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POLIS the Journal of the Society for Greek Political Thought POLIS The Journal of the Society for Greek Political Thought www.imprint-academic.com/polis REVIEW ARTICLE — HOW TO STUDY ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY1 P.J. Rhodes Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 212, $29.95, ISBN 0 91 01095 1. After making a modest beginning in military archaeology, with Fortress At- tica (1985), Josiah Ober turned his attention to Athenian democracy, and with Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989) and a series of articles and edited volumes since then he has achieved a high profile as a scholar who is concerned with the application of modern academic theory, the relationship of Athenian practice to ancient and modern political philosophy, and with the relevance of Athenian practice and philosophy to the modern U.S.A. In this volume an introductory chapter is followed by ten previously published pa- pers, some of them revised and each equipped with an introductory note setting out the context in which the paper was originally produced and some- times the sequel to its original production. The papers originally appeared in a variety of publications, not all of them primarily concerned with ancient Greece, and it is likely that many readers of this book will find, as I did, some that are new to them. In the introductory chapter Ober proclaims his interdisciplinary interests and his belief that the democracy of classical Athens was important because it was not (as Thucydides believed it was under the leadership of Pericles) a nominal democracy which was in fact dominated by one or more of the élite but was a true democracy in which power genuinely resided with the demos and — the theme of Mass and Elite — the demos was able to impose its ide- ology on those of the élite who played an active part in public life. Disclaiming both the positivism of scholars who claim that they themselves have no ideology but simply let the evidence show wie es eigentlich gewesen (‘how it actually was’) and the relativism of those who claim that objective truth is irrecoverable but we can all have our own reading of the evidence (only theirs is the best reading), he sets out to investigate how democratic Athens actually worked and, in particular, how both its supporters and its op- ponents thought about it and spoke and performed within it. 1 My thanks to Dr. L. G. Mitchell for reading a draft of this review and helping me to improve it. POLIS. Volume 15. Issues 1 and 2, 1998 REVIEW ARTICLE — ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 75 Ch. ii is a brief defence of the use of models and paradigms to interpret the phenomena of ancient history and to make sense of them for our own world. Ober suggests that a successful model is meaningful if, like a map compiled with a particular purpose in mind, it serves the purpose which it is intended to serve and takes account of the phenomena which are relevant to that purpose; but the paradigms (integrated sets of models) used to mediate a past society to our own tend to ossify and their ideological postulates to become hidden, so they must repeatedly be challenged and rethought. I shall discuss the is- sues raised in this chapter below. Ch. iii restates Ober’s basic beliefs about Athenian democracy, that it was a true democracy in which power lay with the people, that it was conscious of but successfully resisted attempts by members of the élite to dominate it, and that it was at the same time revolutionary, dynamic and stable. A model which he considers to have had a pernicious effect on the study of Athenian democracy is the ‘iron law’ propounded by R. Michels in 1915 and applied to The Roman Revolution by R. Syme in 1939, that ‘in all ages, whatever the form and name of government, . an oligarchy lurks behind the façade’ (The Roman Revolution, 7). He summarises the main features of Athens’ democ- racy to show that the formation of a governing class was prevented and that the ideology to which members of the élite had to conform to succeed in the assembly and the law-courts was a democratic ideology. He also insists that we should not be misled by élite writers of the period into thinking that the stable democracy and its culture in the fourth century represent a decline after the heady days of the fifth century. Ch. iv focuses on a particular episode in Athenian history, the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508/7 which have been widely celebrated 2,500 years later as marking the beginning of Athenian democracy. What is distinctive about Ober’s view of the episode is his emphasis on collective action by the demos: when Cleisthenes and his associates had been driven into exile, the council (which Ober believes to be the new council of five hundred) refused to be dissolved by the Spartan king Cleomenes, and when Cleomenes and Isagoras occupied the acropolis ‘the rest of the Athenians, who were of one mind, be- sieged them’ (Herodotus V. 72. ii). He regards this as spontaneous mass refusal to accept the régime which Cleomenes was trying to impose, and compares with it the refusal of the French National Assembly in June 1789 to accept its dissolution by Louis XVI. This is an interesting and new view of the episode; it is certainly compatible with what we read in our sources; but Cleisthenes could easily have come to overshadow men who took a leading role while he was in exile, and the fact that we are not told of a leader does not prove that there was no leader. An opponent could argue that Ober is finding what he wants to find here no less than Syme found what he wanted to find in Rome, and that spontaneous action by the Athenian demos so soon after the tyranny needs a stronger justification. .
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