Review Article a Note on Paulin Ismard's Democracy's Slaves: A

Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek AND ROMAN Political Thought 36 (2019) 337-345 brill.com/agpt Review Article ∵ A Note on Paulin Ismard’s Democracy’s Slaves: a Political History of Ancient Greece Mogens Herman Hansen Associate Professor Emeritus, University of Copenhagen, The Saxo Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark [email protected] Ismard, Paulin, (2017), Democracy’s Slaves: A Political History of Ancient Greece. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. x + 188 pp. $35.00. ISBN 9780674660076. Originally published as Démocratie contre les experts: Les esclaves publics en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015). The topic of Ismard’s book is the crucial importance of publicly owned slaves in the Greek poleis in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, and in particular in democratic Athens. But his study includes a considerable and valuable amount of comparative material about public slaves in other civilizations: in Rome, in African and Asian kingdoms as well as slavery in the colonial period in the Americas, Africa and Asia. In this note I focus on his treatment of the public slaves in democratic Athens, called demosioi, and sometimes hyperetai. Analysing the working of Athenian democracy in the classical period we notice a basic distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘administration’, which corresponds to a dichotomy between decision-making and administrative institutions. The decision-making institutions were the demos, the boule, the dikasteria and, in the 4th century, the nomothetai. The administrative were © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/20512996-12340213 338 Hansen some seven hundred archai,1 mostly working together in boards of ten and the boule, which was technically an arche viz. a magistracy with five hundred members.2 But, as said above, the boule was also a decision-making institution. A decree (psephisma) had to be debated in the boule before it was brought before the demos; and in about half of all cases the demos’ decision was a ratification of what the boule had decided.3 Also in some matters the boule could pass psephismata that did not have to be debated and voted on in the Assembly.4 So the dichotomy between politics and administration was not per- fect and it was the boule that belonged in both categories. Ismard accepts the basic distinction between politics and administration (38); but when he applies it to the ancient Greek polis and in particular to the Athenian institutions, he establishes a dichotomy which no previous classical scholar has thought of: instead of distinguishing between demos, boule, dikasteria and nomothetai as decision-making institutions versus boards of archai, and the boule in its administrative capacity he establishes an opposi- tion between political institutions manned with citizens and administrative institutions dominated by public slaves (demosioi), which corresponds to the distinction he draws between amateur citizens and professional slaves: ‘At the Assembly, at the Council, before the city’s courts, even at the gymna- sium, the presence of public slaves was indispensable for the operation of the city’s institutions’ (37). ‘The demosioi were not magistrates, and their activities were considered divorced from the field of the political’ (52). According to this classification all the archai are grouped together with the demos, the boule and the dikasteria and opposed to the demosioi. How many demosioi were there altogether? ‘In classical Athens between one thousand and two thousand public slaves worked in the service of a com- munity of thirty thousand to forty thousand citizens’ (2, 49). These demosioi performed very different tasks: Some were skilled artisans or labourers performing unskilled manual labour (46-47, 87). Here Ismard emphasises the fourth-century inscriptions relating to the sanctuary at Eleusis.5 Others constituted the only police force the Athenians had. They num- bered 300 in the first half of the fifth century but in the second half there were 1 M.H. Hansen, ‘Seven Hundred Archai in Classical Athens’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 21 (1980), pp. 151-73. 2 M.H. Hansen, ‘Initiative and Decision: the Separation of Powers in Fourth-Century Athens’, GRBS, 22 (1981), pp. 347-51. 3 P.J. Rhodes, The Athenian Boule (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 78-82. 4 Rhodes (n. 3), pp. 82-7. 5 K. Clinton, Eleusis The Inscriptions on Stone (Athens: The Archaeological Society at Athens), 159.58. Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek AND ROMAN Political Thought 36 (2019) 337-345.

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