The development of democracy in Greece brought with it a rise in the number of people who became actively involved in the political life of their cities. In Athens (from where almost all of our literary evidence is derived), the legislation of Ephialtes in 462 created a direct democracy, meaning that the people were sovereign in the state.1 The main decision-making body in the Athenian democracy was the Assembly, at which citizens (i. e., men over the age of eighteen who held the franchise) would meet to debate all matters of domestic and foreign policy.2 It was, according to Aristotle, the supreme democratic body (Politics 1299a1). Although there were public officials who performed various important administrative and military duties,3 the people in the Assembly - often numbering in their thousands4 - voted on proposals put before it, and so made policy. As a result, democracy also brought with it a corresponding rise in the number of public speakers who addressed their fellows at Assembly meetings, and these men soon achieved political ascendancy. Of course, public speaking existed before the rise of democracy, and it can be found in works as early as the Homeric poems.5 However, it was very much the preserve of the aristocrats, and the ordinary folk, even well-to-do ones, knew their place in society. The rise of democracy would change all that.
All of this had taken time. Solon had fundamentally begun the democratic process in 594/3 when he ended the aristocratic monopoly of power by making wealth and not birth the prerequisite for political office (cf. AP 7-8). Before Solon, the archons and the Areopagus Council (composed of ex-archons), drawn from only the wealthiest families, had ruled as a matter of course, and the non-aristocrats had little to no political (or judicial) rights. Solon divided the people into four groups based on wealth, ofwhich only the top two could stand for the archonship. Over several generations ordinary people gradually acquired the necessary wealth to stand for office and more legislation (that of Cleisthenes in 508 being the most influential) furthered the democratic process.
However, the Persian Wars of 480-478 brought with them a return to the status quo as the Areopagus appears to have regained much of its earlier political influence in the state (cf. AP 25). Aristocratic families continued to use their family ties and friendships to gain influence, and thus continued to dominate politics. They were concerned more with promoting the expansion of Athenian power in the Greek world, and hence the well-being of the city, rather than with the prosperity of the mass of people. For example, in the late 490s and 480s Themistocles had used the reputation he gained from being a general as a stepping stone into political life. He persuaded the Athenians to build a substantial fleet, and engineered the Greek victory over the Persians at the Battle of Salamis in 480 during the Persian Wars. Athens’ role in the eventual defeat of the Persians enabled it to create the Delian League (in 478), which soon grew into an empire (lasting until 404) based on its fleet. Themistocles was ostracised in 472, and Cimon, the son of Miltiades (who defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon), rose to prominence. For much of the 460s, he worked to increase the size of the Delian League and to promote closer ties with Sparta. However, his opposition to the reforms of Ephialtes in 462 led to his ostracism the next year.
The imperialistic policy of these political leaders did indeed expand Athens’ power greatly but - and this was not their intention - it also increased the power of the poor. The Delian League was a naval empire, but ships without rowers were useless, and at this time the rowers were predominantly thetes, from the poorest stratum (Solon’s fourth group) in society. These people wanted greater political power, and the fact that Athens’ fleet and by extension its empire were ultimately reliant on them gave them a voice. We can see this in the production of Aeschylus’ Persians in 472, which celebrated the Greek victory over the Persians at the Battle of Salamis. This battle was a naval one and hence the play champions the thetic element in Athenian society. However, the one thing hindering the people’s ability to take part properly in the democratic process was the re-emergence of the power of the aristocratic Areopagus, which was seen as something of a bastion of oligarchic power. That changed in 462 with Ephialtes, whose radical democracy remained in force (apart from two brief oligarchic interludes in 411 and 404/3) until the Macedonians abolished it in 322.
Exactly what Ephialtes did is unknown, but the core of his legislation dealt with the Areopagus (AP 25). He conducted a purge of it in order to rid it of corrupt members, and removed its political power, including its jurisdiction over public officials, which he transferred to the Assembly, Boule (which numbered 500 and originally drew up the Assembly’s agenda and had an advisory role) and law courts. This resulted in a significant increase in the workings of these bodies, and by extension of people from all strata of society in the democracy. While the Assembly continued to meet roughly four times a month, the Boule and courts met far more regularly, and by the fourth century the Boule was of paramount importance in the democracy.6 It supervised a number of ‘boards’ or sub-committees charged with the daily running of the state, from administering festivals, building programmes and the dockyards to supervising the poletae who placed state contracts of all kinds, and all financial matters. Political debates did take place in the Boule of course, but we know next to nothing about them. They also took place in the courts, in which rhltores were active in the political eisangelia and graphic paranomon suits.7 However, it is the Assembly, in which the mass of citizens met and the rhetores reigned supreme, that is the focus of my chapter.
Ephialtes died in 461, leaving Pericles as the city’s foremost politician. He had already earned renown as a general, and from now until 429, when he died from the plague that had afflicted the city for a year, he dominated political life. Thus, like the majority of his predecessors, he was a general who went on to exploit his military reputation for political ends. Unlike his predecessors, he was the first to address the people directly in the Assembly, and so started a trend that his successors, the more ‘notorious’ demagogues, would follow (see below). Pericles advanced Athens as a cultural and intellectual centre but he also led the city into a series of military disasters, of which (in my opinion) the Peloponnesian War (431-404) was the greatest. In 432/1 he persuaded the people to reject a Spartan ultimatum that meant war between the two states. His power was so great that, says Thucydides, ‘Athens, though in name a democracy, gradually became in fact a government ruled by its foremost citizen’ (2.65.9).8
The statement is a startling reflection on Athenian democracy: in a state in which the people were supposedly sovereign, real power, it appeared, lay in the hands of a small number of individuals. How did they come to exercise that power, why did they seek it, how well did they exercise it, how important was rhetoric in it, and were the people really so beguiled by the rhetoric of the speakers?
World History
