Rethinking Athenian Democracy By Stuart Dawson Ph.D. Rethinking Athenian Democracy Published by Stuart Dawson Ph.D., Melbourne, Australia 2006 Dr Dawson is currently a Research Associate in the School of Historical Studies, Monash University. The original Ph.D. thesis version of this publication was written within the Department of Politics, with considerable unofficial attendance in Classical Studies around the corner. The aim of this book is to attract wide attention to the full argument that lies behind several papers published in leading journals, which have so far been read only in isolation: Published Refereed Articles ‘Food in Everyday Classical Greece’, Classicum 30.2 (2004) 15-22. ‘George Grote and the ancient Greeks’, Polis 17 (2000) 187-198. ‘The Athenian Wappenmünzen’, Scholia 8 (1999): 73-80. ‘The Theatrical Audience in Fifth-Century Athens: Status and Numbers’, Prudentia 29 (1997) 1-14. ‘The Egesta Decree IG I3 11’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 112 (1996) 248-252. 'Rousseau and Athens in the Democratic Imagination’, Political Theory Newsletter 7.2 (1995) 1-6. Non-Refereed Contributions to Refereed Journals ‘The Earliest English Usage of the Word "Democrat"’, Political Theory Newsletter 8.2 (1997) 36-38. Review of J.T. Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), Thesis Eleven 44 (1996) 122-126. Refereed Conference Paper ‘Reinterpreting Athenian Democracy: Some Implications for Contemporary Debate’, Proceedings of the 1999 Conference of the Australasian Political Studies Association, Canberra (2000) Vol. I: 159-164. Non-Refereed Papers 'Solon in translation: Parallel references to West and Linforth', Scriptorium 2.1 (1997) 38-39. ‘Teaching values and modelling virtues: Some reflections on Plato’s Laches’, Centre for Applied and Professional Ethics Conference website publication, Central Missouri State University (2000). 'Mechanics' Institutes and Colonial Equality’, Mechanics’ Institutes: The Way Forward (Proceedings of the Inaugural State Conference of Mechanics' Institutes of Victoria, 1998), Melbourne: Local Government Division, Department of Infrastructure (2000): 13-16. This book is a revised version of Dr. Dawson's Ph.D. thesis with minor corrections and updates. The quality of the work can best be illustrated by the fact that the article published in ZPE on the dating of the Egesta Decree - a crucial document for the growth of the 5th century BC Athenian naval empire - was lifted straight from the thesis with the addition of only an opening and a concluding paragraph, plus the inclusion of a photograph. ZPE is the world's most highly regarded journal of ancient epigraphical studies. ii CONTENTS Preface iv Introduction 1 Part I - Athens Chapter 1. The Political Structure of Archaic Attica 11 2. The Cleisthenic state 56 3. Democracy and Empire 96 4. The Periclean Demokratia 139 5. A Reappraisal of Athenian Politics 185 Part II – England 6. The Rise of English Hellenism 227 7. Hellenism and Political Reform 272 8. The Political Legacy of Victorian Athens 351 Conclusion 346 Bibliography 351 iii PREFACE This book is centrally an attempt to re-examine and also to challenge much conventional wisdom about the status of Athens in the Western ‘democratic tradition’. The problems it addresses arose from my concern at the participatory emphasis of much contemporary democratic theory. It seemed a common view that increased citizen participation at all levels would somehow make modern Western democracies ‘better’. Central to this view in political thought are beliefs about the nature of democracy heavily indebted to the imaginings of Rousseau and the cultural legacy of Periclean Athens. It seemed, however, that the importance of Rousseau was overstated and that the image of Athens was understated, both as constitutive influences on the formation of modern democratic thought and in respect of the participatory emphasis of contemporary democratic sentiment within British and Australian democratic traditions. Work on the historical reality of Athenian dêmokratia and its shifting modern interpretations led to the construction of a complex hypothesis which stands to contribute both to political theory and to the better understanding of some of its classical referents. This book reappraises the political structure of classical Athens from a viewpoint that does not presuppose a successful Periclean democracy, and contends that there are new reasons to doubt many of the claims for its excellence as a model of democratic politics. It advances an unorthodox reconstruction of Athenian political history which argues that Athenian government in the Periclean era was controlled by its council and not, as generally held, by regular assemblies of citizens. It contends that the orthodox view rests principally on the wrongful use of fourth-century evidence. It argues that an unhistorical vindication of Athenian, and especially of Periclean, democracy was developed by English Radical and liberalist writers in and after the early nineteenth century. The rehabilitation of Athenian democracy was cemented by George Grote’s phenomenally influential mid-Victorian History of Greece. At the same time, reasonable scholarly argument against the Radical reconstruction of Athenian politics was discounted under the weight of a widespread sympathy with liberalist sentiments. Grote’s portrayal of Athens, it is contended, acted as a legitimising factor in the implementation of democratic political reform in Victorian England. And - despite the advances of classical scholarship - an erroneous view of Athens, rooted in a perspective originally articulated by Grote, continues to influence both classical studies and contemporary democratic discourse. The nature of the argument requires extensive reference to historical sources and commentary. For the reader’s convenience, I have given references to classical sources bracketed within the text but – to avoid congestion – scholarly citations are footnoted to the bottom of each page. This procedure will both leave the text uncluttered and permit the sources of information to be readily followed. Unless otherwise specified, all three-figure dates are B.C., and four-figure dates are A.D.. Roman numerals have been dispensed with in classical citations; thus, Hdt. 8.48 would be given, not Hdt. VIII.48. Classical authors are abbreviated as per the Oxford Classical Dictionary except that the Aristotelian Athênaiôn Politeia is abbreviated to A.P. Section references to Plutarch’s Lives refer to the Loeb edition, which varies from the Teubner text. I follow the convention in which ancient writers are spoken of in the present tense (‘Thucydides says’) and modern commentators in the past tense. iv As the bulk of classical commentary uses Latinised spellings of Greek names and places I have followed tis practice in most instances, but in the case of less familiar names and for all technical terms I use transliterated spelling. In any material cited from the work of others, variations from my own practice my occur. Some few terms (e.g. polis, demos, boule, archon) have become so common in discussion that thy have entered the English political vocabulary. In this book the terms ‘boule’ and ‘Council’ always refer to the Clesithenic Council of 500; the Areopagus is always designated as such. Inscriptional material is presented in the format used by the volumes of the series Translated Documents of Greece and Rome edited by E. Badian and R.K Sherk. The title Rethinking Athenian Democracy was first used by me in a book proposal of July 1999, which I still have on file. It thus predates a short article of the same title by Morris Kaplan (published in Political Theory 30 [2000] 449-452), but I am confident that no confusion will result from our sharing this phrasing. What now? I challenge you to put aside your received views of Athenian democracy. Read right through this book at least twice. Even an expert will need two readings to come to terms with and understand the basis of the unconventional perspective advanced here. Less than two readings and you’ll be nitpicking and saying “that can’t be right” before you’ve given yourself a chance to reconstruct your perspective along the lines advocated here. Remember: it’s taken dozens of readings of many texts to deconstruct the orthodoxy, and then to construct a new and different view of Athenian democracy. Once you’ve read it, head back into the ancient texts. The whole point of this work is to make them more accessible to moderns by stripping away layers of creative political mythology that have encrusted the ancient philosophers and historians; to give them a new lease of life through a better understanding of their context. See if the new perspective advanced here clicks for you as it did for me! Acknowledgements As stated in the pre-purchase information, this book is a revised copy of my Ph.D. thesis, Athens and England: The Discourse of Democracy (Monash University, 1996) with minor corrections and updates. My reason for re-releasing and promoting it in this form is that advances in classical and political scholarship have altered little in their general perspective and approach to the key questions addressed here. Yet the significantly different perspective I propose continues to make sense when I pick up and read not just the ancient philosophers – though that was one of the key motivations for undertaking this work, to make their words more comprehensible through a better understanding of the social conditions that produced them – but also much other work on classical life, theatre and social dynamics. I find I can read new work on a wide range of classical topics and learn much from them, while readily discarding what I recognise as wrong-headed conclusions or hypotheses based on what in this work I have called the ‘orthodox’ view of Athens (which, however, is v very much broader than the use of that term might suggest). I find that the perspective advanced here continues to greatly enrich and powerfully enhance my understanding of the ancient world, and hope that it may enrich others’ lives in turn.