Ancient democratic theory, in its various voices, had to respond to the challenge of the plural. In the aristocratic tradition, the many were the obverse of the one, their multiplicity being profoundly associated with vulgarity, lack of education, and therefore the unreasonable. Think of Pindar, Theognis, Parmenides, Plato or the Old Oligarch. But the actual government of the many requires a cognitive reassessment of the multitude. A minimal wisdom of crowds must be admitted if we are to appreciate the ability of the people to govern themselves. Furthermore, a minimal morality has to be attributed to the masses if we are to acknowledge their political fitness. The zero degree of excellence is patriotism, with its corollary virtues that are nothing but good emotions, such as emulation, zelos, anger, orge, and eros for the city.
Funeral Orations, again, offer a template of democratic manliness in its emotional nuances. To take the most paradigmatic sample of that form of rhetoric: in Pericles’ speech in honor of the dead during the first year of the Peloponnesian War (431 bce), as reconstructed by Thucydides, we can follow the speaker’s words at work on the emotions of the audience. While extolling the dead on the battlefield, Pericles becomes aware that praise might be triggering envy in the listeners. He then instructs them to convert that potential phthonos, a base emotion, into a cognate, and yet noble feeling: emulation, zelos. Phthonos, Aristotle will argue, is our displeasure at another person’s prosperity, when that person is like us, thus we feel deprived of something we should possess, not them. It is a negative, passive, and destructive emotion, focused on what others have, but, in our opinion, should cease having. Zelos, on the contrary, is our desire to get for ourselves something another person already has: in this case we act, strive, and compete in order to acquire that same thing. In the situation created by an encomium, phthonos would be for the audience to feel bitter at the hyperbolic celebration of the dead soldiers; zeelos would mean, for the same spectators, to grow excited by those men’s example, and to wish to rise to the challenge.1 The next generation, Pericles argues, should endeavor to become even more outstanding than those heroes. The Athenians should love their city, even become enamored ofAthens, with an unbound eras (Thuc. 2.43.1).
Aristotle will call paraskeuazein a strategy of preparation, modification, or orchestration of the emotions of the audience, in order for the speaker to make them feel and think what he wishes. This skill is as important as the choice of topics and the montage of enthymemes, as demonstrated by the second book of the Rhetoric, with its know-how to excite, appease, or transform the emotions. Now, this strategy appears to be deliberately executed in the existing speeches of Athenian orators. Pericles was a perfect example for Aristotle (who actually mentions the Funeral Oration). L ysias would be too.
A rhetoric of just wars, intended to protect and spread freedom, flourishes after the stasis that culminates with the coup of the Thirty and ends with the victory of the demos, in 403 bce, a success that the People handled with remarkable elegance, as Aristotle observes, by making the decision to reconcile the population and ‘‘not to remember the evil,’’ me mnesikakein. The ordinary citizens fighting at the Piraeus were the true heroes, rising against the tyrants and their friends. Lysias commends them as the worthy men, the andres agathoi ready to take risk (kindunos), acquire fame (doxa), and accomplish worthy deeds, agatha.'2 They face the culprits of terrible things: the slanderers, the greedy, the unjust few who put innocent people to death without trial, confiscated the property of resident aliens only to raise funds, and fundamentally betrayed the city, making it smaller and weaker. These commoners were both excellent and the victims of injustice (Lys. 12.57). Their excellence took shape as a string of emotions, from shame to fearless audacity, but culminates with anger, the most active passion of all, that which drives us to take up arms:
Compelled by no law, but induced by their nature; imitating in fresh encounters the ancient valor of their ancestors; ready to purchase with their own lives a common share in the city for the rest; choosing death with freedom rather than life with slavery; no less ashamed of their disasters than angered against the enemy; preferring to die in their own land rather than live to dwell in that of others; and having as allies their oaths and covenants, and as enemies their open foes of aforetime and their own fellow citizens. Nevertheless, having felt no fear of the multitude of their opponents, and having exposed their own persons to the peril, they set up a trophy over their enemies, and now find witnesses to their valor. (Lys. 2.61-65, trans. Lamb 1930)
Lysias’ speeches addressed, after 403 bce, to the Athenians, as the victorious party, now in control of the city, offer a perfect example of the rhetorical manipulation of orge, in the context of the democratic heroization of the people. The worthy men who resisted at the Piraeus were no less ashamed at what had happened to them than furious (orgizomenoi) against their enemies (Lys. 2.62). These men, Lysias argued, were still in a position to get angry. And anger is the emotion they were supposed to feel and they ought to feel. Along with other feelings and beliefs - such as revulsion for slavery, love of freedom, sacrifice of their lives for the sake of the common good, and fearless courage in taking risks - the rage, orgee, of the men at the Piraeus was an expression of their nature, their phusis (Lys. 2.61), in other words of their natural excellence. This innate nobility was the cause of their uprising, in anger, against the humiliations inflicted on the city by the oligarchs. And orgee is the passion Lysias insisted in awakening and keeping alive, by recalling those events, in a number of speeches delivered in the years immediately afterwards. Lysias will keep remembering and reminding his audience of the events of 403, by stoking the most aristocratic of all passions.
Consider the following passages:
I fully understand you, gentlemen of the jury, when hearing such statements and remembering the events, you get angry [orgizesthai] in the same way against all those who remained in the city. (Lys. 25.1)
I consider, gentlemen, that you would not be justified in hating those who have suffered nothing under the oligarchy, when you can indulge your wrath [orgizesthai] against those who have done your people mischief. (Lys. 25.18)
You feel anger [orgizesthe] against everyone who entered your houses in search either of yourselves or of some member of your household. (Lys. 12.30, trans. Lamb 1930)
‘‘One absolutely must get angry [sphodra chre orgizesthai]' Lysias claims, when a man such as Pheidon, trusted to reconcile the city, ends up betraying it (Lys. 12.58). Sometimes one has to get angry, dei orgizesthai, as Aristotle would also later acknowledge.
Now, the excellence of these men is presented to the audience as the remake of the arete of the men at Marathon. They all defy danger, take daunting risks and, in so doing, become worthy men.3 They all excite the competitive and admiring emulation - the zelos - of mankind.4 The same democratic drive was there at the outset. In the most remote past, the Athenians ‘‘were the first and the only people to drive out the dunasteias of their states and to establish a democracy, believing the liberty of all to be the strongest bond of agreement” (Lys. 2.18).5
The Athenians began their democratic life with a revolution. That foundational war - a stasis - was the condition of possibility for the establishment of the power of the people, a hard-won success. And that was the very first expression of their intolerance of slavery, and their wish to give freedom a political reality, in a collective act of angry valor.
Whereas democratic rhetoric praises the demos and its arete, poets and political theorists, I mentioned, resist recognizing the intelligence and the virtues of the many. Aristotle was the first to argue that a group has more chances of reasoning well than one of its members. He claimed, firstly, that the wisdom of numerous individuals amounts to a cumulative, higher insight; secondly, that a multitude is less prone to persuasion than one person (cf. esp. Pol. 3.11). All this isatafar cry from Herodotus’ comments, when he recounts how, under the pressure of Aristagoras of Miletus, the Athenian Assembly voted to invade Lydia: a thoughtless, and yet momentous, decision that set in motion the Persian Wars. It is easier to sway 30,000 people than one king, Herodotus added (5.97) - and it was not meant as a compliment. This is also at odds with Thucydides' repeated allusions to the haste and fickleness inherent in collective deliberation. And this inverts Plato’s philosophical characterization of democracy in Republic 8. Democracy, Socrates argues, is the reign of multiple opinions, casual political activity, contradictory decisions, changes of mind, and mere conflicts of interest. A demos is but a capricious, moody, and instable beast, to be coaxed with skillful words (Pl., Resp. 8.557a-562a). Demos personified, as Aristophanes shows in his Knights (424 bce), is an old man, exceedingly irascible, half-deaf, demented and gullible, now at the mercy of his cunning slave - a master of flattery (40-68).
Aristotle, the most insightful anthropologist of hellenic culture, was the first elitist philosopher to offer a coherent theory of common sense as the ground of collective deliberation. Consistently, he also offered a theory of emotions as reasons: reasons accompanied by intense feelings of pleasure or pain, reasons that are predictable, often hasty, stubborn and not necessarily good, but reasons that can be prepared, modified, and orchestrated through words and arguments. His cognitive reassessment of the passions is consistent with his serious treatment of rhetoric, an indispensable component of political life, especially in a democracy. Aristotle’s complex views on the role of pathos in human agency culminate in his notion of spiritedness, thumos, as the source of anger and courage, as the cause of collective valor. Manliness, Aristotle, thought, was the only form of excellence available to a great number of men: ‘‘Although it is possible for one man or a few to excel in virtue, when the number is larger it becomes difficult for them to possess perfect excellence in respect of every form of virtue, but they can best excel in military valor, for this is found with numbers’’ (Arist. Pol. 3.1279a-b, trans. Rackham 1944).
Although critical vis-a-vis demokratia, a regime too intent on liberty, Aristotle designed an ideal city-state that was a politeia, a ‘‘city of the citizens,’’ where a club of highly educated and completely virtuous citizens/soldiers would govern themselves, taking turns in office. This aristocratic democracy was for him the perfect polis, and such a thought would have been impossible without a novel response to the challenge of the plural.
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