democratic liberty (Raaflaub 2000: 528). The cult of Dionysus Lyaeus was connected to the fertility of the human and the natural sphere. He was the god of wine and of the flourishing of vegetation, as seen in the wondrous gushing of wine from the ground and the dripping of honey from the thyrsus (Eur., Bacch. 699–707, 711; Phoen. 229–31; Plut., Vit. Lys. 28.4). In its original Theban strand, the cult was characterized by madness inspired by the divinity, in which followers were liberated by surrendering to the god. In this experience of enthousiasmós, when an inebriated devotee of Dionysus was said to be entheos (possessed by god), the individual was freed from their ordinary state and entered a new condition in which they became one with the god within and thereby free (Larson 2007; Otto 1981). Many of these details are derived from (and may have originated in) Euripides’ Bacchae of 405 bce (Leinieks 1996), in this play the god is responsible for a variety of forms of liberation: his disguised self from physical imprisonment, Cadmus and Teiresias from old age, the female bacchantes from thirst and hunger, and men from anxiety and grief. The god also liberates women from the slavery of the household work that the polis has established for them: he frees them from their shuttles and looms, appropriate to slaves, and from taking care of their own children (Eur., Bacch. 118, 702, 1236); and he thus enables them to move outside the home to the mountainside above Thebes to engage in Dionysiac activities, rejecting the roles that the polis (the civic community) and their oikos (family) had assigned them (Leinieks 1996: 316). Although endowed with a political dimension, this liberty from the oppressor, be it the polis, the family, or King Pentheus, is fully achieved only when, by virtue of attaining a state of frenzy, unity with the deity is reached. As Lewis

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Farnell observed long ago, “in his own nature Dionysus [Lyaeus] was not a guiding power of the higher political life; he was not usually recognised as the inspirer of public counsel, nor was any advance in the social organisation, law or morality associated with his religion; his name does not even occur in the formulae of the state-oath” (1896–1909: 138). However, he was a god of liberty, a liberty that did not depend on specific constitutional arrangements nor on a set of civic and political rights. As the epithet Lyaeus reveals, this Dionysiac cult embodied a notion of liberty as a status reached when a person became one with their divine inner self. The Roman equivalent of this god was Liber. In his 45 bce treatise On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero has his Stoic interlocutor Q. Lucilius Balbus distinguish between Liber the son of Semele and the Liber “whom our ancestors solemnly and piously deified with Ceres and Libera, the nature of whose worship can be gathered from the mysteries. Because we call our children liberi,” he continues, “the offspring of Ceres were named Liber and Libera; the sense of ‘offspring’ has been retained in the case of Libera, but not in that of Liber” (Cic., Nat. D. 2.62). Although the Roman historical tradition connected the temple of Ceres, Liber, and Libera to the political conquests of the plebs, by the first century bce the triad was mainly perceived as one of earthly fecundity, with Ceres as the prevalent divinity, while Liber assumed a more independent role (Musiał 2007). Following ancient etymological research, which they thought enabled them to grasp the ratio (essential principle) of the deities, the ancients opined that the name Liber stems from the action of liberating men from semen in intercourse (August., civ. Dei 6.9; cf. civ. Dei. 7.2 = Isid., Orig. 8.11.43.). According to them, Liber, in charge of male and liquid seeds, personified the notion of human and agricultural fertility; as the god of wine, he freed the people’s tongues, minds, and limbs (see Arena 2020b). Liber’s connection with the sphere of agricultural fertility was reflected in his iconographic symbols, such as the thyrsus, ivy, and phallus. The ivy and phallus also figured prominently in the celebration of the Liberalia, a religious festival somehow connected to him (Varro, Ling. 6.14; Ov., Fast. 3. 785–6, Aug., civ. Dei 7.21). At the Liberalia, the Romans often celebrated the coming of age of their next generation of young men, who could be then enlisted to fight. During this rite of passage Roman boys abandoned the marks of childhood, the toga praetexta (the bordered toga) and the bulla (apotropaic locket), and assumed the toga virilis (a plain white toga) to signify the reaching of manhood (Amiotti 1981: 131–40; Dolansky 2008: 47–70). The ceremony had a twofold dimension: first, at home, the puer set aside the insignia pueritiae and dedicated them to the Lares of the house, and then with family and friends embarked upon

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a public procession through the Forum and up onto the Capitol to sacrifice to Jupiter and to Juventas (youth) (App., B. Civ. 4.5.30; Serv., ad Ecl. 4.49, Dion. Hal., Ant. Rom. 4.15.5). As a marker of a freer life, as Ovid puts it, the donning of the toga virilis celebrated the attainment of sexual maturity and entrance into the civic community (Ov., Fast. 3.777–8). With the assumption of the toga virilis, the young Roman male citizen gained a sort of personal identity, being allowed to use his praenomen (forename), to recline at banquets, to begin his tirocinium fori (education for politicians, orators, and lawyers), and most importantly for the commonwealth, to be registered to fight (Varro, GRF fr. 331; Dion. Hal., Ant. Rom. 4.15.5). Young adult citizens probably also gained the right to vote, although the evidence is imprecise. It is not clear whether they could start exercising their voting rights as soon as they donned the toga virilis or after they had been enlisted. It seems plausible that they gained the full franchise only when they began fighting in the army (Gardner 1993: 82). It follows that in the late Roman Republic the god Liber, whose visual signifiers indicated a semantic range of fertility and abundance, and whose ratio the ancients themselves understood as presiding over the liberation of male liquid semen both of men (and animals) and wine (and, more in general, agriculture), attests to a Roman conceptualization of liberty as realization of one’s full potential, inherent in one’s own nature. This is a different way of thinking about liberty from the account of libertas as absence of domination or dependence from the arbitrary will of someone else, expressed through the image of the pilleus and embodied in the cult of Jupiter Libertas. By virtue of Liber’s intervention, wine, one of the forms of his liquid seed, loosens up the body and liberates the inner self from physical constraints, just as it frees the tongue from the constraints of inhibiting thoughts and the mind from constraining passions. Likewise by Liber’s intervention, the male semen, the other form of his liquid seed, is released in an act of sexual union leading to human procreation. Liber, therefore, in the intellectual world of the late Roman Republic, acts as the divine personification of a notion of liberty, according to which men are free when they are liberated from the constraints of their own body or passions, which thereby act as interfering agencies, to realize the full potential inherent in their own nature. This emphasizes liberty as becoming. That the attainment of adulthood was celebrated both in private before the altar of the Lares and in public in a procession through the Forum up to the Capitolium, suggests that the civic community was the arena within which the full realization of one’s natural potential could be fully enacted. This notion of liberty is not, therefore, conceptually apolitical. It rather emphasizes the positive dialectic dimension of liberty: a man is free when he has the power to realize his nature as a civic member of the community. In the first century bce Liber

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was the personified divine quality of a strand of liberty, which consisted in the realization of one’s own nature. In opposition to the public-civic idea of libertas, which indicated the juridical status of the members of the civitas, guaranteed by a matrix of civic and political rights and figuratively represented by the pilleus, this internalized notion of liberty, concerning the realization of an individual’s potential as a member of the community, was conceived as self-fulfillment.

CONCLUSION Adopting the cults of Zeus Eleutherios, Dionysus Lyaeus, Jupiter Libertas, and Liber as prisms to investigate the notions of liberty in the Greco-Roman world, this chapter brings to the fore the conceptualizations of liberty embedded in the historical particulars of these cults. Rather than providing a genealogy of ancient notions of liberty, which would have required a critique of conceptual analysis not identifiable in ancient religious contexts, it sketches some of the distinct notions of liberty as they emerged at important historical moments in conversation with democracy. Out of the experience of slavery, which in one of its forms was imposed as a result of the inability to repay one’s debts, the notion of liberty as absence of slavery was first formulated. This notion, which found its most elegant formulation in Roman law, conceived liberty as absence of dependence on the arbitrary will of someone else. This understanding of liberty of the individual provided also the conceptual framework for thinking about the liberty of the community. Both in Greece and in Rome a polity was considered free when not subjected to the possibility of being dominated by either a foreign power or a domestic individual (or even groups). This status of non-domination enabled the community (as well as the individual) to pursue its own ends. However, classical Greece and republican Rome differed on the institutional means they considered essential for the community to act freely: while Greek democratic thought emphasized the need for full political participation by all citizens, the prevailing Roman republican ideology considered the right to vote sufficient to guarantee the liberty of the community. Alongside these articulations of liberty as absence of arbitrary interference, the cults of the Greek Dionysus Lyaeus and the Roman Liber attest to a different way of thinking about liberty, in which one is free from the constraints of the body and passions when realizing one’s own essence in unity with the god. Although this notion of liberty as self-realization was silent about constitutional arrangements and individual rights, it was not apolitical: it was within the community, in its political dimension, that citizens could become free.

CHAPTER THREE

The Common Good DHANANJAY JAGANNATHAN

INTRODUCTION The common good is an important part of modern democratic ideology, a package of views on diverse political matters that is very nearly the default in both theoretical and political discourse in the so-called liberal societies of Western Europe and North America. Arguably, some elements of this package, such as the rule of law, have been transformed from their ancient origins, given the importance of basic equality in modern political discourse. By contrast, right from the start of the democratic tradition, in the social imaginary of classical Athens (Figure 3.1), we find emphasized a seemingly familiar notion of the common good (koinon agathon, also koinon sumpheron [common advantage] or simply to koinon [the commons]). Setting aside their complex histories, we can distinguish the common good and the rule of law in respect of their conceptual connection to democracy. One can plainly have a democratic society where the rule of law—the injunction that the laws should treat everyone equally insofar as they are members of the polity or, alternatively, the idea that no one in the polity lies beyond the reach of the law—is abrogated. Hence, there is no conceptual connection between democracy and the rule of law. For democracy is a feature of the distribution of access to power and the rule of law is a characterization of the just exercise of power. As a result, the place of the rule of law in the package of democratic ideology is as a further specification of the kind of democracy (commonly called liberal democracy) that we should promote or prefer. By contrast to the case of the rule of law one might hold that there is at least a substantive connection between the common good and democracy.1 The supposed connection is that

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FIGURE 3.1  Visible from across the ancient city, and seen here from the Assembly’s meeting place on the Pnyx, Athens’ Acropolis was home to key civic cults of Athena and other gods, and a repository for both tribute and dedications to the gods. Photograph: Carol Atack.

democracy tends to preserve the common good by preventing the concentration of political power in the hands of a few. If this is in fact the case, the promotion of the common good would be less a matter of the package of democratic ideology and more a genuine feature of democracy itself. The idea that democracy as such promotes the common good would have come as a great surprise to prominent political theorists in classical antiquity. Aristotle, for instance, holds that democracy is defined by the factional exploitation of the rich by the poor such that the common good fails to be achieved (Politics 3.7, 1279b4–10). Yet, as I have already noted, the ancient discourse of democracy, like the modern one, made ample use of the notion of the common good. In the remainder of this chapter, I will consider this disagreement between the supporters and the critics of democracy to shed light on the place of the common good in ancient political thinking about democracy. First, we should hear from the ancient supporters of democracy to consider how their notion of the common good might be related to the concept invoked by democracy’s modern supporters. Thucydides records in the second book of his History of the Peloponnesian War the funeral oration of the Athenian leader Pericles for those who died in the war’s first year (Thuc. 2.35–46; see also Chapter 9, this volume). The speech is

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FIGURE 3.2  Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509–11. Photo: Getty Images.

the most sustained consideration of the common good from a democratic point of view in Greek antiquity and thus will serve as an exemplary case for my discussion. (I will leave aside the vexed question of Thucydides’ own considered evaluation of Athenian democracy under and without Pericles.) Indeed, while the notion of the common good appears regularly in orators such as Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Aeschines who are often our best sources for the self-understanding of Athenian democracy, their references to it are largely off-hand, as with Isocrates’ On the Peace (91).2 In this passage, Isocrates aims to distinguish between archein (ruling) and turannein (domination), invoking the commonplace thought that “it is the task of those who rule to make those they rule happier through their management,” which tyrants neglect in favor of securing their own pleasure. This difference between the sustained treatment in Thucydides and the offhand references in the orators suggests an analytical distinction between ideological and reflective uses of notions such as the common good. In the orators, the use of the notion of the common good is ideological because it is deployed chiefly to elicit approval from the audience on the basis of an acceptance of shared norms. While Pericles’ Funeral Oration is replete with similar ideological appeals, it also contains reflective uses of elements of democratic discourse, that is, uses that do not simply reaffirm a norm but invite reflection by the audience on the justification of this norm. We may imagine that Pericles’ actual audience for the original speech would have expected a celebration of their shared values (see Chapter 9, this volume).

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Whether Pericles broke from this expectation in a way that Thucydides faithfully represents or whether Thucydides himself inserts the outward-looking and justificatory dimensions of the speech as a way of making Athenian values and views intelligible to a broader Greek audience cannot be known. In either case, we find, uniquely, in the Funeral Oration a sustained meditation on what the common good is and how Athenian democracy promotes it. In a characteristic—and justly famous—passage, Thucydides has Pericles describe the common good as follows: Do not weigh the good [these men] have done on the basis of one speech. Any longwinded orator could tell you how much good lies in resisting our enemies; but you already know this. Look instead at the power our city shows in action every day, and so become lovers of Athens. When the power of the city seems great to you, consider then that this was purchased by valiant men who knew their duty and kept their honor in battle, by men who were resolved to contribute the most noble gift to their city: even if they should fail in their attempt, at least they would leave their fine character to the city. For in giving their lives for the common good [koinēi], each man won praise for himself that will never grow old. (Thuc. 2.43, trans. Woodruff 1993) As in the orators’ usage, Pericles sharply contrasts the common good with private or factional interest.3 Moreover, it is a good that inheres in the city, specifically, in the city’s efficacy or power, as opposed to any individual’s life. To what extent does this notion of the common good resemble the one that is part of the modern democratic package of views? Are they one and the same concept, despite the many differences in social and historical context? Might they be distinct conceptions of the same concept? Are they related by mere family resemblance? Of course, to settle these questions something more must be said about the modern notion, though my remarks will of necessity be sketchy.4 A good place to start is the influential account of John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, which can also be seen as a theoretical defense of many elements of the liberal-democratic ideological package (Rawls 1971).5 While Rawls first defines the common good in A Theory of Justice rather thinly and in passing as “certain general conditions that are in an appropriate sense equally to everyone’s advantage” (§39, p. 246), he later sketches an account of the goods of social union—which he imagines would be chosen by the members of a well-ordered society—that goes well beyond this thin conception.6 Rawls contrasts a society where the goods of social union are pursued as ends in themselves with a “private society” where “each person assesses social arrangements solely as a means to his private aims” (§79, p. 521). It is apt to say that in a private society there are no truly common goods, even if cooperative activities are undertaken and institutions set up to regulate them. In short: common goods are the goods of earnest noninstrumental sociality.

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There is considerable overlap between the Periclean ideal of sacrifice for the common good of one’s city and Rawls’s conception of the goods of social union as an inevitable pursuit of human beings given their social nature: common goods are achieved in cooperative endeavors when self-interest is set aside as the sole human motivation. Moreover, Thucydides represents Pericles as responding in his speech to the charge, lodged by those hostile to Athenian culture, that the liberty accorded to Athenian citizens diminished their concern for the welfare of the city. Indeed, Pericles directly connects liberty and public concern when he says that Athenians “are free and generous not only in our public activities as citizens, but also in our daily lives: there is no suspicion in our dealings with one another, and we are not offended by our neighbour for following his own pleasure” (2.37, trans. Woodruff 1993). In Rawlsian terms, we might say that Pericles is replying to the accusation that Athens is a private society simply because of the unusual liberty granted to citizens in the conduct of their own lives. On what the common good is, then, at least one prominent representation of the self-conception of classical Athenian democracy, however idealized, agrees in large measure with one of the most influential theoretical statements of modern liberal-democratic ideology. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to suspect that these representations might count as conceptions of the same concept, despite the radical differences in forms of social organization and historical circumstance. What I hope to show in the remainder of this chapter is that, from this Thucydidean starting point, we may observe a range of determinations of this thin idea of the common good in ancient Greek and Roman political thought that develop the idea of earnest, noninstrumental sociality. Especially striking is the fact that none of the theorists I consider—Plato, Aristotle (Figure 3.2), and Cicero—are proponents of democracy, at least as that term was understood in antiquity. I will close by considering how the very idea of a good common to all is a way in which the democratic culture of Athens influenced even theorists who favored other forms of government.

PLATO AND THE DEMOCRATIC COMMON GOOD The Platonic dialogues contain many reflections on the common good with diverse purposes. I will consider two of these discussions, the first of which presents a critique of Athenian democracy (with a direct rebuttal of Pericles’ view in the Funeral Oration) and the second of which presents an alternative account of rule as expertise, and show how they form a distinctly Platonic account of the common good. The first discussion comes from the Gorgias and the second is found in the first book of the Republic.7 In his conversation with Polus in the Gorgias, Socrates (Figure 3.3) presents a fourfold division of craftsmen concerned with the welfare of human beings,

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FIGURE 3.3  Portrait busts of philosophers such as Socrates were status symbols for display in the elite Roman home, showing the continuing influence of Athenian ideas. Capitoline Museum, Rome. Photo: Alamy.

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along with a corresponding set of imitators (Pl., Gorgias 463e5–466a3). The welfare of human beings is understood here in terms of being in a good condition (euexia) (464a2). Welfare is accordingly divided into the good condition of the body, which is the concern of the trainer and the doctor, and the good condition of the soul, which is the concern of the legislator and the judge (464b2–c3). Socrates identifies the orator as the psychic counterpart not of the doctor but of the gourmet chef, someone who aims to produce pleasure through guesswork rather than genuinely benefiting the audience through expert knowledge (464d7–e1). Later on in the dialogue, in his conversation with Callicles, Socrates connects this analysis of oratory as a practice aimed at the pleasure not the welfare of the audience to the issue of the common good (Pl., Gorgias 502d2–503a1). After securing Callicles’ agreement that the vulgar oratory found in poetry is a sort of flattery, he turns to the practices of Athenian politicians: Well then, what about the rhetoric addressed to the Athenian populace and the populace in other cities made up of free men—what’s our take on it? Do you hold that these orators speak on any given occasion with a view to what’s best, by guessing at what that is, and use their speeches to make the citizens as good as possible? Or do they, too [viz. like the vulgar orators], aim at gratifying the citizens and spurn the common good [tou koinou] for their private benefit, associating with the populace as though they were children, trying only to gratify them and caring not a whit for whether they make them better or worse? (502e10–503a1) What is especially striking here is the opposition between genuine political expertise, which is capable of improving the citizens and thereby securing the common good, and the mere imitation of that expertise in political oratory, which at best supplies pleasure to the citizens and secures only the orator’s own private benefit. For Socrates’ argument to work, we must supply a number of further premises about pleasure and the good that are defended elsewhere in the dialogue, such as the thought—found also in commonsense, moral thinking—that the hedonist cannot consistently secure the good by the indiscriminate pursuit of pleasure, since some pleasures are bad (Pl., Gorgias 497d8–98c8). Despite having secured Callicles’ agreement to these points earlier, Socrates’ characterization of all political rhetoric as aimed at the private benefit of the orators meets renewed opposition. While Callicles is ready to condemn the politicians of their own time, he holds in high regard figures such as Themistocles and Pericles and claims that they improved the citizens (503a5– c3). Socrates replies that these famed orators can only be said to have improved the citizenry,

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FIGURE 3.4  Vase for storage of public property, fifth-century Athens. Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek München. Photo by Renate Kühling.

if, Callicles, genuine virtue is what you earlier maintained—satisfying desires, those of one’s own and those of others. But if that’s not so, and what we were compelled to assent to in the earlier argument is instead true – that virtue is fulfilling those desires which, when satisfied, make a person better and not fulfilling those which make a person worse (this being a sort of skill)—was any of these men skilled in this way? I for my part cannot say so. (503c4–d3)8

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Callicles demurs, but after a long detour in their conversation, in which Socrates establishes the relationships between the good, pleasure, virtue, and happiness discussed piecemeal in the dialogue, Socrates returns to Pericles and secures Callicles’ assent to the claims that if Pericles was himself truly virtuous and a good citizen, he would have improved the Athenians through his speeches over his career (515d3–e1). Yet the Athenians’ ingratitude to Pericles at the end of his career suggests otherwise, a point Callicles again refuses to entertain (515e2– 516a4). The impasse leads Socrates to explain why statesmen such as Pericles and Themistocles are held in high regard, despite their failures to improve the populace: their skill at public service amounts to “an ability to supply the city with what it desired” (517b4–5), a reference no doubt to the military power and other adornments these leaders brought to Athens (Figure 3.4). While Socrates’ discussion relies on the claim that virtue is a kind of technē (skill or expertise), a principle that is prominent in the shorter Socratic works (often called “the early dialogues”) but less prominent elsewhere in the corpus, we nevertheless find in the Gorgias the core of a distinctly Platonic account of politics and the common good. The common good is the psychic welfare of the citizens, which can only be brought about through expertise. Since satisfying the desires of the citizens without regard to these desires’ conduciveness to virtue or vice does not benefit the citizens at all, the only benefit accrues to the orators themselves, in the prestige and power they gain from speech-making in the assembly. No matter how high-minded Themistocles or Pericles intended to be, then, all they accomplished, on Socrates’ account, was to gratify their own less than virtuous desires for status through gratifying the less than virtuous desires of the populace. Underlying this startling conclusion is the thought that, in the absence of real expertise, everyone follows the desires of their own hearts. The problem with democracy, the reason it cannot achieve the common good, is that there is no one who is in a position systematically to aim at it. The core Platonic idea about the common good I want to draw out is this: only the expert aims impersonally at what is good; hence, only the political expert aims at the common good. This notion counts as a determinate conception of what I suggested was the concept of the common good shared between ordinary political discourse and various theoretical discussions, namely, being a good of earnest noninstrumental sociality. Where Plato’s Socrates departs most strikingly from other notions of the common good is in his specification of noninstrumentality, which depends on a theory of aiming at the good that is highly idiosyncratic and yields startling results when applied to concrete examples within political life. In particular, despite their highminded intentions, politicians such as Themistocles and Pericles fail to aim at the common good just as much as the exploitative tyrants from whom Athenian democrats distinguished themselves. Indeed, Socrates concludes the political analysis of the dialogue by claiming that he alone—or with very few others—is engaged in the art of politics (Pl., Gorgias 521d6), since his sole concern is the

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moral improvement of himself and those with whom he converses. We can now see that Socrates’ point could equally be put by saying he alone aims at the common good. In Republic book 1, where Socrates returns to many of the same themes as in the Gorgias, we find this basic account of political expertise and the common good extended and refined. Despite many resonances between the dialogues, the dialectical context is different in the Republic, as the primary subject is not rhetoric but justice. Thrasymachus advances the view that justice simply is what is advantageous to those who are stronger, since the stronger power in any political community makes laws that benefit it and which they force the rest of the community to obey (Pl., Rep. 338d5–339a3). His argument relies on the thought that there is nothing more to justice in a community than the actual norms by which it is organized. Thrasymachus’ theory is more sophisticated than the similar view advanced by Callicles in the Gorgias because it concerns itself not with individuals but with political groups. There is a thoroughly realist cast to this picture. One of its implications is that there are no common goods between rulers and subjects. Since some must rule and others must be ruled in any given society, it follows that there are no common goods at all. Rule, then, turns out to be purely a matter of enforcing one’s interests at the expense of others. In reply, Socrates makes use of an idea we have already seen in the Gorgias, that rule is an activity governed by the norms of political expertise. Socrates grounds this claim in the thought, conceded by Thrasymachus, that rulers can aim more or less well at their own advantage. To rule, per Thrasymachus, is not merely to try to exploit others but actually to succeed in doing so. But this concession brings rule under the broader rubric of skill or expertise, and as Socrates presses, every other expertise seems to aim at benefiting what is governed by it. Socrates’ prime example is herding, where a tender of animals evidently aims not to exploit but to protect those under his care.9 Here, a different dimension of the noninstrumentality of rule emerges from that in the Gorgias. Rulers are not simply those in power but count as rulers insofar as they exercise this power well. If ruling is genuinely skill- or craft-like, then simply taken as a craft, not just as the specific sort of craft that it is, it must serve a purpose in the common social order beyond the purposes of those who set their hands to it, just as a doctor may earn wages for exercising his skill, but success and failure in practicing medicine are measured by healing, not by wage earning.10 Despite the differences between the Gorgias and the Republic, there is a striking commonality. In both dialogues, Socrates argues that political activity can be undertaken well or badly, and reliable success can only be achieved by those with the relevant skill. In the Gorgias, the skill is simply virtue, with virtuous politicians reliably fostering virtue in their societies, on the basis of

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the more general principle that those with virtue will foster virtue in those around them.11 In the Republic, the skill is instead distinctly political, with wise rulers reliably fostering virtue in those over whom they rule. In both cases, the common good is a good sought impersonally by experts in virtue of their expertise.

ARISTOTLE AND THE COMMON GOOD Now let me turn to Aristotle. It will be useful first to sketch out the relationship between Aristotle’s and Plato’s conceptions of the common good before turning to the individual texts of Aristotle to substantiate my claims. In sum, Aristotle shares with Plato the thought that political experts are uniquely positioned to aim at the common good of the community, but he departs from Plato in confining the common good to the virtue of the citizens. Instead, Aristotle speaks of the common good as an overarching or all-embracing good, prominently including the noble activities of virtuous citizens, but extending beyond these activities to include the varied advantages that make these activities possible (Arist., Eth. Nic. 5.1; Pol. 1.1–2). Moreover, Aristotle also does not hold that the political expert aims impersonally at the common good, which opens the door to the criticism— lodged, for instance, by Adeimantus against Socrates in the Republic—that rule is in fact to the detriment of the rulers. Rather, he holds that there is a distinct relationship that obtains between the citizens of a well-ordered polity in which they rule and are ruled in turn for to koinēi sumpheron (the mutual benefit), which is in fact the same as to koinon agathon (the common good).12 It is not that the rulers benefit those who are ruled and then only when the parties switch roles do the former rulers then receive benefits themselves. Rather, beyond any individual instantation of the relation between ruler and ruled, the well-ordered polity allows for rule to be advantageous for both the ruler and the ruled, by contrast to the exploitation that marks rule in deviant forms of society. I will argue in this section that Aristotle’s great advance in theorizing the common good is in presenting this two-sided conception of ruling and being ruled in turn, which is the centerpiece of his theory of citizenship. As a result, the common good comes to be the aim not just of rulers but of all the citizens, whether they participate in rule directly or not. Donald Morrison (2013) has argued that Aristotle’s view is characterized by seeing the common good as common to the citizens both as agents and as beneficiaries, namely, as those who achieve the common good as a common goal that redounds to them all. The picture I plan to develop below is consistent with Morrison’s claim, which is surely correct. In my own reading of Aristotle, I want to make central the relationship that obtains between citizens in a well-ordered polity as a result of this pursuit, by which it can most sharply be contrasted

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with the exploitation that characterizes badly ordered polities. The failure to achieve the common good in a badly ordered polity is not simply a matter of the absence of a common goal or the lack of a good that redounds to all the citizens, but rather the substitution of domination for cooperative pursuit. Aristotle’s place at the start of the republican tradition of politics, and his interest in socalled ordinary citizens as well as rulers, is brought out more clearly by focusing on the relational aspects of his view of political community. To summarize: there are three main features of Aristotle’s account of the common good, as I understand it. 1. The common good is the all-embracing good made possible by and aimed at by the political community. 2. The common good is achieved through the citizens ruling and being ruled in turn in a well-ordered polity, resulting in their mutual advantage, by contrast to the exploitation of those who are ruled by the rulers that characterizes a badly ordered polity. 3. The relation between the citizens that obtains in a well-ordered polity is aptly described as justice in the true and full sense. The Common Good and Common Goods The first point is straightforward, though it is not always appreciated that Aristotle includes a wide range of goods as parts of the common good, namely, as a multiplicity of common goods structured by the single common good. In Politics 1.1, Aristotle defines the political community as the community that achieves the most controlling and all-embracing good. In Politics 1.2, he adds a genealogical story on which the proto-political communities of household and village achieve their end by coming to form a large enough community that selfsufficiency is genuinely possible. Self-sufficiency here is explained in terms of meeting the basic survival needs of the members of the community effectively enough that the pursuit of genuinely valuable human activities is possible, what in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle called activities of leisure. In Politics book 7, Aristotle clarifies that these leisured pursuits will be the province of those who are in the full sense parts of or sharers in the political community, specifically, the citizens, and not those merely necessary for its existence, such as manual laborers, slaves, and so on. On the basis of this description of the self-sufficiency of the political community, and the strong parallels with the argument of Nicomachean Ethics 1.1–2 about the most controlling human good, it is easy to assume that only these leisured activities count as the common good that the political community is devoted to bringing about, since only they really constitute happiness for human beings. When Aristotle returns to the subject in Politics 3.6, however, he puts the point rather differently, in terms of the natural desires that are satisfied by living together:

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In our first discussions […] it was also said that a human being is by nature a political animal. That is why, even when they do not need one another’s help, people no less desire to live together, although it is also true that the common benefit brings them together, to the extent that it contributes some part of living well to each. (Arist., Pol. 3.6, 1278b17–23, trans. Morrison 2013) We are born to live together, and so, Aristotle points out, even beyond any specific advantage we gain from others, we want to live with others. Nevertheless, political life is not simply a matter of the satisfaction of this desire but rather the share of living well that accrues to those who come together. Morrison notes that Aristotle’s talk of a mere “share” of living well can seem potentially “alarming,” since it seems to set the goal of the political community too low, giving to each only some individual good things (2013: 179–80). If, in particular, we assume that the real common good is happiness or living well, as for instance Cooper (2010) does, this conclusion threatens to follow. Morrison rightly notes that the welfare of the citizens goes beyond the activities that make up happiness (2013: 184–5). I disagree with Morrison, however, that Aristotle rules out instrumental goods as being part of the common good (2013: 182). Even though we value health for its own sake, nevertheless, it is subordinate to the activities that constitute happiness; likewise, something like security, which is valuable only for what it makes possible, can count as part of the common good. Indeed, in the passage above, we can see Aristotle as interested in mentioning  the wide range of advantages the political community makes possible, including the best human activities, security and stability in a community, as well as the specific basic needs we all have, which lesser forms of community fail to reliably ensure. For a given member of a political community at a given time, one or another of these advantages will be most salient. Insofar as members receive these benefits from the community as a whole, what they receive counts as one aspect of to koinēi sumpheron (the mutual advantage). Every political community, just to count as a political community, must secure at least some of these goods for its members, perhaps above a certain minimal threshold.13 Only in the well-ordered polity, however, is the common good truly achieved as a matter of the form of the political community. That is the topic to which Aristotle turns next, which was my second point above. Ruling and Being Ruled in Turn Aristotle initially differentiates good constitutions (monarchy, aristocracy, politeia or “polity” in the narrow sense) from bad constitutions (tyranny, oligarchy, democracy) on the basis of what the politeuma (ruling body) aims at, the common advantage in good constitutions, the advantage of the rulers in bad

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ones. He refines this analysis later on in book 3 by distinguishing political rule, which is two-sided, from despotic rule, which is one-sided: Clearly then the constitutions that seek the common advantage are the ones that are correct as far as what is unqualifiedly just, while the ones that seek the personal advantage of only the rulers are all in error and deviations from the correct constitutions, since they are despotic and the city is rather a community of the free. (Arist., Pol. 3.8, 1279a17–21) Talk of advantage of the rulers suggests the contrast case is the advantage of the ruled, as in Republic 1. Aristotle’s mention of the unqualifiedly just here, however, corrects this misperception. In the partial and partisan visions of justice that orient oligarchy and democracy, the good of the community is equated with factional interest. Nevertheless, as he goes on to argue, these are still images of the genuine unqualifiedly just, since rule is apportioned by genuine aspects of merit that are proxies for excellence—wealth in an oligarchy, freedom in a democracy (Arist., Pol. 1280a7–25). The problem is that each of these partial visions excludes the other, leading to the ruling body exploiting whichever is the other class, poor exploiting rich or rich exploiting poor. When true merit—virtue and wisdom—is the standard of justice and of sharing in the constitution, each has as good a claim as any other of comparable standing, allowing for ruling and being ruled in turn and in proportion to real excellence. No doubt in an aristocracy (the most straightforward type of good constitution for Aristotle and the basis of his discussion of the ideal polity in Politics 7), people seek to outdo one another, but not so as to triumph once and for all. As a result, the good pursued is common, since the other members of the citizenbody, even if purely passive in a given context, are always treated as past and future corulers alongside oneself. As I argued above, what results is not just a structure of joint agency and joint beneficiary, but a new essentially cooperative relation between citizens. As a virtuous citizen, one ought not despotize women or metics (resident noncitizens of free status), after all, and yet they do not stand in this civic relation. So beyond being non-despotic, rule of the free by the free has a special polyadic form, extending to all who rightly share in rule.14 For that reason, in good constitutions, what is pursued is the common and not a factional good. To sum up: both Plato and Aristotle offer specific determinations of the basic idea of the common good as the good (or goods) of earnest noninstrumental sociality. For Plato, it is a matter of experts aiming at the good on behalf of a community; for Aristotle, it is rather a product of the special form of cooperative agency possible in a constitution guided by and oriented to virtue. Let me conclude my discussion by turning, finally, to the quite different conception of

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political community and the common good in Cicero. I will aim to show that Cicero’s account, while distinct, shares some features with those I identified above as Platonic and Aristotelian.

CICERO AND THE COMMON GOOD A natural place to start in discussing Cicero’s (Figure 3.5) conception of the common good is the analysis of the res publica (commons) in De republica. A word, first, about my translation of res publica, often rendered “republic” or

FIGURE 3.5  Cicero adapted the ideas of earlier philosophers to the context of the Roman Republic. Portrait bust, Capitoline Museum, Rome. Photo: Alamy.

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“commonwealth.” Despite the influence on Cicero’s work from Plato’s Republic, whose Greek title is Politeia or “Constitution,” it is important to capture what the consensus of recent scholars has identified as the distinctness of the Roman conception of the res publica as a res, that is, as (at least analogically) property or a thing.15 I therefore will employ the translation “commons,” which suggests in the first instance in English not what a community is but rather what it has. By transference, of course, the commons can stand for the community itself, just as Aristotle noted that we may be tempted to speak of a polis as a place when in fact it is a body of citizens (Pol. 3.3, 1276a17–22). So the wide semantic range of res publica can in this way be captured, and at least some of the distinctly Roman aspects of Cicero’s target of analysis can be preserved. Before I turn to De republica, however, I want to draw attention to Cicero’s theory of natural sociability in De officiis, written some years later with more of a theoretical and general orientation than De republica.16 For Cicero invokes natural sociability in passing in De republica, which may give the impression that the idea is of secondary importance to his conception of political community. In De officiis book 1, Cicero is analyzing the kinds of actions that it is our place to do (officia), insofar as they correspond to the traditional list of cardinal virtues—wisdom, justice, courage, and seemliness—though it should be noted that Cicero’s treatment (or at least, Panaetius’ treatment, on which Cicero relies) is innovative at several points. Having already remarked on the general relationship between the moral or the honestum (honorable) and sociability at the outset of his discussion (Cic., Off. 1.12), he returns to the topic in a lengthy excursus from his treatment of justice at 1.50–6. The basic idea in this passage is familiar from both Stoic and Peripatetic ethics: our need for each other brings us together in community with other human beings, a central form of which is political community; justice and liberality, therefore, have natural roots. Indeed, in the Stoic picture, we find emphasized the idea that there is an affinity between any two human beings whatsoever, even beyond the scope of intimate relationships or shared identities. The alternative to this picture is well attested in Epicurean ethics, where justice is regarded as  merely contractual and conventional. Consider, for example, Principal Doctrine 33: “Absolute justice never existed, only contracts for the sake of not harming or being harmed, made in mutual associations in every place, whatever its size” (Epicurus, KD 33 = Diog. Laert. 10.150). It may seem as though the dispute between the Epicurean and the Stoic views lies simply in a dispute about the origins of justice. In fact, the idea of natural sociability plays a substantive role in Cicero’s conception of justice and liberality. Most prominently, property rights are to be limited by the fact that the fruits of the earth are the common possession of all (Cic., Off. 1.21–2). As a result, we may conclude that unlimited acquisitiveness on this account is a failure not (only) of moderation, that is restraining one’s desires to the

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appropriate limit, but of justice, that is, giving to others what they are due. By contrast, on the Epicurean picture, justice is not only conventional but in an important sense local (Principal Doctrine 36 = Diog. Laert. 10.151), which would make it impossible to ground the point that Cicero and the Stoics are pressing here. This debate about whether justice is a natural or rather an artificial virtue, to borrow David Hume’s apposite contrast, is important for understanding Cicero’s theory of the commons in De republica. For the centerpiece of that theory is the idea of the commons as a societas (partnership), a term drawn from Roman civil law. As Asmis notes, the commons as partnership “is upheld by the common agreement of its members and an allocation of rewards that is proportionate to the contributions”, thereby setting “a standard of cooperation for all associations within the state” (Asmis 2004: 570). The very idea of the commons as upheld by agreement along the lines of a legal instrument may give the impression that Cicero is following the Epicureans in conceiving of individual political communities as contractual in nature. In point of fact, however, Cicero is indebted to both Plato and Aristotle here, especially the accounts of the origins of political community in Plato’s Republic book 2 and Aristotle’s Politics 1.1–2. Natural sociability alone does not explain the complex forms of political life and self-governance exhibited by the Greek polis or the Roman Republic. Nevertheless, we do not need to choose between characterizing political community as natural or as artificial. Just as cultivation may be required to foster the growth of an orchard, political community may require intervention and regulation to reach its natural end. That fact does not render political community any less natural. I have been arguing that natural sociability is key to understanding Cicero’s account of the commons and thereby his account of the common good. Let us now take up the definition of the commons itself, which he puts in the mouth of the great second-century bce Roman military and political leader Scipio Africanus the Younger: The commons, therefore […] is the property of a people [res populi]; moreover, a people is not just any gathering of humans, having flocked together [congregatus] in some way, but rather a gathering of a multitude, who are in association on the basis of agreement on law and sharing in benefit [iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus]. (Cic., Rep. 1.39) At first blush, it may seem that Scipio is contrasting two kinds of communities, on the one hand those based in natural sociability, perhaps involving simpler forms of social organization, and on the other hand those regulated by law and agreement. Against the background of the centrality of natural sociability to Cicero’s account of justice in De officiis, however, it becomes more plausible

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to interpret the definition of the commons in line with its antecedents in Plato and Aristotle: the natural sociability of human beings undergirds but does not fully characterize the form of political community. The rest of the passage bears this thought out. Scipio continues: “The first cause of this coming together is not so much helplessness as a certain natural herd instinct, as it were, of humans. For this kind is not lone or solitary” (Cic., Rep. 1.39). At this point, the manuscript text breaks off, but the following section emphasizes the origins of political functions in the need to regulate or administer the common property of a community (1.41–2). As I have been arguing, there is no inconsistency in these two points. Now we can turn to a closer consideration of the idea of the commons as a partnership. The basic legal metaphor articulates a structure of contributions and corresponding benefits, and in Roman law and social thought, a genuine societas is contrasted with a system in which one party gets the proverbial lion’s share of the benefits without undertaking risk (societas leonina) (Asmis 2004: 580–2). Importantly, however, the partners need not be on a strictly equal footing. When Cicero turns to a discussion of the specific kinds of constitution (Cic., Rep. 1.42–3), he has Scipio criticize popular rule (roughly speaking, a moderate form of democracy) for eliminating distinctions in dignitas (merit or rank), just as he criticizes monarchy and aristocracy for curtailing the multitude’s libertas (freedom). In addition to clarifying the idea of a partnership, these observations about specific types of constitution and about what they promote and discourage also help to reveal the sheer scope of the utilitatis communio (sharing in benefit) that defines the commons. In Scipio’s definition, benefit must be construed to include more than the specific goods, such as wealth and safety—mentioned by Cicero in the preface of De republica as the goals of politics—that accrue to individuals through earnest noninstrumental sociality. A commons in which freedom and merit are encouraged to flourish is good for that very reason, not simply as a useful distributive structure but as itself an admirable collective endeavor. As Cicero details in the voice of Scipio in what follows in De republica books 1 and 2, it is precisely that admirable quality that marks out the Roman Republic as an exceptional constitution. Far from giving a contractual account, then, of the character of political community, Cicero founds his view on the natural sociability of human beings, which when channeled through law and institutions results in an earnest sharing of risks and benefits. These benefits, in turn, should not be narrowly construed as advantages in the private life of citizens but as inhering, in an important sense, in the whole character of the life that the citizens live together. In an important sense, the greatest benefit that the commons bestows on its members is living in an admirable community, one that not only secures but also values freedom and merit.

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Cicero’s account, of course, owes much to both Plato and Aristotle (Asmis 2004: 591–5). I will concentrate specifically on how he can be understood to adapt the views of the common good I outlined above. In seeing the common good as brought about by relations of cooperation and nonexploitation among the citizens of a political community, Cicero is hewing quite closely to the Aristotelian picture. On the other hand, by contrast to Aristotle—and far more like Plato—Cicero contrasts the high-minded and rational pursuit of politics by a small class of citizens with the self-interested strivings of the rest. As Scipio says, when reporting familiar criticisms of democracy, “certainly, it is on the wisdom of the best men [in optimorum consiliis] that the welfare of the political community is founded” (Cic., Rep. 1.51). The mistake of aristocrats, the text suggests, is confusing this point with the idea that excellent men will come only from certain families. This picture of a governing class, which can rise above the passions of the masses to rule rationally, has a good deal in common with Plato’s ideal of political experts aiming impersonally at the common good.

CONCLUSION By way of a brief conclusion, let me return now to the initial question I posed about the common good and democracy. I have emphasized that a range of ancient political thinkers take on the idea of the common good as the advantages or benefits of earnest noninstrumental sociality, while developing different substantive pictures of the aims of political community in which this common concept is further specified. None of these thinkers is friendly to democracy, especially in its untempered form, though all of them take note of the advantages of wide political participation for the stability of a political community. Nevertheless, given that the common good originated as a notion in ancient democratic discourse, we can observe that it left a mark on each of their views. For all these later political thinkers, the common good is only achieved when there is freedom from exploitation for the citizens. Hence, the basic idea that every citizen counts when the common good is held up as a standard—even if not everyone has equal standing or access to power, as modern democrats emphasize—belongs even to the undemocratic political theories developed by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Indeed, we may well wonder whether the prominence of equality in modern democratic discourse obscures the central value of properly ordered relationships among citizens and between citizens and the ruling class that these ancient thinkers emphasized in theorizing the common good.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Economic and Social Democracy EMILY MACKIL

As it developed in the Greek world at the end of the sixth century bce, democracy was predicated upon a notion of citizen equality that only deepened over the course of the fifth and fourth centuries. In its early stages a lingering commitment to archaic, oligarchic ideals led to rules restricting eligibility for high political offices to those citizens who met certain property qualifications. As such restrictions were abandoned in the classical period, Greek democracies recognized that, to make widespread political participation not just a formal right but a lived experience, it would be necessary to protect and enhance the dignity of all citizens; to protect the most vulnerable of their citizens; and to reduce social and economic inequality by enacting strategies to share and redistribute wealth and resources within the citizen body. Accordingly they intensified their commitments to providing security, promoting prosperity, and mitigating drastic economic inequality as they reduced formal barriers to substantive participation in politics by citizens of low socio-economic status. And although the Romans never adopted a formal democratic regime, we can recognize the pursuit of some similar paths during the Republic as strategies to increase the political and social power of the lower classes, and during the empire as a means of demonstrating the paternal care shown by the emperor for his subjects. Ancient democracies were not social welfare states in the modern sense; resources were allocated and protections extended not to individuals on the basis of need but rather to every citizen universally, by virtue of his membership

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in the citizen group. Nor did any theory of social justice develop in antiquity that might have guided ancient democracies to use their assemblies and legislative powers to reduce inequality and expand access to resources within the citizen body. Their reasons for pursuing these aims were instead pragmatic. The best way to prevent oligarchs from gaining political power in Greek poleis was to ensure high levels of direct participation in the political process by the poorer masses. If from a juridical and political perspective the most important status distinction in the Greek world was the one that separated free person from slave, there was in fact a spectrum of free status groups (Kamen 2013) that included resident foreigners, known as metics (Akrigg 2015; Whitehead 1977), as well as manumitted slaves, disenfranchised citizens, and others (see Chapters 2 and 5, this volume). The measures that protected the vulnerable and reduced inequality applied exclusively to citizens and never to slaves. Whereas modern notions of social democracy are explicitly or implicitly founded upon notions of universal human rights, in antiquity no such concept existed: slaves had virtually no legal rights in antiquity (Lewis 2018: 42–3) and democracy in its social and economic aspects as in its political functions was reserved exclusively for citizens. There is, then, a very meaningful distance between the social democracies of antiquity and the modern world. It is nevertheless instructive for the modern student of democracy to recognize the steps taken in antiquity to protect the dignity of all citizens and minimize their socio-economic vulnerability in accordance with the basic principles of democracy. Some, indeed, seem to support arguments made by modern social scientists that direct citizen participation in making fiscal decisions tends to improve the socio-economic well-being of the poorer members of a society.

CITIZEN DIGNITY AND ACCESS TO RESOURCES In the early sixth century bce a fierce social struggle developed in Athens. Under an aristocratic-oligarchic regime, land ownership was concentrated in the hands of what was probably a small number of wealthy families, while at least some labor was performed by the landless in a kind of sharecropping arrangement with estate holders. These individuals are described as pelatai (dependents) and hektēmoroi (sixth-parters) by the anonymous author of The Constitution of the Athenians, a late fourth-century treatise written in the school of Aristotle ([Arist.], Ath. Pol.). But when they failed to pay their rent—perhaps one-sixth of their harvest—or otherwise fell into debt, they could be enslaved by their landlords and creditors. The same source reports that “they were discontented on other grounds too: it could be said that there was nothing in which they had a share” ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 2.1). Their anger seethed, and some form of social crisis appears to have erupted.

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In its midst Solon, an Athenian citizen, was appointed archon and initiated a series of reforms that carefully defined the wealth qualifications for public office and military service, thus ossifying a new, timocratic oligarchic regime in Athens. Yet at the same time he enacted several changes to protect the masses that had a profound and lasting impact on the Athenian definition of citizenship. In one of his own poems Solon claims to have removed horoi (boundary- or debt-markers) from the earth, thus freeing the land that had formerly been enslaved. He also claims that he brought back to Athens those who had been sold into slavery or gone into exile for debt, and that he liberated many who were enslaved within the city (Solon fr. 36.5–15). Solon did not preserve institutional or legal details in his poems; for these we rely, cautiously, on later authors. The Constitution of the Athenians reports that he banned the evidently widespread practice of securing loans on the body of the debtor, as a means of abolishing enslavement for debt ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 6.1; Harris 2002). This was a law that applied, of course, only to Athenian citizens. Beyond its immediate application it had the broader effect of contouring the definition of citizenship with basic bodily integrity. The Athenian citizen’s right to bodily integrity was expanded by prohibitions against torture and hubris, the latter of which has been defined as “intentional, often gratuitous action, frequently but by no means always violent, and specifically designed to inflict shame and public humiliation” (Fisher 1990: 126; see also Fisher 1992). Although this law may have had its origins in the Solonian reforms, legal action around it is most amply attested during the fourth century, when democracy was at its strongest in Athens. The law of hubris connected violence against citizens with public dishonor, and it applied to all citizens equally, regardless of their wealth, birth, or social position. In the most fundamental sense, then, the Athenian democracy protected the basic dignity of its citizens. Most modern theories of social democracy advocate measures taken by democratically elected governments to redistribute goods and resources to achieve a form of socio-economic equality that can be construed as the logical counterpart of political equality inherent in the democratic system (Schmidt 2016). In antiquity, however, the willingness of Athens and other democracies to provide resources to their citizens beyond the basic protections just sketched is quite complicated. As is usually the case, ideology and reality appear at some distance from one another. Greek poleis restricted the right to own land and houses to their citizens; this right (called enktēsis) was occasionally granted to foreign benefactors and other honored individuals including some privileged metics, but as a rule property rights were contingent upon citizenship in the Greek world (Schofield 1999a: 111), the outcome of negotiations between elites and subordinate members of nascent states in the archaic period (Mackil 2017). It was only in philosophical

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theories of the ideal state proposed by critics of democracy such as Plato (Leg. 745c3–d4) and Aristotle (Pol. 1329b36–1330a25), however, that land ownership was postulated as a necessary condition for citizenship (Ober 1998: 290–351). Critiques of the institution of private property itself came only from utopian thought-experiments in the classical period (Ar., Eccl. 588–611; Pl., Rep. 416d–417b, 462a–464e, with Garnsey 2007: 6–24). In practice there was a wide spectrum of land ownership in every democratic polis, from holders of large estates to individuals who rented their homes and workshops to that enigmatic category of people often described rather casually as “the landless poor,” the contours of whose lives are so difficult to reveal (Taylor 2017). Insofar as democracy was predicated upon a radical notion of the political equality of all citizens, and insofar as the right to own property was entailed by citizenship, there was a real tension between democracy and the very substantial inequalities in landholding that we know existed throughout the classical period (Foxhall 2002). One solution to this tension was to eradicate the practice of restricting eligibility for high offices within the democracy to those who met certain property qualifications. Our first evidence for the use of property qualifications in a formal sense is in Solon’s reforms of the early sixth century. Solon expanded an existing system of property classes, which divided the citizen body into three groups determined probably by their military capacity ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 7.3, with De Ste. Croix 2004: 5–72; Rhodes [1981] 1993: 138), to tie office-holding carefully and deliberately to landed wealth. Eligibility to serve as archons and treasurers of Athena was restricted to members of the highest one or two classes ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 8.1, 47.1, with Rhodes [1981] 1993: 148), whereas members of the lowest class were able only to attend the assembly and serve as jurors in the law courts ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 7.4). It was only in 457, almost half a century after the establishment of an early form of democracy in Athens, that the property restrictions for serving as archon were formally rescinded ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 26.2). Haltingly, then, the Athenians sought to break the link between wealth and formal political power that was so clearly paradoxical in a democracy predicated upon the equality of all citizens. Just as democracies sought to make the tenure of public office accessible to all citizens by abolishing property qualifications, some also sought to improve their citizens’ access to land. This was accomplished in several ways. The first was that democratic poleis, their subdivisions (e.g., demes), and sanctuaries frequently leased publicly held land to private citizens, a practice attested throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods in Athens (Papazarkadas 2011) and elsewhere. The arrangement had many benefits: it brought additional land under cultivation, with potentially positive consequences for food supply; it brought the city or deme a steady (if small) stream of revenue; and it had the potential to make land available, even if only by leasehold, to those who were

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otherwise landless. Yet it is generally accepted that most lessees were elites who saw leasing as a “source of influence and social standing” (Osborne 1985: 321) as well as profit (Osborne 1988: 289–93), so despite the potential capacity for the leasing of public land to improve access to land for the poor, it is unlikely to have had much effect in that direction. In the late archaic period Athenian commanders began to use their naval might to seize control of territories outside Attica, which would serve the dual function of acting as garrisons to secure Athenian control in strategic areas, and of providing land for cultivation by Athenian citizens. The earliest reported case was the seizure of the Thracian Chersonesos (modern Gallipoli peninsula) in the 540s (Hdt. 6.36–9), well before the establishment of democracy in Athens (Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 904–5). Chersonesos had a strategic location, situated as it was along the narrow strait through which ships laden with grain and slaves from the northern shores of the Black Sea and bound for Athenian harbors had to pass. The practice accelerated in the classical period as Athenian naval power increased, and can be directly associated with the development of democracy at Athens. The lands thus seized were called cleruchies, territories divided up into klēroi (lots) to be possessed by Athenian citizens as cleruchs or klērouchoi (lot-holders). The best known are Lemnos (Hdt. 6.137.1, 140.1), Imbros (Hdt. 6.41.2, 104.1), and Skyros (Diod. 11.60.2; Thuc. 1.98.2), the string of islands leading from the Hellespont toward Attica; these were acquisitions made in the earliest years of the Athenian democracy and staunchly defended throughout the classical period (Xen., Hell. 4.8.15, 5.1.31; [Arist.], Ath. Pol. 62.2; Diod. Sic. 18.18.4). Beyond their strategic location, cleruchies also provided a source of revenue for the Athenian polis (Moreno 2009), and in the fourth century harvests of grain-producing land from Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros were taxed in kind, with the grain shipped to Athens to be sold to Athenian citizens by the state at a price determined by the dēmos (Rhodes and Osborne 2003: no. 26; Stroud 1998). It is clear that the Athenian cleruchies increased the access that Athenian citizens had to land from which they could derive sustenance, and in many cases even an income as absentee landlords, but it is also clear that they dispossessed the former owners of the land. If they were not enslaved (as at Skyros: Thuc. 1.98.2), they appear to have become mere leaseholders and hirelings of the Athenian cleruchs rather than the free property owners they had previously been (Zelnick-Abramovitz 2004). Recent archaeological investigations on the island of Lemnos suggest the establishment of very large rural properties in the territory of Myrina on the western side of the island, during the fifth century, which contrast starkly with the smaller properties detected in the territory of Hephaestia to the east (Ficuciello 2012). These are likely to be the estates of Athenian cleruchs. The Athenian cleruchies thus remind us that a measure taken

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by a democratic state to enhance the economic welfare of its own citizens could very well come, quite literally, at the expense of noncitizens. It is tempting to compare the Athenians’ imposition of cleruchies with the creation of ager publicus (public land) in Italy during the Roman Republic. The traditional narrative held that this land, seized from defeated enemies, was perhaps initially intended to be made available to Roman citizens who were otherwise landless but in fact came to be possessed in ever greater quantities by the wealthy, creating a problem that the Gracchan land reforms of the 130s and 120s bce sought to alleviate. Recent research has shown, however, that the land that remained public in the second century was peripheral to Rome and continued to be cultivated by its historic owners, now Roman allies, whose tenure of the land was practically stable if legally insecure. The real impact of the Gracchan reforms was to privatize even that peripheral ager publicus in the hands of Roman citizens and at the expense of their Italian allies (Roselaar 2010). As with the Athenian cleruchies then, if there were some benefits to Roman citizens in need of land, they came at the expense of outsiders—and at some political risk for the Roman state, if indeed the loss of their agricultural possessions lay partly behind the revolt of the Italian allies in the Social War of the early first century, driven by a demand for citizen privileges. The cleruchies may have been among the most hated and exploitative measures imposed by the Athenians on their so-called allies in the fifth century, as is suggested by the fact that when, in 377, they sought to regain an extended network of allies, they vowed to renounce any property claimed by Athenians in the territory of those who joined the Athenian alliance, and may also have passed a prospective law prohibiting the acquisition or cultivation of land by Athenians in allied territory (RO 22 and Diod. Sic. 15.29.8, with Moreno 2009). But the Athenian democracy utilized its imperial strength in other ways during the fifth century to benefit its own citizens, certainly at the expense of outsiders. They made a systematic effort to exploit the plentiful precious metal and timber resources and trade network of the north Aegean from the 470s onward (Kallet 2013). They captured Eion on the Strymon River (Plut., Cim. 7.4–6; Thuc. 1.97.2) in 475 and used it as an emporion (trading post). From there they sent a very large group of colonists, “made up partly of their own citizens, partly of any others who wanted to join,” north to Ennea Hodoi (Nine Ways) where they must have intended to found a settlement, plans that were ended when the colonists were slaughtered by Thracians in the area (Thuc. 4.102.2). In the 420s they appear to have stockpiled grain produced around the Black Sea at Byzantium for export to Athens and to those allies to whom permission was granted (OR 150, lines 34–40, and IG I3 62). It was alleged in antiquity (Plut., Per. 12) that the Athenians used the tribute they collected from their allies to build the grand public monuments—most famously the Parthenon, Erechtheion

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(Figure 1.5), and monumental gate to the acropolis—erected in the city in the second half of the fifth century. Although close scrutiny of the financial administration of these construction projects suggests that this allegation was false, it is nevertheless true that the tribute, which funded military expeditions, freed up other public funds for expenditures of this kind (Kallet-Marx 1989). The Athenian democracy’s imperial experiment was, among other things, a means of improving Athenian citizens’ access to valuable resources, usually at the expense of noncitizens.

PROTECTING THE VULNERABLE Yet ancient democratic states frequently went beyond protecting the basic dignity of their citizens and taking steps to improve their access to critical resources such as land. They sought also to protect the more vulnerable members of the citizen body, in pursuit not of humanitarian but rather of political goals: to protect democracy and ensure that citizens would continue to be willing to fight the state’s wars. The direct form of democracy favored throughout the Greek world required large numbers of citizens to participate in a wide range of public institutions, from deliberative assemblies to juries to serving terms in public offices. These were time-consuming activities, and if only the rich could afford to participate, the very democratic nature of the state would be threatened, if not completely undermined. The democratic solution to this grave problem was to introduce pay for public service of this kind, whereas oligarchies are reported to have fined their wealthy citizens for failure to participate (Arist., Pol. 1294a37–41). In Athens, where the evidence is most detailed, the process began with the introduction of jury pay around the middle of the fifth century ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 27.3–4, with Rhodes [1981] 1993: 338–40). It was raised from two to three obols for service on a one-day trial around 424 (Ar., Eq. 51, 255, 800), and remained fixed at that rate until the late fourth century. In his comic masterpiece Wasps, produced in 422, Aristophanes satirized the resultant enthusiasm of the poor for serving on juries, not only for the pay they received but also for the sense of power that rendering judgments bestowed on them. In the mid-fourth century the educator and writer Isocrates, advocating reforms that would restore to the old Areopagus Council much of the authority it had enjoyed before the democratic reforms of Ephialtes in 462/461, asked “who among intelligent men can fail to be pained by what goes on, when he sees many citizens drawing lots before the law-courts to determine whether or not they shall have the necessities of life?” (Isoc., Areop. 54). The institution of jury pay was a major target for critics of democracy in every period, who noted that “it was always the ordinary people rather than the better sort who were eager to be picked for jury service” ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 27.4, trans. Rhodes 1984).

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At Athens as many as six thousand citizens were empaneled by lot as potential jurors at the start of the year and swore an oath to “vote [as a juror] according to the laws” (Aesch. 3.6). This group then became eligible to serve as jurors for trials that occurred during the same year. They received special bronze pinakia (juror’s identification tokens), inscribed with their name, patronymic, and deme, and in some periods with one or more official seals; these they presented to court officials who used them in selecting jurors by lot, taking care to ensure equal representation of all ten tribes. The process is described in detail for the later fourth century ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 63–9), when the Athenians began to use boxwood for the juror’s pinakia, reserving bronze for allotment to other offices and public roles in the democracy (Dem. 39.10–12; Kroll 1972; Lang in Boegehold et al. 1995: 59–64). Fragments of the marble allotment machines survive (Dow 1939; Boegehold et al. 1995: 57, 230–4), as do almost two hundred bronze tablets (see Figure 4.1). Early instances of the juror’s pinakia were also stamped with what is called a triobol seal, similar to the type found on the reverse of triobol coins issued in the same period, thus explicitly connecting jury service with the receipt of a three-obol stipend for jurors. Once they had cast their final vote in the case, they received a token that they could at last exchange for their stipend ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 68.2, with Rhodes [1981] 1993: 731). Bronze tokens marked with a variety of images and letters have turned up in quantities in the Athenian Agora (marketplace) and are generally associated with this process of paying citizens for their service on juries in the popular courts as well as for other forms of public pay; these appear to have been succeeded by similar tokens of lead used throughout the Hellenistic period (Boegehold et al. 1995: 67–76; Crosby 1964: 76–85; see Figure 4.2). If the idea of jury pay and the equipment produced to manage that process originated in Athens, both became widespread. Pinakia have been found elsewhere in the Greek world, including Sinope and Thasos in the classical period, as well as Rhodes and perhaps Aeolis and Pamphylia in the Hellenistic (Fraser 1972; Kroll 1972: 268–78).

FIGURE 4.1  Bronze pinakion from the Athenian Agora, fourth century bce. Agora Museum B 822. American School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations.

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FIGURE 4.2  Lead tokens from the Athenian Agora, Hellenistic period. Agora Museum IL 587, IL 656, IL 716, IL 893. American School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations.

Jury service was not, however, the only civic role that was at once essential to the democracy and time-consuming for the individual citizen. Attendance of the Assembly, and a fortiori service on the Council, a year-long post that required almost full-time service, were likewise vital, and it was only by paying citizens to perform these roles that broad participation in the democracy could be made a reality. In Athens citizens began to receive pay for attending the Assembly probably only after the restoration of democracy in 403, and within about a decade the rate of pay was increased from one to three obols per meeting ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 41.3; Ar., Eccl. 289–311, 392). By the late fourth century, Assembly pay had reached 1.5 drachmas for some meetings, and the five hundred men serving on the Council each year received a stipend of five obols per day throughout the year ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 62.2). In his Acharnians, produced in 425, Aristophanes offers a comic depiction of an Assembly meeting with disappointing attendance (Ar., Ach. 17–22). In his Assemblywomen, produced probably in 392, we encounter characters who were turned away from the Assembly because they arrived too late: the quorum had already been reached and with it all the Assembly pay committed (Ar., Eccl. 378–81). It was between these two plays that Assembly pay was introduced, and we know that in the fourth century the Pnyx, the meeting place of the Assembly, was dramatically expanded (Forsén and Stanton 1996) (Figure 4.3). Whether or not the introduction of Assembly pay actually increased levels of attendance and participation, as Aristophanes seems to suggest, it certainly increased the ability of non-elites to participate regularly. With thirty to forty meetings of the Assembly each year, pay for attendance will have been an important source of income for Athenian citizens. With the provision of a daily stipend for a year’s service on the Council, even citizens experiencing significant poverty could afford to serve, and perhaps even welcomed the chance to do so. In the fourth century, tickets to the theatre for the performance of tragedies and comedies in festival contexts were subsidized by the Athenian state, a

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FIGURE 4.3  The bema (speakers’ platform) at the Pnyx, meeting place of the Athenian Assembly in the classical period, Athens. Photograph by Carol Atack.

practice that was transformed into a generalized stipend to all citizens  on festival days, known as the theorikon (Hansen 1987: 98). As with jury pay, so too with Assembly pay and other forms of pay for public service, the practice is attested elsewhere and probably became a characteristic feature of democracies in the late classical and early Hellenistic periods. The process for payment of the ekklēsiastikon (assembly pay) at Iasos, carefully described in a document of the late fourth century (Carlsson 2010: 179–80; Gauthier 1990), used identification tokens belonging to citizens. Similar tokens or tablets have  been found at Mantineia in Arkadia (Robinson 2011: 37), at Styra on Euboia (Cordano 2009), and at Camarina in Sicily (Cordano 1992); it is possible that they were likewise used to verify identification for the distribution of public pay. Greek democracies also sought to extend the safety net to the children of those citizens who died fighting on behalf of the polis. By the start of the Peloponnesian War in 432, the Athenian state was providing financial support for war orphans (Thuc. 2.46.1; [Arist.], Ath. Pol. 24.3). The practice may have been instituted several decades earlier but is clearly democratic in origin as well as in its aims. An Athenian decree, probably issued in 410 after the collapse

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of the oligarchic regime of the Four Hundred, appears to have expanded this privilege to the sons of men who died fighting the oligarchs in the recent civil war (Osborne and Rhodes 2017: 178; Stroud 1971). In the mid-fourth century the democracy on Thasos, with strong ties to Athens, issued a decree outlining funerary honors for agathoi (the brave) who died fighting on behalf of the polis. In addition to honors for the living fathers and sons of these men, maintenance was to be provided for those children “who are in need of support” (Fournier and Hamon 2007). As part of their efforts to embolden citizens to defend their city against the massive siege mounted by the Macedonian ruler Demetrios Poliorketes in 305, the Rhodians decreed “that the bodies of those who died in the war should be given public burial, that their parents and children should be maintained, receiving support from the public treasury, and that their unmarried daughters should be given dowries at public expense” (Diod. Sic. 20.84.3). We also hear of an orphanistēs, an official in charge of orphans, at Selymbria in the Hellenistic period (IK Byzantion S3); whatever may have been the specific arrangements, which are not mentioned in the inscription, it is clear that here too the democratic state undertook to protect and support the children of citizens who had died, probably in war. Other social and economic benefits provided by ancient states were aimed at a much wider swath of the citizen body. In the Roman Empire, the populace, having lost what political power it once had in Rome, could be satirized for caring about only two things—panem et circenses (bread and circuses) (Juv., Sat. 10.77–81). Yet the concern of politically empowered citizens about the supply of grain to their city had a long, democratic history. Conversely, it was in the interests of rulers, especially Roman emperors, to make sure that economic deprivation and distress did not lead to serious political unrest or even rebellion. Cities throughout the Greek world took steps to protect their populace from speculation by grain traders and landowners: regulating prices, prohibiting hoarding and the export of grain during shortages, and even prohibiting anyone from blocking the import of grain (Bresson 2016: 332–8; Garnsey 1988: 74–9). The city of Athens, with a population that outstripped the agricultural carrying capacity of its own territory, used its naval power in the classical period to secure a regular supply of imported grain to the city, and welcomed gifts  and low-cost sales of grain from foreign states (RO 96, with Bresson 2011; Horden and Purcell 2000: 65–74), rulers (Dem. 20.30–5; Plut., Demetr. 33–4), and individuals (Syll.3 495) in every period. But for some Greeks simple distributions of grain at public expense could also be the stuff of satire. In the Assemblywomen of c. 392, Aristophanes’ characters depict an unusually crowded assembly meeting; the explanation for the high attendance was that “the preservation of the polis” was on the agenda. One character reports that in the assembly another citizen had proposed that the fullers be obligated to distribute cloaks to the poor at the onset of winter and that tanners be required

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to allow the homeless to sleep in their workshops. His interlocutor muses that the proposal would pass unanimously “if he adds that the barley-dealers must provide three measures [of barley] to the poor” (Ar., Eccl. 399–426). The line certainly drew a laugh because it sketched a proposal that was similar in spirit to other measures taken by the democracy but went a bit too far for the more conservative Athenian tastes. In the Hellenistic period many cities throughout the Greek world established more or less permanent funds for the purchase of grain for their citizens (Migeotte 1991). Our best attested case comes from the island of Samos, where in the late third century the democracy established a fund for the purchase of grain paid as a tax in kind by producers in a district of the Samian-controlled Asiatic mainland opposite the island (the so-called peraia); once purchased by the fund, that grain was to be distributed “to the citizens who are in residence […] measuring out free to each citizen every month two measures” (IG XII.6.1.172 lines 52–5). This institution was once supposed to have been intended as a form of social welfare (e.g., Tarn and Griffith 1952: 107–8), but more recently scholarship has focused on the purchasing power of the fund and estimated that it could only have provided rations for 7,200 citizens for three months each year, with each monthly ration insufficient to feed a family for the month (Shipley 1987: 218–21; Migeotte 1989). The grain distributions are not restricted to those in need, and there are reasons to suppose that the law was intended only to provide a small supplement to citizen families and to help keep market prices relatively low (Migeotte 2014: 185–7) while creating a local source of credit (Gabrielsen 2005: 143). The overall strategy in the Roman Republic was similar. In 123 bce the tribune of the plebs, C. Gracchus, is reported to have asked, “What could be more just than that a people in need should be maintained from its own treasury?” (L. Annaeus Florus 2.1). He introduced a law through the Council of the Plebs that provided not for the distribution of free grain but rather for monthly sales of grain to citizens at prices subsidized by the Roman state. The rations made available to the plebs frumentaria, the privileged portion of the population eligible to purchase subsidized grain, were insufficient for the needs of a citizen family, as was true with the distributions at Samos. The subsidized sales remained in place, with one brief disruption, until the mid-first century bce, when ongoing shortages and associated high prices prompted the Romans to grant exceptional powers “throughout the world” to Cn. Pompeius Magnus to secure grain for the Roman populace (Cic., Att. 4.1.7). As for the aediles, officials responsible for the procurement of grain during the Republic, so too for Pompey this office was a valuable opportunity for the enhancement of his personal political prestige, much less so an opportunity to help the struggling free poor of Rome.

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Although Augustus began to distribute free grain at his own expense, he also significantly reduced the size of the plebs frumentaria, restricting eligibility to 250,000 and later to perhaps 200,000; to abolish the system altogether was now too much of a political risk (Suet., Aug. 42.3; Garnsey 1988: 236–8). It is clear, however, that at no time was eligibility restricted to those who could demonstrate need, and the tokens that proved the enrollment of an individual were themselves valuable items that could be bought and sold (Virlouvet 1995, 2009). During the first century ce the age of eligibility for enrollment in the plebs frumentaria was dropped below ten, and the emperor Trajan is praised for having enrolled some five thousand children as recipients, a benefaction celebrated on Trajan’s arch at Beneventum (Figure 4.4). This expansion was funded by the establishment of an alimenta scheme in multiple Italian cities, wherein the imperial treasury made cash loans to landowners, and used the interest paid by these borrowers to distribute payments and other resources, including grain, to the children of the free poor until they reached adulthood. It is important to emphasize that, while all of these Roman measures brought some benefit to citizens (Erdkamp 2005: 306–16), they were not enacted by a democracy in the interests of the dēmos itself. If Gracchus’ law was part of a package of legislation aimed at alleviating the increasing problem of grain

FIGURE 4.4  Detail of a relief on the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum depicting the alimenta, a public fund set up by Trajan for the benefit of children. Photograph by George W. Houston, Ancient World Image Bank, New York.

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shortage in a context of frequent warfare and population growth, the subsequent adjustments to the system were made by an elite ruling class that knew it was in their political interest to keep at least some part of the populace supplied with “bread and circuses.”

SHARING THE WEALTH Insofar as its recipients were often privileged and by no means particularly needy, the imperial grain dole moves us away from measures intended to protect the most vulnerable members of society and toward a more generalized strategy in antiquity of using state power to redistribute resources among the citizen body. On the Cycladic island of Siphnos, Herodotus reports that the citizens distributed the annual revenues from their lucrative gold and silver mines among themselves (Hdt. 3.57.2), and in Athens in the 480s the plan to distribute windfall profits from striking a particularly rich vein of silver in their own mining district of Laureion—ten drachmas for each citizen—was stopped only when one leading citizen in the democracy, Themistocles persuaded the dēmos to use the money instead to build a large warfleet of two hundred triremes (Hdt. 7.144.1). In both cases the very simple idea of distributing windfall profits from common natural resources to the citizen body represents the most straightforward form of democratically mandated wealth-sharing. Yet the Athenian decision to use the money for a public good works in the same direction while at the same time prioritizing the shared needs of the polis over the personal benefit of each individual citizen. Over time it was this latter strategy that was widely adopted by Greek democracies. Communal social activity was also a feature of communities with nondemocratic governance, but which nonetheless redistributed resources between citizens and fostered shared experience. Fourth-century writers describe with enthusiasm a public dining system on Crete in which “the grown men eat in the common messes which they call ‘men’s clubs’ [andreia], so that the poorest, because they are fed at public expense, may share in the same things with the well off” (Ephorus, BNJ 70 F 149, trans. Parker 2011; cf. Arist., Pol. 1272a15–20, and Dosiadas, BNJ 458 F2, the third-century author of a Krētika or Cretan Matters). The generalizing nature of these statements is misleading; such arrangements would have been made by individual Cretan poleis. There is good epigraphic evidence for the existence of andreia in several Cretan communities in the late archaic and classical periods, but these inscriptions do not provide us with enough detail to wholly corroborate the literary accounts or render them fully useless (Gagarin and Perlman 2016: 93–5). The better-known public meals of oligarchic Sparta should, however, be seen as an institution designed to promote strong bonds among the citizen male population, rather than as an

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instrument for the redistribution of wealth or aid to the vulnerable. Even if they were initially intended to promote socio-economic equality among the homoioi (the “similars” who were full Spartiate citizens), by the fourth century those in need were not only excluded from the meals but stripped of some citizen rights (Arist., Pol. 1271a26–37, with Hodkinson 2000: 33–4). The most prevalent strategy for redistribution in Greek democracies of the classical period was to obligate the rich to provide certain public goods from their own private wealth (Ober 1989: 200). Whether intentional or not, this so-called liturgical system (leitourgia literally means “a work for the people”) also had the effect of further defining the social position of the wealthy (Foxhall 2002: 219–20) and providing them with a platform for self-aggrandizement, as they used their liturgical performances simultaneously to demonstrate their wealth and their civic virtue. The wealthiest citizens were obligated to serve as trierarchs, fitting out a warship and recruiting and paying a crew of some two hundred oarsmen for an entire year (Gabrielsen 1994). It is estimated that some four hundred men were eligible to serve as trierarchs each year in the later fifth century (Davies 1971: xxix). The transfer of private wealth to the public sphere was a source of prestige for elites within a democratic system predicated upon citizen equality, but many men claimed to have been ruined or nearly so by their public-spirited service. Apollodorus, an Athenian citizen who had been appointed as a trierarch in 362, boasted in a speech before a jury that having mortgaged my property and borrowed money, I was the first to man my ship, hiring the best sailors possible by giving to each man large bonuses and advance payments. More than that, I furnished the ship with equipment wholly my own, taking nothing from the public stores, and I made everything as beautiful and magnificent as possible, outdoing all the other trierarchs. (Dem. 50.7–8, trans. Murray 1939)

There is a mixture of pride and complaint here: Apollodorus has performed his trierarchy with distinction but doing so has drained him of all his resources. Most liturgies, however, were relatively small and associated with religious festivals; of these the chorēgia, which obligated a man to recruit and train a chorus for performance in a tragedy, was the most prominent (Wilson 2000: 11–103). By the late fourth century some chorēgoi sought to commemorate their glorious service with large, monumental tripods: the monument of Lysicrates still stands in central Athens (Figure 4.5). But the liturgical system did not last. After having disenfranchised some 25 percent of Athenian citizens in 317, the Macedonian-installed Athenian governor Demetrius of Phaleron dictated sumptuary laws to curb the ostentatious display of wealth and may have abolished the liturgical system altogether. He is said to have observed that commemorative tripods like that of Lysicrates were “not a votive offering to commemorate their success but a final libation to their gone livelihood and

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FIGURE 4.5  Wealthy Athenians such as Lysicrates in 334 bce erected monuments in the city to commemorate their payment of choral liturgies which funded performances in the city’s dramatic festivals. Photograph by Emily Mackil.

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a shallow memorial of their vanished estates” (Demetrius of Phaleron, BNJ 228 F25, trans. S. Müller 2018). The reforms of Demetrius reveal with striking clarity the association of Athenian democracy with onerous obligations on the wealthy combined with tremendous opportunities for the social and political aggrandizement that came with private expenditure on behalf of the public. The trierarchy was reinstated in the Hellenistic period by the then severely diminished Athenian democracy, but the minimal size of the Athenian fleet and its restricted scope in this period certainly diminished the importance of the liturgy (Oliver 2007b: 196–7). Liturgies are explicitly attested in other poleis in the fourth and third centuries, including Siphnos (Isoc. 19.36) and Kos (Carlsson 2010: 242; Sherwin-White 1978: 213–14), but it is only in Hellenistic Rhodes, governed by an oligarchy, that we hear of liturgies “for the maintenance of the poor” (Str. 14.2.5). It is likely, however, that this brief reference was to a custom rather than a formal institution (Gabrielsen 1997: 32–4). In time, however, the liturgies of the classical and early Hellenistic periods were supplanted by euergetism, the practice whereby wealthy individuals—whether individual citizens or rulers— gave gifts to the polis to ensure the provision of grain, oil, and wine among other things (Müller 2011; Veyne 1990). The tying of the holding of elite offices to the provision of liturgies reinforced this oligarchic trend. But insofar as the transfer of private wealth to the public sphere was no longer legally obligatory, it might be argued that this shift contributed to the empowerment of elites and the dilution of democracy in the Hellenistic period.

CONCLUSION From the protection of the bodily autonomy of the free citizen to public measures for protecting vulnerable individuals and redistributing wealth from the private to the public sphere for the benefit of the whole citizen body, ancient democracies took real steps to minimize the gap between their commitment to the political equality of all citizens and the inevitable socio-economic inequality that arose within that body. It has also been suggested that the fairness and opportunities arising from rule egalitarianism, a key feature of ancient democracies, worked to counteract inequality and promote prosperity (Ober 2015), although poverty persisted (Taylor 2017). The enactment of these measures by democratic assemblies and boards of democratic lawgivers supports the idea behind modern experiments in participatory budgeting, namely that direct citizen participation in fiscal decision-making processes has salutary socio-economic effects on the poor (Touchton and Wampler 2014). Yet the social and economic aspects of ancient democracy were undergirded by political and strategic concerns—to protect the democracy itself by ensuring widespread political participation, and to

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ensure a large and healthy citizen body capable of protecting the polis—and provided benefits only to the citizen male population, normally estimated to represent only some 15–20 percent of the entire population in a given city. The commitment to the protection of human rights that sits at the heart of modern theories of social democracy had no part in the ancient democratic experiment.

CHAPTER FIVE

Religion and the Principles of Political Obligation GEORGIA PETRIDOU

INTRODUCTION A visitor to the new Acropolis Museum in Athens with no prior knowledge of the classical world might be puzzled when looking at the marble document relief depicted on the cover page of this volume.1 The stele documents three decrees concerning Athens’ relationships with the allied city of Samos. The first decree (lines 5–40) honors the Samians for their loyalty at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The second (lines 41–55) and the third (lines 56–75), voted two years later, reaffirm honors and privileges (including Athenian citizenship) for the allied city and its citizens, who had remained loyal to Athens when her other allies revolted after the defeat of the Athenian fleet by the Spartans at Aigospotamoi in 405 bce. The original decree was issued in the same year. The relief depicts the two patron deities of the cities, Athena in full military attire (on the right) and Hera in heavy matronal dressing (on the left), performing dexiōsis  (literally “the clasping of their right hands”). That is to say, they exchange a handshake. This near-universally recognized body language might stand out to the modern viewer as a gesture that signifies equality, political alliance, and friendship (Blanshard 2004: 11; Lawton 1995: 36–7), but the substitution of the Athenians and Samians by their tutelary deities is neither straightforward nor self-explanatory. What kind of people leave their external politics and intricate diplomatic relations to the gods?

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This feeling of uneasiness may be intensified if the reliefs are judged from the perspective of the modern secular state, which in many cases operates independently from the forms of organized religion practiced within its borders. By contrast, in classical Greece, religion “provided the framework and the symbolic focus of the Greek polis,” as Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood famously argued in her article “What is Polis Religion?” (1990: 322; see also Kindt 2012). Even more surprising, perhaps, is the fact that although the Greeks employed an abundance of symbolic conceptions and expressions (verbal, performative, artistic) in their interaction with the divine, they had no single word to describe the equivalent of our concept of “religion.” Instead, the Greeks referred to “religion” by speaking of theia pragmata (literally “divine things”) and nomizein tous theous (literally “to deal with the gods according to the nomoi, i.e., tradition”).2 Still, the pervasive nature of this engagement with the divine is attested in every sphere of sociopolitical and economic activity (education, health care, law-making, law enforcement, etc.) and on every level of societal organization (from the individual to the household, and from the professional and cultic associations to the city-state as a whole). Modern historians of religion describe this high level of interconnectedness between religious and civic life as “embedded religion” (Eidinow 2015). This chapter reiterates the notion of the pervasiveness and embeddedness of religious action in the classical polis. However, it takes a more critical view of other widely accepted perceptions of Greek and Roman religious life, such as the idea that the religious sphere was markedly more egalitarian than, say, the political arena. Religious life may well have been more diverse and open to noncitizens (such as women, metics, and slaves). Nonetheless, precisely because it was so intertwined with the broader societal organization, it was shaped by existing social complexities and stratification. This fact has wider repercussions for modern participatory views of ancient democracy, which define citizenship terms of a spectrum of diverse and multiple pathways rather than as a fixed concept/institution (see Duplouy and Brock 2018). As a whole, this chapter argues for a reciprocal relationship between the political and the religious. It briefly surveys the integral role that religious ideas and practices played in shaping and sustaining democracy in the ancient world. It identifies a bidirectional relationship between religious life and democratic action in the Greek city-state. Religious ideas and practices had a powerful impact on the birth of dēmokratia at Athens in 508/507 bce, and democracy, in turn, influenced the religious life and organization of the city. This chapter, nevertheless, does not restrict itself to classical Athens, but also considers the period that preceded the reforms of 508/507 bce, and briefly those that followed in the Hellenistic period, which coincided with the proliferation of Greek language as well as Greek political and religious ideas across the Mediterranean and Middle East. However, because of the wealth of sources and its cultural importance, Athens remains by necessity its central thematic focus.

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The Roman Republic bore some similarities with the Athenian dēmokratia of the Classical period in name rather than in essence. What remained a constant with earlier democracies, however, was the way in which zealous Roman leaders such as Sulla, and others who posed as advocates for democracy, emphasized their elective affinities with the divine. According to Plutarch (Sull. 34), while Sulla used the appellation felix (“happy,” “fortunate”) in Rome, when he communicated with the Greeks he referred to himself as Lucius Cornelius Sulla Epaphroditos, apparently seeking to indentify himself as a protégé of Venus/ Aphrodite, who was in turn identified with Fortuna/Tyche. Divine sanction of political action seems to have been a sine qua non in the Roman West.

RITUAL POETICS AND DEMOCRACY IN ARCHAIC ATHENS A modern visitor to the Athens of the fifth or fourth centuries bce would probably find something familiar in the dominant position of Athena’s image across the city’s material culture, artistic production (architecture, reliefs, statues, coins, etc.), and sociopolitical and cultural practices (processions, feasts, and festivals). However, to mistake the pervasiveness of images of Athena for metonymic representation (treating Athena as merely a “national symbol”) would be to miss the point entirely. There is nothing incidental or, indeed, accidental in this overwhelming display of a people’s theophilia (literally “the state of being dear to the gods”; Petridou 2015: ch. 8; 2018). Rather, this display of a direct connection with the divine served as a means by which to secure a privileged relationship with fellow city-dwellers, citizens, neighbors, and of course, enemies. This close relationship with the divine is already explored and exploited in Athenian origin myths. As Pierre Bourdieu (1971) argues, mythic discourse is closely linked to the religious interests of those who inherit it, reproduce it, and disseminate it in sociopolitical discourse and cultural production. Athenian myths of origin emphasize the birth of the Athenian people from the earth, their being indigenous to the land of Attica (their autochthony), and their divine lineage as descendants of either Erichthonius (Eur., Ion 20–4, 219–74) or Erechtheus (Il. 2.546–51),3 both of whom came to be identified as the birthless foster son of the virgin Athena and the divine smith Hephaestus. These myths, which had unmistakable political underpinnings (Loraux 1993; Parker 1987), were told in the community, reiterated in cultic practice (Erechtheus had his own temple on the acropolis and annual animal sacrifices performed in his honor), and (re)shaped in literature and art. For instance, side A of an Attic red-figured kylix (Figure 5.1) depicts Athena receiving her newborn son from Gaia (the earth), who is depicted as a crowned woman partially risen from the earth. The birth of the infant is witnessed by Cecrops, the first king of Athens, who stands on the left, while Hephaestus and Herse, Cecrops’ daughter, stand on the right. Cecrops is portrayed here as a crowned

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FIGURE 5.1  Red-figure Kylix depicting Athena, who receives Erichthonius or Erechtheus from Gaia; ca. 440–430 bce, attributed to the Codrus Painter; Berlin, Antikensammlung F 2537. © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek Munich, Photograph by Renate Kühling.

hybridic figure (half man, half snake), who holds a royal sceptre. This hybrid nature—the snake is an animal closely linked to both the earth and Athena— highlights the Athenian claim to autochthony. These myths were not static but evolved to match the political needs of the Athenians. As Sara Forsdyke (2012) maintains, although Athenian myths of origins in the Archaic period (c. 750–500 bce) aimed primarily at linking the Athenians with the gods and the earth, in the fifth century they evolved to provide justifications for Athenian leadership and domination over other Greek cities, in general, and for Athenian superiority over the Spartans (e.g., Hdt. 7.161 and 8.73), in particular. After Athens’ defeat at the hands of Sparta in 404 bce, these myths were adapted once again, this time to accentuate the democratic character of the Athenian city-state, to reinforce Athenian democratic values (Pl., Menex. 238e–239a), and to remind the Athenians of the social cohesion that was needed after the devastating civil wars of the late fifth century. It was not only on this level of collective civic identity that divine sanction was sought. Early Athenian political history features individuals who attempted to secure divine endorsement to validate their political choices, and harness

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existing socio-political momentum, as the story of Phye (Hdt. 1.60.2–5) demonstrates. Phye was, according to Herodotus, a tall and beautiful girl from the deme of Paiania. Sometime in the 550s, this striking figure, dressed as Athena in full military attire, and thus visually assimilated to the goddess, acted as an accompanying goddess (theos pompos), leading a chariot procession that brought the tyrannos Peisistratus back from exile. In all likelihood, Phye was dressed like Athena Promachos (Figure 5.2), the defender of the city. The Promachos type would have been an obvious choice, since it was seen across the city in many different forms. It appeared, for example, on the Panathenaic amphorae, and depictions of Athena in this style had also become a favorite type of offering by the end of the sixth century (Shapiro 1989: esp. 24–7; Villing 1998). Phye’s procession was no mere carnival-style float, however, but provided Peisistratus with a visual divine endorsement, facilitating his reintegration into the Athenian political community.4 In describing Peisistratus, I have avoided the term tyrant as misleading and anachronistic. The Greek tyrannos describes more aptly those conventional, if unusually dominant, leaders (Anderson 2005) who flourished in the early Greek oligarchies. Interestingly, the fourth-century Pseudo-Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians describes Peisistratus more than once ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 13, 14, 16) as an extreme democrat and his reign as resembling more a constitutional government than the rule of a tyrant. Despite Herodotus’ protestations, the Athenians were not simply fooled by the image of a dressed-up girl. They were conscious participants in a sacred procession that served as a two-way political communication. Walter Robert Connor (2000: 56–75) was the first to underline the preeminence of processional performance in the articulation of sociopolitical and religious power structures. Influenced by scholarly developments in socio-anthropology, Connor correctly understands the Phye procession as a meaningful negotiation of power dynamics between the people and their leader, and effectively as an expression of mutual consent in the form of a civic ritual. Phye’s ritual impersonation of Athena as part of a ritual procession not only allowed for Peisistratus’ reintroduction into the community but, more significantly, also for his reinstatement in the political consciousness of the Athenians as the ideal leader (Blok 2000: 17–38; Kavoulaki 1999: 299– 306; Parker 1996: 68, 75–6, 89–92; 2005: 253–69; Sourvinou-Inwood 1990: 271–4). The construal of Phye’s epiphanic procession in terms of a contemporary and easily decipherable ritual grammar (Petridou 2015: 107– 70) was Peisistratus’, and his allies’, way of claiming a privileged relationship with the divine and legitimizing their course of political action. Pericles, and Hellenistic rulers later on, made analogous claims, albeit in subtler ways. Plutarch (Per. 31.2–4) relates how Pheidias depicted Pericles as fighting against the Amazons on the shield of Athena’s statue, and how (Dem.10.2–4) the

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FIGURE 5.2  Roman statue of Athena Promachos, from the Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum, now in the Archaeological Museum of Naples; the statue draws on classical Greek representations of Athena’s fighting stance and costume. Photo: Alamy.

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figures of Demetrius and Antigonus were woven into the sacred robe of the goddess, along with those of the other gods. The significance of the ritual grammar exploited by Peisistratus and his allies was sufficiently ingrained as to still be recognizable some eighty years later. Those who attended the performance of Aeschylus’ play Seven Against Thebes in 467 bce will have been presented with a scene that consciously played on the theme of Peisistratus’ return. Here, a spy in the employ of one of the warring princes of a suspiciously Athens-like Thebes reports to his master the scene depicted on the shield of his rival brother, Polyneikes (Aesch., Sept. 642–9). The goddess Dikē, fashioned out of gold, is shown leading the Theban prince back to his city (Zeitlin 1990, 1996), along with an inscription that reads: “I shall lead this man back to his city, and he shall have a country, and shall range in his ancestral chambers.” Peisistratus’ dramatic return to Athens, led by the goddess herself, had become embedded in the collective Athenian memory as a cunning scheme, a stratagem used by the tyrannos and his allies to return him to power. In both cases, divine sanction is manipulated by the privileged few to exploit a deeply ingrained belief in the inherent superiority of those who enjoy a unique proximity with the divine. Religious belief is, thus, presented as weaponized and exploited by powerful individuals seeking to manipulate political obligation and to predetermine vital decisions, even going so far as to manufacture what amounts to constitutional change.

DIVINE SANCTION AND DEMOCRACY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS A close parallel to the ritual reception of a new leader initiated by a female deity can be found in the climactic scene in Aristophanes’ Birds (414 bce): a triumphal chariot procession brings Peisetaerus onstage with his wife-to-be, the goddess Basileia.5 Basileia reintroduces Peisetaerus to the community, while simultaneously, her very presence reaffirms and articulates his new political identity as a divinely ordained tyrannos (Ar., Av. 106–8; 1675 and 1708).6 Peisetaerus enters the scene wielding the thunderbolt and is received as the new Zeus (1706–65 and esp. 1765). Basileia (a playful pun on the Greek words βασίλεια, “queen,” and βασιλεία, “kingship”) is the stewardess of Zeus’ thunderbolt and everything else that goes with it: planning, law and order, wisdom (Ar., Birds 1537–41). Basileia may not quite be the daughter of Zeus, but she is Dios paredros, namely, a close acolyte of the father of the gods. More importantly, she is also a guarantor of civic order, just like Dikē in the Seven Against Thebes and Athena in the Phye procession. All three of these female deities (Dikē, Athena, and Basileia) restore (or at least attempt to restore) to power political figures (Polyneikes, Peisistratus, and

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Peisetaerus, respectively) who have previously been viewed as problematic in the eyes of the community. All three cases speak volumes for the exceptional aptitude of Athenian leaders for manipulating well-established religious and political symbols to serve their own political agenda. More importantly, they show how inextricably intertwined politics and religion really were in archaic and classical Athens. Religious processions and festivals continued to provide fertile ground for political contestation and kratos renegotiation between the dēmos and the elite well into the classical period and beyond (Connor 2000). Isocrates in his Panegyricus (4.46) likens Athens to one big panegyris (festival). On a socioeconomic level, the Athenian dēmos constrained and sought to control the elite by means of the financial demands it made on them ([Xen.], Ath. Pol. 1.13). By legally binding the rich to financially support festivals, athletic contests, processions, and sacrifices via the city’s liturgical institutions, the religious framework of Athenian democracy guaranteed a very basic redistribution of wealth ([Xen.], Ath. Pol. 2.9–10, 3.4). When Peisistratus died in 528/527 bce, his son Hippias took the position of archon and became the new tyrannos, assisted by his brother Hipparchus. However, Peisistratus’ sons, the Peisistratidai, as the Athenians called them, were far less popular than their father ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 18–19). While one religious procession swept Peisistratus back to power in Athens, another provided the setting to his son’s undoing. Hipparchus was assassinated by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the famous tyrannicides (see Chapters 2 and 8, this volume), during the procession of the Greater Panathenaea of 524 bce, a festival that had, notably, been reorganized by his father. He was stabbed to death in the sacred space of a heroon (a “hero shrine”), the Leokoreion ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 18; Thuc.1.20.2). Hipparchus’ death, and the fall of his brother Hippias four years later, were said to have been sanctioned by Apollo’s oracle in Delphi ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 19; Hdt. 5.63) and instigated by the Alcmeonidae, a powerful Athenian family that dominated Athenian political history for centuries. Upon their subsequent return to Athens after a long exile, the Alcmeonidae and their leading light Cleisthenes sought divine sanction for the revolutionary reforms of 508/507 bce (see Chapter 8, this volume). Cleisthenes’ establishment of a new complex network of demes, trittyes, and phylai (tribes) required divine sanction, which was expressed symbolically once again through the reframing of the state-endorsed ritual poetics. It is within this conceptual framework that we need to evaluate the institution of cultic honors for the tyrannicides (Shear 2012) and the establishment of the ten Eponymoi (namesake) heroes— each of the ten newly organized Cleisthenic tribes (phylai) was ascribed a hero, whose choice was sanctioned by Delphi.7 Bronze statues and cultic honors were established for each of these eponymous heroes (Hippothoon, Antiochos,

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Aias, Leos, Erechtheus, Aigeus, Oineus, Akamas, Cecrops, and Pandion), who were worshipped both collectively and individually at their own heroa (shrines dedicated to heroes) in the 480s. These heroes were already familiar to the Athenians, but the new democratic reforms breathed new life and meaning into their cults. There are further examples of reciprocal influence between religious life and democratic reorganizations. The Parthenon, the new temple on the Acropolis in honor of Athena, the marble pediment of which depicted Athena’s battle against the Giants, provided a symbolic expression of the victory of the newly established democracy over the Peisistratid tyranny (Shapiro 1994). Similarly, new contests between the Athenian tribes at the festival of Panathenaea can be seen as ritually expressed recurring reminders of the Cleisthenic reforms (IG II2 2311; Xen., Hipparch. 3.10–13, with Neils 1994). In the same vein, the cult of Theseus acquired a new meaning during this time  of ad fontes political reorganization. Theseus’ synoecism (unification of Attica) provided the mythic model for Cleisthenes’ reforms, an idea that fueled bold claims by later Imperial-period authors (e.g., Plut., Thes. 25.1) that Theseus had instituted Athens’ democracy. Theseus’ cult was further resignified after the establishment of the Delian League (see Chapter 9), the steppingstone for Athens’ new expansionism, and he was raised to the status of hero par  excellence of the newly ambitious and self-assured Athenian democracy. Public art commemorated the hero’s accomplishments and their reenactment in many of Athens’ festivals, including the Theseia, the Oschophoria, the Pyanopsia, and, of course, the Panathenaea (Plut., Thes. 24.1), foregrounded them in the historical memory of the dēmos. By the time of Pericles, the Panathenaea was regarded as the birthday party of both Athenian democracy and Athena herself (Shapiro 1994: 128). The proponents of democracy sought divine authorization from other civic gods for their actions. It was Artemis Phosphoros, for instance, who in 404 bce helped the democrat Thrasybulus to escape to Mounychia safely, by manifesting herself as a column of fire and illuminating his way through untrodden paths. Notice, however, that although the epiphany of Artemis Phosphoros at Mounychia was thought of as having cardinal importance for the restoration of democracy in Athens (Xen., Anab. 3.2.12; Diod. Sic. 14.32.1– 3), it was to Athena, the city’s tutelary deity, to whom Thrasybulus and his democratic party offered charistēria (thanksgiving sacrifices) in 403 bce upon their return. It was the Acropolis, the city’s political and religious stronghold, which served as the point of culmination for the festive procession that led the exiled democrats back from Phyle (Xen., Hell. 2.4.39; Lys. 13.80–1). The procession and sacrifices marked the reintegration of Thrasybulus and his men into the civic community and the end of civil strife (Kavoulaki 1999: 304; see Chapter 8, this volume).

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FROM THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE GODS TO THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE DEMOS The Samos relief depicted on the cover is not unique in depicting Athena engaging in political and military alliances and conducting foreign affairs on behalf of the city; other fifth-century reliefs, such as a 424/423 treaty between Athens and Methone, portray a confident Athena performing dexiōsis with deities, heroes, or personifications of cities both subject to and freely allied with Athens (ΕΜ 6596; Lawton no. 2).8 By contrast, depictions of Athena performing dexiōsis with the personifications and divine ambassadors of allied cities become rarer immediately following Athens’ defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and the iconographic trope undergoes a dramatic transformation that speaks volumes for Athens’ wounded pride. Document reliefs from this period depict Athena interacting with individuals, most commonly heads of state and dignitaries. The fragmentary honorary decree for Rheboulas, son of the Odrysian king Seuthes III, which dates to 331/330 bce (Figure 5.3), shows how Athens “increasingly conduct[ed] foreign relations through honorary decrees” (Lawton 1995: 37).9 Enough of the text survives to confirm that Rheboulas and his brother Kotys were now granted additional honors besides Athenian citizenship, which had already been granted prior to the relief. The document was set up in alignment with Athens’ anti-Macedonian and pro-democratic campaign. The relief is incomplete, but what remains of it depicts Athena in her full martial attire, and it is she, in all likelihood, who crowns Rheboulas, with the latter depicted as a smaller frontal human figure holding a phiale and accompanied by two horses. The Rheboulas decree is one of many analogous examples of reliefs depicting foreign dignitaries who received lavish honors from the Athenian state in recognition of their services to the city and their opposition to the rise of Macedon. These reliefs are common in this rather turbulent period of Athenian history, which starts in 340 bce (the declaration of war against Macedon) and culminates in 338 (the battle of Chaeronea in Boeotia), when Philip II of Macedon scored his decisive victory over Athens and its allies. When Alexander III (the Great) led his military campaign in the East, anti-Macedonian rhetoric in Athens continued, despite the fact that the city did not join Agis III of Sparta in rebelling against Philip’s successor in 331. It is possible that Rheboulas was one of the Northerners who supported Agis and his revolt. Unlike the Samos relief, where the two deities dominate the scene, the honorary relief for Rheboulas makes the honorand and his equine companions the centerpiece of the composition, occupying three quarters of the scene and pushing Athena to the far right of relief. A good parallel to the Rheboulas decree is the honorary decree of Euphron,10 which contains two decrees. The first of these records honors (including Athenian citizenship) bestowed on Euphron of

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FIGURE 5.3  Honorary decree for Rheboulas the Odrysian (IG II2 349), National Museum of Athens 1476. Photo: Alamy.

Sikyon and his descendants for Euphron’s support during the Hellenic, or, as it was later known, the Lamian War of 322 bce; while the second reaffirms the conditions of the first and orders its republication. In all likelihood, that first relief, just like the honorand himself, fell victim to the modified oligarchy that Macedon imposed on Athens right after their victory in the Lamian War. The

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second relief was established soon after the reestablishment of democracy in 318 bce. On the far left of the relief Athena stands as previously in full military attire, holding a painted spear in her left raised hand. The center of the scene, though, is occupied by Demos, the personification of the Athenian citizen body of citizens (or is it only proponents of democracy?), who is portrayed as a Zeus-like figure only slightly smaller than Athena. Demos is the one who interacts visually with the substantially smaller figure of the honorand, probably offering him a crown representing the gold crown worth 1,000 drachmas mentioned in the first decree. Euphron himself wears a chiton and has his sword strapped diagonally across his chest. On the far left, the scene is completed by Euphron’s horse and an even smaller groom or servant. As mentioned above, Euphron along with several other high-profile democrats, such as Demosthenes, Hyperides and Eucrates the proposer of the antityranny law (see below), were hunted down by the oligarchic sympathizers of Macedon. By the time democracy was established again in Athens in 318, Euphron had fallen fighting the Macedonians at home. More significantly, in the relief, Euphron is offered the gold crown not by Athena but by Demos, the personification of the body of democratic citizens in Athens. The personification and cult of Demos is already known in Athens in the middle of the fifth century (Ar., Knights; now lost material representations of Demos mentioned by Pliny, HN 35.69 and 35.137; and Paus. 1.1.3 and 1.3.5). However, the personification of Democracy is only attested for the first time more than a hundred years later, on the document relief of the anti-tyranny law, the so-called Decree of Eucrates (Chapter 1, Figure 1.1, this volume). Here, a standing Demokratia, the personification of democracy, crowns the seated Zeus-like figure of Demos. The personification of Demokratia on the Eucrates’ relief may represent “a visible manifestation of Athenian concern for its democratic institution” (Lawton 2003: 124). Cultic honors for Demokratia began a few years later, with a statue authorized by the Council (boulē) in 333/332 and sacrifices in 332/331 and 331/330.11 Personifications of Demos and his legislative counterpart Boule, depicted looking like Hera, become far more common in document reliefs after 338 bce, the battle of Chaeronea, and represent not only pro-democratic political sentiment but also anti-Macedonian propaganda (Lawton 2003; cf. Smith 2011). In these later reliefs Athena becomes an onlooker rather than an active agent (see the Sikyon stele). She condones and sanctions political action rather than instigating it. By contrast, the personifications of Demos and Boule come into the foreground and express the city’s dominant political sentiment more explicitly. Demos and Boule are only two of the many personified entities to receive cult in Athens (Parker 1996: 228–37; Smith 2011; Stafford 2000). However, how are we to interpret the physical likeness of the personifications of Democratic

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Demos and Boule to Zeus and Hera respectively in these reliefs? There may be some irony in depicting two democratic figures par excellence as the two deities (Zeus and Hera) most closely linked to monarchy (see Chapter 6, this volume). But these images also mark the close correlation between divine agency and political decision-making, and the divine sanction that underpinned every aspect of Athenian decision-making (Mack 2018). More telling, however, for our purposes, is the need of the Athenians to deify and worship the political institution of democracy itself and its constituent institutions, the Assembly and the Council.

PLAYING HOST AND GUEST WITH THE DIVINE: PUBLIC COMMENSALITY AND CIVIC PERFORMANCE The entanglement of politics and religion in Athens extended to political contestation and the renegotiation of kratos (power) between the privileged few and the dēmos, and was expressed in various arenas of civic performance, including public conviviality and communal feasting. Public commensality both reaffirms civic identity and reflects on diplomatic relations. An example is the final scene of Aristophanes’ Birds (1601–2), where Peisetaerus offers to make peace with the gods by inviting their ambassadors to an ariston, a light lunchtime meal (as opposed to the deipnon, the more substantial evening meal). On special occasions, such as the theoxeniai festivals (“offering hospitality to the gods”) that were celebrated under different names in many parts of the Greek-speaking world, divine guests were imagined as consuming the same foods as the city inhabitants. In Athens, Zeus Philios became the tutelary god of the parasitoi (those who sit and dine beside), that is, the humans who were given the privilege of dining along with a hero or a god at public or private expense (Athen., Deipn. 6.239b–d). In the various Attic demes, parasitoi were invited to participate in ritual dinners offered to the Dioscuri, Apollo (Athen., Deipn. 6.234f–235c), Heracles (FGrHist 323 F11), and Athena (Athen., Deipn. 6.234f–234d). We do not have any detailed information on where these parasitoi sat or the ways in which they interacted with the divine guest. However, it is important that, in most cases, these individuals appear to have been privileged citizens, often quite wealthy, such as the two members of the Kerykes genos who were chosen to accompany Apollo each time he “dined” at the Delion in Marathon.12 In the Athenian Prytaneion, where the city’s benefactors and honorands were allowed to eat for free, sacred tables in honor of the Dioscuri were set out. Here the Athenians offered the twin gods cheese, barley cake, ripe olives, and leeks, thus reminding themselves of an earlier, simpler way of life (Chionides

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fr. 7 PCG). The meal provided an opportunity for the whole of the citizenry to partake collectively in the benefits of conviviality with the gods. Extravagant eating habits marked elite overindulgence and a way of exercising political influence in Athens, especially when poorer citizens were lured into rich households on festive occasions (Parker 2005: 185). Civic communal eating is usually marked by restraint and frugality, in contrast to luxurious private consumption (Hobden 2013: 57–65). This frugality was, according to Athenaeus (4.185f.–186a), intentional, closely regulated by the lawgivers, and somehow closely linked to the safety of the city. In Aristophanes’ Knights, the disruption of the city’s political and social order is reflected in public commensality. Cleon/ Paphlagon, Demos’ steward, rules over both the house and the city of Demos and incessantly consumes everything, raw meat and people included. Although John Wilkins (2000: 177–8) rightly warns us to take this statement with a pinch of salt, the targeting of Cleon/Paphlagon with an accusation of excessive consumption while dining at the Prytaneion suggests that he was diminishing common resources which rightfully belonged to the dēmos. On a civic level, theoxenic rites appear to have been effective in multiple ways. They bridged the gap between the known and the unknown, between the civic core and all those who invade the safe microcosm of the polis, whether traveling humans or wandering gods. Ritual communal dining sanctifies human commensality, raising a cultural institution is to a higher level. It enables the city to reaffirm its civic values and strengthen bonds of conviviality between its inhabitants (Bruit Zaidman 1990). Throughout the Greek world, offering elaborate ritualized hospitality to gods and heroes was an archaic, and to a certain extent aristocratic, practice. It was mostly the members of royal oikoi, or of a socio-economic elite, that were thought to be worthy of entertaining the divine, offering xenismos (hospitality) to a deity. Occasionally, this link between offering xenismos and the aristocratic or even, to an extent, divine lineage of the xenistēs (the one who offers hospitality) was so strong that the two were linked in a cause and effect relationship. However, at some point between the late archaic and the early classical era, offering expensive sacrificial feasts to the poliadic gods and heroes became the privilege of the polis (Bruit Zaidman 1989: 20). In the annual Dioscuri–xenia ritual mentioned above, distinguished Athenian citizens represented the whole community when they dined alongside the poliadic gods, renewing bonds of familiarity and friendship, and securing prosperity and divine blessings for the whole polis. There was a conscious attempt to democratize mythic tradition, which typically laid emphasis on individual reception of deities by members of the local elite (Petridou 2015: 251–88), and replace the privileged few with the polis as a whole. For instance, Isocrates in his Panegyricus (28.4–29.1) suggests that by offering hospitality to the goddess Demeter, his Athenian ancestors

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received as a gift for the first time the cereal crops. The orator makes it sound as if the whole city received the goddess, not just a few of its privileged members. Thus, the whole city is perceived as the divine culture bringer, which in turn disseminates Demeter’s gifts and thus benefits humanity as a whole. This type of democratized theology was, of course, a careful ideological construct that serves the political needs of the time; Isocrates was speaking in a period when Athens needed to reaffirm its cultural superiority over both its allies and its enemies. Divine guests continued, of course, to be entertained by rich and powerful families, and were occasionally even invited to private functions, such as weddings. And yet, it was the polis that gradually started perceiving itself as a collective household, ready to offer entertainment to distinguished members of both divine and mortal spheres.

THE FEMALE AND THE SACRED IN ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY Religious practice was one way in which women as well as men participated in the democratic city (see Chapter 6, this volume). Close scrutiny of key rituals shows how they contributed to the maintenance of civic order, and in turn required the policing of that order. However, extra caution is needed when considering the participation of women in civic rites, especially given the fact that their participation was closely monitored by male citizens and male-based democratic groups and associations. A good example is the debate that arose concerning the suitability of Phano, the wife of the archōn basileus (officeholder king) Theagenes, whose participation in the annual ritual wedding (hieros gamos) of the god Dionysus during the Anthesteria festival in Athens was annulled due to political accusations brought against her stepfather Stephanus and her mother Neaira ([Dem.] 59.73–80). In Apollodorus’ Against Neaira ([Dem.] 59), Stephanus is said to have attempted to pass off Neaira’s children as his own children, and is prosecuted by Apollodorus for knowingly marrying Neaira’s daughter Phano to Theagenes, when he held office (59.18–19; 72–3). The archōn basileus ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 3.5) was an Athenian magistrate invested with both political and religious duties. One duty of the office involved the basilinna (queen), the wife of the archōn basileus, ritually uniting with Dionysus on behalf of the state. Neaira was a non-Athenian, a freedwoman who had worked as a prostitute in Corinth, and had now come to live with Stephanus in Athens. According to Apollodorus, Stephanus had first allowed Neaira’s daughter Phano, a woman who was not an Athenian citizen, to marry an Athenian citizen named Phrastor, and then, after Phrastor divorced her, to marry Theagenes. Stephanus is thus accused of consciously jeopardizing the stability of the convenant between the civic community and its gods.13 All in all, women were allowed, and indeed encouraged, to take part in religious festivities on behalf of the polis, but their access to those rites was strictly regulated by the male citizens of Athens.

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Narrative accounts of this ritual union of Dionysus and the basilinna are rare, for the ritual acts performed by the basilinna on behalf of the city belonged to the arrhēta (rites which must not be spoken about). The related iconographical evidence (mostly vase-paintings such as the calyx krater from Tarquinia, dated to c. 475–425 bce, now in the Museo Nazionale Tarquiniense RC4197) has provoked much controversy (Petridou 2015: 239–40, with more bibliography). Both literary ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 3.5; Hsch. s.v. “Dionysou gamos”) and pictorial representations of the marriage between the god and the Basilinna accord with the following schema: during the three-day festival of the Anthesteria, a marriage procession took place, traveling from the sanctuary of Dionysus at the Marshes to the Boukoleion, the residence of the archōn basileus. Here, the marriage between the mortal queen and the god was somehow consummated, although the details of the rite are unknown. The presence of torches and torchbearers in the iconography, however, suggest a night-time ritual. The cultic union of Dionysus and the wife of the archon basileus, a ritualized erotic epiphany, formed an important part of a major civic festival in which the whole city agreed to give a local woman to the god to enjoy. This ritually enacted union, in which agency lies with the polis itself, provides a striking contrast to the anxiety generated by the random and unpredictable sexual misconduct of male gods toward the female citizens of Cloud-cuckoo-land, as described in lines 556–60 of Aristophanes’ Birds: … and prohibit the gods from passing to and fro through your territory with their cocks up, in the way they used to come down previously to debauch their Alcmenas and their Alopes and their Semeles. And if they do violate your borders then put a seal on their skinned pricks, so they can’t screw those women any more. (trans. Sommerstein 1987) The Aristophanic conception of a polis that strives to protect itself against an invasion of sexually aroused male deities is, of course, meant to raise a laugh. Even so, we should not overlook the fact that fortifying the city’s women against the sexual attacks of invaders was considered to be of paramount significance, and is thus included among other major political and military measures designed to safeguard the newly established city’s existence and independence. We might have expected Peisetaerus to warn the chorus against the violation of the city’s walls rather than its women. However, by focusing on the sexual vulnerability of the female population of the city, Aristophanes draws attention to the status of Greek women as receptacles of power and as integral components of the polis, components whose sexual behavior—provided that it is closely monitored by the male citizens—guarantees social and political stability (see Chapter 6, this volume).

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More importantly, the mortal women in the Birds who are seduced by gods give birth to heroes who featured prominently in heroic genealogies. Thus, Alcmene, the wife of Amphitryon, was seduced by Zeus and gave birth to Heracles, the grandfather of Antiochus, the eponymous hero of the Antiochis phylē (Hes., Scut. 26–49; Diod. Sic. 4.9.2); Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, bore Dionysus, who in turn fathered Oeneus, the eponymous hero of the Oeneidae phylē (Eur., Bacch. 26–31; Diod. Sic. 3.64.3–5); Alope, the daughter of Cerkyon, was raped by Poseidon and gave birth to Hippothoon, the founder of the homonymous Cleisthenic tribe (Dem. 60.31; Hyg., Fab. 187). The Athenians imagined that the gods not only cared for them as parents (see the first section of this chapter) but loved them as sexual partners too. In the same vein, Ion, fruit of a union between Apollo and Erechtheus’ daughter (and subsequently king of Athens), became the eponymous hero of all the Ionians, while his four sons became the eponymous heroes of the four pre-Cleisthenic Athenian tribes. Most importantly, the Athenians were able to claim, through Ion, special political and cultural bonds with the Ionian colonies in Asia Minor, thus advancing their imperial ambitions in the Greek East (Mikalson 2005: 174–5). Divine ancestry was claimed for many political and military leaders of the Greek world, from the Messenian commander Aristomenes (Paus. 4.14.7–8) to Alexander the Great (Arr., Anab. 3.3.2). Likewise in the Roman world, Aphrodite’s affair with Anchises resulted in the birth of Aeneas, the hero who lent his name and parentage to the Aeniadae, traditionally thought to be the first colonizers (oikētores) of Italy (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 192–201, 239–90; Hes., Th. 1008–10). We should also not forget that Caesar and Augustus too traced their bloodline back to Venus herself through Aeneas (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 199–201).

RELIGION AND DEMOCRATIC CRISIS No historical episode better captures the entanglement of religion and politics in democratic Athens than the the infamous case of the profanation of the Mysteries and the mutilation of the Hermaic stēlai in 415 (Osborne 2010: 341–67). The Hermaic stēlai, or the Herms, as they were also known, were hybridic (the upper half was anthropomorphic, while the lower half aniconic) statuary representations of Hermes situated outside both private houses and temples in Athens. On the eve of the ill-fated Sicilian expedition, and in the space of a single night, all the Hermaic stēlai in Athens, which were made out of stone, were defaced. Thucydides (6.27–8) laments the damage done to the Herms and emphasizes the political response to what might seem a purely religious upheaval (see Chapter 8). Large rewards and offers of immunity were

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promised to any residents of the city (citizens, foreigners, or even slaves) who would reveal to the community the perpetrator of the sacrilege. No one actually came forward with any specific information about the perpetrator(s) of the destruction of the Hermaic stēlai. However, a group of foreigners and slaves are said to have described analogous occasions, when the perpretrators of the profane actions were young men who, in an advanced state of inebriation, had damaged Hermaic stēlai and performed in their homes mocking versions of the mystika (secret initiatory rites) that took place in Eleusis (Thuc. 6.28.1). From other contemporary and later sources we learn that the alleged profanation of the Mysteries involved acting out parts of the secret initiation rather than simply revealing secrets verbally, and that certain individuals took upon themselves the roles of hierophant and torch-bearer (Andoc. 1.11; Phrynichus Com. fr. 61 K-A; Plut., Alc. 22.4; [Lys.], Or. 6.51). Centuries later, in 70 bce, the Roman statesman and polymath Cicero attempted in an analogous way to undermine his political opponent Verres’ connections with the cult of Venus Erycina in northwestern Sicily. Cicero emphasized the supposed sacrilege Verres had committed against the sanctuary of Ceres of Henna, a shrine that was regarded as the most ancient in the Roman world (Verr. 2.4.108). Cicero relates how Verres had removed an ancient and revered cult image of the goddess embarking on the quest for her daughter Proserpina (Verr. 2.4.109). Cicero describes the reaction of the Sicilians to this shocking act of sacrilege, pointing out that it was intolerable to the population of a city that he now treats, for rhetorical purposes, as a “shrine” of Ceres with the whole citizen body functioning as her priests (2.4.111). What is most interesting about these events is, as Ana Vasaly puts it, “Cicero’s attempt throughout the Verrines to characterize the defendant as a tyrant. The orator’s manipulation of this stereotype is especially apt here, since the Sicilian tyrants were famous in antiquity for their cruelty—a fact that Cicero pointedly alludes to at the conclusion of the speech (2.5.143–45)” (1993: 122). Rhetorical manipulation and political exploitation of the cult of Demeter (Ceres in the Roman world), it seems, were not the privilege of Athenian Democracy.

CONCLUSION This chapter has surveyed some key case studies that show how inextricably intertwined were the political and the religious realms in ancient democratic ideology and practices, seen in the close connection felt between citizen and patron goddess (Figure 5.4). In many ways, democratic stability and upheaval were both dependent on the degree of stability in the religious order; in turn, religious developments and actions could be instigated by changes in the political arena of the city. The first three sections survey this phenomenon across the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods. The fourth section examines the

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FIGURE 5.4  Attic red-figure wine jug, 470–460 bce, showing an interaction between a citizen and a statue of Athena in Athens’ Agora. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1908. 08.258.25. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

religious significance of political contestation and power negotiation between the dēmos and the sociopolitical elite, as exhibited in public commensality and private feasting. The fifth secion questions certain widely accepted perceptions of religious life as being more egalitarian than life in the political arena. Religious life in ancient Greece may have been more diverse and open to noncitizens (such as women, metics, and slaves), but precisely because it was so inextricably intertwined with societal organization, it was heavily influenced

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and shaped by existing social complexities and inequalities. The final section of this chapter picks up on the reciprocal relationship between the religious and  the sociopolitical explored in the previous sections, focusing on cases where a threat to the religious order by necessity posed a threat to democracy. Despite the close connections between religion and democracy identified in this chapter, we should, nevertheless, be wary of the etic prism through which we tend to view the correlation of the two. It is only from an outsider’s point of view that Greek religion appears to have validated a distinct social order. As Michael Jameson (2014: 233) puts it: “religion was inextricably bound to the social order, so that for most Greeks of the Classical period it would have made no sense to speak of some manifestation as ‘purely political’.”

CHAPTER SIX

Citizenship and Gender CAROL ATACK

Gathering before the dawn, a group of men take up places in Athens’ Assembly, early for the day’s business but securing their places. As the light grows stronger, it might be possible to see that these men are avoiding scrutiny and talking nervously among themselves. These are the women of Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen disguised in fake beards and their husbands’ cloaks. Their leader, Praxagora, whose name means “she who does business in the Agora,” persuades the Assembly to vote for radical reform, instantiating a new city in which women’s sexual freedom is guaranteed, and marriage and the private household and property abolished. At first glance the political life of ancient cities, and especially that of democracies, operates as a system of exclusion based on gender. The humor of Aristophanes’ comedy, performed in competition in 392 or 391 bce, rests on the implausibility of Praxagora’s proposals—although Plato fifteen or so years later would lay out similar notional reforms in the Republic’s vision of an ideal city (Pl., Rep. 457ac). Both Aristophanes’ play and Plato’s philosophy emerged during a period of political stabilization in Athens, where the democracy had been restored (403 bce, Xen., Hell. 2.4.43) and was consolidating political practice while coming to terms with the city’s loss of empire, cultural hegemony, and economic power, and citizens lived in the hope of avoiding a return to the brutal civil war that had accompanied its overthrow at the end of the Peloponnesian War (Shear 2011). Although Aristophanes’ play is a comic fantasy, and the “women” of the titular chorus were played by men, probably with real beards under their masks,

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it is a reminder that the exclusion of women from the life of the city was by no means complete, and that their relative absence from the venues for formal political debate and decision-making as participating members simply left space for other aspects of gender, such as competing forms of masculinity, to come to the fore. Masculinity was encoded in the virtue that characterized the good soldier-citizen—andreia, courage, literally “manliness,” a quality prized in a city where political and military leadership were still connected, as will become clear from the analysis of citizenship and masculinity below. The absence of women from political venues and activities did not result in gender becoming irrelevant; rather, citizens were evaluated on their conformity to gender norms, and orators such as Aeschines in fourth-century bce Athens and Cicero in firstcentury bce Rome policed the gendered behavior and conformity of men and women. In depicting women as able to put on the costume of a male citizen and perform convincingly in the role, Aristophanes reminds his audience that all political activity is a form of performance. But all the performers in the Athenian democratic festivals were men; women did not participate in Athenian drama as actors, or chorus-members, and it is uncertain whether they even attended the dramatic festivals (Cartledge 1997; Goldhill 1987). This chapter will argue that Aristotle’s model of citizenship as a status most fully instantiated by the male citizen of a democratic polis such as Athens (Pol. 3.1.1275b5–7) has the necessary consequence that the exclusion of women from the formal political life of the city, already in evidence in the pre-democratic institutions of the archaic polis, was deepened by democracy, particularly the developed democracy of classical Athens. But it will also explore alternative models of citizenship and political participation, which find other routes by which women contributed to the political life of the ancient world, firstly through Josine Blok’s model of citizenship as shared participation in the religious life of the city, and secondly through Carole Pateman’s model of residual participatory democracy in the workplaces and other associations of technocratic and elitist regimes (Blok 2017; Pateman 1970). The latter can be seen in the ancient world in the form of the collegial associations of craft workers and the developing institutions of new religions such as Christianity. It may be that, in communities where citizenship conferred fewer opportunities for political participation, such as imperial Rome, and within nondemocratic regimes, women had better access to such nongovernmental forms of social and political participation in their local communities, a thesis supported by evidence from Roman provincial cities (see also Chapter 10). The final section of the chapter considers the increased role of women within social organizations in the later Greek and the Roman world. The relationship between democracy and gender turns out to be complex and bidirectional, affecting men and women of both citizen and noncitizen status.

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GENDER AND THE ORIGINS OF DEMOCRACY Democracy in the Greek polis may have developed from the assemblies of male adults of a city or army depicted in ancient epic; in Homer’s Odyssey, the young crown prince, Telemachus, calls an assembly and addresses the adult men of Ithaca (Od. 2.25–34; Haubold 2000: 110–14). Such assemblies might include male heads of households, or the male member of a household serving in the city’s military forces, and in Homer’s depiction they are held at the behest of aristocratic rulers. We know little about the composition of such assemblies in historical cities; an inscription from Chios from the early sixth century bce names a “people’s council” and suggests a complex social organization.1 Ithaca’s meetings involve only men, although women were both policed and managed by their decisions; the situation of Telemachus’ mother, Queen Penelope, is the topic of the Ithacan assembly. Women’s participation in such public, political conversation was unwelcome; Telemachus had earlier dismissed his mother from the communal dining hall and ordered her to retire to the privacy of the women’s palace quarters, when she complained about the topic of the bard’s song (Hom., Od. 1.345–59), inaugurating a culture in which women’s speech was excluded from male public spaces (Beard 2017: 3–6). While Homeric epic does not depict a historical society, it is suggestive of political and social practices of societies earlier than and contemporary with its likely composition in the eighth to seventh centuries bce. Early Greek historical communities developed legal codes and systems for administering justice. The earliest surviving Greek laws suggest that women’s anomalous position was recognized through provisions that ensured that women were only temporarily the heads of households through inheritance, as in the code of Gortyn, a city on Crete, from the mid-fifth century bce. Although women could hold property, and take it back in the event of divorce, were an estate to fall to a female inheritor, this code sets out instructions for ensuring her swift marriage within her paternal family, and thus the return of the property to male control.2 Gortyn was not a democracy, but all Greek poleis demonstrated similar attention to the transmission of property, the focus of the code, and the idea that women were defective as holders of property was widespread—Aristotle criticized Sparta for allowing women to own (so much) property, including real/landed property, and felt that this weakened Spartan society (Aris., Pol. 2.9.1270a11–b6). Women’s status was also differentiated in early pre-democratic Athenian law, which again made clear that adult women of citizen households were part of the property of the household, albeit property with a specific and unique value. Under the law of Dracon of 621/620 bce, citizen males were immune from prosecution for murder if they killed a man caught “next to” women members of their households (Dem. 23.53–4; Cantarella 2005: 239–40).

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This law was invoked by speechwriter Lysias in the defence speech he wrote for Euphiletus, claiming innocence of the charge of premeditated murder of Eratosthenes (Lys. 1.30–1), although its deployment in this speech suggests that it was an unusual defence to make. But the anomalous status of women in the law of most Greek cities, as passive objects of property, occasionally as perpetrators of crime, but never as judges, represents the treatment of women in other aspects of political life. Although women could not participate in political activity, they might get caught up in political rhetoric and abuse. This seems particularly true early in the development of Athenian democracy, as a conservative elite retained power and influence while a wider proportion of the male citizenry took an active role in politics. Women belonging to Athenian aristocratic dynasties might suffer abuse because of the actions of their politically exposed male relatives or be subjected to special scrutiny to discredit their family. Elpinike, sister of the aristocratic and conservative general and politician Kimon, became notorious for her behavior (Kennedy 2014: 78–80). Accusations attached to her in later traditions included incest with her brother (Plut., Kim. 4.8–9) and an affair with the painter Polygnotus of Thasos, who was said to have depicted her as one of the Trojan Women in a painting decorating the Painted Colonnade in the Agora, and thus a highly public place (Plut., Kim. 4.5–6). When Kimon faced ostracism, one voter scratched an additional thought on to the potsherd: “Let Kimon, son of Miltiades, go and take Elpinike too” (Kerameikos O 6874; Kennedy 2014: 80). Whether Elpinike, who was married to Kallias, another very wealthy Athenian, transgressed the boundaries of acceptable behavior for an Athenian citizen, or was abused as part of the political criticism of her family, is unknown, but Rebecca Kennedy cites other examples, such as Koisyra the mother of Megacles, accused of prostitution, to suggest that misogynist abuse of women family members was integral to Athenian democratic discourse (Kennedy 2014: 79–82). As this chapter shows, such abuse appeared in other political contexts in antiquity and was often associated with political turmoil.

WOMEN’S POLITICAL AND CULTURAL ROLE IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Aristotle’s definition of citizenship in book 3 of his Politics, rests on a model of the city clearly derived from the classical city of Athens in which it was developed (Patterson 2005: 267–8; Schofield 2012). Aristotle describes how a (male) citizen participates in a range of activities in his city’s political life, in particular holding offices, which for Aristotle includes participating in the Assembly or serving on a jury. Aristotle writes that:

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We say that one who is entitled to share in deliberative or judicial office is thereby a citizen of that city, and a city, in its simplest terms is a body of such people adequate in number for achieving a self-sufficient existence. (Pol. 3.1.1275b18–21, trans. Barker and Stalley 1995) But this model of citizenship is focused on a narrow subset of the city’s institutions, those in which policy was debated and justice delivered. Recent scholars have argued for a more holistic view of what citizenship meant in the context of the classical polis, which recognizes a further set of activities as core to the maintenance of the polis, namely the religious cult offered to the city’s gods; this view draws on the understanding of Greek cult activity developed in the “polis religion” model.3 Josine Blok thus points out that Aristotle’s model does not adequately account for the broader role of citizens, male and female, outside the institutions of civic governance, in particular their participation in the communal religious life of civic polytheism (Blok 2017: 21–4). Aristotle’s biological thought, in which women are imperfect versions of humanity, and his ethical thought, in which women lack the capacity for the full rationality achievable by men, support his exclusionary framing, in which the typical activities of women are separated from the role of citizen (Connell 2016: 17–52; Leunissen 2017: 139–76). Classical Greek, however, with its gendered nouns and adjectives, provides for the possibility and the use of both male (politēs or astos) and female (politis or astē) nouns for citizens.4 There is ancient evidence for this broader interpretation of citizenship, involving participation not just in political and legal bodies but also the cultural and religious life of the city, participation which itself was dependent on citizenship. Blok cites an ancient appeal to the value of such participation in determining citizenship: Against Eubulides, a speech written by Demosthenes for Euxitheos in defence of his citizen status. Eubulides had accused Euxitheos of falsely claiming citizen status, drawing him into a program of scrutiny of citizen rolls held in 346/345 bce. Euxitheos uses his speech to demonstrate his citizen status, listing claims such as his birth, and his membership of a named family group known as a genos (57.45), and arguing that both his parents have citizen status (57.50–1), and that he has either held or been eligible for various roles, political and religious, for which he qualified as a citizen registered to the deme of Halimous (57.54–5). Josine Blok highlights his opening definition of citizenship, participation in the hiera (holy things) of the city and the koina (communal things) relating to its public life and administration (Dem. 57.3; Blok 2017: 49). But Euxitheos, or so he is made to claim, had once been a poor man, who had sold ribbons in the Agora with his mother (Dem. 57.35), work which might well be done by a metic (resident foreigner); and his mother had been a wet nurse, work associated with enslaved rather than free women (Kasimis 2018: 150–1).

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This definition of citizenship is more inclusive than the Aristotelian version, Blok argues, and better represents the political status of women of citizen families. She also points to many continuing references to the administration of the city’s religious life in the business of the Assembly. The administration of religious roles held by women was often managed in the same way as that held by male citizens, notably the role of priestess of Athena Nike, established in the mid-fifth century.5 This new, democratic priestesshood was filled by lot “from all the Athenian women,” an innovation that, Blok suggests, followed the changes to Athenian politics and citizenship regulations at that time, including the greater use of sortition (Blok 2014). With changes to the qualification for citizenship, Athenian citizens were all guaranteed to have the Athenian descent that occupying a religious office required. Euxitheos emphasizes the status of both his father and his mother because Athenian citizenship, since the law of Pericles of 451/450 bce, required that both parents hold that status ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 26.4): “In the third year after that, under Antidotus, when Pericles spoke, it was decided that because of the number of citizens, anyone who was not born from two citizens [ex amphoin astoin] would not participate in the city.”6 The motives for the greater restriction of citizenship are unclear—Cynthia Patterson suggests that the increased trade connections of imperial Athens created the risk of property passing from Athenian ownership as citizens married xenoi (foreigners) (Patterson 2005). But his case shows that, even for a male citizen leading a life of deep involvement in the polis, that status was open to challenge, and that one route through which it might be challenged was the status of the mother—less formally integrated into the life of the city, and thus more susceptible to challenge. For Euxitheos, loss of citizenship prevented him from burying his mother in the family grave (Dem. 57.70; Patterson 2005: 287). Other ancient sources also suggest separate but significant roles for women— particularly in performing rituals and maintaining the city’s relationships with its gods. Aristophanes again depicted a women’s world that mirrored the male, even to the extent of excluding the other sex, as the married women of citizen status gathered at the Pnyx, the hill where the Assembly met, for the annual fertility rituals of the Thesmophoria. In his Women at the Thesmophoria he imagines this festival as a “world turned upside down” in which women take over men’s space and mimic their institutions; the play’s plot revolves around an imagined threat by the women to put the tragedian Euripides on trial for slandering women in his plays, through his depiction of characters such as Phaedra. After failing to persuade the tragic poet Agathon, who appears dressed as a woman for inspiration while writing his female characters, Euripides persuades one of his relatives to infiltrate the festival and report on the threat (Zeitlin 1996: 375–416). The play concludes with a series of burlesques of scenes from Euripidean tragedy, in which the relative plays the part of tragic heroines, sending up the performance of such roles by the all-male casts of Greek drama.

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FIGURE 6.1  Athena and Hera shake hands in a gesture of dexiōsis confirming an alliance between Athens and Samos, Acropolis Museum 1333. Photo © Acropolis Museum, photo Socratis Mavrommatis 2016.

Comedy also shows women’s religious activity as being at odds with the male political life of the city. It was portrayed as a disruption of rather than contribution to the city’s political life; in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata an official complains of a time when the men could not hear speeches in the Assembly, while debating the Sicilian expedition, because of the cries of women celebrating a (fertility) ritual nearby (Ar., Lys. 387–98).

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Tragedy takes a different route in depicting women as political actors. Women characters also play leading political roles in tragedy, often voicing significant political concerns, even about the role of women in society, and providing the focus of opposition to tyrannical figures. The disparities in power between the genders provides a useful way for dramatists to depict power inequalities between characters. Tragedy’s use of gender reveals the political differences between the democratic Athens in which the plays were staged and the aristocratic world of heroes in which, for the most part, the plays were set. By using the mythical past as a setting, Athenian playwrights could depict women acting and speaking in ways impermissible in their own present; this dislocation in time and space permits the female characters to behave in ways impossible for Athenian women conforming to the city’s customs. While Athenian convention kept women firmly out of public life, both unheard and in public ideally rendered invisible through veiling, the women of myth are lively and vocal participants in their stories, the roles with their powerful sung lyrics offering splendid opportunities for virtuoso male actors. Sophocles’ Antigone, for example, opens with Antigone and Ismene, sisters and daughters of Oedipus, speaking to each other outside their house in Thebes; this city, home in myth to the families of Cadmus and Oedipus, was a frequent setting for Athenian tragedies, and parallels the displacement of political weakness on to gender (Zeitlin 1990). The outdoors setting of this scene is partly a convention of staging—in tragic staging the indoors was revealed only in final scenes with the opening of the onstage doors, often as in this play to great dramatic effect (Wiles 1997: 161–74). The play’s commentary on political conflict is sharpened by its use of Antigone, a young unmarried woman, to represent political powerlessness; her burial of her brother reminds us of women’s religious social role. Euripides’ Medea adapts its source myth to the Athenian democratic context. Euripides’ Medea, a foreign woman but the mother of children with Greek prince Jason, angrily laments the life of (elite) women in the polis, as she seeks to gain the sympathy of Corinthian women. Medea complains first about marriage practices, the need to pay dowries to secure a husband (Eur., Med. 232–4). She then observes that the quality of a woman’s life depends on the character and habits of her husband, and on how easily she can adapt to the practices of her new home (235–40). Women, unlike men, cannot seek pleasure elsewhere (245–8). Finally, she contrasts the risks to women’s as contrasted with men’s lives: Men say that we live a life free from danger at home while they fight with the spear. How wrong they are! I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once. (Eur., Med. 248–51)

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This linkage is echoed in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, when Lysistrata, herself a priestess of Athena (the actual priestess of city patron goddess Athena Polias at the time of the play’s production was called Lysimache) argues that women’s role in social reproduction, as mothers to citizen-soldiers, should give them a stake in making political decisions, particularly that to end the war (Ar., Lys. 589–98). Lysistrata uses women’s work with wool and weaving as an analogy for politics (Ar., Lys. 568–88; Figure 6.2). The female personifications of cities and concepts could be presented as political actors. Athenian laws and decrees were inscribed on stēlai (stone pillars), which were often topped with a bas-relief image illustrating the law or the ideology underpinning it. Stēlai commemorating alliances with other

FIGURE 6.2  This black-figure vase shows women engaged in working with wool and weaving, core women’s tasks in the ancient household. Attic vase attributed to the Amasis painter, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 31.11.10, Fletcher Fund, 1931.

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cities, and noting their details, featured the poliadic goddesses of the cities, as with Athena and Hera on a stele recording a decree between Athens and Samos in 405/404 bce (IG II2 1; Figure 6.1). The Decree of Eucrates, an anti-tyranny decree from 337/336 bce (Figure 1.1; see Chapter 1), features a female figure placing a garland on the head of a seated male figure, and is often interpreted as Democracy honoring the (Athenian) dēmos.7 Such examples from Athenian drama and visual art, from vase paintings to the relief carvings found on legal inscriptions, show that the Athenian political imaginary had a different shape from that of the city’s day-to-day politics— it incorporated the presence of kings, from the city’s foundation myths, and allowed women roles quite different from anything available to them in the city. One Athenian myth seen in both painting and sculpture was the story of the capture and rape of the Athenian princess Oreithyia by Boreas, the god of the north wind (Figure 6.3). The Athenians took this story as a sign of divine

FIGURE 6.3  Boreas abducting Oreithyia, Attic red-figure hydria c. 460–450 bce. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1908.3; Gift of Edward Perry Warren, Esq., Honorary Degree, 1926.

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favor, even acknowledging the role of their “son-in-law” in their resistance to Persia when a north wind aided their actions (Hdt. 7.189). A temple was built at the location from which Oreithyia was said to have been taken, and the Athenians used the scene as a reminder of their power at significant sites, such as their treasury at Delos, rebuilt in the late fifth century during the Peloponnesian War. However, women took part in civic ritual within defined limits. Women’s presence in the public space of the city was a source of anxiety and appears to have been policed through the prosecution of women for activities that spread into the public sphere, whether in response to their public presence in ritual crowds, thiasoi, or through the more elusive actions of rumor. Women could certainly attend the courts as defendants, although they required male guardians to act and speak on their behalf as prosecutors, perhaps the clearest evidence of the asymmetry of Athenian life.

PROSTITUTION AND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE CITIZEN BODY The first part of this chapter surveyed the relationship between citizen and polis through participation in political and civic activities, in which individuals’ mode of participation was determined by their gender. This section focuses on the impact of living in an ancient democracy for individuals who transgressed or were accused of transgressing the limits of acceptable citizen behavior, through sex work or association with it (Cohen 2015: 39–68; Glazebrook and Henry 2011: 3–13). For both men and women, sex work was seen as incompatible with citizen status. One of the most notorious ideological statements of women’s position in democratic Athens was that which Thucydides attributed to Pericles, the general, in the Funeral Speech given in commemoration of the Athenian war dead at the outset of the Peloponnesian War (431 bce). Pericles addresses the citizen body inclusively, speaking to the parents of the dead. But when he turns to address the war widows, he observes that “You will be well honoured if you do not fall short of what is natural for your sex, as will she who is least invoked in male conversation, for praise or blame” (Thuc. 2.45.2, trans. Mynott 2013). Scholars have debated whether Thucydides is making an ironic claim here.8 Pericles’ domestic arrangements at the time were unconventional; the man associated with the law restricting citizenship to those with Athenian citizenstatus mothers was living with a foreign woman, Aspasia of Miletus (Henry 1995). No other woman in classical Athens was talked about or written about more; Aspasia appears or is mentioned in the bawdiest of comedies (Cratinus’ Cheirons, Aristophanes’ Acharnians, and many more), and even well after her

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death in philosophical dialogues (Pl., Menex.; Xen. Mem. 2.6.36; Cic. De inv. 1.51.3). Her status as a metic provoked criticism in two main forms; her lifestyle was undemocratic, and she must have been a prostitute or brothelkeeper. The first criticism attacks her elite background, the second was an easy conflation of metic status with the sex work that was one (but far from the only) occupation available to women in Athens who did not have the financial and social protection of a citizen male head of household (Kennedy 2014: 68–95; see also Cohen 2015). Aspasia probably came to Athens from Miletus when her sister married into Alcibiades’ family, around 450 bce; it is possible that she was sent to Athens because of political unrest in Miletus.9 Marriages contracted between elite families of different Greek cities were common in the early classical period, and provided a way of cementing political and military alliances as well as the consolidation of elite estates that might well include property interests across the Greek world. But the advent of Pericles’ citizenship law made such marriage alliances impractical for Athenians as the children born to them would not have Athenian citizenship. Pericles’ decree made Aspasia unmarriageable in Athens, possibly at the age when it would have been conventional for her to enter into marriage—a worse situation than that faced by Medea. Aspasia’s association with Pericles was unconventional; Pericles may have left his wife for her, given that his wife appears to have remarried (Azoulay 2014: 93). Cratinus describes Pericles as the monstrous offspring of Timē (Honor) and Stasis (Revolution), lusting after “Hera-Aspasia, a dog-eyed concubine” (Cratinus fr. 259 K–A). Cratinus attacks Pericles in multiple ways; linking him to Zeus (and Aspasia to Hera) suggests undemocratic power, Pericles’ lust is described using a new coinage that implies homosexual passivity, and Aspasia is described as a prostitute and linked via the epithet “dog-eyed” to Homer’s Helen, another woman treated as being of doubtful status in a city foreign to her (Hom., Il. 3.171–80). Aristophanes, in his Acharnians of 425 (by when Pericles was dead but Aspasia still alive) takes the abuse further in suggesting that Pericles’ motives for starting the Peloponnesian War were sordidly domestic, involving a tit-for-tat abduction of prostitutes with Megara, leading Pericles into thunderous revenge: “And then the Megarians, garlic-stung by their distress, in retaliation stole a couple of Aspasia’s whores, and from that the onset of war broke forth upon all the Greeks: from three sluts!” (Ar., Ach. 526–9). Although there are many gaps in our knowledge of Aspasia, we know more about her than any other woman of her time in classical Athens. As Thucydides’ Pericles said, virtue for women resided in quiet anonymity (Th. 2.45.2). Her son with Pericles, also named Pericles, was granted citizenship by special decree of the assembly, after the deaths in the plague of Pericles’ two sons from his earlier legal marriage left the general without a legitimate citizen as his heir (Plut., Per. 37).10

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However, the question of eligibility for citizenship had serious consequences for women outside the elite. The difference between life as the legitimate wife of a citizen, able to participate in civic rituals such as the Thesmophoria, and life as a metic might have been particularly sharp for such women. A court case from the fourth century illustrates the complex consequences of women’s precarious grasp on citizen status and the interrelationship of that precarity with the political competition of male citizens. The eligibility or otherwise of women for citizenship becomes the weak link in a male citizen’s status, making accusations against women proxies for political and business disputes. Apollodorus’ challenge to Neaira in the speech Against Neaira is one of the most detailed examples to survive. The case arose from a separate dispute between another Athenian, Theomnestus, and Neaira’s husband Stephanus, although many of the witnesses involved were entangled in a complex web of civic, social, and economic connections. In a complex case typical of the ways in which political disputes played out through maneuvering in the courts, Stephanus had attempted to overturn a decree proposed by Apollodorus by declaring it illegal (a graphē paranomōn); in this he had succeeded, but the fine imposed was not sufficient to bankrupt Apollodorus ([Dem.], 59.6–8). Stephanus then took the dispute further by accusing Apollodorus of a range of crimes that would have resulted in loss of citizenship and ruin (59.4–10). Apollodorus teamed up with brother-in-law Theomnestus to fight back, accusing Stephanus’ alleged wife Neaira of living as if in marriage with a citizen when as a foreign woman she was not entitled to do so, which was an offence according to the law Apollodorus cites and typically carried the penalty of being sold into slavery (59.16–17; Canevaro and Harris 2013: 183–7). Apollodorus’ speech narrated Neaira’s life as a noncitizen woman, beginning with her purchase as a girl by a freedwoman Nicarete, who brought her up as a daughter and taught her to behave as a free woman, raising her value in prostitution (59.18–19). Nicarete brought Neaira to Athens when Lysias the sophist paid for another young prostitute whom she managed to be initiated in the Eleusinian Mysteries (a cult that was open to all Greek-speakers, whatever their status), and she worked as a prostitute in the city before moving on to Corinth, a city notorious for its prostitutes (59.21–6). Neaira’s freedom was bought by clients, but she struggled to establish a stable life until she returned to Athens as the wife of Stephanus, with four children including a daughter, Phano. The offence was compounded when Stephanus married Neaira’s noncitizen daughter to Theogenes, a citizen. Apollodorus’ speech works through the ways in which Neaira and her daughter Phano were not legitimate citizens, whose participation in civic ritual was therefore illegal and rendered their male guardian subject to severe penalties. Apollodorus relates how Phano came to participate in one of Athens’ religious mysteries as a citizen wife (59.72–3). When Theogenes was selected to be the basileus (king) archon, he

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became responsible for maintaining the city’s oldest rituals ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 3.5). Apollodorus claims that Stephanus and Neaira arranged for Phano to marry Theogenes after his selection as basileus; this required her to perform a role reserved for a citizen woman, the ritual marriage to the god Dionysus. Within the economy of polis religion, the presence of a noncitizen in this role is unacceptable to the gods and therefore to the citizens who hope to maintain the favor of the gods. The case further underscores the asymmetry of women’s relationship to the city and its institutions; while subject to the law, their options for defending themselves or initiating cases rested on their legal guardian (usually husband or father) taking up the case. They are not represented on juries, and while they might be present in the court and give testimony, it seems unusual for them to have made speeches themselves. The Greek model was taken up by Roman orators. Women who intruded into the political sphere of the Roman Republic might well be treated in a similar way to Aspasia, even when their personal circumstances were different. While the Roman Republic was not a democracy, its mixed constitution included democratic elements. In his defence of Caelius Rufus on charges of poisoning and extortion in 56 bce, Cicero defends the young Caelius by suggesting that he has been led astray by Clodia, a Roman aristocratic woman (her name is simply the feminine form of the family name) who is believed to have been the model for Lesbia, the woman addressed in Catullus’ love poetry, and a longterm political enemy of Cicero. Cicero’s description of Clodia collapses the imagery of the elite sex-worker, associated with Aspasia, and the suggestions of witchcraft linked to the mythical Medea, into a single image, Clodia as the “Palatine Medea” (Cic., Cael. 18, 31–6; Skinner 2011: 96–120; Strong 2016: 100–6). As Marilyn Skinner notes, rather than attack Clodia as a political actor, Cicero uses misogynist stereotypes to depict her as a “greedy prostitute” and as an untrustworthy character whose testimony should be disregarded (Skinner 2011: 102–3). The historical and poetic traditions are united to exclude a woman from the political sphere. Such traditions were continued into the Roman imperial period, when elite women were attacked for promiscuity and labeled as prostitutes, most notoriously in the case of Messalina, wife of the emperor Claudius (Tac., Ann. 11.26–38; Cass. Dio 60.31.1).

DEVELOPING AND POLICING MASCULINITY A consequence of the exclusion of women from parts of political life in democratic Athens was a sharper focus on the gender conformity of male political actors, a trend evident in subsequent political communities. This section considers how gender-conforming masculinity and citizenship were interconnected, as shown by legal speeches from Athens and Rome in which citizens are attacked for

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their gender identity and lack of sexual self-restraint. Conformity to citizen values was demonstrated through the performance of citizenship in venues such as the assembly and law courts, and within the agonistic context of Athenian democracy such performance was a mode of competition (Roisman 2005). Masculinity and its performance were central to the cultures of classical cities across the Greek and Roman worlds. The ability to speak well and to persuade other members of the group was valued in the worldview of Homeric epic, which continued to inform the education of elite male citizens throughout the classical world. Just as Telemachus was shown emerging into adulthood by speaking to an assembly, so the speeches and actions of the heroic characters of the Iliad provided models for generals and politicians to follow. The constant retelling of episodes from the Trojan War and reflection on Homer’s characters in Athenian tragedy provided another forum for the exploration of masculinity (Hobbs 2000). Figures such as Agamemnon, the leader of the united Greek forces and “shepherd of the people,” Odysseus, and Ajax recur in tragedy, their traditional character traits often exaggerated into excesses, which lead them into difficulties. Ajax, in Sophocles’ eponymous play, is shamed by his violent rampages and commits suicide onstage, unusually for Athenian tragedy. The tension between the great individual and the collective and collaborative world of the polis was a fruitful driver of tragic plot. The ability to speak in public and to perform the role of citizen and leader was vital for success as a member of the Athenian elite. Men with weak speaking voices were unlikely to succeed; biographical sources suggest that Demosthenes trained extensively to overcome a speech impediment (Plut., Dem. 6.3), while Isocrates claimed that he withdrew from public speaking because of his “small voice” (To Philip 81). Masculinity was also strongly connected with military success; as noted above, the Greek word for courage, andreia, derives from the word for man.11 Although the connection between the generalship and political leadership in Athens had weakened by the mid-fourth century, the idea of military prowess as an important part of personal excellence remained. In his Laches, a dialogue that explores the definition of courage, Plato depicts two unsuccessful Athenians from elite backgrounds consulting with Socrates about the education of their sons, to ensure that they progressed in civic and military careers. Plato’s dialogues represent one side of a complex discourse of male sexuality and masculinity played out in Athenian literary sources. The Laches suggests a move away from one style of male excellence to another, and the possible validation of a particular philosophical lifestyle as one to emulate and to be educated in, a view taken even further in Plato’s Symposium. In this dialogue, erotic relationships between men become the gateway to knowledge. Plato transforms the traditional elite institution of adult/adolescent male pederasty into a form of philosophical training. But he still engages with popular critiques of nonconforming behavior.

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FIGURE 6.4  Scene from the outside of a kylix showing older men interacting with youths; one offers a hare as a gift. Attic red-figure kylix c. 480 by Douris and Python. Getty Museum 86.AE.290. Digital image courtesy of the Getty Open Content programme.

Pederasty operated as a means of acculturating citizen males. Fully adult men acted as the “lovers” of younger youths, courting them with gifts (Figure 6.4), but this relationship was contained by social constraints; scholars have debated the nature of any sexual contact between the parties.12 Pederasty is attested in many Greek societies, including Sparta and Crete (Cartledge 2001). Like other practices originating in the more aristocratic world of archaic Greece, it required adaptation for the democratic culture of Athens and the different opportunities for progression to career success available to youths as they became full active citizens. The transition into male adulthood in Greek cities was often marked by special training, periods of seclusion or absence from the city, changes in clothing, and altered status on return. Athenian youth underwent training and military service at the borders of Attica, swearing an oath to the city’s gods; along with an oath said to have been sworn by the Athenian soldiers before the battle of Plataea, this encapsulates an ideology of hoplite masculinity.13 Pederastic relationships transferred prestige between generations, acculturated elite youth in social practices, and provided introductions and opportunities as well as emotional and physical support. At some point in Athenian democratic culture, the citizen practice of pederasty became associated with the noncitizen activity of prostitution. Allegations of sexual impropriety delivered in courtroom speeches began to take the shape of accusations of prostitution during youth, a claim that if proven would both dishonor and disenfranchise a citizen. The assumption was that the prostituted male was marked as a kinaidos, a man who

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lacked sexual self-control (Pl., Grg. 494c–e), often identified with the desire to be penetrated (Winkler 1990: 45–70). The dichotomy between the idealization of pederasty by Plato and its depiction as prostitution in the courtroom has provoked a wide array of interpretations, particularly since many of the texts, which are the sources for this debate and used by both Kenneth Dover in his Greek Homosexuality (first published in 1978) and subsequently by Michel Foucault in the second volume of his History of Sexuality, focused on Greek culture of the fourth century bce (Dover 2016; Foucault [1984] 1985). Foucault synthesizes a vision of an ideal male citizen, who embodies self-restraint and moderation in his lifestyle, from his diet to his sexual practices, drawing on the ethical writings of Aristotle and Xenophon as well as medical and rhetorical texts.14 Foucault’s use of a narrow range of source texts has been criticized, as has his strong focus on masculinity and men’s experiences in the figures of the kalos kagathos (gentleman), and his exclusion of women’s experience, and evidence from material sources (Foxhall 1994). Both Dover and Foucault draw on the orator Aeschines’ Against Timarchus. This prosecution speech, from a court hearing held in 345 bce, demonstrates shifting significations in the practice of pederasty; from being a marker of achievement and character (for the erastēs) and social success (for the erōmenos) it appears to have become conflated with prostitution. Aeschines charges rival politician Timarchus with prostitution, which fell outside the scope of acceptable practice within pederastic relationships, but is aware that his own activities as an enthusiastic erastēs (lover of adolescent boys) will be raised by Timarchus’ defence team, which probably included the orator Demosthenes, who is named in the speech (Aeschin., In Tim. 139) (Figure 6.5). Aeschines emphasizes that he is not opposed to “legal love” and is not claiming that beauty entails involvement in prostitution; he draws a distinction between “good and chaste” relationships and “shameful prostitution” corrupted by pay (137). The ambiguity between acceptable pederastic relationships and unacceptable ones offered scope for pursuing political rivals with claims about their past behavior. Aeschines’ speech shows how an accusation of prostitution could be used as a political weapon, with the intention of forcing a rival out of politics. The consequences for men of being labeled a prostitute were somewhat different from those for women, because they could lead to prosecution on charges for which a standard punishment was atimia, or the loss of citizen rights; Aeschines cites a law listing the political and religious functions from which the convicted citizen will be barred (Aeschin., In Tim. 21). Aeschines presents Timarchus as a man of dissolute habits in the present, exemplified by his presentation in public; his performance of citizenship in the present is a marker of his past dissolution. Timarchus has contravened standards of dress and behavior, speaking “just now” in the assembly first with his arm

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FIGURE 6.5  Scene from the inside of a kylix showing an older man propositioning a younger man, with allusions to both athletic and sympotic contexts. Douris, c. 470–460 bce, Athens. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 52.11.4.

outside his cloak and then discarding his cloak entirely to “wrestle naked in the assembly, with his body in a bad and shameful state through drunkenness and foul behaviour” (Aeschin., In Tim. 26). His performance contrasts strongly with that of Xenophon’s Ischomachus, a character who exhibits all of the qualities of the gentleman (Xen., Oec. 6.13–17). In introducing this character, Xenophon has Socrates say that he first looked for the “gentleman” among those who were physically beautiful but found that they were often “depraved in their souls.” The ideology underlying the objection to prostitution is the strong and continuing idea (seen in other cities, and in Roman republican ideology) of the inviolability of the citizen body (Halperin 1990: 88–112). Both the act of being penetrated and receiving payment for it were problematic; the performance of bodily services was the province of slaves and noncitizen workers, and the presumption was that citizens would not engage in improper physical contact (Cohen 2015; Halperin 1990). Rome did not have a culture of pederasty, but its courts heard similar accusations, in which political and economic misdeeds were associated with nonconformity with the gender norms attached to the idea of citizenship. The

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lifestyle and behavior of Catiline, who led a rebellion against the established regime in the late Roman Republic, is one example. Contemporary historian Sallust argues that the political culture of the Roman Republic was in moral decline; “men let themselves be used as women, while women prostituted  themselves” (Sall., Cat. 13.3). The same association between homosexuality, women’s sexuality, and prostitution was drawn, and again connected to a lack of self-control and to undisciplined physical appetites (Rauh 2011; Williams 1999). In this case enemy politician Cicero, too, famously challenges norms of the performance of masculinity within Roman republican politics, as he rose through the ranks of Roman leadership in the courts rather than through military leadership, and was a “new man” (Cic., Leg. agr. 2.3.1), first in his family to hold a leading political position rather than a member of a well-known and long-established patrician family.

WOMEN IN THE HELLENISTIC AND ROMAN WORLDS The exclusion of women from political participation in Athenian ideology had broad consequences for women’s lives, but democratic Athens’ ideology of exclusion was an extreme case. In later times, when citizenship did not confer as much political power on the individual citizen, women may have been able to develop greater access to participation within social institutions, at the more local end of the political framework. These included the type of religious organization that Blok uses as a marker of citizen status, organized by locality or participation in certain forms of trade. Carole Pateman’s model of participatory democracy included trade associations and factory workers’ committees as places of participation in which democratic practice might be observed even in societies where political participation was limited to a few elite actors (Pateman 1970: 67–84). While her concern was to show that extending political participation through local and lower-level bodies might improve citizen engagement and equity within mid-twentieth-century  ce technocratic nation-states, a similar layering of political activity might be evident in nondemocratic ancient societies in which citizens enjoyed a social and economic autonomy, or in societies with democratic local institutions but part of a larger empire. Like the disempowered and nonparticipating male citizen of an ancient oligarchy, identified by Aristotle (Pol. 3.1.1275a3–5), women’s participation in local social and economic organizations is evident in the later classical world. That Roman women could own property and participate in business also made this possible. James Kierstead uses evidence from inscriptions to argue for the presence of women as civic actors in a range of local associations in both classical and Hellenistic Athens (Kierstead 2019). His survey points to an increased female

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presence in such associations in the later period. Women are honored as priestesses but also as officers of cult groups. In 236/235 bce, for example, a thiasos (unofficial religious group) dedicated to the cult of Artemis honored its leader, a man named Sophron; of the fifty-eight names of group members listed in the inscription, twenty-one are women (IG II2 1297). Their status is unclear. Another group’s inscription, from around 50 bce, lists 129 members of a dining club (SEG 54.235), of whom forty, including the leader Thaleia, are women. Kierstead argues that, as the political power held by male citizens declined, the presence of women in associations was normalized. Likewise in the Roman Empire, women as property holders and owners of businesses engaged with local organizations to participate in both the business community and the cults that helped to cement the community (Hemelrijk 2008). There were also domestic associations that echoed the form of civic institutions, such as the organization of the staff of large households. There is evidence for women’s participation in such associations, because one of their functions was organizing the burial of members, often in a shared columbarium, and funerary inscriptions provide evidence of offices held by the deceased (Hemelrijk 2015: 187–9). While such organizations were far removed from the political sphere, they show women and men acting as officers; Emily Hemelrijk lists women acting as quaestor (ILS 10342), curator (ILS 10331 and 10350), and decurion (many records, including CIL 6, 4019, 4052, 4056–60 from the Monumentum Liviae and thus associated with the imperial household). Outside Rome, women were involved in local associations beyond the funerary context. Hemelrijk cites examples of women involved in the Augustales (freedmen) cults central to non-elite life. In Misenum, not far from Rome, a certain Nymphidia Monime set up a memorial to her husband and recorded her own adlection to full membership of the local college, in 149 (D’Arms 2000; Hemelrijk 2015: 200–1). This was in recognition of benefactions; whether any women named in such inscriptions performed active roles in such organizations remains unknown.

CONCLUSION Ancient democracies were marked by the exclusion of women from participation in formal political activity such as debating and voting. While Aristotle’s model of citizenship privileges forms in which citizens held political office, he noted that citizens in oligarchies might not qualify for political office. Athenian women of citizen status were in some respects like male citizens in such an oligarchy; Josine Blok’s approach acknowledges the participation of women of citizen status in their contribution to the religious life of the city and also in their participation in its economic and social life. The lives of citizen women were

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shaped by their performance of civic ritual, as men’s were by the performance of both ritual and political and military activity. Noncitizen women and men, as well as men who did not conform with ideals of citizen masculinity, were sharply marginalized and their gendered behavior the locus of sharp criticism. While the Roman Republic differed in its ideals, and Roman public life was more permeable, both men and women were evaluated on their performance of socially acceptable versions of their gender.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism Ancient and Modern Approaches DENISE EILEEN MCCOSKEY

INTRODUCTION Having broken from the Nation of Islam just a few weeks before, the black nationalist activist Malcolm X gave one of his most celebrated speeches, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” on April 3, 1964, at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio.1 Even as Malcolm X was addressing the crowd, the United States Senate was in the middle of a filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, landmark legislation that sought to outlaw discrimination in a range of public domains, including voting rights, education, and employment. Initiated in March of that year, the filibuster—a process that allows individual senators to delay voting on a bill by extending debate—would eventually last sixty working days before ending on June 10. Frustrated by the stalling tactics, Malcolm X (Figure 7.1) sought in his speech to call attention to the gap between the promise of American democracy and its discriminatory practices, a theme American civil rights leaders would return to throughout the 1960s.2 Pointing to the racial inequality emanating from America’s own political institutions, Malcolm X forcefully insisted that “it is the government itself, the government of America, that is responsible for the oppression and exploitation and degradation of black people in this country” (Breitman 1965: 31). He likewise castigated the very idea of democracy,

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FIGURE 7.1  Political activist Malcolm X, pictured in Detroit in 1964, during the campaign for civil rights in the USA. Photo: Getty Images.

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proclaiming: “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy” (26). I want to use Malcolm X’s critique of American democracy as inspiration for exploring the myriad links between race and democracy in a much earlier period, that of classical antiquity. For one, Malcolm X’s standpoint is invaluable precisely because it insists that race be taken as central and not merely incidental to the workings of state power. More specifically, Malcolm X’s blistering indictment of America’s system of government calls attention to the fact that democracy encompasses not only abstract political theory—a set of ideals attached to political participation and shared political rule—but also a set of concrete practices, and that both are deeply inflected by notions of power and difference. Finally, by adamantly dismissing the ennobling image often associated with American democracy, Malcolm X forces us to consider democracy’s darker side, first and foremost its victims. Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality provides useful elaboration of Malcolm X’s claims by similarly positing that identity serves as one of the primary realms in which government operates.3 Prioritizing how government practice is conducted rather than who rules or why (Dean 2010: 39–40), Foucault proposes that state power does not manage the lives of individuals defined by identities acquired “elsewhere,” but rather that governmental practices help manufacture and disseminate such identificatory structures as race and sexuality, using these structures to organize the distribution of rights and obligations that bind political subjects to the state and to one another (43–4). Thus, Foucault, like Malcolm X, demands that government conduct be held accountable not merely for establishing the rules that circumscribe political participation but also for its complicity in the production of ideas about race that inform broader social perceptions and practices. That governmentality achieves such an extensive reach into the lives of those it governs is attested by the ways its ideologies and operating principles can be found at work throughout contemporary culture, a dynamic underlined by the discussion of ancient art and literature, especially Greek tragedy, throughout this volume. In this chapter I focus on democracy as practiced by the ancient city-state of Athens beginning in 508/507 bce.4 To underline the centrality of race to Athens’ democratic project, I examine three interrelated topics. I begin by highlighting the ways in which ancient Greek racial theory used ideas about political structure to draw racial boundaries, casting the capacities of the democratic citizen as both the essence of “Greekness” and that which made the Greeks racially (to be defined below) superior to other groups. Then, I turn to the actual practice of governance, outlining some of the concrete measures the Athenian democratic political system used both to legislate a form of racialized citizenship and also to distinguish its citizens from other groups in the city, especially the resident immigrant or “metic.” Finally, I take up the question of

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slavery, a racialized institution that is generally “invisible and ubiquitous” to both ancient writers and modern scholars.5 Paul Cartledge has called slavery “a basis of the Athenian democracy” (2018: 138), but determining exactly how to incorporate slavery in a sustained manner into the analysis of Athenian life can prove challenging. So I want to suggest a few concrete ways we can make Athens’ status as a slave society more integral to the reading of its democracy. At times, I will seek to put Athens’ racial ideologies and practices in greater relief by contrasting them with the political ideas and governmentality of ancient Rome. Strictly speaking, even during its republic, Rome did not have the radical democratic system that was so essential to Athens’ governance and self-definition. Yet the value attached to certain democratic discourses and practices persisted, at least in theory, nonetheless. When he looked back on the rule of the first emperor Augustus, for example, the Roman writer Cassius Dio, writing in Greek c. 200 ce, argued that Augustus strongly wished to be dēmokratikos in his methods (Cass. Dio 55.4.2 cf. 59.3.1), mobilizing the term to underline how far, in contrast, Rome’s emperors had declined from that professed ideal by his own day.6 Even more, contrast with Rome helps underline the fact that Athenian practices, including those that seem most to defy our expectations (such as Athens’ powerful restrictions on citizenship), cannot be explained away as merely “typical” of the ancient world, that is, as existing despite Athens’ adoption of a democratic form of governance. Rather, the presence of such racial ideas and practices needs to be understood precisely within their democratic context, that is, in terms of their essential contribution to the way that system was conceived and operated. In the same way, it is important not to take the presence and meaning of race for granted, especially since there are significant differences between ancient perceptions of race and modern ones.

RACE IN ANTIQUITY While serving time in the Norfolk Prison Colony, Massachusetts, Malcolm X became acquainted with ancient Greek history, writing in his autobiography that “I read Herodotus, ‘the father of History’, or, rather, I read about him” (1992: 192). He also learned, he said, that Aesop was “a black man” (190).7 Aesop, whose fables started circulating in the latter half of the fifth century bce, is a figure surrounded by mystery. His life has been tentatively dated to the sixth century bce, and he may be the only example of a Greek slave or former slave whose writings survive prior to the fourth century, albeit not in their original form (Garlan 1988: 18). Malcolm X’s insistence that Aesop was “black” suggests he identified with the ways Aesop’s position could be said to parallel the powerlessness of black Africans and their descendants in more modern eras. Yet the label “black” is potentially misleading if we read it strictly in terms of

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Aesop’s physical appearance, which we know little about; even more, any sense that his identity could be epitomized by his skin color would have been hard for Aesop himself to comprehend. Skin color has served in recent centuries as one of the primary means for defining racial categories. Given the employment of the human body (or at least its visible features) in making such distinctions, race has often been considered “natural,” a form of identity based in objective science. Yet, as Audrey and Brian D. Smedley argue, “it is necessary and essential to distinguish naturally occurring physical diversity in the human species from culturally based perceptions and interpretations of this diversity” (2012: 12). In other words, it is important to distinguish skin color difference as a minor feature of the human body in biological terms from the vast range of extended meanings and consequences that have been assigned to it (Sussman 2014: 305). So, too, as Michal Omi and Howard Winant write, “although the concept of race invokes biologically based human characteristics (so-called ‘phenotypes’), selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process” (1994: 55)—underlining that the very designation of skin color as the premier marker of human variation requires choices that are linked to a specific time and place. Scholars in recent decades have demonstrated that the partnership of race and biology became entrenched largely during the modern eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, helping provide the ideological grounds for defending exploitative processes such as European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade (Smedley and Smedley 2012; Stepan 1982). It is perhaps not surprising that the ancient Greeks and Romans, facing different historical pressures and different ideological demands, did not conceptualize race in the ways we do today; in particular, in drawing racial boundaries they did not prioritize somatic criteria. Thus, while ancient writers and artists clearly acknowledge skin color differences in their work, it does not hold for them the same range of connotations or provide the foundation for racial categorization; black, in other words, does not mean Black8—nor does light skin color terminology connote the set of ideas and identifications associated with the modern concept of Whiteness (McCoskey 2012: 5–10, 23–4). Relatedly, since the ancient slave trade was not primarily connected to Africa, ancient slavery was not based on skin color distinctions.9 Instead, ancient Greek racial frameworks emerged from—and were transformed by—their own historical contexts, including the degree to which the Greeks were in contact with other groups in the ethnically and culturally diverse world of the ancient Mediterranean. While Roman conquest would later require the Romans to forge racial ideas that situated themselves in regard to a wide range of populations, the Greeks’ thinking about human variation generally centered around a more limited number of groups, including the

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Egyptians, Scythians, and, most especially, the Persians.10 The tenor of contact with these groups, and especially war with the Persians, had a major impact on Greek racial ideas, while the putative source assigned to racial difference— namely, that which was perceived as causing racial difference—also at times varied. In particular, there was continuing uncertainty over whether race derived from “nature” or “culture” (for a history of the intersections of these terms in Western thought, see Glacken 1967). In a famous passage near the end of his work, the Greek historian Herodotus seems to cite the importance of both sources of identity, suggesting that Greek identity was founded on “the identity of blood and language, temples and ritual; our common way of life” (8.144.2; see Chapter 9, this volume). Some historians have interpreted Herodotus’ statement as recording the rising authority of cultural features in Greek racial self-definition during the fifth century, pointing to a shift over time in the Greeks’ conceptualization of race from “who you are” (i.e., a passive identity derived from features such as blood and ancestry) to “what you do” (i.e., an active identity derived from cultural performances, for instance religion and language) (e.g., Hall 2002: 190–1; see also see Munson 2014). Still, there was an ancient corollary to today’s attempts to link race and science, for ancient thinkers at times cited geography and the environment as a primary source of human variation.

THE ANCIENT ENVIRONMENTAL THEORY The proposition that climate or geographic location is the “universal predictor (and cause) of individual physiology and psychology and of collective social organization and behavior” (Hulme 2011: 246)—a doctrine often called environmental determinism—was used for centuries to bolster claims for racial superiority (Livingstone 2002), and it can be traced all the way back to antiquity. The most detailed account of the ancient environmental theory appears in Airs, Waters, Places, a fifth-century bce component of a collection of ancient Greek medical writings known as the Hippocratic Corpus. Drawing a strong correlation between geographic location and a group’s physical and racial character, the essay asserts that “as a general rule […] the constitutions and the habits of a people follow the nature of the land where they live” (Airs, Waters, Places 24; trans. J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann in Lloyd 1978). More specifically, Airs, Waters, Places proposes that the very difficulties of Europe’s climate, and especially its changeability (23), give Europeans a toughness or hardness that makes them more courageous than the people of Asia who suffer from “mental flabbiness and cowardice” (16). Even as it relies primarily on climate, Airs, Waters, Places also conspicuously implicates political structure in the formation of racial character, arguing that a “contributory cause” for the “feebleness of the Asiatic race” derives from their

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“customs” or nomoi and, more specifically, their adherence to monarchy (Airs, Waters, Places 16; trans. J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann in Lloyd 1978), a claim that underlines the primary association of “Asia” in these contexts with the Persian Empire (see Khan 1994). Conversely, the courage of Europeans arises in part from the fact that their political system fosters self-rule while encouraging individuals to take more risks (Airs, Waters, Places 23). Positing a superiority of the Greeks (i.e., Europeans) that derives in part from their democratic system of governance, many scholars have argued that Airs, Waters, Places was written in the latter part of the fifth century bce (e.g., Craik 2015: 34–5), reflecting contemporary interest in providing a racial “explanation” for the successful halt of two separate Persian invasions by a massively outnumbered coalition of Greek city-states earlier in that century. In short, the essay insinuates that Greek victory over the Persians in the so-called Persian Wars can be attributed to the superiority of Greek (i.e., European) racial character itself. Roman writers would later likewise draw on the doctrine of environmental determinism to explain the success of the Roman imperial project; however, like many Greek authors, Roman writers cited not so much the impact of changing climate but Rome’s alleged position in the middle of the inhabited world, an ideal placement, they believed, between the extremes of north and south (Vitr., De arch. 6.1.10–11; cf. Pl., Ti. 24c). Yet even as the ancient environmental theory posited a “natural” source for racial difference and racial superiority, the fifth-century Greek and Persian encounters gave rise to a related racial framework, one that, like Airs, Waters, Places, foregrounded political structure and that pitted against one another not “Europeans” and “Asians” but “Greeks” and “barbarians.”

GREEKS AND BARBARIANS In Euripides’ Medea, a tragedy first produced in 431 bce, the Greek hero (or anti-hero) Jason bemoans the shocking violence committed by Medea (Figure 7.2), his non-Greek partner from Colchis near the Black Sea; despite having two children with her he abandoned her to take a Greek wife. Seeking to find an  explanation for Medea’s vengeful slaughter of their children and his intended bride, Jason markedly turns to racial frameworks, evoking Medea’s origin in a “barbarian” homeland and setting it against the norms of the Greek household or oikos (Eur., Med. 1329–32). Such forceful juxtaposition of “Greek” and “barbarian” in Jason’s lament reflects well the deep dependency of these two concepts on one another, since what it meant to be Greek in the fifth century bce was largely defined against what it meant to be a barbarian and vice versa. Although both a shared sense of “Greekness” and the concept of the barbarian itself operated in limited ways prior to the fifth century,11 it was only

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FIGURE 7.2  The story of Medea’s revenge on Jason inspired classical authors and later artists, such as this 1606 etching by Antonio Tempesta of Ovid’s retelling. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

in the shadow of the Persian Wars that a sustained collective identification as “Greeks”—or rather “Hellenes” (“Greeks” is derived from a derogatory Roman usage)—was mobilized to unite the inhabitants of the Greek-speaking world, who had previously identified primarily with their local polity or city-state, for example, as “Athenians” or “Thebans” (Hall 2002: 179–89). As the meanings of the terms consolidated in and around one another (see Thuc. 1.3.3), Greeks and barbarians became construed as the complete opposite of one another, and a potent notion emerged “of the barbarian as the universal anti-Greek against whom Hellenic—especially Athenian—culture was defined” (Hall 1989: 5). Given that Athens had started to forge its new democratic political system only a few decades before, it is perhaps not surprising that the most persistent criterion for drawing a distinction between Greeks and barbarians was political structure, with Greeks construed as inherently “democratic and egalitarian” and barbarians as “tyrannical and hierarchical” (2). Aligning the very essence of “Greekness” with Athenian democratic

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political ideals, the Greek/barbarian distinction was widely promoted by Athens to advance its own self-interests long after the Persian threat had subsided (Hall 2002: 182–9; cf. Hall 1989: 2). Although it was employed initially to “explain” Persian identity, the category of the barbarian would eventually expand to encompass all non-Greek peoples (Hall 1989: 11). The binary Greek/barbarian is thus, in many ways, the closest ancient equivalent to today’s black/white racial opposition, even as both become more complicated at closer view. There was already notable critique of the concept of the barbarian in the Greek period (e.g., Pl., Plt. 262ce), for example, and when the Romans later adopted the term, they employed it not to articulate a strict binary opposition, since they saw themselves as neither Greek nor barbarian, but rather to locate individual groups along a cultural scale based on their degree of difference from Roman norms, calculating, in effect, the relative “distance from Roman values and qualities (including material development)” displayed by each group (Thompson 1989: 87). As the shift to “values and qualities” might suggest, the Roman employment of “barbarian” thus did not make political agency one of the premier modes in which racial superiority was either formed or expressed. Greek and Roman racial frameworks also differed in the ways they intersected more specifically with citizenship: the Athenian democracy emphatically defined the predilection for a very restricted version of citizenship as a racial capacity and used race, in turn, to establish the normative grounds for who could actually possess it, whereas the Romans operated with a far more inclusive, indeed, in a way universalist notion of citizenship.

CITIZENS BY RACE Written approximately a century after Airs, Waters, Places, Aristotle’s Politics applies the ancient environmental theory explicitly to the question of the phusis (nature) of the citizen. Citing the importance of geographic location, Aristotle asserts that Europeans who live in a cold climate “are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill” so that, while they “retain comparative freedom,” they “have no political organization, and are incapable of ruling over others.” Residents of Asia, on the other hand, are “intelligent and inventive” but also “wanting in spirit,” and so “always in a state of subjection and slavery.” The Greek genos (race), which is “situated between them,” however, is “intermediate” and so superior in racial character, having both spirit and intelligence, and remaining “free,” well governed, and capable of ruling others (Arist., Pol. 7.3, 1327b, trans. Everson 1988). Pointedly distinguishing Greeks from both Northern Europeans and Persians,12 Aristotle thus attributes both good government and the capacity for rule over others to Greek racial character, while treating that very character as a “natural” outcome of geographic location.

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The ardent dedication to “freedom” voiced in such contexts could, of course, be juxtaposed with the very different—not to mention hypocritical, à la Malcolm X—attitude toward freedom evinced by Athens’ system of chattel slavery, but I will return to slavery. For now, I want to underscore a complementary racial narrative that sought to establish the ideological grounds for actual membership in the Athenian citizen body: autochthony. Autochthony was the belief, mobilized with particular intensity beginning in the fifth century, that the Athenians had always lived in Attica and so, by extension, that “all Athenians were descendants of a common set of ancestors” (Rosivach 1987: 303). Providing a narrative that “became the founding fiction of democratic citizen identity” (Lape 2010: 18), the myth of autochthony “claim[ed] that even the lowliest citizen [was] superior, of nobler birth, than any non-citizen” (Rosivach 1987: 303), a view at times fortified by reference to the mythical first king of Athens, Erechtheus/Erichthonius, who had allegedly been born from the soil of the city itself (see Chapter 5 and Figure 5.1, this volume).13 The meanings assigned to Athenian autochthony were scrutinized in a range of Athenian texts, including Euripides’ Ion (Lape 2010: 95–136) and Plato’s Menexenus (Hall 2002: 214–17). The alleged superiority Athens derived from the shared autochthonous origin and so ostensible racial purity of its citizens, however, was an especially prominent theme in the peculiarly democratic genre of the Athenian public-civic funeral oration (Lape 2010: 17; Loraux [1986] 2003). Athens’ pride in its status as a racially closed society contrasts sharply with Roman emphasis on incorporation in building and sustaining its body politic. Thus, in contrast to Athenian narratives, Roman stories manifestly emphasized immigration and “openness” at Rome’s foundations, including a founding figure who was himself a refugee foreigner (Aeneas) and an early king (Romulus) who mandated the admission of outsiders into the Roman population, albeit violently in the case of the Sabine women whose forcible abduction became the founding story of Roman marriage (Miles 1992). As with Athenian origin narratives, moreover, the ideals associated with its civic foundations played a role in Rome’s continuing self-definition as well as its justification for later practices. Thus, in 48 ce, when the Roman emperor Claudius made the case for allowing certain Gauls (those from Gallia Comata or “long-haired Gaul”) into the Roman Senate, he emphasized not only his own non-Roman, Sabine origins—and the alien roots of other prominent families—but also that it was Rome’s long-standing tradition to allow foreigners entry into Rome and its institutions (Tac., Ann. 11.23–25.1; ILS 212; for a comparative analysis, see Griffin 1982). Despite winning the day, Claudius’ argument had little real impact on the composition of the Senate (Woolf 1998: 64); thus reemphasizing that, even as ideologies about bloodline or geographic origin might offer the theoretical

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grounds for racial discrimination or exclusion—or its reverse—in antiquity, governmental conduct itself also plays a critical role in turning such ideology into racial practice.

RACIAL GOVERNMENTALITY In the early sixth century, the Athenian statesman Solon had already started to reconfigure Athenian identity by abolishing debt bondage, meaning “the right of the individual in Attica to mortgage himself, his wife or his children for debt” (Westermann 1955: 4; see Chapter 2, this volume). (Debt slavery technically remained on the statute books, as legal punishment.) In this way, Solon drew “a sharp legal line between the citizen and the slave” (Cartledge 2018: 53) and henceforth Athenian citizens, now forbidden by law from entering into a personal relationship of servitude, would be conceived and treated in law as categorically different from slaves. The concomitant racial connotations of such a distinction are apparent in the prevailing overlap of the categories slave and barbarian in Greek thought, an association reinforced in Aristotle’s political theory, which characterized barbarians as by nature inherently and unalterably servile (e.g., Arist., Pol. 1252a10). Athenian democracy took as its slogan a very specific form of political equality: isonomia meaning the “equality of status and respect under the laws” (Cartledge 2018: 32). Yet we can see in Athenian racial governmentality the persistent limiting of who could actually have such expectations from law. For one, Athenian laws progressively narrowed access to Athenian citizenship itself and so also to the legal advantages and “equality” bestowed on citizens. The reforms of Cleisthenes in 508/507 bce had brought a major reorganization of Athens’ political structures, making enrollment in a local deme “the new basis of citizenship” (66). While it was left to deme officials to determine the validity of citizenship claims, a candidate was required to be both of the required minimum age and the “legitimate son of an Athenian father in good standing” (Lape 2010: 15). The qualifications were tightened further by Pericles’ law in 451/450 bce, which made blood descent on both the paternal and maternal sides a prerequisite for Athenian citizenship (see Lape 2010: 19–25). Calling Athenian citizenship fundamentally “racial” during this period (3), Susan Lape proposes that such legislation sought to put into practice the nativist ideologies underlying the myth of autochthony (19). The policies attached to Roman citizenship place Athens’ increasing restrictions in further relief. Roman citizenship provided an important range of privileges and protections, and regulation of the line between citizen and noncitizen was taken very seriously. Rome’s Italian allies in the late 90s bce thus felt constrained to rise up in rebellion against Rome to be granted the privileges of citizenship. Even—or especially—when all Italians had been granted it,

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the Roman politician Cicero urged that noncitizens be punished for trying to exercise the rights of citizens (Cic., Off. 3.47). Nevertheless, the boundaries defining Roman citizenship were much more porous than Athenian ones; indeed, prior to 212 ce (when the Emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all freeborn residents of the empire) Roman citizenship was strategically conferred on a wide range of individuals and groups, including those the Romans had defeated. Recognizing the importance of citizenship to Rome’s expansionist strategies, a client of Emperor Tiberius, the Roman historian Velleius Paterculus, identified “the extension of citizenship and the growth of the Roman name by the sharing of law” as a major theme of his account of early Roman history (Vell. Pat. 1.14.1). Under Tiberius’ predecessor, the first emperor Augustus, Roman governmentality also sought to intervene in family structure and the marriage practices of its subjects with two specific laws: the lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus and the lex Iulia de adulteriis.14 While the latter outlawed adultery, the former established “rewards and penalties for marriage within and between classes” and also for childbearing (Milnor 2005: 140). In seeming parallel to the Periclean citizenship law of 451 bce, many scholars have read the Augustan laws as thus reflecting ideologies about blood and belonging, positing that Augustus was aiming to (re)produce and reinforce an upper-class community devastated by the recent civil war.15 Yet the Augustan laws, unlike their Periclean counterpart, were not correlated with access to citizenship, and they seem more closely aligned with the general emphasis on public morality that helped define the Augustan era, and in particular on the emperor’s attempt to re-moralize the behavior and thereby the authority of the Roman elite governing class. Some observers have even suggested the Augustan laws were primarily financially rather than socially or politically motivated. The historian Tacitus, while he used the laws to epitomize what was, to him, the bitter rise of Augustus at the expense of the Senatorial order, thus called out the benefit to the state treasury wrought by the penalties prescribed in the legislation (Tac., Ann. 3.28). Finally, our understanding of Athenian governmentality in regard to race has been expanded by increasing scrutiny of policies connected to immigration and the large metic or “resident foreigner” population in Athens (e.g., Kasimis 2018). Metics were at times free citizens from other Greek city-states—Aristotle, for example, was a metic of this kind at Athens—so the distinction between citizen and metic does not map easily onto conventional racial theory.16 Questions about status remain even more thorny regarding female metics (Kennedy 2014). Still, the treatment of metics as a group in Athenian law suggests a continuing reliance on racial frameworks both to articulate and to reinforce their categorical difference from citizens. As one consequence, unlike the firm boundary drawn between citizens and slaves, the line between slaves and metics was made more permeable. Slaves became metics not citizens when they were manumitted,17

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and in the other direction, metics could be sold into slavery as punishment for a range of legal infractions such as the failure to properly designate a citizen guardian or to pay the requisite poll tax (Kamen 2013: 51). Citizens, on the other hand, could be sold into slavery for failure to pay a legally imposed state debt or when adjudged to have been illegally claiming citizen privileges (Dem., Against Eubulides 57). Yet the greater the emphasis placed on rigid citizenship boundaries by Athenian law, the more individual claims to citizenship were open to challenge. The orator and leading democratic politician Demosthenes, for example, found himself accused of, or rather slandered as, not being a true Athenian citizen because of alleged Scythian lineage on his mother’s side, with his opponent Aeschines adding for good measure that Demosthenes had himself been a slave and nearly “branded as a runaway”; Demosthenes would soon return the disfavor, accusing Aeschines of having slave origins of his own (Ober 1989: 268–70). Their contemporary Apollodorus, who really was half-“barbarian” and of servile descent (on his father’s side), was in turn a fanatic upholder of the purity of autochthonous Athenian ethnicity ([Dem.], Against Neaira 59). Given that such attacks cite the specific taboo of slave descent, they invite a turn to my final topic: the role of slavery in Athenian democracy. While an examination of racialized governmentality in relation to slavery—including the slave’s fundamental “legal incapacity” (Hunter 2000: 6)—would yield considerable insight into Athenian racial practice, I want to pursue a different tack and suggest approaches for making slavery itself more persistent in our reading of Athenian democracy.

DEMOCRACY AND ANCIENT SLAVERY Historians have long been disconcerted by the way that slavery pervades classical Greek society.18 As Moses Finley once lamented, “We condemn slavery, and we are embarrassed for the Greeks, whom we admire so much; therefore we tend either to underestimate its role in their life, or we ignore it altogether, hoping that somehow it will go away” (1968: 68). Many classical scholars still try to minimize the basic significance of the topic,19 but a telling reminder that ancient slavery involved the fundamental exploitation and abuse of enslaved persons is the persistent acknowledgment of violence directed toward them in many of our surviving sources.20 Passing references to the degrading treatment of slaves suggest the degree to which such conduct permeated Athenian everyday consciousness. To take just one example, Plato, in the Meno, compares opinions to slaves, in that both seek to run away if not sufficiently restrained or tied down (Pl., Meno 97de). Moreover, our ability to gain an understanding of slavery from the opposing perspective is inhibited by the fact that our evidence is produced almost entirely by non-slaves.21

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Attempts to estimate the actual number of slaves in Athens at any one time in the classical era run up against many difficulties. They have ranged from 20,000  to 150,000, leading Deborah Kamen to propose “the most likely number falls somewhere in the middle, representing 15–35 percent of the total population” (2013: 9). Although Greeks did enslave other Greeks—a practice Greek philosophers and others railed against (Garlan 1988: 50–1)—the Athenians’ slaves primarily came from “Thrace, the lower Danube, the coasts of the Black Sea, and Asia Minor” (Thompson 2003: 3); such foreign origin was sufficient to make slaves “barbarians” in the Athenian view, and so slaves were generally portrayed as racially different from Greeks in Athenian visual art and literature. Enslaved persons were acquired mainly by war or trade, although the children of slave women were presumably added to the population as well, likely including those coercively fathered by the slave master.22 While a slave market was apparently held every month in the central marketplace of Athens, the Athenian Agora (Garlan 1988: 54), evidence for the actual conduct of the slave trade is limited, perhaps “reflect(ing) the distaste felt by the Greeks for [it] and its practitioners” (Thompson 2003: 19). Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery has often been considered essential to modern interpretations of ancient slavery. Casting slavery as beneficial and just, necessary and expedient, but above all in accordance with “nature,” Aristotle’s general premise as well as his execution have troubled later readers. As Peter Garnsey phrased it, “natural slavery as presented by Aristotle is a battered shipwreck of a theory” (1996: 107). Page DuBois agrees that Aristotle offers “no coherent, consistent justification for natural slavery” (2003: 191). She further asserts that “the crucial understanding to be communicated to Aristotle’s listeners and readers concerns not […] the slavishness of some human beings, but rather the primacy of the master” (205). Paul Millett similarly insists that the “inconsistencies and anomalies” in Aristotle’s theory can be explained by recognizing that Aristotle’s ideas “reflect slavery as it was perceived by slaveowners in Athens, including Aristotle” (2007: 194). In short, Aristotle’s theory relentlessly promotes the interests of slave masters, even when it strains his own logic. His general contempt for slaves, moreover, can be witnessed even in a simile he employs in passing in the Nicomachean Ethics, comparing anger to a slave who rushes off before hearing all his instructions, then bungles his task (Arist., Eth. Nic. 7.7.1149a25–8). In practice, not all Athenian citizens owned slaves,23 but the shift in perspective advocated by DuBois and Millett underlines that slavery should be read as an institution that defines not only enslaved persons but also those who own them, and especially—for our purposes here—Athenian citizens and politicians, for whom slave ownership often made certain political functions possible. Aristotle, for example, lauds the fact that slave labor grants slave owners the free time necessary for political participation (Garlan 1988: 139). In more material

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terms, slave labor provided the wealth that permitted the rise of many Athenian politicians. Indeed, even a short list of slave-owning politicians includes some of the most prominent leaders during Athens’ democratic heyday: Pericles, who used a slave overseer at his estates and a slave steward in his town house (Garlan 1988: 63, 69); Cleon, whose family made its fortune from a tannery staffed by slaves (Cartledge 2018: 160); Nicias, who owned upwards of one thousand slaves, leasing them out to the silver mines discussed below (Garlan 1988: 70); Alcibiades, who owned estates covering 260,000 square meters (63); Lysias, himself a metic, who co-owned a workshop with over a hundred slaves (65); and Demosthenes, who inherited slaves as part of his father’s bequest of a knife workshop and couch-making facility (55, 65). Bringing the Athenian citizen or politician into sharper focus as slave owner is not meant to shame such historical personages in any straightforward or simplistic way. But exposing the slave-owning propensities of our so-called “founding fathers” in the United States has had important consequences for how we read them and American history itself, not to mention the processes by which we decide what matters and what not when we enshrine individuals and events in historical memory. Even more to the point, it reminds us that such figures, including those widely admired, invariably participated both directly and indirectly in the constant—and often quite extreme—violence that is requisite for the daily subjugation of other persons; after all, people do not simply enslave others as a single act but rather keep them enslaved. Given its prominence in slave narratives, Hunter argues that the whip itself came to serve as an important symbol in Athenian society (Hunter 2000: 13)—and what would it mean to include that object in the arsenal of items, such as the lot or assembly, we routinely associate with the practice of Athenian citizenship? Still, if we aim to reconceptualize the Athenian as a political subject who takes shape in racial terms not only through racial theory and governmental practice but also via his role as prospective slave owner, how can we make Athenian democracy itself bear a similar weight? When addressing the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, then First Lady Michelle Obama (2009–17) remarked poignantly that, while living there, she was reminded daily that slaves had built the White House (Donnella 2016). It seems likewise imperative, when considering the influence of race on Athenian democracy, to acknowledge the slave labor behind many of the most revered symbols and accomplishments of ancient Athens. Labor itself played a complicated role in democratic Athens; Robin Osborne argues that “slaves ensured that citizens were not obliged to perform domestic tasks for others or work in craft workshops or the mines, where they would both have been deprived of leisure and have been quite apparently subject to, rather than on a par with, other citizens” (2010: 100). In other words, it was only slave labor “that enabled the fiction of citizen equality to be maintained”

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(100). Both men and women were enslaved, and as Osborne’s comments suggest, although household slaves predominate in our sources, the labor of enslaved persons was forcibly directed toward a range of occupations, including agricultural work on large estates and artisan work in various industries. There were also public slaves owned by the state who occupied roles such as those of civil servant or policeman (Ismard [2015] 2017); other enslaved persons were associated with religious sites or the sex trade (Faraone and McClure 2006). Despite the unease that in theory restricted the labor of free Athenians— reflected in Osborne’s quotation above—slaves did at times work alongside free persons in many trades. Perhaps most notably, surviving records testify that slaves labored with both citizens and metics on the Acropolis, helping construct some of democratic Athens’ most emblematic buildings, including the Erechtheion, a temple on the Athenian acropolis named after Athens’ autochthonous founder (Osborne 2010: 89–90). It was almost exclusively slaves, however, who extracted silver ore from the mines at Laureion outside Athens, toiling in “virtual chain-gangs” in “literally lethal conditions” (Cartledge 2018: 139, 138) (Figure 7.3).24 Yielding a major source of revenue for Athens, the mines were so critical to Athens’ success that silver itself became a prominent symbol of the city. When describing Athens’ advantages to the Persian queen Atossa, for example, the Chorus of Aeschylus’ play Persians (472 bce) singles out Athens’ silver

FIGURE 7.3  The extensive silver mines at Laureion in Attica were worked by slaves in harsh conditions. Photo: Alamy.

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supply, telling Atossa that the Greek city has a virtual “treasure chest in its soil” (Aesch., Pers. 238). More pragmatically, it was the huge windfall from the mines that allowed the Athenian general Themistocles to complete an act that has garnered significant praise from historians, that is, the construction of an entire new fleet of triremes between 483/482 and 480, ships that would become key to victory in the naval battles that halted the second Persian invasion (Cartledge 2018: 81). So, too, although slaves did not generally participate in battle, evidence suggests a contingent of slaves participated in the Battle of Marathon in 490 bce (Garlan 1988: 171), an event that was still exerting a strong hold on Athenian memory and self-definition decades later. Finally, slaves and especially freed slaves were apparently drafted to help the Athenian navy defeat a Spartan coalition at Arginusae in 406 bce (Garlan 1988: 164–5; cf. Ar., Frogs 33–4, 190–2). Throughout this era, massive numbers of slave lives were unquestionably sacrificed to Athens’ pursuit of its ambitions, a loss that often goes completely unrecognized in hindsight, silently relegating slave experience to the margins of Athenian democracy and ancient history itself. Kostas Vlassopoulos, however, has urged an important shift in study of the ancient experience of slavery, one that makes enslaved persons more legible as historical agents in their own right by conceptualizing them in terms of the multiple roles they held—including those beyond “slave”—and also the intricate ways they “tried, and in many cases managed, to negotiate their position, take advantage of external circumstances, make use of connections, avoid detection and even gain their freedom” (Vlassopoulos 2011: 127). Providing one illustration of the gains of such an approach, rather than simply asking whether slaves were in competition with free laborers (a major preoccupation of historians who take an economic approach to slavery25), Vlassopoulos posits a wider range of questions about the “side-by-sideness” of free and enslaved persons at ancient work sites, including what kind of impact free workers would have  had on the domination and exploitation of their slave counterparts (126). Similarly, it is important to note when citing the operation of Athenian mines that Athenaeus records that slaves from the mines successfully revolted in the late second century bce, although large-scale uprisings by chattel slaves—as opposed to other enslaved groups, for example, the unfree Spartan helots—were relatively rare in the Greek world (Ath. 6.272ef; cf. Garlan 1988: 180–4).26 While I have suggested concrete ways to make ancient slavery more prominent in discussions of Athenian democracy, by strengthening the conceptual ties between citizen and slave owner and by acknowledging more fully the labor of enslaved persons required by Athens to build and promote its democracy, I would like to conclude by underlining the ways attention to race complicates our enduring sense of ancient democracy’s modern legacy.

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CONCLUSION In the early 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. served as a visiting professor at Morehouse College, an all-male historically black college in Atlanta, Georgia. During his time there, Dr. King taught a course in Social Philosophy and, as one of the prompts on the exam for that class, he offered: “State and evaluate Aristotle’s theory of slavery” (Weinberg 2018). Page DuBois, in her discussion of Aristotle, insists that “African slaves of modernity stand between us and the ancient text, interfering with the analysis” (2003: 189). I, on the other hand, see the presence of African slaves as “disrupting” in crucially positive ways, not “interfering”—as challenging the conventional analysis of ancient slavery through the uncomfortable and embodied type of historical witness they provide.27 And I wonder how King’s students—most presumably descended from slaves themselves—would have handled that prompt. Still, DuBois is right that the study of race and slavery in antiquity remains largely filtered through our modern perspective. However, surely that is even more true of the study of ancient democracy itself, which—all allowances made for essential differences between ancient and modern forms—comes laden with all the expectations that attend the varied attachments different groups have made to its legacy in the West. In the speech he gave the day before his assassination, Dr. King responded to a hypothetical question about which age he would most want to live in and, among a catalog of other stops, he professed: “I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality” (King 1992: 194). Taken together, the views of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. invite reflection on how we take our minds to the world of antiquity, what we run toward when we get there and also what we turn away from. Asking how race pertains to ancient democracy brings uncomfortable answers—from the racialized conduct of Athenian governmentality to the varied ways in which race bolsters the Athenian citizen in both theory and practice, not to mention, of course, Athenian democracy’s deep dependence on the labor of enslaved persons. Yet, given that our impulse is to focus only on the glorious, on the timeless, when we “visit” ancient Athens and its democracy, Malcolm X, in particular, reminds us never to forget its hypocrisies and its victims, and to envision next to all that ancient marble an ancient slave ship pulling into the harbor (Westermann 1955: 11).

CHAPTER EIGHT

Democratic Crises, Revolutions, and Civil Resistance PAUL CARTLEDGE

INTRODUCTION Three of the principal words in my title are of Roman-Latin derivation: civil, resistance, and revolution. Two are Hellenic-Greek: democratic and crises. This is perhaps as it should be. Civil derives from the Latin civis, citizen. Resistance (resistere, to stand against), a refusal to comply with, accept, or give in to, finds its natural expression in Roman Stoicism as a philosophy for living and, politically speaking, in the Stoic resistance to imperial dictatorship during the first century of our era. And as far as revolution (from the Latin revolvere, to turn around) goes, the applicability of the term to the ancient world has been questioned, in both a precise sense (for instance, any Marxist sense of class conflict) and in a broader sense of cultural change (as in “the Industrial Revolution”; Finley 1986: 47–8). Moses Finley’s reason for doubt was that no ancient Greek individual or group formulated, let alone implemented, a transformative economic program embodying not just social amelioration but also transformative social utopianism. But that is surely to set the bar of cross-cultural incompatibility too high. This chapter introduces the Greek conceptualization of civil conflict, and Dedicated to the memory of Mark Golden.

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explores how Athenian democratic culture represented and explored it, not just in the historical and analytical works of Thucydides and Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle, but also in the more or less fictionalised reenactments on stage in both Athenian tragedy and comedy.

CITIZENSHIP, CULTURE, AND THE STATE When talking about a city and its politics, Greeks did not speak of “Athens” as the political referent but “the Athenians”; the most apt English equivalent for the polis of the Athenians is therefore something like “citizen-state” (Figure  8.1). Aristotle’s Politics is particularly preoccupied with defining the politēs (citizen; see Chapter 6), but where it is especially helpful to this chapter is in its further analysis of the sociopolitical composition of each and every politeuma (citizen body). Understanding the composition of the citizen body reveals the fault lines along which civil conflict typically occurred. Given that the ancient analysis of such divisions was an inspiration to Karl Marx, historians have used Marxist models of class conflict to explore social division and conflict in classical antiquity (most notably De Ste. Croix 1981: esp. 69–80). But that approach, as already noted, is controversial.

FIGURE 8.1  The Athenian Agora seen from the Areopagus hill. Photo: Carol Atack.

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On the other hand, we can talk—as the Greeks did not—about first-class as opposed to second-class citizenship: in the cases of (citizen) women at Athens (see Chapter 6, this volume), for instance, or of (male) “Lacedaemonians” who were not “Spartiates” within the polis of the ancient Spartans, famously nonor even anti-democratic (Cartledge 2002c: 138–68; Shipley 1997). Within the democratically empowered male citizen body of Athens, however, all (adult, male, free, legitimate) politai were by definition formally equal: equally free and equally empowered (Cartledge 1996; Raaflaub 1996). Yet, operationally speaking, for Aristotle the broad definition (Pol. 3.1.1275a) of a citizen as he who “has a share in krisis (judgement, including legal judgement) and archē (rule, office)” was insufficient. For him—so far as political ideology, allegiance, and activity were concerned, especially as regards control of the central organs of the polis, and so of its politeia—the crucial distinction and indeed the mutually exclusive opposition and antagonism was a simple antithesis between “the rich” and the “poor” citizens. Even Plato, no enthusiast for democracy, identified the risk that each city was not one city but two, permanently set against each other (Pl., Resp. 4.422e–423a). Alternatively, Greeks spoke of “the few” and/versus hoi polloi (the many), as we (also vaguely) refer to “the elite” and/versus “the masses.” Josh Ober has shown how Athens’ political institutions—the assembly and the courts—provided spaces in which these oppositions could be mediated, as the elite sought to win support from the masses and hence had to formulate programs for which the masses would vote (Ober 1989). Being “rich” meant being sufficiently endowed materially not to have to work for a living and, correlatively, quite often being able to command, indeed often to own the labor (power) of others; being “poor” meant the reverse— having to work for one’s living, and too often at the cost of surrendering one’s total independence to another person. Penia (poverty) easily shaded over into— metaphorical—douleia (slavery), in a world where real, legal chattel slavery was all too prevalent (to the extent that it can be argued that, for example, Athens’ democracy was “based on” slavery). The analogy between being on the winning side as a citizen, and being free, rather than being in the position of a chattel slave, was an easy one for Greek writers to make, as Plato has Gorgias do in explaining what skills he offers his elite students (Pl. Grg. 452d). One further qualification is, however, needed: “poor” did not equate to “destitute”; the Greek word for “poor” (penēs) was distinguished from that for “destitute” (phtokhos) (Taylor 2017). What was it, then, that for Aristotle differentiated the two opposing staseis (factions) of the oligoi (the few) and the dēmos (people)? Paradoxically, Aristotle insisted that, despite the name oligoi, and although dēmos in one of its exclusive, sectarian significations meant the majority or the masses of a citizen body, the difference was not a question of (mere) number. Rather it was a matter of one’s relationship to property-ownership, to the means and labor of production.

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Oligarchs favored the rule of the rich, democrats the rule of the poor. It was only a matter of contingent accident, as it were, that the rich happened to be few in number, the poor a plurality; Aristotle would still speak of “oligarchy” even where the rich were a majority (Pol. 3.8.1279b34–80a3; De  Ste. Croix 1981: 72–3). Why, then, did Aristotle treat the “rich” versus “poor” opposition as being basic and determinative? Because, as a more or less independent observer, he understood the relation between those two groups to be one of systematic tension, opposition, and antagonism: a constant underlying tension that was all too liable to break out into civil strife, if not outright civil war. The Greek word for both the latter forms of antagonistic relationship was stasis, and it speaks worlds that Aristotle devoted roughly a quarter of the Politics (books 5 and 6) to trying to understand why and how stasis had broken out in the past, and how it might be anticipated and forestalled in the future (Lintott 2018). Oddly, given its absolute centrality, Greek stasis has been treated to relatively few dedicated scholarly studies, and its cultural dimension has often been underemphasized (Berger 1992; Gehrke 1985; Simonton 2017: 224–73). A notable exception is the work of Nicole Loraux, who observed that the risk of stasis as civil strife turning into stasis as outright civil war was especially high in the transparent, face-to-face political culture of ancient Greek direct democracies such as Athens. In the context of her overall project of “repoliticising the city,” that is, putting internal conflict back into the center of the Greeks’ definition of politics and the political, Loraux had a particular interest in the outbreaks of stasis at Athens and the remarkable civic and ritual healing that took place there in response (Loraux [1997] 2001).

STASIS: CIVIL STRIFE AS CULTURE To understand Aristotle’s preoccupation, and estimate its limitations, we must move on from the notion of democracy as a set of formal legal institutions, within the framework of which the politics of power were played out, to consider the notion of dēmokratia as culture. It is only within such an allencompassing notion of democracy as culture, as identity-politics, that the peculiarly ancient Greek phenomenon of stasis may be comprehended, a notion that could encompass all three terms of this chapter’s title: civil crisis, resistance, and revolution. Stasis etymologically meant a process of standing, that is, standing apart from and against; it could be applied either to the process itself or to one or more such antagonistic groups, in which case the word is normally translated as “faction(s).” It was endemic in Greek political life. Revolution was less familiar. On the other hand, Hannah Arendt was correct that the ancient Greeks did not countenance her definition of revolution, which for her necessarily connoted

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a combination of freedom and novelty (Arendt [1963] 2006: 2–5). For the Greeks, revolution in the sense of political action or behavior that unacceptably threatened the status quo was precisely neoterismos, “innovationism,” or neotera pragmata—literally “things that are too new.” Novelty was not in itself a good, even for the classical Athenians. It is open to argument whether the introduction of democracy at Athens around 500 bce constituted a “revolution” in this sense. But the phrase metabolē politeias, literally “change of constitution,” which is employed as an organizing metaphor by the late fourth-century bce author of the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Ath. Pol.), and used to describe both this change and further developments, does precisely capture a notion of political “revolution” in one crucial sense. It identifies the more or less violent seizure of kratos/ta pragmata by a dēmos from its oligoi citizens and vice versa, and/or by/from a tyrant. Stasis in that sense of the struggle to control the pragmata, the (constitutional) politeia, was a permanent element of ancient Greek political culture, not a dysfunctional exception.

POLITICAL BACKGROUND: c. 550

bce

TO 500

ce

According to Thucydides (3.82), the sort of violent, outright civil war stasis that erupted on the island of Corcyra (in Greek Kerkura, present-day Corfu) in the summer of 427 between pro-Athenian democrats and pro-Spartan oligarchs was of the generic sort that later became endemic throughout the Greek world, including in the way in which the interests of external powers played out in its internal political affairs. Thucydides was writing with the hindsight of an Athenian of the governing class who had recent, if secondhand, experience of the collapse of ordinary politics into full-blown stasis in his native polis. Thucydides uses the Corcyra episode to present a template for stasis which emphasizes its cultural aspects, as political conflict spills out into the everyday lives of citizens, breaking family ties and religious obligations. Language itself becomes a part of the self-destructive process, pushing citizens to ever more extreme actions: Men assumed the right to reverse the usual values in the application of words to actions. Reckless audacity came to be thought of as comradely courage, while far-sighted hesitation became seen as well-disguised cowardice; moderation was a front for unmanliness; and to understand everything was to accomplish nothing. Wild aggression was a mark of manhood, while careful planning for one’s future security was a glib excuse for evasion. (Thuc. 3.82.4, trans. Mynott 2013, slightly modified) Both oligarchical and democratic factions initiated civil strife and conflict during  this period across the world of city-states. There was a great deal of

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democracy-inspired stasis in regimes that were not democratic. But stasis of a sort may be documented two centuries earlier—in Sparta, the city that pioneered a kind of citizen-state but abstained from progressing to anything that a Greek democrat would have recognized as dēmokratia. Aristotle cites Sparta’s seventh-century martial poet Tyrtaeus for his mention of a struggle between rich and poor (citizens), at a time when, according to Aristotle’s own retrospective classification, Sparta was governed by a regime of aristokratia (Pol. 5.7.1306b). The first, genuinely democratic stasis, however, arose much later—by definition not until after the first institutionalized expression of dēmokratia, at Athens in 508 bce. The process, however, whereby democracy was “introduced” by Cleisthenes was a convoluted one, the mechanics of which are not entirely clear. This is partly due to retrospective myth-making by the democratic Athenians themselves. For what seems to have been a mere intra-aristocratic, interpersonal act of vendetta was later transmogrified by them into a national myth of specifically democratic liberation (Figure 8.2). In 514 Hipparchus, the younger brother of the reigning tyrant Hippias, was murdered by an aristocratic, homoerotic couple at a moment of maximum publicity during what should have been the utmost celebration of communal solidarity: namely, the Great Panathenaea, the annual birthday festival of city-patron goddess Athena (Thuc. 6.57–8). The tyranny was finally overthrown only four years later, by the invading Spartans. After a brief but decisive bout of stasis and a further, failed Spartan intervention, dēmokratia was established in a separate process between 508 and 500 bce. At some point after this, the murderers of Hipparchus came to be referred to as the turannoktonoi, “tyrant-slayers”—inaccurately, as a matter of historical fact. Thucydides severely rebuked this act of populist “fake news,” and crucially he did so in ideological terms: he argued that “these tyrants were in general not oppressive to the people at large [tous pollous]” and that they acted with sunēsis (intelligence) (Thuc. 6.54.1, 54.5–6; Azoulay 2017). But that seemingly objective and innocent, historiographically driven critique should be relocated within the vigorous battle of ideological-political mythopoiesis being conducted during the last decades of the fifth century bce. Echoes of it may still be detected in the pseudo-Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (composed in the 330s and 320s). It contains hints of the vicious counter-pamphleteering of the 411 oligarchy (sections 29–33), in which the story of Athens’ democracy was transformed and retold in support of reactionary preoccupations and goals. The role of “the people” in what is sometimes labeled the “Athenian revolution” is, however, murkier, and whether it was a matter of class-based stasis even more unclear. Herodotus (5.66, 69), says that Cleisthenes triumphed in his personal, intra-aristocratic struggle with pro-Spartan Isagoras because he won “the people” over to his side. But he gives few details and no clear sense of what dēmos might have meant then (Ober 1996b).

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FIGURE 8.2  The image of the tyrannicide (Figure 2.1) recurred in many Athenian context, here linking a tragic hero to Athenian myth on an Attic red-figure amphora, c. 470 bce. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

There is a case to be made, though, that it was an uprising of those wealthier Athenians who could afford to arm themselves as hoplites, the richest third of the citizenry as whole. That put paid to Isagoras’ maneuvers and gave power and heft to Cleisthenes’ new “People’s” Council (the Boulē of 500) and thereby to the People in the decision-making Assembly (ekklēsia). Yet, Cleisthenes was not, unlike the Tyrannicides, celebrated for his reforms. The Athenians’ selfmythologizing appears to have written their great reformer out of their history (Flaig 2011), perhaps because invoking his name was considered excessively partisan and stasis-inducing.

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Another version of events suggests a different narrative, in which the Athenians celebrated the role of the people in the events of 508/507 bce, in a way that supports Ober’s identification of them as constituting the “Athenian revolution.” The dramatic action of Aristophanes’ sex-strike comedy Lysistrata, performed in counterrevolutionary year 411 bce, sets Athens’ war-mongering men against its peace-loving women, who occupy the Acropolis in a bid to end war. Aristophanes divides his chorus into men and women and sets up a comic reenactment of the battle of 508. The men of the chorus, characterized as gruff old men, quickly identify themselves with, or even as, those earlier Athenians who had after initial failure fought off the Spartans: Not even Cleomenes, the first to occupy this place, left here intact. No, for all he breathed the Spartan spirit, he left without his weapons—surrendering to me!—with only a little bitty jacket on his back, starving, filthy, unshaven, unwashed for six whole years. (Ar., Lys. 271–82, trans. Henderson 2000) A few years after the Athenian revolution of 508, in the decade of the 490s, unambiguously class-based, democratic stasis took hold of two Aegean islandstates, Naxos in the Cyclades and Aegina in the Saronic Gulf (the latter visible from Athens’ nascent harbor town of Piraeus). Here regional instability—the effect of the rapid expansion westwards of the new Persian Empire (founded c. 550) to the Aegean shore of today’s western Turkey—had unsettled existing hierarchies within the Greek cities of Asia Minor. The Ionian Revolt of 499 was both the product of and precipitator of class unrest within these cities, starting with mainland Miletus. In Herodotus’ account (5.32), this chain of events had been initiated by an appeal made to the ruler of Miletus by a group of disgruntled Naxian aristocrat-oligarchs, whom the historian (not himself an Ionian Greek) labels—or nicknames—pakheis (the thick), namely, men of considerable material substance, the rich few (Hdt. 5.30.1). A few years later (489–488 bce) on Aegina, which for long had been ruled by a tight plutocracy exploiting the island’s favorable commercial location, one Nicodromus (Hdt. 6.88–91) sought to achieve the kind of anti-plutocratic, proto-democratic coup that was to become familiar in the pages of Thucydides, and hoped for Athenian support. But Nicodromus was ahead of his time, and Athens failed to deliver the naval forces needed (Figueira 2016: 36–8).1 From the early 470s Athens did develop the naval strength required to intervene in the affairs of other states within reach, and with it what contemporaries, including the Athenians themselves, referred to as a “rule” or “dominion” (archē), a kind of small-scale, minor-key “empire” (Thuc. 2.62.1; Ma, Papazarkadas, and Parker 2009).2 But whether the imperial Athenians did consciously export dēmokratia to, and even impose it upon, its subordinate allies, must remain an open question (Brock 2009).

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bce

The Athenian experience of stasis would continue to be driven by events outside the city causing irresolvable conflict within the democracy, or creating opportunities for restive political figures to seize. Engaging in external war risked unrest at home, as Athens’ defining conflict with Sparta showed. Although Athens had processes for managing political conflict, these did not always work. Ostracism was a case in point (Figure 8.3). It was supposed to resolve failures of the process by which political consensus was reached; figures whose implacable opposition to other politicians or their policies had rendered political consensus impossible were sent into a form of temporary exile after a public vote (Forsdyke 2005; Kosmin 2015). On one occasion in 416 bce, however, two political opponents, Alcibiades and Nicias, set aside their personal and strategic rivalry and joined forces to ensure that they avoided ostracism. Instead a third party,

FIGURE 8.3  Athenians could vote to send controversial politicians into temporary exile (ostracism), writing their names on pot sherds (ostraka) like these from the fifth century bce. Photo: Getty Images.

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Hyperbolus, was voted out of the city (Plut., Nicias 11; cf. Thuc. 8.73.3). The resulting imbalance began an episode of stasis. Free to act, Alcibiades in 415 led the Athenians into committing to launching a massive expedition against the cities of Sicily, especially (democratic) Syracuse. His rival Nicias failed to convince the Athenians to vote this down (Thuc. 6.8–31), and so the Athenians set sail against Sicily and its main city, the Spartan ally Syracuse, with both Alcibiades and Nicias at the helm. Just at this crucial moment, as the armada was about to set sail, a gross act of sacrilege was committed, not unlike the murder of Hipparchus almost exactly a century earlier in its religiopolitical ramifications (as Thucydides hints). Once again, political crisis in Athens was shown to be embedded in cultural practice and experience. Dotted around the city of Athens in both public and private spaces were stone effigies of the traveler god Hermes, typically rectangular pillars topped by an image of the head of the god and sporting an erect phallus. Overnight in summer 415, many of these Herms were hammered to desecration—literally defaced but also deprived of the erect phallus (Thuc. 6.53.1–2; Andoc. 1.14). A witch-hunt ensued, hugely detrimental to the effectiveness of the expedition, which got underway regardless, but culminated two years later in total disaster. A formal legal process was at once begun, following an official enquiry that necessarily provoked rumor, suspicion, and delation involving the testimony of slaves as well as free citizens, and that culminated in the conviction of about fifty persons, free resident aliens as well as citizens but all sharing one characteristic: they were rich and—therefore—considered anti-democratic and possibly even willing to support an anti-democratic coup, possibly even a tyranny. Which is where the finger was pointed at Alcibiades—maverick aristocrat, chief winner of the botched 416 ostracism process, and prime mover of the Sicilian expedition, but someone whose lifestyle was such that it was easy to paint him as anti-democratic, if not tyrannous, by inclination. Thucydides thought that Alcibiades’ political preferences were dictated by personal advantage not principle (Thuc. 6.28). The instability of this moment was reflected on stage. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, as we saw above, replays earlier moments of Athenian crisis and suggests how they were used to construct political identity in the face of a new crisis. Class conflict is replayed as gender conflict, with the luxury-loving women taking the place of the Spartans of the earlier revolution, and also representing political opposition to the war. The play lampoons attempts to police civil behavior in the person of the probouloi (magistrates), high-status citizens intended to maintain order. Lysistrata, transgressive leader of the sex-striking women, engages with the magistrate and demonstrates a better understanding of civic life, through the extended analogy of the city with weaving:

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Imagine the polis as a fleece just shorn. First, put it in a bath and wash out all the sheep dung; spread it on a bed and beat out the riff-raff with a stick, and pluck out the thorns; as for those who clump and knot themselves together to snag government positions, card them out and pluck off their heads. Next, card the wool into a sewing basket of unity and goodwill, mixing in everyone. The resident aliens and any other foreigner who’s your friend, and anyone who owes money to the people’s treasury, mix them in there too. And oh yes, the cities that are colonies of this land: imagine them as flocks of your fleece, each one lying apart from the others. So take all these flocks and bring them together here, joining them all and making one big bobbin. And from this weave a fine new cloak for the people. (Ar., Lys. 574–87, trans. Henderson 2000) Lysistrata’s speech recognizes the fundamental divisions in Athenian society that require a conscious effort as well as craft skill to overcome (for women as weavers, see Chapter 6, this volume). The image of the skilled politician as weaver of the social fabric would be taken up decades later by Plato, who used it as an analogy for the work of the statesman in his dialogue of that name, concerning the ideal politician who could create a stable society able to incorporate citizens of different character while avoiding stasis (Blondell 2005; Lane 1997). Athens took some time to recover from the disaster of the Sicilian Expedition, which led within a couple of years to political breakdown. After Alcibiades himself had turned traitor to the democracy (allegedly describing it to an audience of Spartans as “acknowledged folly”: Thuc. 6.89), and had helped foment an actual outbreak of in part physically violent stasis, he had then—arguably—contributed quite significantly, by dereliction as much as commission, to Athens’ eventual defeat by Sparta in 404. That defeat spelled a further bout of stasis culminating in the temporary cessation of dēmokratia and its replacement, enforced by a Spartan garrison, of dunasteia: that is, rule by a small, non-responsible, ultra-oligarchic council. So vicious was their rule— happily, only about one year long—that they earned themselves the title of the Thirty Tyrants (Krentz 1982). Our main contemporary source for these events, Xenophon’s history, emphasizes cultural elements in the story of the Thirty’s rise and fall. Xenophon illustrates the characters involved and their political stances: Theramenes, Thrasybulus, and Critias. Each is portrayed in a way that illuminates his political choices. In the case of Theramenes, Xenophon notes cultural analogies drawn by Theramenes and his critics. Theramenes’ political flexibility, as a mover of the 411 oligarchy but opponent of the Thirty, had earned him the nickname of “stage boot” (kothornos, which could be worn on either foot; Xen., Hell. 2.3.47). But when the Thirty removed him from the citizen roll, often a prelude

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to exile or worse, Theramenes demonstrated his strength. First he sought sanctuary at an altar; the Thirty had him dragged away, thus demonstrating their impiety. Finally, he was sent hemlock to drink, and responded by drinking an ironical toast to Critias, the tyrants’ leader, and playing the game kottabos with the dregs—as if he were at a homoerotic symposium. Xenophon uses further speeches to set out a view of the cultural consensus and shared experience that was thought likely to ward off stasis. As the warring sides reach the final battle, he employs as his mouthpiece a figure with religious authority, Cleocritus, hereditary herald of the Eleusinian Mysteries (in which most Athenians were initiated). He calls for the Athenians to unite rather than drive each other into exile, invoking their communal experiences of religion, education, festivals, and warfare, and he castigates the Thirty for bringing about civil war: “there can be nothing more shameful than this, nothing more unbearable, more unholy and hateful to gods and men alike” (Xen., Hell. 2.4.22, trans. Warner 1966). The final battle between democratic loyalists and the oligarchic ultras was fought in 403 bce between the (oligarchic) Men of the City and the (democratic) Men of the port city of Piraeus. A reconciliation agreement or General Amnesty (a process of “not-remembering”) was concluded, with all the appropriate religious ceremony and ritual. The Athenians returned to being a democracy, provided the victorious democrats observed the Spartans’ emphatic condition that they did not exact condign punishment on their oligarchic enemies and tormentors. The only exceptions to that provision were the Thirty and their immediate cohorts. Remarkably, perhaps, that amnesty was generally observed (there were breaches) and indeed provided the basis for a stasis-free renewal of dēmokratia at Athens for a further eight decades (Shear 2011; Strauss 1986; Wolpert 2002). Tyranny, however, never quite died out as a Greek mode of rule. It had peaked between about 600 and 550 bce, but the Persians had encouraged its recrudescence as they expanded to take in the eastern Greek world of Asia Minor and prolonged its active life within their sphere down to the early fifth century (Rhodes 2019). It was, however, in the “new world” of western Greece that it really enjoyed an almost unbroken run from the late sixth century bce onward, especially at the richest and most populous city of all, Syracuse. A democratic “interlude” had been observed there during the second half of the fifth century, but from 405 bce first Dionysius I and then his son established a specifically anti-democratic tyrant dynasty, exploiting class divisions within the Syracusan citizen population, and between Syracuse and other Greek and nonGreek inhabitants of Sicily (Finley 1979; Lewis 1994). On the northeastern marches of Hellenism in the second quarter of the fourth century Clearchus, a former pupil of the notably anti-democratic Plato, did likewise at Herakleia Pontike (“On the Black Sea”). In old Greece of the

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mainland, one Jason from Thessalian Pherae offered a model of tyranny in the 360s and 350s on which the hereditary kings of the Macedonians, Philip II and his son Alexander the Great, could shape their own autocratic rules. Philip moreover used the establishment and support of tyrannies elsewhere in central and southern Greece, for example on Euboea, as an instrument of his imperial rule. It was thus only a matter of time, should Philip establish his military control unchallengeably, before democracy in any form in all mainland Greece would be under mortal threat. Such was the background and occasion of the passage at Athens, then still— just—a democracy, of the Law of Eucrates in 336 (RO 79; Blanshard 2004; see Figure 1.1, and Chapter 1). The Law was a sort of Athenian anticipation of a Roman measure to be discussed below, the senatus consultum ultimatum (SCU). It absolved in advance from a charge of murder any Athenian who as it were took the law into his own hands, legitimately, and killed a would-be tyrant. Immediately, the Athenians, together with the Thebans, had suffered in 338 a catastrophic defeat by Philip and Alexander on the battlefield of Chaeronea. The Macedonians followed up by depriving Thebes of its democracy, replacing it with an oligarchy, and imposing on the city a Macedonian garrison, a “fetter” to ensure good, pro-Macedonian order (RO 76). When that coercive measure failed to prevent a Theban rebellion in 335, Alexander simply had Thebes physically destroyed—with the exception of its religious shrines and a house that had once been occupied by the patriotic praise-poet Pindar (Arr., Anab. 1.9). Athens, however, and in deliberate contrast, was favored by Philip and Alexander both by not having its (democratic) political constitution abrogated, or even tampered with, and by not having a garrison imposed. The very real threat of actual tyranny was, however, perceived and feared by the vast majority of the Athenians. No less importantly, by passing a specifically anti-tyrant law, on the proposal of the aptly named Eucrates (eu-kratēs, “he who uses his strength to do good” or “who is well endowed with might”), the Athenians symbolically reminded themselves of and wrapped themselves in the founding charter myth of the democracy, the myth of the Tyrannicides. Athens was never conquered by Alexander of Macedon, and the Athenians refused to join in general revolt against his rule led by Sparta in 331/330. But immediately after Alexander’s early death in 323 they did rebel, with catastrophic political consequences. Alexander’s vice-regent Antipater following victory by land and sea did then put an end to Athens’ post-403 dēmokratia. At the outset, in 322/321 Antipater replaced the existing Athenian democracy with a timocratic (census-based) oligarchy, disenfranchising at a stroke between a third and a quarter of the citizenry and making many thousands of them exiles (Wallace 2018). However, while the balance between polis government and monarchical intervention was not fixed and stable, the term dēmokratia came to be applied to

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civic self-government within the framework of a broader monarchy. Athens fell under the sway of the Macedonian kingdom of the Antigonids, and dēmokratia mutated in accordance with a process begun already in the 330s and 320s into something far less genuinely mass-popular democratic so far as the eligibility for and the exercise of actual everyday control of the organs of governance and power were concerned (Habicht 1997; see also Chapter 10, this volume). In that respect, Athens was by no means unusual in the Hellenistic period. But there were exceptions, and one of the more prominent, arguably, was the island-state of Rhodes. The very creation of the unitary city of Rhodes was relatively recent, in 408 bce, and in the struggles between Athens and Sparta, Rhodes had often taken the Spartan, non-democratic side. But in the Hellenistic period, partly because of its wealth, partly because of its location, it was able not only to be relatively independent from any monarchical power but also to exercise a degree of internal autonomy. This had led some scholars to suppose that dēmokratia at Rhodes may have had some content and teeth, above and beyond independence from external monarchical direction, but they are firmly answered by Gabrielsen’s titular formula of “naval aristocracy” (1997; for an excellent overview of the entire debate in its overall Hellenistic context, not specifically tied to Rhodes, see Müller, C. 2018). Typically, however, the term dēmokratia came to be used, or abused, in the Hellenistic era to mean a combination of freedom from direct rule by an external power and domestically the absence of monarchy or autocracy, in other words, some form of republican constitution. One corollary of this general emphasis on non-monarchical control at home was an Athenian-like preoccupation with preempting and punishing attempts at tyranny. But such attempts as were made to resist Roman expansion and domination under the banner of a relatively toothless dēmokratia—most notably in the Peloponnese during the Achaean War of 149 to 146 bce (Rosenstein 2012), and at Athens between 88 and 86 bce (Hoff and Rotroff 1997)—came to naught.

STASIS AND OLIGARCHY The theorization of forms of constitutional rule initiated in the first half of the fifth century bce, initially as a response to the emergence of dēmokratia, found its full development in the fourth-century bce political thought of Plato (428–347) and his most distinguished pupil Aristotle (384–322). In the famous dialogue of the 370s misleadingly translated as Republic (the actual Greek title was Politeia), Plato for theoretical purposes of exegesis posited in book 8 a sliding scale of moral-political declension: down from the lofty ideal of intellectual aristocracy represented by his philosopher kings through a more mundane aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy to the pit of tyranny. Like Xenophon (and probably inspiring him), Plato presented a set of character

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portraits, in which cultural consumption was one marker for the character associated with each regime type. Thus the democratic man is unable to resist the pull of contrasting desires, wavering between the poles of symposium (wild drinking party) and gymnasium (self-disciplined athletic exercise): “Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute [aulos]; at other times he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times he’s idle and neglects everything” (Pl. Resp. 8.561de, trans. Grube and Reeve 1992). In effect, the democratic man lives a life of internal stasis. Aristotle, by contrast, was a pragmatist, seeking nostrums for avoiding stasis by way of positing an ideal “middling” Polity (Arist., Pol. 4.9.1294a30– b41). Reinforcing his tolerance for democracy was his recoil from the extreme nastiness of ultra-oligarchs, some of whom swore an oath to “do as much harm as possible to the hated dēmos” (5.9.1310a8). Aristotle drew on empirical material on which to base his analysis and theory. Apart from the stasis that increasingly disfigured the Greek world during and at the end of the AthenoPeloponnesian War, we might single out the extreme mayhem at democratic Argos in 370 reported by the Sicilian Greek compiler Diodorus in his firstcentury Library of History (15.44). Argive democrats killed between 1,200 and 1,500 oligarchs, not with military weapons but with clubs, giving skutalismos (clubbing) an altogether bad name. It was a sign of the times that Philip II of Macedon, once he had become master of Greece, in 338 formally outlawed stasis under the terms of his pro-oligarchic (and pro-tyrannical), anti-democratic League of Corinth dispensation (RO 76). By contrast, Alexander did nothing to prevent, indeed seems deliberately to have provoked, stasis by his illegal proclamation of an Exiles Decree in 324, forcing the Greek cities under his sway to receive back their political exiles willy-nilly: a classic case of divide and rule exacerbated by having the Decree promulgated at the panhellenic religious festival of the Olympic Games (RO 101).

STASIS IN ATHENIAN CULTURE We have touched above on theoretical and practical connections between stasis and democracy outside Athens. But it was at Athens above all others that democracy was so insinuated into public and popular political culture that its abrogation provoked an existential crisis. The plays performed at Athens’ main religious festivals since the late sixth century were always potentially political, but those staged during the turmoil of the late stages of the Peloponnesian War with its two oligarchic counterrevolutions show a deep concern with the city’s political well-being. For one cultural way in which the Athenians came to terms with stasis in the fourth as well as the fifth century was through the public deployment of civic myth, especially within the political and religious as well as dramatic space of the

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FIGURE 8.4  Orestes as a heroic figure associated with democracy. Vase from Paestum, southern Italy, c. 340 bce. 80.AE.155.1. Getty Museum Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

theatre. Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Orestes (Figure 8.4)—those three are just a sample of the Big Three Athenian tragedians’ central focus on a theatre not only of cruelty in general but of stasis in the form of outright civil war. The Athenians and some non-Athenians in the audience used these plays as an educative safety-valve militating against the temptations and horrors of war to the death against fellow citizens (Cartledge 1997). A striking example is Sophocles’ last tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus (written in 405, posthumously performed 401 bce). Ex-king Oedipus of Thebes, his crimes of patricide and incest exposed (as famously in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus of c. 430), has been expelled, his sullied rule replaced by that of his two sons (also his half-brothers … ). But they fall out and, as the audience would have known, eventually kill each other in a brutal civil war. Sophocles’ elegiac play transports

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the blinded and by then aged Oedipus, accompanied by his faithful daughter Antigone, to the relative calm and tranquillity of a suburb of Athens, Sophocles’ own native deme Colonus. There, near a sacred wood, Oedipus is received magnanimously by Athens’ king Theseus and is promised the rest that Oedipus seeks. In return for which, he promises to confer everlasting, posthumous benisons on the city and people of Athens—the city of which oligarchic Thebes, in all too present actuality as opposed to distant myth, had called for the utter annihilation just three years earlier in 404, though it had since recanted.

STASIS AND THE ROMAN REPUBLIC? There has been much debate as to whether the Roman Republic may properly be classified as “democratic” (Cartledge 2018; Hölkeskamp 2010; Millar 2002; see also Chapter 1, this volume). The loosely woven Republic was not a decision-making constitution of the same democratic kind or type as the polis of the Athenians and those of other democratically governed Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries bce. The Romans did not hold open policymaking assemblies; and they retained a status-division among citizens, between patricians and plebeians (not the same as between aristocrats and commoners: plebeians too could be “nobles”), that continued to be salient right through the Republic and into the period of the empire. In the class-struggle politics that continued to divide Greek cities on economic–political lines during the Hellenistic period,  republican Rome between 220 and 146 bce consistently took the oligarchic side (Briscoe 1967). The Greek historian Polybius (c. 200– 120 bce), analyzing the institutions he saw in Rome, identified a “democratic” component to Rome’s (in Greek terms) “mixed” politeia, both in the various formally decision-making popular assemblies and in the office of the Tribunate of the plebs, but he overestimated its significance (Polyb. 6.11; Walbank 1943). Indeed, it is arguable that the lack of a sufficiently significant democratic counterweight to the aristocratic-oligarchic power of the plutocratic Senate caused the failure of the Republic due to its internal political and socioeconomic contradictions in the middle years and second half of the first century bce. The people, whether seen as a “crowd” or “mob” (Brunt 1971; Millar 1998; North 1990), played a key role in this transformation, but as passive tools rather than active agents. Any movement toward genuine democratic power-wielding either was cunningly bought off by co-opting any potentially dangerous popular leaders into the established aristocratic-oligarchic elite or was vigorously, violently, even illegally suppressed. Conversely, in democratic Athens there was no “mob,” and it was only anti-democrats who saw the dēmos as a ochlos (crowd). One Roman politician of the late Republic who may—the evidence is not conclusive—have been inspired by Greek democratic teachings to try to reverse

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FIGURE 8.5  Joseph-Benoît Suvée (1743–1807), Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, 1795. Photo: Getty Images.

the downward flow was C. (Gaius) Sempronius Gracchus. He was by birth a plebeian aristocrat and by avocation a radical reformer, who followed in the footsteps of, and for his pains suffered the exact same fate as, his elder brother Tiberius: assassination in the midst of an uprising that his enemies managed to have classified retrospectively as treasonous sedition (Figure 8.5). Both Tiberius and Gaius had themselves elected—by the usual method of the (nondemocratic) group vote, conducted in the Plebeian Assembly—to the corporate office of the ten annual Tribunes of the Plebs. Tiberius, assassinated in 133, seems to have been chiefly a single-issue politician. Gaius had a far wider program, which he had begun to implement as tribune elected for 123 and reelected for 122. To accomplish it, he seems to have employed classic, populist—in this case plebeian-populist—rhetoric. While his writings do not survive, we have some references to his speeches (Van der Blom 2016: 290–5). These suggest that Gaius resorted to democratic theatre. Conventionally, invited speakers at the occasional (not statutory) issuerelated public assemblies known as contiones had spoken from the Rostra in the Forum with their backs to the Senate House, so that the audience of ordinary voters in front of them were obliged to look up to the seat of organized

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republican political power, the Senate House. Gaius, however, disregarding the Romans’ prized mos maiorum (custom of the ancestors), had the Rostra placed at the opposite end of the Forum, so that spectators had to turn their backs, literally, on the Senate House and by metaphorical extension coldshoulder the power of the Senate. Gaius’ untraditional policies got him reelected to the Tribunate for a second successive year, itself something considered constitutionally incorrect; but they also stoked violent Senatorial opposition not just to him and his program. Accusations flew of his aiming at “kingship” (anathema to republican Roman sentiment since 509) and destroying the res publica (literally, the “thing of the Populus,” or People in the sense of the entire collectivity of Roman citizens as a whole). Tribunes, however, were by law sacrosanct, their bodies inviolable. That had not, of course, prevented the murder of Tiberius in 133, but that had been dangerously unprecedented, and a special Senatorial judicial commission had to be convened to adjudge retrospectively that he had been iure caesus (lawfully slaughtered). Well, of course it had so judged, but that monstrously false and illegal judgment had itself aroused powerful opposition. So, against Gaius his Senatorial opponents felt the need to cover themselves in advance: they waited until his second term had ended and he was again in 121 a privatus (private citizen) before they passed, again unprecedentedly, the SCU or Ultimate Decree of the Senate, in effect declaring martial law, and had Gaius murdered as an enemy of the state. Actually, the Senate had no inherent legal right to do any such thing: it was not a law-making body, and it was a cardinal principle of Roman law that a court of law in which the life of a citizen was at stake could be established only by the Populus—the “P” part of the republican constitutional formula SPQR (standing for Senate And Roman People). Cicero and Varro agreed that the careers of the Gracchi brothers had split the Roman people and the Republic down the middle. But the reactionary Cicero, instead of placing the blame firmly where it actually lay, with a diehard minority of reactionary Roman Senators (what contemporary and pro-Caesar politician-historian Sallust dubbed the pauci potentes or “the few potentates,” Histories 1.12) opined that the very office of the Tribunate was “pestiferous” and one that—unlike the magistracies, which gave automatic entry to the governing Senate—had been “born in and for sedition”! (Cic., Leg. 19b). Gaius therefore, in the ultra-oligarchic Ciceronian view, received his predictable and rightful deserts. What Cicero chose to ignore, however, was the twofold crisis of the Roman Republic: first, a crisis of representation—large swathes of the citizen population were simply not counted politically; and, second, a crisis of governance—the self-centered ruling elite had made the fatal error of identifying the “liberty” of the free res publica as meaning only their own exclusive, selfish freedom to act as they pleased.

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CONCLUSION The experience of Rome was one reason why James Madison and his fellow Founding Fathers of the United States’ postrevolutionary constitution, unlike some advocates of the French Revolution, were resolutely opposed to anything that resembled ancient Greek-style, direct-rule democracy (Cartledge 2018: 293–8; Kloppenberg 2016). Talk of “democracy” in the 1650s in England soon after its own Civil Wars of the 1640s had not helped. Ancient Greek and Roman culture wars over democracy had their legacy (Cartledge 2018: 283–7). Thus “democracy” generally retained the bad name it had acquired since Roman antiquity into the modern era. Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas has defined civil war as “armed combat taking  place within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties that are subject to a common authority at the outset of hostilities,” and in doing so has challenged the conventional view of violence in civil wars as irrational (Kalyvas 2006: 5). For once, ancients and moderns might agree. Aristotle at least would have done so, if only with great reluctance. While Aristotle argued that the aim of civil society was human happiness and flourishing, his analysis of the cities he knew showed that civil conflict flowed from inequality and competition, constant features of life within the polis. But as the Roman Republic showed, civil strife was not limited to full democracy but also afflicted regimes that had adopted complex political arrangements intended to balance class interests and prevent civil strife.

CHAPTER NINE

International Relations CAROL ATACK WITH PAUL CARTLEDGE

INTRODUCTION The fraught relations between independent Greek city-states of classical antiquity have long inspired those concerned with the study of relationships between modern nation-states. Were Greek cities an “anarchical society” of free and equal cities, anticipating Hedley Bull’s model of sovereign states developing a stabilizing order not necessarily maintained through formal institutions (Bull 2012; Eckstein 2006; Low 2007: 22–30)? Should their attempts to develop international institutions and to cooperate be a model for relationships between modern states, as they were for those, such as classicist Gilbert Murray, arguing for international cooperation after the destruction of the Great War in Europe (Wilson 2011)? Or does conflict between cities in the ancient world show that these relationships can be reduced to a simple formula such as the “Thucydides trap,” as Graham Allison identified the pattern of events that led to the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (Allison 2015)?1 And did democratic regimes conduct their international affairs in a different way from nondemocratic ones? This chapter argues, using classical democratic Athens and its network of relationships with other cities and states as its main focus, that the cultural connections which underpinned relationships between Greek cities should be read alongside realist interpretations. They defuse zero-sum analyses such as the “Thucydides trap” and underpin the complex of traditions, institutions, and processes through which Greek cities managed their interactions. Specific features of the culture of ancient democracy and its immersion in the ritual

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practices of ancient cities influenced the way in which cities conducted their relationships both with each other and with individuals. That is not to say that relations built on shared culture or the acknowledgment of difference could not be marked by the manipulation of power differentials, or that political myths could not be used to disguise or soften hard-nosed political maneuvers. During this period Thucydides has Pericles characterize Athens’ relationship with other cities as “like a tyranny” (Thuc. 2.63.2), insofar as Athens needed to maintain a tyrant-like grip on its alliance. Yet what moderns call the Delian League, the originally mainly defensive alliance on which Athenian imperialism rested, was founded on myths of cultural inheritance shared by the Ionian Greeks (Fragoulaki 2013). The connection between Athenian democracy and imperialism is a complex one; the Delian League, and Athens’ role within it, appear to have been both institutionally and pragmatically novel (Low 2007). This chapter therefore explores the cultural institutions and shared stories that mediated relationships between cities, and the processes through which independent Greek cities created an “imagined community,” in Benedict Anderson’s formulation, which connected them (Anderson 1991). It considers the origin stories through which such connections were made, the material culture through which polis identity was mediated and displayed both at home and at Panhellenic religious sanctuaries, and the performance culture of fifthcentury Athens, which created spaces for displaying and questioning Athenian democratic culture. It also considers how these cultural processes structured relationships with communities identified as non-Greek, both Persian and others. In the later, Hellenistic period, civic myth and foundation stories continued to provide a vehicle for the expression of relationships between political entities. Historiography became a means of building and reaffirming connections, by rooting them in a shared mythicized past told through local histories beginning with foundation myths (Gehrke 2001; Thomas 2019). City-states, especially newer foundations in the eastern parts of the Greek world, sought to construct relationships and to ground these in a shared past. However, the model of international relations as the interaction of equal societies competing for hegemony fails to account for a significant aspect of community interactions between cities and villages, on the one hand, and the monarchical or imperial structures imposed over them, on the other. The chapter concludes with a survey of democracies’ negotiations with dominating powers, from grants of honorary citizenship to the acknowledgment of the deification of rulers.

CONSTRUCTING GREEK IDENTITIES Democratic Athens created its own identity through telling stories about its past interactions with other communities. Although Athenian self-mythologization preceded the development of democracy, stories were retold and adapted

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with different emphases, and different stories were foregrounded for different purposes. The adaptability of myth enabled communities to use it to express shared values and hopes for future cooperation through the narration of past events. Cities used the imagery of gods and heroes as a form of branding, and their stories powered the rhetoric of negotiations. Athens represented itself in inter-polis spaces, notably major religious sanctuaries such as Delphi, through images of its patron deity Athena and its hero Theseus. Political leaders appeal to shared culture and experience, and to connections narrated in foundation stories and myth. In a famous passage with wideranging resonance Herodotus depicts Athenian envoys in the winter of 480/479 appealing in their response to Spartan concerns to shared Hellenic cults and culture, when they assert their willingness to continue to fight the Persians and absolute refusal even to consider giving in, let alone going over to the Persian side: “Again, there is the Greek people—the community of blood and language, temples and ritual, and our common customs; if Athens were to betray all this, it would not be well done” (Hdt. 8.144, trans. Marincola and Sélincourt 2003, modified).

PATRONS, SYMBOLS, AND CULTS The iconography of patron gods and heroes contributed key building blocks to civic identity. Athens was strongly associated with its patron goddess Athena, and her image communicated the city’s political identity at home and abroad, as in the relief image carved above the text of the treaty with Samos (RO 2/OR 191 = IG II2 1, cover image; also discussed in the Introduction and Chapter  6, this volume). The use of gods, heroes, and their symbols as proxies for cities is a fundamental aspect of international relations in the world of the polis and a reminder that these relationships are as intertwined with religion as the internal politics of the city were (see Chapter 5, this volume). The dexiōsis or handshake of Athena and Hera depicted on the Samos decree communicates important elements of the relationship established by the decree text. In representing each city by its poliadic goddess, it accords high and equal status to both parties to the transaction. As we shall see below, cultural elements played a large part in the formal institutionalization of agreements.

THE ATHENIAN GREAT DEEDS Athens constructed its identity through telling stories about its interactions with other cities. The core of Athenian political identity was expressed at events such as the public commemoration of war dead in a epitaphios (funeral oration), which retold stories of the great deeds in which the Athenians had repelled invaders and protected other Greeks (Loraux [1993] 2006: 43–119). This institution was said to have begun soon after the Persian Wars (Diod. Sic. 11.33.3), although

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FIGURE 9.1  In Athenian art Amazons, mythicised women warriors, stood in for the city’s enemies, especially non-Greeks. Amazonomachy scenes became surrogates for depictions of war, as on this 450 bce Attic red-figure vase. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 06.286.86.

a later date seems more likely; as Nicole Loraux showed ([1993] 2006), the institution is deeply connected with the institutionalization of democracy during the fifth century. The funeral speeches occur, either in full or through brief allusion, in many genres of Athenian literature. Besides the surviving funeral speeches themselves (Lysias 2; Demosthenes 60; Hyperides 6) and other forms of rhetoric (Isocrates, Areopagiticus, Helen, Panathenaicus, Panegyricus), they are represented also in historiography and philosophical dialogue. Pericles’ Funeral Speech appears in Thucydides’ History (2.37–46) (although the historian has Pericles pass over the ancient stories in favor of the more recent past); and in Plato’s Menexenus, apparently responding to Thucydides’ version, Socrates recites a funeral speech that he claims was actually written by Pericles’ partner Aspasia.2 The deeds cited provide the background for many surviving tragic dramas, particularly from the time of the Peloponnesian War, when asserting Athenian identity

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became part of the war effort (Euripides, Suppliant Women, Erechtheus). Later in the chapter we will survey the presentation of international relations on the Athenian stage. All instances, whatever their genre, show how interactions with other cities and peoples, especially through military conflict, were central to Athenian democratic ideology and the Athenian political imaginary. While the primary audience for these stories was the Athenian citizenry, they were also used to assert Athenian preeminence over non-Athenians in a range of contexts. Herodotus gives one example in an internal Greek debate before the decisive battle of Plataea (479 bce), in which the Persian land forces were defeated (Hdt. 9.26–7). The Tegeans (from a small city north of and allied to Sparta in the Peloponnese) and the Athenians disputed whose troops should be positioned on the left wing of the battle-line (the Spartans as supreme leaders inevitably occupied the right). The Tegean representatives based their claim on the story of their ancestor Echemus’ deeds in resisting the Heraclids’ return to the Peloponnese, invoking an important foundation myth; this past service had granted them continuing privileges in joint campaigns by Peloponnesian forces. The Athenians respond first with a summary of the deeds which showed that their contribution, in assisting the return of the Heraclids, outweighed that of the Tegeans, but also by downplaying the significance of the past for arraying troops in the present. While the historicity of this debate is unproven, it illustrates many aspects of the role of political myth in negotiating relationships between cities. These stories operate as exemplars of Athenian values and cultural and military leadership. They also connect Athenian myth to mythical stories and cycles associated with other cities. The story of Athens’ support for the Argives is an episode in a story in which other cities become embroiled in Thebes’ internal conflicts through the marriage alliances of their ruling families (Lys. 2.7–10; Eur., Suppliant Women; Isoc., Helen). When Eteocles, ruler of Thebes, defeats his brother Polyneices and his Argive forces, Athenian intervention enables the Argives to retrieve their dead and perform the usual funerary and mourning rites. This story establishes relationships between Athens and Argos, often retold as alliances between cities shifted, and also with Thebes. It also shows the Athenians acting in accordance with religious custom and the norms of ancient warfare, enabling the proper burial of the dead after war, a concern that features in both historiography and drama (this episode is dramatized in Euripides’ Suppliant Women, most likely performed around 423, with its strong support for democracy; Sophocles’ earlier Antigone, probably from the 440s, dramatizes a related story of Theban denial of proper burial). It shows Athens to be effective in policing Greek cultural norms, perhaps a reassurance to its allies, as the historical city of Argos became in the 460s. The pages of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon show that post-battle agreements for the retrieval of the dead were a common practice. The Athenians’

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failure to observe such a truce between the Thebans and the Plataeans (431/430 bce) marked the early stages of the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 2.6); a couple of years later the Athenians sought such a truce after being routed in a battle outside the besieged city of Spartolus, in which they lost their generals (Thuc. 2.79.7). The second such story was that of the Athenian support for the return of the Heraclids to the Peloponnese, an episode that was thought to have taken place just after the Trojan War and has been seen as a turning point as regards the conceptualization of the past between myth and history. This story became a key one through which Athens could assert continuing superiority over Sparta (Atack 2018). It, too, emerged as a theme of Athenian tragedy during the Peloponnesian War, as for instance in Euripides’ Children of Heracles. When Thucydides’ Pericles delivers the official funeral speech after the first year’s campaigning of the Peloponnesian War, he disdains the repetition of these stories (Thuc. 2.36.4) and offers an alternative account of Athenian difference. This is somewhat like Herodotus’ Athenians at Plataea asserting the city’s recent actions as a claim to hegemony, only this time the focus is on culture rather than specific actions. Thucydides had earlier composed speeches (such as 1.76– 8), in which Athenians outline the basis for their imperial policy. His Pericles follows suit by emphasizing Athenian difference in terms that sharply contrast democratic Athens and authoritarian Sparta. Thucydides is not an uncritical herald of Athenian supremacy, however. He suggests that both the words and actions of the Athenians call their ideology into question. As he depicts them, Athens’ treatment of the defeated, pro-Spartan Melians suggests dangerous overconfidence and arrogance, and the Sicilian Expedition’s difficulties and its disastrous end are used to bring out structural as well as personal weaknesses in democratic governance (Thuc. 2.65.12; 7.86–8.1). Thucydides’ disenchanted analysis does not suggest approval of the Athenians, as they assert their power over the hapless Melians with the infamous claim that “You understand [that] judgements about justice are relevant only between those with an equal power to enforce it, and that the possibilities are defined by what the strong do and the weak accept” (Thuc. 5.89, trans. Mynott 2013). Thucydides’ “Melian Dialogue,” like Euripides’ Trojan Women, a play that appeared soon after the Athenian defeat of Melos, is best read as a critique of imperial overconfidence. Thucydides immediately follows the Melian episode with the case study of the Sicilian Expedition (as a major contributory cause of Athens’ ultimate defeat in the Peloponnesian War). Again, Thucydides uses speeches to analyze the problems of democracy, but through depicting a debate in the democratic assembly of Syracuse. The warnings of Hermocrates about the “incredible” (Thuc. 6.33.1) possibility of an Athenian attack are deflected by Athenagoras’ claims that the Athenian threat is not a real one (6.36–7). Thucydides shows Syracuse responding differently from Athens; where Athens

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acted on the democratic vote for the Sicilian expedition, an unnamed Syracusan general steers the city away from agreeing to ignore the Athenian threat (6.41). The city prepares well and ultimately defeats the Athenians.

GREEKS AND OTHERS Two of the Athenian deeds involved the defeat of invading forces, the Amazons (Lys. 2.4–6; Hdt. 9.27.4) and Eleusinian forces led by Eumolpus, the leader of a priestly family, represented in some versions as a non-Greek Thracian (Lycurg., Leoc. 98; Isoc., Panath. 68–9). The more recent conflict between the (handful of resisting) Greeks and the forces of the mighty Persian Empire was woven into these ancient stories through the assimilation of the Persians to mythical enemies, particularly the Amazons; the Athenian critique of Persian culture as soft, luxurious, and greedy, and therefore emasculating, enabled parallels with the mythicized (and admittedly quite fierce) women warriors. Amazons are often depicted dressed in similar clothing to Persians in scenes of battle against them (Figure 9.1). Other depictions of Persians, such as the notorious Eurymedon vase (Figures 9.2 and 9.3), assert Athenian masculinity over Persian submissiveness (Davidson 1998; Smith 1999).

FIGURE 9.2  Eurymedon vase, Attic red-figure oinochoe, c. 460 bce (side a): Man wearing a cloak advances, erect penis in hand, saying “I am Eurymedon.” Hamburg, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe: 1981.173.

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FIGURE 9.3  Eurymedon vase (side b): a crouching man in oriental dress. Hamburg, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe: 1981.173.

But the story of the unsuccessful Amazon invasion of Athens, represented on the Parthenon, had other symbolic uses too. The Amazon community becomes an “inverse” of Athens (Vidal-Naquet 1986: 208; cf. Cartledge 2002b: 94–5), an imagined enemy and cultural opposite. Athenian resident (originally Syracusan) Lysias offers a critique of Amazon political culture, overconfident in its enslavement of nearby peoples until the encounter with Athenian forces enforces gender norms, exposes Amazon feminine weakness and leaves them open to defeat (Lys. 2.6); this is a view of the Persians that appears in a diverse array of other sources, even Plato’s Laws (3.694d–695b). Importantly, these stories also guided interactions with political entities outside the Greek polis system. Conflict between the Persian Empire and Greek cities was seen in cultural terms, not least because of the Persian destruction of Athens’ acropolis and its temples in 480 and 479 bce. But the Persian Wars also supplied a more immediate example of Athens providing help to fellow Greeks, an exemplar that could be deployed in many situations, from the Athenians at Plataea asserting their primacy on the battlefield, to Isocrates’ numerous

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invocations in the fourth century of the Marathon generation a century earlier, as being the ideal Athenians and a reason for other Greeks to follow Athens in a renewed Panhellenic campaign against the Persians (Isoc., Paneg., Panath.).

TREATIES AND LEAGUES Treaties such as those between Athens and Samos were a key element of international relations between cities in this period. They established frameworks within which peaceful exchanges could be conducted, and conflict avoided between the parties concerned, and as in the Delian League, they confirmed mutual support against external aggression. Typical treaties expressed friendship between citizens, granted specific permissions to them, and set out the religious activities that would support and implement the agreement, and the legal processes needed to deal with any breach of it. Political alliances were usually cemented through the recognition of a past relationship that enabled the current alliance to be grounded in the acknowledgment of kinship (Fragoulaki 2013). As Maria Fragoulaki has shown, Thucydides documents such connections between cities, which play a major role in the shifting alliances between Sicilian cities and mainland Greek “mother” cities, and were to be a dominant theme of Hellenistic interstate relations. Because treaties were often formalized by setting up inscriptions on stone confirming their details, many are available to us as primary sources, enabling us to understand how treaties were instantiated through ritual and framed in myth. Such inscriptions give invaluable direct access to ancient decision-making and the way in which decisions were communicated, although the terms of treaties were by no means always observed. The fragmentary nature of many surviving inscriptions, along with difficulties in dating them, also complicates their use as historical documents, although recent scholarship has established some more or less secure parameters.3 The Athenian administration of certain kinds of court cases, for example, depended on the effectiveness of the Athenian democratic jury courts; but pseudo-Xenophon, the pamphleteer sometimes known as the “Old Oligarch,” suggests, in one of his more detailed examples, that the amount of business to be transacted at Athens, together with closure of the courts for festivals, created delays that made pursuing justice in Athens difficult for subjects of other cities, even when treaties had mandated that they do so ([Xen.], Ath. Pol. 3.1–9). After the defeat of the invading Persians in 480/479 bce, there was a fractious peace on the Greek mainland, although the Athenians questioned the Spartans’ intentions toward Persia. Thucydides represents this as a motive for their foundation of an alliance with both defensive and aggressive aims—liberating Greek cities from Persian control and protecting them from further incursions, and undertaking some raids against Persian territories in revenge (Thuc.

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1.95.1–97.1). What has become known as the Delian League was founded in 478/477 bce, with the mainly Ionian cities swearing alliance and recognizing thereby Athenian hegemony (Thucydides asserts in his introduction, 1.2, that these cities were originally Athenian colonies, a kinship relation that Euripides would expand on in his patriotic play Ion, discussed below). The League also became a primary vehicle through which Athens’ democratic culture was transmitted, although the Athenians’ sometimes overbearing leadership also led to accusations that democratic Athens was a tyrant to its subject cities, oppressed as they were through the extraction of tribute, the imposition of garrisons and other imperialist infringements of their notional freedom and equality. That cities paid to participate in their own defence was an unusual feature of the arrangement. When Athens moved the league’s treasury from Delos to the Athenian Acropolis in 454 bce, the financial benefits to the Athenians became more clear. Wealth from imperial tribute undoubtedly played a part in the flourishing of Athenian culture under the democracy, although the size of its contribution to the efficient working of Athenian democratic institutions should not be exaggerated (Cartledge 2018). The Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians describes the oaths sworn by the parties and the ceremony in which lumps of iron were dropped into the sea symbolizing intended permanence ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 23.5). This, and the location of the league’s treasury in the sacred site of Delos, show how international agreements were framed through myth and reinforced through cult. But alongside the ceremonial were tough negotiations about contributions paid to Athens as leader of the league, in the form of money and ships. Evidence from treaties in the years following the foundation of the league show isolated instances of Athens imposing on, for example, the Ionian city of Erythrae (probably in the late 450s) democratic political institutions, such as a council, and mandating honorific attendance at the Athenian festival of the Great Panathenaea (OR 121 = IG I3 14; OR 122 = IK Erythrai und Klazomenai 2; Cartledge 2018: 25–7; Osborne 2000). Individual councilors were required to follow policies supportive of democracy and hostile to anti-democratic elements of the city, who were in exile not least because of their having consorted with Persian elements. Throughout the surviving treaty texts the Athenian voice is a collective one: it is that of the dēmos (the people), requiring loyalty both to Athenians and the wider alliance. Thus Erythraeans, for example, are required to swear that “I shall not defect from the mass of the Athenians or of the allies of the Athenians myself […] not shall I take back any single one of the exiles” (OR 121.23–6). A slightly later treaty with another subject city, Chalcis on Euboea, specifies details of taxation and the justice system—which taxes should be paid in Chalcis, which in Athens, and which cases were to be tried there (IG I3 40 = OR 131, 446/445 bce). The terms of the agreement restrict Chalcis from administering its own

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justice system, requiring them to send many cases to Athens no doubt in part to protect pro-Athenian democrats. The treaty contains performative elements, requiring the citizens of Chalcis to perform sacrifices as advised by oracles and to swear specified oaths. Other treaties, such as that agreed between Athens and Samos (IG I3 48 = OR 139, 439 bce), specify similar agreements: the number of the ships that the Samians should supply and the hostages who will act as surety for the agreement. But the business arrangement is only part of the agreement. The fragmentary text of the decree includes oaths to be sworn by the representatives of both parties: each swears to do good for the “people” of the cities. On the Athenian side, those swearing this oath included Pericles himself. A different form of alliance is shown in another Athenian document, which survives both in inscribed form (IG I3 83 = OR 165) and as quoted by Thucydides, who saw a copy erected at the Panhellenic sanctuary of Olympia, in the territory of Sparta’s then disaffected ally Elis (Thuc. 5.47; Hornblower 2008: 109–20). Thucydides’ text enables much detail from the treaty to be restored. This “Quadruple Alliance” treaty, dating from 420 bce, committed Athens, Argos, Mantinea, and Elea to mutual support and to permitting the movement of troops across their territories. At this point the “Peace of Nicias” (sworn in 421) was in effect, and hostilities between Athens and Sparta, who were formally related by a separate treaty, suspended; but the treaty shows some maneuvering to enable the movement of troops between Athens and the Peloponnese. In 420 both the Argives and the Eleians had democratic governments. The formalities specified for the alliance involve representatives of the cities visiting Olympia and Athens before their respective major intercity festivals, the Olympic and Panathenaic games, to swear the oaths again, renewing the alliance for another two-year period. Copies of the treaty were to be displayed in key locations in the Agora of Athens, and a bronze column erected at Olympia, simultaneously home for the Eleans and a Panhellenic site. As Polly Low notes, the treaty sworn for one hundred years failed only a couple of years later (Thuc. 5.79; Low 2017: 111) when the—now oligarchic—Argives defected to the Spartan side. As Athens again positioned itself as a defence against Spartan hegemony in the early 370s, a new set of treaties established a Second Athenian League. Polly Low notes cultural differences in the formal framing of treaties in this period (Low 2007: 217–41); while some details remain the same, the work of framing the treaty appears to have been dictated by Athenian institutions, and the oaths are sworn by the Athenians alone. Substantial sections of a copy of the foundational treaty for this league survive (RO 22 = IG II2 43, from 378 bce). Notable performative elements include the removal and destruction of earlier inscriptions establishing enmity between cities now joining the

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league. The stone stele recording this decree was set up by the statue of Zeus Eleutherios (“the Liberator”) in the Agora, and included space for the addition of the names of further cities joining the league. City names in different hands suggest that the confirmation of participants was not immediate (Rhodes and Osborne 2003: 97).

THE ECONOMY OF ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM What we translate as “empire,” as in “the Athenian empire” of the fifth century bce (more particularly from the 450s to 404), the Athenians described merely as archē (rule). And by comparison with the mighty Roman Empire, the Athenians’ empire was a rather paltry affair, as the Roman emperor Claudius pointed out (Tac., Ann. 11.24). Yet there is no doubt that Athens did have and control an alliance in such a way as to qualify as exercising empire, and economics, as is usual with empires, lay at the base and kernel of the institution. There remains a legitimate debate over the extent to which Athens used its imperial might to extend democracy as a set principle of governance or as a nostrum of ideological correctness—as opposed to the few certain cases where Athens imposed or enforced democracy on an ally following an attempt at secession: the cases of Erythrae in the 450s (above) or Mytilene in the 420s come swiftly to mind. Such occasions might also be dealt with by resettling territory with Athenian citizens through the process of cleruchy (see Chapter 4, this volume). On the other hand, there is no room for doubting that there was a direct connection between Athens’ economic imperialism and the development or expression of its own democracy, as for instance in the exploitation of the Attic silver mines in Laureion through slave labor; these produced the silver from which was struck the dominant imperial currency and the currency that went, for instance, to pay jurors in the People’s courts from the 450s on. But there does remain an uncertainty in one particularly magnificent instance— the so-called “Periclean” building-program that produced a whole cluster of major public buildings, both secular and religious, on and around the Acropolis between c. 450 and 410. Central to this argument, as it was to the overall program itself, was the building that we—though not the Athenians—call the Parthenon. (That term originally applied only to the central chamber in which the cult-statue of Athena the Virgin or Parthenos was housed.) Critics in antiquity, as in more recent times, have been happy to accuse the Athenians whom Pericles persuaded to vote for this program and so for the Parthenon of ripping off their—subject— allies. Actually, as Lisa Kallet above all has demonstrated (Kallet-Marx 1989), the connection was not so exclusive, direct, or simple. Allied tribute was but one and not the most significant of the income streams directed to funding this magnificent, democratic structure.

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THE ROLE OF INDIVIDUALS The treaties examined so far construct formal relationships between Athens and communities. But the democratic city also noted relationships with individuals from other communities, both monarchical rulers and leading citizens who had provided specific support or benefits to Athens. This recognition of individual merit was perhaps in conflict with the collectivism of democracy, and can be paralleled in developments in the rhetoric of the official epitaphios as the fourth century bce progressed. Thus Isocrates’ later versions of the funeral speech stories attribute the Athenians’ deeds to Theseus rather than to the collective of citizens, and the funeral speech of Hyperides in the 330s commemorates the dead general Leosthenes rather than unnamed Athenians en masse. Honors to individuals often formed part of negotiations for the support of their states, adding a cultural element to power politics; they also recognized military support for Athenian projects. Such relationships were affirmed through decrees conferring honors commemorated with inscriptions, and sometimes with an associated statue. The Athenians began to honor individuals in this way in the fourth century bce. Two early examples are decrees honoring Dionysius I and Evagoras (RO 10 = IG II2 18and RO 11 = IG II2 20, both from 394/393 bce). Dionysius was tyrant of Syracuse, the city that had defeated Athens twenty years previously and was allied with Sparta; although the details of the honors offered by the Council are lost, it can be seen as an attempt at building a new alliance. Evagoras, ruler (“king”) of Salamis on Cyprus, a city that had been dominated by Persia, had previously been honored by the Athenians in 411 and granted honorary citizenship, but the occasion for this new award appears to have been his role alongside the Athenian general Conon in a naval victorious battle against the Spartans at Cnidus in 394. This time Evagoras was honored with a crown and a statue, setting a pattern for many such awards. Although monarchical rulers were to some extent a special case, Athenian diplomacy was conducted by building relationships with key individuals through the widespread and long-standing practice of proxenia, described by William Mack as “the honorific system of inter-polis intercourse that characterized the Greek world” (Mack 2015: 26; Gerolymatos [1986] 2019). Mack explores this intricate web of military, social, and economic relationships constructed by proxeny to argue against realist interpretations of interstate behavior (Mack 2015: 196–200). He also stresses the performative elements of proxenia and the extent to which it was a cultural as well as political institution in which the “proposal and granting of decrees of proxenia were ostentatious performances of conformity, on behalf of the whole community, to the norms of interpolis society which they thus collectively recognized” (Mack 2015: 198; cf. Gerolymatos [1986] 2019).

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The institution was not always successful; Thucydides narrates Alcibiades’ contradictory attempt to secure the role of the Spartans’ proxenos at democratic Athens (Thuc. 5.43), a role which had previously been held by members of his family. This was in the fraught context of the events of 421, which led to the quadruple alliance discussed above. Alcibiades attempted to support the Spartan hostages held prisoner at Athens since their defeat at Pylos in 425, then acted as an unofficial proxenos in the negotiations (5.45). When Alcibiades needed Spartan aid himself in 414, and did not scruple to turn traitor, he emphasized his support of Spartan interests in Athens as well as the official role held by his forefathers (6.89). The case of Alcibiades may not be typical, but it does illustrate the paradoxical position in which a proxenos might find himself as advocate within his city for that city’s enemies. Grants of proxenia were confirmed by decrees that themselves display highly formulaic language. One surviving text from Athens, dated by Osborne and Rhodes to 423 bce, grants the status of “proxenos and benefactor of the people” to Heracleides, probably of Clazomenae (OR 157 = IG II2 8); if their dating is correct (others have suggested a fourth-century date), the grant was part of a complex set of maneuvers intended to advance Athenian interests in the Peloponnesian War. Proxeny continued to be an important tool for building networks during the Hellenistic period, in which the granting of honors to important noncitizens and benefactors played an increasing role in a world conspicuously less characterized by democratic institutions. The abundant survival of decrees, and literary testimony from the historian Polybius and others, show its continuing usage. Polybius, for example, relates that during the Achaean campaign in 217 bce, the Aetolian Cleonicus of Naupactus avoided being sold into slavery because he was proxenos to the Achaeans (Polyb. 5.95.12); he went on to act as intermediary between Philip V of Macedon and the Aetolians. But the institution fell out of use as the Roman Empire transformed power structures of the Greek world, and such peer-interactions were less valuable. Honors from then on were much more likely to be decreed to the emperor and his representatives.

PANHELLENIC INSTITUTIONS At times of crisis the idea of Greek cultural community powered arguments for involvement in and commitment to defensive alliances, such as that contracted during the Persian Wars. The shared religion and culture of the Greeks took physical form in the Panhellenic sanctuaries, which housed cults common to all Greeks. These institutions played a major role in relations between cities, as neutral sites for meetings, and as opportunities to display the wealth and prestige

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of a city through buildings and dedications, and through joint participation in the administration of the sites. The most important sites held regular festivals and games attended by participants from across the Greek world. Olympia was the earliest and in terms of athletic and equestrian competition always the premier Panhellenic site; the inaugural Olympic stade (or 200-meter sprint) race was said to have been held there in the northwest Peloponnese in honor of Zeus of Mount Olympus in what we call 776 bce, and at any rate some time before 700. After Olympia, Delphi ranked second in terms of competitive sports; like the Olympics, the Pythian Games were held every four years, and from the 570s according to a regular cycle that included two other “circuit” Games, both biennial, the Isthmian at Corinth and the Nemean at Nemea. The lyric praise-poet Pindar of Thebes (c. 518–447) composed odes on commission to celebrate victors at all four festivals. Cities used this site to demonstrate their power, as did Athens in the 480s bce, when it built a “treasury” in a commanding position overlooking Delphi’s main processional route to the temple of patron god Apollo. The building housed objects dedicated within the shrine by the city, and its function was primarily political. The treasury commemorated the Athenian victories over the Persians at Marathon and in the later wars; it can thus be seen to celebrate the rise of Athenian democracy. The management of the sanctuary of Delphi was undertaken by an interpolis committee, the amphictyony. Just as the monuments of Delphi reflected inter-polis competition, the management of the site was also subject to political maneuvers. Participation in managing Delphi through the amphictyony gave cities increased access to the services of the oracle. While the operation of the oracle remains mysterious, its use by key cities enabled it to act as an information exchange. This was not always neutral; at times the site was thought to be issuing advice that favored the interests of the Persians. Not far to the west of Athens, at the city’s western frontier with Megara, lay Eleusis, the home deme of tragic playwright and Marathon veteran Aeschylus. Eleusis was most famous and memorable for being the home of one of Greece’s most important mystery cults, a site of initiation, held in honor of Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Most Athenians, it seems, were mystai (initiates), which is one reason why Aristophanes selected them to compose the principal chorus for his 405 comedy Frogs. The main idea behind initiation was to secure as happy as possible an afterlife and to avoid the postmortem, subterranean torments inflicted on such notorious miscreants as Tantalus and Sisyphus. The cult was established well before Athens became a democracy, and its chief religious officials remained drawn by heredity from two aristocratic families even after the democracy came into being. But the democracy did

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take special measures to supervise and control the cult’s material as opposed to spiritual manifestations. Donors were encouraged to be munificent, but their gifts of grain (Demeter was the grain-goddess par excellence) were taxed—for the benefit of Athenians, even though this was a cult with a truly Panhellenic following. Indeed, anyone might be initiated, slave as well as free, as long as they knew Greek well enough to take part in the—by definition secret—rituals. The small Cycladic islet of Delos had a particular association with those Greeks who belonged to the Ionian branch of the Greek family; being Ionian was partly a matter of dialect, partly of culture, especially religious culture. The Athenians were in this sense Ionians, and as such Delos held a special appeal for them. As noted, it was on Delos that the oaths of anti-Persian alliance were sworn post-Persian War in 478/477 under Athenian hegemony, and it was into the sea off Delos that the lumps of mudroi (iron) were sunk to symbolize the alliance’s intended permanence. Athens’ interventions in Delos included “purifying” the island, removing its inhabitants, in an attempt to placate Apollo (Thuc. 3.104.1–6) (Figure 9.4). Cult activity including festivals continued; Socrates’ execution in 399 was delayed while an Athenian religious embassy to Delos performed its tasks.

FIGURE 9.4  At Delos in the Cyclades, other island communities such as Naxos set up monuments at the sanctuary of Apollo; later the island housed the treasury of the Delian League. Photo: Getty Images.

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PERFORMING INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Athens tried hard to have its own major annual festival, the Great Panathenaea celebrated in honor of their patron goddess Athena Polias, upgraded to Panhellenic status; for example, one of the contests was between reciters (called “rhapsodes”) of universal Greek epic poet Homer (Figure 9.5). But the secret initiation ceremonies at Eleusis (see above) were the nearest Athens came to achieving a Panhellenic outreach.

FIGURE 9.5  Athens used prizes from its Panathenaic games to promote the city’s image and assert its antiquity; vase c. 340–339 bce, Getty Museum 79.AE.147. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

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Attendance at Athenian festivals was often mandated in agreements between Athens and other cities. Representatives of other cities might find themselves in Athens for other purposes. Large-scale civic festivals such as the annual Great Dionysia held in spring provided an opportunity for Athens to display its wealth and power to visiting officials from subject cities, whose presence might well have been mandated by treaty. Isocrates describes the display of the tribute gathered by Athens in the theatre on the first day of the festivities, before the plays were performed, at the same time as the sons of the Athenian war dead were led out and bestowed with a symbolic suit of hoplite armor (On the Peace 82). The emphasis on Athenian care for its dead connects this practice with the funeral speeches. That the Great Dionysia was also the largest of Athens’ dramatic festivals points to a political function for Athenian drama, communicating civic ideology both to Athenians and visitors (Cartledge 1997; Goldhill 1987). Scholars dispute just how far and in what ways the plays put on at the festival and audience reception of them were democratic in any strong, political sense, but there is no doubt that the festival was managed entirely in accordance with democratic notions of popular control (see Griffin 1998; Rhodes 2003). Many tragedies performed at the festival retell stories of past conflict between cities and their heroes, including the Athenian deeds. Euripides’ Erechtheus, for example, dramatizes the story of the Athenian king who fought against the invading Eumolpus, while his Suppliant Women shows Theseus helping the Argives retrieve their dead, and Children of Heracles shows Theseus’ son Demophon assisting the return of the Heraclids. In the Erechtheus Praxagora, wife of Erechtheus, gives a long speech explaining why she assents to the sacrifice of her daughter to save the city; in the other plays, messenger speeches provide the opportunity to describe the heroic deeds of the Athenians and their leader. Another Euripidean tragedy, the Ion, connects Athenian royalty to Apollo, making him the father of the king Ion. Athena appears as a dea ex machina at the end of the play, to predict that the Delphi temple slave Ion, revealed as the son of Athenian princess Creusa and the god Apollo (Eur., Ion 1570–94), will rule the city and that his sons will go on to found the Ionian cities. The play was most likely performed around the time of the Sicilian Expedition (415–413 bce), a point when Athens sought to retain the loyalty of its Ionian allies and subjects as its military capability was weakened. However, Athenian comedy also comments on the democracy’s management of international relations, showing citizens’ responses to politicians and their actions. The background of war and conflict is a feature of many of Aristophanes’ surviving plays, but three in particular show citizens responding to war. In both the Acharnians (425 bce) and Peace (421 bce), an individual Athenian citizen negotiates his own personal peace with the city’s enemies. The Acharnians’ protagonist Dicaeopolis (“Just City”) fails to persuade the assembly to agree

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a peace deal; his opening? speech tells the story of the war so far as a parody of Euripidean tragedy. After the citizens vote down his plan, he negotiates a private peace with the city’s enemies and celebrates a festival on his farm while other Athenians suffer in war. Trygaeus, the protagonist of the Peace, receives much better support for his peace plans—the play was performed just before the Peace of Nicias was agreed—although Aristophanes emphasizes similar benefits of peace for agriculture and daily life. Another Aristophanic comedy, the Lysistrata of 411, offers a different perspective on citizens’ involvement with international relations. The play, performed in the wake of the Sicilian Expedition, again shows individual citizens attempting to change the city’s approach, but this time it is the women on both sides who aim to end the war (see Chapter 7, this volume; Olson 2012). While Aristophanes’ political preferences remain unclear—he has been identified as both a supporter and opponent of the democracy—the performance context of the plays suggests that his protagonists’ perspectives are intended to appeal to ordinary Athenians.

DEMOCRACY AND MIGRATION The myth of autochthony, the story that the Athenians had always lived in Athens with their first ruler emerging from the very soil of Attica, drove an Athenian sense of priority and superiority, especially over the Spartans, whose Heraclid ancestors had not only moved to the Peloponnese but allegedly required Athenian assistance to return there after the Trojan War. Other mythhistories provided the basis for newer cities to take a place in the cultural network of Greek cities. Cities might resolve crises of political division or overpopulation by sending out groups to establish a new city as a “colony,” a process that took place extensively during the classical period. This required religious procedure to be followed—the authority of Apollo at Delphi was required—and the new community inherited the cults and affiliations of the mother city. Herodotus describes the process by which many such cities were founded, the “classic” instance perhaps being the foundation of Cyrene in north Africa from the island of Thera (present-day Santorini) with the assistance of Sparta in about 630 bce. As had by then become normal and normative, the settlers consulted in advance the oracle of Apollo at Delphi for both guidance and authorization. But in this case the consultants failed to abide to the letter by Apollo’s advice, whereupon his priestess the Pythia remonstrated very vigorously, telling the Therans that she had herself actually been to where the Therans should have settled (Hdt. 4.157). When a century earlier the Greeks had begun to settle Sicily, for example, the new Greek communities had ties to Corinth and cities of Euboea (Thuc. 6.3–5). But all those “colonial” cities, products of the main

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“Archaic” waves of emigration between c. 750 and 550, were founded well before democracy was established as the politeia of any Hellenic community. That was not the case with a fifth-century foundation or refoundation. Thurii or Thouria, a colonial project of the 440s in southern Italy—on the site where the city of Sybaris (destroyed in 510) had once stood—offers a remarkable coincidence of democratic theory and democratic practice. The presiding patron of this enterprise was Athens, then at the peak of its imperial power and in the first flush of its democratic renovation. Not only that but—probably at the suggestion of Pericles—the chosen nomothetēs (lawgiver) for the new polis was said to have been the sophist Protagoras of Abdera, one of the very few ancient Greek intellectuals whom it is safe to call a convinced ideological democrat. Colonial relationships provided a language for interactions between cities. This enabled Athens to present itself as mother-city rather than hegemonic power, as in an inscription from Paros (SEG xxxi 67 = RO 29; Low 2007: 50–1).4

HONORING IMPERIAL POWERS: THE HELLENISTIC WORLD AND ROME As Chapter 1 showed, complex relations between local communities and centralized monarchies were evident across many regions of the ancient world. The relationships of fully independent Greek poleis that have been the focus of this chapter were perhaps exceptional; as larger empires began to dominate the region, relationships between cities and empires inevitably shifted. From Greek cities forging alliances between themselves and negotiating relationships with the regional powers of the successor kingdoms and, later, the growing power of Rome, international relations in later antiquity involved a wider range of participants, of whom only a small proportion might be considered democratic. Nonetheless, votes by local assemblies conferred authority on decrees. The broad range of communities negotiating treaties and alliances continued to develop the cultural bases of relationships between cities. The expanded Hellenic world of the successor kingdoms saw many new or newly Hellenized communities building relationships using the cultural building blocks of the classical Greek world. Establishing a shared mythical heritage remained important; for example, the small Greek city of Kytenion sought support from other cities to pay for new city walls, by appealing to a shared Dorian heritage (SEG xxxviii 1476; Ma 2003). The city documented its successful appeals to other communities and noted that they were based on acceptance of its story that it was the birthplace of the gods Apollo and Artemis, and various heroic figures.

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The Roman Republic interacted with many independent cities and kingdoms as it rose to dominate the region. But those relationships were conducted not on a democratic basis but through a more oligarchic model, often modeled on established Roman relationships of friendship between the elite and patronage between the rich and poor (Burton 2011). The motif of dexiōsis, the handshake of friendship and alliance, persisted; Burton notes its presence in Roman foundation myth, as the founding figure Aeneas arrives in Italy and shakes the hand of local king Latinus (Livy 1.1.8–9). Many surviving decrees represent statements of alliance, or grant honors to those who have helped cities. They also document a complex and shifting political landscape, especially at the edges of the Greek and Romans. A 155 bce treaty between the Greco-Persian king Pharnaces I of Pontus and the Greek colonial city of Chersonesus in the Crimea (IOSPE 12 402; Burstein 1985: 29– 30) contains many typical expressions of friendship between city and king. In it, Pharnaces promises to respect the “democracy” of Chersonesus and remain at peace with the city, and also to remain friendly with the Romans. A delicate balance of interests is protected by oaths sworn by Zeus, the earth, the Sun, and the Olympian gods. Pharnaces’ descendants included Mithradates VI, the “poison king” who challenged Roman hegemony in the east during the late Roman Republic; cities might well wish to avoid becoming the battleground between the Romans and eastern powers.

CONCLUSION International relations in the world of the ancient polis were conducted through formalized rituals that often involved acknowledgment of shared cultural and religious heritage. Agreements between cities might invoke the authority of shared gods and cults, and presume upon shared heritage. Diplomatic activity might have a religious aspect; ambassadors were guests of honor at civic festivals such as Athens’ City Dionysia and Great Panathenaea. Panhellenic sites provided spaces both for cities to display their wealth and power and for diplomatic intrigue and negotiations to take place. The cultural and religious power of these sites was often borrowed in support of inter-polis organizations and alliances, such as the Delian League dominated by Athens.

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Beyond the Classical Polis Expanding Citizenship and Connecting Communities BENJAMIN GRAY

INTRODUCTION Ancient democracy raises an acute challenge for modern liberal democrats, committed to both moral universalism and equal participatory democracy: the most famous case, classical Athens, supposedly a congenial ancestor of modern democracies, is widely known to have tended to exclude all those outside an elite of male home citizens, denying full civic participation to women, foreigners, and slaves. The problem is deeper than the mere coexistence of democracy and exclusivity. As also noted in Chapter 6 and elsewhere in this volume, the suspicion is ever present that classical Athens’ undoubted success in achieving political equality and participation among male citizens was itself dependent on, indeed built on, a system of exclusion of all outside that enfranchised group. Ancient democracy thus throws into relief the challenges confronted by modern political theorists who analyze, and seek to resolve, the tensions between moral universalism and “bounded” democracy (e.g., Benhabib 2006). This chapter investigates this problematic relationship between democracy and exclusivity in different ancient democratic communities, including Athens (studied together with republican Rome in “Exclusivity with Democracy at Athens, Inclusivity with Oligarchy at Rome?” below), but also many others. On the one hand, close study of the ancient evidence amply confirms that exclusivity, combined with the demonization of those outside the in-group, was often an effective shortcut to the levels of internal solidarity and trust necessary to sustain a demanding democratic system.

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On the other hand, the ancient world also offers wide-ranging evidence for experiments in expanding citizenship, often combined with attempts to preserve the institutions and ethos of democracy. This was not merely a question of philosophers imagining a cosmopolitan utopia. It was also a matter of practical experiments in widening access to citizenship or in binding together disparate individuals and groups, of different origins, in shared political institutions, often covering a wide geographical area. Many such experiments were undertaken by the city-states of the Hellenistic era (c. 323–31 bce), which are the focus of “The Hellenistic Period as an Alternative Case Study,” below. These were the city-states that existed within and between the vast monarchies of the complex, multicultural world created by Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Near and Middle East, which brought Greek political and cultural models into constant interaction with those of many other civilizations (for a recent overview, see Thonemann 2016). Against this background, many city-states doubled down on exclusivity, fending off newcomers, especially those of alien cultural background. Simultaneously, however, many other city-states, or groups of city-states, launched complex experiments in loosening or broadening citizenship, sometimes by inventing new unions of two or more city-states, macrocosms of a single polis, with their own adapted institutions, often democratic ones. “The Hellenistic Period as an Alternative Case Study” assesses the complex relationship between the expansion of the polis and democracy in these Hellenistic cases, linking them to broader debates about the opportunities and pitfalls of open, heterogeneous democracy.

EXCLUSIVITY WITH DEMOCRACY AT ATHENS, INCLUSIVITY WITH OLIGARCHY AT ROME? It would be easy to overestimate the exclusivity of the classical Athenian democracy: even if formal political participation in the Assembly and other civic institutions was restricted to adult male citizens, there were many opportunities for outsiders to participate in civic life, often in more informal ways. As Chapters 5 and 6 (this volume) show, women could play a prominent role on the alternative civic stage of religion (cf. esp. Blok 2017). Moreover, women and those who had not been born Athenian could participate in varied ways in the thriving world of Athenian social, economic, and cultural life, including voluntary associations. Indeed, one tendency in recent scholarship has been to deny that formal legal status divisions, especially the citizen/outsider boundary, ever really frustrated meaningful socio-economic interaction, even collaboration, across them. According to this approach, Athenian society meaningfully resembled a modern melting-pot “nation” (Cohen 2000); it had many “free spaces,” such as the port spaces of the Piraeus or even the civic agora itself, in which citizens and outsiders could interact largely unencumbered by formal status categories (Vlassopoulos 2007a, cf. 2007b) (Figure 10.1).

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FIGURE 10.1  Votive plaque from the Piraeus offered to the Thracian goddess Bendis, 329–8 bce, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Denmark, IN 0462. Photo: Getty Images.

This recent scholarly tendency is a useful corrective to fixation on the exclusivity  of Athenian democratic civic life. Nevertheless, emphasis on the ingenuity with which some residents of classical Athens circumvented the  prevailing legal-political framework has to be combined with acknowledgment of the tenacity of that framework itself, both as institutionalized reality and as internalized ideology (cf. Whitehead 1977). It was probably quite often possible for individuals to slip through the cracks in the framework. For example, the  otherwise unknown Pancleon, the defendant in the case of Lysias Oration 23 (c. 400 bce), had apparently been successful in living in Athenian society for some time with an ambiguous status (Lysias’ prosecuting client alleged that he was of slave status), with the aid of a claim to be a “Plataean,” one of the refugees from the city of Plataea exceptionally granted Athenian citizenship during the Peloponnesian War. However, the system eventually caught up with Pancleon. This was partly the result of legal structures: when he became embroiled in a legal dispute, his personal status ended up the subject of the legal proceedings attested in Lysias’ speech. This was the result of his objecting to being treated by his opponent as a noncitizen (for a summary of the legal details, see Wolpert and Kapparis 2011: 59–61), but that objection set in train the tendency of the Athenian legal system to encourage and facilitate policing of status divisions. In general, Athenian law offered varied avenues for denunciation of those who

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trespassed across status divisions, including runaway slaves and foreigners who falsely claimed Athenian citizenship, or who did not observe the rigorous rules governing the status of metic (or “resident alien”; cf. Kamen 2013: chs. 4–5; Meyer 2010; Whitehead 1977). In Pancleon’s case, his downfall was the result, not only of legal formalities but also of the force of exclusive civic ideology, and its persistence even among liminal groups: according to Lysias (23.6), the (recognized) Plataean community at Athens disowned Pancleon at their monthly meeting in the cheese market. These Plataeans had themselves benefited from an unusual bending of Athenian civic exclusivity, but were not on this occasion prepared to show similar flexibility to Pancleon. Other expatriate groups also clung to, perhaps sometimes emphasized, their original ethnic identity. This was true even of those living in the multicultural Piraeus: consider the Thracian emigrants said to have held a procession to their ancestral goddess Bendis at the start of Plato’s Republic (327a), even if they did inspire an imitation procession among other (non-Thracian) residents. In a similar case involving more disparate individuals, expatriates from the city of Byzantium on the Bosporus come together for business purposes in the Piraeus in Demosthenes Oration 33. It was apparently only exceptional migrant outsiders who took the bold step of questioning civic exclusivity altogether. It was migrants and exiles in classical Athens who developed the early forms of Greek philosophical cosmopolitanism: the theory that the truly wise and virtuous person is at home by nature in the whole cosmos, with no special link other than chance to the city of birth. Fifthcentury migrant Sophists were probably already developing ideas along these lines (for the ideas about unifying laws of nature and human kinship attributed to the Sophist Hippias of Elis, see Plato, Protagoras 337c). These ideas were given a coherent form, very influential for later centuries, by philosophical exiles living in fourth-century bce Athens, especially the early Cynics, probably joined by their pupil, the founder of the Stoic school, Zeno of Citium (on this early history, see Richter 2011: chs. 1–2; for contrasting interpretations of Zeno’s approach, see Schofield 1999b: chs. 1–2; Vogt 2008: chs. 1–2). This early cosmopolitanism was primarily an oppositional movement, designed to expose the contradictions of the established polis system: poleis claimed to promote moral values, but were in fact obsessed with upholding the contingent privileges of those who happened to be born in a certain place to certain parents. Anyone truly interested in virtue would recognize as fellow citizens all others of a similar disposition, not only those in the purely contingent community of birth (for the Stoic Zeno’s reported view that only other virtuous people are “fellow citizens and kin” of the virtuous, see Diog. Laert. 7.33; among the Cynics, Crates of Thebes reportedly declared himself a “fellow-citizen” of another displaced philosopher, see Diog. Laert. 6.93). Asked about his origins, Diogenes of Sinope supposedly explicitly claimed to be a “citizen of the world” (Diog. Laert. 6.63)

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FIGURE 10.2  Sebastiano Ricci (1659–1734), Meeting between the Cynic Philosopher Diogenes and Alexander the Great. Photo: Getty Images.

(Figure 10.2). To Cynic eyes, poleis could not even guarantee their own citizens a secure livelihood and secure dignity: the ascetic, marginal Cynic was far better protected against twists of fate than a conventional polis citizen (see again Diog. Laert. 6.93). It seems that, for these early exponents, “cosmopolitanism” was intended to be as much a contradiction in terms as a positive proposal: there could be no truly universal, inclusive polis, since abolishing exclusivity would transform the polis model out of recognition. These dissident intellectuals were taking aim at the way in which ethnic exclusivity underpinned the civic life of their host polis, Athens, perhaps even more than that of other city-states, where there were not such strong imperatives to limit access to local economic benefits such as the proceeds of the lucrative silver mines and of the Athenian Empire. Despite the caveats above, strong ethnic exclusivity undoubtedly played a crucial role in sustaining Athenian civic identity and the internal solidarity and like-mindedness that sustained the Athenian democratic system (see esp. Loraux [1993] 2006; cf. Kasimis 2018). Susan Lape (2010) has even recently suggested that Athenian civic ideology can be meaningfully compared with modern racist political ideologies. Even if the lack of discrimination based on skin color at Athens weakens this analogy,

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Lape brings into relief the gulf between Athenian civic exclusivity and modern liberal normative expectations of democratic regimes. This exclusivity left its mark even on cosmopolitan theorists: the Cynics certainly did not want to admit all comers to their cosmopolis, only those who satisfied demanding Cynic standards of ascetic virtue. If Athens can be said to bear out a significant connection between democracy and exclusivity, despite all the caveats and complications sketched here, the Roman Republic can be used to illustrate—again with important qualifications—the converse: the frequent entanglement of inclusivity toward foreign-born outsiders with oligarchy. Inclusivity was a foundational principle of Roman citizenship: Rome’s founder, Romulus, was said to have drawn the city’s original inhabitants from outcasts wandering Italy. This myth of Rome as an open and diverse citizen-body was central to Roman self-understanding throughout the Republican period (c. 500–30 bce) and into the Principate (Dench 2005). This very diversity was held to be at the root of the Romans’ famous political and legal institutions, and punctilious respect for them: the first-century bce historian Livy pointed out that only through law could Romulus have forged this heterogeneous community into a united citizenbody (Livy 1.8). This central myth helped to make the Romans much more amenable than the classical Athenians to granting citizenship to outsiders on a systematic basis (Purcell 1990), whether to manumitted slaves or (especially from the first century bce onward) to whole communities or favored individuals who showed loyalty to Rome’s expanding empire, in Italy and then further afield. The result was a genuinely expanded polis (or rather res publica), with a wide and expanding geographical reach as well as a very large number of citizens. The Roman willingness to integrate outsiders was also a consequence of the political character of Roman citizenship, which it itself reinforced. In a famous article, Philippe Gauthier (1981) contrasted a Greek model of citizenship whose central focus was participation in shared political institutions with a Roman model that instead prioritized integration. According to this interpretation, gaining Roman citizenship was as much about being accepted into Roman social, economic, and cultural life as about obtaining a vote in the Roman civic assemblies, though the latter was undeniably often also important. This argument introduces a very tight link between inclusivity toward foreign-born outsiders and the absence of full democracy: it was precisely because the average citizen wielded less political power than in Athens that the Romans were quicker to distribute citizenship to newcomers and allies. An important caveat here is that, as also discussed in others chapters here, the Roman system did have important democratic elements, as Greek historian Polybius recognized in his analysis of the Roman system (notionally in 216 bce) as a “mixed constitution” containing monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic

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elements (Polybius, Histories bk. 6, esp. 6.11–18; compare the modern debate between Millar 1998 and Hölkeskamp 2010). The inclusivity of the Roman system toward outsiders may itself, however, have posed problems for the vitality of the democratic forces in the constitution. The Roman assemblies already enjoyed much less formal political power than the Athenian assembly, and their large (and increasing) scale and heterogeneity probably also made it more difficult for them to emulate the formidable collective bargaining power of the cohesive Athenian dēmos vis-à-vis its elites. By the time of the Principate, far-flung Roman citizens living in different provinces might never even visit Rome (Eberle 2017), let alone forge a common political program with fellow citizens. Another reason for associating Roman inclusivity with hierarchical power is that it also served as an instrument of imperialism, helping to entrench Roman power in different regions (Ando 2016a; for parallel arguments about modern forms of universalism, cf. Chakrabarty et al. 2000a and Douzinas 2007). Selectivity in grants of citizenship (perhaps still relatively restricted in spread around the empire before 212 ce; Lavan 2019b) and manipulation of subtle gradations in privilege for different groups and individuals (Padilla Peralta 2019: s. 2) were useful tools of control. This link between open citizenship and imperialism puts in a different light perhaps the most famous example of “expanding the polis” from the ancient Mediterranean: the edict of Emperor Caracalla of 212 ce (the Constitutio Antoniniana), which granted Roman citizenship to all freeborn inhabitants of the empire, subject to certain minor restrictions (see Lavan 2019a; also the collected essays in Ando 2016b). This was undoubtedly a transformative moment of “expansion” of the republican model of citizenship, which gave new legal rights (and obligations) to a wide swathe of the population of the Mediterranean lands, but it was also inextricably bound up with the operations of a hierarchical, extractive empire. When considered alongside the classical Athenian case, the Roman evidence makes it hard to deny that the demands of including outsiders and sustaining vibrant participatory democracy do not always pull in the same direction. Indeed, in the more democratic of the two cases, classical Athens, the dēmos regularly used its vote to support the exclusivity of Athenian citizenship, preventing the dilution of its privileges through generosity to outsiders (for modern parallels, cf. Benhabib 2006).

THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD AS AN ALTERNATIVE CASE STUDY Against the classical Athenian and Roman background discussed in the previous section, the Hellenistic civic world—usually far less prominent in synoptic volumes such as this one—emerges as an intriguing intermediate

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case. As suggested in my introduction, the Hellenistic period was one of rich experimentation with traditional civic and democratic forms, including efforts to adapt them to a more fluid and multicultural world. This makes Hellenistic thought and Hellenistic cities a valuable laboratory for studying the complex relationship between inclusivity toward outsiders and participatory democracy, including the results of trying to yoke them together, despite the potential tensions between them. This section aims, not to hold up Hellenistic political thought and Hellenistic cities as a normative paradigm to supplant classical Athens and Rome, but, in going beyond the classical polis, to bring into focus their neglected potential as empirical test cases for historians and political theorists interested in practical varieties of open or cosmopolitan democracy, and their problems (cf. Alston 2011; Gray 2018a). Hellenistic Developments in Cosmopolitan Theory Especially in a “cultural” history of democracy such as this, a central concern must be the complex evolution of cosmopolitan theory among philosophers and literary authors in the Hellenistic period. Hellenistic philosophers and historians endowed the basic cosmopolitan ideas that emerged in fourth-century Athens with much richer content. It was probably the third-century bce Hellenistic Stoic Chrysippus, for example, who developed a complex theory of the “natural law” which governs the whole cosmos and underpins any legitimate positive law in particular places (Schofield 1999b: chs. 3–4). Like the Cynic cosmopolis discussed earlier, the Stoic cosmopolis was an imaginary community of dispersed but allied souls: a community that did not have to be created through political reform, because it already existed in virtual form. It is nevertheless clear that Hellenistic Stoics did, in principle, value civic equality among the far-flung members of this imaginary cosmopolis: each was a “citizen,” equal before the unchanging natural law, the same for all. It is more difficult to tell whether Stoics envisaged this cosmopolis as “democratic” in any more substantial sense. Full membership of the Stoic cosmopolis, as true “world citizens,” probably remained restricted in most iterations to the elite of the virtuous (or even of perfect “sages”); it was their extreme moral purity and resulting automatic cooperation that made political and legal institutions superfluous (on Zeno of Citium, see Diog. Laert. 7.33– 4). However, the Stoics do seem to have regarded virtue as accessible, at least in principle, more or less to all humans (Stephens [2018: 82] calls this conception “powerfully democratic”). Even those who were “progressing” toward virtue may well have been recognized at least as partial members of the cosmopolis by many Stoic thinkers, from Zeno onwards (for discussion of this issue, see Vogt 2008: esp. ch. 2). Other Hellenistic thinkers could certainly imagine an inclusive cosmopolis of “all humans,” even one functioning something like a democratic polis. In

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the preface to his monumental first-century bce history of the world, Diodorus of Sicily advocated that “all humans” should honor universal historians, such as himself, using (and urging them to use) language and formulae which recall the ways Hellenistic civic assemblies of real-life citizens passed (by vote or acclamation) honorific decrees for their benefactors (see Diodorus of Sicily 1.1–2). Perhaps most suggestively, when early Christians absorbed Hellenistic civic and cosmopolitan language and thought, they came to describe their supposedly universal church as an ekklēsia, on the model of the real-life civic “assembly” in a democratic city-state: it was certainly possible to imagine a world cosmopolis structured on the model of a Greek democracy, with participatory institutions and strict qualifications for membership (in this case Christian faith) that all could, in principle, meet. In themselves these abstract forms of cosmopolitanism did not automatically stimulate inclusivity in practical politics. Indeed, their very abstraction could easily militate in the opposite direction. The Stoic insistence that all truly virtuous people are automatically free citizens of the cosmopolis could easily belittle the practical difficulties of the marginalized. The implication was, for example, that those suffering exile from their home city were not suffering genuine hardship; if committed to virtue, they remained “citizens” of their “homeland” in the truly important sense (cf. first-century ce Stoic Musonius Rufus, That Exile is Not an Evil 9.2–3, discussed in Stephens 2018: esp. 84–5). Even the enslaved were not truly disenfranchised, since they too could be full citizens of the cosmopolis if they perfected their virtue. The Stoics regarded moral slavery (or “slavery of the soul”) as a far graver threat to freedom than legal slavery (or “slavery of the body”): for them, the truly unfree were those who were “enslaved” in their souls to their unruly passions (consider the report of this aspect of Hellenistic Stoic doctrine in Cicero’s Stoic Paradoxes 5 and its adoption by the first-century ce Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo in Every Good Man is Free 17–19, discussed in Garnsey 1997). The important consequence was, as Garnsey (1997: 159) summarizes it, that “by comparison with the slavery that was a condition of the soul, legal slavery was of marginal importance.” This tendency in Stoicism probably to some degree hindered the development of practical calls from intellectuals for emancipation or other legal changes in the status of the disadvantaged. However, even within Stoicism, it did not preclude, for example, advocacy of hands-on assistance to refugees, as Stephens has argued: the virtuous have to take positive steps to make their home also the home of refugees arriving in need (Stephens 2018: 84–9). To an even greater extent, as I will now argue, many citizens in the Hellenistic cities strove to translate into political reality on the ground the abstract ethics and culture of cosmopolitanism, fusing them with the democratic traditions of the cities themselves.

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Cosmopolitan Democracy on the Ground in the Hellenistic World? The idea that the Hellenistic poleis are an interesting case study of experiments in combining democracy with cosmopolitan inclusivity must face two immediate objections: that the Hellenistic cities were neither democratic nor inclusive. The first objection, that there was little true democracy among the Hellenistic cities, harks back to an old-fashioned view that true participatory self-government did not survive the conquests of Alexander the Great, after which successor kings dominated subordinate city-states, also dominated from within by increasingly powerful civic elites (cf. Veyne 1976). Painstaking research in the Hellenistic evidence, especially inscriptions, has exposed the limitations in this traditional picture: democratic institutions in fact remained vibrant in many cities, with a powerful participatory assembly exerting significant authority, alongside democratic courts and other sophisticated democracy machinery (see esp. Grieb 2008; Hamon 2009). This was partly a matter of the endurance of older democratic traditions that already existed outside Athens, but also of the spread of Athenian-style democratic institutions and ideology, which became an almost universal political koine, to match the koinē form of the Greek language that bound together the Hellenistic world (Ma 2018). This is not to say that democratic institutions of the classical era persisted without adaptation: for example, democratic magistrates seem to have been increasingly selected by election rather than the lot. Nonetheless, other strongly democratic practices—such as pay for attendance at the assembly to encourage the poorest to take part—are still attested (I.Iasos 20). There were significant shifts in some cases toward elite power and away from democratic scrutiny in the later Hellenistic period (after c. 150 bce), as a result partly of Roman intervention and partly of internal evolution in Greek civic life (see Grieb [2008], building on the insights of Gauthier [1985]; see further “Opening citizenship to outsiders in established poleis,” below). Even then, however, democratic institutions and ideology remained potent alongside their rivals (note Cicero’s unease at the power of civic assemblies and assembly rhetoric in first-century bce Asia Minor, Pro Flacco 57; more generally, Gray [2018b], citing earlier bibliography). The second objection has recently been expressed in particularly potent form, bolstered with democratic and postcolonial theory, by Clifford Ando (2018): the Hellenistic poleis can be presented as a colonial enterprise, through which privileged citizen-bodies (made up of Greeks and Macedonians) dominated noncitizen populations, especially in Anatolia and other areas conquered by Alexander the Great. On this interpretation, Hellenistic cities’ claims to “democracy” were the hollow rhetoric of an exploitative elite. There is undoubtedly considerable truth in this model. Many Hellenistic cities established in multicultural areas did remain exclusive and monocultural: for

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example, the Hellenistic polis at Babylon, the ancient Mesopotamian city incorporated into the new Seleucid Empire, existed in parallel with the older Babylonian settlement, without much apparent integration between the older and newer populations (see Mairs 2016: 180). In an area that had for much longer seen Greek-speakers and Greek institutions interacting with native ones, the city of Phaselis on the south coast of Anatolia apparently resisted hybridity and fusion until the first century bce, when its involvement in the “pirate wars” against Rome undermined its prosperity. Before then, the attested names of citizens are overwhelmingly Greek (rather than Anatolian) in origin (Adak 2013). Exclusivity and chauvinism were not, however, the only pattern in the Hellenistic poleis; it is also possible to identify a range of other tendencies, which I will now survey. New Poleis and Networks New city foundations across the Hellenistic world could give those without long Greek ancestry and cultural ties the opportunity to participate as citizens in polis life, and thus join the world oikoumenē of those committed to a Greekstyle civic (even democratic?) lifestyle (on Hellenistic “peer-polity interaction,” cf. Ma 2003). Rachel Mairs presents a convincing portrait of the new city of Ai Khanoum in Bactria (in present-day Afghanistan) as a city distinguished by cultural “hybridity,” even if that term needs to be used with caution (Mairs 2016: 185) (Figure 10.3). The architecture of the city takes the form of a “Greco-Bactrian koinē” of mixed forms (98). Citizens of this and other GrecoBactrian cities who did not have obviously Greek origins could experiment with

FIGURE 10.3  Silver coin of Seleucus I Nicator, Antiochus I Soter, Ai Khanoum/Bactra, 285–281 bce. Photo: courtesy of the American Numismatic Society, 1954.203.299.

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Greek cultural forms, giving them a distinctive new flavor (e.g., Mairs 2016: 144; on the complex inscribed epitaph of a certain Sophytos from Alexandriain-Arachosia, modern Kandahar, SEG 54.1568). Even if it is hard to tell whether hybridity went beyond forms of cultural co-option of or by the local elite, the evidence suggests more complex and reciprocal dynamics of cultural interaction than those revealed in the earlier classic study of Greek civic culture in Bactria (Robert 1968), where the surprising discovery of a set of Delphic moral maxims inscribed at Ai Khanoum is explained mainly in terms of export and defence of Greek culture (cf. Mairs 2016: 73–4). The civic ideal itself need no longer be seen purely as a Greek import: across the Hellenistic East as a whole, new Hellenistic poleis could tap into the long pre-Greek traditions in different regions of both civic government and civic interaction with imperial monarchy (see Vlassopoulos 2007b: ch. 4 on Mesopotamia; on Indian traditions of citizenship, see the Introduction, this volume). Hellenistic kings also organized or assisted the foundation of new cities closer to the older heartlands of Greek civic politics, in the Aegean world and Anatolia. These were usually substantial urban settlements, much larger than the average traditional polis. The settlers were not generally drawn from traditional elites: the majority consisted of mercenaries from royal armies, many of whom would never have experienced the polis lifestyle before. As a result, each foundation merged together within one citizen-body a heterogeneous group, including both incoming mercenaries (mainly Macedonians and Greeks) and members of the existing local population. Ryan Boehm discusses the phenomenon of major new city foundations which cut across ethnic divisions: Demetrias, Thessalonike, and Cassandreia in northern Greece; and Antigoneia Troas and Stratonikeia in Asia Minor, the latter incorporating “old Karian villages” as well as Greco-Macedonian immigrants (Boehm 2018: 198–9, 203). Alexandria in Egypt could be added to the list. It is, admittedly, difficult to determine to what extent those who were neither Greek nor Macedonian by origin could achieve status and recognition in these new cosmopolitan mega-cities rather than serving the citizen-body as slaves or other dependent laborers (cf. Boehm 2018: 24–5). In Asia Minor, citizens with non-Greek names are certainly attested in such places, even if always in a small minority, though there were also other indigenous citizens who concealed their origin by adopting Greek names (on Carian names at Stratonikeia and elsewhere in Hellenistic Caria, see, e.g., Balzat et al. 2013: xxxi–xxxii). Even if these new cities possessed democratic institutions on the traditional model, including an assembly through which the heterogeneous dēmos could find its voice, preserved in inscriptions, it might be objected that these settlements in fact illustrate again how ethnic diversity often goes together

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with political hierarchy: these were cities founded on the initiative of kings. Their very existence partly served the interest of royal bureaucracies in the dilution of old ethnic loyalties and simplification of patterns of local settlement for purposes of taxation and control. Nonetheless, as Boehm (2018) shows, the establishment and flourishing of new cities also depended on local political initiative from below, interacting in complex ways with royal authority. Indeed, it was sometimes precisely a vacuum in centralized, unquestioned royal control which enabled the establishment of complex new poleis in the Hellenistic world, including some whose citizens—or a substantial proportion of them—came from outside the Greco-Macedonian population. The turbulent politics of later fourth- and third-century bce Asia Minor gave many existing Anatolian villages and larger settlements the opportunity to adopt the forms and institutions of a democratic polis, not least as a way to assert their own political identity and independence (Mitchell 2017: esp. 26–8; cf. Schuler 2010: 408, on Latmos and Pidasa in Caria and Timioussa and Tyberissos in Lycia, see also “Experiments in Building Enlarged Democratic Communities,” below). These local Anatolian communities could put their own local stamp on democratic procedures and standards of legitimacy. In the old Carian center of Mylasa, for example, it seems that fourth-century decrees of the assembly had to be ratified by all three of the old Carian “tribes” of the community, in a departure from standard Greek democratic practice (see, e.g., I.Mylasa 1, lines 2–4, with Mitchell 2017: 27). In the early Hellenistic period, the Sagalassians of Pisidia, all of their representatives bearing non-Greek, Pisidian names, made regulations in Greek to protect their civic life against the seizure of their acropolis by an aspiring tyrant or narrow faction, blending classic Greek civic language and rules with more unfamiliar religious regulations and formulae (SEG 59.1409, 50.1304). Another monarchical vacuum in the early second century bce, after the overthrow of the Seleucid Empire by the Romans, also precipitated a new raft of Anatolian city foundations, which merged Greek and Anatolian people and traditions. For example, it was probably in this context that a traditional Carian settlement and/or religious sanctuary started developing into Aphrodisias, which was to be one of the most celebrated cities of Roman Asia Minor (Chaniotis 2010: 461). Many new foundations at this point were, admittedly, encouraged by the favor toward new city foundations of the Attalid monarchy, the Pergamonbased successor to the Seleucids as the hegemonic power in the region. Nonetheless, there is good evidence for the democratic drive with which a local community could demand recognition as a polis. One such community was Toriaion in Phrygia, which must have originated as a settlement of mercenaries, including predominantly Greco-Macedonians but also at least one Gallic member and perhaps others. These incomers had adopted the name of the

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local Phrygian settlement of Toriaion, and perhaps even merged to some extent with the local population. On gaining polis status, they inscribed in celebration the series of letters from the Attalid king Eumenes II which had led to their elevation. Eumenes had addressed them in the first letter as “the inhabitants,” before approving their petition from below to be granted their own politeia (constitution), laws, and civic gymnasium; in subsequent letters he wrote to their “council [boulē] and people [dēmos],” acknowledging the signature institutions of a democratic polis (SEG 47.1745, with commentary). The wealth of inscriptions preserved from Anatolia makes it the region most suited for studying the complex mingling of populations in new poleis and networks of poleis. These complex hybrid democracies were partly picking up older traditions in Anatolia (on the fluidity of early “Ionian” communities, see, e.g., Mac Sweeney 2013). More isolated survivals document similar processes in other regions rich in poleis, such as Sicily, another place where, as in Anatolia, polis communities had long been unusually open to outsiders. For instance, the discovery of the “Entella tablets” on bronze reveals the success of Italian (Campanian) immigrants to Sicily, mainly mercenaries, in adopting and adapting the forms of a democratic polis in their Hellenistic communities at Entella and Nakone (see Ampolo 2001) (Figure 10.4). In an early Hellenistic decree reestablishing concord after civil strife, the Nakonian democratic “assembly [halia] and council” endorsed the suggestion of envoys from the older polis of Segesta to reconcile the factions through a ritual of “brother-making”: the leading factionaries would each be paired up with one of their opponents, together with three neutral “brothers” (SEG 30.1119). This ritual appears idiosyncratic by the standards of the older Greek world, but it also crystallizes one of the central aspirations of all Greek democracies: to unite citizens in the same degree of solidarity and intimacy as would be expected within a single family (cf. Loraux [1997] 2001: 222–7; consider also the widespread Greek institution of the “phratry,” a fictional brotherhood). “Expanding citizenship” could thus give newcomers the opportunity to innovate, at the same time as bringing to the surface central commitments of Greek democratic culture. Opening Citizenship to Outsiders in Established Poleis Long-established cities also engaged in “expanding citizenship” in the Hellenistic period. They did so partly through an openness to granting citizenship to outsiders which would have been questionable in classical Athens. This tendency was perhaps most pronounced in cities located in multicultural regions on the edges of the old Greek world. Around 300 bce, the city of Aspendos, located in the traditionally multiethnic region of Pamphylia (“Land-of-All-Tribes”) on the south coast of Anatolia, passed a democratic decree (“in sovereign assembly”) granting citizenship to disparate mercenaries—they name Pamphylians, Lycians, Cretans, Greeks, and Pisidians—in recognition of their bravery in fighting for

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FIGURE 10.4  Bronze tablet containing the regulations for reconciliation in Nakone. Photo: Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Oxford University.

the city and King Ptolemy (SEG 17.639). This is a striking example of explicit embrace of ethnic mixing of citizens on the part of a democratic civic assembly, itself probably already very mixed in composition. At the same time, the contrast with the civic exclusivity of the Aspendians’ near neighbor Phaselis (see “Cosmopolitan Democracy on the Ground in the Hellenistic World?,” above) reveals the variety of possible approaches (Adak 2013).

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There is nothing quite so emphatic as the Aspendian case from the older Greek cities. Already in the third century bce, however, there are signs of a willingness to naturalize new citizens that perhaps went beyond earlier custom. The most striking example is the old Ionian polis of Miletus, which had a complex democratic constitution in the Hellenistic period (Grieb 2008: ch. 3). The Milesians at one point naturalized around one thousand Cretan mercenaries, together with their families, whom they settled at nearby Myous (Milet I 3.33–8; Carless Unwin 2017: 134–6, citing parallels from the contemporary Peloponnese and Thessaly). This might be thought no more generous than the classical Athenians’ ad hoc grants of citizenship to some groups with whom they had a special cultural and military connection, such as the Plataeans (see “Exclusivity with Democracy at Athens, Inclusivity with Oligarchy at Rome?,” above). However, there are also some signs that the Milesians came in the course of the Hellenistic period to show in general a greater willingness to enable the foreign-born and “bastards” (those not born to two legitimate citizen parents) to progress into full citizenship (see the many apparently routine citizenship grants in Milet I 3 39–93; Günther 2014; Ogden 1996: 304–7). It was in the later Hellenistic period, after c. 150 bce, that older Greek cities seem systematically to have widened access to their citizenship (see, for example, on Athens, Oliver [2007a], and on Priene, Kah [2012: esp. 60–2]). They even increasingly tolerated dual or multiple citizenships, with individuals now sometimes even attributed more than one home city in inscriptions (see Heller and Pont 2012). One such individual was A. Aemilius Zosimos, whom the Prienians honored in the first century bce, noting both his Roman citizenship and the fact that he had been naturalized as a citizen of Priene (I.Priene2 68–70, new edition of I.Priene 112–14). His background is obscure, but it seems likely that he came from outside the Greek and Roman elites: he was perhaps a Greek-speaking Italian who had gained Roman citizenship after the Social War, or even a manumitted slave of a Roman citizen (Kah 2012: 62–3, 68). In any case, he took steps to include outsiders in the civic life of the polis in which he had now become a magistrate: on his first day as stephanēphoros, the chief Prienian magistrate, he invited all to a celebration at his house, and was said thereby to have disregarded the chance fate (tychē) of the slave and the bureaucratic status of the xenos (foreigner) (I.Priene2 69, lines 53–6). This temporary (one-day) suspension of status categories may have only reinforced their bite in normal life, though this period did see a flowering of voluntary associations in the Greek cities which cut across traditional boundaries of gender and ethnicity, including eventually the formation of socially and ethnically diverse local Christian communities (see Harland 2014; Kloppenborg and Ascough 2011; for similar phenomena earlier, see Chapter 6, this volume). It is perhaps troubling—and in keeping with the patterns observed in the opening parts of this chapter—that this late Hellenistic loosening of the

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boundaries of citizenship and civic life does seem to have gone hand in hand with the partial erosion of traditional democracy in the Greek cities. The Prienian decrees for Zosimos themselves testify to this, showing that Zosimos had come to dominate Prienian civic life through his extreme wealth at a time of public poverty. Perhaps, in general, multiple citizenships were a form of class solidarity across the elites of different cities; mobility of person and property could have helped elite figures to evade or minimize civic scrutiny and taxation demands. This particular part of the Hellenistic material perhaps reinforces the link between inclusive citizenship and oligarchy, though much of the Hellenistic evidence also points in the opposite direction, as the next section will confirm. Experiments in Building Enlarged Democratic Communities The most systematic way in which an existing polis could expand itself in the Hellenistic world was through a formal merger with one or more other poleis, creating a mega-polis with a single citizenship. This was a stock feature of the Hellenistic political landscape. Hellenistic kings often encouraged or even supervised such unions, which doubtless sometimes suited their interest in administrative simplicity (cf. “New poleis and Networks,” above). Nonetheless, royal will seems usually to have coalesced with local initiative in a complex power dynamic (Boehm 2018: 209; LaBuff 2015: 8–12, 54). Another potential reason for suspecting that such unions were a backdoor to hierarchical control might be that they often involved the effective absorption of a smaller polis by a larger one. Nonetheless, even in such cases a complex negotiation of power seems often to have taken place (Mack 2014). Gary Reger even argues that such unions could increase the political agency of citizens of the smaller polis: they could assert themselves politically within the new integrated citizen-body, benefiting from their status as enfranchised citizens rather than mere dependents of the larger city (cf. Ma 2018: 280–1), at the same time as preserving local culture, religion, and institutions (on the integration of Olymos and Hydai into Mylasa in Caria, see Reger 2010: 54; cf. Balzat et al. 2013: xxii–xxv). Indeed, a degree of equality and shared participation was implied in the most common word used to describe such unions, sympoliteia (literally, “sharing of a political system” or “common citizenship”). In some cases we can even observe the efforts taken by the parties to a union to construct the resulting mixed polis as very much a shared democracy. When the “residents” of Magnesia-bySipylos were integrated into the larger polis of Smyrna on the western coast of Asia Minor in c. 245 bce, the inscribed regulations for the union emphasized that the Magnesians would be citizens on equal terms with existing Smyrnaeans (I.Smyrna 573, line 44). These new citizens also had to swear an oath that they would denounce any attempt to overthrow “democracy” or isonomia (equality before the law) in Smyrna, “struggling with all love of honour” (lines 67–8).

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The slightly later homopoliteia (union) of the large Aegean island polis of Cos with its smaller neighbor Calymna (late third century bce) contains an oath to be sworn by all citizens of the new unified polis, which spells out the shared duties of all democratic citizens, regardless of which of the two poleis they came from (Figure 10.5). They all had to promise (among other things) not to establish any oligarchy or tyranny, or any other constitution but democracy, and to be a “just judge and equal citizen, voting by hand and stone without favour in accordance with whatever seems to me best for the people” (IG XII 4 1 152, lines 21–9). It would be nice to know more about the long-term fortunes of these ambitious experiments in expanded, hybrid democracy. Their very formation does in itself suggest that at least some Hellenistic Greeks had no difficulty in imagining robust democratic institutions in which citizens of formerly separate communities actively participated on equal terms. Sympoliteia was also one of the important mechanisms by which nonGreek communities were integrated into the community of poleis (the subject of “New poleis and Networks,” above). For example, a religious dedication to the emperor Augustus (SEG 57.1665) reveals these complex dynamics at work in Lycia in southwestern Asia Minor: the dedication was made by the dēmos of both Tyberissos and Timioussa (two originally Lycian settlements), which was “conducting politics together with” (συμ̣[πολ]ιτευόμενος) the large polis of Myra. Not only had these two small communities at some point bound themselves together, but they had also gained recognition and access to political institutions by a further sympoliteia with a more established polis. Here the overseeing great power was not a king but the powerful island democracy of Rhodes, probably itself transferring to Lycia its own internal model of binding separate communities into a single mega-polis (Schuler 2010: esp. 405–8), but the inscriptions also suggest a high degree of local agency. A better attested example of two indigenous Anatolian communities assuming polis identity by means of sympoliteia comes in an interesting inscription from later fourth-century bce Caria. In this case a local governor, Asander, superintended the union of the Carian communities of Latmos and Pidasa into a single polis. The settlement made use of an unusual device for constructing a unified dēmos: for six years, Latmians could marry only Pidaseans, and vice versa (SEG 47.1563, lines 21–5; cf. Van Bremen 2003). In this case we do know that the union did not enjoy success in the very long term, despite (or partly because?) of this ambitious attempt at social engineering: Pidasa was in the  second century integrated into Miletus (Milet I 3 149), with (Herakleiaunder-)Latmos continuing its own independent history. Perhaps even more ambitious than these unions of two or three poleis were full-scale experiments in building large-scale federations of many poleis on a democratic model. Early attempts to build self-consciously democratic federations of many poleis, with their own complex democratic structures, were

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FIGURE 10.5  Inscription documenting the political union of Cos and Calymna, later third century bce. Photo: Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Oxford University.

the Boeotian and then Arcadian Leagues of the fourth century bce, in Central Greece and the Peloponnese, respectively. This federal model was further developed in the Hellenistic period, especially by the famous Aetolian and Achaian Leagues, but also (for example) by the Lycian League, which brought together the heterogeneous poleis of Lycia (see above) from the second century bce onward. Greek federalism has been a growing subject of research interest in recent years (e.g., Beck and Funke 2015; Mackil 2013). It remains an open question to what extent the different Leagues ensured equal access to political power across socio-economic groups. Even in the case of the Hellenistic Achaian League, one of the best attested of these federal systems, the nature of political participation is far from clear. We are not certain, for example, who participated in the regular decision-making assemblies (or synodoi). The less frequent assemblies called synklētoi, which decided on questions of peace and war, appear to have been open to all citizen across different member poleis, but it is not clear if the synodoi were similarly open to all or rather (more probably) composed

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of representatives from the different member poleis, selected by some special process (Rizakis 2015: 124–5). It is more straightforward to demonstrate that these federal systems did succeed in achieving “democratic” equality in a different sense: equal, or at least proportionate, entitlements to political participation and rule among member poleis both large and small. This seems to have been achieved even in traditionally war-torn regions dominated by a single major player, such as the Peloponnese, whose smaller poleis had long been under the shadow of Sparta. The second-century bce Hellenistic historian Polybius, a native of the Achaian League, celebrates how that federation had succeeded in gaining the voluntary loyalty of almost all the poleis of the Peloponnese, to which it offered not only security but also “equality” and “freedom” (or “frankness”) of speech (isēgoria, parrhēsia). He even claims that there could be no purer or truer form of “democracy” than this expanded, multicultural one (Polyb. 2.38), an ambitious and surely conscious challenge to the primacy of the exclusive Athenian model. What (if anything) had to be sacrificed in democratic participation and solidarity to achieve this border-crossing form of democracy, spanning a wide territory, is a central question for future research.

CONCLUSION The ancient world offers a rich seam of evidence for understanding the challenges and opportunities involved in “going beyond the polis”—and especially in expanding democracy. While classical Athens prioritized strong democratic engagement over inclusivity toward outsiders, and Republican Rome took the opposite course, experiments in harmonizing the two values are attested in the evidence for civic life and theory across the multifaceted Hellenistic world. Hellenistic experiments in hybrid, open democracy may have in some cases assisted the imposition of hierarchical control, beneath a democratic façade. As noted in “Opening Citizenship to Outsiders in Established poleis” above, loosening of citizen exclusivity interacted in complex ways with the increasing power of civic elites in the later Hellenistic world: elites themselves could benefit from special civic honors in multiple cities, while the diminished power and prestige associated with simple assembly attendance made ordinary citizenship a less costly commodity to share more widely. Moreover, Hellenistic kings were always keen to support foundations and mergers of poleis and grants of citizenship to outsiders. Peter Thonemann even suggests that some local communities might have deliberately resisted urbanization and the trappings of polis life to evade royal control and taxation (on Phrygia in Asia Minor, see Thonemann 2013a). It is also true that the multicultural Hellenistic polis world continued to rely for its economic prosperity on slaves (cf. Ando 2018). The Attalid pretender

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and opponent of Rome of the 130s bce, Aristonikos, rallied a dissident army of those discontented with Roman power, supposedly including both the rural poor and slaves (Strabo 14.1.38). This would suggest intense exploitation of the disadvantaged. It is possible that the charge that Aristonikos recruited slaves was a polemical invention of his opponents, but that too would confirm that attempts at expanding citizenship did not erode contempt for the unfree. On the other side of the equation, Aristonikos supposedly called his rebel community the “Heliopolitai” (not “citizens of the cosmos” but “citizens of the sun” or “citizens under the Sun”): the polis was a potent political ideal even (especially?) for those who continued to be excluded from it. It is also true that the Hellenistic Greeks adopted as fellow citizens or recognized as citizens of new poleis (see above) members of groups (such as indigenous Anatolians) whom the classical Athenians would more readily have treated as slaves or, at best, as barbarian tributary subjects of their empire. Particularly in the third and earlier second centuries bce, many Greek citizens and thinkers do seem to have been committed to building enlarged but nonetheless meaningful democracies, in single poleis, two-polis sympoliteiai or whole federations. These experimental projects met with mixed fortunes: note the apparent failure of the ambitious promotion of mixed marriage at LatmosPidasa, or the long-term Hellenistic trend away from strong democratic equality as civic fluidity increased. Nonetheless, the failures as well as the successes of Hellenistic attempts at sympoliteia (“doing politics together” in all senses) have much to offer to debates about the difficulties and prospects of open, cosmopolitan democracy.

NOTES

Introduction 1. In an unpublished paper David Stasavage and Ali Ahmed identify economic drivers for rule by consent (Stasavage and Ahmed 2019). 2. The response to Black Athena was an early skirmish in the “culture wars” that have, over the past thirty years, marked the resistance of traditionalist and conservative scholars to critical analyses of the presuppositions and colonialist ideology which underpin many disciplines within the humanities: see further duBois (2001, 2010); McCoskey (2012).

Chapter 1 1. On the philosophical implications of diakosmēsis, see Schofield (2019). 2. Aristotle’s model, often referred to as either the “summation” or “aggregation” theory, has a rich literature of its own, following and responding to Jeremy Waldron’s (1995) exploration of it: Cammack (2013); Lane (2013).

Chapter 2 1. The Athenian fourth-century bce orator Hyperides proposed an alternative aetiology, in which Zeus gained the epithet Eleutherios when exeleutheroi, that is, freed slaves, founded his cult in Athens (Harpocr. s.v. “Zeus Eleutherios,” Wycherley 1957: n. 27). This aetiology, rejected by scholars, highlights the conceptualization of liberty as a status characterized by the absence of a master. 2. Rhodes (Val. Max. 2.10, ext. 1); Eretria and Ilium (Knoepfler 2002: 203, lines 6–10; Ilium: Syll.³ 284; I. Erythrai 503), Chios (SEG XVI, 497 and XVII, 392, with Azoulay 2017: 136–8). 3. See also Aesch., Supp. 605; 699; Eur., Cyc. 119; Supp. 406; Thuc. 4.86.4–5, 8.68.4, 71.1. 4. The Phrygian cap was an important symbol for reformers and rebels in France in the 1790s and England in the 1830s, and was still being used (with the dagger) as a symbol of liberty by the Italian Republican Party (PRI) in 2000.

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Chapter 3 1. I say something immediately below about what I take the concept of the common good to be, something that must be done really to evaluate the connection between democracy and the common good. This concept is further specifiable into a variety of determinate conceptions, which shall be my main topic in the chapter. 2. See Morrison (2013: 197n11) for further references. 3. The Greek contains only the adverb koinēi (commonly) but the passage’s focus on the good the citizen-soldiers have done ensures the sense that Woodruff gives in his translation (Woodruff 1993). 4. For an illuminating account of the aspects of widespread agreement on the common good in both the historical tradition and recent analyses, see Waheeb Hussain’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018) entry, on which I rely in the following sentences. For a dissenting view, emphasizing the disparateness of modern uses of the notion of the common good, see Dupré (1993). What I say here does not turn on this dispute. 5. Citations are from the original edition, first published in 1971 and reprinted in 2005 (Rawls 1971). 6. See Proudfoot (1974: 112–16) for an analysis of this richer conception of the common good. I follow Hussain in taking this analysis to be Rawls’s account of what gets called explicitly “the common good” in other theorists. 7. The common good is also a prominent theme in Plato’s Laws, and, arguably, there we find a different conception from the one I label “Platonic” here. The passages in which this topic arises (e.g., Pl., Laws 715a4–d6, where the achievement of the common good is closely linked to the magistrates’ subservience to the laws) are complex and scattered throughout the Laws. A full treatment, therefore, would require more space than the present circumstance allows. Thanks to René Brouwer for helpful discussion of this topic. 8. I follow Burnet’s Oxford Classical Text (OCT) (1909) over Dodds (1959) in assigning the last sentence to Socrates, a division attested in the manuscripts. 9. In the Politicus, there is a lengthy examination of the analogy between rule and herding and its adequacy in describing human political life. 10. The idea that genuine crafts are marked by their coherence within the goods of a larger social order is also prominent in the Protagoras and the Politicus. 11. That this is a core Socratic idea is perhaps confirmed by its prominent appearance in the Apology, in Socrates’ cross-examination of Meletus, and again in the Meno. 12. See Morrison (2013: 177–8) for this distinction between Aristotle’s two terms for the common good. 13. One may compare Bernard Williams’s idea of the basic legitimation demand as such a minimal threshold (Williams 2005). 14. Indeed, this polyadic form of sharing in rule obtains even in the highly puzzling case of monarchy, as David Riesbeck has shown (Riesbeck 2016: esp. chs. 5 and 6). 15. For the history of the scholarship that led to this consensus about Cicero, see Asmis (2004: 569n2). Accounts of what makes Cicero’s proposal distinctive even in its Roman context are found in Asmis and in Schofield (1995). In general, I follow Elizabeth Asmis’s account of De republica closely but try to draw out what is distinctive about Cicero’s views of the common good, against the background of the views of Plato and Aristotle, which he is creatively adapting to his own purposes. 16. Note, for instance, Scipio’s remark at 1.38 that he will not follow the practices of docti homines (learned people) in his explication.

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Chapter 5 1. Athens and Samos: AM 1333; Lawton (1995: no. 12). For the text of the relief, see IG I3 127, IG II2 1, SEG 36.23 and SEG 37.20; see also Blanshard (2007), Elsner (2015), and on its place in Samian history, Shipley (1987: 130–1). 2. More recently, Eidinow, Kindt, and Osborne (2016) have proposed “theologies” (in emphatic plural) as a useful tool to look at the complex network of religious ideas and practises to which we refer as “religion.” Theologia (literally “discourse about the gods”) is attested for the first time in Plato (Rep. 379a). 3. West (2001) argues that these lines are a sixth-century interpolation; contra Janko (1992: 29–30). They could easily have been introduced then, when the tyrant Peisistratus remodeled and reorganized Athens’ Panathenaea festival, at which standardized versions of the Homeric epic were recited. 4. The girl is called Phyē—from the Greek verb phyomai, “to grow, arise, spring up”— in most sources, following Herodotus 1.60. 5. The chariot is not explicitly mentioned, but as Bowie (1993: 165) aptly notes: “it is somewhat unlikely that the queen of the universe was forced to walk to her wedding, as a mere chamaipous, the bride who was too poor to ride.” 6. As Angus Bowie (1996: 171) notes, the name Peisetaerus (from peitho and hetairos, literally “the one who persuades his companions”) contains allusions to Peisistratus (from peitho and stratos, literally “the one who persuades the army”). 7. On the role of Delphi in Athenian and Greek inter-city-states affairs, see Bowden (2005), Kindt (2016), and Chapter 9, this volume. 8. For the text of the relief, see IG I3 61, SEG 26.17, SEG 31.2, SEG 32.18, and SEG 38.3. The relief is badly damaged with its whole upper part missing. 9. Athens and Rheboulas: NΑΜ 1467; Lawton (1995: no. 46). For the text, see IG II2 349 and Dem. 23.118. 10. Athens and Euphron: NAM 1482; Lawton (1995: no. 54). For the text, see IG II2 448 with Wallace (2014) and Elsner (2015). 11. See Coulson et al. (1994: 116–17). 12. On parasitoi in Cynosarges, in particular, and Heracles as their patron god, and on parasitoi in Attic Comedy in general, see Wilkins (2000: 71–86, 93–7). 13. See also Chapter 6, this volume. It has been argued that ritual did not involve the sexual union between Dionysus and the basilinna but a “ceremonial meeting” (Jameson 1993: 55n23; Parker 2005: 304n58). Though we can only speculate about the details of this rite, it is unlikely that the official union of the god and the basilinna, the wife of the archōn basileus, who in this case represents the entire community, would be conceptually distinct from a sexual union, given the close association of marriage and reproduction for the ancient Greeks.

Chapter 6 1. ML 8 = SEG 33 690; Hölkeskamp 1992: 96, with further examples. 2. IC 4.72 8.20–9.24 = OR 125, G 72; Gagarin and Perlman 2016: 389–403. On Gortyn, women, and property, see also Davies (2005: 319–22) and Osborne and Rhodes (2017: 146–57). 3. Harrison 2015; Sourvinou-Inwood 1990; see Chapter 5, this volume. 4. On the terminology, see Patterson (2005) and Blok (2017: 147–86).

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5. The date is much disputed, but it was later than the change in citizenship law, either 438–435 or 450–445 bce. OR 137 = IG I3 35; Blok 2014; Osborne and Rhodes 2017: 214–22. 6. The change took place in the context of the extension of eligibility for some important political offices to more of the Athenian census classes in 457 bce ([Arist.], Ath. Pol. 26.2), so that the poorer citizens gained access to the higher offices. 7. RO 79 = SEG xii 87, Rhodes and Osborne 2003: 388–93; on revolution, see Chapter 8, this volume. 8. Cartledge 1993: 130–2; Hardwick 1993. On the Athenian public funeral speech, see Loraux ([1993] 2006). 9. Kennedy (2014: 76–7), drawing on Bicknell (1982: 243–7). 10. This Younger Pericles appears in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, where Socrates encourages him to pursue the generalship (Xen., Mem. 3.5); but he was executed in 406, as one of the generals condemned after the loss of the Athenian fleet at Arginusae (Xen., Hell. 1.7.34–5). 11. Latin vir (man) and virtus (excellence) demonstrate a similar association of gender and value. 12. Dover 2016; Foucault 1985. See Davidson (2001) for a critical assessment, and Osborne 2018 for analysis of the depiction of pederasty in vase-painting. 13. RO 88 = SEG xxi 519; Rhodes and Osborne 2003: 440–9; cf. Vidal-Naquet 1986: 106–28. 14. See Davidson (1998), on the pleasures of consumption in classical Athens.

Chapter 7 1. For more on the speech and its context, see Marable (2011: 301–4). 2. In his “I Have a Dream” speech Martin Luther King Jr. (1992) called the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence a “promissory note” that America had “defaulted on” when it came to black Americans. 3. Foucault often applies his analysis specifically to modern political systems (especially liberalism), see Walters (2012: 12–13). 4. I follow Cartledge in using this as the starting point for Athenian democracy (2018: 59 and passim); other scholars place the beginning as late as 462/461, see Cartledge (2018: 220). 5. I borrow this pairing from DuBois (2003: 6 and passim). 6. For the contrasting reality of Augustan monarchy, see Cartledge (2018: 265–70). 7. Arguing that Malcolm X’s schooling in prison was more formal than suggested by his autobiography, Tucker notes that he was enrolled in a number of classes at Norfolk, including Latin Part I, in which he received “average to excellent” marks (2017: 204–5, cf. 201). 8. On black skin color in antiquity, see Snowden (1970) and Thompson (1989). 9. Slaves could come from Africa in antiquity, but Africa was never a major source; see Snowden (1970: 184, 186). 10. Although Herodotus’ passing comments about Egyptian skin color (Hdt. 2.57, 2.104) have been pored over in more modern centuries (see Wiesen 1980), Herodotus himself pays more attention to cultural differences when defining Egyptian racial difference. 11. Hall argues that a “Hellenic consciousness” developed over the eighth to sixth centuries (1989: 6); on prior meaning of the “barbarian,” see (9–10).

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12. Racial distinctions between the Greeks and Northern Europeans were common in antiquity, cf. Pl., Resp. 4.435e. Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, Places also emphasizes the diversity within Europe, including the Scythians: see Isaac (2004: 65–7). 13. For the connection of autochthony to the conceptualization of sexual difference and belonging in Athens, see Loraux (1993). 14. The lex Papia Poppaea would be added in 9 ce, see Milnor (2005: 144). 15. Whether Augustus perceived a racial component to the Roman population that needed “restoring” or indeed “protecting” through bloodline has often been debated in relation to a passage in Suetonius (Aug. 40.3); see Thompson (1981). In terms of the marriage laws, the contemporary poet Propertius reads their encouragement of childbearing in terms of rebuilding the Roman army (Prop. 2.7.14). 16. Kamen (2013: 43) notes that freed slaves in the metic category were almost always non-Greek, while freeborn metics were mostly Greek. Hall proposes, however, that public perception may have treated the entire group as foreign (i.e., non-Greek), despite the actual demographics (2002: 186). 17. Although freed slaves could be awarded citizenship in exceptional cases (Kamen 2014: 284). 18. Despite other forms of servitude, chattel slavery was the most prominent during this era, and manumission was not widely practiced in Greece. The status of freed slaves remained precarious, and they continued to bear significant social stigma: see Kamen (2014: 283–4). 19. As DuBois notes, ancient slavery is often “confined to the work” of what she calls “slave-ologists” (DuBois 2003: 23). See Cartledge (2002a), DuBois (2003), and Bradley and Cartledge (2011) for surveys of scholarship on ancient slavery. 20. DuBois documents the ways the body of the slave was subject to a range of violations, from torture to branding (2003: 101–13). 21. Aesop’s fables may be the only exception, although DuBois argues that by then his slave identity was merely a ruse, since the fables primarily support the status quo (2003: 177). The later Roman author Phaedrus, however, specifically identifies fables as a “cryptic discourse of slaves” (164–5). 22. The sexual exploitation of male and female slaves within the household is often difficult to isolate in our sources; see Garlan (1988: 52) and DuBois (2003: 104–5). 23. The poorest Athenians did not own slaves, but those who could afford hoplite armor generally did (Garlan 1988: 60–1). 24. For more on the mines, see Thompson (2003: 144–53). As he notes, physical restraints have been found on-site (221). 25. Focus on slavery’s role in the ancient economy was initiated by Marx’s writings; see Garlan (1988: 3–7); on labor competition, see p. 72. 26. Thucydides suggests that more than 20,000 Athenian slaves escaped between the years 413 and 404 (see Cartledge 2018: 138). 27. For the impact of Aristotle’s views on American ideas about slavery, see Monoson (2011) and Wish (1949); Garnsey (1996: 15–16) discusses a plantation owner named William Harper, who recommends the reading of Aristotle.

Chapter 8 1. Nicodromus began his campaign from Athens and returned to live in Athens, harrying Aeginetan ships from his new home in Sounion, on the southern tip of Attica. 2. The classic study of Athenian empire remains Meiggs (1972); see Chapter 9, this volume.

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Chapter 9 1. For critical assessments of international relations theorists’ readings of Thucydides, see Forde 2012; Keene 2015. 2. Whether or not the funeral speeches preserved as the works of Lysias and Demosthenes are authentic (in the sense of having been delivered on the official occasion of the public funeral) is unknown; Demosthenes did deliver a funeral oration after the Athenian defeat by Philip II of Macedon at Chaeronea in 338 bce, but speech 60 in the Demosthenic corpus may not be it. 3. See Papazarkadas (2009) for a survey of changes in scholarly opinion since Meiggs (1972). 4. For an updated commentary and bibliography, see Attic Inscriptions Online n.d.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Valentina Arena is Reader in Roman History at University College London. Her work focuses on the history of ancient ideas and ancient political thought as well as the wider intellectual landscape of the Roman Republic. She is the author of Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the late Roman Republic (2012), the editor of Liberty: Ancient Ideas and Modern Perspectives ( 2018 and 2020), and coeditor of volumes on Roman political culture, ancient democracy, Varro, and the antiquarian tradition. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded research project Ordering, Constructing, Empowering: Fragments of the Roman Republican Antiquarians. Carol Atack is a Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her research on ancient Greek political thought explores intersections of power and ethics, and theories of political change. Her books include The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece (2020) and, with Tim Rood and Tom Phillips, Anachronism and Antiquity (2020). She is currently working on a monograph on the temporality of Platonic dialogue. Paul Cartledge is A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College and emeritus A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, Cambridge University. He is the author, coauthor, editor or coeditor of some thirty books, most recently Democracy: A Life (2018) and Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (2020). He is an honorary citizen of modern Sparti, holds the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour (Hellenic Republic), and is President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. Benjamin Gray is Lecturer in Ancient History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He specializes in the connections between political thought and

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practice in the ancient Greek world, with a focus on the Hellenistic period. He is the author of Stasis and Stability: Exile, the Polis, and Political Thought, c. 404– 146 bc (2015) and coeditor, with M. Canevaro, of The Hellenistic Reception of Classical Athenian Democracy and Political Thought (2018) and, with M. Canevaro, A. Erskine, and J. Ober, of Ancient Greek History and Contemporary Social Science (2018). Dhananjay Jagannathan teaches philosophy and classical studies at Columbia University, New York. His main research interests are in ancient Greek ethics and political philosophy and in issues at the intersection of philosophy and literature. He has published a series of articles on Aristotle’s distinctive conception of political wisdom and political justice and is currently writing a book entitled Aristotle’s Practical Epistemology on the theory of moral knowledge in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. Denise Eileen McCoskey is Professor of Classics and affiliate in Black World Studies at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy (2012) and coauthor of Latin Love Poetry (2013). She is currently serving as editor of the forthcoming A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity and working on a project examining the role of eugenics in early twentieth-century American classical scholarship. Emily Mackil is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research centers on the political, economic, and legal history of the ancient Greek world. She has published numerous articles on ancient federal states, monetary and economic history, and property ownership. She is the author of Creating a Common Polity: Religion, Economy, and Politics in the Making of the Greek Koinon (2013), which won the Goodwin Award from the Society for Classical Studies. Andrew Monson is Associate Professor of Classics at New York University. His research interests focus mainly on ancient politics, law, and economic history. He is the author of From the Ptolemies to the Romans: Political and Economic Change in Egypt (2012) as well as Agriculture and Taxation in Early Ptolemaic Egypt (2012), and coeditor of Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States (2015). Georgia Petridou is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek History at the University of Liverpool, UK. She works on classical literature, history of Greek and Roman religion, and ancient medicine in its sociocultural context. She is the author of Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture (2015) and the editor of a

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special issue of the journal Religion in the Roman Empire (vol. 3, no. 2, 2017), entitled “Embodying Religion: Lived Ancient Religion and the Body.” She has also coedited, with C. Thumiger, Homo Patiens: Approaches on the Patient in the Ancient World (2016) and, with R. L. Gordon and J. Rüpke, Beyond Priesthood. Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Imperial Era (2017).

INDEX

Achaemenid empire 7, 141–3, 152–3, 177, 181–3 iconography 16, 23–4 ideology 32 Aeneas 34, 111, 146, 195 Aesop 140–1 Agis III of Sparta 104 Aelius Aristides 2 Aeschines 59, 116 Against Timarchus 131–2 Aeschylus 189 Persians 152–3 Seven Against Thebes 101, 170 Suppliant Women 24–5 Ai Khanoum 207–08 Alcibiades (Athenian general and politician) 17, 126, 151, 163–5 as proxenos 188 Alexander III (the Great) of Macedon 9, 10, 34, 104, 111, 167–9, 206 conquest of Eastern empires 198 destruction of Thebes 167 Alexandria (Egypt) 208 Amazons 99, 178, 181–2 Antipater 167 Aphrodisias 209 Apollodorus Against Neaira 127–8, 149 archons 79, 80, 109–10 king archon 109–10, 127–8 Arendt, Hannah 158–9 Areopagus Council (Athens) 83

Argos 24–6, 169, 179, 185 archē (rule, office) 5, 18, 157 ruling and being ruled 67 pay for 84–6 Aristophanes Acharnians 85, 126, 192 Assemblywomen 80, 85, 87–8, 115–6 Birds 101–2, 107 Frogs 191 Knights 21 Lysistrata 30, 121, 123, 162, 164–5, 193 Peace 192 Wasps 30–31, 43, 83 Women at the Thesmophoria 120 Aristotle defining citizenship (Pol. 3) 118–19, 156–7 defining democracy 58 Nicomachean Ethics 67, 150 on class conflict 156–8, 169 on liberty 45 on monarchy (Pol. 3) 28–9 on the common good 67–71 on the dēmos 19–20 on race 145–6 on slavery 150 Politics 2, 5, 10, 67, 145–6, 169 [Aristotle] Constitution of the Athenians 78–80, 161, 184–5

INDEX

Aspasia of Miletus 125–6, 178–9 Aspendos 210–11 assemblies 4, 24–6, 28, 32, 45, 65, 117, 180 Athenian 17, 20–1, 30–1, 80, 87–8, 115, 151, 161, 192–3 Hellenistic 205–11 masculinity and 128–32 right to participate in 80 pay for attending 85–6, 206 Roman contiones 172–3, 203 women excluded from 117–19, 198 Athena 95, 177 Polias 123, 191 Promachos 99–101 priestess of 120 Athens 1–3 see also festivals Acropolis 97, 103 Agora 41, 84, 150, 198 building programme 82–3, 152, 186 democratic revolution of 508 18–19, 27, 139, 162–4 enslaved in 150–2 Hellenistic 133–4, 212 honours for individuals 187–8 democratic reforms of 457 80 oligarchy 411/10 162 oligarchy 404/3 163, 165–6 oligarchy 322 105–6 Peisistratid tyranny 99–101 Pnyx 85–6, 120 political structures 27, 102–3 property classes 80 public dining 107–8 resisting Persia 41, 124–5, 181–3 Solon’s reforms 39–40, 78–9 tribes 102–3 Attalid monarchy 209–10 Attica 53, 81, 97, 103, 146–7, 193. See also Laureion Augustus (Roman emperor) dedications to 214 portrayed as democratic 140 and grain supply 89 legislation on marriage 148 Res Gestae 34 authority 15–35, 83, 148, 174, 209 autochthony 97–8, 146–7, 193 axial age 9–10

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Babylon 39 barbarians see non-Greeks battles Arginusae (406 bce) 153 Chaeronea (338 bce) 104, 106, 169 Marathon (490 bce) 153, 183 Plataea (479 bce) 181 benefit 74 Blackness 141 Blok, Josine 116, 119–20 Bodin, Jean 28 Brutus, Lucius Junius 43 Brutus, Marcus Junius 50 burial societies 134 Byzantium 3–4, 11, 200 and grain trade 82 Caesar, Julius 43 Caracalla (Roman emperor) 148 Edict of Caracalla 3, 203 Carthage 10, 47 Cassius Dio 140 Cato the Elder (Roman politician) 49 Catullus (Roman poet) 128 Cecrops (king of Athens) 27, 97–8 children financial support for orphans 86–7 transition to adulthood 131–3 Chios 117 Chalcis 184–5 Christianity 3, 207, 212 Chrysippus 204 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (Roman politician and author) 116 on justice and the common good 71–5 On the Agrarian Law 133 Against Catiline 34 For Caelius 128 For Cluentius 48 For Flaccus 206 Laws 33, 175 On Duties 72, 148 On the Republic 33–4, 71–5 [Rhetoric to Herennius] 48 Stoic Paradoxes 205 Against Verres 112 citizenship 4–5, 67–9 as basis for redistribution 77–8 and bodily integrity 79

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and dignity 78–83 expanding 197–217 and gender 115–35 granted as honor 104–5 incompatible with sex work 125–8 loss of 126–8, 131–3 in oligarchies 133 and race 147–9 and right to own property 79–80 restricted 120 weakened 202–3 citizen body 5, 30, 44, 45, 77, 78, 80, 83, 87, 90, 93, 94, 108, 112, 125, 132, 146, 156-7, 202, 208, 213 city Hellenistic 204–7 mergers 213–6 Claudius (Roman emperor) 186 on Rome’s inclusiveness 146 Cleisthenes (Athenian politician) 27, 43, 102–3, 147, 160 Cleon (Athenian politician) 151 cleruchy 81–2 climate 142–3, 145 Clodia 128 clothing pilleus 46–7, 50–1 toga praetexta 54–5 toga virilis 55 coinage Athenian owl 27 denarius of C. Egnatius Maxsumus 47 denarius of Brutus 50–51 of Seleucus I Nicator 207 colonisation 193–4 and trade 82–3 comedy 21, 30, 115–16, 121–2, 162, 189, 192–3 common good 48, 57–75 commonwealth (res publica) 71–4 as partnership 73–4 concord (homonoia) 5, 20, 210 Constantinople 3–4 constitutions typologies of 69–70 changes between 168–9 Corinth League of Corinth 169 Corcyra (Corfu) 159–60

INDEX

Cos 214 cosmopolitanism 198, 200–8 council 4, 8, 45, 106–7, 161, 187, 210 pay for serving on 85 courts in Hellenistic cities 208 Crates of Thebes 200–1 Cratinus Fr 259 126 Crete 90–1, 117, 130 crowd 5 Cynics 202–3, 206 Darius I of Persia 23 debt bondage Athens 39–40, 147 Rome 50 Deioces, king of the Medes 8, 31–2 Delian League 103, 176, 183–4, 190 Delos 125, 184, 190 Delphi 192, 193 Pythian Games 189 demes 27, 80–1, 102–3 registration in 119 Demeter 111–12 Demetrius of Phaleron 91–2 Demetrius Poliorcetes 87 democracy changing definition of 167–8 direct 77, 83 in Hellenistic cities 206–7 liberal 57, 60–1 and race 137–40 Demokratia (goddess/cult) 3, 20, 106 dēmos (people) as superhuman person 19 Demosthenes 59, 129, 149, 151 Against Polycles (50) 91 Against Euboulides (57) 119, 149 [Against Neaira] ([59]) 127–8, 149 Diogenes of Sinope 200–1 diakosmēsis 27 Diodorus Siculus 205 Dionysius I of Syracuse 187 Dionysus 127–8 Lyaeus 51–6 diplomacy 187–8 diversity 141 Dover, Kenneth 131

INDEX

Ebla 38 Ecbatana 8 economy 77–94 C. Egnatius Maxsumus 47 Egypt 141, 208 Pharaonic 9–10 elections 5, 206 as oligarchic 2 scrutiny prior to 22 in Rome 48, 172–3 Eleusis 111–12, 166, 189–90, 191 Elpinike 118 emperor 4 cult 3 empire Achaemenid Athenian 120, 164, 186 Roman see Roman Empire Seleucid 209, 211 Ephialtes (Athenian politician) 83 Epicurus Principal Doctrines (Kyriai Doxai) 72–3 equality 4, 147 enabled by slavery 151–2 Erechtheus (king of Athens) 97–9, 146–7 Erythrae 184, 186 ethnicity 137–54 Eucrates, Decree/Law of 19, 120, 124, 167 eudaimonia (happiness) as goal of political community 67–9 euergetism 93 Euripides 120 Bacchae 53–4 Children of Heracles 192 Erechtheus 192 Ion 184, 192 Medea 143–4 Orestes 170 Suppliant Women 26, 44, 179, 192 Evagoras of Salamis (Cyprus) 187 exception, state of 28–31 expertise, political 63 factions see stasis federalism 215–6 festivals 103 City Dionysia (Athens) 53, 85–6, 192 funding 91–2

255

Great Panathenaea (Athens) 41, 99–101, 102–3, 160, 184–5, 191–2 Liberalia (Rome) 54–5 Olympic games 169, 185 processions 99–101 Thesmophoria (Athens) 127 Finley, Moses 149, 155 food supply 81–2, 87–9 communal dining 90–1, 107–8 foreigners 20, 106, 127, 202, 212. See also non-Greeks Foucault, Michel 131, 139 freedmen and women 127, 202 religious activity of 134 freedom 37–56 communal 50 as racial characteristic 145–6 as sexual release 55 freedom of speech see parrhēsia fulfilment see eudaimonia funeral speeches 58–60, 125, 146, 177–81, 187, 192 gender 115–35 as analogy for class conflict 164–5 generalship 129 goddesses see individual goddesses representing cities 19, 95, 123–4 gods see individual gods Gracchus, Gaius 82, 88, 171–3 Gracchus, Tiberius 43, 46, 172 graphē paranomōn 127 Greek identity 143–6 Hammurabi 8 happiness see eudaimonia Harmodius and Aristogeiton see Tyrannicides Hellenistic period 203–16 colonialism in 206 kingdoms 32–3 new cities 9–10 thought 203–7 Herodotus 4, 8, 140, 162, 179 on Athenian democracy 160 on identity 142, 179 on kingship 29 on tyranny 41 Hinduism 9

256

Hipparchus (Athenian tyrant) 160 Hippias of Elis 200 Hippocratic corpus Airs, Waters, Places 142–3 Hittite “Song of Liberation” 37–8 Hobbes, Thomas 15 Hölkeskamp, Karl-Joachim 33 Homer 191 Iliad 129 Odyssey 117 homonoia 5, 20, 210 hubris 79 Hyperides 187 Iasos 86, 206 ideal city 80 identity Greek 141–2, 144–5, 176–7 Roman 145 Igingalliš 38 immigration 139–40 India 8–9 inequality between citizens 78 see also Eucrates, Law of international relations 175–95 Ionian revolt (499 BCE) 162 Isocrates Areopagiticus 83 Helen 179 On the Peace 59, 192 Panegyricus 102, 108–9 To Philip 129 isēgoria 216 isonomia 4, 147, 213 Jeremiah (Hebrew prophet) 39 judgement 5, 157 Jupiter Libertas 45–51 Optimus Maximus 51 jurors 80, 83–5 pay for 83 justice 29, 40, 60, 66–8, 117, 180 democratic 45, 183–4 Epicurean conception of 72 and gender 117

INDEX

liberal conception of 70 Stoic conception of 72 Kantorowicz, Ernst 19 Keane, John 6–7 King, Martin Luther 153–4 kinaidos 130 kingship 28–30 Hellenistic 208, 213 philosopher kings 29–30 labor 50, 79, 151–2 land 25, 39, 97, 142 grants of 81–2 public 82 reform 82 right to own 79, 80–1 Laureion, Attica, silver mines 90, 150–2, 186 law 29–30, 88–9, 106 bodily integrity and 80, 131, 173 codification of 16–17, 30 collective will as 21 common good and 72–4 discourse of 27–8 natural 15, 204 policing status 199 rule of 2, 16–17, 41, 48–9, 57, 202 women and 117–18, 127–8 law codes Athenian 16–17, 117–18, 147–8 Dracon 117–18 Gortyn 117 Roman Imperial 148 Roman Republican 148 Leagues Arcadian 215–16 Boeotian 215–16 Delian 103, 176, 183–5 Second Athenian 185–6 legal system 80, 83–5 Liber 51–6 liberty 37–56, 173 liturgy 91–3 outside Athens 93 Livy 202 Loraux, Nicole 158, 177–8

INDEX

lot see sortition Lysias On the Murder of Eratosthenes (1) 118 Funeral Speech (2) 178–9, 181–2 Against Pancleon (23) 201 Macedon 10, 104–6 Maeandrius of Samos 40–1 Mari 23 marriage 125–8 Augustan laws 148 forced 146 sympoliteia and 214 Marx, Karl 155–6 masculinity 116, 128–33, 181 and courage 129 Mesopotamia 6, 7–8, 207–8 metics 119, 125–6, 139, 148–9 exclusion from politics 197–200 Miletus 164, 212, 214 Millar, Fergus 32–3 mining 90 mob 4, 5, 171 monarchy 6–8, 28–30, 74, 146, 168, 208 and climate 142–3 Musonius Rufus, Stoic philosopher 205 myth Athenian civic 169–70 Athenian foundation 145–6 political 176 Roman foundation 146, 195 Mytilene 21, 186 Naxos 164 nexus 50 Nicias (Athenian general and politician) 17, 151, 163–4, 185 non-citizens see freedmen and women, metics, slaves non-Greeks 20, 106, 143–5, 147–50 Obama, Michelle on slavery 151 Ober, Josiah on Athenian revolution 18–19 Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens 27–8

257

ochlos see mob office-holding 80 Old Oligarch see ps-Xenophon oligarchy 78, 133, 163–7 Olympia 191 Oreithyia (Athenian princess) 124–5 ostracism 118, 163–4 Ovid 55 panchayat 9 Panhellenic sanctuaries 13, 24, 176, 185, 188–91 parrhēsia 44, 218 in Rome 49 Participation 77–8 Pateman, Carole 133 Pausanias 40 peculium 49 pederasty 129–33 Peisistratus, tyrant of Athens 99–100 Pelasgus of Argos 24–5 Peloponnesian War (431–404 bce) 95, 104, 163–5, 178–9 cultural consequences 115, 169–71 Pericles 58–60, 63, 125–6, 151, 176 citizenship laws 120, 125–6, 147–8 depicted by Pheidias 99–101 depicted by Thucydides 125–6, 178 Persia 7–8, 142, 143–5, 166, 177, 181–3 as “other” 141–3, 152–3 Persian Wars (490, 480–79 bce) 43, 143–4, 152–3, 179, 181–2, 189–90 Pettit, Philip 48 Phaselis 207, 211 Philip II of Macedon 104, 167, 169 Philo of Alexandria 205 Phoenicians 10 Phrygian cap see clothing: pilleus Piraeus 166, 198 as home to migrants 200 Plataea 40, 178, 179, 199, 212 Plato on the common good 61–7 Gorgias 61–6, 157 Laches 129 Laws 182 Menexenus 146, 178 Meno 149

258

Republic 29, 66–8, 72, 115, 157, 168–9 Statesman 29–30 Symposium 129 pleasure 63 plebs 10, 48, 50, 54, 88, 171–2 Pliny the Elder 41–2 polis embedding of religion 95–7 expansion 197–217 politeia 4, 69, 72, 157, 159 Polybius 10, 33, 171, 202–3, 216 populus 10, 19, 173 poverty 157 power 40 democratic 18–22, 57–8, 60, 107, 180, 202, 216–17 divine 21–2 economic 77–8 gender and 110, 122, 126, 134 Imperial 171–3, 203 liberty and 43–5 monarchical 3, 8, 15–16, 23–4, 29–30, 101, 168, 209, 213 naval 81, 87, 162 potestas 49 religious 99–101, 189 Republican 33–4, 48, 87 state 15, 90, 134, 139 Priene 212–13 Principate see Roman Empire processions 54–5, 97–9, 101–3, 110, 200 property 79–80 property classes 80 and women 117–18 prostitution see sex work Protagoras of Abdera 194 proxenia 187–8 ps-Xenophon, Constitution of the Athenians 44–5, 102, 185 Raaflaub, Kurt 45 race 137–54 In Greece 143–6 in Rome 146–7 in the USA 137–9, 153–4 racism 201–2 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice 60–1

INDEX

redistribution 79–80, 90–3 religion 95–114 civic polytheism 119 mystery cults 111–12 republicanism 48 revolution 18, 26, 126, 155–74 Rheboulas, honorary decree for 104–5 rhetoric funeral speeches 58–60, 125, 146, 177–81, 187, 192 and masculinity 129 as political practice 63 Rhodes 93, 168, 214 rites of passage Athenian 130 pederasty as 130 Roman 54–6 Roman Republic 6, 10–11, 33–4, 97 civil strife in 171–3 external relations 194, 198 inclusivity 147–8, 202 foundation myth 195, 202 grain distribution 87–8 liberty in 42, 45–51 public land in 82 women in 128 Roman Empire 3 citizenship in 116, 147–9, 200–3, 212 grain distribution 87–9 Rome Capitol 43, 55 Forum 55, 172 Senate 146–7, 174–5 Romulus (mythical founder king of Rome) 202 sacrifice 3, 102, 103, 185 animal 97 Samos 40–41 treaty with Athens 95, 177 food supply 88 Schmitt, Carl 17, 19 state of exception 17–18 Scipio Africanus the younger 73–4 Segesta 210–1 seisachtheia 39–40, 78–9 self-sufficiency 68–9 Sen, Amartya 7

INDEX

senate (Rome) 146–7, 174–5 senatus consultum ultimum 33, 167–73 sex work 125–8 silver 90 Simonides, Fr. 140 40 Sicily 112, 164–5, 210 Siphnos 93 slavery 139–41, 149–53, 186 and debt 39–40 and sex work 127–8, 132 as political analogy 38 as religious analogy 3 transatlantic trade (modern) 141 and violence 151 slaves 140 excluded from politics 197 excluded from welfare 78 Smyrna 213 societas (partnership) 73 Socrates on the common good 61–7 execution of 190 Solon (Athenian politician) 39–40, 79, 147 On Eunomia (Fr. 36) 39, 79 songs Harmodius song 43 Song of Liberation 37, 43 sophists 65–7 Sophocles Antigone 28, 170, 179 Oedipus at Colonus 26, 170–1 sortition 44, 84, 127–8 Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane 96 sovereignty embodied 22–7 imagined 18–22 popular 15–16 Sparta 130, 216 Aristagoras and 29 and Athens 98, 164–5 helots 153 Heraclids 180, 193 as oligarchy 160 public dining 90–1 stasis 158–74 statues Athenian tyrannicides 41–2 Brutus the liberator 43, 51 herms 164

259

Stoicism 72, 155, 204–7 Sulla (Roman general, first century bce) 33–4, 97 sympoliteia 213–6 symposium 169 synoecism 27, 103 Syracuse 46, 164, 166, 180–1 taxation 91–2 technē 30, 66 and the common good 65–6 Teššub (Hittite god) 38 theatre 85–6, 164 Thebes (Boeotia) 52–3, 167, 171, 179 Themistocles (Athenian politician) 90, 153 Theramenes (Athenian politician) 165–6 Theseus (mythical king of Athens) 24–7, 44, 103, 171, 187 Thurii 194 Thrasybulus (Athenian politician) 103–4 Thrasymachus (sophist) 66 Thucydides Funeral Oration 58–60, 178–80 Melian dialogue 180 Mytilene debate 21 on stasis 159–60 Sicilian expedition 164, 180–1, 183 “Thucydides trap” 175 Tiberius (Roman emperor) 148 tokens, jury service 84–5 trade 120 speculation in grain 87–8 tragedy 24–6, 85–6, 91–2 treaties 183–6 Athens and Samos 183, 185 Delian League 183–5 Quadruple Alliance 185 Second Athenian League 185–6 tribunes of the plebs 10, 48, 172 trierarchy 91 tyrannicides, Athenian 41–3, 102, 160 tyranny 101–2, 112, 166–7 Athenian empire as 176 Thirty Tyrants 165 anti-tyranny decree see Law of Eucrates Tyrtaeus 4, 160 United States of America 174 founding fathers as slave-owners 151

260

universalism 197 uproar 22 Valerius Maximus 49 violence 13, 79, 143, 174 against the enslaved 149, 151 Vlassopoulos, Kostas, on slavery 153 voting see elections war. See also Peloponnesian War; Persian Wars financing of 91 Lamian (322 bce) 105–6 Trojan 195 wealth 38, 40, 70, 74, 78–80, 102, 107 dependent on labour of the enslaved 151 dependent on empire 184 redistributing 90–3 welfare 77–8, 86–7 Whiteness 141

INDEX

women 115–28 non-citizen 148–9 and religion 96, 109–11 and slavery 127–8, 148–9 excluded from politics 116, 198 X, Malcolm 137–9, 140–1 Xenophon. See also ps-Xenophon Hellenica 165–6 Oeconomicus 132 Xerxes of Persia 41 Zeno of Citium 200–2, 204 Zeus 21–2, 27, 101 Eleutherios 37–45, 46, 185–6 (see also Jupiter Libertas) Olympian 189 Zimri-Lim, king of Mari 8

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