AH1 Option 1 Democracy

1 JACT Teachers’ Notes AH 1.1 Athenian Democracy in the Fifth Century BC 1.1 Books and Resources Useful books: relevant and stimulating material is found in the books listed in the Specification, and we particularly urge looking at R.K. Sinclair's Democracy and Participation at Athens, Josiah Ober's Mass and Elite in Classical Athens, and Cynthia Farrar's The Origins of Democratic Thinking. There have also been a number of helpful articles in Omnibus, particularly issues 14, 15, 17, 19, 23, 26, 28, 33, 35, 49, 51, 53, 55. Teachers will find Christopher Carey's Democracy in Classical Athens (BCP) extremely helpful. Highly useful and concise is John Thorley’s Athenian Democracy (in the Routledge Lancaster Pamphlet series). Eric Robinson’s Athenian Democracy: A Reader is a very useful collection of ancient sources and modern essays on aspects of the subject, but the key sourcebook is Roberts’ Athenian Radical Democracy LACTOR (hereafter ARD). Rhodes’ Athenian Democracy (Edinburgh University Press) contains useful articles on a number of aspects of the subject. Much of the modern scholarship on ancient Athenian democracy is concentrated on its workings in the fourth century BC: this is a reflection of the fact that a very considerable amount of epigraphical and oratorical evidence survives from that era. It is possible that many fourth-century practices were common to the fifth century, though there are important differences between fifth- and fourth-century democracy. The web: http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/home is a hugely useful resource for studying Athenian democracy, with essays, glossaries by top scholars Athenian agora website (excellent for the material discoveries pertaining to Athenian democracy from the Athenian agora): http://www.agathe.gr/ 1.2 Sources In contrast to the modern world, which has produced a huge and varied corpus of democratic theory, no ancient Greek political thinker composed a fully-articulated statement or justification of democratic values. It may be the case that, in Athens, the everyday reality of such a system, combined with the prevailing orality of democratic practice, would have made the prospect of such a treatise appear mundane or self- defeating. But ancient Greek literature contains many passing references to debates about democracy and democratic values, indicating that there was indeed discussion and contention about the ideals, merits and problems of democracy in fifth-century Greece. Discussions include an extraordinary section of Herodotus’ Histories (Hdt. 3.80-83), Pericles’ funeral speech for the war-dead at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 2.36-46), and Euripides’ Suppliant Women (esp. 404-41). The Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides (in the fifth century) and Xenophon (in the fourth century) therefore give us occasional insights into the workings and ideologies of democracy. Note in particular Hdt. 3.80-3 (the probably fictional constitutional debate), 5.66-9 (the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes); Thuc. 2.35-46 (the funeral speech of Pericles—a eulogy of the democratic system), 2.65 (the ‘obituary’ of Pericles), 4.26-30 (Cleon’s style of leadership; other important passages on democratic leadership include 3.36-50 (the Mytilene debate) and 6.8-32 (the debate about the expedition to Syracuse)). Xenophon gives us an exciting account of the 2 JACT Teachers’ Notes debate about how to punish the generals after the battle of Arginusai (History of Greece, 1.7). We are heavily reliant on fourth-century sources for understandings of the working of Athenian democracy: the corpus of Attic oratory and the second half of [Aristotle]’s Athenaion Politeia (the Constitution of the Athenians) (translated by P. Rhodes in a Penguin edition and also by J. Moore in Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy) of the 320s BC are sources which allow a detailed reconstruction of fourth- century practices. Another text also entitled Athenaion Politeia (the Athenian Constitution) is the one attributed to Xenophon in antiquity, but which today, generally thought not to be the work of that author, is given the title The Old Oligarch (in the notes referred to as OO). This work sets itself out as the work of an author dissatisfied with the position of the wealthy elite in the Athenian democracy, but at the same time suggests that there is a connection between democracy and Athens’ sea-based empire. This pamphlet is generally thought to have been written in the late fifth century, though Hornblower (in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, third edition) suggests that it may be the work of a fourth-century writer. This text is translated by J. Moore in Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy and now in a LACTOR by Robin Osborne. Another contemporary source is Plato’s account of the trial of Socrates, the Apology: this gives us at least Plato’s view of the opposition that an oddball like Socrates might have faced in Athenian democratic society. Aristophanes’ comedies of the late fifth and early fourth century BC are also very useful to anyone who wants to see how democratic politics was represented through a comic lens. His comedies were performed in front of audiences of Athenian citizens as part the festivities of festivals such as the Lenaia or Dionysia. The fact that they were entered into a competition meant that they are often designed to appeal to popular views (though sometimes the playwright may have challenged the views of the audience). A valuable book, C. Pelling’s Literary Texts and the Greek Historian investigates the ways in which ancient texts manipulate history in order to suit their own purposes and suggests that ancient texts tell us vital things about the way in which the Athenians constructed their own state but also offer insight into both the author’s and the ancient audience’s assumptions. J. Roberts, Athenian Radical Democracy 461- 404 BC LACTOR 5 is an excellent collection of the sources. Finally, a source of the late first/early second century AD deserves mention. Plutarch’s biographies of Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades and other Athenians are also useful for the history of institutions and the narrative of the history of democracy, but Pericles has a tendency to make Athenian politics resemble Roman politics particularly in terms of political groupings (as Sara Forsdyke has argued on Plutarch Nicias 11: see her Exile, Ostracism and Democracy, pp. 170-4). The most detailed ancient account of the development of Athenian democracy is to be found in [Aristotle]’s Athenaion Politeia (the Constitution of the Athenians). 1.3 Background information In order to set the scene, it may be useful to provide a background chronology of the history of the Athenian democracy 3 JACT Teachers’ Notes Before the Fifth century The traditional account of the history of Athenian democracy is the one told by [Aristotle]’s Constitution of the Athenians. It has a tendency to emphasise the role of individuals in the development of political institutions, and no modern history has been able to change this emphasis. At least three big names from earlier in the sixth century are associated with the emergence of Athenian democracy: Solon the law-giver, Pisistratus the ‘tyrant’ and his son and successor, Hippias. In 594, when Athens was in political turmoil, Solon was appointed chief magistrate or Archon and, exceptionally, mediator. Despite the survival of some of his autobiographical poetry, it is hard to be sure just what socio-political problems he was called upon to solve, but something is known of his solutions (ARD 44 and 203). Solon ended the enslavement of Athenian peasants for debt, and in so doing he contributed towards an idea of humanity which divides the world between free men (in the Athenian context, citizens) and slaves. He moved Athens from aristocracy, under which the highest public offices were reserved for the sons of the ‘best’ families, to timocracy, under which the criterion of eligibility for a given office was a man’s agricultural production (grain, olive oil, wine). On that basis he defined four orders: Pentakosiomedimnoi, Hippeis, Zeugitai, Thetes. The chief officials were drawn from the top two orders; Zeugitai could hold minor offices; Thetes, who owned little or no land, could hold no office but, very significantly, could attend the Assembly (ekklesia). The set of laws which Draco had laid down in the late seventh century was revised and extended by Solon. He introduced public lawsuits (graphai), whereby any citizen, and not just a victim, could prosecute. Finally, he allowed appeals from the verdicts of magistrates to the (H)eliaea, which may have been the Assembly meeting in a judicial capacity. Both these last two measures had far-reaching consequences for democracy. In the event Solon failed to save constitutional government, and in the middle of the sixth century Pisistratus, after a period of competition for political power between factions based on family and locality, managed to secure his position as unconstitutional monarch or ‘tyrant’. After a successful reign of nearly 20 years, he died in 527. His elder son Hippias ruled in the style of his father until 514 when his brother, Hipparchus, was assassinated. Thereafter his rule became harsher. In 510 he was driven out of Athens by the intervention of the Spartan king, Cleomenes. What followed was two years of aristocratic feuding between Cleisthenes of the Alcmeonid family, who had been Archon in 525/4, and Isagoras. (Aristocracy had worked smoothly when the heads of the great houses were able to agree on who should hold the major offices.) Because Cleisthenes was getting the worst of it and Isagoras had been elected Archon for 508/7, he ‘took the people into his following’.

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