Key ideas: Published in 2004. "If anything, I attempt to persuade the reader that looking to political action to make improvements in American society reflects a misplaced faith in the political process, a faith sometimes spawned by the modern idealization of democracy. Seeking to improve society through politics reinforces the view that the solutions to human problems are usually political and thus fosters a belief that politics should play a central role in our lives. It is this kind of thinking that I seek to address. So if this work is to be associated with a call for any partic- ular action, that action must begin with changing individuals’ minds" (L. Samons)
If anything, I attempt to persuade the reader that looking to political action to make improvements in American society reflects a misplaced faith in the political process, a faith sometimes spawned by the modern idealization of democracy. Seeking to improve society through politics reinforces the view that the solutions to human problems are usually political and thus fosters a belief that politics should play a central role in our lives. It is this kind of thinking that I seek to address. So if this work is to be associated with a call for any partic- ular action, that action must begin with changing individuals’ minds….
Of course, every student of political science knows that the American system of government codified in the United States Constitution is not actually a “democracy” as that term was defined in the eighteenth century. In fact, most of the American Founders considered “pure” democracy like that practiced in ancient Athens—where the people ruled themselves directly through votes in a popular assembly—to be a particularly unstable and dangerous form of government…
Madison, for example, praised the difference between real democracy and American government, writing that the “true distinction between [the ancient democracies and republics] and the American governments lies in the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity, from any share in the latter,” a distinction which “must be admitted to leave a most advantageous superiority in favor of the United States.”…
For although Americans now suffer from a kind of national delusion, in which we live in a constitutional representative republic but believe we live in a democracy, we also have come to act, and to expect our political leaders and system to act, as if our government is a democracy (as traditionally defined) and as if the popular will represents a moral “good” in society.
Like any patient suffering from a psychosis, American society perhaps needs to be put on the analyst’s couch and forced to confront the realities of its own nature and democracy’s sordid past.
The Athenian people’s execution of Socrates in 399 serves as a useful touchstone, not so much because it was typical of Athenian democracy as because modern discussions of Athenian democracy so often ignore Socrates’ execution or treat the event almost as if the philosopher took his own life. If a democratic ancient regime was capable of trying, convicting, and executing one of the most influential and brilliant thinkers in all of Western history (not to mention carrying out other equally appalling actions), surely we should confront the factors that led to this deed. Instead, readers of works on Athenian democracy are far more likely to encounter hymns to Athenian “liberty and equality” based on Pericles’ famous Funeral Oration than frank analysis of Socrates’ execution and other disturbing aspects of Athenian history.
Athens survived the Peloponnesian War only because the victorious Spartans decided not to listen to the recommendation of their allies, who wished by destroying Athens’s citizen population to inflict on the Athenians the same punishment that Athens had meted out to others. The Athenians’ refusal to make peace earlier in the war (when offered favorable terms by Sparta) thus qualifies as a “fatal mistake,” as do the series of mistakes made before and after Athens’s defeat by the Macedonians at Chaeronea in 338 (see chapters 5 and 6 below).
Moreover, the Athenians’ decision in 415 to invade Sicily and at- tack Syracuse, as opposed to simply helping their Sicilian ally Egesta, was both demonstrably unwise and without moral justification, and it deserves criticism on both grounds….
What, I wonder, would Athens have become without its own public crit- ics (like Aristophanes), its moderate and patriotic oligarchs (like Thucydides), and its intellectuals and teachers (like Socrates and Plato), whose works called into question the very basis of the regime?47 Even the democratic hero Pericles acted as a critic of the Athenian people, standing in front of the demos and blaming the citizens themselves for their mutability.
Has any politician in recent memory blamed “the American people” for national problems? Has any popular film ridiculed not only our leaders, but the people who elected them and the very system of election itself? Are we really satisfied with a public selfanalysis that reaches its most philosophical and moralistic heights in the ac- cusation “You mean you didn’t vote?!”
Modern democratic government is, after all, a tool created by human beings in order to achieve some end—an end such as a better or more just society. As a tool—and not a metaphysical principle—democracy deserves to be evaluated in terms of its ability to perform its task. For once a type of government becomes the goal of political action, the system of government may threaten to replace the values it was originally de- signed to foster, reflect, or permit.
In short, treating democracy as an end rather than a means threatens to create a kind of popular faith centered on a political system (or the supposed values it generates) as the only true absolute.
The worship of freedom through democracy seemingly has replaced other things as a goal for our lives and political system, things that may be more important to individual human beings and just societies. In essence, we may already have enshrined democratic political ideals as the tenets of a new religion
As support for this hypothesis, I would simply ask the reader to imagine a dinner party attended by any number of (say) businessmen, teachers, politicians, ironworkers, and journalists. A person at this party proclaiming, “I don’t support the idea of marriage [or the family, God, the sanctity of human life, a citizen army, etc.]” is unlikely to raise an eyebrow. Let him, however, announce that he does not approve of the vote (or democracy itself), and the reaction is liable to be pointed. (If he lights a cigarette while making this announcement, it may even be violent!)
Nevertheless, despite the Athenians’ emphasis on duties rather than rights, Athens did suffer from instituting specific democratic practices. The potentially negative effects of democratic practices in Athens look particularly ominous today, since contemporary America (like ancient Athens) has instituted potentially dangerous democratic practices but (unlike Athens) also has generated a society based on modern democratic theory and beliefs.
Unlike Athens, America today has no strong set of values against which to gauge democracy. And, as Finley almost predicted, the ostensible rejection of explicit moral goals for society that are extraneous to the system of government and the ennoblement of democracy itself as politics’s ultimate end has led in fact o the adoption of questionable “values” derived from that form of government.
Democracy and its ideological offspring—freedom, choice, and di- versity—threaten to dominate American society and supplant older Ameri- can ideals as moral goods, despite the constitutional and largely nondemocratic form of American government.
In short, without a strong set of nonpolitical values, modern America may run risks that the Athenians.
Athens’s history offers bracing positive and negative lessons for modern citizens and their regimes. These lessons do not, however, fall readily under the comfortable rubrics of “liberty and equality.” They rather stem from the Athenians’ unwillingness fully to embrace ideas like absolute equality, political choice through election, and the rights championed by modern political philosophers.
Athens’s lessons for us derive more from an Athenian social matrix based on duty to gods, family, and polis, and from the economic re- alities in ancient Athens, than from the fact that Athenians without property could attend meetings of the assembly and cast their votes…
To enjoy the potential benefits of studying Athenian history, we must face the possibility that demokratia had deleterious effects on Athens. We must also face the possibility that the city’s “successes” rested on factors largely unrelated to Athens’s democratic government.
Beyond the fact that the Athenians enjoyed a strong and intricate social structure that preceded and then to some degree restricted the negative impact of demokratia, early in democracy’s history the Athenians found themselves in unique and enviable circumstances stemming from their rich natural resources, the centralization of Athenian power (through a long and largely stable period of tyranny), the existence of a large disfranchised but free and economically beneficial class (the metics), and the successful advancement of Athenian imperialism.
But democratic practices such as using public funds to make payments to those serving on Athens’s juries arguably aggravated negative aspects of the Athenian character. In the fifth century, these democratic practices first encouraged the Athenians’ martial and aggressive tendencies, fueling the Athenian empire. Athens’s power and prosperity and its increasingly radical democratic government ultimately helped bring on the devastating Peloponnesian War and then encouraged its continuation for twenty-seven years.
The factors inspiring this war and the long conflict itself fundamentally altered the fourthcentury Athenians’ historical circumstances and attitudes. Under these new conditions, Athens’s democratic regime amplified existing problems and created others, weakening the Athenians’ military and morale sufficiently to fa- cilitate Macedon’s victory over the southern Greeks, thereby contributing finally to the loss of Athens’s independence and the end of classical Athenian democracy.
Ancient Greece, which the Greeks (Hellenes) called Hellas, was dominated by hundreds of independent, self-governing city-states known as poleis (singular polis)… A typi- cal polis comprised a town or city center (astu) surrounded by land (chora) farmed and owned by the polis’s citizens. Goods were exchanged and formal and informal public interaction took place in the main square and marketplace (agora) in the city center. Some poleis possessed a citadel, often located on defensible and/or fortified high-ground. At Athens, this citadel came to be called the akropolis (“high city”)…
Athens covered an area (known as Attica) of approximately 1,000 square miles and probably had at least 30,000–40,000 adult male citi- zens for most of the classical period…
Other large poleis in Hellas included Thebes (to Athens’s north in Boeotia), Corinth (located on the isthmus between Attica and the Peloponnese to the west of Athens), Argos (south of Corinth in the Peloponnese), and, of course, Sparta (also called Lacedaemon), which by around 600 b.c. had come to control the southern Peloponnese.
Each polis relied on an assembly of adult male citizens that acted as a more or less sovereign authority within the state. In the assembly, citizens of each polis might vote to elect magistrates; approve legislation, treaties, and decisions about war or peace; and, at least in some cases, render judicial decisions. In Athens, this assembly was known as the ekklesia and it eventually consisted of all free citizen males, regardless of whether they owned property or not.
Property qualifications for citizenship or office-holding were apparently common in Greek poleis, as they were in most parts of early America, even after the Revolution and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
In Sparta, the state seemingly provided equal plots of land for the limited numbers of full citizens (known as homoioi, or “equals”), but in other poleis ownership of a small farm and the consequent ability to afford the arms necessary to fight in the infantry phalanx as a hoplite (i.e., one with a hoplon— a large shield) probably qualified one for citizenship.
However, one of the defining qualities of Athens’s demokratia—a word combining the basic ideas of power (kratos) and the people (demos)—was the absence of a property qualification for citizenship. Thus at Athens even the poorest individuals had the opportunity to cast their votes in the assembly and (at least eventually and perhaps unofficially) to serve on the Council of 500.
Nevertheless, both before and after the institution of demokratia, the Athenians did divide their citizen body into stratified groups based on the ownership of property and restrict certain offices to those reaching a given property qualification.
According to Athenian tradition, the lawgiver Solon (ca. 594/3) separated the Athenians into four categories based on the agricultural production of their land: the pentakosiomedimnoi (possessing land yielding 500 medimnoi of dry or wet produce per year) formed the highest group, followed by the hippeis (“horsemen,” with land producing over 300 medimnoi), zeugitai (“yokemen,” from their style of fighting or their yokes of plow animals, with over 200), and thetes (“laborers,” possessing land producing less than 200 medimnoi per year or no property at all).
The Athenians placed formal checks on the persons who could hold their most important offices, even if the individuals were selected by lot from the citizen body. But one must emphasize that the questions the candidates were asked had nothing to do with their abilities to perform the tasks associated with their office. Instead, these questions sought information about the potential officeholders’ citizenship and their previous performance of duties.
That is, prospective Athenian officials faced questions about their character and behavior and not about their knowledge, intelligence, experience, or technical skills.
Not long after the period of Solon’s reforms (ca. 594/3), Athens fell under the control of the tyrant Peisistratus and his sons (ca. 561–511/10).35 Like many Greek tyrants, Peisistratus was simply an “unconstitutional” ruler, someone who had seized power in a polis and had done so outside the normal avenues of political action. The position of tyrant in sixth-century Greece did not carry the particularly negative connotations later associated with the term. In fact, to some later Athenians, the period of Peisistratus’s rule seemed to have been a “golden age.”…
The period of Peisistratid rule is especially crucial for this study, because so many of the trends that developed under the demokratia seem to have their origins under the Athenian tyrants…
Peisistratus seems to have opened up avenues of citizenship to those of questionable birth or connections, thereby increasing the ranks of his supporters while undermining his aristocratic would-be opponents.
Although he probably should have been immune from prosecution for his actions before 403 under the terms of the declared amnesty, Socrates’ association with Critias and Alcibiades encouraged his prosecution in 399 on charges of corrupting the youth, introducing new gods, and not believing in the state’s gods. An Athenian jury convicted the philosopher and sentenced him to death.
Among Socrates’ surviving followers, some now apparently abandoned any hope of a political career. Plato first left Athens but then re- turned and devoted himself to the study of philosophy, while Xenophon had already departed to lead the life of a military adventurer and author.
in this chapter, i seek to test the modern democratic faith in election, voting, and low qualifications for citizenship.1 Analysis of the Athenians’ practices in these areas will demonstrate the negative impact of their reduction of property qualifications for full citizenship and of their use of the vote to determine policy, while outlining the positive effects of continued noneconomic qualifications for citizenship. An examination of Pericles’ career will illustrate the benefits and dangers of charismatic leadership in an environment of popular rule. I hope to suggest that the vote—especially in an environment with few social restraints or civic responsibilities—represents a threat to, as much as an instrument of, justice.
The vote has not always served as the defining feature of democracy. As strange as it may seem to moderns, Aristotle considered election to be an oligarchic or aristocratic element in government.3 As Aristotle noticed, even in regimes with no property qualifications for citizenship or office, wealthier citizens tend to dominate elected positions. The philosopher thus identified democracy not with the act of voting but rather with popular control of the courts, the absence of a property qualification for citizenship, the use of the lottery to fill public offices, and the rule of the poor in their own interests.
By Athenian reckoning, Pericles held not only the official position of strategos, but also the informal place of rhetor (political orator), making proposals in the council and assembly and thus acting as what the Athenians would later call a demagogos (plural demagogoi), literally a “leader of the demos.”
The Athenians initially seem to have used the term demagogos without pejorative intent, and it has been well said that the so-called demagogues served a necessary function in the Athenian regime. Such men served not merely as the voices of various political interests but also as remarkably free critics of the very populace they sought to influence. That is, the best demagogoi attempted to change popular opinion and thus, as Thucydides puts it in his praise of Pericles, to lead the people “rather than to be led by them”
Indeed, since the term demagogos explicitly denotes someone who leads or shepherds the demos, the eventual use of this word as the primary epithet for a political panderer represents a virtual reversal of its original meaning.__The word demagogos in fact implies that the people need someone to lead them and that political power, at least in part, is exercised appropriately through this leadership__.
As early as Pericles’ day, some Athenians apparently expressed or implied reservations about allowing a citizen body including even those without property to choose Athens’s leaders and make policy via votes in the assembly. Although justifiable as a way of permitting all citizens to participate in their government, such a practice obviously enabled the poorer citizens to empower leaders who had improperly ingratiated themselves with them, placing the interests of a faction above those of the polis as a whole.
The latent dangers in allowing greater participation to those without property began to emerge after Pericles proposed that Athens begin to pay citizens for jury duty. hese payments led to others: if jurors deserved daily payment, why not members of the Council of 500 or those holding other magistracies?
After the mid fifth century, payment for public service served as a fundamental and defining characteristic of Athenian democracy. In the years following Pericles’ innovation, it undoubtedly became increasingly difficult for a leader opposed to this use of public money to win out over Pericles and his supporters… only proposals to increase public payments seem to have had political viability in Athens.
That these conditions encouraged the rise of what we call “demagogues” is entirely comprehensible. In an environment where a public figure can help secure his own election to office or the success of his legislation by proposing the distribution of more public money to a large enough portion of the electorate, and where there is no strong feeling among the populace that such a distribution is shameful or morally wrong, leaders proposing increased payments possess a tremendous advantage over their opponents.
Nevertheless, Athenian government did not collapse immediately after the institution of public payments, nor did the Athenians immediately vote themselves into public bankruptcy. Indeed, not until the 420s do we begin to see evidence of the potentially harmful effects of these practices…
… our sources indicate that “leaders of the demos” after Pericles increasingly pandered to the electorate and (unlike Pericles and some others) often told the people only what they wanted to hear.
Most Greek poleis in the classical period seem to have had property qualifications for full citizenship. These qualifications apparently tended to coincide roughly with the amount of property necessary to enable someone to provide his own weapons and thus serve in the citizen militia of hoplites.
Similar property qualifications were also common in the United States, even after the Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution…
Nevertheless, by the 450s the Athenians had removed all but the most nominal economic restrictions on free Athenian males for full (or almost full) participation in political life. Athenians of the lowest property class, the thetes, could vote in the assembly and (probably) serve on the Council of 500. And although the property qualification for the office of archon remained at the approximate level of the hoplite-farmers (the zeugitai) after 457, Aristotle suggests that in the fourth century this restriction was not enforced….
The Athenians’ removal of property qualifications for citizenship might encourage us to analogize citizenship in democratic Athens and citizenship in modern democratic regimes, in which property qualifications long ago passed out of use. But this analogy is very misleading, first, because moderns tend to associate citizenship primarily with the rights and privileges this status guarantees rather than with the qualifications it requires or the duties it implies.
Athens’s history under demokratia shows the Athenian people voting repeatedly to make war on their former friends and allies (as well as enemies), to conclude alliances with their recent enemies or with Greeks that had collaborated with Persia, to execute or exile their own leaders, to extort monetary payments from allied states that wished to be free of Athenian hegemony, to use this extorted money to fund Athenian projects (including the extortion of more money), to impose their own form of government on formerly autonomous states by force, to execute and enslave thousands of nonAthenian Greeks, to invade foreign states with massive force in order to expand Athenian power, to usurp or undercut taxes formerly paid by foreign citizens to their own states, to require religious oaths of loyalty from their al- lies, to refuse requests for assistance from allied states or to send only token or mercenary forces to these allies, to continue and even increase state payments to themselves in the face of pressing need elsewhere, to refuse to help other Greek states resist Macedonian hegemony, and to grant honors to the very dynasts who imperiled their form of government. All this, again, resulted from majority votes in the Athenian assembly.
Of course, we may attempt to balance these expressions of the popular will by juxtaposing them with the Athenian votes to send aid to the Ionian Greeks during their revolt from Persia (499), to stand against the Persians at Marathon and Salamis (490, 480), to crush the Persian forces in southern Asia Minor at the Eurymedon (ca. 466), to assist their Spartan allies during a helot revolt (462/1), to reestablish demokratia (in 410), to stand (at last) against Philip of Macedon (in 339/8), and to honor citizens, foreigners, or other states that had done good services for Athens.
But it would certainly be difficult to construct a list of praiseworthy or wise Athenian votes in the classical period that could rival in number those ballots that to many moderns (and at least some ancient Greeks) have seemed unjust, belligerent, or simply foolish.
Moreover, most of the Athenian assembly’s more admirable decisions appear very early in the period of demokratia, before the radicalization of the regime in the late 460s. After that time, very few votes of the demos reflect anything but a rather narrow view of Athens’s (or rather, individual Athenians’) self-interest.
in 454/3, the Athenians voted to transfer the league treasury from the island of Delos to Athens, and they subsequently voted to use this money for Athenian projects like the building program on the acropolis.48 At least one prominent Athenian, Cimon’s relative Thucydides son of Melesias, seems to have opposed Pericles’ program of spending the allies’ money in this way. But the Athenian demos voted to ostracize him too (ca. 444/3) and continued to support expenditures for buildings for Athens and payments for themselves as jurors.
To moderns, he often seems a kind of disembodied or dehumanized spokesman for democratic values, transmitted to us through less than careful readings, summaries, or decontextualized quotations from Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Many people know that Pericles in that address called Athens the “school of Hellas,” and that he praised Athenian government and society in contrast to the Spartans’ regime. Yet few authorities have emphasized the primary thrust of the speech, which is thoroughly militaristic, collectivist, and unstintingly nationalistic.
A close examination of Pericles’ Funeral Oration in Thucydides reveals a monument perhaps an even more “nationalistic”—as opposed to “democratic”—than the Parthenon. After briefly dilating on Athens’s open society and implicitly contrasting this with the control of individual lives putatively found in Sparta, Pericles passes quickly to the issue of Athens’s power and the need for Athenian citizens, literally, to become “lovers” of the city or its power. Even Pericles’ famous proclamation that Athens was a school, or “education” for Greece, rests on a military foundation:
In short, I say that as a city we are an education for Hellas, and I doubt if the world can produce a man, who where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility as the Athenian. And that this is no mere boast thrown out for the occasion, but plain matter of fact, the power of the state acquired by these habits proves. For Athens alone of her contemporaries is found when tested to be greater than her reputation, and alone gives no occasion to her assailants to blush at the antagonist by whom they have been worsted, or to her subjects to question her title by merit to rule. Rather, the admiration of the present and succeeding ages will be ours, because we have not left our power without witness, but have shown it by mighty proofs; and because far from needing a Homer for our panegyrist, or other of his craft whose verses might charm for the moment only for the impression which they gave to melt at the touch of fact, we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us. Such is the Athens for which these men, in the assertion of their determination not to part with her, nobly fought and died; and well may every one of their survivors be ready to suffer in her cause. (2.41; trans. R. Crawley, adapted, with emphasis added)
Such ideas are echoed later in the last speech of Pericles presented in Thucydides’ work:
Remember, too, that if your country has the greatest name in all the world, it is because she never bent before disaster, and because she has expended more life and effort in war than any other city, and has won for herself a power greater than any hitherto known, the memory of which will descend to the latest posterity; even if now, in obedience to the general law of decay, we should ever be forced to yield, still it will be remembered that we held rule over more Greeks than any other Greek state, that we sustained the greatest wars against their united or separate powers, and inhabited a city unrivaled by any other in resources and magnitude. These glories may incur the censure of the slow and unambitious; but in the breast of energy they will awake emulation, and in those who must remain without them an envious regret. Hatred and unpopularity at the moment have fallen to the lot of all who have aspired to rule others; but where odium must be incurred, true wisdom incurs it for the highest objects. Hatred also is short-lived; but that which makes the splendor of the present and glory of the future remains forever unforgotten. Decide, therefore, for glory then and honor now, and at- tain both objects by instant and zealous effort: send no heralds to Lacedaemon, and do not betray any sign of being oppressed by your present sufferings, since they whose minds are least sensitive to calamity, and whose hands are most quick to meet it, are the greatest men and the greatest communities. (2.64; trans. Crawley, adapted, with emphasis added)
Modern sensibilities recoil (or rather should recoil) from the naked nationalism of Pericles’ orations, a nationalism that one cannot dismiss as merely empty or patriotic rhetoric. The Parthenon’s symbolism and Athens’s consistent drive to Aegean hegemony after the 470s confirm this aggressive sense of national superiority as a guiding principle of Athenian interaction with other states and a fundament of the Athenians’ self-image…
For Pericles, Athens’s superiority to other states stemmed from its power and from its citizens’ character—a character that had facilitated the acquisition of that power.…
Pericles’ arguably greatest political success occurred in the late 430s, when persuaded the Athenian populace to refuse all concessions to the Peloponnesians (thus bringing on the Peloponnesian War in 431) and then persuaded the hoplite-farmers of Attica to move inside the city walls and allow their lands to be ravaged by Spartan invaders.109 Even after the war continued into its second year and the Athenians were suffering from a devastating plague, Pericles continued to support the conflict and the Athenian dominance that he seemingly believed it would ensure, albeit in the face of great popular opposition…..
Pericles’ political convictions and even the particular program he pursued as a result of those convictions—including peace (or at least détente) with Persia, imperial expansion into mainland Greece and tightened controls on the allies (all actions that risked hostilities with Sparta and its allies), and payments made to poorer Athenians in return for their participation in public service—seem comprehensible, if not predictable, given his family background and personal history.
But it is less easy to explain the kind of abstraction that appears in Pericles’ thoughts about Athens in the speeches Thucydides attributes to him.That Thucydides has colored these addresses with his own language and thought cannot be doubted, but the historian—who ex- presses his admiration of Pericles’ political character in glowing terms—is unlikely to have invented the basic thoughts contained in these orations….
The Athenians, in Pericles’ view, needed to accept his belief both in the superiority of the state to the individual and in the related moral value of public service and its ability literally to act “as a cloak to cover a man’s other imperfections.”
Such ideas stood in stark contrast both to the older aristocratic ideal of individual arete—manly excellence exhibited to assert individual superiority and to gain the honor and rewards (time) such superiority produced—and to the newer Socratic conception of excellence, which emphasized individual ethics.
Of course, a populace that has been empowered politically through the vote or public payments will probably begin to have an increasingly high opinion of itself. This, we may speculate, can lead ultimately to the confir mation or even encouragement of this high opinion by politicians (who wish to gain the people’s approval).
This inflated self-image can also lead to unwillingness on the part of the people to hear itself criticized by those to whom it grants authority, especially if elected officials repeatedly tell the people that they (their leaders) are mere conduits for the popular will.
Thus, for example, American politicians find it impossible to lead the people when they are constantly claiming that they seek to reflect or implement what “the American people” want.
One may justifiably doubt whether a thoroughly democratized populace will frequently elect those who stand in opposition to the electorate’s view of itself. This doubt points to one of the inherent dangers facing modern democratic regimes, which define and defend themselves primarily through the existence of free elections.
The vote allows individuals in effect to rule their neighbors and thus makes them think of themselves as rulers. Eventually this self-image may tend to supplant other considerations when the people evaluate candidates.
Those candidates who seem to assert any superiority to the people (intellectual, moral, or otherwise) become less acceptable than those who confirm what the people already think of themselves.…
Moreover, there may be a tendency for a democratic people, again, once they have been empowered politically, to seek out not only leaders to whom they feel no collective inferiority but even leaders to whom a significant part of the people can feel superior (morally or otherwise).
As the collective morale of a democratic society declines, the people may decide to sacrifice real leadership in favor of their own psychological comfort, and while it cannot be proved that this oc- curred in fourth-century Athens, modern experience suggests that it is a real possibility.
At the very least, Athenian history demonstrates the need for democratic politicians to be able to criticize the electorate. This necessitates that those willing to risk political defeat and those of perceived character and accomplishment hold office. As the Athenians showed, one way to help achieve this goal is to connect political leadership with onerous and dangerous duties like those required of an Athenian general. Based on the Athenians’ experience, Americans may justifiably ask whether there is not a need for qualifications for political leadership beyond the age of the candidate.
The common Athenians’ ability to cast ballots in assembly did not lead to a particularly just or peaceful regime. In fact, it would be much easier to argue the opposite—that Athens’s use of the common citizens’ votes to determine policy aggravated martial and nationalistic tendencies and eventually empowered individuals more interested in their own advancement than in the good of Athens or its citizens.
To the extent that moderns have seized on voting as the defining act of democracy, we have enshrined an aspect of the Athenian regime that is potentially dangerous and that the ancients themselves did not even consider particularly democratic.
Because voting demands little of us, and allows us by extension to rule our neighbor, tax his property, or limit his smoking—all from the anonymity of the voting booth (as opposed to the public, open-air ballots by show of hands in the Athenian assembly)—it provides both a cheap salve to our civic conscience (“I am a dutiful citizen since I vote”) and a philosophical and moral justification for any current regime (“the people voted for it”).… Since election also intensifies the tendency for citizens of a modern regime to shift the blame for any action onto “the government” or elected officials, the vote serves conveniently to shield the electorate from both criticism and responsibility.
As we have noted, the Athenians did not use the secret ballot in their assembly. Jurors in Athenian courts, however, could disguise their votes for or against conviction even from their fellow jurymen. Is it not strange that modern America has chosen almost the very opposite arrangement? We tend to hide our personal preferences regarding our leaders, voting in tiny, private booths and often considering the question “Whom did you vote for?” somewhat rude. Meanwhile, our jurors discuss their views openly among themselves (since they often seek unanimity) and, more than infrequently in major cases, eventually appear in interviews for newspapers or television programs, explaining why they voted for guilt or innocence. But surely the question of a citizen’s preference in an election should be a more public affair than a juror’s determination about the guilt or innocence, and thus even life or death, of another individual.
The fact that asking another citizen about his preference in a national election could be considered impolite in fact demonstrates the extent to which the modern idealization of politics has distorted our conception of the appropriately public and the private aspects of our lives. Since a citizen’s vote has the potential to affect the lives of all other citizens in a very real and concrete way, only not answering questions about one’s vote should be considered offensive.
Strangely, many Americans ostensibly put more emphasis on the act of voting than on the issue of whom one supports. But since the purpose of voting presumably is to elect particular individuals, who will then carry out particular policies or represent particular ideas, this reverence for the very act of voting itself seems perverse. Many Americans have apparently come to be lieve that the democratic “process” is more important than the “product.” (And is this not an idea one actually hears in numerous contexts today, where discourse and consensus are so often praised over particular decisions?) The idea that voting and free elections are the principal condition necessary for the existence of good government has become a modern dogma. A means of reaching a definable end (“voting” in order to empower individuals who are just and will do specific things) has become an end itself.
To rectify this situation, we must first ask ourselves what goal we actually seek by allowing individual citizens to vote. If, in fact, our only goal is simply voting itself, we might as well admit that the American political system has little purpose other than to ensure its own moral justification. In such a situation, any immoral or unwise act—whether it is executing a great philosopher or killing civilians while making undeclared war on Serbia or Iraq—can be defended on the grounds that it reflects the results of the democratic process….
Finally, those who do vote sometimes seem to consider themselves morally superior to those who do not. But it surely reflects the sad state of modern America’s concept of civic duty when one is hard pressed to produce any other aspect of participation in public life beyond voting that can be equated with a moral responsibility. Even jury service, the democratic action par excellence to Aristotle, is frequently treated by Americans as an onerous imposition on one’s time, to be avoided at all costs by anyone “with a life.”….
Only elections resulting in officials willing to risk removal from office by criticizing the populace that elected them—in short, that result in real leaders—should be considered beneficial. To the extent that voters elect only those who will in turn hold them up to no standard of conduct, the practice of election should be seen as potentially harmful.
Despite the sacrifices the Sicilian expedition entailed, the war also held out the promise of profit for individual citizens (through booty and pay) as well as for the state itself. According to Thucydides, the Athenian leader Alcibiades emphasized such material profits and glory, as well as the need for empires to expand continually, when he supported the expedition to Sicily in the Athenian assembly:
Let us therefore be convinced that we shall augment our power at home by this adventure abroad, and let us make the expedition, and so humble the pride of the Peloponnesians by sailing off to Sicily, and letting them see how little we care for the peace that we are now enjoying; while at the same time we shall either become masters, as we very easily may, of the whole of Hellas through the accession of the Sicilian Hellenes, or in any case ruin the Syracusans, to the no small advantage of ourselves and our allies. (Thuc. 6.18; trans. Crawley, adapted)
Although the Athenian general Nicias attempted to dissuade the citizenry by stressing the size and expense of the undertaking they were contemplating, the Athenians voted to launch the Sicilian expedition. Thucydides’ description of the scene is memorable and chilling:
ll alike fell in love [eros] with the enterprise. The older men thought that they would either subdue the places against which they were to sail, or at all events, with so large a force, meet with no disaster; those in the prime of life felt a longing for foreign sights and spectacles, and had no doubt that they should come safe home again; while the idea of the common people and the soldiery was to earn wages at the moment, and make conquests that would supply a never ending fund of pay for the future. With this enthusiasm of the majority, the few that liked it not, feared to appear unpatriotic by holding up their hands against it, and so kept quiet. (Thuc. 6.24; trans. Crawley)
In the event, the Sicilian expedition failed miserably and thus did not result in endless pay for the multitude. Instead, the invasion depleted Athens’s resources through the expenditure of thousands of talents and the deaths of thousands of citizen-soldiers and rowers. Of the tens of thousands of Athenians and allies serving in the initial Athenian fleet of 415 and the ships sent out subsequently, most were killed or sold into slavery by their Syracusan captors. Since the overconfident Athenians had also reopened hostilities with Sparta in mainland Greece in 414, the news of the ultimate disaster in Sicily in 413 resulted in near panic conditions in Athens.
From these popular votes to alter Athens’s form of government, we can draw certain important conclusions about Athenian attitudes toward themselves and demokratia in the late fifth century. In early 411, at any rate, many Athenians did not believe that their current form of polis government (demokratia) was the only legitimate or practicable form of regime. A good number of Athenians were willing to contemplate a major change in their political system, a change that would in fact almost totally remove what had become two cardinal principles of Athenian democracy: pay for public service and the ab- sence of a property qualification for full (voting) citizenship. Even if many Athenians saw the replacement of democracy as a temporary measure, it would seem that their view of themselves as a unique and superior people at this time was not tied primarily to the idea or practice of demokratia.
The Athenian example suggests, therefore, that once people are allowed to vote themselves an income—whether from revenues confis- cated from other states (or future generations), from natural or public resources, or from the property of their fellow citizens—and once they have become inured to the receipt of such funds, it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse the situation via democratic processes. One imagines that a political leader of tremendous character and charisma would be necessary to convince such a populace to vote to give up their stipends.
No such leader emerged in fourth-century Athens…
But it hardly seems possible that the state that in the fifth century had produced Themistocles, Aristeides, Cimon, Pericles, and Alcibiades—not to mention Sophocles, Socrates, and others—was inca- pable of producing equally talented or brilliant leaders a mere century later. Is it not much more likely that such individuals actually did exist in fourthcentury Athens, but that they often chose not to enter the public arena?
Our fifth-century sources hint that such an attitude among some wealthy Athenians was already developing in the mid fifth century. By the fourth century, state service as a general or political advisor to the demos carried increasing risk to one’s person and property. According to Plato, Socrates stated in 399 that it was impossible for a just man to live a public (i.e., political) life in Athens (Ap. 32a). After his teacher’s execution, Plato himself eschewed Athenian political life and devoted himself to philosophy, although he made abortive and futile attempts to assist would-be philosopher-kings in Syracuse. Talented men like Xenophon and other Socratics also either left Athens or abandoned politics.
We may again note the increasing separation in the fourth century between the political careers of Athenian orators/diplomats and the military careers of Athenian generals. Men like Demosthenes and Eubulus did not normally command armies, as Pericles, Cleon, and Themistocles had done. Is it too much to surmise that this separation of duties had a deleterious effect on the character of Athens’s leadership, although perhaps not on the quality of its leaders’ speeches?…
Demosthenes more than once warned the Athenian people that they were unwilling to listen to a speaker who did not tell them what they wanted to hear. Perhaps he was right.
Not to do so, the Athenians maintain, would be evidence of Athens’s weakness. The Melians’ appeals to justice and their faith in the gods and their Spartan relations are dismissed as folly by the Athenians in a famous passage:
Melians. You may be sure that we are as well aware as you of the difficulty of contending against your power and fortune, unless the terms be equal. But we trust with the help of the gods that our fortune may be as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust, and that what we want in power will be made up by the alliance of the Lacedaemonians, who are bound, if only for very shame, to come to the aid of their kindred. Our confidence, therefore, after all is not so utterly irrational.
Athenians. When you speak of the favor of the gods, we may as fairly hope for that as yourselves, neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practice among themselves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear to have the worse. But when we come to your notion about the Lacedaemonians, which leads you to believe that shame will make them help you, here we bless your simplicity but do not envy your folly. The Lacedaemonians, where their interests or their country’s laws are in question, are the worthiest men alive; of their conduct toward others much might be said, but no clearer idea of it could be given than by shortly saying that of all men we know they most indubitably consider what is agreeable honorable, and what is expedient just. Such a way of thinking does not promise much for the safety which you now unreasonably count upon.
The Melians nevertheless resisted and were destroyed. As Thucydides bluntly writes, the Athenians “put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves” (5.116; trans. Crawley).
This infamous example of Athenian brutality, which became paradigmatic for all those wishing to cast aspersions on Athens or its democracy, speaks for itself.
But Athens arguably lost the Lamian War long before its final capitulation in 322. Repeatedly refusing to take vigorous action as their allies and interests fell before Philip after the early 350s, the Athenians preferred to listen to those statesmen who promised “peace in our time” and the continuation of public payments. Usually unwilling to take the field themselves in large numbers, Athenian citizens too often relied on mercenary troops even when they did vote for military operations. The limited forces they dispatched were underfunded, and the generals actually available and willing to command lived under constant threat of fine, exile, or death if they failed.
To those who see Macedon’s triumph as inevitable, the Athenian demos and Athens’s leaders bear little responsibility for the loss of their independent government. Such a conclusion betrays a fatalistic and deterministic view of history that ignores the very “unrealistic” stand made by a few Greek poleis against the mighty Persian empire. In fact, we simply cannot say whether the Macedonian army presented an impossible opponent for the southern Greeks, because the Athenians and other Greeks waited too long before opposing Macedon aggressively and then were unable to put together the kind of coalition force that had withstood the Persians. Athenian democratic politics played a major part in both these failures and therefore deserves to be analyzed carefully as one of the reasons for Macedon’s success.
It is easy to attribute the end of Athenian freedom to Philip and his successors—too easy and too comforting, and too reflective of the usually unstated desire to exculpate the individual Athenians and their democratic political system from the choices that led to their defeat.
Nevertheless, like the idea that democracy represents the best form of government, the view that good government depends in part on a “separation of church and state” has become an American article of faith. Again, we must leave aside the fact that the American Founders made no effort to restrict local religious establishments via the Constitution and that they largely distrusted democracy and did not seek to make the United States into one.
Today, most Americans believe in a “constitutional” separation of church and state and maintain that their government is a democracy. Our politicians encourage this belief by talking about heeding “what the American people want” and designating those regimes of which they approve as “democratic” and those they would criticize as “undemocratic.” Having lost most of its historical content, the word democracy has come to stand for the amorphous idea of “good government” centered around personal rights and the practice of casting ballots.
In short, like many successful religions, democracy has been put into a palatable and easily digestible form—a form that is only loosely related to its historical origins and that requires a certain degree of faith within the followers. And like many religions, too, democracy sometimes affects public actions and professed opinions more than real lifestyle or private beliefs.
To speak of democracy as a kind of national religion may seem absurd, especially since contemporary American democracy has made separation of church and state such a hallowed doctrine. But let us consider the idea for a moment. Surely it is fair to say that democracy now represents a doctrine that few dare to challenge openly in any serious or fundamental way.
Publicly expressed American views about government and society seem to reflect an almost absolute belief in the value of democracy, treating it as something more than a mere political system with certain properties that has existed at particular moments in history.
If, then, democracy has become an almost unimpeachable doctrine, we might seriously consider whether it has begun to function as something like an unacknowledged religion, essentially filling a void left by the diminishing presence of previous social values. Is it so outrageous to suggest that the vote now serves as a kind of Eucharist—as the privilege and duty that identifies one as a citizen and democrat in good standing? (Indeed, those who do not partake in this sacrament are often said to have “no right” to criticize American government.)
As in a religion, in modern America various sects within democracy compete for followers and dominance. But, as if mimicking the competing denominations or branches found within other religions, all claim to be the “true” democrats, who are really interested in providing “what the American people want” and thereby guaranteeing as much freedom and happiness to “the American people” as possible.
Democrats and Republicans quibble over fairly small changes in rates of taxation and marginal alterations to social programs. Questions about the principles supporting such programs as the progressive income tax, public education, or Social Security are rarely heard (much less taken seriously).
Moreover, in a land that continually praises “diversity,” is it not somewhat odd that there is virtually no popular political opposition to the principle that whatever “the American people” want is an appropriate goal of our society? I do not mean to imply that everyone who uses the phrase sincerely believes that he knows or really cares about what “the American people” want. I only wish to emphasize that this is the rhetorical stance one must take to suggest that one is a good political leader.
The idea that American political figures should actually lead the people by telling them what they should want and why—that is, the idea that a politician should risk popular disapproval by attempting to change the opinion of the majority—has almost no currency in contemporary public debate. Can anyone imagine an American elected official or political candidate today actually criticizing the populace for their views (and succeeding in changing the electorate’s minds), as Pericles, Cleon, and even (in the end) Demosthenes did?
[T]wo of the most well-known ancient characterizations of Athenian democracy and society, namely, Pericles’ Funeral Oration and Plato’s Apology of Socrates…
… even on a minimalist view of these speeches’ historicity, they represent the views of two very distinct schools of thought about Athenian democracy and human society. Those schools might be loosely described as a “statist” view (Pericles’) and a “moral” view (Socrates’).
Pericles values a citizen’s service to the state above all other qualities…. Moreover, according to Pericles, the Athenians, “unlike any other nation,” regard the man who does not participate in the political life of the city “not as unambitious but as useless. Pericles repeats his statist views in a later speech, opining that “national greatness is more for the advantage of private persons, than any individual well-being coupled with public humiliation.”
The express goal of Pericles’ collectivism was national greatness, which he conceived of especially as power over other states. As we have already noted in chapter 2, it was Athens’s power, and not its cultural or political superiority, on which Pericles relied for Athens’s future reputation:
In short, I say that as a city we are an education for Hellas, and I doubt if the world can produce a man, who where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies and graced by so happy a versatility as the Athenian. And that this is no mere boast thrown out for the occasion, but plain matter of fact, the power of the state acquired by these habits proves. For Athens alone of her contemporaries is found when tested to be greater than her reputation, and alone gives no occasion to her assailants to blush at the antagonist by whom they have been worsted, or to her subjects to question her title by merit to rule. Rather, the admiration of the present and succeeding ages will be ours, because we have not left our power without witness, but have shown it by mighty proofs; and because far from needing a Homer for our panegyrist, or others of his craft whose verses might charm for the moment only for the impression which they give to melt at the touch of fact, we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us. (Thuc. 2.41; trans. Crawley, adapted)
Pericles returns to this theme at the end of his last speech in Thucydides:
Remember, too, that if your country has the greatest name in all the world, it is because she never bent before disaster, and because she has expended more life and effort in war than any other city, and has won for herself a power greater than any hitherto known, the memory of which will descend to the latest posterity; even if now, in obedience to the general law of decay, we should ever be forced to yield, still it will be remembered that we held rule over more Greeks than any other Greek polis, that we sustained the greatest wars against their united or separate powers, and inhabited a city unrivaled by any other in resources or magnitude. (Thuc. 2.64; trans. Crawley, adapted)
The raw militarism and jingoistic nationalism of these words have drawn little comment in most recent work on Athenian democracy. Very few authors have, like Paul Rahe, drawn attention to the dissonance between such belligerence and the modern conception of Athens as the politically progressive state that acted as the artistic and intellectual heart of ancient Greece….
Perhaps most important for the modern world, Pericles felt free to adopt the position that “private failings” were less important than “public service” because Athenian society as a whole already put restraints on private action. Specific requirements for office-holding and citizenship addressed moral and social questions as much as political concerns.
Pericles himself recognized the “unwritten laws” of society that brought disgrace on those who violate them. That disgrace—imposed (even if passively) by Athenians on fellow Athenians—provided Pericles with an environment in which he could tap the Athenians’ sense of moral obligation even as he touted the benefits of empire. Such continuing societal norms demonstrate that the Athenians never enshrined freedom, choice, and diversity as demigods; instead, they remained constrained by ideals of duty to the gods, family, and polis.
These social constraints represent the natural result of a healthy society in action, and they arguably provided both Pericles and the American Founders with the social foundations upon which their political systems could function successfully (at least for a time). Pericles recognized this and relied on it—note his repeated references to duty in his speeches— although he admittedly introduced political forces into Athens that would begin to change this social fabric.
Socrates seems to have known the dangers (and certainly he felt the effects) of these new forces, exemplified by the large courts of paid jurors created during Pericles’ leadership in Athens. It was a paid jury of five hundred citizens, of course, that convicted Socrates and condemned him to death on the charges of introducing new gods, not believing in the traditional Athenian gods, and corrupting the youth
Plato’s account of Socrates’ speech in his own defense against these charges contains—among other things—a refutation of Pericles’ ideas about the relationship between state and citizen, public and private morality, the wisdom of the collective versus that of the individual, and other fundamental tenets of democratic thought….
In short, at least as reported by Thucydides, Pericles held that all citizens had both the obligation and the ability to serve the state in a public capacity.
Such views are clearly antithetical to Socrates’ in the Apology.
Not only does Socrates make it clear on several occasions that he has consciously chosen not to participate in public affairs (23b), either in the assembly (31c–32a, 32e–33a) or in the law courts (17d, 32e), but he also asserts that his own kind of service to Athens has been far more valuable (see below) and that it is im- possible and dangerous for an honest man to lead a political life in Athens:
This is what has prevented me from taking part in public affairs, and I think it was quite right to prevent me. Be sure, gentlemen of the jury, that if I had long ago attempted to take part in politics, I should have died long ago, and benefited neither you nor myself. Do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; no man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive even for a short time. (Pl. Ap. 31e–32a; trans. G. M. A. Grube)
Although Socrates himself (significantly) reminds the jury of his own military service at Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delion (28e), he could not have accepted Pericles’ view of personal merit based on public rather than private morality. For Socrates, the greatest good consisted of the daily discussion of virtue.
So far from arguing that a man’s public service could compensate for private failings, Socrates maintains that a man “should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting like a good or a bad man” In contrast, Pericles praises the Athenians’ tolerance, even as he notes their respect for the law:
The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace. (Thuc. 2.37; trans. Crawley)
Moreover, Socrates makes it clear that there is a higher authority even than the law. The philosopher claims that he must obey the god first, and since he interprets his quest for a wiser man than himself as a response to Apollo’s oracle, he asserts that he would continue to question those around him even if the jury were to forbid it. On this issue of divine authority, Socrates stands in sharp contrast to Pericles’ statism….
In the famous passage in which he questions his accuser Meletus, Socrates makes it clear that, just as only the horse trainer improves horses while others corrupt them (because they lack horse-training skill), only a minority (the few) are able to improve humans, while the majority corrupt them.
Thus, he concludes, it is impossible that Socrates alone harms the citizens while everyone else improves them (as Meletus had claimed). It follows, of course, that any majority—including the majority of jurors—is unlikely to choose rightly.
But this is not Socrates’ only criticism of democratic principles, for although Pericles maintains that in Athens “advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity”, Socrates asserts that “reputation for capacity” in no way guarantees wisdom. In fact, by questioning the politicians who were reputed to be wise, Socrates had found that this class had the least wisdom of all.
The politicians, the very men advanced by their “reputation for capacity” according to Pericles, were “nearly the most deficient” in wisdom in Socrates’ view. Since Socrates clearly does believe in the efficacy of special training or education in particular areas, surely for him the area in which these men most needed training was in human excellence or virtue (arete)…
Socrates maintained that the individual must first seek to improve his own soul, his own moral condition. In Socrates’ view this improvement of the individual would ultimately lead to a better state, although this was its by-product and not its express goal: “Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence brings about wealth and all other public and private blessings for men”
Pericles described a system geared to produce a citizen who placed the advantage of the state over the virtue of the individual—or rather, a state in which acting for the (perceived) good of the state was the highest virtue.
Thus, through the social ostracism of the man who takes no part in public affairs (one such as Socrates), who is considered “useless” in Pericles’ view, and through the prizes offered to those who do participate, the state ensures itself of a continued supply of servants.
Pericles emphasizes this utilitarian role of citizens when he encourages parents of the deceased to have more children. These children, he asserts, will not only “help you to forget those whom you have lost, but will be to the state at once a reinforcement and a security.”
Since for Pericles the greatest honors should be offered as rewards for state service, he ends his speech by reminding the mourners that the children of the Athenians killed in the war will be reared at the public expense, the polis thus granting a “most useful prize in this contest of valor. . . . And where the rewards for merit [arete] are greatest, there are found the best citizens”