The 430s were the last great age of Athenian optimism. By 431, Sparta and Athens were at war (detailed in Chapter 18) and the city had been ravaged by a terrible plague. After Athens had reached such a peak of intellectual and physical vigour, it is hard to imagine the city crawling with dying bodies in the shadow of the splendour of the Acropolis. Despite moments of success the war was to end in 404 bc in disaster for Athens and the city was lucky not to be humiliated by the destruction of its walls by the victorious Spartans.
Yet democracy was to survive in Athens until 322 bc and the different contexts in which it functioned will be explored here. Much has been learned as a result of the large increase in written texts, especially those recorded on stone. Twenty thousand inscriptions in total have been found in Attica alone. Fifth-century Athens was especially rich in ‘political’ inscriptions, with the Decree of Themistocles and other decrees, the Tribute Lists, treaties, and funerary inscriptions among them. A further 500 decrees survive from the fourth century. ‘They were’, suggests James Whitley, writing of inscriptions in general, ‘monuments to a democratic idea, their erection and inscription a performance of public accountability—an outward, durable and visible sign of the public character of the Athenian state.’ However, dating, finding precise translations and establishing the public context in which they were placed is daunting. Scholars such as H. B. Mattingley have carried out meticulous analyses of how individual Greek letters changed their form over time so that inscriptions can be dated by the change.
So what do the inscriptions tell us about Athenian democracy? The interaction between politicians continued to drive events. Many speeches, some 150 in total, survive. Some, those of the great teacher Isocrates (436-338), for instance, were samples used in training, many others were authentic forensic speeches designed to manipulate an audience to a desired result. (See further Interlude 4.) However, decisions needed to be recorded and achievements applauded. The tribute lists, which, in fact, show only the one-sixtieth of the annual tribute that was dedicated to Athena herself, were set out on tall columns that acted as a form of imperial propaganda in themselves.
To the inscriptions can be added the narrative of the historian Thucydides for the last years of the fifth century (see Chapter 18 for Thucydides). So some chronology of political events can be re-created. In the despair that followed the outbreak of war and the plague in 431, the Assembly turned against Pericles, fined him, and deposed him from his generalship (although he was soon re-elected, ‘as is the way with crowds’, remarked Thucydides). He died in the summer of 429 of some lingering illness probably related to the plague.
After Pericles’ death new leaders arose, the so-called ‘demagogues’, who were accused by their rivals of manipulating the emotions of the Assembly for their personal advantage. Thucydides was hostile to them, he even suggests the lack of a Pericles was one reason why Athens lost the war, but the picture of the ‘demagogues’ that has survived may well be a distorted one, the traditional prejudice of the aristocrat against the upstart. Another source, The Constitution of the Athenians, whose author is conventionally known as the ‘Old Oligarch’, is scathing about the ignorance and lack of education of the masses. ‘As things are, anyone who wishes can stand up and talk, disreputable though he might be, and he will gain what is beneficial for himself and those like him.’ Certainly these leaders, of whom Cleon, Hyperbolus, and Cleophon were the most prominent, came from manufacturing rather than landed aristocratic backgrounds. Cleon owned a tannery, Hyperbolus a factory for making lamps, and Cleophon made lyres. They did not aim to become generals and concentrated their energies on building up support within the Assembly. They competed for power with the generals such as Nicias and Alcibia-des (see further below, p. 299) whose origins were more aristocratic.
A famous example of the new volatility, recounted by Thucydides, was the debate on the treatment of the people of Mytilene after the city had revolted against Athens in 427. At first the Assembly, swayed by impassioned oratory, decreed that all the Mytilenean men should be executed and the women and children enslaved. A trireme was sent off with the order. The next day the Assembly, in more sober mood, reversed the decision. (A second trireme reached the city in the nick of time.) In 406 there was a debate over the fate of the generals who after a naval victory at Arginusae had left the scene without picking up survivors (their defence being that a violent storm had made this impossible). Various proposals were put forward as a means of assessing their guilt, some of which appeared to be unconstitutional. The mass of the Assembly shouted that the decision should be left to the people, even if this meant disregarding normal procedures, and went on to order the execution of those six generals who had arrived back in Athens. Later, however, but only when it was too late, the Assembly again repented of its harshness (and rather hypocritically accused the main speakers of ‘forcing’ the people to act the way they did).
Athenian democracy was subverted on two occasions. In 411, after an Athenian expedition to Sicily ended in disaster, the Assembly surrendered its power to a Council of Four Hundred. This was overthrown after four months, and an Assembly whose membership was limited to the richer 5,000 citizens was introduced. This only lasted until 410, when full democracy was restored. In 404 the Spartans, now finally victorious, imposed a Commission of Thirty on Athens, the ‘Thirty Tyrants’ as they became known. They could only survive with a supporting garrison of 700 men and launched a reign of terror in which some 1,500 Athenians may have died. In the winter of 404/403 the democrats, with Theban help, launched a countercoup. The Piraeus was seized and the Thirty overthrown. The restored democracy was to last until its overthrow by the Macedonians in 322 and is a testament to its underlying resilience.
The character of fourth-century democracy in Athens was subtly different from that of the fifth century. The city appeared sobered by the devastating experience of the Peloponnesian War, in particular by the volatility of decision-making, as shown in the Assembly, and the experience of the ‘Thirty Tyrants. A new respect was now evoked for the traditional laws (the nomoi) of the city. Between 410 and 399 these laws were codified and inscribed for all to see on the walls of one of the stoas. Henceforth, if any law was to be changed or a new one introduced it had to be done by a modified procedure. A legislative body, the nomothetai, was set up. It consisted of all members of the Boule plus 1,001 citizens drawn from the jury lists for the year. Any change in the law was first proposed by the Assembly but then had to be debated before the much smaller nomothetai, which decided by simple majority whether it should be accepted. The principle of democratic involvement was maintained, but modified to allow the Assembly’s decisions to be reconsidered. The Assembly could still pass decrees, psephismata, but now these were limited in scope or only valid for a short period. Any speaker who proposed a measure that was contrary to existing laws without going through the new procedure could now be prosecuted and the proposed law declared invalid. The prosecution took place before jurors in the traditional way, and in effect the jurors were now deciding whether a particular decree of the Assembly was valid or not.
There is also evidence that the Areopagus, still an unelected body of former magistrates who sat on it for life, was revived as an important part of the constitution in the fourth century. By now, however, the property qualification for archons had disappeared, so the body was more broadly constituted than it had been a hundred years earlier. In 403/402 the Assembly had decreed that the Areopagus was to supervise the administration of laws by the magistrates. In the 340s the Areopagus acquired the power to try, on its own initiative, political leaders who had, in its opinion, tried to overthrow democracy or were guilty of treason or bribery. Its verdict was then passed to the jurors for confirmation. In addition there are examples, from the second half of the century, of the Areopagus actually intervening to annul the elections of officials by the Assembly.
As Mogens Hansen has argued in his The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (2nd edition, London, 1999), the fullest study of Athenian democracy for this period, these changes were justified by the Athenians on the grounds that the traditional laws of the Athenian state from the days of Solon and Cleisthenes were simply being restored. This was nonsense, of course, but, as in 461, an appeal to some ancestral constitution of the past was the only way to bring about political change. ‘Like many Greeks,’ writes Hansen, ‘the Athenians had a soft spot for the “golden age”, the belief that everything was better in olden times and that consequently the road to improvement lay backwards and not forwards.’ The result was that the Athenians maintained confidence in their democracy and it survived until overthrown in 322. In many ways, with the powers of the Assembly restricted, Athenian democracy was more mature in the fourth century than it was in the fifth, while the distinction made between laws (nomoi) and decrees (psephismata) was a forerunner of a similar distinction made by the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution between the clauses of the Constitution and laws proposed by Congress which could not overrule them. The penetrating studies of the use of political language by Josiah Ober confirm that the fourth century saw a stability in the political system that was achieved without any sacrifice of the ideals of 461.
The nineteenth-century French writer Alexis de Tocqueville described Athenian democracy as ‘an aristocracy of masters. While there was always more leisure time in pre-industrial economies, particularly in the slack periods of the agricultural year, it can be argued that democracy would not have survived without slavery and an income from empire and, perhaps more important, from the trade that allowed citizens to be paid as jurymen, administrators, and legislators. The Athenians believed, or allowed themselves to be convinced by Pericles, that they were superior to the citizens of other cities (although there were many other democratic states in Greece whose constitutions have not survived). Here is Pericles speaking in the winter of 431/430 at the annual festival at which the Athenians commemorated their dead (the so-called Funeral Oration):
Remember that this city has the greatest name among all mankind because she has never yielded to adversity, but has spent more lives in war and has endured more severe hardships than any other city. She has held the greatest power known to men up to our time, and the memory of her power will be laid up forever for those who come after. Even if we now have to yield (since all things that grow also decay), the memory shall remain that of all the Greeks, we held sway over the greatest number of Hellenes; that we stood against our foes, both when they were united and when each was alone, in the greatest ways; and that we inhabited a city wealthier and greater than all. . . The splendour of the present is the glory of the future laid up as a memory for all time. Take possession of both, zealously choosing honour for the future and avoiding disgrace in the present. (Translation: Paul Rahe)
He goes on to praise the harmony of the city, the mutual tolerance of its citizens, and the respect shown for the laws and the concept of justice.
Pericles is here claiming high ideals for his city. In fact, he is doing nothing less than transferring the values and achievements once prized by individual aristocrats to the citizens of Athens collectively (remember the four-horse chariots on the Parthenon frieze!). Already, however, he is recording the first doubts that these ideals will continue to be realized and the plague itself, as recorded by Thucydides, portrays anything but a mutually supportive community. As Bernard Knox has shrewdly pointed out, these words suggest that Athens was, like a Sophoclean hero, ‘in love with the impossible’
It is certainly true that Athenian democracy demanded a consistent involvement that is rather forbidding to modern minds. ‘We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say he has no business here at all’ argues Pericles in the same Funeral Oration. The contrast with modern political thought is striking. Contemporary human rights centre on the right of the individual (every individual, not just those enjoying citizen status) to protection against the power of the state. This is a concept that the Athenians would have found difficult to grasp. They despised those who withdrew from public life. (The Greek word idiotes, from which the English ‘idiot’ is derived, meant one who put private pleasures before public duty and who was, for this reason, ignorant of everything that really mattered.) The Athenian citizen was not without protection. He could always argue his case before a jury, but ultimately a decision of a jury or the use of ostracism was final and there was no appeal to any higher principle than that of the will of the people. Socrates (for whose trial see later, p. 282) and the generals who survived Arginusae found this to their cost. It is easy to point to the shortcomings and contradictions of Athenian democracy. However, it remains unique as the world’s only example of a successfully functioning and sustained direct democracy. It lasted for nearly 140 years—a remarkable achievement in a period of history where instability was the norm.
World History
