The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy: A Politico-Cultural Transformation and Its Interpretations ed. by Johann P. Arnason, Kurt A. Raaflaub, and Peter Wagner (review)

This book, part of a series of works edited by Arnason, Raaflaub, and Wagner and devoted to the comparative study of civilizational change, consists of sixteen essays in four sections, many of which initially saw life as contributions to the 2006 EUI-sponsored conference on “The Greek polis and the Invention of Democracy,” with additional chapters added later. The varied provenances create a certain unevenness in the work, but the book, while seldom offering anything truly novel, guarantees thought-provoking reading.

The first section, “The Greek Experience in Long-term Perspective,” offers the contributions of two of the work’s editors, Arnason and Wagner. Both scholars situate the more focused contributions of the subsequent three sections within a larger discussion of the history and theory of democracy in general. Arnason reminds us that the Greeks developed their poleis removed from the mainstream of Near Eastern powers, but still influenced by those powers; and that the polis system itself was hardly inevitable, as other systems developed alongside it. Nor can studies of the democratic polis merely focus on Athens; other poleis experienced their own democratic moments, even if they proved less stable over time and were far less well documented. Wagner argues that the temptation to see the development of modern Western democracies as a linear evolution from Athens fails, and that by the nineteenth century early modern theories of democracy routinely rejected the (relative) inclusiveness of Greek models.

In the second section, “Ways of Polis-Making: Grasping the Novelty of the Political,” the essays focus on the contribution that various forms of public discourse made to the developing democracy of Athens. Egon Flaig’s contribution on Greek tragedy is a bit of a disappointment; it contains a noteworthy outright error (the archon, not the basileus, awarded the choregoi for the festival of the City Dionysia (Ath. Pol. 56.3) and Flaig writes Clytemnestra where he clearly means Antigone (76, 86) Moreover, Flaig treats Antigone with very little nuance and in his discussion of the Oedipus the King he ignores completely the radical rereading and reevaluation of Frederick Ahl’s work on Oedipus. More successful are the contributions of Harvey Yunis and Adriaan Lanni on rhetoric and law, respectively. Lanni makes a persuasive case that the court system, far from being an embarrassment (a view overdetermined by the trial of Socrates), was instead an augment to, and even an inseparable element of, the Athenian democracy. Overall, the massive jury pool and the size of the juries for individual cases guarantee the openness that is the hallmark of Athenian democracy. Elizabeth Meyer’s contribution offers a sound examination of the use of inscriptions in Athens and connects the physical expansion of the area in which inscriptions are found to the expansion of secular aspects of the democracy.

The third and most successful section, “Changing a Way of Life: Democracy’s Impact on Polis Society,” offers some genuinely stimulating essays. Sara Forsdyke reminds us that, on the ground, the formal differences between citizen and noncitizen may not have been all that clear or well-enforced; Athens provided multiple venues for all classes of residents to interact. Claude Mosse’s contribution reiterates the role of the demos, contrasted with a political elite (the politeumenoi) in creating and maintaining the Athenian democracy: even men of comparatively small economic or social standing fought hard to retain their rights and prerogatives as citizens. Robin Osborne’s essay on religion and democracy adds more to the mosaic, as he rejects the conclusions of earlier scholars and affirms the central role that religion played in civic life and emphasizes the difficulty entailed in imagining the Athenian democracy without religion. Lawrence Tritle completes the picture in his essay on “Democracy...