In each form of government, emotions make up a dynamic system, one that we can call a ‘‘pathetic apparatus.’’ By ‘‘apparatus’’ I mean a pragmatic notion: in a society, there are normative values that bridge words and deeds, rules and practices, models and speech-acts, status and agency. All these values solidify into rights, habits, and bodies, as I mentioned, but can be met with either compliance or resistance. It is in this ramified and dynamic manner that power acts within a society. Each particular apparatus of rights, habits, and bodies creates the conditions for a particular set of emotions. The pathetic apparatus of tyranny, for instance, includes greed, envy, and arrogance on the one hand; terror and subservience on the other. The pathetic apparatus of democracy requires different feelings and character traits: a self-governing multitude is, above all, courageous, proud, competitive, and potentially envious. States remain stable or, on the contrary, collapse when their pathetic apparatus loses its balance: when they reach a breakage point, such as the last straw in tyrannical humiliation, or a popular rule that verges on unmanageable conflict. This is, at least, the vision of historical change shared by political theorists such as Herodotus and Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, but also by political agents such as democratic public speakers.
The most obvious characterization of a passionate rule is that of a tyrant. In his Persian dialogue on the forms of government, Herodotus has a relative of the Great King, Otanes, the son of Hystaspes, claim that monarchy is not pleasant, hedus, nor good, agathos (Hdt. 3.80-3). It is bad and it makes its subjects suffer. This occurs because of the hubris and the phthonos that inevitably affect any king. Offensiveness and envy are the reasons why a certain exercise of power - unlimited, exclusive, and unchecked - is unworthy: that level of supremacy can set the best of all men astray from what is proper; it corrupts his character, and fatally stokes those foul emotions. The flaws of monarchy, therefore, are the vices the monarch acquires once in that position, and these vices consist of strong feelings: his envious inability to bear the excellence of young men; his predatory sexual appetite that makes him rape women, thus dishonoring their families; his indiscriminate temper toward flatterers and friends alike; and his immeasurable arrogance. A tyrant is insolent, erratic, insatiable, and volatile. This is why, the Persian grandee claims, it would be best to place power in the hands of the many.
Does this mean that a democracy would be based on reasonable, dispassionate deliberation? A democracy, Otanes argues, would grant publicity, transparency, and responsibility. Magistrates would take turns in office and give account of their doing. Justice would be the same for all. There would be no place, as a consequence, for the intense concentration of wealth, means, and command that induces a king to want more. But what Otanes fails to mention is a form of excellence that lies at the core of any praise of the people empowered: military valor. In 521 bce, long before Cleis-thenes’ reforms in Attica, conventionally considered the birthday of democracy, a Persian grandee was its very first inventor. He missed, however, one crucial point: he failed to acknowledge that individual motivation for freedom which, together with equality before the law, makes the substance of a popular rule. For Herodotus himself, at least when he speaks on his own behalf, it is the process ofdemocratization that was responsible for Athens’ prosperity and warlike strength. One of the features of this government was its improbable success in the noblest of all virtues, which is also an emotional performance: fearlessness on the battlefield.
Two years after Salamis, 50 years before Herodotus’ Histories, Aeschylus’ Persians set the stage for Athens’s self-representation. Redistributed and shared in an egalitarian plural, power political and military would prove far superior to an authoritarian administration and a hyperhierarchical chain ofcommand. The emotional resource of manliness and fearlessness was the secret of the unexpected victory at Salamis, as the character of Xerxes himself is obliged to explain back in Susa, to his devastated courtiers. ‘‘The people from Ionia do not flee from the spear,’’ claims the Chorus. And Xerxes: ‘‘They are manly! I have seen a disaster I never expected’’ (Aesch. Pers. 1025-6). As his mother, Atossa, has to learn with great surprise, the Athenians could be called neither the slaves, nor the subjects, of any human being (Aesch. Pers. 242).
After the Persian Wars, we shall see in a moment, political rhetoric would never cease to reiterate that signature fantasy, especially in the template of funeral panegyrics.
Democratic warriors, be they hoplites or marines or even sailors, were no less intrepid than Heracles, Achilles, or Ajax, the Homeric icon whom Cleisthenes himself chose as an eponymous hero for one of his new tribes.
World History
