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The Birth of the Mob: Representations of Crowds in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature by Justin Jon Schwab

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The Birth of the Mob: Representations of Crowds in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature by Justin Jon Schwab The Birth of the Mob: Representations of Crowds in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature By Justin Jon Schwab A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Leslie Kurke, Chair Professor Mark Griffith Professor Daniel F. Melia Fall 2011 Abstract The Birth of the Mob: Representations of Crowds in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature by Justin Jon Schwab Doctor of Philosophy in Classics University of California, Berkeley Professor Leslie Kurke, Chair This dissertation surveys the representation of crowds and related phenomena in Homer, the Attic tragedians, and Aristophanes. The first chapter begins by noting that while recent scholarship has explored the role of the crowd in ancient Roman history and literature, virtually no similar work has been done in archaic and classical Greek studies. Admittedly, Greek poleis were on a much smaller scale than was Rome, and it may be for this reason that classical scholars have assumed “the” crowd is not a feature of ancient Greek society. In order to explain why this absence of study is due to a limited understanding of what crowds are, I survey the development of crowd theory and mass psychology in the modern era. I adopt the model of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, which studies crowds as part of a spectrum of group behavior, ranging from small “packs” to imagined crowds at the level of a nation. Under this expanded model, I argue that crowds are universal human phenomena whose representations in archaic and classical Greek literature are fruitful objects of study. The chapter ends with a brief survey of “crowd words” to be examined, including homilos, ochlos, homados and thorubos. The second chapter studies crowds in Homer through a close reading of several words and passages. The two crucial words for this study are homilos and homados, which refer respectively to a crowd and the distinctive noise it makes. I survey the homilos in the Iliad as a background of anonymous figures against which elite figures display their excellence, before arguing that the suitors in the Odyssey are the closest Homer comes to representing a crowd. Individually elite, they nonetheless are reduced to the status of a mob by the fact of their aggregation. The third chapter examines the crowd in tragedy. I argue that the crowd looms as an offstage threat to the elite characters depicted onstage, most obviously in such plays as Sophocles’s Ajax and Euripides’s Andromache and Orestes, but to some extent in almost every surviving tragedy. In this chapter, the word ochlos (not yet present in Homer) is the key crowd-term, although homilos and other words are also present. The works of 1 Euripides are particularly rife with descriptions of crowds, and my survey illuminates just how central the topic was to his work, in a reflection of the troubled politics of his era. The fourth chapter examines the discourse on the crowd in Aristophanes. I demonstrate that the comedian’s work is highly concerned with crowds and other groupings of people. Athens during the Peloponnesian war was crowded, not only due to the siege but in mentality and dramatic representation. To many of Aristophanes’s characters, the improper aggregation of bodies is just one symptom of the general disintegration of society and decline of traditional morality. Where in tragedy the crowd must remain offstage, comedy can also bring crowds onto the stage, in such scenes as the opening of the Acharnians. I close with a Postscript presenting two quotes of Plato, from the Republic and the Laws, whose descriptions of crowd behavior and its effect on individuals take on new significance in light of the deep history of the representation of crowds which this dissertation explores. 2 CHAPTER ONE CROWD THEORY This dissertation surveys the representation of crowds in the two great epics of Homer, the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the comedian Aristophanes. It covers each of these authors in varying levels of detail, and has two major goals: to identify the vocabulary with which they describe crowds, and to infer from these descriptions certain underlying concepts of group behavior and collective psychology. As a preliminary question, I must address whether such a thing as a crowd was available as an object of representation during the period surveyed. This will require establishing a distinction between two senses of the word “crowd.” According to the modern, sociologically technical sense of the word, archaic Greece and classical Athens clearly did not have crowds. According to a broader sense of crowd, however, as any aggregation of people exhibiting behavior interpreted by those who observe or represent it as threatening and/or volatile, they clearly did. Such aggregations are universal human phenomena – indeed, they are found in many other species of animal. If the goal is to determine, not to what extent the ancient sources conform to our modern categories, but rather how these ancient sources represent crowd-like formations and behavior on their own terms, this broader definition is more useful. Once this distinction between the narrow and broad understanding of “crowd” has been established, we must consider two formulations of the problem of the crowd. According to one school of thought, which I call the “lowest common denominator” theory, crowds are dangerous because only a relatively few people are capable, or law- abiding, or restrained in their actions, or whatever the quality is that crowds are thought to lack. A large gathering of people, then, will tend to contain undesirable elements; as its size increases, these elements will come to dominate. The other theory is that of the “Group Mind.” On this model, crowds exhibit problematic behavior not because of the prior character of their component members, but because the very fact of aggregation “dumbs down” the members of the group subordinates them to a collective entity that operates as its own organism, or some combination of these two mechanisms. Both these theories of why crowds are dangerous things are present in the surveyed texts, implicitly and at times (especially in Euripides) explicitly. Especially in the fifth century texts, written and performed during a period of increased mass participation in politics and intermittent military mobilization, we find representations of groups and group behavior as crucial elements.1 After a history of the development of the modern theory of the crowd, with constant reference to its implications for the investigation of ancient texts, this introductory Chapter offers a list of Greek words that directly denote or are often found associated with descriptions of crowds. The stage will then be set for the examination of individual authors’ works in the subsequent Chapters. 1 The ultimate expression of this is in Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, for which see Chapter Three. 1 The major work to date in the field of classical studies on the subject of the crowd is Fergus Millar’s The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic. This dissertation positions itself, as it were, at the other end of the field: its subject Greece rather than Rome, its sources read as literature rather than history. Millar’s own description of his project will serve to highlight these contrasts. At the beginning of his first chapter, Millar announces: The first purpose of this book is to present a series of images of the Roman people: assembling in the Forum, listening to orations there, and responding to them; sometimes engaging in violence aimed at physical control of their traditional public space; and dividing into their thirty-five voting groups to vote on laws.2 A few pages earlier, in the preface, he defines his intent as “merely to try to feed into our attempts to understand Republican Rome a sense of the possible significance of a series of images of political meetings that are to be found in our literary sources.”3 Millar restricts his inquiry to images of the political crowd, and indeed his work makes a political argument: that the Roman Republic was more democratic a system of government than is usually appreciated.4 The role of mass assemblies in this system, he maintains, has been neglected; the work (originally a series of lectures) redresses this neglect. Arranged chronologically, it studies the political crowd from the post-Sullan restoration of popular elections in the 70s B.C. to the decline of popular politics in the 50s and beyond. Millar’s project is made possible by the (relatively) thorough documentation of the late Republican period: “[T]he political life of these three decades,” he notes, “is more fully recorded than that of any other period of the ancient world.”5 This dissertation takes as its subject one of those “other” periods. It must be stressed at the beginning that this is not an attempt, parallel to his, to assess the (actual, historical) role of the crowd in, e.g., classical Athens. Rather, the focus is on the representation of crowds in canonical archaic and classical Greek texts: specifically, Homer, the three tragedians, and Aristophanes. A trade-off is made: we lose the specificity and thoroughness of Millar’s study, but we access a broader range of sources, dig further into the roots of representation, and engage larger questions in political and social theory.6 Where Millar’s study is a “deep” plumbing of a more narrowly defined historical phenomenon, this dissertation is more in the way of a “broad” survey of a theme over 2 Millar 1998:1. 3 Id. ix. 4 “[I]t is difficult to see why the Roman Republic should not deserve serious consideration … as one of a relatively small group of historical examples of political systems that might deserve the label “democracy,”” p.
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