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THE ANCIENT GREEK POLIS
The Invention of Politics
In his play, The Suppliant Women, Euripides interrupts the action with a short political debate between a herald from despotic Thebes and the legendary Athenian hero, Theseus. The Theban boasts that his city is ruled by only one man, not by a fickle mob, the mass of poor and common people who are unable to make sound political judgments because they cannot turn their minds away from labour. Theseus replies by singing the praises of democracy. In a truly free city, he insists, the laws are common to all, equal justice is available to rich and poor alike, anyone who has something useful to say has the right to speak before the public, and the labours of a free citizen are not wasted ‘merely to add to the tyrant’s substance by one’s toil’.
This brief dramatic interlude may do little to advance the action of the play, but it nicely sums up the issues at stake in Athenian political theory. It also tells us much about the polis and the social conditions that gave rise to political theory. Contained in the conception of freedom exalted by Theseus are certain basic principles that the Athenians, and other Greeks, regarded as uniquely theirs, defining the essence of their distinctive state. The Greek word for freedom, eleutheria, and, for that matter, even the more restricted and elitist Latin libertas – in reference to both individuals and states – have no precise equivalent in any ancient language of the Near East or Asia, for instance in Babylonian or classical Chinese; nor can the Greek and Roman notions of a ‘free man’ be translated into those languages.1 In Greek, these concepts appear again and again, in everything from historical writing to drama, as the defining characteristics of Athens.
So, for instance, when the historian Herodotus offers his explanation for the Athenian defeat of Persia, he attributes their strength to the fact that they had shaken off the yoke of tyranny. When they were living under tyrannical oppression, ‘they let themselves be beaten, since they worked for a master . . .’ 2 Now that they were free, they had become ‘the first of all’. Similarly, the tragedian, Aeschylus, in The Persians, tells us that – in contrast to subjects of the Persian king, Xerxes – to be an Athenian citizen is to be masterless, a servant to no mortal man.
It would, of course, be possible to attribute the Greeks’ clear delineation of ‘freedom’ to the prevalence of chattel slavery, which entailed an unusually sharp conceptual and legal distinction between freedom and bondage. The growth of slavery certainly did clarify and sharpen the distinction. But the distinctive Greek conception of autonomy and self-sufficiency owes its origin to something else, and the uncompromising definition of servitude is a consequence of that conception more than its cause.
The distinguished medieval historian, Rodney Hilton, once remarked that ‘the concept of the freeman, owing no obligation, not even deference, to an overlord is one of the most important if intangible legacies of medieval peasants to the modern world.’3 If Hilton was right to trace this concept to the peasantry, he was surely wrong not to give the credit for it to the ancient Greeks. It was the liberation of Greek peasants from any form of servitude or tribute to lord or state, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, that produced a new conception of freedom and the free man. This conception was increasingly associated with democracy – so much so that an anti-democrat like Plato (who, as we shall see, thought that anyone engaged in necessary labour should be legally or politically dependent) sought to subvert the concept of eleutheria by equating it with licence. At the same time, the liberation of the peasantry wiped out a whole spectrum of dependence and left behind the stark dichotomy of freedom and slavery, the one an attribute of citizens, the other a condition to which no citizen could be reduced.
Although a leisurely life was no doubt a cultural ideal, the Greek conception of eleutheria has at its heart a freedom from the necessity to work for another – not freedom from labour but the freedom of labour. This applies not only to the masterless individual but also to the polis governed by a citizen body and one that owes no tribute to another state. In its emphasis on autonomous labour and self-sufficiency, this concept of freedom reflects the unique reality of a state in which producers were citizens, a state in which a civic community that combined appropriating and producing classes ruled out relations of lordship and dependence between them, whether as masters and servants or as rulers and subjects. That civic community, which was most highly developed in democratic Athens, was the decisive condition for the emergence of Greek political theory.
In the previous chapter, we outlined some of the ways in which the polis, and especially the democracy, generated a new mode of thinking, a systematic application of critical reason to interrogate the very foundations of political right. This mode of thinking was, it was suggested, rooted in a new kind of practice, which had less to do with relations between rulers and subjects than with transactions and conflicts among citizens, united in their civic identity yet still divided by class. The self-governing civic community and the practice of politics – action in the public sphere of the polis, a community of citizens – reached its apogee in democratic Athens, which was also home to the classic tradition of Greek political theory.
The Rise of the Democracy
The evolution of the democracy can be traced by following the development of the civic or political principle, the notion of citizenship and the gradual elevation of the polis, civic law and civic identity at the expense of traditional principles of kinship, household, birth and blood. To put it another way, the processes of politicization and democratization went hand in hand, and the most democratic polis was the one in which the political principle was most completely developed. The historic events commonly identified as the milestones in Athenian political development can all be understood in these terms. In each case, the strengthening of the political principle at the same time represented an advance in popular power and a reconfiguration of relations between classes.
Archaeology and the decipherment of Linear B, the script that preceded the Greek alphabet, have revealed much about the states that existed in Greece before the emergence of the polis. They were, as has already been suggested, analogous to other ancient states, albeit on a smaller scale, in which a bureaucratic power at the centre controlled land and labour, appropriating tax or tribute from subordinate peasant communities. Little is known about how this state-form disappeared or what intervened between its demise and the rise of the polis. Much of what is known about Greek society on the eve of the polis depends on the Homeric epics, which certainly do not describe the Mycenean civilization that is supposed to be their theme. Invoking myths and legends from an earlier time, they depict a social structure and social values of a later age. The Homeric poems may not exactly describe any society that ever existed in Greece; but, in general outline, they remain our best source of information about the aristocratic society that preceded the polis, a society already coming to an end when the poet(s) memorialized it. The epics at least allow us some access to the social and political arrangements that gave way to the polis.
The principal social and economic unit of ‘Homeric’ society is the oikos, the household, and especially the aristocratic household, dominated by a lord who is surrounded by his kin and retainers and supported by the labour of dependents. There is scarcely any ‘public’ sphere: duties and rights are primarily to household, kin and friends; and various social functions, such as the disposal of property and the punishment of crime, are dictated by the customary rules of kinship, while jurisdiction, such as it is, belongs exclusively to lords.
Yet when the epics were written, household and kinship ties were already being displaced by different principles. There were ties of territoriality, around an urban centre, while the bonds and conflicts of class were at work in relations between master and servant, or lord and peasant, and in the class alliances of lordship. ‘Homeric’ lords had become an aristocracy of property, bound together by common interests as appropriators, though often in vicious rivalry with one another, and increasingly isolated from their producing compatriots.
The aristocracy used its non-economic powers, especially its judicial functions, to appropriate the labour of subordinate producers. In that respect, it still had something in common with the ancient bureaucratic state, in which the state and state office were the principal means of appropriation. The status of lords may even have been a remnant of the old bureaucratic state and its system of state-controlled appropriation. But the critical difference is that there was, in post-Mycenean Greece, effectively no state, no powerful apparatus of rule to sustain the power of appropriators over producers. Property was held by individuals and households, and the aristocracy of property had to face its subordinates not as a well organized ruling force but as a fairly loose collection of such individuals and households, often engaged in fierce conflict with each other, and distinguished from their non-aristocratic compatriots less by superior power than by superior property and noble birth. Their relations with peasant producers were further complicated by the community’s growing military reliance on the peasantry.
By the time we reach the first relatively well-documented moment in the evolution of Athenian democracy, the reforms of Solon, the conflict between lords and peasants had decisively come to the fore. Although Aristotle, in his account of the Solonian reforms, is no doubt exaggerating when he says that, at the time, all the poor were serfs to the wealthy few, there can be little doubt that dependence of one kind or another was very common. There was widespread unrest, which the aristocracy was in no position to quell by sheer force. Instead, there was an effort to settle the conflict between peasants and lords by means of a new political dispensation.
Whatever Solon’s motivations may have been, the significant point for us here is how he sought to placate the unruly peasantry. He eliminated various forms of dependence which allowed Attic peasants to be exploited by their aristocratic compatriots. He abolished debt-bondage and prohibited loans on the security of the person, which could issue in slavery in case of default; and, by instituting his famous seisachtheia, the ‘shaking off of burdens’, he abolished the status of the hektemoroi, peasants whose land, and some portion of their labour, was held in bondage to landlords.4 In other words, he eliminated various forms of ‘extra-economic’ appropriation through the medium of political power or personal dependence.
The effects of these reforms, liberating the peasantry from dependence and extra-economic exploitation, were enhanced by strengthening the civic community, extending political rights and elevating the individual citizen at the expense of traditional principles of kinship, birth and blood. Although citizens would still be classified into stratified categories, the old division among artisans, farmers and the aristocracy of well-born clans would no longer be politically significant and would be replaced by more quantitative criteria of wealth, based on an already existing system of military classification. While the former governing council, the Areopagus, was still confined to the two richest classes, the third class was given access to a new Council of 400, to act as a counterweight. The poorest military category, the thetes, was apparently admitted for the first time to the assembly, which became increasingly important as the power of the aristocratic council declined.
Solon also reformed the judicial system, creating a new people’s court, to which all citizens had access. Any citizen could have his case transferred to this court, taking it out of the reach of aristocratic judgment and weakening the aristocracy’s monopoly of jurisdiction. Traditionally, kinship groups had always had the initiative in avenging crimes against their members, according to age-old customs of blood vengeance. Now, any citizen could bring charges against anyone else on behalf of any member of the community. Crime was now defined as a wrong committed against a member of the civic community, not necessarily a kinsman; and the individual Athenian had the initiative as citizen, while the civic community, in the form of citizens’ courts, had jurisdiction.
In various ways, then, Solon weakened the political role of noble birth and blood, kinship and clan, while strengthening the community of citizens. It is too much to say that his reforms were democratic; but they did have the effect of weakening the aristocracy, which was increasingly incorporated into the civic community and subject to the jurisdiction of the polis. Impersonal principles of law and citizenship were taking precedence over the personal rule of kings or lords. The new civic relationship between aristocracy and peasants, together with other labouring citizens, meant that the Athenians had moved decisively away from the old division between rulers and producers. The state, in the form of the polis, was becoming not a primary means of appropriation from direct producers but, on the contrary, a means of protecting citizen producers from appropriating classes.
The polis also created a new arena for aristocratic rivalries. Solon’s reforms certainly did not end the influence of noble families, nor did they diminish the ferocity of intra-class rivalry. Athens would long continue to be plagued by aristocratic infighting, even to the point of virtual civil war, sometimes with help from Sparta for one or another of the contenders. But it was becoming harder for landlords to contend for power just among themselves. They now had to conduct their competition within the community of citizens, and this meant that they could advance their positions by gaining support from the common people, the demos. The paradoxical effect was that the civic community and the political principle were further strengthened by aristocratic rivalry. Although there has been much dispute about the ‘tyrants’ who followed Solon, who they were and what they represented, the most likely explanation is that they were a product of just such competition among Athenian aristocrats;5 and the general tendency of their regime was, again, to strengthen the polis against traditional principles – for instance, building on what might be called ‘national’ as against local loyalties, by such means as a national coinage, festivals and cults, including the cult of the goddess Athena, patron of the polis.
After the expulsion of the last tyrant by Sparta, there followed, in 510–508 BC, a period of particularly violent struggle, in which the principal contenders were Isagoras and Cleisthenes, both representing noble families. When Cleisthenes prevailed, at least temporarily, he instituted reforms that would later be regarded as the true foundation of democracy. In a sense, he was simply following the logic established by Solon and the tyrants. His reforms, in 508(?) BC, further weakened the traditional authority of the aristocracy, their power over their own neighbourhoods and over smaller farmers in their area. Like his predecessors, he accomplished this by elevating the polis and the whole community of citizens over old forms of authority and old loyalties, submitting local and regional power to the all-embracing authority of the polis.
But what was most distinctive about this moment in the history of Athens was that the demos had become a truly central factor in the political struggle. By now, the people were a conscious and vocal political force. Cleisthenes did not create this force, but he had the strategic sense to mobilize it in his favour. Whether he was himself a true democrat or simply another scion of a noble clan seeking to enhance the position of his own aristocratic family, his appeal to the demos was direct and unambiguous. Herodotus writes that, when Cleisthenes found himself weaker than Isagoras, he made the demos his hetairoi – a word difficult to translate but suggesting comrades or partners. It also suggests the associations, friendship groups or clubs, the hetaireiai, which formed the power base of the aristocrat in Athens.6 The demos, in other words, had replaced friends and kin of aristocrats as the source of political power. When Cleisthenes’s enemy, Isagoras, drove him out, with the help of Sparta under its leader, Cleomenes, the demos rose in revolt, erupting into the political arena in an unprecedented way, as a conscious political force acting in its own right and in defence of its own interests.
Whatever his intentions, the result of Cleisthenes’s reforms was the establishment of an institutional framework that was to govern Athenian democracy from then on, with only a few modifications. He changed the whole organization of the polis by removing the political functions of the four tribes, dominated by the aristocracy, which had been the traditional basis of political organization – for instance, in the conduct of elections – and replaced them with ten new tribes based on complex and artificial geographic criteria. More significantly, he subdivided the tribes into demes, generally (but perhaps not always) based on existing villages, and made them the foundation of the democracy, its fundamental constituent unit and the locale of citizenship. The new divisions cut across tribal and class ties and elevated locality over kinship, establishing and strengthening new bonds, new loyalties specific to the polis, the community of citizens.
Cleisthenes also effected other major reforms, introducing measures designed to create some kind of counterbalance to institutions still dominated by the aristocracy, such as the Areopagus, which continued to have a monopoly of jurisdiction in crimes against the state and in controlling magistrates. In particular, he gave the Assembly a new legislative role. But it was the institution of the demes perhaps more than any other institutional reform that vested power in the demos. It was in the deme that the peasant-citizen was truly born. Democratic politics began in the deme, where ordinary citizens dealt with the immediate and local matters that most directly affected their daily lives, and the democratic polis at the centre was constructed on this foundation. It was here that the traditional barrier between producing peasant village and appropriating central state was most completely broken down; and the new relation between producing classes and the state extended to other labouring citizens too.
Nothing symbolizes more neatly the effect of Cleisthenes’s reforms than the fact that Athenian citizens were thereafter to be identified not by their patronymic or clan name but by their demotikon, the name of the deme in which their citizenship was rooted – an identification not surprisingly resisted by the aristocracy, which clung to the old identity of blood and noble birth. To be sure, the aristocracy continued to hold positions of power and influence, and Cleisthenes may or may not have intended to establish true popular sovereignty. But his reforms did advance the power of the people. Cleisthenes himself seems to have described the new political order as isonomia, literally equality of law, which had to do not simply with equal rights of citizenship but with a more even balance among the various organs of government, giving the popular assembly a more active legislative role than ever before. Although the demos, who elected magistrates, would not achieve full sovereign control as long as the Areopagus retained its dominant role in enforcing state decisions and holding magistrates to account, the new legislative role that Cleisthenes gave to the Assembly was a major enhancement of popular power.
There were also other more intangible effects of Cleisthenes’s reforms. We shall have more to say later about developments in the concepts of law, justice and equality; but it is worth mentioning here that Cleisthenes has been credited with a significant change in Greek political vocabulary, the application of the word nomos, instead of the traditional thesmos, to designate statutory law.7 What is significant about this change is that, while thesmos implies the imposition of law from above and has a distinctly religious flavour, nomos – a word that suggests something held in common, whether pasture or custom – implies a law to which there is common agreement, something that people who are subject to it themselves regard as a binding norm. The application of nomos to statute became common usage in Athens, which had thereby adopted ‘the most democratic word for “law” in any language.’8
Was the Democracy Democratic?
After Cleisthenes, popular power continued to evolve, with the Areopagus losing its exclusive jurisdiction in political cases, with popular juries playing an ever greater role (pay for attendance was introduced in the 450s under Pericles), and the Assembly gaining strength (though pay for attendance was introduced only in the late 390s). Since much of what we might regard as political business was dealt with in Athens by means of judicial proceedings, the power of popular juries was particularly important, and Aristotle – or whoever wrote the Constitution of Athens commonly attributed to him – would later describe it as one of the three most democratic features of the Athenian polis. Athens’s victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC or, more especially, the naval victory at Salamis in 480 ushered in the golden age of the democracy, a new age of democratic self-confidence. When the historian Thucydides a few decades later depicted the most famous democratic leader, Pericles, he was able to put into his mouth a glowing account of democracy in his famous Funeral Oration. For all its rose-tinted prose, this speech tells us much about the realities, and even more about the aspirations, of Athenian political life.
Pericles, himself an aristocrat, tells us that Athens is called a democracy
because its administration is in the hands, not of the few, but of the many; yet while as regards the law all men are on an equality for the settlement of their private disputes, yet . . . it is as each man is in any way distinguished that he is preferred to public honours, not because he belongs to a particular class, but because of personal merits; nor, again, on the ground of poverty is a man barred from a public career by obscurity of rank if he but has it in him to do the state a service . . . and we Athenians decide public questions for ourselves or at least endeavour to arrive at a sound understanding of them, in the belief that it is not debate that is a hindrance to action, but rather not to be instructed by debate before the time comes for action.9
And indeed the Assembly, which all citizens were entitled to attend, deliberated and decided on every kind of public question, while legal cases were commonly tried in popular courts. The council which set the agenda for the Assembly was now chosen by lot annually from among all citizens. Although election was regarded as an oligarchic practice, it was used for some positions, typically military and financial, which required a specialized skill. But in general public offices, which tended to be ad hoc, were not treated as specialized professional employments; and many officials were chosen by lot. In principle, then, and to a great extent in practice, all citizens could be involved in all government functions – executive, legislative and judicial. To be sure, aristocrats like Pericles (who reached his influential position in the democracy as a military leader chosen by the people) still enjoyed great influence, while wealthy and well-born citizens probably still had disproportionate weight in the assembly. Yet (as anti-democrats like Plato make very clear) we should not underestimate the day-to-day role of popular power in juries and assemblies, nor the significance of democratic practices like sortition (selection by lot) for various public positions.
Nevertheless, even taking into account the historically unprecedented, and in many ways still unequalled, power of the Athenian people, we must pause here to ask whether, or in what sense, it is appropriate to call the Athenian polis a democracy. After all, this was a society in which slavery played a major role, and in which women had no political rights. In fact, the evolution of democracy increased the role of slavery and in some ways diminished the status of women, especially in respect to the disposition of property. It can hardly be denied that the imperatives of preserving property had a great deal to do with restrictions on the freedom of women, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the position of smallholders, the peasant-citizens of Athens, generated particularly strong pressures for the conservation of family property. It is even more obvious that the liberation of the peasantry and its unavailability as dependent labour created new incentives for enslavement of non-Greeks. So, while slavery was relatively unimportant in the days of Solon, in the golden age of the democracy, according to some estimates, there may have been as many as 110,000 slaves out of a total Attic population of 310,000, of which 172,000 were free citizens and their families (the number of citizens with full political rights would then have been somewhere in the region of 30,000), with another 28,500 metics or resident aliens, free but without political rights.10
Athens was a democracy in the sense – and only in the sense – that the Greeks understood the term, which they themselves invented. It had to do with the power of the demos, not only as a political category but as a social one: the poor and common people. Aristotle defined democracy as a constitution in which ‘the free-born and poor control the government – being at the same time a majority’, and distinguished it from oligarchy, in which ‘the rich and better-born control the government – being at the same time a minority’. The social criteria – poverty in one case, wealth and high birth in the other – play a central role in these definitions and even in the end outweigh the numerical criterion. This notion of democracy as a form of class rule – rule by the poor – certainly reflected the views of those who opposed it, who may even have invented the word as a term of abuse; but supporters of the democracy, even moderates like Pericles, regarded the political position of the poor as essential to the definition of democracy.
The enemies of the democracy hated it above all because it gave political power to working people and the poor. It can even be said that the main issue dividing democrats from anti-democrats – as it divided Theseus and the Theban herald in The Suppliant Women – was whether the labouring multitude, the banausic or menial classes, should have political rights, whether such people are able to make political judgments. This is a recurring theme not only in ancient Greece, where it emerges very clearly in Plato’s philosophy, but in debates about democracy throughout most of Western history.
The question raised by critics of democracy is not only whether people who have to work for a living have time for political reflection, but also whether those who are bound to the necessity of working in order to survive can be free enough in mind and spirit to make political judgments. For Athenian democrats, the answer is, of course, in the affirmative. For them, one of the main principles of democracy, as we saw in Theseus’s speech, was the capacity and the right of such people to make political judgments and speak about them in public assemblies. The Athenians even had a word for it, isegoria, which means not just freedom of speech in the sense we understand it in modern democracies but rather equality of public speech. This may, in fact, be the most distinctive idea to come out of the democracy, and it has no parallel in our own political vocabulary. Freedom of speech as we know it has to do with the absence of interference with our right to speak. Equality of speech as the Athenians understood it had to do with the ideal of active political participation by poor and working people.
We can judge the significance of the Athenian definition only by comparing it to democracy as we understand it today. While we have to recognize the severe limitations of Athenian democracy, there are also ways in which it far exceeds our own. This is true of procedures such as sortition or direct democracy, with ordinary citizens, and not just representatives, making decisions in assemblies and juries. But even more important is the effect of democracy on relations between classes. It is true that modern democracy, like the ancient, is a system in which people are citizens regardless of status or class. But if class makes no (legal) difference to citizenship in either case, in modern democracy the reverse is also true: citizenship makes little difference to class. This was not and could not be so in ancient Greece, where political rights had far-reaching effects on the relations between rich and poor.
We have already encountered the peasant-citizen, whose political rights had wider implications. Peasants have been the predominant producing classes throughout much of history, and an essential feature of their condition has been the obligation to forfeit part of their labour to someone who wields superior force. Peasants have been in possession of land, either as owners or as tenants; but they have had to transfer surplus labour to landlords and states, in the form of labour services, rents or taxes. The appropriating classes which have made these claims on them have been able to do so because they have possessed not only land but privileged access to coercive military, political and judicial power. They have possessed what has been called ‘politically constituted property’.11 The military and political powers of lordship in feudal Europe, for instance, were at the same time the power to extract surpluses from peasants. If feudal lords and serfs had been politically and juridically equal, they would not, by definition, have been lords and serfs, and there would have been no feudalism.
This type of relationship, and even patronage (such as would exist in Rome), was absent in democratic Athens. Its absence certainly had the effect of encouraging the enslavement of non-Greeks. But it is, again, important to keep in mind that the majority of Athenian citizens worked for a living, mainly as farmers or craftsmen, and that citizenship in Athens precluded a whole range of legally and politically dependent conditions which throughout history have compelled direct producers to forfeit surplus labour to their masters and rulers. This is not to say that the rich in Athens had no advantages over the poor – though the gap between rich and poor was very much narrower in Athens than in ancient Rome. The point is rather that the possession of political rights made an enormous difference, because it affected how, and even whether, the rich could exploit the poor.
Here lies the great difference between ancient and modern democracy. Today, there is a system of appropriation that does not depend on legal inequalities or the inequality of political rights. It is the system we call capitalism, a system in which appropriating and producing classes can be free and equal under the law, where the relation between them is supposed to be a contractual agreement between free and equal individuals, and where even universal suffrage is possible without fundamentally affecting the economic powers of capital. The power of exploitation in capitalism can coexist with liberal democracy, which would have been impossible in any system where exploitation depended on a monopoly of political rights. The reason this is possible is that capitalism has created new, purely economic compulsions: the propertylessness of workers – or, more precisely, their lack of property in the means of production, the means of labour itself – which compels them to sell their labour power in exchange for a wage simply in order to gain access to the means of labour and to obtain the means of subsistence; and also the compulsions of the market, which regulate the economy and enforce certain imperatives of competition and profit-maximization.
So, both capital and labour can have democratic rights in the political sphere without completely transforming the relation between them in a separate economic sphere. In fact, it is only in capitalism that there is a separate economic sphere, with its own imperatives, and so it is only in capitalism that democracy can be confined to a separate political domain. It is also only in capitalism that so much of human life has been put outside the reach of democratic accountability, regulated instead by market imperatives and the requirements of profit, the commodification that affects all aspects of life, not just in the workplace but everywhere. Citizenship today, in the conditions of capitalism, may be more inclusive, but it simply cannot mean as much to ordinary citizens as it meant to Athenian peasants and craftsmen – even in the more benign forms of capitalism which have moderated the effects of market imperatives. Athenian democracy had many great short comings, but in this respect, it went beyond our own.
In one other respect, Athenian democracy was no less imperfect than is today’s most powerful democracy. The commitment to civic freedom and equality among citizens at home did not extend to relations with other states. Athens increasingly exploited its growing power to impose imperial hegemony on allied city-states, largely for the purpose of extracting tribute from them. The Athenian empire was, to be sure, shaped and limited by the democracy at home. Imperial expansion was not driven by the interests of a landed aristocracy, and the Athenians often displaced local oligarchies in dependent city-states, establishing democracies friendly to Athens. Nor, while commercial interests were certainly at work, was the Athenian empire a mercantile project. The imperial mission was, in the first instance, to compensate for domestic agricultural deficiencies in order to ensure the food supply by controlling sea routes for the import of grain. This project was certainly a costly one, requiring ever-increasing revenues from tribute to maintain the Athenian navy; but the social property relations underlying the democracy ensured that Athens never established a territorial empire, as the Romans would do. While Roman peasant soldiers, as we shall see, would be subject to years of service far away from home, leaving their properties vulnerable to expropriation by aristocratic landowners, Athenian military ventures were strictly limited by agricultural cycles and the needs of free peasant soldiers returning home to work their farms. Yet however limited their imperial objectives may have been, the Athenians could be spectacularly brutal in pursuit of their aims; and nothing in their democratic culture precluded such brutality.
The two faces of Athenian democracy would be eloquently captured by the historian, Thucydides, in two of the most famous passages in his History of the Peloponnesian War. In Pericles’s Funeral Oration, the historian puts in the mouth of the great democratic leader a speech extolling, among other things, the virtues of civic equality. In Athens, Pericles suggests, inequalities between rich and poor, the strong and the weak, are tempered by law and democratic citizenship. In the Melian Dialogue, the Athenians, in debate with a recalcitrant city-state that refuses the status of tributary ally, are made to express with unadorned ruthlessness the imperial principle that ‘right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’
The Evolution of Political Theory
Political theory has been defined here as the systematic application of critical reason to interrogate political principles, raising questions not only about good and bad forms of government but even about the grounds on which we make such judgments. It asks the most fundamental questions about the source and justification of moral and political standards. Do standards of justice, for instance, exist by nature, or are they simply human conventions? In either case, what, if anything, makes them binding? Are the differences between rulers and subjects, masters and slaves, based on natural inequalities, or have human beings who are naturally equal become unequal as a result of human practices and customs? These moral and political questions have inevitably raised even more fundamental issues. In fact, the tradition of Western philosophy emerged in ancient Greece in large part out of debates that were in the first instance political. In Athens, political debate opened up a whole range of philosophical questions discussed ever since by Western philosophers: not only ethical questions about the standards of good and bad but questions about the nature and foundations of knowledge, about the relation between knowledge and morality, about human nature, and the relation between human beings and the natural order or the divine.
It is easy to take these forms of thought for granted as emerging more or less naturally out of the human condition and the perennial problems humanity faces in its efforts to cope with its social and natural universe. We seldom stop to consider the very specific historical preconditions, intellectual and social, that made it possible to think in these critical terms. But it is worth asking what kinds of intellectual assumptions we must make in order systematically to raise questions about the foundations of good government, standards of justice, or the obligation to obey authority; and it is also worth asking what social conditions have given rise to such assumptions.
In order to question existing arrangements, there must, at the minimum, be some belief in humanity’s ability to control its own circumstances, some sense of the separation of human beings from an unchangeable natural order, and of the social from the natural realm. There must be, to put it another way, a conception of human history instead of simply natural history or supernatural myth, an idea that history involves conscious human effort to solve human problems, that there is a possibility of deliberate change in accordance with conscious human goals, and that human reason is a formative, creative principle, to some extent capable of transcending the predetermined and inexorable cycle of natural necessity or divinely ordained destiny. Such a view of humanity’s place in the world tends to be associated with some direct experience of social change and mobility, some practical distance from the inexorable cycles of nature, which is most likely to come with urban civilization, a well-developed realm of human experience outside the cycles and necessities of nature.
These conditions were present in all the ‘high’ civilizations of the ancient world and gave rise to rich and varied cultural legacies. But nowhere else had the emphasis on human agency taken centre stage in intellectual life, as it would do in Greece. The two most characteristic products of that distinctive legacy are history as practised by the Greek historians, notably Herodotus and Thucydides, and political theory, in the sense intended here. What distinguished Greece, and especially democratic Athens, from other complex civilizations was the degree to which the prevailing order, especially traditional hierarchies, had been challenged in practice; and conflict or debate about social arrangements was a normal, even institutionalized, part of everyday life. It was in this context that Athenians were faced, in new and unprecedented ways, with moral and political responsibility for shaping their own circumstances. Debate was the operative principle of the Athenian state, and the citizen majority had a deep-seated interest in preserving it. This was so because, and to the extent that, politics in Athens was not about sustaining the rule of a dominant power but about managing the relation between ‘mass’ and ‘elite’, with the public institutions of the state acting less as an instrument of rule for the propertied elite than as a counterweight against it, and with the common people in the role of political actors, not simply the object of rule. Reflection on the state was from the start shaped by that relation and by the tensions it inevitably generated.
To get a sense of how Greek political theory came into being, it is useful, again, to consider it against the background of the Homeric epics, the last major expression of ostensibly unchallenged aristocratic rule, at the very moment of its passing. When the epics were written down, whether by Homer himself or by someone else recording an oral tradition, traditional modes of transmitting cultural knowledge and values were no longer adequate, and conditions were emerging that required other forms of discourse, placing new demands on writing. In that respect, Homer was a transitional figure, both in the development of Greek literacy, as a poet still obviously steeped in the oral tradition but whose work was set down in writing, and as the poet of a dying aristocracy, no longer safe in its dominance, no longer able to take obedience for granted, and increasingly beleaguered by a challenge from below. Perhaps the very act of writing down the epics acknowledges the passing of the social order they describe (or the passing of a social order something like the one they have invented) and the need to preserve its principles in a form less ephemeral than oral recitation; but there is no evidence in the substance of the epics, in which the lower classes are scarcely visible, that aristocratic values now require a more robust and systematic defence than songs in praise of hero-nobles.
What happens to the concept of dik, the Greek word for justice, is a telling illustration. In Homer, there is no real conception of justice as an ethical norm. The word dik appears in The Odyssey several times but largely as a morally neutral term, describing a characteristic behaviour or disposition, or something like ‘the way of things’. So, for example, the dik of bodies in death is that flesh and bone no longer hold together, or the dik of a dog is that it fawns on its master, or a serf does best when his dik is to fear his lord. There are one or two usages that have a somewhat more normative connotation. On his return to Ithaca from the Trojan War, a still unrecognized Odysseus comes upon his father, Laertes, digging in the vineyard like a peasant or slave. Odysseus tells him that he looks more like a man of royal blood, the kind whose dik is to sleep on a soft bed after he has bathed and dined. This could simply refer to the typical lordly way of life, but dik here may also have about it the sense of a due right. Perhaps the closest Homer comes to a moral norm of justice appears in a passage suggesting that the gods do not like foul play but respect dik and upright deeds, the right way. Yet even here, dik does not refer to an ethical standard of justice so much as correct and proper behaviour, especially the behaviour of true nobles, in contrast to the intrusive rudeness of Penelope’s suitors who, in their confidence that her husband, Odysseus, will never return to punish them, are breaking all the rules of decency.
Homeric usage, then, idealizes a society in which the way of things has not been subjected to serious challenge. Dik does not appear as a standard of justice against which the prevailing order can and should be judged. But a very different meaning of dik already appears in the work of Homer’s near, if not exact, contemporary, Hesiod; and it is surely significant that the poet in this case is speaking not for nobles but for peasants. Himself a ‘middling’ farmer in Boeotia, Hesiod is no radical; yet his poem, Works and Days, is not only a compendium of farming information and moral advice but also a long poetic grumble about the lot of hard-working farmers and the injustices perpetrated against them by greedy lords. In this context, dik appears in the figure of a goddess who sits at the right hand of Zeus. Hesiod tells us that she watches and judges ‘gift-eating’ or ‘bribe-swallowing’ lords who use their judicial prerogatives to exploit the peasantry by means of ‘crooked’ judgments. Dik, Hesiod warns, will make sure that the crooked lords get their come-uppance. The poet, to be sure, is not calling for a peasant revolt, but he is certainly doing something of great conceptual significance. He is proposing a concept of justice that stands apart from the jurisdiction of the lords, a standard against which they and their judgments can and must themselves be judged. It could hardly be more different from Homer’s customary and unchallenged aristocratic way of things.
The difference between Homer and Hesiod is social no less than conceptual, the one idealizing an unchallenged dominant class whose values and judgments pass for universal norms, the other speaking for a divided community in which social norms, and the authority of dominant classes, are acknowledged objects of conflict. The issues raised here by poetry would become the subject of complex and abstract debates, for which writing would increasingly become the favoured medium, reaching fruition in the philosophical discourse of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, especially in democratic Athens. The kind of systematic enquiry that the Greeks had already applied to the natural order would be extended to moral rules and political arrangements. Dik would pass from the poetry of Homer and Hesiod to the elaborate philosophical speculations of Plato on justice or dikaiosune in The Republic, as opponents of the democracy (of which Plato was the most notable example) could no longer rely on tradition and were obliged to construct their defence of social hierarchy on a wholly new foundation.
The Culture of Democracy
To get a sense of how much the issues of political theory permeated the whole of Athenian culture, it is worth considering how moral and political questions arose not only in formal philosophy but also in other, more popular cultural forms, notably in drama. The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides tell us a great deal about the atmosphere in which political philosophy emerged. We have already seen how political debate intruded into Euripides’s Suppliant Women. In Aeschylus, the first of the major tragedians, the questions of political theory are introduced with greater subtlety but are also more integral to the dramatic action. Aeschylus was particularly well placed to judge the importance of the changes that Athens had undergone. He grew up in an age of tyranny and war. Having fought at Marathon, he saw the democracy come into its own. With experience of the past and steeped in its traditions, he was nevertheless very much a part of the new climate, in which citizens were forced to confront new questions about the moral and political responsibility of ordinary humans who no longer looked upon themselves as simply playthings of the gods or obedient subjects of lords and kings.
His classic trilogy, The Oresteia, appeared in 458 not long after the murder of the democratic leader Ephialtes, who had deprived the Areopagus of its traditional functions, apart from its role as a homicide court. It is likely that Aeschylus was, among other things, conveying the message that this old aristocratic institution, while it still had a role to play in the democracy, had been rightly displaced by more democratic institutions. The trilogy has as its central theme a confrontation between two conflicting conceptions of justice, in the form of a contest between the endless cycle of traditional blood vengeance and new principles of judgment by judicial procedure. The first represents Destiny, the fury of uncontrollable fate; the other, human responsibility – an opposition that may also represent the antithesis of old aristocratic principles of kinship and blood rivalry as against the judicial procedures of a democratic civic order.
The murder of Agamemnon, king of Argos, by his wife, Clytemnestra, sets in train what could be an endless cycle of blood, as Orestes obeys an apparently natural law and avenges his father’s death by killing Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. The inexorable laws of revenge mean that Orestes, pursued by the Furies, must also become the victim of blood vengeance, and so the cycle will go on and on. There is also, in a confrontation between the Furies and the god Apollo, a clash between old principles of kinship – represented by the Furies – and Apollo’s commitment to patriarchal-aristocratic right, according to which the murder of a king is a crime in a way that matricide is not. The resolution comes in the last of the three plays with the establishment, on the instructions of Athena, of a court to hear the case of Orestes and end the matter once and for all. The jury will be manned not by gods or lords but by citizen jurors. Aeschylus still gives the gods a role, and fear will still play a part in enforcing the law – as the Furies become the more benign Eumenides. Nor does the tragedian repudiate the customs and traditions of the old Athens. But he is unambiguous about the importance of replacing the force and violence of the old order with new principles of reason, the rule of law and ‘Holy Persuasion’, the kind of order established by the polis and its civic principles – in particular, the democratic polis ruled by its citizens and not by kings or lords.
The attribution to Aeschylus of another play, Prometheus Bound, has been put in question, although his authorship was generally accepted in antiquity. Yet, whether or not it can be read as expressing his views, it tells us much about the culture of Athenian democracy, if we compare its telling of the Promethean myth to other versions of the story. The myth in what is probably its more conventional form appears in Hesiod. Prometheus steals fire from Zeus as a gift to humanity. In his anger, Zeus threatens to make humanity pay for this gift. There follows the story of Pandora’s ‘box’, a storage jar containing the threatened ‘gift’ from Zeus. Contrary to the advice of her brother-in-law Prometheus, she opens the jar and releases every evil, ending a golden age when the fruits of the earth were enjoyed without effort, and humanity was free of labour, sorrow and disease, although hope remains trapped inside. Hesiod combines this with another story about stages in the decline of humanity, which was once equal to the gods but is now a race that works and grieves unceasingly. For Hesiod, this is, in the main, a story about the pains of daily life and work. In Aeschylus’s recounting of the Prometheus story, as in other variations on the same themes in Sophocles, and in the Sophist Protagoras, it becomes a hymn in praise of human arts and those who practise them.
In this first and only surviving play of a trilogy, (pseudo?) Aeschylus’s Prometheus, being ruthlessly punished by Zeus for his pride, is presented as a benefactor to humanity. He has given them the various mental and manual skills that have made life possible and good, ending the condition of misery and confusion in which they had first been created. He also represents the love of freedom and justice, expressing contempt for Zeus’s autocracy and the servile humility of the god’s messenger, Hermes. As in The Oresteia, the tragedian is not here repudiating the gods or tradition, and there may be some right on both sides. But there is no mistaking the importance of the way he tells the Promethean story. Human arts, skills and crafts in his version betoken not the fall of humanity but, on the contrary, its greatest gift. The full political significance of this becomes evident not only when we contrast this view of the arts to the practices of Sparta, where the only ‘craft’ permitted to citizens was war, but also, as we shall see, if we compare it to Plato’s retelling of the myth, where labour is again presented as a symbol of decline, in the context of an argument designed to exclude practitioners of these ordinary human arts, the labouring classes, from the specialized ‘craft’ of politics.
In Sophocles’s Antigone, as in Aeschylus’s plays, there are also two opposing moral principles in tragic confrontation, and again there is right on both sides. Eteocles and Polyneices, sons of the late ruler, Oedipus, and brothers of Antigone, have killed each other in battle. The new king of Thebes, Creon, has decreed that Eteocles, who fought on the side of his city, will be buried with full military honours, while Polyneices, who fought against the Thebans, will be left unburied. Antigone insists that she will bury her traitorous brother, in defiance of the ruler’s decree and in obedience to immortal unwritten laws.
The play is sometimes represented as a clash between the individual conscience and the state, but it is more accurately described as an opposition between two conceptions of nomos, Antigone representing eternal unwritten laws, in the form of traditional, customary and religious obligations of kinship, and Creon speaking for the laws of a new political order. This is also a confrontation between two conflicting loyalties or forms of philia, a word inadequately conveyed by our notion of ‘friendship’ – a confrontation between, on the one hand, the ties of blood and personal friendship and, on the other, the public demands of the civic community, the polis, whose laws are supposed to be directed to the common good.
It cannot be said that Sophocles comes down decisively on one side or the other. It is true that we have great sympathy for Antigone, and increasingly less for the stubborn Creon; yet both the antagonists, Antigone and Creon, display excessive and uncompromising pride, for which they both will suffer. The tragedian here too clearly respects ‘unwritten laws’, but he also stresses the importance of human law and the civic order. Yet, for all of Sophocles’s even-handedness, it becomes clear that Creon’s chief offence is not that he insists on the supremacy of civic law but rather that he violates the very principles of civic order by treating his own autocratic decrees as if they were law.
In a dialogue with his son Haemon, Creon, having decreed Antigone’s punishment, maintains that her act of disobedience was wrong in itself. Haemon believes it would be wrong only if the act itself were also dishonourable, and, he says, the Theban people do not regard it so. ‘Since when,’ Creon objects, ‘do I take my orders from the people of Thebes?. . . I am king and responsible only to myself’ – in a manner reminiscent of Xerxes in Aeschylus’s Persians. ‘A one-man state?’ asks Haemon. ‘What kind of state is that?’ ‘Why, does not every state belong to its ruler?’ says the king, to which his son replies, ‘You’d be an excellent king – on a desert island.’
In an ode that interrupts the action, the Chorus sings the praises of the human arts, and the rule of law which is the indispensable condition for their successful practice. We can deduce from this interlude that Sophocles regards the civic order and its laws as a great benefit to humankind, the source of its progress and strength. Yet he is also very alive to the dangers of allowing the polis to be the ultimate, absolute standard, discarding all tradition. Among the chief benefits of the civic order is the possibility of governing human interactions by moderation and persuasion. Perhaps the polis is, ideally, the place where different ethics can be reconciled. But one thing is clear: the possibility of resolution by discussion and persuasion, rather than by coercion, is greatest in a democracy, where one man’s judgment cannot prevail simply by means of superior power.
There is also, in the ode, another indication of Sophocles’s commitment to Athenian democracy. Of all the wonders of the world, he writes, none is more wonderful than humankind. What distinguishes humanity are the various human arts, from agriculture and navigation to speech and statecraft. In this poetic interlude, as in Aeschylus’s Prometheus, human society is founded on the practical arts; and Sophocles here sums up the central values of the democracy: not only the centrality of human action and responsibility, but also the importance of a lawful civic order and the value of the arts, from the most elevated literary inventions to the most arduous manual labour. In the interweaving of these themes – the centrality of human action, the importance of the civic principle and the value of the arts – we can find the essence of Greek political theory, the terrain of struggle between democrats and those who seek to challenge them by overturning democratic principles.
Democracy and Philosophy: The Sophists
The plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles bespeak the rise of the civic community, citizenship and the rule of law, as against traditional principles of social organization. They reflect the evolution of the democracy with its new conceptions of law, equality and justice, a new confidence in human powers and creativity, and a celebration of practical arts, techniques and crafts, including the political art. But their tragedies also manifest the tensions of the democratic polis, the questions it inevitably raises about the nature and origin of political norms, moral values, and conceptions of good and evil.
The dramatists speak for a society which has certainly not rejected the notion of unwritten and eternal laws, universal principles of behaviour, or obligations to family, friends and gods. But it is also a society in which the very idea of universal and eternal values is open to question and nothing can be taken for granted. The experience of the democracy makes certain questions inescapable: what is the relation between eternal laws and man-made laws, between natural and positive law? It is all very well to connect the two by invoking some divinely inspired lawgiver (as the Spartans did, while the Athenians did not); but how do we account for the differences among various communities, which all have their own specific laws? And what happens when democratic politics encourages the view that one person’s opinion is as good as another’s? What happens then to universal and eternal laws or conceptions of justice? Are these just man-made conventions, based simply on expediency, human convenience, agreement among ordinary mortals and the arts of persuasion? If so, why can we not change them at will, or, for that matter, disobey them?
From the middle of the fifth century BC, these questions were increasingly raised in more systematic form, first by the so-called sophists and then by the self-styled philosophers. There already existed a tradition of natural philosophy, systematic reflection on nature and the material world; and among the natural philosophers, some had begun to extend their reflections to humankind and society – such as the great atomist Democritus, who devoted his life to both science and moral reflection. But the sophists can claim credit for making human nature, society and political arrangements primary subjects of philosophical enquiry.
The sophists were paid teachers and writers who travelled from polis to polis to teach the youth of prosperous families. They flourished in Athens thanks to a keen and growing interest in education, especially in the skills required in the courts and assemblies of the democracy, the arts of rhetoric and oratory. Athens, with its cultural and political vitality, attracted distinguished teachers from other parts of Greece: Prodicus of Ceos, a student of language; Hippias of Elis, whose interests were encyclopedic; the brilliant rhetorician, Gorgias of Leontini, who came to Athens not as a professional teacher but a diplomat; and above all, the earliest and greatest of the sophists, Protagoras of Abdera, friend and adviser to Pericles, about whom more in a moment. Among the other sophists were Thrasymachus, whom we shall encounter in our consideration of Plato’s Republic; and the second-generation sophists, such as Lycophron, who is credited with formulating an idea of the social contract; Critias, the uncle of Plato, who also appears in his nephew’s dialogues; the possibly fictional Callicles, whom Plato uses to represent the radical sophists’ idea that justice is the right of the strongest; the so-called ‘Anonymous Iamblichi’, who countered the radical sophists by arguing that the source of power is in community consensus; Antiphon, perhaps the first thinker to argue for the natural equality of all men, whether Greek or ‘barbarian’; and, much later, Alcidamas, who insisted on the natural freedom of humanity.
We should not be misled by the unflattering portraits of these intellectuals painted in particular by Aristophanes and Plato, for whom they represented the decline and corruption of Athens. It is impossible to judge the portrayal of the sophists by these critics without knowing something about the historical moment in which they were writing. During this phase of the democracy, even democratic aristocrats like Pericles were being displaced by new men such as the wealthy but ‘common’ Cleon. In Plato’s aristocratic circles, there was, not surprisingly, an atmosphere of disaffection and nostalgia for the good old days. Unfortunately, the aristocratic grumbles of a small minority have tended to colour views of Athenian democracy ever since, creating a myth of Athens in decline which has been very hard to shift.
Aristocratic disaffection did have more serious consequences, which left a deep mark on the democracy. There were two oligarchic revolutions: a brief episode in 411 but more particularly the coup in 404 which, with the help of Sparta, established the bloody rule of the Thirty (the Thirty Tyrants). With the support of a 700–man Spartan garrison on the Acropolis, the Thirty murdered and expelled large numbers of Athenians. Thousands fled the city, and only 3,000 Athenians – perhaps 10 per cent of the citizenry – retained full rights of citizenship. Yet, when the democracy was restored in the following year, it displayed remarkable restraint in dealing with the oligarchic opposition, instituting, at Sparta’s behest, an amnesty which ruled out the political persecution of the oligarchs and their supporters; and despite the catastrophes that brought the golden age to a close, the fourth century was to be the most stable period of the democracy, which enjoyed widespread support among the poor and even the rich. This was also a period in which the culture of Athens flourished and when it truly became what Pericles had earlier called ‘an education to Greece’. There was no further serious internal threat to the democratic regime, and it came to an end only when Athens effectively lost its independence altogether to the Macedonians in the last quarter of the century.
The notion that the late democracy was a period of moral decay is largely a product of class prejudice. To be sure, there were serious problems, especially economic ones; and the Athenians had paid a heavy price in the Peloponnesian War, to say nothing of the plague. But the myth of democratic decadence has more to do with the social changes that marked the decline of the old aristocracy, which were accompanied by political changes in both leadership and style, a new kind of popular politics that brought to maturity the strategy adopted by Cleisthenes at the beginning of the democracy, when he made the people his hetairoi. Critics described these changes as the triumph of vulgarity, materialism, amoral egoism, and ‘demagogic’ trickery designed to lead the ignorant demos astray. What is most striking about the attacks on a leader like Cleon – by figures as diverse as Thucydides, Aristophanes and Aristotle – is that they invariably suggest objections of style more than substance. Aristotle, for instance, can think of nothing worse to complain about than Cleon’s vulgar manner, the way he shouted in the Assembly and spoke with his cloak not girt about him, when others conducted themselves with proper decorum.
For critics like Aristophanes and Plato, the sophists became the intellectual expression of this alleged moral decadence and were made to stand for the decline of traditional values. They were portrayed as representing a polis where even young aristocrats had given up the high moral standards of their ancestors, a polis in which all standards of right and wrong had been abandoned, and even those who knew the difference were likely to prefer wrong to right. The rhetorical strategies perfected by the sophists, and the lawyer’s adversarial principle that there are two sides to every question, were interpreted by critics as simply a way of ‘making the worse cause seem the better’. But, while some sophists may indeed have been unprincipled opportunists, among them were thinkers who made substantial and innovative contributions to Greek culture and the traditions emanating from it. Even while their ideas have come down to us only in fragments or in second-hand accounts, especially in the dialogues of a generally hostile Plato, enough remains to justify the claim that the sophists, and Protagoras in particular, effectively invented political theory and set the agenda of Western philosophy in general.
The sophists varied in their philosophical ideas no less than in their politics. What they generally had in common was a preoccupation with the distinction between physis (nature) and nomos (law, custom or convention). In a climate in which laws, customs, ethical principles, and social and political arrangements were no longer taken for granted as part of some unchangeable natural order, and the relation between written and unwritten law was a very live practical issue, the antithesis between nomos and physis became the central intellectual problem. The very immediate political force of this issue is dramatically illustrated by the fact that, with the restoration of the democracy, magistrates were prohibited from invoking ‘unwritten law’, an idea that now had powerfully antidemocratic associations.
The sophists in general agreed that there is an essential difference between things that exist by nature and things that exist by custom, convention or law. But there were disagreements among them about which is better, the way of nature or the way of nomos, and, indeed, about what the way of nature is. In either case, their arguments could be mobilized in defence of democracy or against it. Some, in support of oligarchy, might argue that there is a natural division between rulers and ruled and that natural hierarchy should be reflected in political arrangements. Others, in defence of democracy, might argue that no such clear division exists by nature, that men are naturally equal, and that it is wrong to create an artificial hierarchy, a hierarchy by nomos as against physis. But other permutations were possible too: a democrat could argue that a political equality created by nomos has the advantage of moderating natural inequalities and permitting men to live in harmony. Or it could be argued that, however similar men may be by nature, life in society requires differentiation, a division of labour, and hence some kind of inequality by nomos.
If sophists could be either oligarchs or democrats, it was democracy itself that had brought such issues into sharp relief. In the context of civic equality, the seemingly self-evident observation that, as Thucydides put it in the Melian Dialogue, ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ could no longer simply be taken for granted and was up for discussion in unprecedented ways. There were now indeed two sides (at least) to the question. The juxtaposition in practice of civic equality and ‘natural’ inequality, the inequality of strength and weakness, produced particularly fruitful tensions in theory, which found expression both in Thucydides’s history and in philosophy.
It is not as easy as Plato would have us believe to distinguish between the intellectual activities of the sophists and true ‘philosophy’, or love of wisdom, as practised by Plato himself and the man more commonly credited with its invention, Socrates. To be sure, Socrates was not a paid teacher, though he could always rely on the largesse of his almost uniformly wealthy and well-born friends and acolytes – such as his greatest pupil, the aristocratic Plato. But both Socrates and Plato conducted their philosophic enterprise on the same terrain as the sophists. Not only were the ‘philosphers’ also concerned primarily with human nature, society, knowledge and morality, but they also proceeded in their own ways from the distinction between nomos and physis, between things that exist by law or convention and those that exist by nature. They certainly transformed this distinction, in a way that no sophist did, into a philosophical exploration of true knowledge. Unlike the sophists, who tended towards moral relativism or pluralism and never strayed far outside the sphere of empirical reality, Socrates and Plato were concerned with a different kind of ‘nature’, a deeper or higher reality which was the object of true knowledge. The empirical world was for them, and more particularly for Plato, a world of mere appearances, the object of imperfect conventional wisdom, at best (more or less) right opinion but not real knowledge. The philosophers drew a distinction between learning and persuasion, suggesting that the sophists, like lawyers, were not really interested in learning the truth but only in making a case and persuading others of it. Yet even if, for instance, Plato’s conception of the division between rulers and ruled is grounded in this hierarchy of knowledge and not on a simple test of brute strength or noble birth, we can still see the connections between the philosopher and those sophists who opposed the democracy on the grounds that it created an artificial equality in defiance of natural hierarchy. More particularly, we can see that the sophists, especially the democratic ones and Protagoras in particular, set the questions the philosophers felt obliged to answer.
Socrates and Protagoras
Socrates, probably the ancient Athenian most revered in later centuries, is also in many ways the most mysterious. He left none of his ideas in writing, and we have to rely on his pupils, especially Plato but also Xenophon, for accounts of his views. Although the differences between Plato’s and Xenophon’s Socrates have often been vastly exaggerated, it is certainly true that each of these two very different witnesses, the philosopher and the rather more down-to-earth and unphilosophical general, brings something of his own disposition to the portrait of his teacher. There has been heated debate about the ‘real’, ‘historical’ Socrates; about the degree to which Plato’s philosophy represents an extension of Socratic teachings or a clear departure of his own; and, not least, about Socrates’s attitude to the democracy.
The trial and death of Socrates have presented enormous problems of their own. While commentators seem, on the whole, to agree that the death sentence was a grave injustice, they differ on what it tells us about the democracy. On the one hand, there are those who see only an injustice perpetrated by a repressive democracy against a man of conscience, the model of the courageous intellectual who follows his reason wherever it takes him in defiance of all opposition and threats. On the other hand, some commentators see not only an injustice but also a beleaguered democracy, which had just come through a period of oligarchic terror and mass murder after a coup against the democratic regime; and they see in Socrates not only a philosopher of courage and principle but also a man whose friends, associates and pupils were among the leading oligarchs – a man who, as democrats fled the city, remained safely in Athens among his oligarchic friends, with every indication that they were confident of his support.
This is not the place to rehearse all these debates.12We can confine ourselves to a few less controversial facts about Socrates, his life and work, and then proceed to an analysis of those ideas that had the greatest consequences for the development of political theory. All we can confidently say about his life is that he was an Athenian citizen of the deme of Alopeke, born around 470 BC, son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete; that he participated in some military campaigns, most likely as a hoplite (which required enough wealth to arm oneself and support a retainer) during the Peloponnesian War; that he took part as a member of the Council in the trial of the generals of 406 BC; and that he was tried and condemned to death in 399. There is little evidence to support the tradition that his father was a sculptor or stonemason (he may have owned slaves employed as craftsmen, as did the fathers of Isocrates and Cleon) and his mother a midwife, and even less that Socrates followed in his father’s footsteps. There is some evidence that he was a man of comfortable means, though certainly not among the very wealthiest. His friends and associates, however, were almost uniformly wealthy and well born; and the picture of Socrates regularly holding philosophical discussions with artisans around the streets and markets of Athens should be taken with a grain of salt.
During the oligarchic coup and the regime of the Thirty, Socrates stayed safely in Athens, as one of the privileged 3,000 citizens. Some time after the democracy was restored, a charge was brought against him for not duly recognizing the gods of Athens, introducing new gods and corrupting the youth. It seems likely that these accusations were, at least in part, a substitute for more overtly political charges ruled out by the amnesty; but, in any case, there can be no doubt that Athenians looked upon the philosopher with suspicion because of his association with the enemies of the democracy. This does not detract from his dignity and courage; and the main reason given for his refusal to escape with the help of his friends – that he must honour the laws of his polis – testifies to his principled commitment to the rule of law. In this respect, he was quite different from many of his oligarchic friends. But nor do his courage, dignity and loyalty to principle make him a supporter of the democracy.
The question then is whether the suspicions aroused by his associations are supported by what we know of his ideas. Here, again, we have little to go on. What we know with some degree of certainty is that he adopted a particular method of inquiry: engaging in dialogue with one or more interlocutors, he begins with a very general question about the nature of knowledge or the meaning of a concept such as virtue or justice, proceeding by a painstaking series of questions and answers to enumerate the manifold particular instances of ‘virtuous’ or ‘just’ actions; and, with his characteristic irony, he searches out the inconsistencies and contradictions in his interlocutor’s definitions. Although he typically professes ignorance and an inability to teach, it becomes clear that, by seeking the common qualities of all the specific instances of ‘virtuous’ or ‘just’ actions, he attempts to find a ‘real’ definition of virtue or justice – not a rule-of-thumb characterization of specific acts in the empirical world but a definition that expresses an underlying, universal and absolute principle of virtue or justice. The object of the philosophic exercise is to elevate the soul, or psyche, the immortal and divine element in human nature to which the flesh should be subordinate. Applied to politics, the object of philosophy is to fulfill the higher moral purpose of the polis.
In itself, neither the Socratic method nor even the conception of absolute knowledge associated with it has any necessary political implications. But Socrates’s most famous paradox, that virtue is knowledge, is altogether more problematic. On the face of it, this principle simply implies that people act immorally out of ignorance and never voluntarily; and, whatever we may think of this as a description of reality, it seems at least benevolent in its intent, displaying a tolerance and humanity towards those who do wrong which appears to rule out retribution. Nor is there anything political in the admirable first principle of Socrates’s moral teaching: that it is better to suffer wrong than to inflict it. But there is more to the identification of virtue with knowledge, which has far-reaching consequences, not least political and antidemocratic implications. The combined effect of this identification and the moral purpose he attributes to the state is, for all practical purposes, to rule out democracy and even to make ‘democratic knowledge’ an oxymoron.
The implications of Socrates’s formulation become most visible in the confrontation with the sophist Protagoras, depicted in Plato’s dialogue, Protagoras. If we can rely on Plato’s reconstruction of the sophist’s argument, he seems to have laid out a systematic case for democracy; and it is based on conceptions of knowledge, virtue and the purpose of the polis opposed to those of Socrates. What we know from Plato’s portrayal and from the very few genuine surviving fragments of the sophist’s writings is that Protagoras was an agnostic, who argued that we cannot really know whether the gods exist; that we can rely only on human judgment; and that, since there is no certain arbiter of truth beyond human judgment, we cannot assume the existence of any absolute standards of truth and falsehood or of right and wrong. Human beings, indeed every individual, must be the final judges – an idea famously summed up in his best-known aphorism, ‘Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are and of things that are not that they are not.’
Such ideas were significant enough. But in Plato’s Protagoras, there is a discussion between Socrates and Protagoras which effectively sets the agenda for the whole of Plato’s mature philosophical work and the intellectual tradition that follows from it. Although this dialogue is no longer commonly regarded as among the earliest of Plato’s works, it has been described as the last of his ‘Socratic’ dialogues, after which he strikes out on his own, developing his ideas more elaborately and independently of his teacher. Protagoras opens up the questions to which the philosopher will devote the rest of his working life and which will, through him, shape the whole of Western philosophy.
What is most immediately striking about the dialogue is that the pivotal question is a political one. Socrates presents Protagoras with a conundrum: like others of his kind, the sophist purports to teach the art of politics, promising to make men good citizens. This surely implies, argues Socrates, that virtue, the qualities of a good citizen, can be taught. Yet political practice in Athens suggests otherwise. When Athenians meet in the Assembly to decide on matters such as construction or shipbuilding projects, they call for architects or naval designers, experts in specialized crafts, and dismiss the views of non-specialists, however wealthy or well born. This is how people normally behave in matters regarded as technical, involving the kind of craft or skill that can and must be taught by an expert. But when the Assembly is discussing something to do with the government of the polis, Athenians behave very differently:
. . . the man who gets up to advise them may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, merchant or shipowner, rich or poor, of good family or none. No one brings it up against any of these, as against those I have just mentioned, that he is a man who without any technical qualifications, unable to point to anybody as his teacher, is yet trying to give advice. The reason must be that they do not think this is a subject that can be taught.13
Protagoras gives a subtle and fascinating answer, introduced by yet another story about Prometheus. He sets out to show that Athenians ‘act reasonably in accepting the advice of smith and shoemaker on political matters’.14 There is no inconsistency, he says, between the claim that virtue can be taught and the assumption that civic virtue, or the capacity to make political judgments, is a universal quality, belonging to all adult citizens regardless of status or wealth. His argument turns out to be less a case for his claims as a teacher of the political art than a defence of Athenian democratic practice, insisting on the capacity of ordinary, labouring citizens to make political judgments.
Although there is a brief defence of democracy in Herodotus (III.80), Protagoras’s speech is the only substantive and systematic argument for the democracy to survive from ancient Greece. It is true that we have to rely on Plato to convey the sophist’s views, and we have no way of knowing how much of it Protagoras actually said. But, in contrast to Plato’s attacks on other sophists, Protagoras emerges as a fairly sympathetic and deeply intelligent figure, and Socrates somewhat less so than is usual in Plato’s dialogues. In any case, whether or not these are the authentic ideas of Protagoras, they certainly express a coherent democratic view; and Plato spends the rest of his career trying to counter it. Much of his philosophy thereafter, including his epistemology, seeks to demonstrate that virtue is a rare and lofty quality and the political art a specialized craft that can be practised only by a very select few, because it requires a special and elevated kind of philosophic knowledge.
