Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City, 750–330 B.C. by Andrew Lintott (review)

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES REND US 353 ANDREW L1NTOTT. Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City, 750-330 B. C. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 289pp. Cloth, U.S. $25.00. ISBN 0-8018-2789-2. This is a valuable book, albeit inflated with a good deal of what teachers would cross out in red ink as " p lot summary". Divided into eight chapters and four brief appendices, it traces various forms of civil conflict in Greece from the archaic period through the Macedonian conquest. The manner of presentation is often tiresome, as it entails endless recitation of the events of Greek history: the format consists fundamentally of a narrative history, alongside which trots an accompanying interpretation. Lintott's rehearsal of the course of Greek history is illuminating when he is discussing the career of Aristodemus at Cumae, but it is irritating when he narrates the history of something as familiar as, say, the oligarchic revolution at Athens in 411, an account of which covers nine pages. Lintott introduces his examination of stasis and the Athenian empire by explaining that he must first "briefly recapitulate a well-known story" (98) . Many of the stories which Lintott recapitulates are, alas. well-known--and worse yet, they are rarely brief. There is no scholarly pie into which Lintott does not stick his inquiring finger, whether it be the origins of tyranny, the popularity of the Athenian empire, or the mutilation of the herms, and the result is sometimes a superficial treatment of events. Some of his comparative material, moreover, is unhelpful and intrusive. This book is about Greece (a fact which should have been clearly advertised in the title), and the occasional Roman analogues might better have been relegated to the footnotes rather than allowed to clutter the text with any pretence that the book treats the classical world at large, a prospect which its chosen time period precludes. For all its faults, however, the book has a great deal to offer. Lintott is at his best in the last two chapters, liThe Philosophers and Civil Conflict", in which he offers a thorough discussion of Aristotle's treatment of stasis in the Politics, and liThe Importance of Civil Strife 354 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS in the Classical Cityll, where he presents his conclusions. Here he offers a number of important observations about changes in the nature of civil strife during the time period under discussion. Noting that after 500 war among the poleis II was the greatest stimulus to fighting inside cities ll (261), he argues persuasively that another important change later on was the greater degree of popular participation in civil strife after 400. Where the demos was actively involved in fifth-century stasis, Lintott points out, it was generally because of the extremes of misery which developed during the Peloponnesian War. What is most valuable in Lintott's analysis of the participation of the demos in civil strife during the fourth century is the vital corrective which it offers to the rather narrow view advocated by Ste. Croix in The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca, 1981). which appeared just before Lintott's book. As Lintott points out, the schism in the Greek world between free labour and slaves, who shared few interests with the free poor and took no part in the vast majority of civil conflicts, gravely undermines the notion of a Marxist class struggle in the Greek poleis. Lintott also reminds us that the rather more open channels of communication which ~ life offered its citizens, and the greater social coherence and sense of community in the city-state, combined inevitably with a certain underlying pyramidal structure of patron-client relations between the dunatoi and the demos to prevent the emergence of (say) lithe robust forms of social protest characteristic of the eighteenth century A. D. II (259). This distinction between the world of ancient Greece and that of modern Europe has escaped 5te. Croix, whose choice of Van Gogh's liThe Potato Eatersll for his frontispiece alerts readers to an incongruous blending of the two worlds in his interpretation of history. Lintott's treatment of civil conflict in classical Greece is not...